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Fine Art Lecture - Evolution of Art Overview

The institutions of society (Church, Government) define the role of artisan and control the purpose of art (religious worship, city glorification).

Art changes as the role of individual in society strengthens.

Early artists rendered a two-dimensional idea, not a true appearance.

The techniques of perspective and the central vanishing point lead to Perfect Realism.

Art of Being Human: Subjectivity, self-expression, emotional complexity.

Classicism - 1000 B.C. - 150A.D. - Purpose of Greek/Roman Art

To beautify and glorify the city.

To embody and keep alive Greek and Roman religion and mythology.

To impart a feeling of cultural immortality -- art, made from stone, will last forever.

To glorify and perfect the human form.

In seeking to tie themselves to the gods, ancient Athenians believed that the goal of life was to achieve physical and moral perfection.

Characteristics of Greek/Roman Art

Artist as craftsman, artisan.

Impersonal Art - no personal or subjective viewpoint.

Geometric & Harmonious - mathematical relationships reflect a perfectly ordered universe.

Imparts a feeling of security - arrangement is aesthetically pleasing.

Divine Proportion - Golden Section in architecture. The most pleasing relationship between two connecting lines is such that the smaller is to the larger what the larger is to the sum of the two, or 1 to 1.68.

Medieval Art - 500 A.D. - 14th Century - Purpose of Religious Art

To glorify the life and death of Jesus Christ, the saints and disciples.

To provide peasants with a depiction of God’s Kingdom and a vision of a glorious afterlife.

To ensure the Church remains a dominant force in the lives of its citizens.

Characteristics of Medieval Art

Art rendered the idea, not the true appearance.

Limited supplies and techniques.

No realistic imitation had been invented.

Two dimensional paintings - figures and background on equal terms (no perspective).

Early Renaissance - Giotto di Bondone, 1266-1337

Florentine Artist who prepared the way for artistic realism.

Rediscovered the art of perspective (foreground and background to scale)

Fresco painting (paint mixed with fresh plaster)

The central vanishing point (point at which the background actually disappears)

Chiaroscuro - use of light and darkness so that both light and dark interact.

Renaissance - 15th - 16th Century

Rebirth - the rediscovery of the classical world.

Realism - accurate portrayal with painstaking details.

Emotional Complexity in subjects invites emotional response.

The Portrait: a supreme example of the individual artist's influence upon art.

Renaissance movement toward individualism, breaking loose from the medieval attempt to equalize everyone in the eyes of God.

Fresco - colors more vivid, plaster adds more depth.

Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-1600

Captures emotional complexity in his subject’s faces.

Subtext - depicting inner feelings/thoughts (Mona Lisa’s famous smile, eyes looking off to side).

Portrait of common individual (Mona Lisa) caught in a particular inner action at a particular time.

Chiaroscuro - using darkness and light to create mood and emotion.

Depiction of human race with accurate perspective and painstaking details.

Michelangelo, 1475-1564

Creates tension between classical style and the expression of passion.

Pain/emotion projected into marble.

Unending and unsatisfied quest for greatness.

Depiction of human race with accurate perspective and painstaking details.

Raphael, 1483-1520

Perspective - images in the distance smaller than foreground images.

Chiaroscuro - contrast between light and shadow.

Madonna and Child Paintings: Depicts the Virgin as a real woman, and the infant Jesus as a child (with a sense of advanced wisdom in his face).

Fresco - made possible a greater sense of depth.

Perfect Realism - 17th Century Dutch Masters

Art of Perfect Likeness, Faithful Imitation. Artists reproduced portraits, figures, and landscapes with the greatest accuracy and minute detail.

Psychological Realism - Depicting intense inner emotion.

Chiaroscuro - contrast of light and darkness; source of light seems external to the painting.

Dutch Still Life Paintings

Rembrandt, 1606-1669

Intense Inner Psychological Realism - He depicted the character behind the face, the pain suffered, the longing.

Self-Portrait - In his series of self-portraits, Rembrandt used darkness to enhance the aura of quiet wisdom that age and experience have given.

Master of Chiaroscuro - contrast between light and shadow. Light comes into the portrait from an undefined source beyond the canvas.

Produced over 3,000 pieces of art in his lifetime.

Francisco Goya, 1746-1828

His emotional paintings helped to personalize the style of the artist.

Early work characterized by realistic landscapes, portraiture.

Political purpose to his work: he rebelled against the corrupt Spanish government, developed hatred for the upper class, and, as a result, painted his personal views of society.

Painted outrageous satires of the royal families.

Depicted the ravages of war (invasion of Napoleon) and dramatized the theme of war’s cruelty.

Impressionism - 19th Century

Subjectivity and Self-Expression. Since the invention of the camera, artists turned away from realism toward a fresh way to imitate the world. The artist is freed from rigid formalism.

Painting as an “Event” - art is appreciated totally for itself.

Color bursts on canvas and dabbing brush strokes blend into a unified emotional effect. This blending of various hues and shadings creates a continuum of light.

Subjects: the commonplace, nature, and the intermingling of the upper, middle, and lower classes.

Post Impressionism - 19th - 20th Century

Rejection of objective representation in favor of subjective expression.

Perspective is subjective.

Intent: transfer to the canvas the world as they saw it -- projecting their own unique depth perception.

The familiar world is altered by emotion and the subjective experiences of light, bold colors, and form.

Time period that bridges the gap between Impressionism and Abstractionism.

Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890

Re-fashioned art to suit himself.

An explosion of pure feeling transferred to color, shapes, and paint textures.

A short, stabbing brush stroke technique that makes the canvas throb with energy.

Sensuous impact of life’s forms and colors.

Heavily influenced by the vivid colors used by Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Abstractionism - 19th - 20th Century

Intention and Alteration - The modern artist wants to alter the world through an introduction of a new vision.

Rationale belongs to the individual artist.

Conceptual - The idea is in the artist’s head. We may never figure out its true meaning.

Artist abstracts from real life only those elements that interest him/her.

Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944

What matters in a work of art is form: a pleasing arrangement of lines and color, existing for no purpose other than aesthetic experience.

Distills familiar world into pure shapes and forms.

Language of Color - Color could become like music, beautiful for its interrelationships of tones and intensities.

Cubism - 20th Century

Artists deconstruct realistic details in their minds and reconstruct them into childlike blocks, reducing everything to cubes.

The world is made up of shapes and colors, that what we see are fragments, reassembled by our mind.

Picasso and Braque theorized that we do not see objects or figures. Instead, we see events extending over a period of time. The eye is in continuous motion and observes continually shifting viewpoints. We misconceive that a stable field of vision exists. If we could slow down our vision, we would see images that are pieces of things and people.

Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973

A Modern and a Contemporary Artist - worked in many styles, but was particularly drawn to the color blue.

The art of being human needs the spirit of children. Artists should retain their childhood delight in all things.

Guernica: By not pretending to photograph realism, it achieves truth rather than reality. In essence, Picasso found a new pathway to truth.

Surrealism - 20th Century

Beyond Realism: Artists sought to imitate the unfamiliar world of dreams and the unconscious mind.

The goal - to make the unconscious mind a tangible part of the external world.

Employs recognizable shapes and forms but put together in unrecognizable contexts.

Spanish painter Salvador Dali creates a dream world made up of recognizable images that do not fit rationally together.

The pioneer psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung influenced Surrealist artists.

Superrealism - 20th Century

Superrealism does not define one specific technique. All it guarantees is that artists linked to this category are imitating reality as they see fit.

Pop Art is an extension of superrealism that greatly exaggerates the ordinary (Andy Warhol).

Art cannot be defined, because art is the action of the artist (O’Keeffe).

Georgia O’Keeffe, 1887-1986

Approaches her subjects by intuitively magnifying their shapes and simplifying their details to underscore their essential beauty.

Imitates one or two striking and colorful forms in the familiar world and transfers them to canvas with many details left out.

She sees the world, not as the cubists did - broken down into geometric shapes - but as a place in which certain shapes leap out at the artist for whatever reason - the colors, the aesthetic appeal of the form itself, the textures, the unconscious significance to the artist.

The Harlem Renaissance - 1920’s - 1930’s

An artistic, cultural, and social burgeoning of art concerning the African American’s place in American life.

Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro. Harlem was not so much a place as a state of mind, the cultural metaphor for black America itself.

A cultural and psychological watershed, a era in which black people were perceived as having finally liberated themselves from a past fraught with self-doubt and surrendered instead to an unprecedented optimism, a novel pride in all things black and a cultural confidence that stretched beyond the borders of Harlem.

Aaron Douglas, 1899-1988

African American art should be its own movement and stand on its own merit. It too could show the world a new way to see.

His style is the result of a philosophy, a deep-rooted belief that, in trying to imitate the actual world, Art as Likeness was really falsifying the way we see the world. Like the Cubists, Douglas forced the viewer to reconsider how reality was viewed.

Douglas desired to conceive, develop, and establish an art era: “Not white art painting black… let’s bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, pain, sorrow, hope, and disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people.”