| Q27. What are you looking at? |
What are you looking at? Marcel Duchamp ... Said from, and not "by" Marcel Duchamp, thereby making his role in the process quite clear: this was an idea "from" an artist as opposed to a work of art "by" an artist. the National Academy of Design's conservative and stifling attitude to modern art. Duchamp thought it was for artists to dcecide what was and what was not a work of art. In essence, art could beanything as long as the artist said so. But the great power of ideas is that you cannot un-invent them. Duchamp redefined wat art was and could be. An artist's job was not to give aethetic pleasure - designers could do that, it was to step back fromthe world and attempt to make sense or comment on it throught the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves. ---------- Pre-Impressionism: getting real 1820-70 They are lovely objects that depicts recognizable scene in a figurativemanner. It is with unabashed roanticism tghat we view the IMpressionists' late-nineteench-century pictures: the hazy, atmospheric and oh-so-French subjects ... They didn't go in for all that "conceptual nonsense" and those "abstract squiggles" that came later, but prodcued paintings that are clear, beautiful and refreshingly inoffensive. The Impressionists were the most radical, rebellious, barricade-breaking, epoch-making group of artists in the entire history of art. The respectable-looking nineteencn-centurey Impressionist painters, on the other hand, wer the origianl outlaws; they really were subversive and anachic. They wanted to leave their studios and go outside to document the modern world around them. Plenty of other artists had gone outside to observe and sketch their aubjcet, but they would then go back to to their studios to incorporate their observations into fictionalized secnes. if they were to capture the sensation of a fleeting moment with any sense of truth, speed was now of the esence. they accentuated their brushwork by painting in thick, short, colorful, comma-like bursts that added a sense of youthful energy toi their paintings, reflecting the spirit of their age. Paint, for the Impressionists, became a amedium whose material properties were being celebrated as opposed to being disguise behind the artifice of a pictorial illusion. it became the Impressionists' obsession to reporduce accurately the light effects they was before their eyes. They shrugged their shoulders and carried on. paint en plein air And they way to do that was by immersing oneself in the day-to-day of metropolitan living: watching, thinking, feeling and finally recording. ------------------ Impressionism: Painters of Modern Life 1870-90 ... nor the epitome of Impressionism, but it does contain all the elemetns what would make the movement famous: the staccato brushstrokes, the modern subject (a working port), the prioritizing of the effects of light over any pictorial detail, and the overriding sense that here is a painting that is to be experienced and not just looked at. monet, who had started his artistics life a s a caricatureist , Eugene Boudin had encouraged him to paint outside, saying that "three brushstrokes from nature are worth more than two days' studio work a the easel. For Monet people are not the point; his interests focused on the effects of the natural ligt on the water, boats and sky. His painting is criper, less romantic than Renoir's soft=focus evocation of a halcyon day, is color palette more harmonious, his compositional structure more rigid. The biggeest difference, thourhg, is in the amount of rigor applied to accurate documentation. MOnet's rendition of the event is a believable account, whereas Renoir's effot is sentimental and saccharine, a picture that owes as much to eighteenth-century Rococo as it doesn to Ipressionism. as Oscar Wilde would say a little whie later, "there is only one thing in the worod worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." MOnet already knewe of John Constable's paintings, as he did those of Jaems McNeilll Whistler, who was Ondon[based. But it is likely that it was the atmospheric papintings of another artist that really fired his imagination. J.M.W.Turner (1775-18510 LIKE moNET, WAS A PIANTER FASCINATED BY TRHE EFFECT OF ANTURAL light, once being so moved by nature's luminousmagnificence that he reportedly said that " the sun is God'. Monet's aim was to produce a harmonious work of art, where forms and light and atomosphere blend into one resolved entity. The apinting is sketchy almost to the point of being out of focus. Which is Monet's breat triumph. Degas' principal concern; his focus lay more in an artist's ability to give his or her subject the illusion of movement. Degas considered himself a "realist" painter and disliked being called an Impresssionist, although he was very active participant in the inaugural 1874 shows. ------------ Post-Impressionionism: Branching out 1880-1906 Post-Imressionists , Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, GEorges Seuraat, Paul Cezanne Gauguin had been alighned with the Symbolist movement (in which paintings were full of symbolic references). ... most of the art produced prior to the arrival of the Impressionists was make-believe. Impressionists' strict adherence to objectivity and and everyday life Fry had also included Matisse and Picasso in his 1910 show buyt they came to be filed -- at least for a while -- under Fauvisim and Cubism respectively. The visual language of trhe imagination. Vam Gogh and Expressionism Van Gogh's great paintings are not simply picture, they're more like sculptures. From a few meters away some of his later paintings start to take on a three-dimensional quality. within three years the Norwegian artist Edvard MUnch (1963-1944) painted his now famous The Scream (1893) , a creation that owes much to Van Gogh. Munch copied van Gogh's method of "warping" the image in The Scream to convery his deep inner emotions. ... epitome fo an expressionistci painting; Paul Guaguin and Symbolism "Primitivism" of Guaguin's Tahitian paintings, which inspired Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti and Henri Rousseau. Gauguin rebelled against Impressionism and returend art to the realms of the imagination, for whih generations of artists are thankful. Seurat's Pointillism ------- Cezannne: The father of us all 1839-1906 Cezanne was the first artist to paint using two eyes, said Dvaiv Hockney. Paul Cezanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter. Cezanne was an artist determined to figure out how a painter could represent a subject with complete accuracy: not a fleting moment like an Impressionist landscape, or the one-view-fits-all accuracy of a photograph, but accurate in the sense of it being true reflection of a rigorously observed subject. He realized around 130 years ago that seeing is not believing: it is to question. cezanne deduced, was the problem with the art of his time and of the past: it failed to represent how we truly see, which is not from one perspective, but from at least two. The door to Modernism had benn opened. But perspective's oss was truth's gain. The view Cezanne is presenting is a composite of the differing angles we all enjoy when studying a scene. Still Life with Apples and Peaches is a painting that demonstrates how Cezanne changed art foreer. His aandonment of traditional perspective in facor of a commitment to voerall pictorial design and the introduction of binocular vision led directly to Cubism (where almost all illusion of three dimensions was abandoned in preference for maximizing visual information), Futurism, Constructivism and the decorative art of Matisse. Cezanne returned to nature. He had solved some of the problems of accurately representing our visual perception with his dual-perspective technique, his harmonious compositions and his highlighting of specitic, subjectively selected feature. we don't really see detail when looking at a landscape, we see shapes. Twenty-five years later Cezanne's analytical approach to representation based around reducing visual details to geometric shapes would lead to its logical conclusion: total abstraction. He has fused time and space by overlapping and intergrating seperate planes of color in a technique know as "passage" (a technique that led to Cubism). His ideas of grid-like structure and simplifying detail into geometric forms can be seen in the architectur of Le Corbusier, the angular desgins of the Bauhaus, and the art of Pet Mondrian. It was the Dutchman who took Cezanne's ideas to the extreme with his famous De Stijl paintings, in which a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines with the oaacsional rectangle of primary color wa the entirety of the picture. ------------------ Primitism 1880-1930 Fauvisim 1905-10: Primal Scream The Age of Enlightment, which dawned toward the end of the seventeenth century. Tahiti, decalaring that once there he would become a "savage" and make art inspired by his "primitive" sourroundings (and, at it turned out, spread venereal disease). It was a back-to-basics policy that alsoinformed the fin=de=fiecle international decorative arts movement known variously as Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and the Vienna Secession. The artists and crafttsmen involved made sensuous and curvaceous products and paintings that harked back to the elegance of ancient pottery and the simplicity of nature's motifs. Gustav Llimt (1862-19180'S PAINTINGS CERTAINLY HAS THE MYSTICAL AIR OF pRIMITIVISM , BUT IT IS FAR MORE OPULENT AND REFINED THAN THE WORK.... mAURICE DE vLAMINKC (1876-1958) PAINTING EN PLEIN AIR aNDRE dERAIN (1880-1954) rESTAURANT DE LA mACHINE A bOUGIVAL (C.1905) Les FAuves (wild beasts) Matisse has structuredhis image, Cezanne's advice to paint what he really saw, and not what he had been taught to see. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is the painting that led to Cubism , which in turn led to Futurism., abstract ar and much, more. Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) Primitism in Sculpture Constantin Branucsi (1876-1957) Abandonign model-making and carving directly into materials was, he said, "the true road to sculpture". Auguste Rodin Alberto Giacometti ----------------- Cubism: Another point of View 1907-14 Nobody has equalled Appllinaire's astutue observation regarding the true nature of Cubism, an art mmovement that can often appear difficult to the point of being imprenetrable. essence of ubism: taking a subject and deconstructing it through intense analytical observation. "bad artists cop, great artists steal, " which is an approach to art=making that we would call Postmodern nowadays. Cubism is about acknowledging the wto-dimentional nature of the canvas and categorically NOT about trying to re-create the illusion of three dimensions (a cube, for example). To paint a cube requires the artist to look at an object from a single perspective, point, whereas Braque and Picasso were now looking at an object from every conceivable angle. Braque blend multiple viewpoints of the same subject on a single canvas. Einstein's conclusions regarding the relative nature of time and space concept of a fourth dimention Cubist idea of breaking matter down into a series of ineterelating gragments seems an entirely logical step to take; Braque and Picasso's introduction of papie colle, to paste or glue ------------------ Futurism: FAst forward 1909-19 they declared themselves to be a distant cousin of Monet's Impressionism or SEurat's color theories. They came from France (FAuvism, Cubism, Orphism), Germany (Die Brucke and De Bllaue Reiter), Russia (Rayonism) and Britain (Vorticism). out with the old and in with the new rhw mourh and pen of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (`876-`1944) Futurism wa overtly political from the start. The Fururist sculptures and paintings owed much to the technical and compositional inventions of Cubism. They too were concerned with collapsing time and space into one image, and adopted similar technique of overlapping and fractued planes to create the effect. The States of Mind triptych is a quintessential Futurist painting that was one of the highlights of the Futuristss' first show in Paris in 1912 at the Galeris Bernheim-Jeune. another example of the Fururists' simultaneity technique. The montage of images also recalla Cuibist collage (and latter-day poster advertisement). Apollinaire .... adjudged Delaunay's The Cardiff Team,..... Orphism from Orpheus, who beguiled the god with music that connected withe soul. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)... Cubo-Furturism called Vorticism Out with eh oldk, in with the new. Communism was on its wasy. And so was Fascism. Futurism will fofrever be inextricably linked with Fascism. ----------------- Kandinsky / Orphism / Blue Rider: The sound of music 1910-14 "Abstract Art" describes paintings or sculptues that do not mimic or even attempt to represent a physical subject, Mark Rothko and Wassily Kandinsky Manet Each subsequent generation of artists eliminated eyet more visual information in an attempt to cpature atmospheric light (Impressionism), accentuate the emotive qualties of color (Fauvism) or look at a subject from mutilple viewpoints (Cubism) Frantisek Kppka (1871-1957) .. Cubo-Futurist, Orphism robert Delaunay .... ubsoure ge Gernab avb=abt 0garde abd American Abstract Expressionistrs. Paul Klee (1879-1940) Blue Rider Group Kupka, Delaunay, Kandinsky and Klee marched toward abstraction with music ringing in their ears. ------------------- Suprematism / Constructivism: The Russiams 1915-25 Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) who was still working in a Cub-Futurist style at the beginning of 1919. idea of "alogism" -- an obscure "ism" ... "alogia" meaning absurd from a "rational" The intersection where common sense and absurdity come into conflict.... "manifesto painting" Suprematism, a form of pure abstraction: a totally non-descriptive type of apinting. freed art from the burden of the object. Remove the clutter, implify the shape, reduce the color palette ad concentrate on the purity of form. Suprematism was pure art, in which it was the oil paint that dictated color and forj, and not shapes copied froj nature. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) Malevich's Supresmatism and Tatlin's Constructivism construction art Constructivists Lyubov Popova (1889-1924), Alexandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) and Aleksandr Ekster (182-1949) artist-engineers Almost immediately afterward he produced another manifesto pronouncing a "death to art," saying it was "bourgeois." El Lissitzky (1890-1941) the shapes and style of non-representational art being used in a highlyt symbolic, representational manner Lissitzky's poster demonstrates the power of non-objectvie art. ---------------- Neo-Plasticism: Gridlock 1917-31 Neo-Platcism was to help society start aftresh with a new attitude where unity, not individualism, ws the priority. "to express plastically what all things have in common instead of what sets them arpart". Momdrian did nod think it was art's jb to mimic real life; he thought art was part of real life, like language and music. Balance, tension and equality was all for Mondiran. His art was a political manifesto calling for freedom, unity and cooperation. In art, forms and colors have different dimension and position, but are equal in value. Mondrian'scompositions are always asymmetrical, as it helped create a sense of movement Mondrian said tha "Neo_Plasticism stands for equality because... it is possible for each, despite differences, to have the same values as others." Bauhaus: School Reunion 1919-33 the outward expression of their products' inner "character" The Bauhaus Wlater Gropius It was 1919 and the Bauhaus was born. He argued that architecture was the most important art form, saying that "the ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building." Bauhaus alsted for only foruteen years. Lyonel Feininger (1871-1965) Johannes Itten (1888-1967) German Expressionism began in 1905 with the Dresden-based Die Brucke (The Bridge) group, who were f999lwed bt Jabdubsjt;s ?Bke Ruder gang. Both had been inspired by the Expressionism of Van Gogh and Munch, the Primitivism of GAuguin and the non-naturalistic colors fo the Fauves Die Brucke artist Ernt Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) His Self Portrait as a Solder (1915) is an example of German Expressionism at its most bleak and poigmant. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (189501946) Josef Albers (1888-1976) Gropius had now gathered in Weimar representatives from all the school of abstract art: Kandinsky, Klee and Feininge from the Blue Rider group, Van Doesburg from De Stijl and Neo-Plasticism, and Moholy-Nagy and Albers championing the non-objectvie art of the Russiams. Marianne Brandt (1893-1983) Wilhelm Wagenfeld and karl Jucker Wagenfeld Lampe (1924) Marcel Breuer (1902-81) Ludwig MIes van de Rohe (1886-1969) ... responded differently, choosing nbeither to fight, nor to return home. West, to the land of the free: to Amercia. ---------------- Dadaism: Anarchy Rules 1916-23 Maurizio Catteland (b.1960) Hugo Ball (1886-1927) Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) Dada was launched on Joly 14, 1916 (Bastille Day) by way of a public reading at the Waaag Hall in Zrich, a presenting job that fell to Hugo Ball. Absurdism was an ani-rational trend in Paris with the French Symbolist poets. Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme and Arthur Rimbaud. Theybelieved that intuition and richly evocative language could reveal life's great truths. Alfred Jarry (1879-1907) Ubu Roi The Dadaists wanted a new world order that took on a child's perspective, where selfishness wastolerated and the individual celebrated. Jean Arp (1886-1966) Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Law of Chance (1916-17) Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) Schwitter's practice of turning undesirable everyday objects into works of art was not new.Brque and Picasso had already done it, and so had Arp. But Marcel Duchamp had tqaken the concept the furthiest in 1917 when he transformed a urinal into his "ready-made" scuplture Fountain, without making any effort to change either its physical appearance, or incorporating it into a larger work (which is what Schwitters, Braque, Picasso and Arp had done). It was an action that made Duchamp the daddy of Dada, a movement about which he was initially completely unaware. Dada needs conflict o exist in its purest form. Without it the movement morphs into something slighly different: no less determiined or radical, but subtler. In 1924, Dada became Surrealsim. ------------------- Surrealism: Living the dream 1924-45 Breton In hommage to Guillaume Apollinaire ... First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Breton's new idea was to tap into their unconscious mind in order to dredge up unseemly secrets that had been suppressed for the sake of decency. French poet Comte de Lautreamont, called Les Chants del Maldoror (1868-9) Kazimir Mlaevish, Wassily Kdandinsky and Piet Mondrian had already exploded the role of the unconscious in art. Breton's Surrealism aimed to confront us with shocking words and images no expose the depravity of our own minds. Mallarme, Baudelaire and Rimbaud as proto-Surrealsits, Lewis Carroll Edgar Allan Poe Jean Miro (1893-1983) Max Ernst (1891-1976) Jean Arp Tristan Tzara Salvador Dali (1904-89) "systemize confusion and thus help to discredit completely the world of realy, ": by way of painting "dreamscapes." His aim was to make "hand-painted dream photographs.:" Dali has succeeded in his intention to disturb anyone who looks at the work. Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) metaphysical American Realist painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) X-ray images as "paintign wit light" Rayographs the melting effect of Man Ray's solarization technique Frida Kahlo (1907-54) Kahlo's symbolism reveals the importance of folk art in her work. Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) -------------------------- Abstract EXpressionism: The grand gesture 1943-70 Frederick Kiesler (1890-1969) Jackson Pollock (1912-56) Abstract Expressionism German-born photographer called Hans Namuth (1915-90) Clement Greenberg Willem De Kooning (1904-97) Pollock broke the ice for for Abstract Expressionism Barnett Newman (1905070), the Color Field. Mark Rothko (1903-70) moved beyond his Abstract Expressionism and into Pop Art "simple expresssion of the complex thought," which is as gooda way as any to explain Abstract EXpressionism. ----------------------- Pop Art: Retail Tjerapy 1956-70 Eduardo Paolozzi (192402005) Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) defined popular culture as: "Popular (designed for a mass audience0, Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, exy Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business." Jasper Johns (b.1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) Andy Warhol (1928-87) Chinese artist Ai Wei Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97) In the 1960s, fcolor comics used a printing technique called Ben-DayDots. based on as Georges Seourat's Pointillism. Where the art of Pollcok and Rothko had been all about existential feelings, LIchtenstein and Warhol focused purely on the material subject; removing all trace of themselves in the process Peter Blake (b.1932) Claes Oldenburg (b.1929) --------------------- Conceptualism / Fluxus / Arte Povera / Performance Art: Mind Games 1952 Onward The father of conceptual art is Marcel Duchamp, whose ready-mades -- most notably hisurinal of 1917--caused the decisive rupture from tradtition and force a re-evaluation of what could and should be considered art. Before Duchamp's provocative intervention, art was something man-made, typically of aesthetic, technical and intellectual merit, which had been mounted in a frame and hung on a wall, or presented on a plinth to look splendid. Duchamp's contention was that artists shoudl be limited to such a rigied range of media through which to express their ideas and emotions. those ideas could now be ealized through whatever medium the artis chose Marina Abramoic (b.1946) The whole point of such events is that you had to be there-that's part of their allure. Performance art gave them the oppotunity to boost their visitor numbers further by presenting a fresh take on live entertainment. Nouveau Realisme French artist Yves Klein (1928-61) was inteested in what he called "the void" --- the infinite space that is the sky above us, and the seas below. philosophica feelings for the "vooid" through large abstract monochrome paintings, which after a while were allproduced in just one color: ultramariane blue........International klein Blue (OKB) French Nouveau Realisme Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) took a razor blade to his, Spatialism (Spazialismo) Fontana's slashed cnavases we re no longer simply looking at it, but are also peering into it, replacing one kind of illusion withanother. Arte Povera poor art Michelangelo Pistoletto (b.1933) Fluxus Conceptual Art Bruce Nauman (b.1941), documenting their own performances and then displaying them in galleries... Francis Alys (b.1959) Spiral Jetty As Sol LeWitt said, "Conceptual art is good only when the idea is goo." ------------------- Minimalism: untitiled 1960-75 Minimalist sculptures The objective is always the same: a desire to bring life under control Donald Judd (1928-94) The anser is to simply be seen, enjoyed and judeged purely on its aesthetic and maereialterems: how it looks and the way it makes you feel. Thee's no requirement to "interpret" the work -- there is no hidden meaning to look for. Frank Stella (b.1996) "What you see, is what you see." Judd's solution was to reduce the elements: to simplify. It was a Minimalist 's appreoach. Stella, like Judd, wanted to eradicate all sense of illusion in his painting. Cqrl Qndre (b.1935) Dan Flavin (1933-96) Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) Minmalism had marked the end of modernism. Art was now moving into a new era of Postmodernism. -------------------- Postmodernism: Flase Identiy 1970-89 Postmodernism is that it can be pretyy much anything you want it tobe. Cindy Sherman (b.1954) To do that requires a process of doconstruction as you unpick the elements the artist has taken from various sources... Modernism rejectyed tradition; Posmodernism didn't reject anything. Barbara Kruger (b.1945) -------------------- Art now: Fame and Fortune 1988-2008-Toaqy Monumentalism, Experienctialism, Sensationalsim Daniel Hirst (b.1965) ---------------------------------EOF