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American Art - Final Exam
Final exam
22
Art History
Undergraduate 4
12/03/2018

Additional Art History Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
[image]
Definition
Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, Millrun, Pennsylvania, 1936-39

- Kaufman family owned department stores in Pittsburgh
- Wright built house on top of waterfall
- Concrete slabs creates idea of building cascading similar to waterfall
- Issues with the house, concreate slabs have started to sag, costs a lot of money to keep house running
- Frank Lloyd Wright very difficult to work with
Term
[image]
Definition
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (Portrait of Professor Gross), 1875

- Eakins studies human anatomy closely, some problematic accusations by students.
- Surgery done on small boy, mother is cringing to the left of the doctor.
- Showing surgery as a type of violence against body.
Term
[image]
Definition
Robert Koehler, The Strike, 1886

- Shows struggle between workers and owners, showing workers on strike
- Owner signified with top hat and black suit
- Strikers are emotional, animated – pointing, fist in the air, expressions, impressionistic style towards background, bringing tension of left side (clearer painting) to the climax of the issue
- Very much about sympathizing with workers, woman with children by brick wall, juxtaposed with capitalist owner. His stern look is opposite from her hopeful look. Might be hopeful, saying we should work out conflict
- 1886 Haymarket Incident, big year for labor reform in the US. Workers planted bomb, police fired at workers, high tensions between owners and workers.
Term
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Definition
Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962

- Begins with commercial work (windows, illustration)
- Realized he could create fine art that brought in and centered around public figures/celebrities and popular culture
- ‘The Factory’ at Union Sq West
- Constantly looking at news for sources
- Putting Marylin in front of gold background, almost like Madonna or religious icon
- Even more garish than Marylin would ever actually look
Term
[image]
Definition
Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934

- Originally meant to be at Rockefeller Center
- Man going into the future controlling space, etc
- Included Lennon, leader of Soviet Russia
- Rockefeller destroyed mural after he saw Lennon was included
- Image of Rockefeller drinking in the mural to get back at him
- Horrors of war, police brutality, upper class critiques
Term
[image]
Definition
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending the Staircase, No. 2, 1912

- Breaking up the image of female, showing motion of descending the stairs
- Playing off of modernist impulse
- Showing movement because we don’t see in ‘snapshots’ but in a flux of images, showing multiple perspectives in one image
- Same idea of multiple perspectives interpreted by Picasso in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- NY public was not convinced after Armory
- Although it’s making fun/parody of Duchamp, it is completely getting what Duchamp is trying to do
Term
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Definition
Philip Evergood, American Tragedy, 1937

- Heroic image of laborer with arm around pregnant woman fighting back
- Police rising up against workers
- Paintings are almost cartoon like
- Exaggerated with color
Term
[image]
Definition
William Le Baron Jenney, Home Insurance Building, Chicago, 1884–85

- One of the first skyscrapers
- 11 floors, cast iron
- Steel used for upper floors of structure (can hold more weight than iron)
Term
[image]
Definition
Pierre Koenig, Case Study House #22, 1959-60

- Photographed by Julius Shulman
- American magazines puts forward idea of working with architects that create case study houses (affordable, yet promoting modernist ideals)
- Roof, steel, glass
- Photograph is as much about architecture as it is about photographer taking picture
Visual Acoustics documentary about Shulman’s life
Term
[image]
Definition
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts, 1955

- Target is everyday found object
- Top of work also has castes of body parts, slots for body parts for them to be hidden or exposed— interest in the body and perhaps coded meaning, could be pointing at Johns’ sexuality
Term
[image]
Definition
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953

- Questioning of desire for total abstraction
- Takes de Kooning drawing and erases it, Dada-esque
- Also Rauschenberg making mark/gesture by obliterating drawing with eraser
Term
[image]
Definition
Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949

- Probably most influencial architecture piece of its time
- Curator at MoMA
- Now open to public in New Canaan, CT
- Different structures on site
- Inspired by Farnsworth house (by Mies van der Rohe in Illinois)
Term
[image]
Definition
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm No. 30, 1950

- Clement Greenberg critiques Pollock, says this was pushing art to its limits, heroic,
American, imaginative of what art could be
- At the time, US is involved in cold war (communism vs capitalism)
- Threat of nuclear war
- Cuban missile crisis, Soviet Union has missiles pointing at US from Cuba
- US govt promotes art like Autumn Rhythm as symbol of American freedom, “expression of American freedom”
- Masculine expressive painting, very alcoholic
- Idea of painting in west, open land (appropriating American landscape)
- “Action painting” or “all over painting”
Term
[image]
Definition
Jacob Lawrence, She Felt the First Sting of Slavery from the Harriet Tubman series, 1939-40

- Did politically charged work about African American experience
- Modernist shapes and flattened perspective
Term
[image]
Definition
Statue of Columbia, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

- Were big deals, hosted by different countries that had displays showing technological and cultural progress
- Enormous events and millions of visitors (27 million in attendance to Chicago)
- Open for entire summer
- Some buildings were built as permanent structures, others temporary
- Opening of all world culture (emancipation of men)
- 400 buildings on 700 acres
- Federick Law Holmstead
- Daniel Burnham (flatiron building) was director of works, in charge of hiring architects
- Fair itself celebrated as Columbus's 400's anniversary of landing in America
- Many buildings built of type of plaster 'staff' (temporary)
Term
[image]
Definition
Dorothea Lange, WRA, Hayward, California, May 8, 1942

- Outbreak of WWII
- War on two fronts for US
- War relocation authority, creates camps for Japanese Americans
- Image shows family being tagged
Term
[image]
Definition
Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, Vanna Venturi House, 1964

- House designed for his mother, still stands today
- Created variation of typical American home
- Triangular roofline split in half, unexpected
- Interior is still traditional, but stairway is playful and cut up
- Is sometimes described as ‘post-modern’— mimics or parodies modernist style, interacted directly with marketplace, breaks down boundaries of high and low culture
- Designed and redesigned the house for 4 years
- Recognizes awkwardness and confusion
- Still including elements from modernism for interiors
- Embraces contradiction, surprise
- Thousands of examples of ‘bad post-modern’ architectures
- “Don’t trust an architect that’s trying to start a movement
Term
[image]
Definition
Ramiro Gomez, Balenciaga, 2016

- Does work that tries to get us to think about labor and workers
- Inserts garden worker into Balenciaga ad
- Mexican origin
- Race notion of who is doing labor (particularly in So Cal)
Term
[image]
Definition
Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in a Polyester Suit, 1980

- Caused more and more controversy
- Westchester University students would leave the room when David spoke about Mapplethrope
- Fetishizes black male body from white photographer
- Caused great amount of panic, government would try to censor art which became counterintuitive
- Richard Meyer writes larger book about censorship (teaches at Stanford)
- Using aesthetics of film to classically frame photograph
- Homophobia hysteria that being gay leads to interest in children— taken to an extreme to cause fear
Term
[image]
Definition
Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

- Mythical Aunt Jemima caricature of maternal black woman (racist trope that repeats over and over again)
- She represents Aunt Jemima, left hand she is holding a gun
- She will be able to break out of the box that contains her
Term
[image]
Definition
Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932
Term
[image]
Definition
Alfred Hitchcock, Still from Rear Window, 1954
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