• Mary Cassatt, “The Bath,” c. 1892

  • Very tuned to the psychological charge of a mother and her child

  • Like an asian woodblock print:

    • Flattening of the picture plane

    • Emphasis of line and contour

    • Use of floral motifs

    • Cropping of form

    • The theme (bathing a child)

• James McNeill Whistler, “Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket),” c. 1875

  • Post-impressionism, even more abstract than French impressionism

  • Most abstract American painting painted up to this time

  • Interested in visual pleasure

  • Painted using the soup method

    • Cover the canvas with a gray or black primer

    • Add little details here and there

  • Described as “throwing a pot of paint in the face of the public”

  • Whistler sued Ruscan (critic) for his comment and won

  • No longer making religious or inspiring art, it is now all experimentation

• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “At the Moulin Rouge,” 1892-95

  • Form itself can carry meaning

  • Lautrec was a dwarf and was, because of his abnormality, let in many circles that most artists were not able to access

• Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” 1884-86

  • not naturalistic at all

  • Dis-topia: Play and relaxation have become a cruel opposite in modern Parisian life

  • Pointillism

• Vincent van Gogh, “Night Cafe,” 1888

  • Symbolism: Red and green shows the darkness of civilization, terrible passions of humanity

  • Romanticism: expressing the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime

• Vincent van Gogh, “Starry Night,” 1889

  • First artist to set the trend for the typical artist being an outcast

  • Beginning of painting “feeling”

• Paul Gauguin, “Vision after the Sermon,” or “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,” 1888

  • Interested in not external truths, but internal truths

  • The women are having a vision

  • Both real and imagined world, which are separated by the diagonal tree trunk

• Paul Cezanne, “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” 1902-1904***

  • When breaking down a Cezanne painting, you find the underlying geometric structure of nature

  • Color is more important here than foreshortening

  • Color takes the place of line

• Odilon Redon, “The Cyclops,” 1898

  • Galiteo is having a dream about the cyclops

  • Redon also goes to his dreams for his material

• Edvard Munch, “The Scream,” 1893

  • Modernity is a thing (bridge, new building), modernism is an expression of an experience among modernity

  • Appeals to all senses: you hear it, visual, oral, tactile

• Augustus Saint-Gaudens, “Adams Memorial,” Rock Creek Cemetary, Washington, D.C., 1891

  • Clover Adams was known as “Henry Adam's wife”

  • In her search for autonomy, she became a photographer

  • Committed suicide by drinking photo-developing chemicals because they considered her “hysterical” due to her depression

  • This statue was made to represent “nirvana,” or being beyond joy or sorrow

• Auguste Rodin, “Burghers of Calais,” 1884-89

  • Life-size so at the viewer's level

  • Episode from the 100 years war where six men sacrificed their lives so that the rest of the town may live

• Louis Comfort Tiffany, “Lotus Table Lamp,” c. 1905

  • People that worked inside would gravitate toward this lamp because its flora motif. It is even transparent and delicate looking like a flower and its leaves.

  • Art nouveau glass that completed the whole effect in a home

  • Stained by chemical fire

• Louis Sullivan, “Guaranty Building,” Buffalo, New York, 1894-96

  • Built many windows in order to illuminate the interior of the building

Marcel Duchamp, "Nude Descending a Staircase," no. 2, 1912

The painting combines elements of both the Cubist and Futurist movements.

The discernable "body parts" of the figure are composed of nested, conical and cylindrical abstract elements, assembled together in such a way as to suggest rhythm and convey the movement of the figure merging into itself.

• Henri Matisse, “Woman with the Hat,” 1905

  • More interested in color to have expressive possibilities

  • Painting on the edge of abstraction

• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “Street,” Dresden, 1907-1908

• Vassily Kandinsky, “Improvisation 28,” 1912***

  • Feeling is the point of the work

  • Abstraction, not figurative or representational

  • Suggests spontaneity and action

• Franz Marc, “Fate of the Animals,” 1913

  • German expressionist

  • Develops preoccupation with animals and their way of moving

• Pablo Picasso, “Les Demoiselles d' Avignon,” 1907

• Georges Braque, The Portuguese,” 1911

  • Analytic cubism: breaking down of form

• Pablo Picasso, “Still Life with Chair Caning,” 1912

  • First form of collage

  • Looking beneath the surface to break from tradition

  • Synthetic cubism

• Georges Braque, “Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass,” 1913

  • Aims to fool the mind, not the eye

Giacomo Balla, "Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash," 1912

We get a ground-level perspective, the dog's view of the world.

Conveys bodily movement with a static image.

• Umberto Boccioni, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” 1913

  • Literally moves through space

  • You can tell where he was a second ago, and also where he is going

Marcel Duchamp, "Fountain," 1917

As surely as it was a prank, Fountain was also, like the other readymades, a calculated attack on the most basic conventions of art.

He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.

Hannah Hoch, "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada...," 1919-20

Hannah Hoch looked at these contradictions and used them to construct a number of fractured, disturbing photomontages which simultaneously expressed the conflicting realities of pleasure, anger, confidence, and anxiety.

• John Sloan, “Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street,” New York City, 1907

  • Modernism, grungy, not cleaned up. Realistic.

Marsden Hartley, "Portrait of a German Officer," 1914

Intensely powerful canvases in an Expressionist vein.

The condensed mass of images (badges, flags, medals) evokes a collective psychological and physical portrait of the officer.

• Charles Demuth, “My Egypt,” 1927

  • Understanding cubism by reducing the picture to flat geometric planes

  • Pun: Title meaning is caused by rays making pyramid shapes and the grain elevator alluding to the Egyptian pyramids

  • Smooth lines, emphasis on contour, precise lines

Alfred Stieglitz, "The Steerage," 1907

Shapes related to one another–a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me: simple people; the feeling of ship, ocean, sky.

• Pablo Picasso, “Guernica,” 1937

  • Subject: German bombing of Spanish town of Guernica

  • Violence, horror, fear and loss

  • Visual metaphors: Open mouths of people and figures, disembodiment of figures, light shining in = Picasso 'shining a light' on chaos

  • Borders on surrealism because of the dream-like effect

• Giorgio de Chirico, “Melancholy of a Street,” 1914

  • Asks the question of reality

• Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931

  • How stable is time = ants eating away at clock

• Rene Magritte, “The Treachery of Images,” 1928-29

  • Artistic pun: Says it is not a pipe because it is oil on canvas, not an actual wood pipe

• Dorothea Lange, “Migrant Mother,” Nipomo Valley, 1935

  • Other people migrating

  • One of the photographers hired to take documentary photos of squalor and decrepitude

  • Artistically posed piece playing on historical art

  • This is “modern Mary” in shambles

  • American dream of mobility is stopped by the reality of being “stuck”

• Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks,” 1942

  • A lot both in your face, and subtle

  • Lots of symmetry

  • Surreal: Looks like a fish tank, figures are locked in, during WW so why are men not at war, street represents moving but how did the figures get there, street is dark, diner is too well lit for late at night

  • Streamline architecture

  • Emphasis on darkness and light

  • Hopper is not influenced by film noir, he influenced film noir.

• Jacob Lawrence, “No. 49,” from “The Migration of the Negro,” 1940-41

  • About first major migration of African Americans from the rural south to urban cities

• Grant Wood, “American Gothic,” 1930

  • Play on stereotypes (southern conservative farmer)

  • Gothic architecture in background (high roof, pointed window)

  • “Gothic” technically means old-fashioned

  • The people are as harsh and rigid as the Gothic architecture in the background

• Thomas Hart Benton, “Pioneer Days and Early Settlers,” from mural, “A Social History of the State of Missouri,” Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, 1936

  • Rejected family's known job of politics, but was a politic in painting

  • This shows an America that is building and going places

  • People of difference are working together

  • Preserving the folklore (Huck Finn, Jesse James, Frankie and Johnny) through the painting

  • Representationalism: About bringing the art to the people; made his art very accessible and affordable to the public

• Jackson Pollock, “Number 1,” “1950 (Lavender Mist),” 1950

  • No one is telling you what to think, you decide what the painting means

  • Large scale, web of paint, aggressive art

    • Very modernist (search for experience)

    • Action painting

• Willem de Kooning, “Woman 1,” 1950-52

  • Abstract expressionism

• Barnett Newman, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” 1950-51

  • Idea of losing yourself to the sublime

• Mark Rothko, “No. 14,” 1960

  • These artists were getting into origins

  • Art just meant to be art, not meant for other reasons (religion, history, etc.)

  • The overwhelming scale of these paintings were meant to overshadow and take you in like the weighty current events of the war

• Morris Louis, “Saraband,” 1959

  • Stained very thin pigment onto unprimed canvas

  • Non-representational art in a time of persuasive propaganda; Propaganda told people what to think so they made art that lets you think for yourself

  • Fried on minimalist art: “Art degenerates [loses quality] as it approaches a condition of theatricality [acting out, telling a story].”

  • Believed when art becomes theatrical, it becomes illustration, not art.

• Donald Judd, “Untitled,” 1969

  • Believed sculpture was better than painting because it was already three dimensional

  • Materials and art should be closely allied

  • No illusion, no hidden meaning

• Eva Hesse, “Hang-Up,” 1965-66

  • Unlike Judd and Smith, she shows neat forms become untidy

  • Uses latex and cloth

  • Shows the “guts” of art falling out, reaching out to you

• Richard Hamilton, “Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?”, 1956

  • Reference to all the media that fill the world

  • Anti-Greenburgian, embracing kiche art

  • Only thing abstract is the floor

  • Embrace of pop culture

• Jasper Johns, “Flag,” 1954-55

  • Bridges the gap between minimalism and pop art

• Robert Rauschenburg, “Canyon,” 1959

• Roy Lichtenstein, “Hopeless,” 1963

  • Emotion-less in all its emotion because of the fakeness

  • From all the blurred color of minimalism, we arrive back at almost Giotto-esque separation of colors

  • Painted, but with stencils and masking tape to get hard edges

• Andy Warhol, “Marilyn Diptych,” 1962

  • Pop-art, Marilyn is reduced to registers of ink

  • Left to right, she dematerializes

  • Warhol is saying that we are worshiping at the shrine of Marilyn

  • We are worshiping pop art culture

  • Loses genuineness

• Claes Oldenburg, various works exhibited at the Green Gallery, New York, 1962

  • Worked with “soft” or “maliable” art made to be sold

• Audrey Flack, “Marilyn,” 1977

  • Uses voni tas: fleeting essence of life ex. Hourglass, candle, fruit, flowers, compact mirror

  • Super-realism movement

• Duane Michaels, “Supermarket Shopper,” 1970

• Judy Chicago, “The Dinner Party,” 1979

  • All women left behind are given a seat to a party which no men are invited

  • Women often get left out of art history

• Barbara Kruger, “Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face,” 1983

  • Talking about Mary Cassatt's “At the Opera” 1878

• Guerilla Girls, “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist,” 1988

• Robert Arneson, “California Artist,” 1981

  • Tries to make politically incorrect references

  • Very un-”slick” guy

  • Aging hippy

  • Work of human hands is very apparent

• Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty,” Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970

  • Un-pop art because it cannot be sold

  • Anti-materialist movement

Joseph Beuys, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare," 1965

-Hare symbolizes incarnation
-Honey on head symbolizes human ability to think
-Intellectualizing can be deadly to thought: one can talk one's mind to death in politics or in academics

• Bruce Nauman, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths,” 1967

  • ESSAY: 5-6 works, thesis. What does the true artist do? What are those truths? What devices does the artist use to reveal them? Color (Fauvists), Beauty (Falling Rocket)?

  • “Vision After the Sermon”: helps the world by revealing the ability to have a vision

  • “Still Life of Chair Cane”: Picasso shows difference between perceptual and conceptual reality (what you see and what you know), what is he revealing?

  • Pollock: He is true, his paint shows exactly each fling of his wrist

  • Don't just list, but does the artist expose the underbelly of the world? And how?