ART II Famous Artworks Students Should Know

ART II
Famous Artworks Students Should
Know
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Pablo Picasso Cubism
What makes this artwork significant?
• Picasso was influenced by Cezanne’s work
• Picasso’s painting is considered to be the first Cubism painting
Red Eiffel Tower
Robert Delaunay Cubism
What makes this artwork significant?
• In the Eiffel Tower series, solid objects and their merging with space were fragmented
• In the Eiffel Tower the interpenetration of tangible objects and surrounding space is accompanies by intense movement of geometric planes that are more dynamic than static equilibrium of Cubist forms
The Bargemen
Ferdinand Léger Cubism
What makes this artwork significant?
• Léger understood the Cubist notion of freeing the painter from a responsibility to realism.
• Léger was concerned with replacing his subject matter with colors and shapes rather than converging or diverging planes and forms. His paintings were closer to pure abstraction than many of his Cubist contemporaries. • Léger sought to express the noise, dynamism and speed of new technology and machinery, working through several themes, or cycles, of imagery depicting humans in motion. Dynamism of Dog on a Leash
Giacomo Balla Futurism
What makes this artwork
significant?
• An Italian artistic movement that began in around 1910, Futurism drew heavily on the energy and values of the machine. • primary objective to depict movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the twentieth century. • Dog on a Leash, got to grips with the problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing several images on top of each other. Inevitably, the advances that were made by this short‐lived movement was eventually to be overtaken by the art of cinematography.
Rectangles Arranged According to the Laws of Chance
Jean Arp Dada
What makes this artwork
significant?
• The principle of chance was employed as an 'anti‐art' device, in both Dadaist art and literature, as it overstepped the skill and craftsmanship associated with traditional artistic values.
• after landing to improve the aesthetic interaction between the rectangles, Arp made some minor adjustments. If the other artists knew, they would kick him out of the club!
Las Dos Fridas
Frida Kahlo Surrealism
What makes this artwork
significant?
• 1938 André Breton, principal initiator of the surrealist movement, described Kahlo's art as a "ribbon around a bomb". Because she utilized the elements European Surrealists used to convey their ideas. She painted her life like she did because it was how she felt.
• Surrealism emphasized the role of the unconscious to explore the human mind. It tried to liberate the mind by employing the psychic unconsciousness in a more orderly and serious manner through thoughts, fantasies, dream‐images, and desires.
Broadway Boogie Woogie
Piet Mondrian De Stijl
What is significant about this artwork?
• De Stijl was a Dutch 'style' of pure abstraction developed by Piet Mondrian
• Mondrian gradually refined the elements of his art to a grid of lines and primary colors which he configured in a series of compositions that explored his universal principles of harmony. • He saw the elements of line and color as possessing counteracting cosmic forces. Vertical lines embodied the direction and energy of the sun's rays. Horizontal lines relating to the earth's movement around it. Yellow radiated the sun's energy; blue receded as infinite space and red materialized where blue and yellow met.
Time Transfixed
Rene Magritte Surrealism What is significant about this artwork?
• He used out of place and out of proportion imagery to provoke thought.
• He worked carefully on his titles, he was unhappy with the English translation of the title of this painting: the original French, La Durée poignardée, literally means “ongoing time stabbed by a dagger.”
• Magritte hoped his patron would install it at the bottom of his staircase so that the train would “stab” guests on their way to the ballroom. In an ironic twist, James installed it over his fireplace, to Magritte’s great dissatisfaction.
White Center
Mark Rothko Abstract Expressionism
What is significant about this artwork?
• Abstract Expressionism was the first American art style to exert an influence on a global scale.
• Many of the Abstract Expressionists discussed their art as aiming toward a spiritual experience, or at least an experience that exceeded the boundaries of the purely aesthetic. In later years, Rothko emphasized more emphatically the spiritual aspect of his artwork
• “only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.”
Portrait of Woman in Hat
Amadeus Modigliani Expressionism
What is significant about this artwork?
• Amedeo Modigliani was the quintessential bohemian artist whose lifestyle and tragic death at thirty‐five inspired two feature films.
• Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style, characterized by mask‐like faces and elongation of form.
Rhythm
Sonia Delaunay Orphism What is significant about this artwork?
• Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colors and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design. • She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964, and in 1975 was named an officer of the French Legion of Honor.
Bird in Space
Constantin Brancusi Abstract What is significant about this artwork?
• From the 1920s to the 1940s Brancusi was preoccupied by the theme of a bird in flight. He concentrated not on the physical attributes of the bird but on its movement. • In "Bird in Space" wings and feathers are eliminated, the swell of the body is elongated, and the head and beak are reduced to a slanted oval plane. • Brancusi's inspired abstraction realizes his stated intent to capture "the essence of flight."
Le Nord Express AJM Cassandre Art Deco
What is significant about this artwork?
• Adolphe Jean‐Marie Mouron (pseudonym AJM Cassandre)
• He studied at the Académie Julien where he mostly painted in the 'academic' style of Cezanne. His works eventually were inspired by the Bauhaus and Cubist movements and he began to use the name 'Cassandre' on all work that evoked this new modernist style (referred to as Art Deco today). • His most famous logo was the 3‐lettered, YSL, for Yves Saint Laurent .
• His legacy lives on to this day and he is credited with being one of the most important artists of the Art Deco era ‐ his contributions to advertising design have shaped modern methods and continue to inspire designers today
Bauhaus Composition
Sándor Bortnyik Bauhaus
What is significant about this artwork?
• He did not become a member of Bauhaus, yet he got acquainted with its principles and methods. • The co‐existence of styles characterized his works for some time: plain constructions, expressionism and cubism.
The Sun Sets Sail
Rob Gonsalves Magic Realism What is significant about this artwork?
• Gonsalves’ work is much influenced by Dali, Tanguy, Magritte and of course, the perspective illusions of Escher.
• Magic Realism received its name in the 1925s by German art critic, Franz Roh. Artists working in this style attempt to depict reality in a different way—works possessed a resemblance to reality while also retaining a dream‐like or fantastical quality. • The style was popular in Europe and the United States from the 1920’s to the 1940’s and retained several practitioners during the 1950’s. Often seen as a combination of Realism and Surrealism, the paintings portrayed representational subjects but often incorporated flat tones, strange perspectives, and unusual arrangements to give the piece an imagined quality. Carnival of Harlequin
Joan Miró Surrealism
What is significant about this artwork?
• Joan Miro’s style has been interpreted as Surrealism combined with the playfulness and whimsical nature of a child. • The carnival shown in "Harlequin's Carnival" is a merry making festival, a period of revelry that concludes before the Ash Wednesday in the Christian Calendar. The end of the carnival marks the beginning of the season of LENT, commemorating the Passion of Christ through individual sacrifices for the next forty days. At the carnival, people celebrate by disguising themselves into funny characters and objects called floats and move around the place, entertaining others, and building a pleasant, festive ambience.
Girl Before a Mirror
• Pablo Picasso
• Modernism
What is significant about this artwork?
• a complex variation on the traditional Vanity—the image of a woman confronting her mortality in a mirror, which reflects her as a death's head. • On the right, the mirror reflection suggests a supernatural x‐
ray of the girl's soul, her future, her fate. Her face is darkened, her eyes are round and hollow, and her intensely feminine body is twisted and contorted. She seems older and more anxious. • The girl reaches out to the reflection, as if trying to unite her different "selves." • The diamond‐patterned wallpaper recalls the costume of the Harlequin, the comic character from the commedia dell'arte
with whom Picasso often identified himself—here a silent witness to the girl's psychic and physical transformations.
Untitled, 1976
Alexander Calder Surrealism
What is significant about this artwork?
• Calder revolutionized the art of sculpture by making movement one of its main components.
• "mobile" ‐‐ a word coined in 1931 by artist Marcel Duchamp to designate Calder's moving sculpture • As a major contribution to the development of abstract art, Calder's stabiles and mobiles challenged the prevailing notion of sculpture as a composition of masses and volumes by proposing a new definition based on the ideas of open space and transparency.
I and the Village
Marc Chagall Cubism 1911
What is significant about this artwork?
• The significance of the painting lies in its seamless integration of various elements of Eastern European folktales and culture, both Russian and Yiddish.
• its clearly defined semiotic elements (e.g. The Tree of Life) and daringly whimsical style were at the time considered groundbreaking.
Blue Monochrome
Yves Klein Minimalism 1961
What is significant about this artwork?
• Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. • Klein likened monochrome painting to an "open window to freedom." • He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. • Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.
Summer Table
Brice Marden Minimalism 1972
What is significant about this artwork?
• He has always been very clear that his paintings have content—both formal and expressive—that springs from his sensory and emotional experiences as well as his research into the limits and possibilities of pictorial space. • These references, while remaining generic for the viewer, are often very specific and personal for Marden: the yellow hue in Summer Table (1972–
1973), was suggested by the color of a glass of lemonade at a picnic.
Dunes and Sea II
Milton Avery Modern 1960
What is significant about this artwork?
• he pushed towards the farthest limits of pure abstraction without abandoning his commitment to working from nature. • Serenity and harmony had prevailed in all of Avery’s work. Yet this work, more than ever, exuded a world of low‐key emotions from which anger and anxiety were absent. Me and the Moon
Arthur Dove Abstract 1937
What is significant about this artwork?
Dove made a habit of working while listening to jazz on the radio
• Dove employed abstracted forms in his work, in order to sort through the abstraction of modern, technologically mediated American life, and to examine its impact on the individual American's consciousness and creativity.
• embraced the abstraction brought to swing by commercialization and technological intervention
Cityscape I,(Landscape No. 1)
Richard Diebenkorn
Abstract Expressionism 1963
What is significant about this artwork?
• Based on the aerial landscape and perhaps the view from the window of his studio, these large‐scale abstract compositions are named after a community in Santa Monica, California, where he had his studio.
• he "Ocean Park" series, begun in 1967 and developed for the next 18 years, became his most famous work and resulted in approximately 135 paintings. He was influenced by Henri Matisse’s paintings.
“The Promise”
Barnett Newman Abstract Expressionist 1949
What is significant about this artwork?
• “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.”
• Newman's paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme.
• Newman is generally classified as an abstract expressionist on account of his working in New York City in the 1950s, associating with other artists of the group and developing an abstract style which owed little or nothing to European art. • His rejection of the expressive brushwork employed by other abstract expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and his use of hard‐edged areas of flat color, can be seen as a precursor to post painterly abstraction and the minimalist works of artists such as Frank Stella.
“1957‐D No. 1”
Clifford Still Abstract Expressionist 1957
What is significant about this artwork?
• black and yellow with patches of white and a small amount of red, these four colors, and variations on them (purples, dark blues) are predominant in his work, although there is a tendency for his paintings to use darker shades.
• His non‐figurative paintings are non‐objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in a variety of formations. Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still's arrangements are less regular. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been "torn" off the painting, revealing the colors underneath. Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto, causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces. "I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit."
Still severed ties with commercial galleries and in 1961 moved to a 22 acre farm near Westminster, Maryland, removing himself further from the art world. The property was located on eastern side of Old Westminster Road about one‐half mile north of the intersection with Stone Chapel Road.[4] Still used a barn on the property as a studio during the warm weather months
Clyfford Still Mausoleum at Pipe Creek Church of the Brethren Cemetery, Carroll County, Maryland
“Woman and Bycicle”
Willem de Kooning Abstract Expressionist 1952 – 1953
What is significant about this artwork?
• de Kooning explored emotion and expression in his work and he is known as an Abstract Expressionist artist. Although many of his paintings are abstract, de Kooning often combined abstraction with recognizable forms such as the female figure. • Woman and Bicycle depicts a standing woman, whose body is visible among the brushstrokes, slashes, scrapes, and smears of paint. She has elements of the stylish women that de Kooning would have seen on billboards and in magazines in the early 1950s. She is wearing a tight, low‐cut outfit and high heels, fashionable at that time, but not very practical for bike riding.
• This woman might appear menacing because she has two toothy, grinning mouths. The lower mouth hangs like a necklace. It suggests that De Kooning
changed his mind about the composition of this painting and where to place the woman’s mouth. The circles and swirls of paint in the lower left half of the painting could be parts of the bicycle.
• “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it–drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”