*Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-1906, o/c, 5’8” x 7’9”,

Barnes Fdn. Salon des Indépendents, 1906

“wild beasts”

“flat, broad colors, no shades of color, sticking to same tone”

-decorative quality

-supposed to imply pleasure and harmony

-must strive for individualism

-exploiting physical sensations intended

-we need to break through artificial restraints

-very large paintings

-somewhere in joy of life (mini dance in the distance)

-scale is askew with no difference in color tones

-nude figures

-quest to arrange of pairings & figures, very sexual, walking, embracing each other

-arbitrary colors (unrealistic) pink sky, purple grass

-feeling of wellbeing

*Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1928, bronze, 54 x 8 1/2 x 6 1/2", MOMA

-beauty is as beauty does

-an essence (not always exterior)

-simplification

-arcs when things glide in the air

-aerodynamic

-feathers, head, beak

-long arcing form

-supposed to evoke feeling of emotion of flight

*Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Street, Dresden, 1908, o/c, 4’11” x 6’6”, MOMA

-human spirit, human anxiety can be explored

-get anxiety from this image

-move away from modern life

-start to celebrate existence of human beings rooted to express themselves through gestures and through the bodies

-‘react to the work’ in time period

-link to this ‘Street’ scene- Van Gogh’s Night Café, or Moulin Rouge might have inspired this

-very plunging, upward perspective

-claustrophobia

-strips us of individuality

-or perhaps ‘Paris Street, Rainy Weather’ no one making eye contact

-primitivism

-want to go back to a society that doesn’t have material motivation

*Max Pechstein (1881-1953), Indian and Woman, 1910, o/c, 32 x 26”, St. Louis

-ambiguity here

-vivid colors

-rounded, curving treatment

-don’t have ragged treatment of human form

-feeling of emotion from human form

*Emil Nolde (1867-1956),

The Last Supper, 1909, o/c, 33 x 42”, Copenhagen

-Nolde kind of hangs on to rural, peasant background in works

Many artists:

-turned away from organized religion

-“makes us slaves”

-don’t have a lot of works that have to do w/ religious subject matter

-except Nolde

-using acidic green and yellow for the faces

-mask-like images on 12 apostles

-light on faces, especially on Christ’s face

-crushed together

-right up to the edge

-no sense of space to emphasize closeness and make it more intense

-faces totally caught up in moment

-back of head –Judas perhaps

-means ‘wild beast’

-looking at art in France and Germany

-Expressionism