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Classical Greece
Ancient Greece During its "Classic" or "Golden Age"

Focus on the city Athens and its Acropolis
The Panathenaic Way and Victory Temple

Quick Time Line:

Geometric Period 1050 BCE - 700 BCE (700 BCE)
Orientalizing Period 700 BCE - 600 BCE (600 BCE)
Archaic Period 600 BCE - 480 BCE (600 BCE)
The Golden Age of Perikles (Classic Phase) 480-350 BCE (450)
Late Hellenism 350-30 BCE

The Acropolis
Context: Located on the highest point in Athens, Greece, the Acropolis was first constructed as a fortress/governmental palace for the king or Anax
around 1000 BCE. However, after the Athenian defeat of the Persian army, the city embarked on a new Classical Era and began to rebuilt the site.
The version we now know dates from 450 BCE, which is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age of Perikles", the Athenian leader at the
time. There are many acropolai (the plural for Acropolis) in Greece; however, the one in Athens is the most famous in existence.
The Acropolis is equivalent to our modern day civic center. On it there were galleries, temples, a bank and at its base was a marketplace and two
theaters. Temples were included because religion and patriotism were combined. There was no separation of church and state as in our government;
however, like us, the Athenians were a democratic culture. At the base of the Acropolis are markets called "stoas" where merchants would sell their
goods. Philosophers would rent out stoas to preach their beliefs and pass out pamphlets.
The term "acropolis" is actually two words placed together. "Acro" means high and "polis" means city: so the Acropolis of Athens is the highest
point of the city. Although the Acropolis was originally established around 1000 BCE, the Acropolis and the buildings on it we are most familiar
with were renovated during the leadership of the Greek General named Perikles. The Greek period we will be discussing the most is between 480-
400 BCE.
Perikles, who fought as a general in the Persian War (c480 BC), returned home to find that his city and most of the Acropolis had been destroyed
by the Persians in his absence. Perikles took it upon himself to rebuild the city and to do so he founded an alliance of city states in 478 BC called
the Delian League. The money from the Delian League was the primary source of funding for the reconstruction of the Acropolis.
Around 480 BCE, Sparta, Athens, and Corinth formed the League of Delos(1) (equivalent to or modern day NATO). The Greek island Delos was
originally the "bank" for the League; however, Perikles, a great economist, wanted Athens to be the treasury of the Delos League. He knew that the
island would boost the economy of Athens and once he found the ACropolis completely destroyed, he used the money from the Delos League to
rebuild it.
The Acropolis, Athens, Greece. A good way to understand Perikles and his role in Athens is to read "Perikles’ Funereal Oration" which was recorded by the Greek historian
450 BCE The Classic Era Thucydides. Find it in Mencher, Liaisons 49, 87-90 (Thucydides: Perikles' Funeral Oration)
Architects and artists: Iktinos, Kallikrates and
Mnesicles were the main architects for the complex.
Phidias was one of the sculptor/painters responsible
for the design of much of the ornamentation.
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/classic_early_christian_byzantine/acropolis_panathanaic_nike_pottery.htm[7/31/2013 12:51:46 AM]

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Context: The Panathenaic Procession

This next section will be in the order of the procession in which the Athenian celebration would have encountered the buildings of the
Acropolis. The term Panathenaic literally means "all of Athens." "Pan"- Means "all" and is also associated with the god of all the
woods, "athenaic" - Athenian.
Although the Acropolis was home to a polytheistic (many gods) culture, the majority of the complex was devoted to Athena, the goddess
of wisdom and the main goddess of the city. Below is the basic plan of the Acropolis, its buildings and the two theaters at its base. Along
the perimeter of the hill on which it is perched is a pathway, marked in gray. On certain festival days, every four years, the entire town of
Athens came out and took the long route around the Acropolis to its top which is known as the "Panathenaic Procession."
This procession would begin in Athens's Agora take the Panathenaic way (see the diagram of the Agora in Stokstad) and pass by the
Herodean Theater continuing on past the Theater of Dionysus all the way around the base of the hill and finally ending with entry into the
Propylaia, also known as the Pinakotheke. By moving all the way around the hill instead of just walking up, each Athenian could
understand the magnificence of this sacred high point. The journey would end at the Parthenon where the Athenians who had made the
trek would leave their offering to the goddess Athena.

Form: These Athenian theaters follow the same design as the theater at Epidauros (see Stokstad 5-72). The design is a symmetrical hemisphere (half circle) that
is arranged similarly to modern day stadiums and can seat nearly 12,000 people. The stone material and the shape of the theater allowed the sound of the actors,
who stood in the orchestra, to be heard throughout the theater. The actors entered onto the orchestra from the parados (wings). Behind them was usually a static

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building that was the backdrop called the skene. This backdrop had no ornamentation or painting and was fairly simple. In fact, props were kept to a minimum
on the stage.
Iconography: The theater itself was an important place for Athenians to gather and although it was probably not designed to be a symbol of civic pride, it
developed a similar meaning to our stadiums and theaters within our own towns. One modern example would be Oakland's "Coliseum."
Context: Theater and performance of Greek Tragedy and Comedy were an important component in the lifestyle of the Athenians. The theater was a place in
which stories, mythology, and cultural values were conveyed and ideas were explored. The theater also served as an important social setting and helped the
economy by bringing in tourists for festivals. The fact that a theater was devoted to the god Dionysus indicates the importance of the ideas and values personified
by him. Dionysus (also called Bacchus) was the god of drama and of wine. In essence he was the god of liberation. Theater was considered a type of liberation
and served as a great distraction from the outside difficulties of the ancient world.
"Ancient tragic drama was a public event done in large scale. At Athens the Theater of Dionysus, built against the steeply rising east slope of the Acropolis, was
large enough to accommodate fourteen to seventeen thousand people. This group sat together on benches without divisions so that as arms, legs, and haunches
touched, emotions could race through the audience. A large crowd is characteristically animal. Probably it was in reaction to the natural volatility of a crowd
that the Athenian assembly passed a law making an outright and provocative disturbance during a performance a capital offense. The setting offered little form
of crowd control. Performances were out of doors, in daylight, continuous, starting at dawn in a large arena where there must have been constant movement, as
at present-day sporting events or a Chinese opera. People leaving to relieve themselves, hawkers selling food, these were moving elements of the panorama as
much as the actors and the chorus".
(Charles Rowan Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975 and 1987) 127-128.
One of the most important festivals in Athens focused on the performance of Greek drama. The festival named the City Dionysia or Greater Dionysia which took
place in late March was an important event dedicated to the god Dionysus.

Form: The physical form of the Greek theater strongly influenced the manner in which the plays were written and performed. The actual components of a Greek
play echo the physical form and symmetry of the theater itself.
Components of Greek tragedy and the structure of the Greek tragedy This is the order of a play's performance, how each one of the acts is structured and what it
contains.
prologos (prologue) This is the opening scene in which an opening monologue or dialogue is presented. This establishes the background information in the play
and also introduces the "conflict," by outlining some events to follow. The prologos therefore is like the skene or setting because it provides the background
information.
parados The name for the wings of the stage on which the chorus stands and comments. The parados is also the name for when the chorus enters, chanting a
lyric. Think of the word parody from our culture. A parody is a commentary on a text that we are usually familiar with.
episode This is similar to individual acts in a play. These usually consist of dialogues between actors, which are complimented by choral odes known as the
stasimon. The episode is similar to the central location of the main action that occurs on the orchestra.
stasimon The choral ode that usually comes at the end of each episode. It is a type narrative in which the chorus summarizes the action and hints at what will
happen next. This is the instant replay and contains pretty much the same information as the parados.
exodos This is the last stasimon which accompanies the action and the ceremonial exit of the actors from the stage. This could also be referred to as an ending
stasimon.
More on Greek theatre available on this site.


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Form: The interior of this symmetrical, yet balanced kylix (wine cup) was decorated in black-figure style with the figure of the Greek god Dionysus in a boat.
Out of the deck of the boat springs a grape vine and surrounding the ship are several dolphins or porpoises. The figures are painted with a slit watered-down
clay over the red, therefore creating that black-figure style The ground of the vessel is the natural red of the clay and the sail is heightened with white glaze.
The scraffito technique is used as a means to bring out the details with an etching tool.
Iconography: It makes perfect sense that a wine vessel would be decorated with an image of the Greek god of wine, theater and ecstatic liberation, Dionysus.
(The Romans called him Bacchus.) The grape vine represents his role as the god of wine and the dolphins are probably transformed sailors who committed an
act of hubris against the god in one of the myths that precede the story told by the Greek tragic play The Bacchae (also called the Bacchic women). The "lucky"
number of seven figures into the symbolism with seven dolphins and seven bunches of grapes.
Context: Origin of Dionysus. (See Mencher Liaisons 49-86 (Ovid "Semele"). Dionysus's mother Semele, the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes, had an affair
with Zeus (called Jove by the Romans) who disguised himself as a shepherd boy. Unfortunately, her family does not believe she is carrying Zeus' child. Hera,
Zeus' wife finds out about the affair and goes down to earth disguised as a nurse maid to comfort Semele. Hera, angry at her husband and jealous of the young
maiden, tells Semele to make Zeus promise that the next time he appears to her it would be in all his glory (robes, thunder, etc.). When Zeus keeps his promise,
his powerful presence burns the young woman to ashes and all that remains is Dionysus. Zeus picks him up and inserts him into his thigh where he is reborn.
Dionysus in a Boat by Exekias Hera finds out about Zeus' devotion to his new son and chops Dionysus into pieces. Zeus then swallows him and he is reborn a third time.
(black and white photo) (click for color)
Dionysus then lives with the satyrs in the woods, away from Hera's harm. They devoutly teach him the lessons of life and he becomes the god of liberation and
Interior of an Attic black-figured kylix
goes back to his mother's land. On his way back to his home he comes across sailors who told the young god they would take him wherever he wanted to go.
c 540 BCE diameter 12"
Instead, they try to take advantage of him by using him as a slave, so Dionysus curses them by calling snakes and panthers to appear on the boat. As the sailors
Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich
jump overboard he ends the events by turning them into dolphins. The kylix depicts Dionysus turning his boat around to go back to Thebes and take revenge
Archaic, Black-figure
upon his mother's family who did not believe that Zeus was her child's father.
The Athenian variety of gods consisted of a group of gods who exhibited extremely human characteristics: they would love like people, play favorites, steal from
each other and cheat each other. In some ways, according to our culture's values, they were not very morally developed. There are many myths which discuss the
exploits of the gods and use them as models to explain the faults and triumphs of human characteristics. These myths not only pass on the stories, but, transmit
cultural values as well. Mythology was passed on in many forms, decorative motifs on pottery, walls, and architecture, as well through poetry and performing
arts. At the base of the Acropolis are two theaters, the Herodean Theater and the Theater of Dionysus. The inclusion of these theaters as integral part of the
Acropolis tells us quite a lot about the culture of the Greeks.

The Greek Orders (Also see the Elements of Architecture page 164. in Stokstad)
Greek temple architecture is designed in the post and lintel style. The posts are the columns and the lintel is the entablature that rests on top of them. Each one of these columns is a different style or
order and has a distinct physical appearance.

The Doric:
Form: The Doric is the simplest of the designs. It has no base, simple fluting up the shaft of the columns and a simple capital that
has no intricate ornamentation. The entablature is divided into three sections consisting of the unornamented architrave, the frieze,
which is subdivided in to the triglyph (tri- three glyph marks) and the metope. The metope can also contain relief sculptures. (By the
way, the Parthenon is a Doric order.)
Iconography and Context: I was taught to look at the orders in a rather chauvinistic manner which is probably how the Greeks saw
them as well. The Doric order is the most dignified and masculine of the orders and was named after the Dorian region.

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Sometimes the Doric order will exhibit a slight swelling in the center of the column. This swelling, known as entasis, is thought to
either correct the curvature of a temple for the eyes or to show that the column is responding to the weight of the building as it is
begin held up.
The Ionic:
Form: The Ionic is more complex. It has a base, simple fluting up the shaft of the columns and has an ornamented capital that makes it look like the letter "i". The
entablature of the Ionic order is less complex than the Doric and is divided in two sections. These sections are the unornamented architrave and the frieze, sometimes
decorated with relief sculptures. (The Nike Temple is Ionic.)
Iconography and Context: I was taught to look at the orders in a rather chauvinistic manner which is probably how the Greeks saw them. The Ionic order is a bit
more feminine in its design because of the soft volutes of its capital. It is a rather problematic column because it does not turn corners well as you can see from this
detail of the Nike Temple corner. It was named after the Greek region of Ionia.
The Corinthian:
Form: The Corinthian is as complex as the Ionic but a bit overdressed. It has a base, simple fluting up the shaft of the columns and has an ornamented capital that makes
it look like a salad basket with its acanthus leaves. The entablature is divided in two sections consisting of the unornamented architrave, and the frieze which is sometimes
decorated with relief sculptures.
Iconography and Context: I was taught to look at the orders in a rather chauvinistic manner which is probably how the Greeks saw them. But, in a more 20th century
context, the Corinthian order is the Carmen Miranda or "drag queen" of the orders with its overly ornate basket on its head. It was named after the region of Corinth,
conquered by the Greeks.
Carmen Miranda

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Know these components and these orders.

Form: The Nike Temple is a small (27'x9') ionic order temple. The temple is amphiprostyle with four columns on both the east and west facades. There is little
space between columns because of stone's lack of tensile strength (flexibility). There is a continuous running frieze in the entablature. The Nike Temple faces in
one direction (west), but appears to have two entrances with blank side walls. Surrounding the temple is a low wall called a parapet which contained low flat
relief sculptures. On the parapet's (3) side is a bass relief carving(4) (a statue) of Winged Victory, or Nike.
Iconography: The goddess Nike is a winged female figure that represents victory. The fact that this temple is located at the very entrance of the Acropolis could
mean that victory is at the forefront of Athenian ideology.
Context: This temple was in earlier times a type of "look out" from which Athenians could guard and foresee any intruders on the way in.

Nike Temple, (Temple of Athena Nike)

c425 BCE
by Kallikrates, Acropolis Athens,
Classic Greek Ionic Temple Style
Form: This high relief carving is just one of many of the same type of winged figures in different poses. In this sculpture the winged figure of Nike is
adjusting her sandal. Unfortunately most of the head and the wings sprouting out of her back have been destroyed but the torso and legs are well preserved.
The anatomy and carving of the figure is very naturalistically rendered; yet it struggles to maintain a certain idealized figure. In other words, her figure
adheres to the natural parts of a human body, but it also tends to preserve certain features as ideal. This mixture of natural and ideal is heightened by the
drapery that clings to her body. The style of sculpting drapery, as if it were wet, is called the wet drapery style.
Iconography: Winged figures in Greek art are personifications of victory. These nike figures are placed about the pediment of the Nike temple in different
attitudes or poses as if they are part of a parade in celebration of Athens' victory during the Persian Wars. The idealization of the female form here is
probably an illustration of the concept of kalos.
Context: Many of the male figures found on the Acropolis from all eras are nude. However, it isn't until the second century that we begin to see nude
females in Greek art. The wet drapery style is a happy medium for representing idealized women because the folds and contours can be used to highlight the
ideal features of each figure. Interpretations of the drapery covering this figure's form might be in keeping with our own taboos against female nudity. In
our culture men are allowed to reveal a larger part of their body than females yet we design fashions that tease viewers by accenting certain part of the female
form. The Greeks' use of wet drapery might fill a similar need and indicate the concept of the female form as submissive versus the male form representing
strength.

Nike from Parapet

of the Temple of Athena Nike -
A statue of Winged Victory c. 410 BC,
Marble, 42" tall
Acropolis, Athens.
Classic
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Form: This stele is rendered in style very similar to the Nike parapet. The two female figures are rendered in profile right against the front of the picture
plane. The figures inhabit what looks to be a post and lintel temple which gives the viewer the sense of an environment. Each woman is idealized physically
through the use of wet drapery. The folds of each dress accent the protruding knees and fluid bodies. The anatomy of their faces is naturalistic with some
idealized features as well. An example of this is the bridge of the noses is representing as a straight line, a minor distortion of how noses fit in with the
geography of the face: the bridge is usually slightly curved at the top. This aquiline feature is referred to as the Greek nose.
Iconography: Scenes like this are called genre, or everyday, scenes. This is a scene of everyday life in which a maid brings a jewelry box to her mistress
and she examines her trophies. This kind of scene, which is often referred to as the "Mistress and Maid" motif is one that can also be found on vases as well
as steles. It can best be interpreted as a typical scene of upper class feminine pursuits. The maid, the jewels, the chair, and the implied literacy of the visitors
to the grave by the inscription on the lintel, are emblems of economic power that compliment the seated woman's beauty and status. (Compare this to the
iconography of vases that depict two males such as in the Exekias vase.)
Context: This stele was used as a grave marker and is probably an attempt by the artist and the people who commissioned it to make an idealized portrait of
the represented, seated woman, buried in this grave.
Stele of Hegeso
c.410-400 BC, Marble, 5'9"
Athens. Classic
Form: This stele is rendered in style very similar to the Stele of Hegeso. The two female figures are rendered in profile view up close against the front of the picture plane.
Each is idealized physically and wearing wet drapery. The anatomy of their faces is naturalistic but idealized as well: the bridge of their noses is a straight line which is a
slight distortion of how noses fit in with the geography of the face. This aquiline feature is referred to as the Greek nose.
The white-ground technique is a vase painting technique in which the pot was first covered with a slip of very fine white clay, over which black glaze was used to outline
figures, and diluted brown, purple, red, and white were used to color them.
Iconography: This scene is a slight correction on the Stele. In this one the maid brings the mistress a stool for her maid. (I think it is the chest itself.) This is also a kind of
genre scene, in which a maid brings a jewelry box to her mistress and she examines her trophies. This motif, which is often referred to as the "Mistress and Maid", is one
that can also be found on vases and can best be interpreted as a typical scene of upper class feminine pursuits. The maid, jewels, the writing and the clothes are emblems of
economic power that compliment the seated woman's beauty and status. (Compare this to the iconography of vases that depict two males such as in the Exekias vase.)
Context: Stokstad relates that this vase was used as a memorial ornament and is probably an attempt by the artist and the people who commissioned it to make an idealized
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portrait of the woman who it memorializes. Art is then establishing male and female roles through its depictions.
Lekythos with "Mistress

and Maid"
theme- c. 440 BC, Athens.
white-ground and black-
figure decoration
with touches of tempera,
15" tall Museum of Fine
Art Boston
Classic
1. 1Delos is a small island off the coast of Greece. This is where the original treasury was to be kept.
2. 2(Charles Rowan Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975 and 1987) 127-128.
3. 3 According the Dictionary of Architecture, "a parapet is a low wall, sometimes battlemented, placed to protect any spot where there is a sudden drop, for example, at the edge of a bridge, quay, or
house top."
John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, "parapet," Dictionary of Architecture, Third Edition ed.: 237.
4. 4Bass- base or low relief -relieved or pushed out from the wall.
Ancient Greece During its "Golden Age" Focus on the city Athens and its Acropolis
The Parthenon
Now we are going to look at the main and most important building on the Acropolis that is called the Parthenon. As you leave the entrance, you see it on the right-hand side facing you. It is meant to
represent the home of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. We know a lot about this building because there were actually records left from that time including; how it was paid for, who worked on it, etc. The
main architects for it were Iktinos and Kallikrates. The main sculptor who worked on it was a guy named Phidias. It really is a “magnum opus” (one of the greatest works we will look at) because it is the
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schema building for all the future buildings we will be studying, both in architecture and design/ornamentation.
The story is that “Athena,” who is the goddess of wisdom, is also the patron goddess for this building. I think it is kind of important that this building represents her main attributes which are wisdom and
also chaste values, meaning she is a celibate goddess that is very dignified, very logical and very powerful. She is also the main goddess who supports Odysseus in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Remember Zeus gave birth to Dionysus?
Well, he also gives birth to Athena, and this is how it happens. One day he has a terrible headache and the God of the Forge; Hephaestus, or you may know him by his “Star Trek” or Roman name,
“Vulcan” comes and cuts his head open with an ax and Athena springs from his head like a fully formed idea; fully armed, clothed and ready for battle in her weaponry and all her glory. I also think that
there is a little bit of that weird idea that she also springs out of his head from a headache, (I guess some parents feel like their kids are headaches) so you can draw your own conclusions to that.

Iktinos and Kallikrates The Parthenon c450 BCE Athens, Greece

17:8 ratio
kalos
symmetria
Pythagorean ratios 6:8, 9:12

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The building represents “symmetria,” “kalos” and a lot of the irrational and rational ideas concerning numbers that we discussed before. So first off, when you are approaching it; you actually approach it
from the West side. It is canted at a slight angle so you get to see two sides of the building. The West side is the short side facing you and it is not the entrance; it was actually used as a storage room.
And remember, we talked about the Pythagorean idea concerning the ratio of 8 to 17; that it is a beautiful and kind of a strange irrational number, but also how it makes the building look about three
times longer? So when you travel down it, you get the sense that the building is extra-large because you get to see the entire length of the building as you bring your goods to Athena who is housed
inside.
When you step up closer to the building you see that it seems to be completely square, logical and level, but I think one of the most interesting things that a lot of people have taken a look at and find
particularly interesting, is that it actually has a bunch of curved lines. In the base it actually, I think, rises a couple of centimeters in the center and in the entablature; and the columns themselves kind of
tilt in a little bit. Those sorts of weird little distortions that are not squared off and do not seem completely logical, are actually quite logical. If you did not have that rise to compensate for the curvature
of the eyes and some weird things that happen in terms of how we see things, it would probably look like it was sort of leaning out and kind of bubbling in a strange way. So those distortions in the
foundation, the rise of the building and the columns canted back, are meant to actually compensate for irrational things that happen with the structure.
Overall, it is a “Doric” order temple and that means it’s the most masculine order of temple. I think it is also interesting that they chose the most dignified (for them) and the most masculine order, to
house a female goddess; who incidentally is a virgin goddess. The term “Parthenos” means “virgin.” Do you remember the term “parthenogenesis” means “virgin birth” from biology class? This is the
virgin’s “cella” or chamber.

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If we look at the Doric order and we analyze a little bit more closely using these diagrams, I think you can see some things that are important. So notice that it does not have a base and that it is a simple
column that goes straight into the “stylobate.” Remember when I told you that the term for column is “stylos” and the term for base is “bate”? So, “stylobate” means “column base” and we also have the
term “steriobate,” which means “second base.” And that’s probably the original “stylobate” and “steriobate” foundation for that structure. They started a temple in about 490 to Athena. Then when the
Persians came and decimated the Acropolis, all that was left (more or less) was the foundation; so it (or parts of it) were used to construct the Parthenon.
If we zoom in on the frieze of the entablature, you will see that there is also an alternation between what are called “triglyphs” and “metopes.” For “triglyph,” the term “tri” means “three,” meaning it has
three marks. The “metopes” actually made up the end parts for the original wooden structures of that time; and would have been used to keep animals (such as birds) from getting in through the roofline.
They were originally made out of “terra-cotta tiles.” Now all of the elements that we see for this building are made out of this almost solid stone and emulate or mimic the original wood structure. So a lot
of it is just left over style. For example: like how in some cars the hubcaps looks like they have spokes, but now they are just for decoration compared to the actual spokes on the original cars when they
were first made in the 1920s and 30s and were actually functional. I think a lot of the elements on the entablature of Greek buildings are kind of like those left over vestiges that are just ornaments that
people like to have, and they are included because they are part of the Doric order.

Doric Order
We are looking at a temple from Italy actually; because some of the best preserved temples are in Italy. What I want you to notice is that as we move up the column, we see that there is fluting, a slight
swelling in the center; sort of three quarters of the way or two thirds of the way up the column, that it drops back into the echinus or “capital” of the column and that the swelling is called “entasis.” This
is a way of actually making the columns appear straighter and possibly used to either make it look as if the columns are swelling under the pressure of the entablature to give an organic kind of feel to it;
or the other way of looking at it, is possibly that the drop back about two thirds of the way up the columns is meant to increase the already emphasized size of the building.

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Greek, Paestum Italy Basilica 550BCE

entasis


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The next place where you zoom in on is the pediment of the building, which is the top. It has frame like molding or outline on it called a “cornice.” I think in Italian it is called a “corniche” which
literally means “frame.”
We are going to take a look at the sculptures that were set in there. In the pediment of the Parthenon are a series of sculptures that have kind of been put up there like knick knacks on a shelf. Most of
them do not actually exist anymore on the Parthenon. Most of them are in England, in the British Museum. Now we will talk about how Athena lost her marbles.
These are three of the figures that would have been tucked into the top of the pediment, and the first idea that I want to bounce off you is actually where they all went. Phidias is the sculptor and they
have been there for thousands of years (more or less). Then there is the war between the Ottoman Turks and the Venetians. Around 16 CE, there is this battle where the Ottomans have munitions dumps or
some powder kegs and gunpowder inside the center of the Parthenon; and unfortunately for us, the Venetians score an unlucky hit and the powder kegs explode; therefore, bursting the whole Parthenon
from the inside out. So what is more or less left after that, is the metopes that are surrounding the entire entablature and a couple of the pediment sculptures, but probably a lot of the heads fell off. I also
have the suspicion that some of the heads were stolen much earlier by robbers, because you could just climb up there and grab a couple of heads; you could sell them on the antiquities market.
Then we get into the 1800s, late 1700s and there is this guy named Lord Elgin; and he was a Scottish Lord, who was basically the ambassador to Turkey. He got permission to remove all of the marble
sculptures from the Turkish government, bring them back and put them on his Scottish mansion in the UK. So this guy basically says he is preserving these things. He brings them back and then when he
dies, he leaves them all to the British Museum. And so they are called the “Elgin marbles” because they were renamed after Lord Elgin. So if you ever want to see a really significant and great collection
of the marbles from Athens, you have to go to England.
Something interesting about them is that they are finished on the back as well as the front; even though they would have been placed up there like knick knacks on a shelf. We do not actually know who
these three figures are. They are just kind of given the term “Three Goddesses.” If you noticed, they are in “wet drapery” style and they show the anatomy of the female form. Some people suggested that
the pediment they come from represents the birth of Athena and that is entirely possible. Phidias, who sculpted them, basically seems to have had a kind of workshop where you have a group of sculptors
working for a master sculptor and mentor.

Three Goddesses? (Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite?) (Possibly the three fates) (The Elgin Marbles)
from the East pediment of the east pediment of the Parthenon
sculptor: Phidias ? c438-432 BCE tallest figure 4'5"
If we zoom in on the corners of this, you will see that there are a couple of horses, kind of springing out of that pediment. It has been suggested that the way this is arranged shows good organization of
the space by creating the sculptures to best fit the design. The horses rising on the left-hand side represent the sun God, “Helios” who is somewhat interchangeable or synonymous with, “Apollo”; and he
is rising along with the sun in the East. If you move across to the right-hand pediment, there is a horse that actually does not really exist in record history. This horse has its head leaning over the right-
hand side of the pediment and is possibly either Helios’ or Apollo’s lead horse or, as Jennifer Tobin has suggested, Selene, the goddess of the moon’s horse. So what you possibly have is the sun rising
with Helios and setting with the moon taking over with Selene. I think a good way of looking at it would be to imagine that Helios’ or Apollo’s chariot is simultaneously launching and landing. In our
view we only see the tops of the horses being shown as they ride across the sky leading Apollo’s chariot, because in some ways that would really kind of make sense. The East pediment is greeting the
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sun and Athena is the goddess of wisdom, Apollo is the God of rationality and the sun rising is a metaphor for enlightenment; similar to what we saw in “The Allegory of the Cave” by Plato. So all of
those are ideas are about how rationality, enlightenment and intellect are part of what makes the sun shine on the planet and that the doorway that leads into Athena’s chamber is basically greeted by
wisdom, knowledge or enlightenment.


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Apollo's Lead Horse? (Selene's Horse?) (The Elgin Marbles)

from the East pediment of the east pediment of the Parthenon by Phidias ?
c438-432 BCE approximately 2' tall
Now these diagrams show what the façade might have possibly looked like if all the sculptures were there. I do not know if you can completely trust it, but I think what is kind of cool that it is
“polychromed,” has the battles of the “Lapiths and Centaurs” and, as Jennifer Tobin has suggested, that the whole frieze depicts the birth of Athena as she was released from Zeus’s head with the rest of
the sculptures being gods and goddesses that were acting as an audience or witnesses. You can see that the wind drawing is slightly different from the actual reconstruction we just looked at. I also wanted
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to show you a reconstruction of the metopes and how the Parthenon might have looked with its original polychromy from the encaustic wax that would have been used as paint to illustrate the series of
stories around the triglyphs and metopes.


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What I would like to do next is talk about the “triglyphs” and “metopes”; as well as, the entablature for both inside and outside because even though this is a Doric temple, it has ionic features. It has a
box within a box kind of design. The outer sequence is a purely Doric entablature and column style. The interior has a sort of box that originally had walls around it. It was an enclosed space within a
series of perimeter columns called a “peristyle.” If you think back to the term “stylobate,” then think about it, a “perimeter stylos” means a perimeter of columns, right? Then it would have the “cella” in
the interior.


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Pheidias Panathenaic Frieze
So the “cella” and the storage room on the other side of the wall have a “continuous frieze.” A continuous frieze is actually an Ionic feature that we have seen in other temples. This is not a feature of the
Doric order. The Doric order has that alternation of metopes and triglyphs and so the architects placed an Ionic style continuous frieze on the interior peristyle. You can see on this continuous frieze that
there is no division between the characters or figures that are dancing across it. There are two possible stories being represented here. The favorite theory seems to be that it is the “Panathenaic
Procession” that happens every four years and that this is a series of figures in a procession leading up to Athena.
If we zoom in a little bit on one of the friezes, it is depicting ideal soldiers or ideal Athenian citizens who have “kalos.” I think an interesting thing is the relationship between the sizes of the riders’
bodies to the sizes of the horses because I don’t think the sizes are accurate. I think the whole point is to show that these figures are ideal or beautiful people.

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Phidias? Detail of the Panathenaic Procession(The Elgin Marbles)

from the north frieze of the Parthenon
c438-432 BCE approximately 3' 6" tall
(now in the British Museum) Classic Greek
Let us look at another frieze. We see this other frieze from the so-called “Panathenaic Procession.” What you are seeing is a parade. There is no deep space, this would have been colored, and these
figures are in wet drapery; which shows the female forms. These are probably figures in the Panathenaic parade that led up to Athena; and this frieze supposedly culminates into this next one.
If you look at this frieze, it shows, a “peplos” or a sort of garment that is the thing that they would dress the figure in the center of the Parthenon in. This leads us to the second theory about what this
might represent if it is not the “Panathenaic Procession”; and there are some good reasons why it wouldn’t. The first reason would be that almost all the temples that precede this one always had
mythological themes and this is actually more like a genre scene of everyday life; not necessarily every day, but it is actual live people from that time period. It is almost like a current event sculpture in
low and high relief.


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Fig. 402 Maidens and Stewards, Marble Height approx. 43 in. 447 – 438 BCE
Fragment of the Panathenaic Procession from the east frieze of the Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens.
(now in the Louvre) Classic, Greek


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Another possible explanation is that it represents a little-known myth from Athens about a king named Erechthus; who had to sacrifice his daughters in order to win a battle. Therefore, the friezes
themselves might represent the funeral procession; and that the gown or garment that we are looking at here, is a representation of the funeral gown that their bodies would have been dressed in. I guess
you can decide for yourself about what these friezes represent, but I need to caution you that almost universally, people believe it is the “Panathenaic Procession.”
An idea to stress is that these represent godlike or ideal figures. Although the building and its sculptures predates Plato and his writings, one could still say that these figures represent a “Platonic ideal.”
They have “kalos”; which means they have beautiful figures and musculature, they are powerful looking, the women are beautiful and their bodies are perfect. So this might represent in some ways the
ideal Athenian citizen. And if you think about that, you can actually relate it to Pericles’s “Funeral Oration” (recorded by the historian Thucydides).
Pericles boasts that all the citizens of Athens matter, that Athens is the model for all other cultures and that Athens has somehow earned some kind of place of honor by being morally superior, physically
superior, intellectually superior and superior in terms of the arts. It shows how they saw superiority as the way of measuring worth in their world/time period. When you think about the athletic and
military primacy of Athens the idea of “kalos” might not be too far off. That, to me, really supports that this is a representation of the “Panathenaic Procession.”

The frieze and entablature with sculptures in situ

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Now, the last segment that I want to discuss with you is on the “entablature” with the sculptures. Some are “in situ”; which means “original setting/location,” but some of them are in the British Museum.
What I want to look at is the metopes and triglyphs on the outer entablature; which is really traditionally a Doric entablature. The triglyphs and metopes are basically an alteration of design motifs, and the
metopes are where all the decoration begins.
Let us zoom in a little bit one of the triglyphs for a second. They probably are a vestige that represents the ends of beams and they have these little pegs that are in the bottom called “guttae”; which are
basically just wooden pegs or nails.


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Zoom in on some of these metopes; some of which are actually in the British Museum. They all represent the Lapiths fighting the centaurs. We looked at this story before, so we kind of know it is a
representation; in some ways, of this idea of the bestial or uncontrolled nature fighting the rational Apollo or Apollonian ideology. So what I am suggesting is that this represents that battle between the
Apollonian and Dionysian conflict of the rational self and the passionate or uncontrolled ecstatic self. I think that this really clearly represents that you can slice it down the middle. This especially was my
favorite example because it is so symmetrical. So you can slice it down the center, it is symmetrical and half of it is taken up by a Lapith man; the other is taken up by a centaur. If you don’t remember

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the story, just go back to the “François Vase.”

Then when we see this figure, it almost looks like he is dancing. Do you remember the Band called “the Eurythmics” from the 80s? They got their name actually from an old-fashioned term called
“eurythmea” or “eurhythmic gesture.” “Eurythmia” literally means the dance pose or moving in a dance like way to music. It almost looks like these guys are dancing and this guy is about to cut off the
centaurs head.
I want to suggest is that the bodies are extremely beautiful, and this represents “kalos” and the power and beauty of the human body. So do the centaurs, but another interesting element is that the centaurs
body is actually the size of a pony. If you want to really represent a sort of Apollonian and Dionysian conflict you can’t really represent things to scale because if they are in true scale, there’s a sort of
disproportion favoring the bottom half that runs away with you. Remember talking about how the centaurs got drunk, their bottom half ran away with them and they tried to rape people? I think that is
evidenced in this piece. So, we have beautiful Lapith human figures that represent the rational human side and then the centaurs that are being defeated by the Lapiths and rationality.

Lapith Fighting a Centaur,

metope relief from the Doric frieze on the south side of the Parthenon c440 BCE
eurythmea
eurythmic gesture

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One of the ideas about why the battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs is represented on the exterior and the metopes of the Parthenon, is that it might also represent; in some kind of metaphorical or
symbolic way, the battle between the Persians and the Athenians. It suggests that the Persians are the animal creatures that need to be defeated and that the Lapiths are the humans and, therefore, the
Athenians are the rational ones. So if you think about it, it is the same kind of ideology and the same kind of propaganda that you will see in any kind of war poster. You could think about this as a
combination of religion, politics and propaganda all put together.
Professor Jennifer Tobin suggested is that the faces of all the centaurs look like they are in agony while the humans all look placid and peaceful. I am not sure that is true. You might want to Google them
and decide for yourself. I think they all look kind of unemotional even though their bodies are moving in “eurythmia” or “eurhythmic gesture.” I think it is more likely that, the humans represent a beauty
that only humans can have and the horses are beasts in some ways.
The interior of the Parthenon has two sections. That storage room behind the cello was probably just used as a place to put the goods that were brought up to Athena. If you were walking up to the
Parthenon, confronted with the West side and walked all the way down the base of the building until you ended up at the “cella,” you would see a statue of Athena inside it.
The thing is you cannot go inside the “cella.” You can only stand in the doorway where there would be oil lamps lit up and you can hand your goods to the priest who would set them at the base of the
sculpture of Athena. I think that is rather significant because it is a dramatic way of affecting how you feel about Athena when you walk up to the structure. So what I am suggesting is that after you have
had this whole Panathenaic sort of walk; even if it is not during the “Panathenaic Procession”; you have walked all the way up to the top of the Acropolis and down the entire length of this building to
stand at the doorway; and you can only look in. It makes you feel that it takes a lot to be able to be in/near the presence of a god/goddess; therefore making you appreciate them more or increasing the
amount of value you place on them. And what you see when you look inside; lighten only by oil lamps would be this statue of Athena that stands seemingly taller than what she would be outside the
building.


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So, one of the things about the “cella” is that Kallikrates actually designed a “double tiered” structure so that there were two sets of columns on the interior. There are reasons for this design. First, if you
make the columns the same size as they are outside, they would be massive and take up all the floor space. So, if you make thinner columns and double stack them; it actually takes up less floor space. I
think that it was also, in part, a symbolic thing because the other thing it does is make the sculpture’s height seem doubled; even though the original sculpture has obviously been lost. The sculpture
would have been; I suppose, almost 50 feet tall. In her right hand there would have been a statue of a “Nike” figure; which stands for “winged victory.” She would have had a mast or wooden structure as
her core and the exterior would have been encased in gold leaf, gold sheets or ivory that would have been tinted to look like flesh. She would have been carrying a shield, holding victory in her right hand
and probably standing in a “contrapposto” pose. So this would have been a cult (religious) statue that was in the center of the Parthenon and you would have dropped off your goods for that.
One of the stories that I’ve heard is from one of Dr. Rufus Fears’ lectures that I have listened to recently. He talked about Phidias who was the sculptor for the Acropolis. The lecture covered how Phidias
was a good friend of Pericles; the guy that got the money together and was the patron of the arts for the Acropolis, how Phidias was brought up on charges of impiety over putting an irreverent sculpture
on the shield of Athena and actually thrown in jail for it and that he eventually died in prison for it. I think the sculpture actually represented Pericles or it represented Phidias as an artist, but I am not sure
which one.


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So an interesting element is that we have this sculptor Phidias, who is working with the architects, Iktinos and Kallikrates while working on this wonderful building; that they were under the protection of
Pericles and that Pericles was not actually able to protect his own sculptors. They were actually brought up on charges of misappropriating funds and that kind of thing. So, I guess the same kind of
contention that exists today when we have these kinds of things existed then.
So, I will leave it at that and we will talk more about the “Erechtheion” in the next lecture


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Additional Information
A term paper that is most excellent:
William Harmon
Prof. Kenney Mencher
April 29, 2002
Art 103A
Term Paper
Parthenon
High on the top of a hill in Athens, Greece sits the ruins of a city. The Persians in 480 BCE destroyed a once continuously developing and thriving city-state, the Acropolis. The
remains of this city on the hill were to remain as a Greek memorial displaying the sacrifice made defeating the Persians. On the highest point of this devastated structure lay the
remains of a sanctuary that housed an olive tree. This sacred symbol, devoted to the Goddess Athena, would be the focus point and driving force of reconstruction some thirty years
later. However, a new temple would be built to house this Goddess of Athenian military power. Conforming to an architectural level of brilliant and outstanding proportions, this
temple would symbolize Athenian honor to the Virgin Goddess Athena. This temple would be known as the Parthenon. The Parthenon is an example of unique and original
architecture of a powerful empire that embodies the ideals of a culture that regarded itself as having a special unity between its people, government and gods. This statement will be
established through contextual, formal and iconographic analysis.

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Looking at the context of the Parthenon, we can see how overcoming such devastating odds defeating an enormous rival such as the
Persians gave way to feelings of immense confidence to the citizens of Athens. This Greek victory set in motion an era known as the
"Golden Age". This would be an era that would further Athens development of a new democracy and social environment. Influenced by an
aristocrat named Pericles, various new laws were introduced setting apart Athenians from any other cultures of its time. One of these laws
imposed would dramatically affect the social standing and rights of the common people. "In 451 B.C. Pericles introduced one of most
striking proposals with his sponsorship of a law stating that henceforth citizenship would be conferred only on children whose
mother and father both were Athenians" (Martin 9.3.1). With this new regulation came new advantages for these exclusive citizens of
Athens. This privilege allowed ownership of private land while being protected under the same laws as the wealthy aristocrats (Martin,
9.3.1). You now had an equal voice that could influence decisions about your future as a citizen of Athens. This marked the way for
participation in politics. Women also shared new, but limited privileges compared to men. Although women did not have a political voice
or were allowed to get involved with large financial dealings, they were still protected by the law. In spite of this somewhat prejudiced
ruling, the women of Athens could enlist the services of a legal male guardian and have him speak for her in court if a situation developed
that needed legal assistance, such as a law suit (Martin 9.3.1). Although the new citizenship standing had some shortcomings, it still
prevailed as a groundbreaking and exclusive change unique to those who were true citizens of Athens. New feelings of extraordinary
stature began to develop in the mindset of Athenian culture. Defeating a tremendous enemy such as the Persians was proof that the gods
favored them during this "Golden Age". The next step during this era of great wealth and prosperity would not only show Athenian unity
of its people and government, but pay homage to their Goddess of military power. The wealth and brilliance of a united and powerful
empire would soon be echoed through outstanding architecture and sculpture. The construction of the Parthenon would not only express
Parthenon 447-438 BCE Athenian honor to the Virgin Goddess Athena, but also make a bold and distinctive statement about its culture.
architects Iktinos and Kallikrates
sculptor Phedias (Phidias)
view from the Northwest
marble, polychromed with encaustic
The Acropolis, Athens, Greece
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The formal design of the Parthenon would enlist the skills of architects (Iktinos and Kallikrates) and sculptor (Phidias) whose
brilliance in their fields would allow success in achieving the immense task of creating a temple of monumental proportions.
They would be innovators of new design while making bold statements of unity between the people and its gods. No expense
would be spared for this massive undertaking. Twenty thousand tons of marble would be used for its construction alone. The
Doric style of architecture would have changes made in its symmetry. Instead of the usual six columns across it would have
eight, making the structure 230 feet wide. Seventeen columns in width would give the Parthenon a length of 100 feet. Since
perfectly straight lines would make the structure look curved to the human eye, the architects intentionally put slight curves and
entasis style columns throughout the architecture giving the building an appearance of being perfectly straight. "By overcoming
the distortions of nature, the Parthenon's sophisticated architecture made a confident statement about human ability to construct
order out of the entropic disorder of the natural world" (Martin 9.4.6.2). The confidence of the Athenians close relationship to
their gods would be further expressed within the sculptures of the Parthenon. Its unique and innovative style of sculpture would be a distinctive form executed through the
skills of Phidias. While the temple used standard Doric features, which included pediment sculptures, one particular area of the complex incorporated a continuous frieze
done in the Ionic order. Combining an Ionic frieze to a Doric temple would attract attention, which of course it was meant to do. The sculptures would embrace Athenian
deities, as well as the Athenians themselves. The low relief style carving of the Ionic frieze included 114 separate sections that when combined measured 524 feet in length
and 3 feet in width. The combined classic architecture and sculpture of the Parthenon not only reflects the prosperity, originality, and artistic genius of Athenian culture,
but also depicts their ideals concerning a special relationship with the gods.

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Within the entablature of the Parthenon, the Ionic frieze not only acknowledges the homage paid to the Goddess Athena, but symbolizes an Athenian mind-set of their strength and
unity between themselves and the deities. Extending along both sides of the temple, the frieze depicts a festival that was held every four years known as the Panathenaic procession.
The frieze shows idealistic carvings of young, strong, but graceful Athenian men and women in procession. Skillful men on horseback along with sturdy, yet graceful looking women
are shown in harmony during their ascent to the top of the Acropolis. The symbolic statements mirrored in this low relief sculpture reflect healthy and strong citizens who represent
the "ideal inhabitants of a successful city-state" (Stokstad 192). At the head of the procession, deities await their arrival. Having been included in the presence of these deities
symbolizes a prevailing confidence between the Athenians and their gods.
The Athenian culture of the "Golden Age" reflects a time in history when the defeat of an overwhelming enemy would inspire new ideals and confidence of its people. Original laws
of citizenship were established that would unite the people as a democracy. Their creativity would continue to expand in areas of art and architecture unique to Athenian culture. With
the profusion of wealth, the construction of the Parthenon had no limits of artistic license and would ultimately represent a powerful empire while emphasizing its independence.
Combining both the citizens of Athens and their deities within the sculpture of the Ionic frieze conveyed a symbolic statement about the unique relationship between the gods and
these favored citizens of the "Golden Age".
Works Cited
Martin, Thomas R. "An Overview of Classical Greek History." The Perseus Project 1997. <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/vor?
type=phrase&alts=0&group=typecat&lookup=Parthenon&collection=
Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman#Section> 17 Apr. 2002.
Neils, Jennifer "Reconfiguring the Gods on the Parthenon Frieze." Art Bulletin Vol. 81 (1999) : 16 Mar. 2002 <http://catalog.ohlone.cc.ca.us:2083/ehost.asp?
key=204.179.122.129_8000__740279529&site=ehost&return=n>
Stokstad, Marilyn "Ancient Greece." Art History. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002.
Three Goddesses(?) (Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite?)

(Possibly the three Fates or Graces) Form: These three reclining figures are designed so that they would fit in with the triangular shape of the pediment. They are meant
(The Elgin Marbles) to be incorporated into a large narrative placed on the pediment and their position maintains their involvement. They were placed on
from the East pediment of the Parthenon top of the pediment almost like nick nacks on a shelf: they were not bolted or attached to them.
Phidias ? c438-432 BCE tallest figure 4'5" The figures were originally polychromed with encaustic paint, as were all sculptures on the Parthenon. They are idealized figures that
incorporate the wet drapery style as a means to accent their perfected features.

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Iconography: It is hard to comment on the iconography of the three figures without the required conclusive evidence as to their
identities. Stokstad discusses the identities of the three figures on page 190. Even without their specific identities these figures
represent a feminine ideal for the culture. The anatomy and wet drapery style contribute to this notion by accenting certain idealized
(and erotic) features.
Context: Approximately 60% of all the sculpture from the Parthenon resides in England's British Museum. These figures and several
more like them found their way to this museum through the adventures of a Scottish noble named Thomas Bruce, the earl of Elgin.
Bruce, who was the ambassador to Turkey, asked the Turkish government, who controlled Greece in the mid 1800's, if he could
remove some of the sculptures and bring them home. The Turkish government granted his request with a bit of hostility. Bruce then
installed the sculptures within his home. After a time the sculptures came to be in the possession of the British Museum. There
remains a constant struggle for the Greeks to regain ownership of these sculptures.
This kind of relocation of great works of art and the question of replacing works such as these has been one that is hotly debated
across national lines. In the last thirty years or so, mainly because of the theft of art and other treasures by the Nazis, a system of
The Doric entablature with its triglyphs and metopes.
international codes and laws have been enacted to protect and restore such works to their original owners. Unfortunately, these laws
are complex and somehow the Elgin Marbles have remained in England.

Form: This extremely naturalistic rendering of the head of a horse would have been originally placed in the lower right hand corner of
the east pediment. As with the three female figures, its shape is designed to maintain the form of the triangular pediment. The
horse's nose and lower lip were designed to overlap and break the framing device of the cornice. Originally this sculpture would have
been painted with encaustic.
Iconography: The identity of the horse and its owner is still heavily disputed, but Professor Broderick of Lehman College has
provided the most interesting attribution: Since the grouping resides at the entrance end of the Parthenon, which is also the end that
greets the sun in the morning, Broderick suggests that the horses on the far left portion are the horses of Apollo rising in the
morning. Perhaps this horse, which is at the far right, is the lead horse as the Apollo's chariot sets, making the world become dark
again.

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This suggestion of meaning also allows for a certain economy in terms of the symbolic narrative. Only the necks and heads of three
or four horses need to be seen for the viewer to "get" the narrative. Figures simply need to suggest and the viewer's imagination can
provide the rest.
Context: Recently this sculpture and the other Elgin marbles have been in the focus of the media because the British museum has
been accused of improperly cleaning the Elgin Marbles in the 1930's. To complicate and compound the problem the museum has
attempted to cover up its mistakes by hiding the documents that pertain to this discussion. (See Art News Magazine, Summer 2002)
Apollo's Lead Horse? (Selene's Horse?) Despite these accusations, it is possible that the marbles and sculptures that exist in the British Museum's collection are still better off
(The Elgin Marbles) than those that are still in situ (in their original placement.) The marble sculptures that are still in situ on the Acropolis have been
from the East pediment of the Parthenon severely damaged by Athens' heavy pollution.
Phidias ? c438-432 BCE approximately 2' tall
Form: These youthful figures on horseback are sculpted in relief style. Originally polychromed, these sculptures are idealized as well
as naturalistic. The space that they inhabit is still fairly flat in that the figures are placed against the front of the picture plane, but
some attempt has been made to create depth by overlapping the figures. Depth is further enhanced by the deeper relief towards the
upper part of the scene. Remember that these reliefs are supposed to be seen from below and it is always more difficult to see the
upper parts. Therefore, the sculpture is required to bring out those details so that no part of the scene is lost. The diagonal of each
figure drives the viewer forward in an attempt to move through the story of the procession.
Iconography: Although Stokstad mentions that there is some debate as to the exact interpretation of these friezes, in my opinion, they
represent the Panathenaic procession. We can guess that these figures are the ideal Athenian citizens who participate in the
procession. These men, in particular, exhibit the qualities of young Athenian men by demonstrating control over their horses and by
sustaining an obvious physical strength.
Context: The structure of the Parthenon is almost a box within a box. The exterior structure had Doric columns and a Doric
entablature while the interior structure had Doric columns with an Ionic entablature. These friezes would originally have been placed
Detail of the Panathenaic Procession in situ on the interior perimeter of the structure. As such they would have been slightly less visible than the metopes that would be on
(The Elgin Marbles) the Doric exterior frieze. (Click here to see some images.)
from the North frieze of the Parthenon
Phidias ? c438-432 BCE
approximately 3' 6" tall
Yet another impressive paper.....
Julie Daniell
November 11, 2002
Art History 103A
Mencher
The Athenians : “Gods Among Men” or Merely Snobs?
“There are two types of people - Greeks and everyone who wish they was Greek.” - Gus Portokalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Since the time of the Renaissance, Europe
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and America have been enthralled by the legacy left by the ancient Athenians. For the great Europeans of the Renaissance, it was Greek art and literature that left its lasting
impression on them. Artists such as Michelangelo and authors like William Shakespeare borrowed freely from the Greek arts to create their own masterpieces. In the United States,
Revolutionary leaders looked towards Athens - the first democracy - for ways to shape their new government. Over the years we've borrowed (and stolen) a number of ideas from the
Athenians. But, does that mean they’re infallible? Hardly. The Athenians may have created the first democracy but they weren’t perfect. Indeed, the ancient Athenians were rather
full of themselves. And through a formal, iconographic and contextual analysis of the frieze at the Parthenon, designed by Phidias in 432 BCE, I will prove that the Greeks weren’t
as idealistic as we might have believe.
“2,500 years ago, Athenian reformer Cleisthenes renounced tyranny and proclaimed the birth of a radically new government, democracy” ( Fleischman 1). Athens created
democracy, a government for the people, but that didn’t make it an utopian nation. For one thing, they didn’t listen to everyone in the city-state. Women were still thought of
possessions. Slaves were, of course, ignored. Unless you were a privileged Athenian man, democracy still meant next to nothing. Even men from different places were considered
“barbaric.” And as the years passed, Athenians only began to think more and more about themselves. In 454 BCE, the building of the Acropolis, or Athenian high city, began.
Originally, the area served as the last defendable resource of the city. But, while at war with the Persians, the city was burned down. When the Athenians returned from defeating
the Persians, a new high city was begun. It was to be a representation of Athenian pride and greatness. But, the money used in building the new structures at the Acropolis was not
even Athenian money. The great statesman, “ Pericles used the financial resources from the tribute contributed by the Greek city-states, funds which were intended to secure
Athenian military projection” ( Hamilikas 2). With this stolen money, Pericles built a number of large and beautiful buildings in a show of conspicuous consumption and Athenian
pride. The largest and most important of these buildings was the Parthenon, one of the temples to the patron goddess of Athens, Athena. And, one of the most interesting and
controversial decorations on the Parthenon is its frieze.
The Parthenon frieze, a running relief sculpture 160 meters long and built of marble, is a piece of Athenian art that has baffled historians practically since its creation. One of the
major problems in interpreting the frieze is its position at the Parthenon. As to be expected, the piece was skillfully sculpted. “The compositions on the west frieze blocks are free,
and ingenious... varied in pose, dress or gesture of each figure” ( Boardman, 107) Phidias created a piece that places the viewer in an illusion, even while the execution of actual
depth had yet to be created. Yet, the frieze also stands apart from its audience. It is lifted 12 meters off of the ground and divided by the columns that stand 20 meters away.
“...[T]he Parthenon was a work of art not specially considerate of
those wanting to see it: the frieze particularly so” (Spivey 141). Why would Phidias bother to design anything that can’t really be seen? According to Nigel Spivey, the reason for
this is that “Works of art... are not necessarily bound to care whether anyone sees them or not” (141). The Parthenon frieze is an example of artistic hubris, or creating art for an
ideal audience. But, it is also an example of Athenian bragging - to create a piece and not allow anyone to see it.
There is another interpretation as to why the Athenian’s hid their art. Athens was created by two separate stocks of men - the Dorians and the Ionians. “According to ancient
Greek racism, those of Dorian stock and origin were considered the hardier, the tougher, the more manly... The Ionians, on the other hand, were those orientalized Greeks, spoiled
by the wealth, feminine elegance, and soft living of the near Eastern culture” (Adair 2). Athenian art was also divided by these two cultures, with the Doric order appearing more
spartan and “masculine” and the Ionic more graceful and “feminine.” Generally, the Greeks preferred the Doric style to the Ionian but the Athenians always had to be different.
“Attica, the territory in which we find Athens... [ showed] a tolerance, even a preference, for Ionic architecture. Athens, in particular, preferred it” (Adair 2). Athens had gained a
heritage from the Ionian culture - Homer (author of The Iliad,) for one, had come from the near East. And, yet the Athenians didn’t want to appear soft or unmanly. They had just
won the war! Why would they want to appear as anything but powerful? So, they contrived to hide their femininity.
There is also an undoubted sense of tension throughout the piece. It is generally believed that the frieze is a representation of the Panathenaic procession - a parade held every
four years. At that time, a great procession of people would weave their way through Athens and to the Acropolis and “an enormous peplos [female garment] was taken to the
Acropolis for Athena Parthenos (‘virgin’) in the Parthenon” (Brooklyn College Classics Department 4). Animal sacrifices would follow at the altar. But, one must notice that the
peplos is never delivered. “The whole procession, from beginning to end, was a preparation” (Adair 3). The horses are unruly and the appearance of human bodies, both in the
nude and through their clothing, increase a sense of anxiety. Athenians were worried about their masculinity but they refused to show it to anyone else - another picture of the
Athenian superiority complex. And the Athenian pride doesn’t stop there.
Not only was the Panathenaic festival a celebration of Athena’s birthday but it was also a celebration of Athens, herself and her defeat of the Persians - the peplos was believed
to be carried on the mast of a ship, a sign of the Athenian victories at sea (Brooklyn College Classics Department 4). This procession is another show of how well the Athenians
thought of themselves. Granted, the Parthenon was a part of their city and built solely to accommodate Athena. But, they weren’t the only Greeks to fight the war. If they were the
idols that some historians claim them to be, they would have given a little credit to the fellow Greeks who fought before them.
All in all, the Athenians weren’t as great as they would have led other Greeks, or even their own citizens, to believe. They were certain that they were the height of civilization.
The problem with the Athenians is that they were impossibly sure of themselves even in the face of their own complexities. We, as Americans, can admit that the Athenians did give
us a lot. But, by looking at the Parthenon frieze, we can also admit that they were often nothing more than snobs. And, we often seem to fall into this trap as well. We do tend to
see and show ourselves as better and more brilliant than any other nation. But, maybe by looking at Athenian art we can change that for the better. And, by studying the Parthenon
frieze in a new light and understanding the Athenians, we might be able to escape the mistakes of yesterday.
Works Cited

Adair, Mark J. “A Dream in the Parthenon.” American Journal of Art Therapy Aug 1990: 14

Classical Greece
Ebscohost .OhloneCollege Lib., Fremont, CA. 31 Oct 2002.
Boardman, John. Greek Sculpture : The Classical Period. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1985. 106-109.
Fleischman, John. “In Classical Athens, A Market Trading in the Currency of Ideas.”
Smithsonian July 1993: 38. Ebscohost .OhloneCollege Lib., Fremont, CA. 31 Oct 2002.
Hamilakis, Yannis. “Stories from Exile: Fragments From the Cultural Biography of the Parthenon (or ‘Elgin’) Marbles.” World Archaeology Oct 1999: 18. Ebscohost .OhloneCollege Lib.,
Fremont, CA. 31 Oct 2002.
Neils, Jennifer. “Reconfiguring the Gods on the Parthenon Frieze.” Art Bulletin. March 1999: 6.
Ebscohost .OhloneCollege Lib., Fremont, CA. 6 Nov 2002
Spivey, Nigel. Understanding Greek Sculpture. Ancient Meanings, Modern Readings. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1996. 140-148.
Wilford, John Noble. “New Analysis of the Parthenon’s Frieze Finds It Depicts a Horrifying Legend.” New York Times.4 July 1995: 11. LexisNexis . OhloneCollege Lib., Fremont , CA . 7
Nov 2002.
<http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu>
Form: These idealized and naturalistic figures inhabit a square picture plane that is still fairly flat. The fabric draped around the body of the male figure
effectively frames his muscular torso and follows the movement of his outstretched body. The composition is arranged symmetrically so that the human Lapith
inhabits the left section and the Centaur the right. Some attempt has been made to create depth by overlapping the figures.
The poses the figures take in these and other metopes that represent the centauromachy are somewhat artificial. It's almost as if the figures are "vogueing" or
dancing. These kind of dance, or art poses are referred to as eurythmea or eurythmic gesture.
Iconography: This relief tells a story about Greek mythology, a centauromachy (a battle between centaurs and humans). In this myth the Lapiths and centaurs do
battle after the wedding of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths. The centaurs, drunk after the celebration become unruly, and attempt to rape (in this case it means
Lapith Fighting a Centaur,
sexually and to abduct or steal them) the young boys and young girls. The human men help their kin by fighting back, but Apollo stops the battle and sends the
metope relief from the Doric frieze
centaurs home.
on the south side of the Parthenon c440
BCE The concept of symmetry or symmetrea is reflected in the centauromachy, whose main antagonists are half-man half-beast, represent the struggle against man's
British Museum, London bestial nature. This is reflected in the symmetrical layout of the composition and the equal proportion of man to horse in the centaurs' bodies.
Greek Classic
This metope demonstrates the desire of the Greek artist to move towards a more naturalistic or realistic style. Nevertheless, the figures and their bodies are still
idealized and perfect looking. Naturalism, and specifically depicting the male human form accurately, is linked to the fact that the Greek gods take a human
form. Man for the Greeks was created in their gods' image and therefore it is almost a form of representing the divine if the work is naturalistic. (By the way,
this is similar to the Judeo-Christian notion that man is created in God's image.)
The figures are also beautiful and this is an icon of goodness for the Greeks. In Greek epic poetry the hero is always described as handsome or beautiful and
their physical appearance is a reflection of the character's virtue. The idealism or beauty of the Greek figure is linked to the concept that you can judge a book
by its cover. The Greek term for beauty is kalos (calos). The term kalos can also be interchanged with and is synonymous with goodness. Therefore, to call
someone or something beautiful also means that that thing is also "good." Interestingly enough, this concept remains throughout art history.
Compare the metopes to the Francois Vase.
1. 1Delos is a small island off the coast of Greece. This is where the original treasury was to be kept.

Classical Greece
2. 2(Charles Rowan Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975 and 1987) 127-128.
3. 3 According the Dictionary of Architecture, "a parapet is a low wall, sometimes battlemented, placed to protect any spot where there is a sudden drop, for example, at the edge of a bridge, quay, or
house top."
John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, "parapet," Dictionary of Architecture, Third Edition ed.: 237.
4. 4Bass- base or low relief -relieved or pushed out from the wall.
Ancient Greece During its "Golden Age" Focus on the city Athens and its Acropolis
The Erechtheum

Context: "The most exceptional Ionic building on the Acropolis is the enigmatic Erechtheum, to the north of the Parthenon. Built
about 420 B.C., the temple was regarded with special veneration. Its site was particularly sacred, for it included the tomb of
Cecrops, the legendary founder of Athens, the rock that preserved the mark of Poseidon's trident, and the spring that arose from it.
In a walled area just to the west of the temple stood the sacred olive tree of Athena. The building's complexity of plans and levels can
be partly understood from this complicated archaeology, as well as from its having housed not only a shrine to Athena Polias, but
also altars to Poseidon, god of the sea; Hephaestus, god of fire; Erechtheus, a mythical king of Athens, who had battled
unsuccessfully with the sea god; and Butes, brother of Erechtheus and priest to Athena and Poseidon. Moreover, spoils from the
Persians were kept in the temple, as well as the famous golden lamp of Callimachus, which burnt for a year without refilling and had
a chimney in the form of a palm tree."
—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p94.
Form: This asymmetrical even confusing structure, the Erechtheum, is primarily Ionic in style. The building is a bit schizophrenic
in its form because it has porches on all sides but some of them tend to mix the ionic style with engaged columns and even human
figures. It is also not a complete rectangle and it varies in size. The building also used to sport a natural spring and a living olive
tree.
A major feature of the Erechtheum is its Porch of the Maidens. The caryatid figures (columns in the shape of women that supports
Erechtheum (Erechtheion) by Mnesicles the porch) look almost like a chorus line. The over all symmetry is enhanced by the fact that the two figures on the left are a mirror
c430 BCE image of the right. (Note the order of the extended leg is reversed.) The figures stand in contrapposto stance in which their is a
Athens, Acropolis, gentle shift of weight at the hips that gives the bodies an "S" shaped curve..
Classic
Iconography: The function of the structure is not quite clear. We know that based on what was housed there that the building may
have served as another temple and most certainly a kind of reliquary.
The columns on the Porch of the Maidens is almost certainly meant to be iconic. The columns on the porch are the embodiment of
the concept of the column as an organic architectural component. The woman, in their guise as physical supports for the structure,
might be symbols as the pillars of the community on whose shoulders the city rests. The weight they bear is evidenced in their
contrapposto stance. The contrapposto is almost the human equivalent to the entasis of the Doric order of the Parthenon.
cary·at·id
Pronunciation: "kar-E-'a-t&d, 'kar-E-&-"tid
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ids or cary·at·i·des /"kar-E-'a-t&-"dEz/
Etymology: Latin caryatides, plural, from Greek karyatides priestesses of Artemis at Caryae, caryatids, from Karyai Caryae in
Laconia
: a draped female figure supporting an entablature

Classical Greece
Sculpture During the Classic Period

Form: This frontally oriented sculpture of a young male figure is well over life sized, is idealized, and naturalistic. Some of the features of the face, the musculature of
the abdomen and above the genitals have been distorted to fit in with an ideal of physical beauty. The hair, nose of the figure and eyebrows have a rather geometrically
stylized aspect to them as does the overall anatomy of the figure. There is still a hint of the archaic smile.
The figure stands in a life like contrapposto pose (contra- against posto- posture) in which the body takes on an over all "s" curve. There is a shift of weight at the hips
and a majority of the figure's weight is on one leg. The torso is turned in a slight angle opposite to the angle of the hips. The pose looks almost as if the figure is in
movement.
This is a marble sculpture made by Romans copied from a bronze original that used the hollow casting or the cire perdue or lost wax process. The process is referred to
as lost wax not because we have lost the process, but because the figure is originally sculpted from wax which is lost in the process. The original is encased in clay.
Two drainage holes are placed in the clay and when the clay is heated, the wax runs out of the hole leaving a cavity. Bronze is then poured into the cavity and when the
bronze cools the clay mold is broken open revealing the bronze sculpture. Since the bronze is a fairly soft metal, details can be etched and molded while the bronze is
cool.
(go here for diagrams)

Iconography: This sculpture depicts a perfect and beautiful young man the essence of kalos.
In Greek epic poetry the hero is always described as handsome or beautiful and their physical appearance is a reflection of the character's virtue. The idealism or beauty
of the Greek figure is linked to the concept that you can judge a book by its cover. The Greek term for beauty is kalos (calos). The term kalos can also be interchanged
with and is synonymous with goodness. Therefore, to call someone or something beautiful also means that that thing is also "good."
Doryphoros (Spear Bearer)
(also called "the Canon") The original sculpture was actually designed to be an icon that represented physical perfection of the human form and therefore a god-like kalos. The Doryphoros by

Classical Greece
by Polykleitos c450-440 BC Polykleitos was considered so proportionately perfect that it was called the "canon" (a set of rules or criterion or standard of judgment).
Roman copy after a bronze
The contrapposto pose serves the same purpose as the archaic smile. Both were designed to give the work a more lifelike illusion. In the case of the archaic smile, it
original
marble height 6'6" almost as if there is the beginnings of movement in the face and the same is true of the contrapposto that seems as if the body is about to move.
tree stump and leg brace are Context: Schema and correction play heavily into this work. There are elements derived from the original kouros figures, such as the step forward, the idealized form and
later the archaic smile, but, Polykleitos builds on the naturalism to make the sculpture more life-like.
Roman additions
Classic, Greek Since this is a Roman marble copy after bronze original, this would make this yet another corrected view. This copy of the work is the "correction" on the Greeks
original "schema" and so its accuracy is in question. Historians and Romans have often called this work the Canon. This work was designed by Polykleitos to be his
canon or his treatise (a complete guide of sorts) to making a perfect sculpture. Unfortunately, neither his sculpture or his written texts survived but we do have Roman
descriptions of the text and Roman copies of the sculpture and so the Romans referred to it as the "Canon." The naming of this sculpture is complicated for this and
other reasons.
It is thought that the original bronze carried a long spear and that is where he gets his name. Doryphoros in Greek translates as "spear bearer." This marble sculpture of
the Doryphoros is a Roman copy of the first original bronze by Polykleitos. We are lucky enough to have a sculpture that was made at the same time as the original
Doryphoros referred to as the Riace Bronze or Young Warrior from Riace (c 460-450 BCE) that approximates what the original Doryphoros must have looked like.
Another look at schema and correction:
Summary of Gombrich
Renown art historian Ernst Gombrich developed a theory to explain these adaptations and changes and refered to it as
schema and correction. If we were to look at the Archaic period's art and architecture as the plan or schema, we can
see how the later Classic period might have taken the archaic art as its schema and updated it in order to make the
designs more pleasing according to the later tastes. These changes are referred to as the correction.
To understand his theory called "schema and naturalization," or "schema and correction." To understand it you
basically just need to know the definitions of three words.
Schema is the cultural code through which individuals raised in a culture perceive the world. For example, we
recognize stick figures to be humans.
Correction is where you take that schema and you compare it to what your senses tell you about the world and
then you make it more accurate.
Mimesis is the process of correcting your schema.
Kouros from Attica (the region surrounding Athens) Gombrich's idea can be expanded to looking how later groups can take the earlier work of art and mimic it (mimesis).
c600 BCE 6' 4" marble This is a kind of Darwinian theory kind of like Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fitest."
polychrome, encaustic
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY Doryphoros (Spear Read some more stuff by Gombrich if it interests you!
Archaic Bearer)
(also called "the
Canon")
by Polykleitos c450-440
BC
Roman copy after a
bronze original
marble height 6'6"
tree stump and leg brace
are later
Roman additions
Classic, Greek

Classical Greece

Diana Holcombe
Art History 103A
April 30, 2001
Professor Mencher
A Great Reason to Scuba Dive
Scuba diving in exotic places can be great exercise, as well as a fun thing to do with your friends. But there might be another surprising advantage to this rather extreme
hobby. You could actually discover buried treasure! The Young Warrior from Riace (c 460-450 BCE) was discovered in exactly that way. A tourist was scuba diving off the
southern coast of Italy and found what appeared to be a human arm sticking out of the ocean floor. After more careful investigation he discovered it was a metal human arm,
and after careful excavation it was discovered that the statue was almost six feet tall, and made out of very heavy bronze. After the statue was retrieved and revived, theories
flew around about how, and where the Riace Warrior came from. By studying the form, and iconography of the sculpture, and then comparing these traits to the context in
which the sculpture was made, I will attempt to analyze the Young Warrior from Riace as in depth as possible.
The sculpture was made using the cire perdue (lost wax) process. This process was a favorite for Greek sculptors because it enabled them to make sculptures that were in
THE RIACE BRONZE much more life like poses. (Stokstad 181) The first step of this rather complex procedure is to make the sculpture out of wax, and then cover the wax with clay. Then the
c460-450 BCE Classical clay is fired which melts the wax so that the clay embodies a hollow form. Molten bronze is then poured into the hollow space. Once the bronze is cooled, the clay shell is
Greek bronze w/ bone, removed, and you have your finished, beautiful, bronze sculpture! Sound easy? I'm sure it's not. Which makes some of the other details of the statue even more incredible.
glass paste, silver & copper The eyeballs are made of carved bone, and colored glass. And each eyelash and eyebrow are of separately cast bronze. The nipples, and lips, are a pinkish copper, and the
inlaid,h. 200cm Reggio teeth are made from silver. The entire statue is of a Greek Warrior that has a young body, but an old face. He is about six feet tall with a contrapposto stance, and an almost
Calabria: Museo Nazionale naturalistic, but still very idealized body form. His body is very smooth, and athletic looking, but his face has deep lines, and bags under the eyes. The hair, and beard are
This sculpture was made in both done very purposefully with separate strands all overlapping each other. He would be holding a sword, and a shield if he were in his completely original form.
Greece, possibly by the
Greek Sculptor Phidias. The iconography of this statue is fairly clear. The purpose of this statue was probably to instill a sense of pride about the Greek army, and to illustrate the strength and
wisdom that Greek men were expected to have. The body form is exaggerated because of the height and the muscle structure in the stomach, but is still realistic enough to
make men and women feel that Greek men could, should and do look this way. The beard is symbolic of wisdom, but the long hair is a sign of youthfulness. A major
contradiction, but also an image that is being radiated to men. Telling them it is possible to achieve great intellectual achievements while you are still young? If only you
were Greek! The athletic body and contrapposto stance is symbolic of an athlete or warrior. And the smoothness of the body makes it fairly obvious this was a young man.
This statue is from the Classical period of Greek art (480-350 BCE). This was a time of expansion to farther parts of Europe. Including colonies in Italy, and Sicily. It is
accepted that the statue was being exported, or imported to a Greek colony located on the tip of Italy. (Stokstad 182) How the statue wound up in the ocean is all speculation.
Perhaps the ship was in distress and the statue was thrown over board intentionally, or it could have been lost in rough seas. Either way, that part remains a mystery.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, this period of Greek history is one of expansion, but mainly a peaceful time, where the Greeks embraced their heritage and
developed miraculous strides in their architectural, and artistic methods. Trade flourished, and so did the cultural trading of ideas. Pericles came to power and brought with
him refreshing ideas to change the face of the Greek temple, and the Greek government. The Parthenon was erected, as well as numerous other temples, and altars. During
this mostly governmental and architectural renaissance, sculpture was being seen as an even bigger way to express wealth, and power. Much like our models in magazine
photographs, sculptures capture the essence of a time period, or of a person. They can be used as propaganda, or as a way to record history. The Young Warrior from Riace
does both. He is a good looking warrior, selling his image to the people of Greece. And yet he represents a time period, so he captures the events taking place during the
Classical period of Greek life.
Many things have been found hidden beneath the vast waters of the ocean. But few have matched up to this statue. We have looked at the form, and iconography of the
statue. We also looked at some of the things surrounding its creation. It's not hard to understand why the Greek government and its people loved this statue, and the things it
stood for. It was a representation of the country's power, and pride. It showed the exquisite craftsmanship that the Greeks were capable of. And last, but not least: for the
last thirty years it has inspired people all over the world to go scuba diving.

Classical Greece

Kritian Boy by Kritios, Form: This sculpture shares much in common with the Doryphoros: it is of a young male figure, it is idealized, naturalistic
"Ephebe of Kritios" c480BCE and shares in the same stylizations. Some of the features of the face, the musculature of the abdomen and above the genitals
marble, height 46" have been distorted to fit in with an ideal of physical beauty. The hair, nose of the figure and eyebrows have a rather
Greek, Classic, geometrically stylized aspect to them as does the overall anatomy of the figure. There is still a hint of the archaic smile.
The figure stands in a life like contrapposto pose (contra- against posto- posture) in which the body takes on an over all "s"
curve. There is a shift of weight at the hips and a majority of the figure's weight is on one leg. The torso is turned in a slight
angle opposite to the angle of the hips. The pose looks almost as if the figure is in movement.
Iconography: This sculpture, like the earlier Kouros figures, was actually designed to be an icon that represented physical
perfection of the human form and therefore a god-like kalos. This sculpture might even have been the schema for the
Doryphoros by Polykleitos.
Context: This sculpture was found in the rubble underneath the Acropolis and was preserved in the same way as the
Moscophoros. Since the only sculptures that survived by Kritios were Roman marble copies, this sculpture was considered
quite a find and was attributed to the sculptor based on its formal and stylistic similarities to Roman copies.
This sculpture is a good formal example of the idealized distortions made by Greek sculptors of the human head and face. Side view facial
features are idealized. Hair is perfect. No indention from nose to forehead, known as a "Greek Nose." The ear is too high and far back. This
sculpture is made based on their conception of physical beauty. They simply decided to make nature over according to their tastes.

Classical Greece
Blonde Boy's Head 480B.C.-
Form: This sculpture shares much in common with the Doryphoros and Ephebe of Kritios: but aside from the idealized stylizations of these sculptures it appears to be in
movement. In actuality the sculptor Myron has chosen to freeze an actual moment in the process of an athlete throwing a discus. Nevertheless, the sculpture, like all Greek
sculptures, whether in the round or relief style, is frontally oriented. There is only one way the sculptor meant for the viewer to see the image.
Diskobolos (Discus- Iconography: This is a symbol of Greek male athleticism and therefore the ideal citizen and soldier. The athletic activity he is participating in is probably also a reference to
thrower) heroism during the Olympics.
by Myron c450BCE
Context: This sculpture is one of the first examples of a figure caught in a convincing frozen moment. The original sculpture would have been cast from bronze and this
5'1"
possibly would have eliminated the need for the tree stump and for one of the arms to be engaged or connected with the leg. This sculpture also demonstrates the ability of the
Roman marble copy after
Greeks to actually observe nature and mimic the movement of the human body convincingly.
a
Greek bronze original
Greek Classic
canon
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English, from Late Latin, from Latin, ruler, rule, model, standard, from Greek kanOn
Date: before 12th century
4 a : an accepted principle or rule b: a criterion or standard of judgment c : a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms
1 a : a regulation or dogma decreed by a church council b: a provision of canon law
2 [Middle English, prob. from Old French, from Late Latin, from Latin, model] : the most solemn and unvarying part of the Mass including the consecration of the bread and wine
3 [Middle English, from Late Latin, from Latin, standard] a: an authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture b: the authentic works of a writer c: a sanctioned or accepted
group or body of related works <the canon of great literature>
5 [Late Greek kanOn, from Greek, model] : a contrapuntal musical composition in two or more voice parts in which the melody is imitated exactly and completely by the successive
voices though not always at the same pitch
synonym see LAW
kalos In Greek epic poetry the hero is always described as handsome or beautiful and their physical appearance is a reflection of the character's virtue. The idealism or beauty of the
Greek figure is linked to the concept that you can judge a book by its cover. The Greek term for beauty is kalos (calos). The term kalos can also be interchanged with and is
synonymous with goodness. Therefore, to call someone or something beautiful also means that that thing is also "good."

Classical Greece
trea·tise
Pronunciation: 'trE-t&s also -t&z
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English tretis, from Anglo-French tretiz, from Old
French traitier to treat
Date: 14th century
1 : a systematic exposition or argument in writing including a methodical
discussion of the facts and principles involved and conclusions reached
<a treatise on higher education>
2 obsolete : ACCOUNT, TALE
Hellenistic Art
800-700 B.C.= Oriental Influence
700-500 B.C.= Archaic Period
480-350 B.C. = Classic Age
350-100 B.C.= Hellenism (Hellenistic Art)

Form: This statue's anatomy is considerably more realistic than earlier sculptures. The musculature is softer, and more sensuous and there is even a bit of body fat.
Although the statue is in contrapposto position to indicate slight movement the "S" curve of the body is heightened and the movement is more exaggerated by the arm that
is held aloft. The head of the adult figure is turned towards the infant that is reaching towards the extended arm. This sculpture although still frontally oriented, is even
more in the round than others. The viewer can begin to move to the far left and right to see a more interesting and complete view of the figure.
Iconography: This sculpture probably represents Hermes and Dionysus. Hermes is the wing footed messenger god who served as a temporary "nurse maid" for Dionysus
in order to protect the young god from Hera. Hermes is holding out a bunch of grapes, and young Dionysos's reaching for them is prophetic symbol of Dionysos's role as
the god of wine. The scene is a bit of a genre scene and probably symbolizes the more humanistic or playful attributes of the gods.
Context: Stokstad asserts that this is probably a copy because of the anachronistic elements of the footwear and the fact that Romans often used braces and other elements
to further support their sculptures. I believe that this sculpture is really Hellenistic because it exhibits the more dramatic and lifelike qualities of that period. This sculpture
represents a break with the earlier periods in the fact that the anatomy is a bit more sensuous and realistic and that the scene is more of a dramatic and interactive moment.
Stokstad (page 210) discusses the idea that Greek art around 320 BCE goes through a marked shift and begins to change into a style that stresses life-like and less general
themes. Hellenistic style art is very similar to the changes in film between the 1950 and the 1980's in the United States. If one was to think of a gangster film from the
1950's the themes, dialogue, sexual content, and violence were fairly restrained and the moral of the film would usually be that good conquers over evil or something just
as high minded. Today, we have films that are much more violent, more dramatic and the higher moral them is harder to understand. The same dramatic shift happens in
Greek art between the classic age and the later Hellenistic phases. The sculpture by Praxiteles is an excellent example of this shift. It is a fine example of a transitional
work of art between the two periods.
Hermes (Mercury) and the
Infant Dionysus.
by Praxiteles or his followers
c340-320 BCE
marble with remnants of
red paint on the lips and hair
height 7'
Classic or Hellenistic

Classical Greece
Form: This sculpture is a massive sculpture of a composite creature known as a Nike. The convincing anatomy is heightened by the use
of wind whipped wet drapery of her chiton and the forward moving posture of the figure. Originally this sculpture would have had
extended arms and probably a face with a fierce facial expression.
She is placed on the prow of a stone boat. Gardner describes that the setting of the sculpture would have been augmented with the
sculpture's placement in the upper basin of a two tiered fountain that would have suggested to all the senses that the ship was moving and
splashing through the water.
Iconography: Homer and other poets often described victory as being "winged." Images of flight and floating above the water are almost
part of every culture's collective unconscious. The iconography of the the figure is clearly defined and augmented by her location on the
prow of a stone boat as winged victory leading the navy into victorious battle. The massive size, movement, and youthful body of the
figure are symbols of power as well.
Nike of Samothrace 190 B.C.E.
by Pythokritos of Rhodes? Context: Stokstad describes the conditions and condition the sculpture was found in her book.
Marble, height 8'
Louvre, Paris
Hellenistic

Form: The anatomy of each of the three figures are illustrations of ideal anatomy for their ages. The counterpoise and twisting of the
figures, while not contrapposto (which is a standing pose) is a pose that inspired Michelangelo. Michelangelo referred to such twisting and
turning as serpentata (serpentine). The individuals' faces are highly dramatic and expressive and the figures themselves interact with each
other and with the serpent that attacks them. Overall, this is one of the best examples of how Hellenistic art pushed the envelope from the
Classic period.
Iconography: This sculpture represents an episode out of the Roman poet Vergil's Aeneid. This particular scene recounts an event about the
Fall of Troy. Laocoon, a celibate priest in the service of Poseidon, was punished by Poseidon, for acts of hubris against the god. (Hint:
Notice he has children) Another interpretation of this tale and his subsequent punishment was that he warned the Trojans "Beware of Greeks
bearing gifts" when they opened the gates and were presented with the famous Trojan horse in which Odysseus and his men hid. Either
interpretation of this yields that this sculpture is a warning against interacting with or offending the gods.
Context: The origins or provenance of this work is still in question. One of the questions that arises in the study of this sculpture is, is it a
Roman copy or a work of art made by late Greek Hellenistic sculptors Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenadoros? Who was the work made
for? Either way, the work was found in the remains of the emperor Titus in Rome in 1506. Recently evidence seems to suggest that this
work is the original and not a copy. According to Gardner, there are accounts by a historian from Titus' time named Pliny of the sculpture
and several fragments illustrating similar stories from the Odyssey were found 6o miles from Rome in the seaside villa of first century
emperor Tiberius. One of the fragments was signed by Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenadoros.
The fact that this work was almost certainly made for a Roman audience by Greek artists inspires another interesting observation. Greek art
under Roman patronage might have been freed to become even more dramatic and violent. Parallels of this exist in a possible comparison
between the accounts of the fall of Troy as portrayed in the literature of the Greek Odyssey, and Roman Aeneid. The Greek account barely
mentions Laocoon while the Roman account is a bit more detailed. (Hint: This would make an awesome paper topic)
Laocoon and his sons, c1C BCE by

Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenadoros
of Rhodes, marble 8' tall
Vatican Museum, Rome
Hellenistic


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Technologies: Architecture

Most of the following text is "borrowed" from the
following website.
Full text and story at
http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html
Form: This structure is based primarily on an earlier

greenhouse design Paxton used to house the giant Victoria
Regia lily in Chatsworth England and incorporates iron,
wood and glass. Paxton's design won the commission
primarily because the materials were benefitial: the fact
that they were lighter and cheaper.
The dimensions of the building based on 24 foot intervals

were a result of the maximum size of a sheet of glass that
could be manufactured at a reasonable cost (49 inches was
the cheapest for reliable 16 oz glass). Mostly site
construction using pre fabricated componets, some of
which were cast less than 24 hours earlier. The cast iron
columns were tested on site, and on site milling and
machine painting included miles of wood glazing bars.
Even temporary fencing material was designed to be used

in the final building so little was wasted. The transept was
strategically placed to preserve and temporarily cover the
large elm trees on the site. When the building was torn
down and moved to Sydenham, broken glass was remelted
providing some of the replacements.
Iconography: The Crystal palace was built to showcase

the achievements of Great Britain during the Industrial
Revolution. The British were very secure in their belief
that they were the ideal of Industrialization that they felt it
neccesary to show the rest of the "less civilized" world by
staging this enormous exhibition. "The prevailing attitude
in England at the time was ripe for the somewhat arrogant
parading of accomplishments. Many felt secure,
economically and politically, and Queen Victoria was
eager to reinforce the feeling of contentment with her
reign. It was during the mid-1850s that the word
"Victorian" began to be employed to express a new self-
consciousness, both in relation to the nation and to the
period through which it was passing.
Context: "Despite outbursts of opposition to Albert by the

press the family life of the Victorian court began to be
considered increasingly as a model for the whole country.
Albert had appreciated the achievements of Prime
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Minister Robert Peel's political and military advances and

publicly advocated the advancement of industry and
science. These facts began to sway opinion in his favor as
respectable foundations of family life and industrial
supremacy were becoming rapidly acquainted with the
monarchy of Victoria and Albert. Conceived by prince
Albert, the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in
Sir Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace 1850- London in the specially constructed Crystal Palace. The
51Originally in Crystal Palace was originally designed by Sir Joseph
Chatsworth, England Paxton in only 10 days and was a huge iron goliath with
Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert, and the Duke over a million feet of glass. It was important that the
of building used to showcase these achievements be
Devonshire's gardener, Joseph Paxton. grandiose and innovative. Over 13,000 exhibits were
displayed and viewed by over 6,200,000 visitors to the
exhibition. The millions of visitors that journeyed to the
Great Exhibition of 1851 marveled at the industrial
revolution that was propelling Britain into the greatest
power of the time. Among the 13,000 exhibits from all
around the world were the Jacquard loom, an envelope
machine, tools, kitchen appliances, steel-making displays
and a reaping machine from the United States.The objects
on display came from all parts of the world, including
India and the countries with recent white settlements, such
as Australia and New Zealand, that constituted the new
empire. Many of the visitors who flocked to London came
from European cities. The profits from the event allowed
for the foundation of public works such as the Albert Hall,
the Science Museum, the National History Museum and
the Victoria and Albert Museum."

Form: Huge tower built of steel beams and girders."...to obtain the 300 meters,
the Tower is basically composed of two elements : - a base, which is a sort of bar
stool, very sturdy, standing on 4 main pillars that are bonded and extended with a
much lighter batter at the smaller level that constitutes the second floor, - a tower
firmly attached atop. The value of the pillar base is directly related to the
swaying caused by wind forces."
" The parts used to construct the Tower:
All of the iron came from the factories of Mr. Dupont and Mr. Fould,
blacksmiths located in Pompey (Meurthe-et-Moselle), who were represented in
Paris by their director Mr. A. Prègre and who kept us informed on iron grades.
They were delivered at the following prices:
Equal angles from 40 to 100 ..................................13.25 F per 100 kg
Standard sections, 1st and 2nd grades..................................13.25 F per 100 kg
Standard sections, 3rd and 4th grades ..................................13.75 F per 100 kg
Wide flat bars up to 500..................................15.00 F per 100 kg
Ordinary sheet iron..................................15.50 F per 100 kg
Checkered plate ..................................16.50 F per 100 kg

lesson_technologies
Special tee-sections (designated in Eiffel's book)..................................16.00 F per

100 kg
Open and closed angle sections, at made to order angles
..................................20.00 F per 100 kg
The rivets came from Mr. Letroyeur and Mr. Bouvard in Paris. The quality was
that of boiler or locomotive rivets."
Iconography: " The plan to build a tower 300 metres high was conceived as part
of preparations for the World's Fair of 1889. Emile Nouguier and Maurice
Koechlin, the two chief engineers in Eiffel's company, had the idea for a very tall
tower in June 1884. It was to be designed like a large pylon with four columns of
lattice work girders, separated at the base and coming together at the top, and
joined to each other by more metal girders at regular intervals. The company had
by this time mastered perfectly the principle of building bridge supports. The
tower project was a bold extension of this principle up to a height of 300 metres -
equivalent to the symbolic figure of 1000 feet. On September 18 1884 Eiffel
registered a patent "for a newconfiguration allowing the construction of metal
supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 metres". In order to
make the project more acceptable to public opinion, Nouguier and
Koechlincommissioned the architect Stephen Sauvestre to work on the project's
appearance. Sauvestre proposed stonework pedestals to dress the legs,
monumental arches to link the columns and the first level, large glass-walled
halls on each level, a bulb-shaped design for the top and various other
ornamental features to decorate the whole of the structure. In the end the project
was simplified, but certain elements such as the large arches at the base were
retained, which in part give it its very characteristic appearance. The curvature of
the uprights is mathematically determined to offer the most efficient wind
Gustave Eiffel 1887-1889 resistance possible. As Eiffel himself explains: "All the cutting force of the wind
Eiffel Tower Paris, passes into the interior of the leading edge uprights. Lines drawn tangential to
France 984-foot (300-metre) each upright with the point of each tangent at the same height, will always
International Exposition of intersect at a second point, which is exactly the point through which passes the
1889 flow resultant from the action of the wind on that part of the tower support
to celebrate the centenary of situated above the two points in question. Before coming together at the high
the French Revolution pinnacle, the uprights appear to burst out of the ground, and in a way to be
shaped by the action of the wind".
Context: " An engineer by training, Eiffel founded and developed a company

specializing in metal structural work, whose crowning achievement was the Eiffel
Tower. He devoted the last thirty years of his life to his experimental research...
His outstanding career as a constructor was marked by work on the Porto viaduct
over the river Douro in 1876, the Garabit viaduct in 1884, Pest railway station in
Hungary, the dome of the Nice observatory, and the ingenious structure of the
Statue of Liberty. It culminated in 1889 with the Eiffel Tower. After the end of
his career in business, marred by the failure of the Panama Canal, Eiffel began an
active life of scientific experimental research in the fields of meteorology,
radiotelegraphy and aerodynamics. He died on December 27,1923."
All text and more fun readin about the tower at http://www.tour-

lesson_technologies
eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/
Form: Length of river span: 1595.5 feet
Total length of bridge: 5989 feet
Width of bridge floor: 85 feet
Suspension cables: four, each 15.75 inches in diameter
and 3578.5 feet long,
containing 5434 wires each, for a total length of 3515
miles of wire per cable
Foundation depth below high water, Brooklyn: 44 feet 6
inches
Foundation depth below high water, Manhattan: 78 feet 6
inches
Tower height above high water: 276 feet 6 inches
Roadway height above high water: 119 feet (at towers)
Total weight, not including masonry: 14,680 tons
Source: Blue Guide to New York, 1991, p616. ISBN
0393304868.
Iconography: "In 1855, John Roebling, the owner of a

wire-rope company and a famous bridge designer,
proposed a suspension bridge over the East River after
becoming impatient with the Atlantic Avenue-Fulton
Street Ferry. Roebling worked out every detail of the
bridge, from its massive granite towers to its four steel
cables. He thought his design entitled the bridge "to be
ranked as a national monument… a great work of art."..."
Responding to those who doubted the need for the bridge,
Roebling responded that projected growth in the cities of
New York and Brooklyn would necessitate the
construction of additional bridges. Specifically, Roebling
suggested future construction of the Williamsburg and
Queensboro bridges further north along the East
River.Two years later, in June 1869, the New York City
Council and the Army Corps of Engineers approved
Roebling's design. Later that month, while examining
locations for a Brooklyn tower site, Roebling's foot was
crushed on a pier by an incoming ferry. Roebling later
died of tetanus as a result of the injuries. Immediately
following Roebling's death, his son, Washington, took
over as chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge...The
Brooklyn Bridge cost $15.1 million to build, $3.8 million
John Augustus Roebling Brooklyn Bridge 1867-1883 of which was to purchase land for approaches and the
remainder going toward construction. This was more than
twice the original cost estimate of $7 million.On May 23,
1883, President Chester Arthur and Governor Grover
Cleveland officially dedicated the Brooklyn Bridge before
more than 14,000 invitees. Emily Roebling was given the
first ride over the completed bridge with a rooster, a
symbol of victory, in her lap. After the opening
ceremony, anyone with a penny for the toll could cross

lesson_technologies
the Brooklyn Bridge. On the first day,the bridge carried

trolley lines, horse-drawn vehicles, and even livestock."
Full text at http://www.nycroads.com/crossings/brooklyn/

Context: "...it is Roebling's 1840 patent for the in-situ

spinning of wire rope that has to be recognized as one of
the decisive breakthroughs in modern suspension bridge
technology. This patent brought John Roebling a
commission to build a cable-suspended, wooden aqueduct
over the Allegheny River in 1845. Roebling built a
number of such aqueducts before receiving two major
bridge,commissions in his mid-career: his 821-foot-span
Niagara rail bridge of 1841-55 and his 1,000-foot span
Cincinnati Bridge of 1856-67; both of which were
prototypes for the 1,600 foot Brooklyn Bridge, whose
construction ran through two generations of Roeblings
between 1869 and its completion in 1883.The twin
masonry support towers of this vast span necessitated the
building of foundations 78 feet below the water level...
— Kenneth Frampton and Yukio Futagawa. Modern
Architecture 1851-1945. p31.
Bibliotheque St. Genevieve, Labrouste, 1842-1850


lesson_technologies
Form: This building uses the barrel vault design, supported

by the many decorative arches found within.
Iconography: "The Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve is located

in the Quartier Latin in Paris, France. It is located across
from the Pantheon, built in1790, and in former years became
the church of Ste.Genevieve. Labrouste originally
invisioned the library having a fore court, which would be
planted with big trees and decorated with statues. Instead he
chose to embellish the vestibule to resemble a garden. The
size of the site was approximately 278' x 69'." (
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu)

Context: "One of the greatest cultural buildings of the

nineteenth century to use iron in a prominent, visible way
was unquestionably the Bibliotheque Ste.-Genevieve in Paris,
designed by Henri Labrouste and built in 1842-50. The large
(278 by 69 feet) two-storied structure filling a wide, shallow
site is deceptively simple in scheme: the lower floor is
occupied by stacks to the left, rare-book storage and office
space to the right, with a central vestibule and stairway
leading to the reading room which fills the entire upper story.
The ferrous structure of this reading room—a spine of
slender, cast-iron Ionic columns dividing the space into twin
aisles and supporting openwork iron arches that carry barrel
vaults of plaster reinforced by iron mesh—has always been
revered by Modernists for its introduction of high technology
into a monumental building."
—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture:
from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p478.


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Realism
Realism in France During the 19th Century
This page is devoted primarily to the artists who worked in the "realist style" of art and literature. According to the Brittanica,

"Realism" in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism
rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in its
broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism
can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women. The
works of such 17th-century painters as Caravaggio, the Dutch genre painters, the Spanish painters José de Ribera,
Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, and the Le Nain brothers in France are realist in approach. The
works of the 18th-century English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett may also be called
realistic.
Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-19th century in France, however.
Indeed, realism may be viewed as a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880. One of
the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure français du XIXe siècle in 1826, in which the word is
used to describe a doctrine based not upon imitating past artistic achievements but upon the truthful and accurate
depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer the artist. The French proponents of realism were
agreed in their rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism of the academies and on the
necessity for contemporaneity in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the lives, appearances,
problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and
the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of
contemporary life and society--its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.
Realism was stimulated by several intellectual developments in the first half of the 19th century. Among these
were the anti-Romantic movement in Germany, with its emphasis on the common man as an artistic subject;
Auguste Comte's Positivist philosophy, in which sociology's importance as the scientific study of society was
emphasized; the rise of professional journalism, with its accurate and dispassionate recording of current events;
and the development of photography, with its capability of mechanically reproducing visual appearances with
extreme accuracy. All these developments stimulated interest in accurately recording contemporary life and
society.

Context according to the Brittanica,
Satirical lithographs
In 1830 Daumier began his satirical work: his busts lampooning
certain contemporary types and his many lithographs. He enjoyed
the company of grandiloquent men and mainly associated with
men of the left. It was at this time that Charles Philipon, a liberal
journalist who had founded the opposition journal La Caricature,
invited him to become a contributor.
King Louis-Philippe generally tolerated jokes at his expense, but,

when unduly provoked, rather than bring suit against a paper, he
preferred to seize it, a procedure that meant ruin for its staff and
financial backers. Only once during his reign did he deal
severely with an offender--with Daumier in 1832, and then only
after the second of the artist's most violent attacks. Sentenced to
six months in prison, Daumier spent two of them in the state
prison and four in a mental hospital, the king apparently wanting
to show that one had to be mad to oppose and caricature him.
Honore Daumier, Gargantua, 1831, lithograph
After his release in February 1833, Daumier was never again
In 1830, after learning the still fairly new process of lithography, indicted, even though in his cartoons he continued to attack a
Honore Daumier (1808-1879) began to contribute political cartoons to regime, a form of society, and a concept of life that he scorned,
the anti-government weekly journal, Caricature. He was an ardent while at the same time creating unforgettable characters.
Republican and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in 1832 Daumier's types were universal: businessmen, lawyers, doctors,
for his attacks on King Louis-Philippe, whom he represented as the professors, and petits bourgeois. His treatment of his lithographs
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/19th_century/realism.htm[1/21/2014 3:51:29 PM]

Realism
archetypal glutton in the political cartoon Gargantua. was sculptural, leading Balzac to say about him that he had a bit
of Michelangelo under his skin.
Daumier's scene shows the monumental king on a toilet with a huge
plank descending from his mouth like an extended tongue. A pathetic
crowd pressed into the right foreground -- consisting of cripples,
emaciated mothers, and tattered workers -- gather in front of the
Parisian skyline (e.g., the towers of Notre Dame can be seen at right
middle-ground), while government ministers dutifully march up the
plank to feed Louis-Philippe the underprivileged's taxes which he
excretes to another crowd of officials standing below. King Louis-
Philippe was also sensitive to this political cartoon because of the
manner in which Daumier depicted the monarch's head: it is shaped
like a pear, which in French also means "block head" or stupid.
The above text is quoted from,

http://www.smcm.edu/art/arth100/Expanding/Revolution/Daumier.htm
(however this link is no longer working)

Realism Excerpted from,
(the italicized portions, in outline form, are Vitality's signature. by Robert Hughes, Time, 3/8/93, Vol. 141 Issue 10, p62,
directly quoted from 2p, 3bw HTML Full Text
http://hills.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~jcarpent/artapout.htm)
The French artist Honore Daumier (1808-1879) is the cartoonist's god,
Chronology though of course he is much more than that. It's impossible to think of an
1839 Daguerreotype presented outstanding 20th century caricaturist, from David Low to Ronald Searle and
1848 Communist Manifesto David Levine, who doesn't owe something fundamental to him. Most people
1848-52 Revolution in Europe know him only through his prints, those distillations of vengeance in which,
1859 Charles Darwin publishes Origin through a long career, Daumier impaled the dignitaries of bourgeois France
of Species on his lithographic crayon. No greater visual satirist ever lived; none, one
1861-65 American Civil War may be fairly sure, ever will.
1873 Clerk-Maxwell Theory of Electro-
magnetic Radiation The diffusion of Daumier's satirical prints has been such that they tend to
1891 First movie camera patented overshadow the rest of his work. Toiling against unrelenting deadlines,
1884 1st Salon des Artistes working sometimes on eight stones at a time, he made literally thousands of
Independants (Salon of Independents) them for magazines like Le Charivari. In fact there were only two moments
1886 8th and last Impressionist when he was able to give his time entirely to drawing and painting for their
exhibition own sakes, producing images that were not designed for mass reproduction.
1900 Sigmund Freud, The The first was just after the 1848 revolution, when press censorship put him
Interpretation of Dreams out of work. The second was after 1860, when he was fired for a time by Le
1903 First flight of the Wright brothers Charivari. Nobody can guess how many watercolors and drawings he turned
1905-15 Albert Einstein's Theory of out during these interludes -- one of his writer friends, Theodore de Banville,
Relativity remembered a studio full of ``cartons overflowing with drawings, so swollen
1914-18 World War I that they could not be shut'' -- but only a tiny fraction of them has survived.
Quite a lot of that fraction went on view last week at the Metropolitan
Painting of Modern Life: Realism Museum of Art in New York City, in ``Daumier Drawings,'' jointly
subjects from everyday world organized by the Met and the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut of Frankfurt.
factual, commonplace, not idealized
Rail Road- import and export goods into To see this exhibition is to see why Charles Baudelaire, reviewing the Paris
cities Salon of 1845, placed Daumier, as a draftsman, in the company of Ingres and
Creates a division on class- "upper Delacroix. He was, of course, different from both. Unlike Ingres, Daumier
middle class" who can afford to see art, wasn't interested in ideal form or perfect ``Greek'' contour, even though
also music, theatre, and literature classical prototypes inform his work -- how far, one can easily judge from
machine made goods his scenes of refugees straggling across an open landscape, which bear a
1848 -1854 French Revolution distinct relation to the friezes on Trajan's Column, known to him from
1861- 1865 U.S. Civil War engravings. He loved to guy the sacred Antique, but it was the kind of satire
1871 Suez Canal open in Northern that could only be done by an artist fully intimate with his target. And
Africa. Germans and French establish although he got a lot from Delacroix, admiring the fluidity of his line and the

Realism
trade power the older artist brought to painting the victims of barbaric force --
Karl Marx- Socialism on the rise. Delacroix's Massacre at Chios has a long resonance in Daumier's work --
According to the text "Karl Marx Daumier didn't share his love of the exotic. For Daumier, everything worth
believed that the laws of human society drawing happened right under his nose, in the railway carriage, the
could be discovered by science and used estaminet, the cellar, the butcher's shop or the lawcourts. Like Balzac or
to construct what he called the golden Dickens, Daumier worked out of immersion in the muck and detail of life as
age of humanity. it was lived.
In his hands, the act of drawing acquired an extraordinary power and range.
It was, in one sense, sculptural: the dense shadows of ink wash convey the
shape and width of a head or a body with such emphasis that you feel you
could almost lift it off the page. Drawings like Two Men Conversing or The
Drinkers are so vivid in their tonal structure, and at the same time so natural
and unpretentious in their expression, that you feel included in the meetings
they depict. Daumier's line is always in motion, and startlingly responsive to
the perceived moment. It is rarely just an outline: it surrounds the form with
the haze of energy, made up of scribbled marks, suggestions and hints. It is
the record of a sensibility that continually probes and is always correcting
itself in nuances. In other hands, such ambiguity would seem fluttering. In
Daumier's, it is the signature of an explosive, unappeasable vitality. . .
His repertoire of expression is immense. What artist ever did more with the
smile, the shrug, the sneer of complicity, the lifted eyebrow -- the myriad
signs of consciousness that lie outside the repertoire of classical art? Rapid
movement is keyed into the very nature of Daumier's sketches. With their
flicker of successive positions for a lawyer's hand, or a dog's legs, they
burgeon in time as well as in space, thus seeming to predict Futurism. And
indeed, just as Daumier's drawings contain his prehensile relation to the past,
so they look forward to the more modern artists: the massive strong men and
pathetic acrobats of Picasso's Rose Period are already in Daumier's carnival
scenes. Giacometti was deeply influenced not only by Daumier's drawing but
by his series of tiny, malignant caricature-sculptures in clay known as Les
Celebrites du Juste Milieu.
If Daumier's appeal to other artists is inscribed on the art that came after him,
his enduring popularity with a more general public comes from wider
sources. Basically, Daumier lives because for more than a hundred years
people have realized that he was on their side -- a tribune of the singly
powerless against the collectively powerful. This is not an attitude an artist
can simply adopt; he or she must feel it deep in the bones, as by instinct,
which Daumier clearly did.

Form: Daumier's image incorporates dramatic shifts of

chiaroscuro, tenebrism and radical foreshortening in an image
which is at the same time photographic in its value structure yet
somewhat cartoon like in its execution.
This image is a lithographic print that was originally published in

the news paper. According to the Brittanica, lithography is a
planographic printing process that makes use of the

immiscibility of grease and water.
In the lithographic process, ink is applied to a grease-

treated image on the flat printing surface; nonimage
(blank) areas, which hold moisture, repel the
lithographic ink. This inked surface is then printed--

Realism
either directly on paper, by means of a special press (as

in most fine-art printmaking), or onto a rubber cylinder
(as in commercial printing).
The process was discovered in 1798 by Alois

Honore Daumier,
Senefelder of Munich, who used a porous Bavarian
Rue Transnonain, 1834
limestone for his plate (hence lithography, from Greek
more on Daumier
lithos, "stone"). The secret of lithographic printing was
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-
closely held until 1818, when Senefelder published
june00/daumier_4-25.html
Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A
Complete Course of Lithography).
Iconography: Overtly this print is an attack on the French government. It documents the results of events
surrounding the uprisings in Paris during the 1830's. During a riot in which many of the streets were barricaded,
some paving stones were hurled down at police marching through the streets. The police retaliated by storming
one of the building that they thought contained the rebels and they killed all the residents. According to the
general population all of the residents were fast asleep and the police attacked innocent people and murdered
everyone including the children and old people in their sleep. Notice that in this image they are wearing
nightshirts. Daumier documents what he believes was the unjust death of these occupants. The figures in this
image are lit in the religious manner of Caravaggio and the pose of the central figure is reminiscent of many
images of Christ and of the image by David of Marat. Daumier adds a particularly goulish touch to this image by
placing the body of an infant beneath the central figure. Both lay in a puddle of blood.
I might have the specifics of the story a bit off. Here's some info from another website,
Despite serving time in prison for the content of his political cartoons, Daumier continued to
criticize the French government. For instance, when twelve Parisians were killed in a raid
by government infantrymen because they had shown support for an uprising in another
important French city, Daumier represented the massacre in the illustration Rue Transnonain
(1834). Unlike Gargantua, there is a total absence of caricature. Instead, the victims are
portrayed with realism.
Daumier's Rue Transnonain is also important because the central dead adult has been
appropriated from Delacroix's earlier revolutionary image Liberty Leading the People
(1830). More than likely, a contemporary French audience would have noticed how the
prostrate figure in Daumier's image is placed in a similar pose to that of Delacroix's dead
man in the right foreground below the allegorical figure.
The above text is quoted from,
http://www.smcm.edu/art/arth100/Expanding/Revolution/Daumier.htm
Form: These images all use reduced earthtoned palettes. The

compositions are symmetrical and stable. The space is fairly
shallow and arranged in bands with the focus of the image in the
foreground.
One of the most important aspects of these images is that

Daumier has created multiple copies of the same image by using
a process called grid and transfer or squaring. According to the

Realism
Brittanica,
"Squaring" in painting, simple technique for

transferring an image from one surface to another
(and sometimes converting the image from one scale
to another) by non mechanical means. The original
work to be transferred is divided into a given number
of squares; the same number of squares is then
marked off-- with charcoal or some other easily
removable medium--on the surface of the receiving
Honore Daumier, Third Class Carriage, 1862 area. The contents of each square of the original are
oil on canvas, 25"x35" then drawn in the corresponding square of the
reproduction. The use of the grid ensures the accurate
placement of images onto the reproduction.
The Egyptians used squaring at least 5,000 years ago.

It has been used to transfer cartoons onto murals, to
transfer preparatory drawings onto canvas paintings,
and to alter the scale of any work in the same media.
This process is important because it demonstrates the influence

of mechanical reproduction (photography and printmaking) on
the practice of fine art. Daumier is influenced by the
technologies used to create his cartoons in the newspapers even
when he makes fine art. Daumier would have used the process
of "squaring" to reproduce images like this on to lithographic
stones and printmaking plates.
This process was also used during the Renaissance. Check this
out:
Honore Daumier, Third Class Carriage, 1862. http://www.clevelandart.org/techniques/squaring.html
Drawing
Daumier's work is realistic but it is still stylized in a cartoon
like manner. His portraits of everyday people are more
caricatures than attempts to capture a realistic or photographic
realism.
Iconography: Daumier is a lot like Hogarth. Even in his use of

the technology of printmaking to communicate and sell his
work. The iconography of Daumier's work (like Hogarth) deals
primarily with Parisian and or French culture and its social
organization. His work often deals with social injustice but
often his work documents and is a commentary on the structure
of French society.
According to the Webmuseum,
Honore Daumier, a French artist, was deeply

interested in people, especially the underprivileged. In
Third-Class Carriage he shows us, with great
compassion, a group of people on a train journey. We
are especially concerned with one family group, the
Honore Daumier, young mother tenderly holding her small child, the
The Third-Class Carriage

Realism
weary grandmother lost in her own thoughts, and the

1863-65 young boy fast asleep. The painting is done with
Oil on canvas simple power and economy of line. The hands, for
25 3/4 x 35 1/2 in. (65.4 x 90.2 cm) example, are reduced to mere outlines but beautifully
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York drawn. The bodies are as solid as clay, their bulk
indicated by stressing the essential and avoiding the
nonessential. These are not portraits of particular
people but of mankind.
Hogarth's Third Class Carriage is also a commentary on the

compressed and cramped existence of the French "third class" or
lower class. Even though they are doing the bulk of the work
their carriage is decidedly less comfortable than the first class
carriage below. Notice also that the wealthy people in the first
class carriage are not conversing or leaning against one another.
Their facial expressions are much more detached and aloof as
well. This in some ways demonstrates Daumier's empathy for
the lower economic classes. In some ways he is very Rousseau
like in his egalitarianism.
Daumier, Honore 1808-1879

First-Class Carriage 1864 Daumier, Honore 1808-1879 French -
black chalk, wash, watercolor and Third Class Carriage
conte crayon on wove paper Berlin :Private Collection Gerstenberg Collection
Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery inv.37.1225
Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornans, 1849 oil on canvas, 51x58"

Form: Courbet's paintings are rendered
in a realist and a realistic/naturalistic
manner. His value structure, anatomy
and color are all fairly well observed and
true to life. Nevertheless, Courbet also
worked with some formal elements that
were less naturalistic. His color is made
up of a palette of low key somber earth
tones. The composition of this image is
traditional but a bit odd. The grave is
cropped in the center foreground and the
figures stand in a frieze like band just
behind the hole. The background's sky
and low flat mountains are almost
surreal (dreamlike) in their appearance.
His paint quality is a bit unique in that

Realism
he incorporates the use of impastos in his work. He employed a heavy use of the palette knife to literally trowel the paint on to the
surface of the canvas. The figures in the image are realistic but they are also "types" of people and in some ways their rough and course
features are almost caricaturish in how they are rendered.
Iconography: The Burial at Ornans, depicts "real" people attending the funeral of a common or "real" person. Courbet specialized in
working class people and ordinary landscapes. He took the idea of "History Painting" and expands on it by heroicizing the ugly
common people of the country whom he had a great amount of sympathy for. In some ways he is creating a monument for the common
French peasant but the image also has some of the moralizing memento mori like warnings contained in Masaccio's "Trinity with
Donors." The hole in the foreground is very similar in its symbology to Masaccio's skeleton.
The strange truncated grave of the buried peasant demonstrates his anti heroic composition and an interest in the documentary and
formal qualities of photography. His memento mori is an attempt to illustrate the common fate of all humanity and for him his painting
was and attempt to show this in an unedited truth to perceived fact - "the here and now." Even the formal qualities of using earthy tones
and the rough impastos are for Courbet symbolic of the rough and drab nature of reality.
Context: Courbet was considered the father of Realist movement in 19th century art and accepted the term "realism" to describe his art.
According to the Brittanica,

Courbet (b. June 10, 1819, Ornans, Fr. d. Dec. 31, 1877, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switz. ) was a
French painter and leader of the realist movement. Courbet rebelled against the Romantic painting of his day, turning to
everyday events for his subject matter. His huge shadowed canvases with their solid groups of figures ("The Artist's Studio,"
1855) drew sharp criticism from the establishment. From the 1860s a more sensuous and colorful manner prevailed in his
work.
Courbet was born in eastern France, the son of Eléonor-Régis, a prosperous farmer, and Sylvie Courbet. After attending both
the Collège Royal and the college of fine arts at Besançon, he went to Paris in 1841, ostensibly to study law. He devoted
himself more seriously, however, to studying the paintings of the masters in the Louvre. Father and son had great mutual
respect, and, when Courbet told his father he intended to become a painter rather than a provincial lawyer, his father
consented, saying, "If anyone gives up, it will be you, not me," and adding that, if necessary, he would sell his land and
vineyards and even his houses.
Freed from all financial worry, young Courbet was able to devote himself entirely to his art. He gained technical proficiency
by copying the pictures of Diego Velázquez, Ribera, and other 17th-century Spanish painters. In 1844, when he was 25, after
several unsuccessful attempts, his self-portrait "Courbet with a Black Dog," painted in 1842, was accepted by the Salon--the
only annual public exhibition of art in France, sponsored by the Royal Academy. When in the following years the jury for the
Salon thrice rejected his work because of its unconventional style and bold subject matter, he remained undaunted and
continued to submit it.
The Revolution of 1848 ushered in the Second Republic and a new liberal spirit that greatly affected the arts. The Salon held
its exhibition not in the Louvre itself but in the adjoining galleries of the Tuileries. Courbet exhibited there in 1849, and his
early work was greeted with considerable critical and public acclaim.
In 1849 he visited his family at Ornans to recover from the hectic life in Paris and, inspired again by his native countryside,
produced two of his greatest paintings: "The Stone-Breakers" and "Burial at Ornans." Painted in 1849, "The Stone-Breakers"
is a realistic rendering of two figures doing menial labour in a barren, rural setting. The "Burial at Ornans," from the
following year, is a huge representation of a peasant funeral, containing more than 40 life-size figures. Both works depart
radically from the more controlled, idealized pictures of either the Neoclassic or Romantic schools; they portray the life and
emotions not of aristocratic personages but of humble peasants, and they do so with a realistic urgency. The fact that Courbet
did not glorify his peasants but presented them boldly and starkly created a violent reaction in the art world.
Form: This painting is rendered in an even more

frieze like manner than the his "Burial at Ornans."
Courbet's palette and paint quality remain consistent
throughout the body of his work. This work is earth
toned and the brushwork is fairly rough and
tangible.
Iconography: The Brittanica comments that ""The

Stone-Breakers" is a realistic rendering of two
figures doing menial labour in a barren, rural
setting." The subject matter of the painting

Realism
demonstrates Courbet's sympathy for the plight of

the rural poor; however, it is a plight he does
nothing to remedy (his father was a wealthy
farmer.)
Courbet heightens the pathos of the image by

depicting two literally faceless workers. As such
one could imagine there own face on the workers or
perhaps his message is that we don't really notice or
acknowledge the individual identities of this faceless
Gustave Courbet, Stonebreakers 1849 cast. Nevertheless, he does identify their ages well
destroyed 1945 enough. The boy is too young to be doing the hard
Dresden manual labour of breaking up stones and the straw
French, Realism hatted adult is too old. The need for their hard work
is evidenced in the worn and ragged clothing they
wear.
Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus 1863

Oil on canvas (4’ 2.7" x 7’ 3.75")
French Academic Painting or Neoclassic
Stokstad points out that Daumier was a bit of an art critique as well and that he
commented on the reality of practicality of continuing in the typical Neoclassical
and Academic traditions of painting the nude female form in the guise or
"disguise" of classical goddesses. In some ways, Daumier was pointing out that
images like this not only had no relationship to 19th century French culture but
was also possibly an immoral excuse to satisfy the appetites of the "male gaze."
Other French "Realist" authors felt similarly and Emile Zola, who wrote
similarly themed realist literature to Flaubert pointed out the "realities" of the
image above.
When Cabanel's Birth of Venus was presented at the salon of 1863, this painting
was purchased by Napoleon III. The novelist, Émile Zola (naturalism), rejected
Honore Daumier, this painting calling it a "goddess drowning in a river of mud (who) looks like a
This Year Venuses again!. . . Always Venuses! c1864 very delectable tart, not in flesh and blood—that would be indecent—but in a
sort of pink and white marzipan."
The paintings of Manet take on a similar argument.


Realism
Manet, Edouard. Olympia 1863 Oil on canvas

TIZIANO Vecellio (Titian) The Venus of Urbino 1538
51 3/8 x 74 3/4 in.
Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm
French Realism
Italian Renaissance
Form: Manet was a realist in the same way that Courbet was. He uses a "real" kind of palette of earthtones and local unsaturated
colors. His composition is a very traditional borrowing from Titian's work and he renders textures, figures and objects convincingly.
His brushwork is also a bit rough in some areas however it is no more rough than the brushwork of Velázquez. His skin tones and
lighting however are a bit disturbing and he lacks a strong sense of chiaroscuro in this image.
Iconography: This image is a kind of "answer" to the traditional art historical point of view concerning the female nude. In this image,
Manet, in a similar manner to Daumier's cartoon above, lampoons or parodies the tradition of painting Venuses. In this case, he is
directly commenting on Titian's painting.
For each element in Titian's painting, Manet reflects a similar one. For example, the loyal sleeping dog in Titian's painting (which
seems a bit sarcastic even there considering the context of the image) is echoed by the black cat arching it's back in Manet's image. The
dog in Titian's work is probably a reference to fidelity and constancy much as it is in Durer's print "The Knight, Death and The Devil"
but Manet replaces this with a cat which is a symbol of feminine sexual power and witchcraft. The tasteful textiles, surfaces and
textures of Titian's work are replaced by a gaudy eclectic combination of textiles and wallpapers in Manet's work. In fact, in 1850-51
the world's fair or exposition was hosted in Chatsworth, England by Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. One of the purposes
of the exposition was to instruct the masses in the ways of good taste and design. Victoria and Albert noticed that thanks to
industrialization textiles were in great abundance and fairly cheaply priced. Victoria and Albert believed that the uneducated masses of
England were combing fabrics and wallpapers without regard to taste. Manet's painting is a fairly good example of this willy nilly
combination. Manet may have meant it as a statement concerning the taste of Olympia.
Please read Contrapposto Magazine Bringing Olympia Into the Present

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe [Luncheon on the Grass]

http://www.musee-orsay.fr/index.php?
id=851&L=1&tx_commentaire_pi1[showUid]=7123
Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet exhibited Le

déjeuner sur l’herbe under the title Le Bain at the Salon des
Refusés (initiated the same year by Napoléon III) where it became
the principal attraction, generating both laughter and scandal.
Yet in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet was paying tribute to

Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from the Concert
champêtre – a painting by Titian attributed at the time to Giorgione
(Louvre) – and taking his inspiration for the composition of the

Realism
central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after

Raphael's Judgement of Paris.But the classical references were
counterbalanced by Manet's boldness. The presence of a nude
Manet, Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863. woman among clothed men is justified neither by mythological nor
Oil on canvas 84" x 106" allegorical precedents. This, and the contemporary dress, rendered
the strange and almost unreal scene obscene in the eyes of the
public of the day. Manet himself jokingly nicknamed his painting
"la partie carrée".
In those days, Manet's style and treatment were considered as

shocking as the subject itself. He made no transition between the
light and dark elements of the picture, abandoning the usual subtle
gradations in favour of brutal contrasts, thereby drawing
reproaches for his "mania for seeing in blocks". And the characters
seem to fit uncomfortably in the sketchy background of woods
from which Manet has deliberately excluded both depth and
perspective. Le déjeuner sur l'herbe - testimony to Manet's refusal
to conform to convention and his initiation of a new freedom from
traditional subjects and modes of representation - can perhaps be
considered as the departure point for Modern Art.
Raimondi detail of The Judgement of Paris 1520
Diego Velázquez Las Meninas

Realism
Edouard Manet. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. 1656 Oil on canvas 10'5''x9'

1882. Oil on canvas. 37"x51" Located in Museo del Prado,
Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, UK.
The Folies-Bergère was Paris's first music hall, described by one magazine as having an atmosphere of 'unmixed joy'. It was notorious as
a place for men to pick up prostitutes; the poet Maupassant said the barmaids were 'vendors of drink and of love'.
Here a barmaid is shown before a mirror, which reflects the audience watching a performance. Manet knew the Folies-Bergère well. He
made preparatory sketches there, but he painted the final version in his studio, planning his composition in the sketch shown below. One
of theOil sketch for A Bar at the Folies-Bergère Edouard Manet, Oil Sketch for A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881-82 (Private
Collection, courtesy Pyms' Gallery, London) barmaids, Suzon, acted as a model, posing behind a bar Manet had set up.
This picture was Manet's last major work, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882. It is unsettling. An acrobat's feet dangle in the air at the
top left of the painting. The quickly-sketched crowds suggest the bustle of the Folies- Bergère.
In contrast, the barmaid is detached and marooned behind her bar. Manet has displaced her reflection to the right. She faces us, but the
mirror shows her leaning towards a customer. Are we standing in his shoes?
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collections/paintings/imppostimp/manet.shtml
French painter Édouard Manet presented A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at the 1882 Paris Salon exhibition just one year before his death.
The painting is the culmination of his interest in scenes of urban leisure and spectacle, a subject that he had developed in dialogue with
Impressionism over the previous decade. On loan from the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery in London, the painting is a masterpiece
that has perplexed and inspired artists and scholars since it was painted over 100 years ago.
The Folies-Bergère was one of the most elaborate variety-show venues in Paris, showcasing entertainment ranging from ballets to circus
acts. Another attraction was the barmaids, who were assumed by many contemporary observers to be available as clandestine prostitutes.
By depicting one of these women and her male customer on an imposing scale, Manet brazenly introduced a morally suspect,
contemporary subject into the realm of high art. By treating the topic with deadpan seriousness and painterly brilliance, Manet staked his
claim to be remembered as the heroic "painter of modern life" envisaged by critics like Charles Baudelaire.
In addition to the social tensions evoked by the painting's subject, Manet's composition presents a visual puzzle. The barmaid looks
directly at the viewer, while the mirror behind her reflects the large hall and patrons of the Folies-Bergère. Manet seems to have painted
the image from a viewpoint directly opposite the barmaid. Yet this viewpoint is contradicted by the reflection of the objects on the bar
and the figures of the barmaid and a patron off to the right. Given such inconsistencies, Manet seems not to have offered a single,
determinate position from which to confidently make sense of the whole.
The visual and psychological ambiguities of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère have prompted many questions:
• How are we to characterize the barmaid's expression?

• What is the nature of the viewer's relationship to the barmaid?
• What is happening between the barmaid and the man reflected in the mirror?
• If we see the man's reflection in the mirror, why isn't his figure also visible in front of the bar?
• Why is there no indication in the mirror of the balcony walkway on which we imagine the man, or ourselves, to be standing?
• Why are the reflections of the figures and still life objects displaced so far to the right?
The more one reflects on Manet's painting, the more difficult it becomes to project a straightforward narrative onto it, and the more
conscious and uncertain we become of our position as spectators. At once invoking and undermining the traditional notion of painting-
as-mirror, Manet's work becomes a profound interrogation of the act of looking itself.
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manet_bar/


Japonism
Japonism
Japonism ~ other cultures (primarily Western) incorporating Japanese art into their own art,
like Orientalism
Historical background: in the 1850s, Admiral Perry busted open Japan and other East Asian
countries, forcing them to trade with the West. Soon after, the Europeans started mining the
Japanese culture.
What makes Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola influenced by Japonism? It has elements of
Japanese art (Japanese screen on the left, Japanese print on the right), and the painting itself
has a slight tilt upwards, a flattening out of the image*.
This has nothing to do with the evolution of art history, i.e. Japan did not take the idea
Manet, Edouard from 13th century European art and the West took it back; it was just a modern take on
Portrait d'Emile Zola 1868 art.
Oil on canvas 57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in. (146 x
114 cm) The reason why Emile Zola would want to be painted with Japanese art in the background is
Musee d'Orsay, Paris in order to appear worldly.
Whistler was a bit of a dandy. He was staying at a woman’s house while her husband was
away when he painted the Peacock Room. The room’s gold-leafed panels and Japanese motifs
are evidence of the Japanese influence.
dandy ~ a man who likes to dress up, is slightly effeminate, usually a connoisseur of expensive
tastes
Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black has a more graphic design look: interlocking
shapes, flat plane, not much volume.
Crows in Snow c1700
Japan, Edo period (1615-1868)

The Peacock Room was once the dining room in the London
home of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy shipowner from
Liverpool, England. It was originally designed by a gifted
interior architect named Thomas Jeckyll. To display
Leyland's prized collection of Chinese porcelain to best
advantage, Jeckyll constructed a lattice of intricately carved
shelving and hung antique gilded leather on the walls. A
painting by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) called La
Princesse du pays de la porcelaine — or The Princess from
the Land of Porcelain — occupied a place of honor above the
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/japan/japan_and_japonism.htm[7/31/2013 2:16:12 PM]

Japonism
fireplace.
In his patron's absence, Whistler was inspired to make

bolder revisions. He covered the ceiling with Dutch metal, or
imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a lush pattern of
peacock feathers. He then gilded Jeckyll's walnut shelving
and embellished the wooden shutters with four magnificently
plumed peacocks.
Whistler wrote to Leyland that the dining room was "really

alive with beauty — brilliant and gorgeous while at the same
time delicate and refined to the last degree," boasting that the
changes he had made were past imagining. "I assure you," he
said, "you can have no more idea of the ensemble in its
perfection gathered from what you last saw on the walls than
you could have of a complete opera judging from a third
finger exercise!" He urged Leyland not to return to London
yet, since he did not want the room to be seen before every
detail was perfect.
Yet Whistler entertained visitors and amused the press in the

lavishly decorated room, never thinking to ask permission of
the owner of the house. His audacious behavior, coupled
with a dispute over payment for the project, provoked a
bitter quarrel between the painter and his patron. Leyland
would not consent to pay the two thousand guineas that
Whistler wanted: "I do not think you should have involved
me in such a large expenditure without previously telling me
James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903). of it," he wrote to the artist. Eventually Leyland agreed to
The Peacock Room 1876—77. half that amount, but he further insulted Whistler by writing
his check in pounds, the currency of trade, when payment to
artists and professionals was customarily made in guineas. A
pound is worth twenty shillings and a guinea twenty-one, so
the already offensive sum was also smaller than expected.
Jeckyll had nearly completed his commission when he

consulted Whistler — who was then working on decorations
for the entrance hall of Leyland's house — about the color to
paint the dining room shutters and doors. Concerned that the
red roses on the leather hangings clashed with the colors in
The Princess, Whistler volunteered to retouch the walls with
traces of yellow. Leyland permitted Whistler to make that
minor alteration and also to adorn the wainscoting and
cornice with a "wave pattern" derived from the design on the
leaded glass of the pantry door. Assuming the decoration of
the room to be virtually complete, Leyland went back to his
business in Liverpool.
Perhaps in retaliation, Whistler took the liberty of coating
Leyland's valuable leather with Prussian-blue paint and
depicting a pair of peacocks aggressively confronting each
other on the wall opposite The Princess. He used two shades
of gold for the design and highlighted telling details in
silver. Scattered at the feet of the angry bird are the coins
(silver shillings) that Leyland refused to pay; the silver
feathers on the peacock's throat allude to the ruffled shirts
that Leyland always wore. The poor and affronted peacock
has a silver crest feather that resembles the lock of white hair
that curled above Whistler's forehead. To make sure that
James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903). Leyland understood his point, Whistler called the mural of
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain the fighting peacocks "Art and Money; or, The Story of the
La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 1863-64, Room." He obtained a blue rug to complete the scheme and
Oil on canvas, 199.9 x 116.1 cm. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.91

Japonism
titled the room Harmony in Blue and Gold. After concluding

his work in March 1877, the artist never saw the Peacock
Room again.
Despite the controversy surrounding its creation, Leyland

kept his dining room as Whistler had left it and continued
filling the shelves with porcelain until his death in 1892.
Twelve years later the Peacock Room was removed from the
Leyland house and exhibited in a London art gallery. Having
recently acquired The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,
Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), who later founded the Freer
Gallery of Art, purchased the Peacock Room in 1904. The
room was again taken apart, and reinstalled in an addition to
Freer's house in Detroit, where it was used for the display of
his own collection of ceramics. Freer recognized the
importance of the Peacock Room in understanding Whistler's
style, and he also believed it to exemplify the spirit of
universal beauty that informed his philosophy of collecting
and united his holdings of Asian and American art.
After Freer's death in 1919, the Peacock Room was

transported to Washington, D.C. and installed in the new
Freer Gallery of Art. By then, having been dismantled,
moved, and reassembled three times, the room's physical
structure had become highly unstable. Between 1947 and
James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903) 1950 two Boston restorers, John and Richard Finlayson,
Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother 1871 carried out an extensive renovation: they remounted the wall
hangings with wax on a new plywood framework, repaired
the damaged ceiling, restored the cracked and buckled
leather, and retouched or repainted many surfaces of the
room. The Finlaysons seemed to have concentrated their
efforts on the painted panels and disregarded the surrounding
framework of wainscoting, even though Whistler himself had
lavished attention on every inch of the decoration. Largely as
a result of their selective restoration, the artist's subtle
harmonies fell sadly out of tune.
Fortunately, Whistler's intricate patterns of color design were

successfully retrieved during a recent conservation project.
Using cleaning systems designed specifically for the task, a
team of conservators gradually removed an accumulation of
darkened varnish, dirt, and overpaint, leaving the original
surfaces of the room untouched. The wooden wainscoting
was revealed to be not murkey brown but greenish gold.
And the dark, lusterless ceiling became vibrant with feather
patterns spun across a shimmering golden ground. Once the
conservation was complete, the dominant inspiration for the
color scheme became clearly apparent: the coppery golds and
brilliant blues and greens of Whistler's decoration resemble
the iridescent markings of peacock feathers.
http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/peacock/default.htm

Japonism
Harunobu, Suzuki (Japanese, 1725-1770)

Eight Views: The Evening Bell, woodblock print, published by
James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903).
Shokakudo
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain
La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 1863-64,
Oil on canvas, 199.9 x 116.1 cm. Gift of Charles Lang Freer,
F1903.91
Mallet Vase with Ladies

porcelain with overglaze-polychrome decoration

Japonism
Qing period (1662-1722)

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903).
The Princess from the Land of Porcelain
La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 1863-64,
Oil on canvas, 199.9 x 116.1 cm. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.91
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849): The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. woodblock print 9"x14"

Japonism
(From the series: Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji)
The Great Wave at Kanagawa (from a Series of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji), Edo period (1615–1868), ca. 1831–33
Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849); Published by Eijudo
Polychrome ink and color on paper
10 1/8 x 14 15/16 in. (25.7 x 37.9 cm) (Oban size)

H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (JP1847)

The preeminence of this print—said to have inspired both Debussy's La Mer and Rilke's Der Berg—can be
attributed, in addition to its sheer graphic beauty, to the compelling force of the contrast between the wave and the
mountain. The turbulent wave seems to tower above the viewer, whereas the tiny stable pyramid of Mount Fuji sits
in the distance. The eternal mountain is envisioned in a single moment frozen in time. Hokusai characteristically cast
a traditional theme in a novel interpretation. In the traditional meisho-e (scene of a famous place), Mount Fuji was
always the focus of the composition. Hokusai inventively inverted this formula and positioned a small Mount Fuji
within the midst of a thundering seascape. Foundering among the great waves are three boats thought to be barges
conveying fish from the southern islands of Edo. Thus a scene of everyday labor is grafted onto the seascape view of
the mountain. (Metropolitan Museum Website)
This is perhaps the single most famous of Hokusai's woodblock prints - perhaps of all Japanese prints. It belongs to
the series 'Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji' (Fugaku sanj?rokkei).
The graceful snow-clad mountain stands out unperturbed against the deep blue of the horizon. Yet it is reduced to a
tiny hillock compared with the towering strength of the wave which threatens to engulf the struggling boats. Such
clever, playful manipulation of the composition is a feature of many of Hokusai's works.
This monumental series was the first to exploit the new chemical Berlin blue pigment, which had recently become
cheaply available from China. It provided Hokusai with a strong blue for both sky and water and had the added
advantage that it did not fade. Hokusai's series was so commercially successful that the publisher, Nishimuraya
Eijud?, extended it with another ten prints, printed this time with black instead of blue outlines.
Several thousand impressions were taken of the design from the cherry-wood printing blocks, literally as many as the
publisher could sell. This is a fine early impression, still with sharp outlines, which formerly belonged to the French
collector René Druart (1888-1961)
Under the Wave, off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami-ura), also known as ‘The Great Wave’, is surely the most
famous of all Japanese prints. It was designed by artist Katsushika Hokusai in around 1831 and issued as a popular
colour woodblock print.
Although ‘The Great Wave’ is often seen as typically Japanese, in fact it mixes influences from both east and west.
Hokusai’s imagination had been captured in his youth by his discovery of European-style perspective. Now, aged
about seventy, he adapted European perspective in a very inventive way, playing games in the image between the
relative sizes of the large storm wave in the foreground and tiny Mount Fuji in the distance.
Japanese prints such as 'The Great Wave' influenced Western artists such as Whistler, van Gogh and Monet. During
the 20th century and beyond, the image has spread even more widely into popular culture and has been frequently
replicated and adapted. It is even painted as a mural on a house in Camberwell, South London.
This is a unique opportunity to delve into the story behind this iconic work, learn how Hokusai made ‘The Great
Wave’, and discover how the print has become a truly global inspiration.


Japonism
Ando Hiroshige Ando Hiroshige

Dyers' Quarter, Kanda Ushimachi, Takanawa
From From the folio From the folio
"One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" 1857 "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" 1857
Woodblock print 13 1/4 x 8 5/8 in. Woodblock print 13 1/4 x 8 5/8 in.
The Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum
Dyers' Quarter, Kanda, No. 75 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
Long strips of freshly dyed cotton fabric hang from drying platforms erected high above dyers' shops in
the Kanda district. Monogrammed fabric strips in the center dominate the composition. One bears the
"fish" mark of the publisher of the series, Uoei, cleverly written so that it resembles the word for "we,"
pronounced "ue" and hence an abbreviation of "Uoei." The strips in the background bear the lozenge-
shaped mark of Hiroshige; the inner shape reads "hi," the outer square "ro": "Hiro" [shige]. It is
characteristic that the artist has placed himself behind his publisher—and that his personal mark appears
only this once in the entire series.
Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige (Ando), Japanese, 1797-1858

Medium: Woodblock print
Place Made: Japan
Dates: 11th month of 1857
Period: Edo Period, Ansei Era
Dimensions: Sheet: 14 3/16 x 9 1/4 in. (36 x 23.5 cm) Image: 13 3/8 x 8 3/4 in. (34 x 22.2 cm) (show
scale)
Markings: Publisher: Shitaya Uo Ei
Signature: Hiroshige-ga
Collections:Asian Art
Museum Location: This item is not on view
Accession Number: 30.1478.75
Credit Line: Gift of Anna Ferris
Rights Statement: No known copyright restrictions
Caption: Utagawa Hiroshige (Ando) (Japanese, 1797-1858). Dyers' Quarter, Kanda, No. 75 from One
Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 11th month of 1857. Woodblock print, Sheet: 14 3/16 x 9 1/4 in. (36 x
23.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Anna Ferris, 30.1478.75

Japonism
Image: overall, 30.1478.75_PS1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2006

Catalogue Description: This autumn scene shows long strips of freshly dyed cotton fabric hanging from
drying platforms above the dyers' shops in the Kanda district, with Mount Fuji in the distance. It is
thought that this design might have been inspired by a similar print, "Fuji of the Dyers' Quarter" in
Hokusai's "One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji" (Fugaku Hyakkei, vol. II), published more than two
decades earlier. In the left corner are textiles with large patterns in brown and indigo, for the summer or
the bath. The blue and white pattern in the center is not printed in the traditional indigo of the dyer but
the imported Prussian blue of the printer. The fabric will be made into cotton strips to be used as towels
and headbands, common gift items in the Edo period and even today. The strips in the foreground bear the
"fish" mark of the publisher, Uoei, and the strips in the background bear the lozenge-shaped mark of
Hiroshige himself. The title name, Kanda Kon'ya-cho, was a proper administrative name and a description
of the principal trade conducted in this district. By the end of the Edo period, the dyeing profession was
scattered all over the city and by 1854 only 47 of the 522 dyeing shops in the city were located in Kanda.
However, dyeing flourished here into the early 1960's, and even today there are still some fabric firms in
the area, which is located just east of the Japan National Railways Kanda Station.
Japanese Art
Foldable screens tie in with Japanese architecture. They’re used as a shield from the wind, to divide rooms into smaller units, or as
decorative items.
The reason the birds in Crows in Winter tend to look like Disney’s crows is that in the Japanese culture, crows have a positive
iconographic significance. They are gleaners, they pick up what’s left over. (In the Chinese culture, crows signify bad spirits.)
The Europeans’ method of printing thus far utilized methods of intaglio and lithography. The Japanese excelled in woodblock printing, in
which the area you carve away shows up white, whereas what you leave behind is inked.
To make multi-colored prints, you carve the design for the lightest color first, make your prints, then reduce the same block for each
successive darker color, adding layers of color to your prints. Or, to ensure you can make any unknown number of prints, you carve
several blocks, one for each color.
Papermaking is considered a national treasure in Japan. There are various kinds of paper, including wood pulp mixed with rags and cotton
paper. Rice paper, still used today, is best for printing on.
Themes for print designs were not very lofty, mostly of the floating world, e.g. Geishas.
Geisha ~ a hostess and entertainer who is highly cultured: skilled in the tea ceremony, is trained on a musical instrument, writes poetry,
i.e. someone you want at a social gathering; not someone engaging in sex
As the Europeans adapted Japanese art, so Japanese artists incorporated European techniques. Eishi’s Evening under the Murmuring Pines
begins to look more painterly, and Hiroshige’s Takanwa Ushimachi features sfumato and a horizon line.
painterly ~ appearing to have volume
The main subject of Hokusai’s The Great Wave and Kijikazawa is Mount Fuji. They represent two of the artist’s 36 views of Fuji. The
idea of variations on theme is similar to Monet’s depictions of a "different" Rouen Cathedral with each change of light. In contrast though,
Mount Fuji is shown as a stable image amidst the swirl of action, and all the different activities around it indicate that the mountain is a
way of life. Thus Mount Fuji is an icon for importance and permanence. The important thing was not the physical depiction of an object,
but the spiritual expression of the object.
Hokusai published a sketchbook that studied waves, wind, faces and poses (e.g. floating in water). It contained humor not found in his
woodcuts.
The Japanese tea ceremony is a formalized choreography of making and presenting tea. Every sound means something. Everything has its
place. The scroll painting on the wall is chosen to set the mood for the guest to contemplate. The flowers are set out for the guest’s
enjoyment. Each implement has a story, even a personality. Some pieces are rough, others are highly polished. Not all pieces match,
following Hideyoshi’s philosophy, "imperfection is beauty."
Hideyoshi was a Shogun who unified Japan. He tried to invade China. He then moved on to Korea, where he became enamored with the
beautiful ceramics. He forced a large number of potters to Japan so they could produce rough pots there.
The tea is a powdered substance that you whip up. It is stored in no particularly recognizable jar. Why is there no standard for jars?
Because everyone’s concept of beauty is different, not one type of jar is more beautiful than another.

Japonism

Cezanne
Cezanne, The Father of Cubism

Form: According to art critic Robert Hughes;

Cezanne admired the Impressionists,

especially Pissarro and Renoir, and
derived inspiration from them; it is
hardly possible to imagine his
landscapes of the 1870s without their
quantum of Impressionist freshness.
But the whole thrust of his work is
about something other than the delight
in the fleeting moment, the "effect" of
light, color and atmosphere, to which
Impressionism was dedicated.
Underneath the delectable surface was
structure, like reefs and rocks beneath
a smiling sea, and that was what
Cezanne sought and obsessively
analyzed--the bones and masses of the
world. His famous remark about
seeking in nature "the cylinder, the
sphere, the cone" need not be taken
literally--he was never a geometric
Paul Cezanne, painter, still less an abstract one,
Still Life with Peppermint Bottle 1890-1894 though later abstractionists would build
Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in on his work. And yet his greatest
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Cezanne
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C paintings bear abstract constructions of

tremendous amplitude and sureness.
Early Cezanne the stumblebum turned
into one of the finest manipulators of
paint who has ever lived. Perhaps
manipulator is the wrong word--it
suggests trickery, whereas in Cezanne
the relation between the paint surface
and the imagined surface of the object
(a rock, the side of a house, an apple)
is astonishingly direct and candid. This
doesn't come across in reproduction. It
rises from the paint itself, that discreet
paste in which every trace left by the
brush seems to help create the
impression of solidity, so that you feel
you could pick the apple--which is
both a rosy sphere of light and a ball
as heavy as plutonium--off the table.
And yet the surface is never closed,
never overdetermined; that is part of
the magic.
Modernism's patriarch. by Robert

Hughes, Time, 6/10/96, Vol. 147 Issue
24, p72, 4p, 7c CEZANNE, Paul --
Paul Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, 1895
Exhibitions; ART museums --
Oil on canvas 65 x 80 cm Art Institute Chicago
Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
Iconography: Cezannes' still life works were the

beginning of cubism. They are often credited with
inspiring Artists like Picasso and Braque to go
further with the ideas that Cezanne had already laid
out. When one looks at these still life's', one is
inclined to say that Cezanne could not draw
accurately. The left side of the table does not meet
up with the right, the wine bottle is misshapen, and
the fruit looks like it is in danger of rolling off the
tilted tabletop. But, according to Stokstad, it wasn't
that he couldn't draw, it was Cezanne showing
'willful disregard for the rules of traditional
scientific perspective.' They say that he is merely
observing the still life from many different angles
and attempting to incorporate them all into a
cohesive whole. As Cezanne would say, "
Something other than realty-a construction after
nature.'
Context: According to art critic Robert Hughes,

"The greater the artist the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a
consolation prize. "As a painter, I become more lucid in front of Nature," Paul Cezanne wrote to his son
in 1906, the last year of his life. "But that realization of my sensations is always very painful. I cannot
attain the intensity which unfolds to my senses. I don't have that magnificent richness of coloration which
animates nature." As Picasso famously said, it's Cezannes anxiety that is so interesting. But not only the
anxiety. There are anxious mediocrity's too. It's the achievement that counts. If Cezanne was not a heroic
painter, the word means nothing. This was evident to some of his friends and contemporaries, such as

Cezanne
Emile Zola. They saw, as later generations have seen, that his painting was also a moral struggle, in
which the search for identity fused with the desire to make the strongest possible images of the Other--
Nature--under the continuous inspiration and admonishment of an art tradition that he revered. He
compared himself, not quite jokingly, to Moses: "I work doggedly, I glimpse the promised land. Will I be
like the great Hebrew leader, or will I be able to enter it? "He was indeed the Moses of late 19th century
art, the conflicted, inspired, sometimes enraged patriarch who led painting toward Modernism--a
deceptive Canaan sometimes, not always flowing with milk and honey, but radically new territory all the
same. The essential point, however, is that just as Moses died before reaching Canaan, so Cezanne never
lived to see Modernism take hold--and he might not have liked what he saw, had he lived. It used to be
one of the standard tropes of art history that Cezanne "begat" Cubism, and it is a fact that no serious
painter since 1890 has been able to work without reckoning with Cezanne. But the idea that Cubism
completed what Cezanne began is an illusion. It may be that Cezanne was reaching for a kind of
expression in painting that did not exist in his time and still does not in ours. Instead of theory, he had
"sensation," the experience of being up against the world--fugitive and yet painfully solid, imperious in
its thereness and constantly, unrelentingly new. There was painting before Cezanne and painting after
him, and they were not the same. But Cezanne's own painting matters more than its consequences.
Inevitably, this deep innovator claimed he invented nothing. "In my opinion one doesn't replace the past,
one adds a new link to it."
Yes and no. Modernism's patriarch. by Robert Hughes, Time, 6/10/96, Vol. 147 Issue 24, p72, 4p, 7c
CEZANNE, Paul -- Exhibitions; ART museums -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
Form: The brushstrokes are more deliberate and

planned than those of the Impressionists, he is not
merely trying to be painterly, but to record the
'sensations' of nature.
Iconography: This was a mountain near Cezannes

home in France, and he painted it over thirty times
during his life. According to Stokstad, The even
lighting and still atmosphere makes these paintings
more enduring when compared to way
Impressionists are always trying to capture the
'moment'. Cezanne wanted to capture a sense of
timelessness and solidarity with this impressive
landscape. On the top painting, the trees in the
foreground help to create the illusion of depth and
underscore the immensity of the mountains. Even
on the bottom painting, which is much looser and
more abstracted, we find the mass of trees in front,
and a vast expanse of land stretching back toward
the imposing hills.

Cezanne, Paul Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885-1895
Oil on canvas 28 5/8 x 38 1/8 in.
The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania Cezanne has often been called a
universal artist, but you cannot grasp
his work unless you realize that he was
a deeply local one as well. He was not
just French but southern
Mediterranean French, a Provencal;
and the obsessive, enduring,
reinforcing sense of the particular
landscape of his cultural memory is
wound into his work so far as to
completely remove it from the domain
of pure, unsymbolic form. In a sense it

Cezanne
is part of the great movement away

from the national toward the local that
characterized so much of European,
including French, culture in the latter
half of the 19th century. You feel it
particularly in Cezanne's series of
landscapes of his "sacred mountain,"
Mont Sainte-Victoire. Now it is a mere
shimmer of profile in a watercolor,
whose blank paper becomes the white
light of the Midi, burning through the
pale flecks of color. Elsewhere, in the
late oils, it achieves a tremendous
faceted density, that crouched lion of
Paul Cezanne, rock. In between there are lyrical
Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885-1895 tributes to it, as in Mont Sainte-
Oil on canvas 25 x 32 in.
Victoire Seen from Bellevue, 1882-85,
Private Collection Pennsylvania
where it appears almost shyly on the
left of a tender, early springtime
landscape, all new green, traversed by
an aqueduct (sign of the ancient
Roman roots of Provence) and crossed
by a pale road whose kinks are tied to
the branch forms of the pine that rises
in the foreground to bisect the canvas.


Gauguin
Gauguin
from Encyclopædia Britannica "Gauguin," (Eugène-Henri-) Paul
Early years.
Gauguin was the son of a journalist from Orléans and of a mother who was half French and half Peruvian Creole. After
Napoleon III's coup d'état, the Gauguin family moved in 1851 to Lima, and four years later Paul and his mother returned to
Orléans. At the age of 17 he went to sea and for six years sailed about the world in freighters or men-of-war. In 1871 he joined
the stockbroking firm of Bertin in Paris and in 1873 married a young Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad. His artistic leanings
were first aroused by his guardian, Gustave Arosa, whose collection included pictures by Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and
Jean-François Millet, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker, with whom he started painting. Gauguin soon started
going to a studio to draw from a model and receive artistic instruction. In 1876 his "Landscape at Viroflay" was accepted for the
official annual exhibition, the Salon. He developed a taste for Impressionist painting and between 1876 and 1881 assembled an
impressive group of paintings by Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind.
Gauguin met Pissarro in 1875-76 and began to work with him, struggling to master the techniques of drawing and painting. In
1880 he was invited to contribute to the fifth Impressionist exhibition, and this invitation was repeated in 1881 and 1882. He
spent holidays painting with Pissarro and Cézanne and made visible progress, though his early works are often marred by
clumsiness and have drab colouring. Gauguin thus became more and more absorbed by painting, and, in 1883, when the Paris
stock exchange crashed and he lost his job, he decided "to paint every day." This was a decision that changed the course of his
whole life. He had a wife and four children, but he had no income and no one would buy his paintings. In 1884 Gauguin and his
family moved to Copenhagen, where his wife's parents proved unsympathetic, and his marriage broke up. He returned to Paris in
1885, determined to sacrifice everything for his artistic vocation. From then on he lived in penury and discomfort, his health was
undermined by hardship, he became an outcast from the society to which he had belonged and could never establish himself in
any other, and he came to despise Europe and civilization.
In 1886 the expressive possibilities of colour were revealed to him in the pictures of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and he
began to occupy himself with this aspect of painting at Pont-Aven, Brittany. Gauguin then had two decisive experiences: a
meeting with van Gogh in Paris (1886) and a journey to Martinique (1887). The one brought him into contact with a passionate
personality who had similar pictorial ideas and tried to involve him in working them out communally; this attempt came to a
disastrous end after a few weeks at Arles in 1888. The other enabled Gauguin to discover for himself the brilliant colouring and
sensuous delights of a tropical landscape and to experience the charm of a primitive community living the "natural" life.
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Gauguin
Gauguin decided to seek through painting an emotional release, in consequence of which he reacted against Impressionism. The
key to his artistic attitude from 1888 on is to be found in these significant phrases:

Primitive art proceeds from the spirit and makes use of nature. The so-called refined art proceeds from sensuality
and serves nature. Nature is the servant of the former and the mistress of the latter. She demeans man's spirit by
allowing him to adore her. That is the way by which we have tumbled into the abominable error of naturalism.
Break with Impressionism.
Gauguin therefore set out to redeem this error by "a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say to primitive art." A
possible method for arriving at a new form of pictorial representation was suggested to him by Émile Bernard, a young artist
well acquainted with stained glass, manuscripts, and folk art. He pointed out that in these arts reality was generally depicted in
nonimitative terms and that the pictorial image was made up of areas of pure colour separated by heavy black outlines. Such was
the origin of the style known as Cloisonnism, or Synthetism, which attained its most expressive possibilities in such paintings
by Gauguin as "The Vision After the Sermon" , "Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin!," and "The Yellow Christ" (1889).

"The Yellow Christ" (1889)
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) -

Bonjour, monsieur Gauguin, 1889.
When Gauguin broke with his Impressionistic past, he gave up using lines and colours to fool the eye into accepting the flat
painted image as a re-creation of an actual scene and explored instead the capacity of these pictorial means to induce in a
spectator a particular feeling. His forms became ideated and his colours suggestive abstractions. Maurice Denis, in Théories
(1920), described a small painting executed by Paul Sérusier under Gauguin's direction in 1888; this landscape seemed to have
no form as a result of being synthetically represented in violet, vermilion, Veronese green and other pure colours. . . . "How
does that tree appear to you?" Gauguin had asked. "It's green isn't it? All right, do it in green, the finest green on your palette.
And that shadow? Isn't it blue? Well then, don't be frightened of making it as blue as possible." Thus [writes Denis] was
presented to us for the first time, in a paradoxical but unforgettable manner, the fertile conception of a painting as "a flat surface
covered with colours arranged in a certain order."
Gauguin indulged in "primitivism" because he could make a more easily intelligible image; his simple colour harmonies
intensified this image; and, because he wanted his pictures to be pleasing to the eye, he aimed at a decorative effect. His
purpose in all this was to express pictorially an "idea." It was as a result of this that he was acclaimed as a leading painter of the
Symbolist movement. Gauguin's whole work is a protest against the soul-destroying materialism of bourgeois civilization.

Gauguin
"Civilization that makes you suffer. Barbarism which is to me rejuvenation," he wrote (1891) to the Swedish playwright August
Strindberg. So Gauguin installed himself in Brittany (Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu, 1889-90, 1894), Tahiti (1891-93, 1895-1901),
and the Marquesas Islands (1901-03), where he could paint scenes of "natural" men and women.
Before 1891, Gauguin tended to flatten things deliberately, and his effect was often strained, but throughout the 1890s his
primitivism became less aggressive as the influences of J.-A.-D. Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes led to increasingly rounded and
modeled forms and a more sinuous line. This process can be followed in works such as "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" (1892; "When Shall
We Be Married?"), "Nave Nave Mahana" (1896; "Holiday"), and "Golden Bodies" (1901). Simultaneously, Gauguin's images
became more luxuriant and more naturally poetic as he developed his marvellously orchestrated tonal harmonies. His chief
Tahitian work--"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"--is an immense canvas painted in 1897-
98. This is the consummate expression of much that he had painted in the previous six years, and the aura of dreamlike, poetic
inconsequence which surrounds this semiphilosophical allegory of primitive life is most powerful.
From 1899 on, Gauguin became increasingly ill and was continually in pain; he was also involved in frequent rows with the
governing authorities for siding with the natives against them. Yet despite melancholy, his last pictures still have serenity and
hope.
Influence.
In 1889-90 a group of young followers had gathered round him at Pont-Aven, including Sérusier, Charles Filiger, and Denis,
who transmitted Gauguin's ideas to Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch owed much to
Gauguin, as did the painters of the Fauve group--Henri Matisse in particular--who profited from his use of colour. Gauguin's
primitivism and stylistic simplifications greatly affected the young Pablo Picasso and led to the aesthetic appreciation of black
African art and hence to the evolution of Cubism. In Germany, too, Gauguin's influence was strong.
Gauguin was unique in his ability to hold a mysterious balance between idea, perception, and visual image. His pictures make
their effect visually, not as a result of literary overtones. He was a great stylistic innovator, and, when he rejected the conception
of a picture as a mirror image of an actual scene and turned from an empirical to a conceptual method of pictorial
representation, his influence was wide and long-ranging.

(D.C.)
Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Form: This oil on canvas painting exhibits intense, saturated, non-local
colors. Gauguin’s paint quality is spotty and thin and in general his
brushstrokes are not as thought out or visible as Van Gogh's. Gauguin’s
work is not really about an illusionistic tradition. The forms are often
very flat and almost feel as if they are forms cut out of colored paper.
Gauguin doesn't concern himself much with chiaroscuro, value or
perspective in most of his paintings.
Iconography: Gauguin was a friend of Van Gogh, and the two often
painted each other. This paining is showing Van Gogh in the process of
creating the work for which he is most famous for, Sunflowers, and
shows him with his characteristic bright red beard.
Context: Gauguin was married and had five children, he became

unemployed when the bank he was working for went through some
financial difficulties. Free to pursue his dream of painting full time he
moved to Arles, where the living was cheaper, and there struck up a
friendship with Van Gogh. He also went to Denmark, but then
Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers 1888 disappointed at not being able to sell his paintings, came back to France
Oil on canvas 28 3/4 x 36 1/2 in. Private collection and lived at Pont-Aven, before embarking off to Tahiti.
Form: Oil on canvas, red is the primary color

Gauguin
used for the ground, instead of the expected

green, and everything is pushed forward and
crowded into the picture plane. Space and the
illusion of space is basically ignored except for
in the size scale relationship of the figures in the
foreground compared to the wrestling angel in
the background.
Iconography: Gauguin painted this work while

living in the small town of Arles. There was a
small community of devoutly religious people
whom lived there and he was so impressed with
their almost fanatical belief that he painted this
as a representation of some of the women
having a vision of Jacob wrestling with the
Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) angel. Jacob stole his brothers' birthright, and
1888 Esau, his brother went out to kill him. Jacob hid
Oil on canvas (28 3/4 x 36 1/4 in) National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh out for 20 years, built up great wealth and
family, and decided to make it all up to his
brother. He sent many gifts to him before he
journeyed forth to find him, and while on the
road ran into what is interpreted to be an angel.
He wrestled with the angel, was wounded in the
process, but won, and was renamed Israel. He
was given the angels blessing and all turned out
okay in the end. It has been speculated, because
the Bible does not truly make clear who exactly
the person was in the road, that it could be an
allegory for Jacob wrestling with his
conscience, guilt, or with God.
Context: If we are to assume that Gauguin was

trying to say anything about his respect for
these women and their devotion, it could have
been that he was feeling guilt for having left his
wife and five children behind while he pursued
Early Christian/Byzantine, Vienna Genesis Manuscript his dream of painting.
Jacob and Angel c525CE
Form: Oil on canvas, a bit of a departure from the early

impressionist style Gauguin had adopted while painting with Van
Gogh. There is still much non-local color in the skin tones, and
perhaps because of the religious name of the painting, his adopted
style is somewhat flat and Byzantine.
Iconography: Gauguin, tired of being a failure in France, eventually

moved to Tahiti to live permanently. He became enthralled with the
locals, their lifestyle seemed to encompass the bohemian and
religious ideals that he had been unable to attain. That is, walking
around in states of what he would consider 'undress', the slow pace

Gauguin
of the island, and that he was respected as a painter by the locals.

He was just as exotic to him as they were to him. Because of his
overwhelming adoration for this lifestyle, he began to paint the
people around him as religious icons, in this case the Virgin and
Child. Interestingly, his paintings sold better in France now that he
did not live or paint there.
Context: By now, Gauguin had left his wife and children for good
and had very little contact with them.
Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria (We Hail Thee Mary)

1891 Oil on canvas 44 3/4 x 34 1/2 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Form: Oil painting with a markedly more subdued palette, and an
almost cubist feel to it. Note that he way the girl is tilted off the bed
is reminiscent of a Cézanne still life.
Iconography: Gauguin was a scalawag of the highest order. With five

children and a wife in France he found himself a thirteen-year-old
girl as a lover. This is a portrait he painted of her in their shared
bungalow. The story has it that she would wake up screaming from
nightmares, knowing that her relationship with Gauguin was wrong,
and pronounce that the spirits of her dead ancestors were watching
them as they slept and disapproved greatly. This painting also follows
in the tradition of French artists like Ingres and Manet, where the
painting is all about the male gaze and the naked female form. It also
recalls the idea of Orientalism, 'exotic' things and people in 'exotic'
places.
Context: Though Gauguin may have decided to adopt the island life,
Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892 he could not seem to leave behind his Eurocentrism and style of
Oil on burlap mounted on canvas 28 1/2 x 36 3/8 in. (72.4 panting. He may have felt that he was being terribly creative, but in
x 92.4 cm) truth he was merely recycling the same themes and settings that have
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY been passed down through all European Art Academies.


Gauguin


Seurat
Seurat, The King of the Dot
Form: Form: Seurat's style is called "pointalism" because Seurat painted by

putting dots of pure color one next to the other. When the viewer moves away
from the painting the dots are mixed together by our eyes. This optical mixing is
very similar to what happens with the individual pixels on the computer.
Seurat's color were often the most pure and saturated hues available and in order
to modulate the colors he would often place a dot of a complimentary color next
to another in order to desaturate the colors. Often he would place two primary
colors next to another in order to creat a secondary color. By placing a blue dot
next to a yellow one he could create a green field.
Make sure you click the picture to get a close up view of it.
Iconography: The Eiffel tower is a much better subject than people for Seurat,
especially because of his 'scientific' and analytical view of painting. because of
the cooler colors used for the sky, and the warmer colors used for the tower, he
was able to create a definition between the man made building and nature. It also
worked to create a sense of atmospheric perspective, as though we are seeing the
tower through the fog of early morning.
Context: Seurat was a native of France, so the Eiffel tower was a fairly common
and familiar sight for him.
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Seurat
Georges Seurat, The Eiffel Tower 1889

Oil on panel 9 1/2 x 6 in.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
1884-86
Oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago
Pointalism/Post Impressionism
According to art critic Robert Hughes,

The "scientific" painter with his abstruse

color theories recedes somewhat, and an
inspired lyricist comes to the fore--a 19th
century Giorgione. As the art historian
Robert L. Herbert puts it in his catalog
essay, Seurat "wanted to be perceived as a
technician of art, and so he borrowed from
science some of the signs of its authority,
including regularity and clarity of pattern.
"But, as Herbert points out, Seurat's dots are
not really dots either. Far from laboring
away at a mechanical surface programmed
in advance by theories of complementary
color, Seurat displayed the most intuitive
and mobile sense of the relations between
sight and mark. One of the miracles of his
art is his ability to analyze light, not through the simple juxtaposition of dabs of color but by a layering of tiny brush
marks built up from the underpainted ground, so that the eventual surface becomes a fine-grained pelt, seamless and
yet infinitely nuanced, from which captured light slowly radiates.
Against the cult of the moment. by Robert Hughes. Time, 9/23/91, Vol. 138 Issue 12, p74, 2p, 3c, 1b HTML Full Text
Iconography: Seurat was disdainful of the practice of Sunday afternoon strolls in the park, as they were covers for peoples'
naughtiness. Much like an 'afternoon delight', the park was where married men would go to dally with their mistresses,
unemployed men would lay on the grass and smoke, and women would bring their unruly children to run rampant. If you look at
the right side of the painting, you will see the woman with the umbrella walking with the man. She has a pet monkey on a leash
and there is a dog frolicking near it. The woman is the mistress, the monkey is a symbol of an 'exotic pet', which the woman
would herself be considered to be, and the dog is a symbol for fidelity, of which the man seems to have none of.
According to www.artchive.com

"Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park before
focusing on the people; always their shapes, never their personalities. Individuals did not interest him, only their
formal elegance. There is no untidiness in Seurat; all is beautifully balanced. The park was quite a noisy place: a
man blows his bugle, children run around, there are dogs. Yet the impression we receive is of silence, of control, of
nothing disordered. I think it is this that makes La Grande Jatte so moving to us who live in such a disordered
world: Seurat's control. There is an intellectual clarity here that sets him free to paint this small park with
astonishing poetry. Even if the people in the park are pairs or groups, they still seem alone in their concision of
form - alone but not lonely. No figure encroaches on another's space: all coexist in peace. "This is a world both real
and unreal - a sacred world. We are often harried by life's pressures and its speed, and many of us think at times:
Stop the world, I want to get off! In this painting, Seurat has "stopped the world," and it reveals itself as beautiful,
sunlit, and silent - it is Seurat's world, from which we would never want to get off."

Seurat

Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born in 1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping
diphtheria in 1891, at 31. This all too early death has had the effect of concentrating his life around a single stylistic
effort, the invention of pointillism. The one thing everyone knows about Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures
composed of dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into its constituent parts was scientific and
not, like Monet's Impressionism, intuitive. Had he lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a hale duffer of
70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were coming into their maturity as artists. What would he have left behind
him by then? Possibly--if one can guess from his last big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque, 1890-91-
something quite different from the calm,composed "Egyptian" classicism of his best-known work, the sublime Un
Dimanche a la Grande Jatte of 1884-86. For the last paintings are more frenetic, more consciously urban and, above
all, more influenced by mass culture (the posters of Jules Cheret, for instance) and working-class entertainment
(fairgrounds, circuses, cafes concerts) than anything he had made before. We would then remember Seurat not only
as a great synthesizer of classical order and modernist perception but also as the artist who fused both with the
exacerbated delights of the mass culture that was emerging at the turn of the century: the true "painter of modern
life," as anticipated by Baudelaire. The history of modern art, in terms of its engagement with "low" culture, might
then have been quite different. Because he died so young, we have the first artist but only hints of the second.
Against the cult of the moment. by Robert Hughes. Time, 9/23/91, Vol. 138 Issue 12, p74, 2p, 3c, 1b HTML Full
Text


Vincent
Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh's work and the details of his biography are so linked to his paintings iconography that it would be almost impossible to
discuss Van Gogh without a brief overview of his life. The following is an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Early life
Van Gogh, the eldest of six children of a Protestant pastor, was born and reared in a small village in the
Brabant region of southern Netherlands. His early years in his father's parsonage were happy, and he
loved wandering in the countryside. At 16 he was apprenticed to The Hague branch of the art dealers
Goupil and Co., of which his uncle was a partner.
Van Gogh's working life can be roughly divided into two periods. The first, from 1873 to 1885, during
which he wrestled with temperamental difficulties and sought his true means of self-expression, was a
period of repeated apprenticeships, failures, and changes of direction. The second, from 1886 to 1890,
was a period of dedication, rapid development, and fulfillment, until it was interrupted by a series of
mental crises from 1889 onward.
He worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in Paris from then until April 1876. Daily
contact with works of art aroused van Gogh's artistic sensibility, and he soon formed a taste for
Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and other Dutch masters, although his preference was for two contemporary
French painters, Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot, whose influence was to last throughout his life.
Van Gogh disliked art dealing. Moreover, his approach to life darkened when his love was rejected by a
London girl in 1874. His burning desire for human affection thwarted, he became and remained
increasingly solitary. He became a language teacher and lay preacher in England and, in 1877, worked
for a bookseller in Dordrecht. Impelled by a longing to give himself to his fellowmen, he envisaged
entering the ministry and took up theology but abandoned this project for short-term training as an
evangelist in Brussels in 1878. A conflict with authority ensued when he disputed the orthodox doctrinal
approach. Failing to get an appointment after three months, he left to do missionary work among the
impoverished population of the Borinage, a coal-mining region in southwestern Belgium. There, in the
winter of 1879-80, he experienced the first great spiritual crisis of his life. He was sharing the life of the
poor completely but in an impassioned moment gave away all his worldly goods and was thereupon
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Vincent
dismissed for a too-literal interpretation of Christian teaching.
Penniless and with his faith destroyed, he sank into despair, cut himself off from everyone, and began
seriously to draw, thereby discovering in 1880 his true vocation. Van Gogh decided that his mission from
then on would be to bring consolation to humanity through art, and this realization of his creative powers
restored his self-confidence.
The productive decade

His artistic career was extremely short, lasting only the 10 years from 1880 to 1890. During the first four
years of this period, while acquiring technical proficiency, he confined himself almost entirely to
drawings and watercolours. First, he went to study drawing at the Brussels Academy; in 1881 he moved
to his father's parsonage at Etten, Neth., and began to work from nature.
Van Gogh worked hard and methodically but soon perceived the difficulty of self-training and sought the
guidance of more experienced artists. Late in 1881 he settled at The Hague to work with a Dutch
landscape painter, Anton Mauve. He visited museums and met with other painters. Van Gogh thus
extended his technical knowledge and experimented in the summer of 1882 with oil paint. In 1883 the
urge to be "alone with nature" and the peasants took him to Drenthe, a desolate part of northern
Netherlands frequented by Mauve and other Dutch artists, where he spent three months before returning
home, which was now at Nuenen, another village in the Brabant. He remained at Nuenen during most of
1884 and 1885, and during these years his art grew bolder and more assured. He painted three types of
subjects--still life, landscape, and figure--all interrelated by their reference to the peasants' daily life, to
the hardships they endured, and to the countryside they cultivated. Émile Zola's Germinal (1885), a novel
about the coal-mining region of France, greatly impressed van Gogh, and sociological criticism is
implicit in many of his pictures--e.g., "Weavers" and "The Potato Eaters." Eventually he felt too isolated
in Nuenen.
His understanding of the possibilities of painting was evolving rapidly; from studying Hals he saw that
academic finish destroys the freshness of a visual impression, while the works of Paolo Veronese and
Eugène Delacroix taught him that colour expresses something by itself. This led to enthusiasm for Peter
Paul Rubens and a sudden departure for Antwerp, where the greatest number of Rubens' works could be
seen. The revelation of Rubens' simple means, of his direct notation, and of his ability to express a mood
by a combination of colours proved decisive. Simultaneously, van Gogh discovered Japanese prints and
Impressionist painting. His refusal to follow academic principles led to disputes at the Antwerp academy,
where he was enrolled, and after three months he left precipitately in 1886 to join his brother Theo in
Paris. There, still concerned with improving his drawing, van Gogh met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul
Gauguin, and others who were to play historic roles in modern art. They opened his eyes to the latest
developments in French painting. At the same time, Theo introduced him to Camille Pissarro, Georges
Seurat, and other artists of the group.
By this time van Gogh was ready for such revelations, and the changes that his painting underwent in
Paris between the spring of 1886 and February 1888 led to the creation of his personal idiom and style of
brushwork. His palette at last became colourful, his vision less traditional, and his tonalities lighter, as
may be seen in his first paintings of Montmartre. By the summer of 1887 he was painting in pure colours
and using a broken brushwork that is at times pointillistic. Finally, van Gogh's Postimpressionist style
crystallized by the beginning of 1888 in masterpieces such as "Portrait of Père Tanguy" and "Self-Portrait
in Front of an Easel," as well as in some landscapes of the Parisian suburbs.
After two years van Gogh was tired of city life, physically exhausted, and longing "to look at nature
under a brighter sky." His passion was now for "a full effect of colour." He left Paris in February 1888
for Arles, in the southeast of France.
In his pictures of the following 12 months--his first great period--he strove to respect the external, visual
aspect of a figure or landscape but found himself unable to suppress his own feelings about the subject.
These found expression in emphatic contours and heightened effects of colour. Van Gogh's pictorial style
was not calculated, however, but spontaneous and instinctive, for he worked with great speed and
intensity, determined to capture an effect or a mood while it possessed him. His Arles subjects include
blossoming fruit trees, views of the town and surroundings, self-portraits, portraits of Roulin the postman
and other friends, interiors and exteriors of the house, a series of sunflowers, and a "starry night."

Vincent
Van Gogh knew that his approach to painting was individualistic, but he also knew that some tasks are
beyond the power of isolated individuals to accomplish. In Paris he had hoped to form a separate
Impressionist group with Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others whom he supposed to have similar
aims. He rented and decorated a house in Arles with the intention of persuading them to join him and
found a working community of "Impressionists of the South." Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and for
two months they worked together; but, while each influenced the other to some extent, their relations
rapidly deteriorated because they had opposing ideas and were temperamentally incompatible.
On Christmas Eve 1888, van Gogh broke under the strain and cut off part of his left ear. Gauguin left,
and van Gogh was taken to a hospital. He returned to the "yellow house" a fortnight later and resumed
painting, producing a mirror-image "Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear," several still lifes, and
"La Berceuse." Several weeks later, he again showed symptoms of mental disturbance severe enough to
cause him to be sent back to the hospital. At the end of April 1889, fearful of losing his renewed capacity
for work, which he regarded as a guarantee of his sanity, he asked to be temporarily shut up in the
asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in order to be under medical supervision.
Van Gogh stayed there for 12 months, haunted by recurrent attacks, alternating between moods of calm
and despair, and working intermittently: "Garden of the Asylum," "Cypresses," "Olive Trees," "Les
Alpilles," portraits of doctors, and interpretations of paintings by Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet all
date from this period. The keynote of this phase (1889-90) is fear of losing touch with reality and a
certain sadness. Confined for long periods to his cell or the asylum garden, having no choice of subjects,
and realizing that his inspiration depended on direct observation, van Gogh fought against having to work
from memory. At Saint-Rémy he muted the violent colours of the previous summer and tried to make his
painting calmer. As he repressed his excitement, however, he involved himself more imaginatively in the
drama of the elements, developing a style based on dynamic forms and a vigorous use of line (line often
equated with colour). The best of his Saint-Rémy pictures are thus bolder and more visionary than those
of Arles.
Van Gogh himself brought this period to an end. Oppressed by homesickness--he painted souvenirs of
Holland--and loneliness, he longed to see Theo and the north once more and arrived in Paris in May
1890. Four days later he went to stay with a homeopathic doctor-artist, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a friend
of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, at Auvers-sur-Oise. Back in a village community such as he had
not known since Nuenen, four years earlier, van Gogh worked at first enthusiastically; and his choice of
subjects such as fields of corn, the river valley, peasants' cottages, the church, and the town hall reflects
his spiritual relief. A modification of his style follows: the natural forms in his paintings are less
contorted, and in the northern light he adopted pale, fresh tonalities. His brushwork is broader and more
expressive and his vision of nature more lyrical. Everything in his pictures seems to be moving, living.
This phase was short, however, and ended in quarrels with Gachet and feelings of guilt at his inescapable
dependence on Theo (now married and with a son) and his inability to succeed. In despair of ever
overcoming his loneliness or of being cured, he shot himself and died two days later. Coincidentally,
Theo died six months later (Jan. 25, 1891) of chronic nephritis.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

oil on canvas 28x36" Metropolitan New York
Form: The texture of this painting is fairly rough
because Van Gogh used thick impastos of paint.
Van Gogh also used straight umodulated out of the
tube colors. The dominant colors here are primary
tones. Van Gogh rendered most of the forms using
outlines and contour lines and did not rely on value
or chiaroscuro to define or describe his subjects. In
a way, this is more of a drawing with paint than a
painting. The brushstrokes in the sky are designed
in sweeping large curvilinearcounterbalancing
strokes. Van Gogh's application of short dashes of
colour one next to another is a demonstration of
impressionist style optical mixing. This is
demonstrated especially in how he applied the blues

Vincent
of the sky.
The composition is asymmetrical. The large cyprus

tree in the foreground dominates the image and its
shape is echoed by the church's steeple in the
background.

Iconography: This was painted while Van Gogh was

locked up in an asylum in Saint-Remy, France. It was, of necessity, painted from memory unlike most of the rest of his work,
which was painted either outdoors or as a still life.
The dominant elements in this painting are the sky, the stars in it, and the cypress tree in the foreground. The fact that the sky is
like a sea in motion could be read in any number of ways: as a clue as to the turbulence of Van Gogh's state of mind and or
possibly an illustration of the unknown forces that move the universe. The moon seems to radiate energy, but it does not appear
friendly, or gentle, as one would imagine moonbeams to be. Instead it imitates the radiating waves one would find when a stone is
dropped in a pond, disruptive.
The cypress tree in the foreground were often used as gravemarkers and were planted as memorials over graves. In my
interpretation, (Mencher's) the large tree in the foreground seems to connect the earth and the sky in a way that the steeple in the
background cannot hope to. This may possibly be Van Gogh's own ideas of the role of man in the world versus the role of nature
in God's plan. This idea being very similar to St. Augustine's ideas concerning the "City of Man and the City of God." This is
similar to Masaccio's interpretation in his painting The Tribute Money.
Context: Van Gogh was extremely religious in his early years, before he took up painting as an avocation. There is speculation
that there is significance to the fact that there are eleven stars in the sky, taken from the Old Testament in the bible; the story of
Joseph, " 'Look, I have had another dream,' he said, ' I thought I saw the sun, the moon and eleven stars bowing to me,' " Genesis
37:10

Form: The texture of this painting is fairly rough because Van Gogh
used thick impastos of paint. Van Gogh also used straight umodulated
out of the tube colors. The dominant colors here are primary tones
except for the yellow ochres and oranges used for the bedposts. Van
Gogh rendered most of the forms using outlines and contour lines and
did not rely on value or chiaroscuro to define or describe his subjects.
In a way, this is more of a drawing with paint than a painting.
The entire image has a rather fisheye lens look to it and the
perspective seems a bit off. There are two possible reasons for this.
One scholar has explained that Van Gogh's room's walls angles were
actually just a touch off. This is actually true because one can
actually see the house today, but there are also some other visual
discrepancies. Some of the vertical lines in the seem to sway or

Vincent
curve. The pictures lean out just a bit too far and the vertical and
horizontal lines are not consistent with the laws of linear perspective.
Two other explanations exist. Van Gogh was careless, which at times
Room in Arles, 1889 he was and he may have been forced to sit so close to the canvas that
Van Gogh he unconsciously incorporated the distortions that naturally occur
when sitting to close to a painting. He was unable to move away
from the painting to check the visual problems.
Iconography: As in the "Starry Sky" the formal elements may be an expression of Vincent's internal world. This
painting was done in Vincent's own room in Arles. Note the cramped composition, the disproportion of the bed, the
saturation of colors, and the odd angle of the paintings hanging over the bed. This, while done from life, does not
accurately represent an external reality, it seems to represent his own 'internal' reality.
Van Gogh was taken care of by his older brother Theo. As a result, he was allowed a certain amount of self-pity and
malaise that other men his age and bearing could not afford to indulge themselves in. Theo sent him to Arles to 'rest',
and Van Gogh was in a state of poverty and under-nourishment while living there, as well as hallucinations and acute
depression. This resulting painting, nervous and cramped appearing as it is, is an accurate reflection on how he felt at
the time, like the walls were pressing in on him, and all he could do was sleep. Like the religious fervor he had
embraced earlier in life, Van Gogh became as equally obsessed with painting once he had decided it was his true
calling, and felt that he must put on canvas the myriad demons within his own troubled mind.
Context: According to www.vangoghgallery.com,
" Vincent's Bedroom in Arles is one of the artist's best known paintings. The striking colours, unusual
perspective and familiar subject matter create a work that is not only among Van Gogh's most popular,
but also one that he himself held as one of his own personal favourites.. because Van Gogh was so
pleased with the painting he described it at great length in letters to his family. In fact, Vincent describes
this painting in no less than thirteen letters and, as a result, a great deal is known about the artist's own
feelings about the work. In a letter to his brother, Theo, Vincent wrote:
' My eyes are still tired by then I had a new idea in my head and
here is the sketch of it.
Another size 30 canvas. This time it's just simply my bedroom,
only here colour is to do
everything, and giving by its simplification a grander style to
things, is to be suggestive here
of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture
ought to rest the brain, or rather
the imagination. The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles.
The wood of the bed
and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very
light greenish-citron.
The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet table orange,
the basin blue.

Vincent
The doors lilac. And that is all--there is nothing in this room with
its closed shutters.
The broad lines of the furniture again must express inviolable rest.
Portraits on the walls, and
a mirror and a towel and some clothes.
The frame--as there is no white in the picture--will be white.
This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I was obliged to take.
I shall work on it again all day, but you see how simple the
conception is. The shadows and
the cast shadows are suppressed; it is painted in free flat tints like
the Japanese prints. It is
going to be a contrast to, for instance, the Tarascon diligence and
the night café.'
Form and Iconography: The colors used in this earlier work are calm,
almost peaceful. Though he is using the short brushstrokes, they are not
filled with the tension and anxiety found n his other works. The
asymmetrical composition is sweeping, this is a view of an entire field,
leading off into the distance.
It is said that Van Gogh was happiest when the weather was nice and he
could be outdoors painting. Though plagued with mental instability and
a string of failed relationships with women of questionable repute, there
were occasional breaks in his unhappiness. This painting would clearly
be a reflection of his ability to enjoy and observe nature. It also puts to
rest the theory that Van Gogh was an untalented artist. As we can see
here, when it pleased him to do so, he could paint quite beautifully as
well as accurately capture the world he saw around him.
Context: Van Gogh was never happy in big cities, and his appreciation
for the outdoors is often shown by the time he takes to render his
Van Gogh landscapes.
Landscape with snow, 1888
Form: Ink was on paper. Looking much

like an etching this is done with ink and a
paintbrush. The main figure is just off to
the side enough to make the work
asymmetrical, and it also has a nice
gestural and loose feeling to it.
Iconography: This image is based on a

similar work called the "Sower" by Millet.
It is an illustration or representation of the
Parable of the Sower as told by Jesus in
which he likens the toils of the sower to
our own journey through life. "That if one
sows a good seed one will reap a good
crop."
This story and the image that he borrowed

Vincent
from Millet would have had a particularly

strong resonance for Van Gogh because he
was very religious. As a quick study, this
is a good piece of work. Once again, we
see the joy that Vincent has while
outdoors. The figure is of a man sowing
grain for his harvest, which could indicate
the connection between earth and man,
symbolizing the connection that Van Gogh
himself felt for the earth. In the back, the
sun is uncharacteristically huge and round,
and its' rays are depicting shining outward
from it. This gives it an energy and a sense
of happiness it would not have had if the
sun were absent from this work.
Context: In 1885, while still in the

Netherlands, Van Gogh had focused much
of his artistic energy doing studies and
representations of the poor peasants he
encountered. It seems he had an affinity
for those who had to work hard to make a
living, and he may here be hearkening
back to those days.
These drawings were actually done after

Van Gogh had already made a painting of
the same subject.
Sower with Setting Sun, 1888

Van Gogh

Form: Expressionistic self portrait, done in oils with non-local colors and thick heavy
brushwork.
Iconography: This is one of many self portraits done by Van Gogh. It was at this time in
his life that he had met and worked with Gauguin in Paris. They had a seemingly

Vincent
temperamental relationship, at first best friends but then having many near violent falling
outs. Van Gogh's mental health seemed to worsen during this time, and looking at this
painting one can see evidence of his descent into a nervous breakdown. He is swirling the
background around his figure, which suggests an anxious energy and tension. He has used
sickly greens and yellows in the both the highlights and shadows of his face, and the look
he exudes is intense and troubled. If we look at his upper body, it appears as though he is
about to hunch his shoulders forward, or move in some way to suggest protecting himself,
and his mouth is set in a definite frown. This unhappiness can be attributed to the fact that
Vincent was cooped up in a house for the winter with his sometime-friend Gauguin, and
his failed friendship and love life was getting too much for him to bear.
Context: " The relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin deteriorated throughout
December, however. Their heated arguments became more and more frequent--"electric"
as Vincent would describe them. Relations between the pair declined in tandem with
Vincent's state of mental health. On 23 December Vincent van Gogh, in an
irrational fit of madness, mutilated the lower portion of his left ear. He severed the lobe
with a razor, wrapped it in cloth and then took it to a brothel and presented it to one of the
Self Portrait, 1889 women there. Vincent then staggered back to the Yellow House where he collapsed. He
Van Gogh was discovered by the police and hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Arles. After
sending a telegram to Theo, Gauguin left immediately for Paris, choosing not to visit Van
Gogh in the hospital. Van Gogh and Gauguin would later correspond from time to time,
but would never meet in person again."
www.vangoghgallery.com

Form: Early oil painting, symmetrical and well crafted. earthen
palette and realistic representation.
Iconography: One of the earlier works done by Van Gogh, while

living in the Netherlands. He was new to painting, and as such
was working very hard to paint accurately and well in order to
gain credibility. He has painted this scene of a cemetery probably
as he saw it and was working hard to maintain realism.
Cemeteries were nothing new to Van Gogh, in fact it is
speculated that they may have played a part in his unhappy
mental state. Before Vincent was born, his mother had been
pregnant with a boy, who was stillborn. His parents named it
Vincent and buried it in a graveyard close to their home. His
mother became pregnant very soon after and Vincent Van Gogh
was born exactly one year to the day the other baby had been
stillborn. His mother used to take Van Gogh to the graveyard
every year on his birthday to visit the grave. It is speculated that
the young Vincent was traumatized by constantly seeing the
gravestone with his name and birthdate as the date of death for
the unfortunate baby.
Cemetery in the snow, 1885
Context: Whether it is true that it led to his subsequent
Van Gogh
depression and insanity or not, Van Gogh was still familiar with
the setting of a graveyard and did an exquisite job capturing the
silence and stillness of this scene.

Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)
Lyrics and Music by Don McLean
Starry, starry night

Paint your palette blue and gray

Vincent
Look out on a summer's day

With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and daffodils
Catch the breeze and winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand
Now I understand
They did not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now
For they could not love you

But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as
beautiful as you

Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget
Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know

How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They did not listen they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will...
asym.met.ri.cal or asym.met.ric adj [Gk asymmetria lack of proportion, fr. asymmetros ill-
proportioned, fr. a- + symmetros symmetrical] (1690) 1: not symmetrical 2 usu asymmetric,
of a carbon atom: bonded to four different atoms or groups -- asym.met.ri.cal.ly adv --

Vincent
asym.me.try n
¹coun.ter.bal.ance n (1611) 1: a weight that balances another 2: a force or influence that

offsets or checks an opposing force ²counterbalance vt (1611) 1: to oppose or balance with
an equal weight or force 2: to equip with counterbalances
cur.vi.lin.ear adj [L curvus + linea line] (1710) 1: consisting of or bounded by curved lines:
represented by a curved line 2: marked by flowing tracery <~ Gothic> -- cur.vi.lin.ear.i.ty n


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Kindred Spirits: American Painters

Context: Robert Hughes in this next section describes how Americans viewed America and the resources America had
to offer. For Americans, the landscape was and expression of the American Spirit and the painting and writing from
this era are somewhat united in their rejpoicing point of view. Although, at some points, you will be able to see that
Americans were also self critical.

Excerpted from,
The sacred mission.by Robert Hughes. Time, Spring97 Special Issue, Vol. 149 Issue 17, p10, 10p, 7c, 1bw
HTML Full Text

The first thing the colonists in the New World saw, the stuff they had to define themselves against, was
nature. A sense of the wilderness, promising or oppressive, was one of the chief shared signs of American
identity, and it became a prime subject of the country's art. "In the beginning," wrote John Locke in the 17th
century, "all the world was America." It was not necessarily a reassuring thought, for America seemed very
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, strange to its first European settlers, particularly the Puritans in New England. To them, its rocky coast and
Oil on canvas, 44 in. x 36 in. (111.8 cm tangled woods were--in the expressive phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical
x 91.4 cm). desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant
Collection of the New York Public landscape painting or religious art during the 17th or 18th century, by the mid-19th century, landscape was
Library. the national religious symbol.
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
The artist who began this process was Thomas Cole (1801-48), a transplanted Englishman from the "dark
To the left is Thomas Cole, the founder Satanic mills" of the industrial Midlands. Cole's clients were mainly from the rich Federalist "aristocracy,"
of the whose members, offended by Jacksonian populism, wanted pastoral images of a pure American scene
Hudson River School of painting. unsullied by the marks of getting and spending. Skeptical of progress, Cole painted the landscape as Arcadia,
On the right is William Cullen Bryant, a which served to spiritualize the past in a land without antique monuments. He loved the freshness of primal
major mountains and valleys--unpainted, unstereotyped, the traces of God's hand in forming the world. America's
nature poet of the nineteenth century and columns were trees, its forums were groves, and its invasive barbarian was the wrong sort of American, the
editor developer, the Man with the Ax.
of Picturesque America, a set of books
showing the natural beauty of the United When Cole left on a trip to Italy, his friend William Cullen Bryant, nature poet and editor, urged him in a
States. sonnet not to be seduced by the humanized, picturesque Europe--to "keep that earlier, wilder image bright."
After Cole's early death, that image was to get wilder and brighter still in the work of his only pupil,
"Painted a year after Thomas Cole's Frederick Edwin Church (1826-1900). Descended from six generations of Yankee ministers and merchants,
death, this view of Cole with his friend patriotic and deeply religious, Church inherited Cole's belief in a style of landscape suffused with "a
William Cullen Bryant is set on a rock language strong, moral and imaginative." His paintings--mostly of the Hudson Valley and vistas of South
ledge in his beloved Catskill Mountains. American grandeur--were greeted as both religious icons and triumphs of observation, fusing piety and
By the 1830s and '40s such Hudson science in one matrix. Church hit a peculiarly American vein of feeling: Romanticism without its European
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/19th_century/kindred_spirits_American_19thC.htm[7/31/2013 2:56:19 PM]
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Valley scenery was hardly wilderness; it component of alienation and dread, a view of the universe in which God was in heaven and all was basically
was already opened by railroads and right with the world.
frequented by tourists. But Cole and his
followers used it to evoke the But for all the grandeur of its pictorial rhetoric, Church's work didn't fully express the hot idea of westward
"American sublime" and dispel, once expansion within North America--the belief in Manifest Destiny. To convey the image of the Western
and for all, the more primitive forest landscape as glorious and triumphal, the Cinerama devices first used by Church were taken up by other
fears of Puritan days. " Robert Hughes painters, notably Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and Thomas Moran (1837-1926).
The German-born Bierstadt made a hugely successful career on the insight that the landscapes beyond the
Missouri made America unique among nations. His style was superdetailed, bombastic and almost
obnoxiously grand, intended to knock your socks off with spectacle. In Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867,
his most extravagant anthem to Manifest Destiny, the covered wagons roll forward into a sunset of such
splendor that it's obvious God is beckoning them on, flooding their enterprise with metaphorical gold.
Moran, the son of poor immigrant handweavers, was virtually self-trained as an artist but was a devotee of
the great English landscapist J.M.W. Turner. He created the all-time Big American Painting, the climactic
panorama of America's years of Western expansion, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1893-1901.
Albert Bierstadt,
Rocky Mountain Lander's Peak, 1863
approximately 4'x8"

Form: This 1849 painting depicts William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole in Kaaterskill Clove.
Iconography: . "Kindred Spirits," which is in the collection of the New York Public Library and depicts Cole and
Bryant conversing on a rock outcropping in the Catskills with their names carved into one of the trees... Cole, Durand
and Bryant, Ms. Foshay writes in her catalogue essay, "shared the belief that nature, particularly nature in the New
World, resonated with overtones of meaning." "It was a sacred place, where true communion could bring not only
joy in the beauty of the outdoors, but also enlightenment. With ink and with paint, these artists explored the tangible
appearances of the natural world in search of its intangible truths. They communicated their perceptions in landscape
paintings and nature poems that guided the direction of cultural ideas and aesthetic expression in nineteenth-century
America," she continued...."These men," Foshay continued, "sought through their writing and painting to embellish
and dignify the New World with a culture sown on native soil. The resource that they identified to inspire this native
art was the American landscape - unique in its richness, variety and wildness. They emphasized scenery that
minimized such intrusions of civilizations as railroads, buildings and farmlands. This land was God's creation, still
fresh from his hand. It offered spiritual and moral possibilities, these men believed, for those trained to recognize
them." Indeed, the purity of most Hudson River School paintings was bathed in the light of "Manifest Destiny," a
concept that would actually evolve a bit later when a second generation of Hudson River School artists such as Albert
Bierstadt and Thomas Moran would glorify the natural wonders of the American West while another, Frederic Church,
Cole's sole pupil, would carry his explorations even further afield to Central and South America and to the Middle
East...The importance of the Hudson River School paintings in helping to forge a national image can not be
underestimated especially in the years before photography became popular. The artists would travel regularly to the
Catskills, the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, the coast of Maine and Newport, R. I., and travel in those days was
neither easy nor quick and their prolific production of paintings, sketches and engravings would provide many

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Americans with awe for their country's remarkable, bucolic landscapes..."Unlike his mentor and friend, Cole, Durand
was attracted to the 'common details' of nature, spotted in situ. He sought to study them with a clear eye and
reproduce them faithfully. He did not want to lose the keenness of his first impression….The simple design of these
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, studies is also different from the complex compositions of Cole's allegorical landscapes. Durand uses nature in the
Oil on canvas, 44 in. x 36 in. (111.8 cm x form of a dead tree or a bunch of rocks to compose the picture. The artist sought to discover design in nature, rather
91.4 cm). than to rearrange the elements of nature to create a pleasing pictorial design….Wandering through the woods and
Collection of the New York Public selecting scenes as he found them was, for Durand, a spiritual journey. The works that he produced became acts of
Library. devotion….In Bryant's poems, Durand found confirmation of his belief that the particulars of nature were the
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. embodiments of God's handiwork. To study these particulars carefully was a process of enlightenment; to recreate
them in text and image was a religious endeavor. Durand produced several pictures based on themes from Bryant's
verses, including Thanatopsis and Early Morning at Cold Spring, both painted in 1850."

Context:
"Asher Brown Durand was born in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey, the eighth of eleven children. His
frail health exempted him from working on the family farm; instead, he helped his father, a watchmaker and
silversmith. Following an apprenticeship to engraver Peter Maverick from 1812 to 1817, Durand entered into full
partnership with Maverick and ran the New York branch of the Newark-based firm. The partnership dissolved in 1820
in a dispute concerning Durand's acceptance of John Trumbull's commission to engrave The Declaration of
Independence, which Durand had apparently taken on without deferring to Maverick's position as senior partner.
(Maverick, who interpreted the act as a violation of their partnership agreement, heatedly accused Durand of trying to
sabotage his career.) The completion of the work in 1823 established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest
engravers. An active member of the New York art community, Durand was instrumental in organizing the New-York
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Drawing Association in 1825 (later the National Academy of Design, which he served as president from 1845 to 1861)
and the Sketch Club in 1829 (later the Century Association). During the late 1820s and early 1830s, when his interest
gradually shifted from engraving to oil painting, he demonstrated a growing competence in portraiture and genre
subjects. With the encouragement of his friend and patron Luman Reed, Durand ended his engraving career in 1835.
"In 1837, a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake, in the Adirondacks, with his close friend Thomas Cole seems to
have determined Durand's decision to concentrate on landscape painting. In 1840, with money advanced by Jonathan
Sturges, Reed's son-in-law and business partner, Durand embarked on a two-year European Grand Tour, part of which
was spent in the company of the artists John Casilear, John Kensett, and Thomas Rossiter. Durand's annual summer
sketching trips in the Catskill, Adirondack, and White mountains yielded hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that he
later incorporated into finished academy pieces. These are the embodiment of his Hudson River School style. With the
death of Cole, in 1848, Durand was recognized as the leader of American landscape painting. He died on the family
property in Maplewood, to which he had retired from active professional life in 1869."
(www.artchive.com)
Form: Oil painting, using the theme of a 'storm tossed boat.'
Iconography: Many artists use themes such as "storm tossed boat" or in the case of the trancendentalists,
towering vistas that are meant to represent God, in nature. The theme of the boat in a stormy sea is meant
to convey the futility of human struggle against the awesome forces of nature.,

"A stay in England from 1881 to 1882, during which Homer lived in a fishing village, led to a
permanent change in his subject matter. Thereafter he concentrated on large-scale scenes of
nature, particularly scenes of the sea, of its fishermen, and of their families. Taking up solitary
residence on the Maine coast at Prout's Neck, he produced such masterpieces of realism as
Eight Bells (1886, Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts); in it the drama of the sea scene
is imbued with an epic, heroic quality that symbolizes the dominant theme of his maturity:
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream 1899 human struggle with the forces of nature. In his Gulf Stream (1899; Metropolitan Museum of
Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 49 1/8 in. (American Realist) Art, New York City), the black sailor lying on the deck of a small, dismasted boat is
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York dramatically highlighted at the center of a ring of predatory sharks. "
http://www.island-of-freedom.com/
Context: (Originally published in the Tennessee Tribune 3/9/00 )
"I have liked Winslow Homer's painting, The Gulf Stream, for many years, but I would never have
understood what makes it so beautiful, nor that it can teach men and women about our own lives, had it
not been for my study of Aesthetic Realism. Eli Siegel, who founded the education of Aesthetic Realism,
defined what beauty is and pointed to its importance for every person's life in this principle: "All beauty is
a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."
People have been pained at not being able to make sense of their desire for energetic activity on one hand,
and for rest or repose on the other. Aesthetic Realism teaches that we can learn from art how to put these
opposites together in our lives. Homer’s painting — in its composition and technique shows that we can
feel truly reposeful and energetic at once. It has in it a man on a boat whose mast has been broken and
swept away by a hurricane, adrift in the restless sea, and surrounded by sharks. I once thought it justified
my feeling that the world was cruel and battered one about. I learned this was not what this painting is
JMW Turner The Slave Ship 1840 35"x48"
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about, or why I liked it. Homer's The Gulf Stream met my deepest hope — to like the world honestly —
because it puts opposites together in a way that shows the world makes sense.
At any age people can want to get away from things, and older people tend to go more and more for rest.
At 88, I am grateful to continue to learn about this drive in myself and humanity in classes and public
seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation in New York City.
In "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" Eli Siegel asks about Repose and Energy: Is there in
painting an effect which arises from the being together of repose and energy in the artist's mind? — can
both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail
and composition? — and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for
repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?
The tumultuous sea and whitecaps, the sharks, broken boat and waterspout in the distance on the right —
all have motion and turbulence. Yet the man seems strangely at ease as he rests on his elbow, looking out.
Homer’s composition shows that both man and world are a relation of "repose and energy, calmness and
GERICAULT,Theodore 1791-1824 intensity, serenity and stir." Before I met Aesthetic Realism I shuttled between feverish, exhausting
Raft of the Medusa 1819 activity in work or sports, to getting home, pulling down the blinds and going to sleep. I felt these
Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism different directions in myself had to fight. It was my good fortune that in 1947 I began to study it. In the
thousands of Aesthetic Realism Lessons which Eli Siegel gave to people, he saw each person with the
deep comprehension humanity hopes for, because he saw every person as an aesthetic situation of
opposites.
When I told Mr. Siegel in a lesson, of a frightening dream about being on a train, on a stretcher, he
explained: You want to be on the move, but while being on the move you're afraid that something in you
wants to be very quiet and take it easy. While you're on the train something in you would like to take it
easy and be in the hospital. The opposites which were fighting in me, are made beautifully one in The
Gulf Stream. There is the activity of the waves, the waterspout, the sharks, as the boat is tossed about,
while the schooner in the distance on the left is moving calmly. There is motion in the waves as they roll
and peak, but there is ease at the same time because of the definiteness of the shapes and the rhythm of the
curves. I believe that is why watching the ocean makes for composure in people. As the man reclines on
the boat he is not taking it easy, as I once did, to get away from the world — his mind is alert as he looks
Winslow Homer, The Life Line 1884 out steadily for help. I understood more why this painting moved me, when I read this sentence by Mr.
Oil on canvas 29 x 45 in Philadelphia Museum of Art Siegel: "If we look at a desperate and controlled sea painting of Winslow Homer, we can see passion and
control given to black muscles." Aesthetic Realism understands anger, which I was so pained about and
unable to control. In a lesson Mr. Siegel said: While you jump from being sweet to angry you'll be tired.
You want to like people and also hate them, and you go from hot to cold.
While you play around with this you're going to be tired. This fight in me and so many men is resolved in
The Gulf Stream. Look at the relation between the open mouth of the shark with its teeth and the dark
opening of the boat’s hold from which sweet sugar cane extends. The cane represents a world giving the
man sustenance. The fierce and the sweet do not jump from one to the other, as they once did in me. I
learned my anger came from wanting to feel that people were against me; that I was in a hostile world I
should be separate from. As Homer separates things, he also joins them and shows they are not against
each other. The curve of the back of the boat is like the curve of the shark’s tail fin and body on the right,
and the curves of waves and sharks are alike. Homer has bathed the man and boat in light and they seem
to be safely nestled in a trough of waves. Does this say the world can be comforting? I believe Homer's
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work shows his hope to make sense of wanting to see the world as an enemy and as a friend — the fight
Eli Siegel so kindly explained in me. Aesthetic Realism taught me that repose and energy do not have to
fight, and saved me from a life of anger and loneliness. This is a hopeful and beautiful painting because it
composes repose and energy, the fierce and sweet, in such a way that shows the world makes sense. We
can all learn from it."


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Winslow Homer,1836-1910 Snap the Whip, 1872
Oil on canvas, 22 x 36" (55.88 x 91.44 cm.)
Because it seems the quintessential embodiment of the American spirit, this painting is one of Winslow Homer's most discussed and
reproduced works. As one of our greatest artists, Homer and his life are justifiably the subject of a voluminous body of scholarly writing.
Snap the Whip, dating from just about the mid-point of his life, tells us a good deal about some of the critical transitions in his artistic
development at that time. However familiar and appealing such a work seems to us, it delights and informs with each new look we bring to
it. One of the reasons it is so well known is that it exists in several versions: a large figure drawing for the central group of boys (1872,
Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York), a finished oil study (1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the final Butler Institute canvas, and another
figure drawing believed to be a cartoon (Fig. 1), for the nearly exact replica executed as a wood engraving and published in Harper's
Weekly, September 20, 1873 (Fig. 2). In addition, there are a few closely related works also dating from the early seventies, School Time
(n.d., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Va.) and Country School (1871, Saint Louis Art Museum). As Homer moved
from drawing to study to larger painting, he made a number of compositional adjustments and refinements, a characteristic process for him
in his treatment of a subject in different media or scales. For example, there is only one tumbling figure to the left in the Cooper-Hewitt and
Metropolitan images, and five instead of four boys in the central grouping. Homer began the oil study by including the background hillside,
which he then painted out, possibly to keep some spaciousness in this small format. Clearly, the larger size of the Butler Institute's painting
allowed him to maintain the mountain setting, a formal echoing of the curving diagonal line of boys in the foreground.
From his early training as a draftsman and printmaker in Boston and subsequent experience as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, Homer
entered his artistic maturity with a consummate skill for compositional organization and telling detail. Here he fuses in perfect equilibrium
the three principal elements of his painting-mountains cape, school building, and figures-both as subject and as design. This tripartite
balancing has a further expression in the whip line itself: the three anchoring boys at the right, the four running figures in the middle, and the
two flying off at the left. As Jules Prown has shown us, Homer's visual theme is that of interdependence and interconnections, held and
broken, among human beings. Painted just as the artist was moving from his own youth into middle age, this, and a number o related images
from the mid-1870s, suggests he increasingly had in mind his own sense of relatedness and separateness within family and society. As
obviously lighthearted, dynamic, and spontaneous as Snap the Whip appears in both form and content, a number of subtle internal tensions
heighten its meaning; the play of stillness and motion, running and falling, stones and flowers, interior and exterior, wilderness and
construction, physical and mental. This latter contrast is especially pertinent, for the game is taking Place during a midday break indicated by
the shadows of a high sun-from the disciplines of learning inside the schoolhouse behind.
Speculation about the location has proposed Easthampton, Long Island, and upstate New York, where Homer had painted at the beginning of
the 1870s. But both the hilly landscape and the sketch for a later schoolteacher picture are more specifically associated with the inland
location, though typically Homer generalizes his image beyond the moment. At this time there was nostalgia for the disappearing "little red
schoolhouses' contrasted with significant reforms taking place in American education, the new role of the teacher, and changes in the
curriculum emerging in the decades after the Civil War. Homer must have thought more broadly about these matters, for this thematic
series of paintings depicted play as well as study, freedom as well as detention, the teacher alone and with students, and the schoolhouse as a
classroom, a solitary building, and a backdrop. Indeed, its clean cubic form stands as a central focus of order, proportion, and intellectual
clarity within the encircling arms of boys and mountainside.
Along with Mark Twain's writings, Homer's pictorial visions in the 1870s are among America's supreme celebrations of youth and the cult
of the "good bad boy" of the time, when humor mixed with serious truths, and play, like work, held risk as well a pleasure. We cannot be
certain how much Homer identified with his subjects then, as we know he did in later decades, but the critical issue of aloneness versus
community that seems to underlie works like Snap the Whip and Dad's Coming (1873, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) was one
that his life and art would face from here on out. Significantly, after Snap the Whip, there would never be another painting of a large and
active group of figures in Homer's art.

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JOHN WILMERDING
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson 1893

Oil on canvas 49 x 35 1/2 in. Hampton University Museum, Virginia
Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in 1859 in Pittsburgh into a middle class family. At the age of 13, after observing an artist at work at a neighborhood park, Turner
decided to become an artist. Tanner's father, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, discouraged his artistic pursuits, hoping that he would instead
enter the ministry. However, at the age of 21, Tanner enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There his interest turned to landscapes. His teacher,
Thomas Eakins, a noted genre painter, encouraged him to paint scenes from everyday life. In 1893, Tanner painted "The Banjo Lesson," a realistic study of
African American life. By portraying an elder teaching a boy how to play the banjo, Tanner showed a positive and dignified image of African Americans. In 1895,
believing he could not fulfill his artistic aspirations in America, Tanner settled in Paris. There, he focused on religious paintings, winning much critical acclaim
for "Daniel in the Lion's Den" and "The Resurrection of Lazarus."
Related Artists:
Edmonia Lewis
Laura Wheeler Waring
An African American Realist and student of Thomas Eakins, Tanner faced much racism in the U.S. which had a profound influence on his work. Tanner painted
this piece when he had come back to the U.S. for an African American Congress in Chicago (he had been living in Paris). This is Tanner’s first major painting of
African American life. Here, Tanner presents a banjo lesson in a modest setting, an elderly man and small boy, likely possessing a familial connection, strum the
banjo. They are very focused, this lesson is a passing of knowledge orally rather than in written form, the banjo acting as a conduit of cultural knowledge.

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Though likely a slave and kept illiterate, the man is able to pass on his musical talents. Making music was a viable profession for African Americans at this time,
yet Tanner’s depiction contrasts strongly with stereotypical depictions of banjo players, often grotesque exaggerated renderings. Tanner is dignifying the often
satirized subject by showing the child playing in a new style, showing his advanced skill at a young age. Tanner kept the detail and light in the center of the
canvas on the central figures, while his looser brushstrokes kept the surrounding space sparse. His expressive light and shadow are reminiscent of Rembrandt
giving the work a quasi-religious feel.

Form: Oil paint on canvas, portraiture.
Walt Whitman by Thomas Eakins

The friendship between Eakins and Whitman began in 1887. They had met in Whitman's Mickle Street
residence in Camden. A few weeks later, Eakins went to Camden without warning to paint the portrait, a
spontaneous act that Whitman much admired (Homer 210). "Much of Whitman's admiration for Eakins
centered on the portrait" (Homer 213). In the portrait, Whitman was represented exactly how he was. By
1888, Whitman showed his age. And Whitman appreciated Eakins' portrait because it showed his age, too.
There is nothing picturesque about Whitman in the portrait -- he simply looks like an old man (my index
page shows the similarities between a photo and Eakins' painting). In admiration of Eakins, Whitman said,
"'I never knew of but one artist, and that's Tom Eakins,' he said another time, 'who could resist the
temptation to see what they ought to be rather than what is'" (Goodrich 123). It was Eakins' realism that
Whitman admired so much -- a realism extending even to the portrait of the aging poet. Whitman
contrasted Eakins' portrait to Herbert Gilchrist's, "which is parlor Whitman" (Goodrich 123). Whitman,
focused on the realistic aspect of human beings, told Horace Traubel not to glamorize Walt's last days.
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/archive1/classroom/student_projects/brian/eakins.html
Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Walt Whitman. 1887

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Whitman 1881 Photo by Bartlett F. Kenny, Boston.

As a painter, Thomas Eakins had a relationship with Walt Whitman unlike any other. Born in
Philadelphia in 1844, Eakins did not meet Whitman until the latter half of the 1880's, but "the
two men had a deep respect for each other" (Goodrich 122). In his old age, Whitman had
relocated to Camden, New Jersey, right across the Delaware and very close to Philadelphia.
Eakins "went into the wilds of New Jersey where he found. . . Walt Whitman, in a self-chosen
exile of his own. Expelled from the bourgeois world, or so the legend ran, Whitman and Eakins
together built the metaphysics for a distinctly American realism -- the poet's ecstatic and high-
hearted, the painter's murky and inward-turning" (Gopkin 78). The two men shared not only a
friendship and mutual respect, but an artistic vision of American democracy grounded in realism.
Philadelphia-Camden Friendship: Celebrating America

Whitman and Eakins were friends in more than just the sense of acquaintance; in fact, Eakins was
one of 32 people invited to a dinner party for Whitman's 72nd birthday (Goodrich 124). They
were so close that the day after Whitman died, Eakins went to Camden with some of his students
and made a death mask and hand cast of Whitman (entitled Death Mask of Walt Whitman, 1892,
in Houghton Library of Harvard University. Unfortunately, no images were available). When
Eakins heard of Whitman's death, he immediately contacted Horace Traubel to make the mask of
his friend, a man he admired very much. This illustrates that the relationship transcended a mere
respect between two artists.
The two artists had similar ideas of America and art. "Whitman disliked European manners and
conventions, and he was passionately devoted to America and to a celebration of the democratic

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ideal. . . The chief similarity between Eakins and Whitman was their self-sufficient confidence,
which allowed them to disregard the conventions of their time. Eakins, like Whitman, insisted on
making art in a way that seemed most appropriate and truthful, without giving in to popular or
critical opinion" (Homer 217). They were individualists who did not waver in the face of
criticism. Both men were artistically rejected in their lives -- though as Whitman aged he gained
more popularity. Eakins was scrutinized by the bourgeois Philadelphia society. He paid a high
price for his fascination with the nude body. Whitman also had a fascination with the body, but
because of the nature of poetry -- words -- was less explicit than Eakins, who painted the body.
"Both were democrats, despising forms and conventions which hid the essential human being"
(Goodrich 122). The tendency to celebrate the human body was prevalent in both Whitman and
Eakins' work. A major difference must be brought to light, though: "Eakins concentrated on the
individual; Whitman, on humanity and the cosmos" (Homer 219).
In spite of this idea, Eakins was still profoundly indebted to the poet. When Weda Cook (who
wrote music to O Captain, My Captain!) was posing for Eakins, "the artist talked much to her
about Whitman and would sometimes quote his verses" (Goodrich 122). Not only was Eakins
fond of Whitman's poems, but "it was the concrete, realistic side of the poet, his observation, and
his feeling for the body, that appealed most to the painter, who used to say: 'Whitman never
makes a mistake'" (Goodrich 122). It is this admiration that Eakins can be classified as a
Whitmanian painter.

The Swimming Hole and "Song of Myself"
The Swimming Hole, now widely known

as The Swimmers, is exemplary of Eakins'
work because it shows his infatuation
with the nude body. Eakins once said that
"a naked woman 'is the most beautiful
thing there is -- except a naked man'"
(Matthiessen 604). He actually lost his
teaching job at the Pennsylvania
Academy because of his fondness for the
nude figure (reminiscent of Whitman
being fired for writing an inappropriate
book). The Swimming Hole also shows
that Eakins is a Whitmanian painter
because "Walt's work, in turn, approaches
the powerful construction of Eakins in his sketch" (Matthiessen 610). Eakins' scene directly
echoes Whitman's "Song of Myself," particularly the scene with the 28 bathers. "Moreover, a
number of art historians and literary critics have concluded that Swimming is a response to
Whitman's 'Song of Myself'" (Folsom and Price, eds. Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive). The
section that Eakins is depicting is the following:
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

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Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,

She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?

Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not
ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray (Whitman 197-198).
Whitman's words are clearly echoed in the canvas; but so is Whitman's presence. "The example
of Walt Whitman, who celebrated the joys of nudity in the open air, may well have influenced
Eakins, and Whitman, in turn, would certainly have enjoyed this scene glorifying male
companionship" (Homer 116). The sexuality of the painting is strikingly reminiscent of Whitman
as well: "There is content in this painting that, in Whitmanesque fashion, is unabashedly sexual"
(Foster 29). Themes of fraternity and sexuality permeate Walt Whitman's poems, and Eakins used
these in The Swimming Hole. Knowing of the respect and admiration that Eakins had for
Whitman it is no wonder he plays a role in Eakins' painting. It is important that it occurs in The
Swimming Hole -- Eakins, who like Whitman was somewhat ostracized because of his love for
being naked and undisguised, looks to Whitman to convey ideas of 'manly love' or sexuality.
In Swimming: Thomas Eakins, the Twenty-ninth Bather, Elizabeth Johns suggests that the above
poem is applicable to the lives of the two men. "Here, Whitman as the woman who is both poet
and character in the poem brings the young men into full sexual experience, but, in the self-
centeredness of immaturity, they do not recognize her agency" (Johns 77). The poem again acts as
an influence on Eakins: "In Whitman's poem are the two worlds in Eakins' picture: one inhabited
by high-spirited young men -- the subjects of Swimming -- the other by an observing presence that
rejoices in their beauty and loves them with a tenderness and passion of which they are oblivious"
(Johns 77-8).
Thomas Eakins is a Whitmanian painter; he was inspired and influenced by the the great poet
Walt Whitman. Eakins had the unique opportunity to befriend the poet -- he therefore is

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influenced by Whitman as a poet and as a person. Their friendly personal relationship is evidence
of this, as is The Swimming Hole. As realists, Eakins and Whitman again are similar -- both want
to depict the actuality of America.
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/archive1/classroom/student_projects/brian/eakins.html
I Sit and Look Out

Walt Whitman
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

Dr. Samuel D. Gross appears in the surgical amphitheater at Jefferson Medical College, lit by the skylight
overhead. Five doctors (one of whom is obscured by Dr. Gross) attend to the young patient, whose cut left
thigh, bony buttocks, and sock-clad feet are all that is visible to the viewer. Chief of Clinic Dr. James M.
Barton bends over the patient, probing the incision, while junior assistant Dr. Charles S. Briggs grips the
patient's legs and Dr. Daniel M. Appel keeps the incision open with a retractor. The anesthetist (Dr. W.
Joseph Hearn) holds a folded napkin soaked with chloroform over the patient's face, while the clinic clerk
(Dr. Franklin West) records the proceedings. A woman at the left, traditionally identified as the patient's
mother, cringes and shields her eyes, unable to look. Confident of the outcome of the operation, Dr. Gross
calmly and majestically turns to address his students, including the intent figure of Thomas Eakins, who is
seated at the right edge of the canvas.
Eakins' masterpiece, acclaimed as the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century, depicts the
famed surgeon Samuel D. Gross as he paused to instruct students at Jefferson Medical College in
Philadelphia. Born in the city and a student at Jefferson, Eakins wished to celebrate his professor and the
city's illustrious medical community. He also hoped, at the age of thirty-one, to establish his own
reputation as a realist painter. Drawing on his training at the Pennsylvania Academy and in Europe, Eakins

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composed a majestic painting that wedded modern naturalism to the technique and impact of the old
masters. Painted expressly for the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, the picture and its bloody
detail shocked the art jury; ultimately, it was displayed among the medical exhibits at the fair. Kathleen A.
Foster , from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, 2009.
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/299524.html
Artist: Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), one of the greatest American painters, an artist of severity, of 19th-
century sobriety, who never seemed to doubt that his was a moral vocation. Eakins was born in
Philadelphia, son of a writing master. He approached art as a branch of knowledge, studying as much
Eakins, Thomas The Gross Clinic 1875 Oil on canvas drawing and anatomy as could be studied in Philadelphia before, in 1866, applying to the Ecole des
96 x 78 in. Beaux-Arts in Paris, the supreme 19th-century art academy.
Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson
University, Philadelphia In France Eakins became the pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the definitive academic painter of clinically
precise scenes from Roman history. Returning to Philadelphia, he quickly found himself as an artist,
transferring the historical weightiness of French academic painting to an American context, painting
sportsmen frozen at their oars, reflected in still, empty water, most brilliantly in his 1871 work The
Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) .
Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy, and insisted on the most thorough research, by his students
and himself. He was a photographer, and used photographs to prepare paintings; nude shots of him and
male friends survive. He got into trouble for letting female students draw the male nude, for which he lost
his professorship and was censured for "conduct unworthy of a gentleman". Looking at his paintings, it
seems amazing that anyone could have doubted Eakins's seriousness.
Subject: Eakins approached Dr Samuel D Gross (1805-84) with his idea for a portrait in the operating
theatre at Jefferson Medical College. Gross was an innovative surgeon and champion of surgical
intervention. This operation - to save a gangrenous leg by removing pus - is one he pioneered.
Distinguishing features: It is Gross's face that holds you, his forehead caught by light from above, a
glowing white star fringed with silver and grey, and the black pits of his eyes, their darkness only
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REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn heightened by the light. He has paused for a moment to explain a detail of the procedure to the students all
The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632 around him in the shadows of the theatre. The painting does not freeze the moment so much as expand it
Oil on canvas, 169,5 x 216,5 cm infinitely: there is a massive, grand stillness to this imposing canvas in which you contemplate with awe
Mauritshuis, The Hague the dominating, dignified figure of the surgeon, all in black, except for the shocking shining red blood on
his right hand as he holds the scalpel like a pen, or perhaps a palette knife.
What is Gross thinking? There is something terrible, unutterable in the shadowed rock of his face. All the
weight and responsibility of this moment between life and death is in his slightly disengaged moment of
thought - this is what it is to be a surgeon.
Below him, an old woman, the mother of the young man on the operating table, claws her hands in horror,
covering her face, her eyes. This directs us back to Gross, to his calm, heroic ability to look, to see. His
eyes contain the knowledge of sickness, the history of pain. The assistants too look unflinchingly at the
wound they hold open. At a remove, the audience watch and learn. Two figures lean in the shadows of the
theatre's exit, reminiscent of the passages of a Roman arena. This is a modern arena, and Eakins portrays
Gross as a modern hero.
Inspirations and influences: The figures receding in the passage recall the figure in the doorway in
Velázquez's Las Meninas . In its ambition and intellect, this is the American Las Meninas .
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/aug/03/art
Is Thomas Eakins a Great Artist?
by James F. Cooper
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875 Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaThomas Eakins, The
Gross Clinic, 1875
Philadelphia Museum of Art and
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Today, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) is generally recognized as an American master; indeed, some place him at the very pinnacle of American art. The Gross
Clinic, completed by Eakins in 1875 after a year of torturous effort and now regarded as the centerpiece of his career, was recently the object of a heated bidding
war between the city of Philadelphia and a very rich buyer who wished to add it to her collection of American treasures in another state. The monumental 2002
retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its accompanying catalogue, which launched a new wave of interest in the artist’s career, featured some of
Eakins’s best, including The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) from 1871, Swimming (1885) and Singing a Pathetic Song (1881).
Now, several new biographies have dredged up the old controversies and scandals that tainted his career. The precipitating event was the discovery, in 1984, of the
Charles Bregler Collection of thousands of Eakins documents, letters, memorabilia and photographs, hidden away for almost a century. Purchased by the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1985, these documents are examined in great detail by Henry Adams in Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an
American Artist (Oxford University Press, 2005). They have done much to lend credence to the original charges that led to Eakins’s dismissal as Professor of
Drawing and Painting by the directors of the Pennyslvania Academy in 1885. Indeed, the book raises several additional new charges of bizarre personal behavior.
Adams’s research also supports the contention that Lloyd Goodrich, in the first (1933) biography of Eakins, “reported information very selectively, suppressing
things that seemed odd about Eakins’s behavior, and even deliberately altering facts to support his view of Eakins’s character.”1 It all makes for a remarkably
interesting read, with sordid twists and turns, several deaths, suicides, breakdowns and insanity.
Almost lost in this soap opera is the only truly relevant question: is Thomas Eakins a great artist? Do these dark stories of impropriety have a direct bearing on the
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quality of his painting? Adams argues convincingly that the dour subject matter of Eakins’s paintings was a result of his life experiences. Sidney K. Kirkpatrick
draws a similar conclusion in The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (Yale University Press, 2006). Indeed, both attribute Eakins’s growing popularity today precisely to
the fact that he seems to have flouted Victorian social and sexual mores. Yet Adams and, to a lesser degree, Kirkpatrick also point out that the newly discovered
personal papers, secreted by Bregler, Eakins’s long-time assistant, make one wonder why the artist wasn’t arrested at some point. More importantly, I believe, the
new documentation challenges the integrity of his art and his place as the most important art instructor of human anatomy and figure drawing in nineteenth-
century America.
Some viewers, myself included, have always been disturbed by the soupy darkness that envelops the majority of Eakins’s paintings. It was very apparent in the
recent retrospective at the Met. When Eakins returned from three years of study with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his palette was
much brighter; his brushstrokes were phlegmatic and daring. Between 1870 and 1873 he created a series of promising canvases depicting scull racing on the
Schuylkill River. The tour-de-force Max Schmidt in a Single Scull (1871) and The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873) impressed the Philadelphia art world
with their strong compositions, solid draftsmanship, subtle color, strong chiaroscuro, lovely impressions of nature and the river, and painterly brushwork. Before
coming back to the United States, Eakins had taken a trip to Madrid to study the paintings of Velázquez, whose portraits had a profound influence on Édouard
Manet and Edgar Degas. For a brief time back in Philadelphia it looked as if Eakins were going to emerge as an American Manet or, at the very least, an
American Pissarro. Then, inexplicably, darkness flooded his paintings. Perhaps, the terrible anecdotes that Adams and Kirkpatrick have chronicled weighed him
down.
Eakins was only twenty-two when he entered Gérôme’s atelier. It was considered an honor to study with one of the most successful history painters in France.
Many Americans applied. Eakins, who appealed to the master in person, was accepted, but Gérôme had misgivings as time went by. In three years of study Eakins
never finished a single study of the human figure, required for completion of the course. Eakins returned to Philadelphia without completing his studies.
Nevertheless, he presented himself as one of Gérôme’s favorite pupils and claimed to be very knowledgeable about the human figure. Eakins quickly became a
professor of drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy. For the next ten years he was regarded as the supreme instructor of figure drawing in the United States and
lectured widely in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Yet many art critics and patrons disliked his paintings. One critic described Eakins’s paintings as
“lifeless.”2 Mariana Van Rensselaer, one of the foremost art critics of the period, intuitively grasped the problem when she wrote that Eakins’s paintings were
“scientifically true, but…artistically false.”3
It was known during Eakins’s lifetime that he was a pioneer in the use of photography to assist the artist in understanding human anatomy and motion. What was
not known until now was the extent that Eakins relied on photographs as his primary reference source for portraits and scenes. The Bregler Collection reveals that
Eakins shot thousands of photographs, many of them of nude male and female models, which he projected directly onto his canvases with the use of an opaque
projector. He traced them and made scratch marks to guide his brush, then camouflaged the incisions with layers of paint. Eakins and his wife, Susan, took great
care to keep the projection stage of the process and the source photographs a secret. She left instructions that all records and photographs should be burned upon
her death. When she died in 1939, Bregler rescued the entire contents of the studio; it remained hidden until 1984.
Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York CityThomas Eakins, The
Champion Single Sculls
(Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York CityMany artists have used photography as a primary or secondary source, but Eakins and his enablers, who
included his wife and assistants, went to extraordinary trouble to hide any evidence of this activity. The publicity might have tarnished the credibility of the artist,
who during his lifetime was considered the premier expert and lecturer on human anatomy. But why should this make any difference in our evaluation of Eakins’s
art? The information provides a clue to what’s wrong with Eakins’s paintings. It explains why the figures in his compositions seem tacked together artificially. It
explains the awkward application of paint within the linear contour of a figure, which doesn’t seem to correspond to its volume and lighting. It explains why some
of his portraits seem so lifeless. The color of the red dress in the 1903 painting The Actress (Portrait of Suzanne Santje) appears to be troweled on with a palette
knife without regard to the human form wearing the dress. Photographs of Margaret Harrison, who posed for Singing a Pathetic Song (1881), discovered in the
Bregler Collection, are exactly like the image replicated in the finished painting.
The most disturbing disclosure about Eakins’s work is just how he was able to achieve the much-lauded technical truth of his portraits. Eakins sometimes shot as

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many as forty pictures for each subject. However, claims Kirkpatrick, these technical revelations “do not detract from a viewer’s appreciation of Eakins’s
paintings. Instead, they put them in a fascinating new context.”4Context is the operative word here. Kirkpatrick is not looking with the eye of an artist. For him,
the aesthetics of Eakins’s work is not the issue. Modernity, for Kirkpatrick, as it is for many strong advocates of Eakins’s work, means being a rebel against the
status quo, against the values of society and its cultural institutions. But was Eakins a rebel? The Bregler papers reveal the identities of the heretofore undisclosed
witnesses who testified against Eakins at the secret hearings conducted by the directors of the Pennsylvania Academy, which led to his removal as professor of art.
The myth is that Eakins was discharged for removing a loin cloth from a male model in front of a classroom of female art students. Indeed, the frontispiece of
Kirkpatrick’s book features a quote by Eakins: “I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature’s works, the naked figure.” The truth of the matter
is quite different. The directors initially defended Eakins, calling the incident “a tempest in a teapot.”5 It was only after more serious accusations were raised that
the board was moved to act. Charges of incest, physical abuse of several female students and unnatural behavior with male students were made by two of Eakins’s
own sisters (through their husbands). Moral failings are, regrettably, part of many artists’ biographies. More important to our inquiry are the charges, brought by
his own staff, about the failure of his teaching methods, particularly his convoluted drawing formulas based upon mathematics, isometric drawing and perspective.
The faculty particularly objected to the cancellation by Eakins of all courses on aesthetic theory, art history and sketching from nature. Eakins’s famous
unpublished Drawing Manual (published in a hardbound illustrated edition by the Philadelphia Museum in 2005) is now revealed as a reactionary and in many
ways preposterous text on perspective. Incredibly, although he shot “several thousand” photographs of the naked human form, there is not one single drawing or
reference to the human body contained in its pages. The manual is limited to perspective studies of simple mechanical objects—a cube, a chair, a table.
The real reason Eakins was fired was the suspicion that he was an incompetent artist. Those who testified against him were younger, more modernist artists who
had worked with him. Eakins’s paintings did not sell. Commissioned portraits were returned or never picked up. These controversies served as distractions from
the real issue, the poor quality of his art. The Met retrospective in 2002 was, for me, a sobering experience. It began with the exciting paintings of rowing sculls
on the Schuylkill River but quickly bogged down in a string of dark, soupy, unattractive works, occasionally broken by a portrait of some merit. His most famous
painting is The Gross Clinic (1875), painted only a few years after his return from studying in Paris with Gérôme. To this day, Eakins’s reputation hinges upon
this monumental work. He painted it as a tour de force, representing the host city, Philadelphia, at the first World’s Fair to be held in America, on the centennial
of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A great pavilion was erected by the city of Philadelphia to hold the American art. To Eakins’s chagrin, when
the fair opened, The Gross Clinic was nowhere to be seen in the American exhibition hall. After many embarrassing inquiries he was directed to an army-post
hospital, where his painting had been hung between a pair of cots holding poorly modeled papier-mâchè patients. The few contemporary writers who reviewed it
shared the feeling of the judges that it was not suitable for viewing, owing to its “graphic nature.” The New York Herald called the work “decidedly unpleasant
and sickeningly real in all its gory details.”6 The New York Tribune called it “powerful, horrible…yet fascinating.”7 Another critic called it a “degradation of
art.” The majority of comments focused on its realistic depiction of the bloody patient’s body and the stained hands of Dr. Gross (who was also very unhappy with
the results). Few critics ventured to judge it aesthetically, although some made derogatory comments about the darkness of the color. It languished unwanted for
two years, until it was purchased for $200 by alumni of Jefferson Medical College.
The revival of Eakins’s reputation is based upon the artist’s perceived integrity, brutal honesty and high moral stance. Despite all the new information on Eakins’s
scandalous life, both Adams and Kirkpatrick consider The Gross Clinic a masterpiece. Kirkpatrick writes: “No artist since the Renaissance had overcome such
challenges in arrangement of figures and action or composed a work of such intellectual and metaphysical scope.”8 John Russell, writing for The New York
Times, concurs: “We prize Eakins above all for a new dimension of moral awareness that he brought to American painting.” He concludes: “We ask ourselves
whether Thomas Eakins was not the greatest American painter who ever lived.”9 It is this very question which drew me to re-examine the painting at its
temporary installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Eakins’s monumental effort, eight by seven feet, portrays the celebrated surgeon Dr. Samuel D. Gross removing a piece of infected bone from the thigh of a
patient suffering from osteomyelitis. Five doctors are assisting him in this delicate operation.10 The surgery is being observed by almost thirty medical students in
the amphitheater at Jefferson Medical College. Gross is depicted deep in thought, pausing momentarily with scalpel in hand. A strong light from above illuminates
the dome of Gross’s head and the heads of the doctors working on the patient. William Innes Homer, author of Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (Abbeville Press,
1992), compares The Gross Clinic to Rembrandt’s masterpieces The Night Watch (1642) and the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulip (1632). Homer praises the
American artist, but the comparison immediately draws attention to what is wrong with Eakins’s painting. The darkness surrounding the figures in both
Rembrandt works is rich, and the deep velvet blacks add greatly to the atmosphere. The black background which covers almost two-thirds of The Gross Clinic is
essentially a dark wash tinted with red. All of the doctors and several of the students are dressed in black, including the patient’s mother, shown directly right and
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below Dr. Gross’s right hand. The perspective of the painting is askew because Eakins has used white in the background behind Dr. Gross to frame his own self-
portrait (the figure seated in the first row of the auditorium sketching the scene). The chalky white of the table he is drawing on sits visually on the surface of the
canvas, refusing to recede into the background. To make matters worse, Gross’s shirt is almost the same tone and chroma as the tabletop behind him. Eakins takes
no advantage of the painting’s apparent “flatness.” He makes little attempt to organize the figures and the negative or “empty” spaces between figures into formal,
cohesive elements of color and line, which communicate visually with each other and the entire composition. Indeed, his preparatory oil sketches for the final
work reveal the same confusion and murkiness.
Why did Eakins’s scene disturb so many people? The entire surface of the huge painting is dominated by red, possibly alizarin crimson. Everything has a red tint,
the blacks, the whites and the greys. Deliberately or unconsciously, Eakins’s entire surface is the color of human bone marrow. The blood on Dr. Gross’s hand and
the hands of the surgeons assisting him are merely highlights of the pervasive ghoulish color that permeates every inch of the canvas. Dr. Gross’s portrait is very
well done, although he often complained about the number of sittings he was forced to endure, but the other portraits are remarkably bland and uninteresting. The
dark area directly behind Dr. Gross’s head is scrubbed in, with heavy phlegmatic brushstrokes that sit visually on the surface of the canvas. This might work in an
Impressionist or Fauve painting but is distracting in a scene that purports to be realist. The heavy brushstrokes extend across the center of the painting, where they
stop abruptly in mid-air, in front of a hallway leading into the auditorium. To complicate matters further, there are two figures standing in the aisle of the hallway,
rendered in an unconvincing dark wash. Similarly rendered are many of the ghostly figures in the auditorium. The background color suggests dark brown gravy, a
problem that increasingly afflicts many of Eakins’s later works. Eakins’s reputation as a professor of art rested upon his knowledge of anatomy and perspective. In
his manual for artists Eakins writes: “the one and only law of perspective: Twice as far off, half as big.” He breaks his own cardinal rule in his depiction of the
only female figure in the room full of men. The patient’s mother is seated directly behind Dr. Gross, her clenched hands flung across her face in a melodramatic
gesture, yet she looks about a third of Gross’s size. Much of Eakins’s reputation rested on his knowledge of the human body and his ability to paint it. There is
little evidence of that here in The Gross Clinic.

Eakin'S PHOTOS
Eakins’s most aesthetically successful works are probably his earliest, particularly outdoor scenes. Adams concurs with Kirkpatrick that Eakins’s reputation rests
upon the perception of “honesty” and “integrity” in his portraits.11 However, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) of 1871 and The
Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake (1873) are demonstrably among the most successful compositions Eakins ever painted. Did the artist lose his nerve? His

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paintings grew darker and muddier thereafter, with brief flashes when he pulled himself together. Singing a Pathetic Song (1881) and Swimming (1885) are the
last successful major works he produced, although he continued to paint for another thirty years. However, the Bregler Collection reveals all of the figures, nude
and clothed, in both of these paintings were traced from photographs, which Eakins took great pains to disguise. He was still a relatively young man in 1886 when
he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Subsequently, he was fired from several other drawing academies. Did the controversy over his
firings promote a reputation for “honesty,” “integrity” and “high moral standards”12? Alexander Eliot writes: Eakins’s “greatest virtue [honesty] counted against
him.”13 But is it rather his dishonesty about his secretive professional and personal life that sets him apart?
Adams, mesmerized by the scandals in Eakins’s private and professional life, neglects what is paramount: was Eakins a great artist? Would we spend as much time
on the scandals in the lives of van Gogh, Gauguin, Rimbaud, Toulouse Lautrec and Baudelaire? No, of course not. They are modernists and expected to
misbehave. In the misguided attempt to transform Eakins into a modernist, far too little attention has been directed toward the quality of his work. Lloyd Goodrich
maintained that “Eakins was the greatest American artist,” while John Singer Sargent was “superficial.”14 Yet Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward D. Boit (1882)
is a far superior figurative-group painting than The Gross Clinic. Sargent brilliantly resolves the challenges of composition, darkness and light, color, brushwork
and realism that confounded Eakins. Ironically, Sargent composed this miracle of elegance and beauty when he was only twenty-six, five years younger than
Eakins when he painted The Gross Clinic. Both of these American artists had trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. From the beginning, Sargent’s genius was
recognized by his teachers and fellow students. “Eakins has the unique distinction of having had more of his paintings destroyed by disgruntled patrons than any
other artist of modern times,” observes Kirkpatrick. It is not enough to be a martyr, real or perceived, to modernism or any other movement. We must judge
artists, contemporary or historical, on the integrity and beauty of their work.
Notes
1 Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 35.
2 Sidney J. Kirkpatrick, The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 174.
3 Ibid., p. 251.
4 Ibid., p. 14.
5 Adams, Eakins Revealed, p. 51.
6 Kirkpatrick, The Revenge of Thomas Eakins, p. 196.
7 Ibid., p. 196
8 Ibid., p. 190.
9 John Russell, “Thomas Eakins,” in Reading Russell: Essays 1941–1988 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p.108.
10 This operation was considered a serious medical proceedure in the nineteenth century.
11 Adams, Eakins Revealed, p. 25.
12 Ibid., p. 25.
13 Alexander Eliot, Three Hundred Years of American Painting (New York: Time Incorporated, 1957), p. 138.
14 Cited, Adams, Eakins Revealed, p. 24.
American Arts Quarterly, Spring 2007, Volume 24, Number 2.

- See more at: http://www.nccsc.net/legacy/is-thomas-eakins-a-great-artist#sthash.eQoWYdgj.dpuf

Eakins, Thomas The Swimming Hole (1885)

The Independent's Great Art series
By Tom Lubbock
Friday 01 February 2008


America 19th C
About the artist
The painted world is still: this is well known. But making that point, David Hockney once
gave it a wise turn, saying that in pictures "things don't actually move. The figures are, and
will always remain, exactly where the painter put them". Notice, he doesn't say (as you
might expect) that the figures remain exactly where they are. No, they remain exactly where
the painter put them.
This brings the stasis of the image up against the activity of the artist. The figures in a
painting do not just materialise on the picture surface. Where they are is where they've been
put. Like the laying of a table or setting of a stage, painting a picture involves numerous acts
of placing and positioning.
Of course, to look at a painting in this way means that you imagine its figures as being
somehow separate from the picture in which they appear. It's as if they pre-existed the scene
they were assembled into – as if they could be picked up and moved about before being put
in their final position.
That's not literally how paintings are made, but it's not so far off. In the preliminary studies
for a picture, the same figure may be repositioned several times before arriving at its final
pose and place. During the painting process, it may be moved around on the canvas itself. If
the painting is from life, there is also a living model involved. Models really are separate
bodies, who are put into positions by verbal instruction or direct physical manipulation.
Painters may also use puppets and "lay-figures" for similar purposes. In all these ways, the
painter puts the figure in its place.
And in some pictures, you're made to feel this. The "putness" of the figures is not just a fact,
it's an effect. You feel that they are separate from the scene in which they appear. You feel
that they've been physically put into the positions they occupy. The human figures in these
pictures, though apparently free agents, seem like dolls, models, playthings – passive,
manipulable.
Eakins, Thomas The Swimming Hole 1884-85 The effect has something in common with pornography, with its helpless sex objects put
Oil on canvas 27 3/8 x 36 3/8 in. through their positions and permutations (even though there may be no actual sex portrayed).
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth A good example is the work of Balthus, whose figures often find themselves bound, held
down and splayed by the firm geometrical composition of his pictures. But that's not the
only way to do it.
Thomas Eakins' The Swimming Hole is a classic of American painting. It shows a scene of
healthy, manly, outdoor activity: a group of young fellows having stripped off for a dip. It is
based on the swimming excursions that were enjoyed by the artist and his students. Eakins
himself appears in the water at bottom right – in signature position, so to speak.
The subject has often been seen as homoerotic – or unconsciously homoerotic, and therefore
perhaps the more erotic, for being unconscious of it. And obviously we can all be knowing
about the 19th century and its ideals (or delusions) of masculine comradeship.

America 19th C
But if there is something sexy in The Swimming Hole, it's not solely in its subject matter.
It's in the feeling that these fine naked bodies are the picture's playthings. Though shown at
exercise, these swimmers don't seem fully in command of themselves. They've been put – in
their places, their poses, their actions.
This is partly because the figures, especially the three on the rock, seem separate, both from
one another and from the picture. They don't look like a group that has assembled itself,
more like a group that has been assembled – three disconnected bodies, put together, collage-
wise.
Manet, Dejeuner sur l'herbe 1863.
There is also the way the figures bear themselves. They don't look like people doing
Oil on canvas 84" x 106"
something, more like people maintaining positions that have been imposed on them, into
which they have been put. They look like models holding studio poses.
This is most evident in the middle figure of the three, the man half-kneeling with his hand
raised. What's he doing? In the studio it would be clear: he is employing a standard trick for
keeping an arm raised and flexed, holding on to a sling, to support the strain of the limb. But
in the painting the sling is eliminated – leaving only a nude in an overtly artificial pose.
In their arrangement and in their poses, these three bodies show clear signs of being under
external manipulation. (All three might actually be the same man, in different positions.)
Though purportedly pursuing fresh air, fitness, freedom, the figures on the rock are laid out
like mannequins in a shop window. They have strong young physiques, but they're doll-like.
This alluring mixture of muscularity and passivity: did Eakins know what he was doing?
The artist
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was – until Pollock – the great American artist. Born in
Philadelphia, he had studied Velazquez and Rembrandt in Europe, and pursued Realism with
scientific rigour. He learnt from Muybridge's photographs of bodies in motion. A great
believer in the living model, he lost his teaching job after allowing mixed life-classes to
draw a male nude. His greatness was largely posthumous.

America 19th C


lesson_Der_Blaue_Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter (named after an emblem of St. George)

Form: Oil on canvas. Bright, saturated colors laid on in
thick impastos. Impressionistic
Iconography: He's playing with the formal elements,

texture, color, composition, light, and shadow. One of
his earlier works, Kandinsky is here still very
representational. Though the colors are bright and
harmonious, the picture meant to be somewhat abstract,
we still recognize it as a sunny lane seen through the
trees. We can see by this work that he is still very
much in tune withthe idea of a harmonious symphony.
Context: As a musician first, Kandinsky was interested

in harmony and balance, he wanted his paintings to
reflect beautiful music. "Born in Moscow in 1866,
Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His
parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky
himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The
influence of music in his paintings cannot be
overstated, down to the names of his paintings
Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions. In
1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose
to study law and economics, and after passing his
examinations, lectured at the Moscow Faculty of Law.
He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote
extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of
great interest and ultimately exerted substantial
influence in his work. In 1895 Kandinsky attended a
French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's
Haystacks at Giverny. He stated, "It was from the
catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had
not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right
to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was
aware too that the object did not appear in the
picture..." Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty,
Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study
life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as
basic for an artistic education. Ironically, Kandinsky's
work moved in a direction that was of much greater
Vasily Kandinsky. Autumn in Bavaria abstraction than that which was pioneered by the
1908; Oil on cardboard, 33x45cm; Centre Georges Pompidou, Impressionists. It was not long before his talent
Paris surpassed the constraints of art school and he began
exploring his own ideas of painting - "I applied streaks
and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife
and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..."
Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his
work was exhibited throughout Europe from 1903
onwards, and often caused controversy among the
public, the art critics, and his contemporaries. An active
participant in several of the most influential and
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/Der_Blaue_Reiter.htm[1/21/2014 3:58:08 PM]

controversial art movements of the 20th century, among

them the Blue Rider which he founded along with
Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee,
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), and Schonberg,
Kandinsky continued to further express and define his
form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical
writings. His reputation became firmly established in
the United States through numerous exhbitions and his
work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who
became one of his most enthusiastic supporters."
(www.arthistory.cc)

Form: Oil on canvas. Thick impastos of saturated
color. "Color directly influences the soul. Color is
the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is
the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand
that plays, touching one key or another purposively,
to cause vibrations in the soul."
Iconography: “Painting is like a thundering collision

of different worlds that are destined in and through
conflict to create that new world called the work,” he
wrote. For him, a work of art came into being the
same wayas the cosmos, through catastrophes, and out
of the cacophony." He tried to dissolve the object in
order to create the whole.
Context: "Art historians still argue which was the first

non-objective painting, but Kandinsky is clear on the
subject: he did not paint it; he saw it, or allowed
himself not to see it, to be more precise. It just
happened suddenly, when he looked at one of his
landscapes standing on its side against the wall and
saw it as an abstraction. From this point, in every
subsequent work, he tried to dissolve the object in
order to create the whole. The final symphony was
what he called “the music of the spheres” — or his
“Moscow hour.” Kandinsky began to see all his
paintings as music, compositions meant to reflect the
increasingly turbulent world surrounding him. This
did not sit well with his conservative minded
comrades in Russia, to whom art was not an
expression of inner feeling, it was a realistic view of
mother Russia. Or, more succinctly, good
propaganda.
"During his Munich years, though considered a
Vasily Kandinsky. Composition No. 2 1910 Russian artist, Kandinsky was a leader of Munich’s
early expressionist scene, organizing the Phalanx
exhibition club in 1901 and the New Artists’ Union in
1909. He published the famous Blue Rider almanac in
1911. At that time, Munich was one of the best cities

in which to be a foreign artist. Still, inevitably,

Kandinsky was considered “a Byzantine” by the
conservative Munich critics, and “a degenerate
follower of Western art” by the even more
conservative critics in Russia. Meanwhile, he was
keen to maintain contact with Russia: he took part in
Russian exhibitions; included Russian artists in his
Munich projects; and sent his manuscript of On the
Spiritual in Art to Russia where it was read at one of
the meetings of the Artists’ Union in 1911 and
became an important influence."
(www.capitalperspective.ru)

Form: Oil on canvas. The picture is conceived of as a vibrant
arrangement of rapidly moving color areas that make no reference to a
storyline or object in external reality.
Iconography: "One of Kandinsky's Improvisations, which carries a

subtitle (unusual for him at this period, especially because the subtitle
does make an association with external reality). The only way to
account for this is to realize the time period: one year before the
outbreak of WWI. This image, perhapps more than any others by
Kandinsky, expresses the theme of impending apocalypse. A reference
to a firing cannon and buildings toppling over foreshadow the war and
destruction to come. The drama here is backed up by the explosive
formal dynamics, which act out his theme. Opposed to the orderly
construction and restricted color range of Cubism and other hard-edge
geometric abstraction; did not trust an art that evolved out of logic or
the rationale; trusted only internal feelings and intuition. His art, thus,
has a mystical core that takes form at this time in dreamy
improvisations that are not earthbound. Space is conceived of as an
unbounded, energy field; he has no interest in illusionistic one-point
perspective. Line, shape, and color all have their own autonomy and
function freely within the unbounded field. Note how the color bleeds
here and suggests a slippage beyond any boundaries that would attempt
to contain it. The picture has its own reality, though this image does
make reference to an external reality. Significantly, though, that
external world is being destroyed; for Kandinsky it is the spirit that will
rule in the end. Germany in the years leading up to WWI where "joie
de vivre" (joy of life) was not the atmosphere. In his desire to make
abstraction spiritual, Kandinsky expresses the growing spiritual crisis
of Germany, which moved abruptly from an agricultural society (close
to nature) to a technological society (factories and German efficiency)
due to the Industrial Revolution."
Context: German Expressionist artists picked up on the apocalypse to

come in the tense years leading up to war (1910-1914); the theme that
they continually express or try to overcome is angst: an alienated
anxiety. What they want to do is give visual form to inner life; they
are, thus, against Mimesis. The art is highly subjective and they do not
hesitate to exaggerate or abstract to express internal, felt reality. It is an
art born out of inner necessity. There are two groups of German
Expressionists: Die Brucke (the bridge) and Der Blaue Rieter (the Blue

Rider). Kandinsky belongs to Der Blaue Reiter, which is an art that

stresses intuition and a metaphysical projection beyond the world of
matter through color and forms that push away from description and
towards non-objectivity. The movement is typically more lyrical and
romantic than the sharpened tensions and jagged edges of Die Brucke.
Kandinsky had trouble letting go of the object in the beginning for fear
people would mistake his abstractions for formal decoration. This
canvas was painted one year after he published his book, "Concerning
the Spiritual in Art" and one year before the outbreak of WWI. In its
reference to a cannon and the destruction of cities, Kandinsky is
perhaps expressing the "apocalyptic enthusiasm" that showed up in
Franz Marc's work of 1913, as well (see "Fate of the Animals"). From
1910-12, Kandinsky had struggled to make a complete break with the
objective world, realizing in the end that "the object harms my
painting." Though trained in the logic of law, Kandinsky wants only to
be guided by creative intuition. In a scientific age, intuition is often
looked on as fuzzy thinking; Kandinsky's book is an important
theoretical text for making an argument that the intuitive is a valid
position of knowledge in its own right. Kandinsky would return to
Russia, his homeland, during the war. When Russia has its own
revolution in 1917, Kandinsky becomes the director of the Russian
museum system; during this short-lived period--the Heroic Period of
Vasily Kandinsky. Improvisation No. 30 Communism--Russia will emerge as the most progressive country for
(War Like Theme) 1913 abstract art in all the world. In the 1920s, Kandinsky returns to
oil on canvas 43 x 43" Chicago AI Germany and joins the faculty at the Bauhaus, where his work begins
to take on more of a geometric hard-edge; the book he writes in 1926,
"Point and Line to Plane," suggests a different logic than the earlier
"Concerning the Spiritual in Art," but Kandinsky's art will remain
mystical and abstractly directed his whole career. He ends up in Paris
where he dies in 1944."
(taken entirely from
http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/20thcwebsite/438mid/ah438mid-
Info.00061.html)
"His inclination to spirituality must have seemed outdated, as must

have his great reluctance to embrace the political and ideological
project of the Bolshevik party as his own. For Malevich, Kandinsky
was just a refined and uninteresting German. For young and fiercely
Bolshevik constructivists, like the multitalented Rodchenko and his
energetic wife, Varvara Stepanova, who were both working with
Kandinsky at the Institute for Artistic Culture, he was an old man, still
an artist only in a very outmoded sense. Rodchenko and Stepanova
wanted to create in the social space rather than on the canvas. They
even banned the word that was sacred to Kandinsky: “composition.”
For them, the idea of composition was an anathema: a contemplative
approach that they planned to abolish in favor of more active and
ideological constructivism. And they succeeded.
In late 1921, Kandinsky was forced to resign from his post as the
director of the Institute of Artistic Culture. Very soon, he departed for
Germany. By 1920, the first monograph about him was published in
Germany; and in 1922, Walter Gropius appointed him to his faculty in
Bauhaus. Kandinsky was almost sure that art in Russia had gone a way
that was not exactly his own. There was no Moscow any more, just the

USSR. But Kandinsky did not emigrate, far from it, at least originally.
For a long time he was considered a representative – the representative,
in fact – of the Soviet avant-garde, the one that worked abroad. And
that was how he thought of himself, until 1927, when he had to take
German citizenship: as a Soviet citizen, he would no longer be allowed
to stay abroad or travel. For the same reason he took a French passport
in 1939: to maintain his cosmopolitanism. “National anthems have now
been sung in almost all the countries, but I am content not to be a
singer,” he wrote in 1938, six years before he died in his French exile.
Still, Moscow remained at the core of his universalism, of his synthetic
ideology opposed to artificial separation. “Moscow,” he wrote, is
defined by “the duality, the complexity, the extreme agitation, the
conflict, and the confusion that mark its external appearance and in the
end constitute a unified, individual countenance.”
(www.capitalperspective.ru)

Form: Oil on canvas. some saturated colors.
assymetrical and geometrically abstract.
Iconography: "Composition VIII reflects the

influence of Suprematism and Constructivism
absorbed by Kandinsky while in Russia prior to
his return to Germany to teach at the Bauhaus.
Here, Kandinsky has moved from color to form as
the dominating compositional element. Contrasting
forms now provide the dynamic balance of the
work; the large circle in the upper left plays
against the network of precise lines in the right
portion of the canvas. Note also how Kandinsky
uses different colors within the forms to energize
their geometry: a yellow circle with blue halo
versus blue circle with yellow halo; a right angle
filled with blue and an acute angle colored pink.
The background also works to enhance the
dynamism of the composition. The design does
not appear as a geometrical exercise on a flat
plane, but seems to be taking place in an
undefined space. The layered background colors -
light blue at bottom, light yellow at top and white
in the middle - define this depth. The forms tend
to recede and advance within this depth, creating a
dynamic, push-pull effect."
(http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/)
Context: Kandinsky created a series of these

"Compositions". "Kandinsky viewed the
compositions as major statements of his artistic
ideas. They share several characteristics that
express this monumentality: the impressively large
format, the conscious, deliberate planning of the
Composition VIII
composition, and the transcendence of
1923 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm (55 1/8 x 79 1/8 in);
representation by increasingly abstract imagery.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Just as symphonies define milestones in the career

of a composer, Kandinsky's compositions

represented the culmination of his artistic vision at
a given moment in his career. Regrettably, the first
three compositions were destroyed during World
War II. They are represented in the exhibition by
full-scale, black-and-white photographic
reproductions. One of the strengths of the
exhibition is the assembly of preliminary studies
for most of the works. These were done in oil,
watercolor, ink and pencil.These help convey a
sense of the three lost compositions, but cannot
hope to replace the actual canvasses. The viewer
is left with a profound feeling of loss for the
destroyed works."
(http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/)


Expressionistic Movements
Expressionistic Movements: Life, Death and Anxiety at the turn of the Century

Form: Although
painted in oil on
canvas, the paint
is applied in a
rather thin often
washy manner
which exhibits
little or no
texture. The
composition is
asymmetrical and
the figure of the
robed figure with
the skull is
placed in an
empty field that
stands in stark
comparison to
the group of
figures on the
right side.
The figures are

painted in a
strange
combination of
illusionism and
flat unrealistic
anatomy. There
are passages of
modeled value
which are also in
a formal tension
against the flat
graphic designs
Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1916
of the patterns on
Oil on canvas 178 x 198 cm
the figures'
Private collection, Vienna
clothes.
Stokstad calls him Art Nouveau
or Sezession-stil (Germany) The designs on
Secessionist the clothes vary
in color and form
from harsh
angular crosslike
forms, geometric
shapes such as
triangles and
squares to
rounded
curvilinear
forms.
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/expressionism.html[1/21/2014 3:57:33 PM]

Iconography:
The composition
is designed to
create a tension
between the
figure which
represents death
at left and wields
either a club or
some sort scepter
against the
massed
interwoven
bodies of the
sleeping unaware
figures on the
right.
The types vary

from old, and
young woman, to
mothers and
young well
muscled male
youths. The
patterning of the
clothing is also
meant as a type
of clue as to the
roles each figure
has. Death is
wearing a
cruciform pattern
which could be a
semi-sarcastic or
caustic statement
about religion
and salvation.
Each of the
living figures
seems to be
sporting an
individualistic
pattern whose
hues may be in
accordance with
there
personalities as is
the skin tone of
the male and the
pale females.
Klimt's work in
general and this

in specific
exhibits a rather
"expressionistic"
quality.
According to the
Brittanica,
"Expressionism"
is an,
artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and
responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration,
primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.
In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries,
and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of
modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic
and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual
crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later
of France.
More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a number of German artists, as
well as Austrian, French, and Russian ones, who became active in the years before World War I and
remained so throughout much of the interwar period.
The roots of the German Expressionist school lay in the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and
James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885-1900 evolved a highly personal painting style. These
artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes,
to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory
intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective
outlooks or states of mind.

Context: According the Brittanica,

Gustave Klimt, b. July 14, 1862, Vienna, Austria d. Feb. 6, 1918, Vienna
Austrian painter and founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Sezession.
After studying at the Vienna School of Decorative Arts, Klimt in 1883 opened an independent studio
specializing in the execution of mural paintings. His early work was typical of late 19th-century academic
painting, as can be seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the
Kunsthistorisches Museum.
In 1897 Klimt's mature style emerged, and he founded the Vienna Sezession, a group of painters who
revolted against academic art in favour of a highly decorative style similar to Art Nouveau. Soon
thereafter he painted three allegorical murals for the ceiling of the University of Vienna auditorium that
were violently criticized; the erotic symbolism and pessimism of these works created such a scandal that
the murals were rejected. His later murals, the "Beethoven Frieze" (1902; Österreichische Gallery, Vienna)
and the murals (1909-11) in the dining room of the Stoclet House, Brussels, are characterized by precisely
linear drawing and the bold and arbitrary use of flat, decorative patterns of colour and gold leaf. Klimt's
most successful works include "The Kiss" (1908; Österreichische Gallery) and a series of portraits he did
of fashionable Viennese matrons, such as "Frau Fritza Riedler" (1906; Österreichische Gallery) and "Frau
Adele Bloch-Bauer" (1907; Österreichische Gallery). In these works he treats the human figure without
shadow and heightens the lush sensuality of skin by surrounding it with areas of flat, highly ornamental,
and brilliantly composed areas of decoration.

Form: This image shares in many of the same qualities as

Death and Life. Although painted in oil on canvas, the paint is
applied in a rather thin often washy manner which exhibits little
or no texture. The composition is rather central and static but
the filed of flowers in the foreground and the bending pose of
the figures grants it a rather asymmetrical quality.
Again here the figures are painted in a strange combination of

illusionism and flat unrealistic anatomy. There are passages of
modeled value which are also in a formal tension against the
flat graphic designs of the patterns on the figures' clothes.
The designs on the clothes for the male figure are angular
boxlike forms as opposed to the rounded curvilinear forms of
the female figure's clothes. The same contrasts appear in the
skin tones, the female is pale whereas the male is dark. This
seems very similar to the depictions of male and female figures
in Egyptian Art as well as in the murals at Knossos.
Iconography: The poses of the figures can be read immediately

as a kiss, however, many of my students have noticed that the
female's head seems bent back in an uncomfortable angle and
to some she seems to be being accosted rather than kissed.
Other students have read this as a passionate willing liaison.
The pose, skin tone and patterns on the fabrics seem to conform
with stereo types concerning male and female roles. The pose
of the male is more aggressive while the female's pose is at the
very least the receptor of his advances. Traditionally in many
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-8 cultures males are depicted as darker than females. Henry
oil on canvas, 5'10"x6' Sayre, in his text book A World of Art comments that males'
Vienna National Museum bodies are often depicted as angular and square while the
Stokstad calls him Art Nouveau female form is often depicted with more curved line. The
or Sezession-stil (Germany) patterns of the figure's garments seem conform to Sayre's and
Secessionist societies' views that woman are softer and rounder while the
male body is more angular.
Context: An interesting element in these works, and my own

theory, is that Klimt was heavily influenced by the
developments made in the fabric/weaving and printmaking
industries. It is possible to make the connection that thanks to
industrialization, textile design and the creation of brightly
colored and printed fabrics may have been a primary
inspiration for Klimt.
Form: Since this painting is both
representational and also rather expressionist in
it's rendering many of the forms are hard to
decipher. The symmetrical composition is
arranged in three bands.
In the foreground of the image, rendered in thin

washy oil paint are several anatomically
inaccurate figures. A smiling female figure
clothed in a pale patterned dress stands near a

flower which may be growing out of the lawn

on which they stand. This figure is balanced in
the right of the composition by a scowling
female figure, dressed in a dark gown with
clasped hands. Both figures bracket a male and
female figure who dance between them. These
females eye sockets appear to be dark hollows.
All the foreground figures' forms are delineated
by the use of radiating contour lines. There is a
Edvard Munch The Dance of Life 1899 small indication of light and shadow in the
rendering of the facial features but the drapery
does not demonstrate and tonal rendering.
Similar figures dance on the lawn in the
midground. Although it is rather hard to make
out, in the background is an image of the sea
with the moon reflected in it.
Iconography: The almost childlike drawing and

rendering of forms in Munch's work is almost
equally reflected by his rather unsophisticated
iconography. As the title implies, this painting
renders the artist's anxieties concerning the
transient nature of life. For Munch, (who many
of his family was sick and or had died) this
image represent the scary nature of life as a
waltz that is almost out of control. For Munch
(who probably needed prozac or paxil) we
dance through life in scary nocturnal
environment perched between life and death.
Context: A colleague once related how that in many of the Northern countries in Europe, that often summer is so short
that when the weather is warm enough great parties with dancing and music take place out of doors at all hours of the
day and night to enjoy the weather. It is possible that Munch is using such events as a point of departure for his
imagery.

Edvrad Munch b. Dec. 12, 1863,

Löten, Nor.d. Jan. 23, 1944,
Ekely, near Oslo
Norwegian painter and
printmaker whose intensely
evocative treatment of
psychological themes greatly
influenced German
Expressionism in the early 20th

century. His painting "The

Scream" (1893; see photograph
"The Scream," tempera and

casein on cardboard by Edvard
Munch, 1893; in the
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo...) can be
seen as a symbol of modern
man's spiritual anguish.
Early years.
Munch was born into a middle-
class family that was plagued
with ill health. His mother died
when he was 5, his eldest sister
when he was 14, both of
tuberculosis--the latter event
being recalled in his first
masterpiece, "The Sick Child"
(1885-86). Munch's father and
brother also died when he was
still young, while another sister
developed mental illness.
"Illness, insanity and death," as
he said, "were the black angels
that kept watch over my cradle
and accompanied me all my life."
Munch showed a flair for

drawing at an early age but
received little formal training. An
important factor in his artistic
development was the Christiania
Bohème, a circle of writers and
artists in Christiania, as Oslo was
then called. Its members were
characterized by a belief in free
love and a general opposition to
Edvard Munch The Scream 1893 bourgeois narrow-mindedness.
One of the older painters in the
circle, Christian Krohg, gave
Munch both instruction and
encouragement. But Munch soon
outgrew the prevailing naturalist
aesthetic in Christiania, partly as
a result of his assimilation of
French Impressionism after a trip
to Paris in 1889 and his contact
with the work of the
Postimpressionist painters Paul
Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec from about 1890.


Artistic maturity.
Munch's own deeply original style crystallized
in about 1892. The flowing, tortuous use of line
in his new paintings was similar to that of
contemporary Art Nouveau, but Munch used
line not as decoration but as a vehicle for
profound psychological revelation. The outraged
incomprehension of Norwegian critics was
echoed by their counterparts in Berlin when
Munch exhibited a large number of his
paintings there in 1892 at the invitation of the
Union of Berlin Artists. The violent
emotionalism and unconventional imagery of
his paintings created a bitter controversy. The
scandal, however, helped make his name known
throughout Germany, from where his reputation
spread internationally. Munch lived mainly in
Berlin in 1892-95 and then in Paris in 1896-97,
and he continued to move around extensively
until he settled in Norway in 1910.
Paintings of love and death.

At the heart of Munch's achievement is his
series of paintings on love and death. Its
original nucleus was formed by six pictures
exhibited in 1893, and the series had grown to
22 works by the time it was first exhibited under
the title "Frieze of Life" at the Berlin Secession
in 1902. Munch constantly rearranged these
paintings, and if one had to be sold, he would
make another version of it. Thus in many cases
there are several painted versions, in addition to
prints based on the same images. Though the
Frieze draws deeply on personal experience, its
themes are universal: it is not about particular
men or women but about man and woman in
general, and about the human experience of the
great elemental forces of nature. Seen in
sequence, an implicit narrative emerges of
love's awakening, blossoming, and withering,
followed by despair and death.
Love's awakening is shown in "The Voice"

(1893), where on a summer night a girl standing
among trees is summoned more by an inner
voice than by any sounds from a boat on the sea
behind her. Compositionally, this is one of
Munch, The Vampire 1895 several paintings in the Frieze in which the
winding horizontal of the coastline is
counterpoised with the verticals of trees,
figures, or the pillarlike reflection across the sea
of sun or moon. Love's blossoming is shown in

"The Kiss" (1892), in which the faces of the

kissing man and woman melt so completely
into each other that neither retains any
individual features. An especially powerful
image of the surrender, or transcendence, of
individuality is "Madonna" (1894-95), which
shows a naked woman with her head thrown
back in ecstasy, her eyes closed, and a red halo-
like shape above her flowing black hair. This
may be understood as the moment of
conception, but there is more than a hint of
death in the woman's beautiful face. In Munch's
art, woman is an "other" with whom union is
desperately desired, yet feared because it
threatens the destruction of the creative ego.
Munch's acute awareness of the suffering

caused by love is clear from such titles as
"Melancholy" (c. 1892-93), "Jealousy" (1894-
95), and "Ashes" (1894). If isolation and
loneliness, always present in his work, are
especially emphasized in these pictures, they are
equally so in "Death in the Sick Room" (1893-
Munch Madonna 1902 95), one of many paintings about death. Here
the focus is not on the dying child, who is not
even visible, but on the living, each wrapped in
their own experience of grief and unable to
communicate or offer each other any
consolation. The picture's power is heightened
by the claustrophobically enclosed space and by
the steeply rushing perspective of the floor.
The same type of dramatic perspective is used

in "The Scream," or "The Cry" (1893), which is
almost certainly Munch's most famous painting
(see photograph
"The Scream," tempera and casein on cardboard

by Edvard Munch, 1893; in the
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo...). It depicts a panic-
stricken creature, simultaneously corpselike and
reminiscent of a sperm or fetus, whose contours
are echoed in the swirling lines of the blood-red
sky. In this painting anxiety is raised to a
cosmic level, ultimately related to that intuition
of death and the void which was to be central to
Existentialism.


Munch's massive output of graphic art--consisting of etchings, dry point, lithographs, and
woodcuts--began in 1894. The principal attraction of printmaking was that it enabled him to
communicate his message to a much larger number of people, but it also afforded him
exciting opportunities for experimentation. Munch's prints closely resemble his paintings in
both style and subject matter. Munch's art had evident affinities with the poetry and drama of
his day, and interesting comparisons can be made with the work of the dramatists Henrik
Ibsen and August Strindberg, both of whose portraits he painted.
Later years.
Munch suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908-09, and afterward his art became more positive
and extroverted but hardly ever regained its previous intensity. Among the few exceptions is
his haunting "Self-Portrait: The Night Wanderer" (c. 1930), one of a long series of self-
portraits he painted throughout his life. An especially important commission, which marked
the belated acceptance of his importance in Norway, was for the Oslo University Murals
(1909-16), the centrepiece of which was a vast painting of the sun, flanked by allegorical
images. Both landscapes and men at work provided subjects for Munch's later paintings. This
increased emphasis on the outside world may well have reflected a greater personal maturity,
but artistically Munch was no longer in the vanguard. It was principally through his work of
the 1890s, in which he gave form to mysterious and dangerous psychic forces, that he made
such a crucial contribution to modern art. Munch bequeathed his estate and all the paintings,
prints, and drawings in his possession to the city of Oslo, which erected the Munch Museum
in 1963. Many of his finest works are in the National Gallery (Nasjonalgalleriet) in Oslo.


lesson_fauves
Beastly Color! "Les Fauves" (Wild Beasts).

Form: Oil on canvas, broad strokes of thick impastos, using non- local color, and
visible brush strokes. Vivid, saturated colors. "He has used color alone to describe
the image. Her oval face is bisected with a slash of green and her coiffure, purpled
and top-knotted, juts against a frame of three jostling colors. Her right side repeats
the vividness of the intrusive green; on her left, the mauve and orange echo the
colors of her dress. This is Matisse's version of the dress, his creative essay in
harmony." (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/matisse/green-stripe/)
Iconography: Here the subject matter wasn't so much his wife as it was playing eith
color. With this he's moving away from representation and is now playing with the
idea of color. "The green stripe down the center of Amélie Matisse's face acts as an
artificial shadow line and divides the face in the conventional portraiture style, with
a light and a dark side, Matisse divides the face chromatically, with a cool and
warm side. The left side of the face seems to echo the green in the picture's right,
the corresponding is true for the right side of the face, where the pink responds to
the orange on the left. The natural light is translated directly into colors and the
highly visible brush strokes add to the sense of artistic drama."
(matisse.hypermart.net)
Context: "Matisse was born the son of a middle-class family, he studied and began
to practice law. In 1890, however, while recovering slowly from an attack of
appendicitis, he became intrigued by the practice of painting. In 1892, having given
up his law career, he went to Paris to study art formally. His first teachers were
academically trained and relatively conservative; Matisse's own early style was a
conventional form of naturalism, and he made many copies after the old masters.
He also studied more contemporary art, especially that of the impressionists, and he
began to experiment, earning a reputation as a rebellious member of his studio
classes. Matisse's true artistic liberation, in terms of the use of color to render forms
and organize spatial planes, came about first through the influence of the French
painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne and the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh,
whose work he studied closely beginning about 1899. Then, in 1903 and 1904,
Matisse encountered the pointillist painting of Henri Edmond Cross and Paul
Henri Matisse The Green Stripe Signac. Cross and Signac were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes (often
1905 dots or “points”) of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense
oil and tempera on canvas color. Matisse adopted their technique and modified it repeatedly, using broader
strokes. By 1905 he had produced some of the boldest color images ever created,
including a striking picture of his wife, Green Stripe (Madame Matisse) (1905,
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). The title refers to a broad stroke of
brilliant green that defines Madame Matisse's brow and nose. In the same year
Matisse exhibited this and similar paintings along with works by his artist
companions, including Andre Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. Together, the
group was dubbed les fauves (literally, “the wild beasts”) because of the extremes
of emotionalism in which they seemed to have indulged, their use of vivid colors,
and their distortion of shapes."
(matisse.hypermart.net)
"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or
depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a
good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue."~Henri Matisse

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lesson_fauves

Form: Oil on canvas, broad strokes of thick impastos, using non- local color, and
visible brush strokes. Vivid, saturated colors. He used bright, saturated analogous
colors to create the lights and darks, instead of traditional skin tones. The hat itself is
wild and abstract looking, perched precariously atop her head. The composition is
symmetrical, she looks directly over her shoulder at the viewer from the center of
the canvas. "Brisk strokes of colour--blues, greens, and reds--form an energetic,
expressive view of the woman. As always in Matisse's Fauve style, his painting is
ruled by his intuitive sense of formal order". (
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/fauvism/)
Iconography: "The painting exemplifies the fundamental characteristics of fauvism

with its choice of subject (a portrait), energetic paint strokes, and use of unnatural
colors. Madame Matisse’s dress, skin, and feathered hat — as well as the
background — are all portrayed with unrealistic shades of vivid colors applied with
active brushwork." (http://www.matisse-picasso.com/artists/matimages.html) The
portrait wasn't made for just a portraits sake. It was used as a "pretext for pictorial
innovation sometimes leading toward pure abstraction".
Context: "Matisse's portraits are almost always of family, or of friends - people in

his circle, painters, painters wives, musicians, actresses, collectors who had become
friends. There are very few commissioned portraits. And as to his models, it is only
occasionally that he made portraits of them. The family, Mme Matisse and
Marguerite in particular, are like hard driven laboratory assistants. During the crucial
Matisse Woman with the Hat
years 1905/6 his wife is the model for the paintings in which he summarized the
1905
Fauve style, The Hat and The Green Stripe. And it is she again who sits through
oil/canvas 31.75"x 23.5" SF
endless sittings for the great portrait that is his major response to cubism. These
MOMA
paintings mark radical turning points. She had supported him through thick and thin.
These sittings which stretched her nerves to breaking point, and the results of which
brought down storms of ridicule from conservative critics and the ardent support of
critics like Appolinaire, were strenuous tests of her support and understanding."
(Full text at http://www.giotto.org/vasari/portraits.html)
Form: Oil on canvas. Painting done with thick impastos of paint in a very
'painterly' manner, which means that the brush stroke is visible. This piece was
done in hues of blues, greens, and red. The composition is symmetrical, and
the colors used are non-local.
Iconography: "The compulsive, restless alluvia ornament of the background,

recalling the work of mental patients, is for some physicians an evidence that
the painting was done in a psychotic state. But the self-image of the painter
shows a masterly control and power of observation, a mind perfectly capable
of integrating the elements of its chosen activity. The background reminds us
of the rhythms of The Starry Night, which the portrait resembles also in the
dominating bluish tone of the work. The flowing, pulsing forms of the
background, schemata of sustained excitement, are not just ornament, although
related to the undulant forms of the decorative art of the 1890's; they are
unconfined by a fixed rhythm or pattern and are a means of intensity, rather,
an overflow of the artist's feelings to his surroundings. Beside the powerful
modeling of the head and bust, so compact and weighty, the wall pattern
appears a pale, shallow ornament. Yet the same rhythms occur in the figure
and even in the head, which are painted in similar close packed, coiling, and
wavy lines. As we shift our attention from the man to his surroundings and
back again, the analogies are multiplied; the nodal points, or centres, in the

lesson_fauves
background ornament begin to resemble more the eyes and ear and buttons of
the figure. In all this turmoil and congested eddying motion, we sense the
extraordinary firmness of the painter's hand. The acute contrasts of the reddish
beard and the surrounding blues and greens, the probing draughtsmanship, the
liveness of the tense features, the perfectly ordered play of breaks, variations,
and continuities, the very stable proportioning of the areas of the work - all
these point to a superior mind, however disturbed and apprehensive the artist's
feelings."
Van Gogh Self-Portait September Context: Vincent VanGogh is famous for his self portraits, he painted 24
1889 during a two year stay in paris 1886-88. . He has done many over the years, all
oil/canvas 65"x54"cm chronicling his unstable state of mind and descent into madness and
Saint-Rémy, Paris depression. Van Gogh, as a mentally disturbed individual, seemed committed
Musèe d'Orsay to painting the world the way that he experienced it in his mind, not the way it
truly was. His self portraits are often disturbing and bizarre, and share a
glimpse into his own distorted self perception. "He sold only one painting
during his lifetime (Red Vineyard at Arles; Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and
was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his fame grew
rapidly thereafter. His influence on Expressionism, Fauvism and early
abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-
century art. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his
ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times,
providing the most auspicious material for the 20th-century vogue in
romanticized psychological biography."
(http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/)

Form: This painting is done with a very saturated color-
pallete, it has a flattened picture plane and little attention is
paid to concepts of proportion or depth. Has a feel of
graphic design.
Iconography: Matisse was interested in making things

'happy'. He wanted his paintings to show the joy he felt for
life, so they are often whimsical and filled with patterns and
scenes of everyday life, the thing that he enjoyed the most.
"Matisse also limits his perspective in this work. He makes
elisions in the line around the table, frames the chair, the
window, and the little house in an innovative manner by
cutting them off, and encloses two of the planes, the green
and the blue in a window."
(http://www.mystudios.com/art/modern/matisse/matisse-
red-room.html)

lesson_fauves
Context: Matisse was often sick at various times throughout

his career, but it did not seem to dampen his passion for
creating. This painting started out as 'Harmony in Green',
then it became 'Harmony in Blue'. The canvas was actually
Matisse, Harmony in Red (La Desserte), 1908
Oil on canvas 180 x 200 cm The Hermitage Museum, St. painted entirely blue to begin with, and then he decided it
was better as 'Harmony in Red'. This may be a motivating
Petersburg
factor in the choice of red used, as it had to cover a whole
lot of blue without it peeking through.As he gets older, his
works simplify.
Form: An early form of stencil, these images are actually
cut-out shapes. The colorful cut-out shapes known as
pochoir.
Iconography: "The two principal themes to be found in

Jazz are the noise and excitement of the circus (the series
was originally named Le Cirque, but Matisse changed it
before publication) and the syncopated rhythms of popular
jazz music. In the The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown the
horse is the only distinct figure; the equestrienne is implied
by her fan shaped skirt, overlapping the horse's flank, and
the clown by his vibrant costume in green, black, and
yellow." (www.museum.cornell.edu)
Context: "Matisse's twenty cut-outs called Jazz, depicting

circus scenes, folklore subjects, life in Parisian music
halls, and the artist's own travel experiences. It was in the
early 1940s, when he was confined to his bed for most of
the day, that Matisse began to pursue the cut-out as an art
form. His assistants painted opaque watercolor onto white
sheets of paper, which Matisse in turn cut into a variety of
shapes, often retaining both the primary form (the
Matisse, The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown,
"positive") and the cut-away piece (the "negative"),
Plate V from the Jazz series, 1947
arranging them in vibrant juxtapositions. He pinned and
Color pochoir. 25 5/8 x 16 9/16 in. (65 x 42 cm)
re-pinned the pieces to the wall of his studio until he was
finally satisfied with the overall harmony of the
composition."
(www.museum.cornell.edu). Matisse is once again
focusing on what he observes, what is lighthearted, what
makes him feel "happy." He is also going beyond painting

lesson_fauves
and pioneering new ways to create his images.

Form: The colorful cut-out shapes known as pochoir. Gouche on paper. It was also
screen printed and used as an illustration for a book entitled "Jazz".
Iconography: "In his Jazz series, Matisse used prepared, gouache-painted papers of
various vibrant colors to compose collages that related to his memories of the circus,
popular stories, myths and journeys he took. They are very personal expressions of his
imagination, feelings, and inspirations." (www.neworleansonline.com.)
Context: The story of Icarus is an old one, in which a man and his son wanting to fly
to escape a certain doom, fashions wings for his son and his self with wax and
feathers. The father warns him not to fly too close to the son. But Icarus, becoming
too confident and perhaps rebellious, flies to close to the sun, the wax melts, the wings
fall apart, and he falls to the ground far below. Here, Matisse has Icarus falling against
a night sky filled with stars, and the figure looks more joyful than death bound. This
may have been Matisse's' way of changing the story to make the context one of
happiness and salvation rather than death and defeat. Being confined to his bed did
little to dampen his love for life or the energy of social events such as the circus or
musical performances. Matisse was determined to not allow politics or social mores
affect the message of his work. "Like many artists of his time, Matisse took an active
interest in creating artwork to accompany written texts. The resulting illustrated books
Matisse Icarus 1947
are works of art in their own right and exemplify his style. Matisse's Jazz, printed in
1947, is such a book."
(www.neworleansonline.com)


Roman Art
Roman Art and Architecture: Classic Roman Period Art

Form: This lifesize naturalistic figure, which stands in contrapposto, is also realistic. The individualism of the figure's face and the portrait busts
he holds is a bit of a departure from the idealism of the Classic Greek era. Even during the Hellenistic period of Greek art, the figures were still
extremely stylized. In this case, the idea of a realistic likeness warts, balding, and wrinkles are recorded accurately. This kind of realism is
referred to as verism.
This sculpture also incorporates as part of its initial design the use of supports, such as the plant form that supports the bust in the figure's right
hand and the robes that support his left. This is a bit different from the Roman marble copies of Greek bronze originals in which the supports
were added as afterthoughts to the initial design to make up for the marble's lack of tensile strength.
Iconography: This sculpture is a portrait but is also meant to show the lineage (ancestry) of the Roman patrician (leading citizen or founding
father. Literally comes from pater: father). By holding effigies of his ancestors he is showing his importance and therefore it is fairly important
to make sure that the likenesses express the character of the individual.
Context: The culture of the Roman Empire was fairly different from the Greeks, but much of their plays, music, art, education, and way of
representing themselves were based on the Greek culture. Rome was originally founded as a republic which is a fairly democratic form of
government similar to and somewhat based on Greek forms of government. In a republic, an individual's rights as well as accomplishments can
often distinguish them. Paradoxically, the accomplishments of one's family can also distinguish the individual. This might explain the increase
of realism while still using some of the Greek schemas or conventions for sculpture.
Also see Stokstad's section Roman Funerary Practices
Some of the specific artistic forms and processes borrowed from the Greeks were,

the wet drapery style- drapery appears to hang on sculptures as if wetted. This shows off the anatomy underneath the cloth.
contrapposto- the subtle shift of weight at the hips that gives sculptures a more lifelike appearance.
A Roman Patrician with the Greek orders
Busts
of his Ancestors,
late 1st C BCE
Marble, lifesize
Classic Roman

Form: The veristic style of the Roman Patrician above is also expressed in Roman portrait busts. According to Gardner, the Romans, unlike the
Greeks, believed that a sculpture of the head alone was enough to fulfill the requirements of creating a portrait of an individual. The Greeks
believed that one needed the whole body for an accurate portrait. Nevertheless, in each of these busts, every feature is recorded faithfully, but,
the age of the sitter and the verism of the portrait was probably influenced somewhat by the gender of the sitter.
The materials also varied in portrait sculpture. Marble and cast bronze were often used. Often the scultures were polychromed as well. In the
case of some sculptures, and even cheaper material, such as terra cotta- was used and then painted with encaustic. (Terra cotta is fired clay
often with a bit of sand or gravel mixed in.) The use of clay, in which both an additive and subtractive process can be used was probably
convenient because with this form of sculpting mistakes can be fixed.
Iconography and Context: At the start of 200 B.C. individuality was increasing. Sculptures were often produced to show the power and wealth
of an individual such as a statesman or a military leader. The Roman Empire had representational form of government run by the Senate. The
Senate system was powerful, however, some military leaders "ceasers" who had distinguished themselves in battle and through political coups,
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Roman Art
became emperors who considered themselves living gods. Often power was passed from relative to relative and through generations. Sculptures
were made of these family members almost as a form of ancestor worship.
Head of a Roman Patrician Interestingly enough these sculptures also express how the Romans viewed male and female roles in their society. Often portraits were made to
from Ortricoli, show the men as older and distinguished, at a time in their lives when they were most powerful. Women are almost never depicted as aged.
c75-50 BCE Marble They are mostly depicted as young and beautiful. Since art was mainly produced and commissioned for a male audience it is possible to draw
approx. 14" the conclusion that art reflects a dominantly male view of the world. This is often referred to by art historians and scholars as the "male gaze."
Museo Torlonia, Rome
Classic Roman

Roman Art
Head of an unknown
Roman.
terra cotta with traces of
color. 1st C BCE
Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston
Classic Roman
Young Flavian Woman. c 90 CE marble, height 25" Museo Capitolino, Classic Roman

Roman Art
Portrait of Augustus as General.

from Primaporta Rome, Italy
c20 B.C., 6'8''.
Vatican Museum, Rome
Classic Roman
Form: This idealized portrait is possibly a copy of a bronze original. The statue stands six feet eight inches tall and is made of
white marble. The statue depicts a male figure wearing armor and some drapery, with his right arm raised. The figure carries a
bronze spear or staff in his left hand. The texture of the hair and skin mimic the texture of real hair and skin. Augustus stands in
contrapposto, appearing to be stepping forward with most of his weight resting on his right hip. Attached to his right leg is a small
dolphin with a winged baby on its back.
Iconography: This sculpture presents a more realistic portrait of Augustus than Greek portrait sculpture did however he is still
idealized because he is the ideal. The unnatural height of the statue is symbolic of the god-like status of Augustus. The figure's
armor is a symbol of his role as a military leader. His raised right arm with an extended index finger appears as if he is gesturing or
lecturing. According to Professor Farber, this is "called ad locutio gesture that traditionally conveyed the power of speech in
Roman art." This is symbolic of his abilities as a leader and a speaker. The bronze staff in its left hand is an icon that signifies his
status as a leader. The statue appears to be stepping forward and most of the weight appears to be resting on his right hip. This pose
referred to as contrapposto was first developed in classical Greece. The use of contrapposto represents a legacy inherited from the
classic Greek culture. Engaged against the right leg is a small dolphin with a winged baby on its back. The dolphin is a maritime
reference and the small winged figure on its back, may represent winged victory. The two icons when juxtaposed against one
another may represent victory at sea. However, some interpretations of this iconography have suggested that the winged figure is
Cupid and therefore represents Augustus relationship as a descendent of the gods.
Context: Augustus Caesar (1st century B.C.) was a dictator who considered himself a God. He subverted the Roman republican,
democratic system, but pretended it still existed by granting the senate some power. This statue is probably one of the copies that
was placed as public art in many town squares as a work of political propaganda. Augustus waged an extremely profitable series of
wars and was able to extend the Roman Empire's borders as well as control the Senate. The unnatural height of the statue is
symbolic of the god-like status of Augustus because the average height was around five feet. His raised right arm symbolic of his
abilities as a master orator refers to an earlier statue, the Aulus Metellus. The raised arm, a symbol of rhetorical power as a speaker
is combined with the bronze staff and armor are references to the abilities that any Roman leader should possess. In some ways,
this is the originating idea of our conception of the "Renaissance Man" of the 1500's. The references to the Aulus Metellus statue,
contrapposto pose, invented by the classical Greek culture, and the Cupid, that represents Augustus as a descendent of the gods,
grant both the Augustus Primaporta and Augustus authority based in time honored traditions.


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Roman Art

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Colosseum, (Flavian Amphitheater) Form: One of the major innovations in this building is the technology used to create it. A combination of complex arches (see
Rome Italy 70-80 CE Stokstad for more in depth description) and concrete which is a building material which consists primarily of lime, cement, sand
Classic Roman (pozzolana), and water with rubble mixed into it and as such is very inexpensive and easy to work with. Since concrete can be
easily molded or poured into a durable and strong stonelike substance, it was also used to create the arches and the internal filling
of the walls.
A an excellent student, Sue Che wrote,

with the invention of concrete, the Romans were much more daring in creating new styles in construction. They came
out of the shell of ‘post and lintel’ and started with simple arches like the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamian. The
simple arches such as the triumphal arches could not satisfy their creative minds, the Romans extended the arches and
got the barrel vaults. To add more interests to the vaults, they were placed across or next to each other and created the
groin vaults and the arcades. Finally, the easily bored Romans put all the ideas and efforts together and built this giant
oval shaped amphitheater called the Colosseum. The whole structure was designed with arches, connected vaults and
arcades. The outer façade is tiers of arches all the way around. When you go inside, barrel vaults and cross vaults
support the tiers of seats for the audiences. It is truly amazing what the Romans can do when you put concrete in their
hands.
Stokstad points out that it existed before but that the Romans perfected it and without many Roman building would not have been
able to be created. (Before you do the worksheet, make sure you read Stokstad for a more complete description of concrete and the
different forms and ways it was used.)

The exterior walls were of a creamy colored calcium carbonate material called travertine, the inner walls of siliceous
rock deposits called tufa, and the vaulting of the ramped seating area of monolithic concrete (for support). The fourth
floor was embellished with Corinthian pilasters (ornamental) which carried wooden masts from which an awning was
suspended to shield spectators from the sun. Composite are on top of the pilasters and are more visually and though
makes the building look more taller. Marble and wooden seats accommodating up to about 50,000 spectators surrounded
an arena measuring 280 ft by 175 ft. The floor of the arena was made of heavy wooden planks: chambers below the
floor housed animals for the games.
quoted directly from:
http://www.dsu.edu/departments/liberal/artwork/Thesis/text/ArtH1-07.html
Its construction was started by Vespasian in AD 69 and inaugurated in AD 80. This Amphitheater was very important

Roman Art
because of arch technology. This building had four stories and its arches were framed by superimposed orders: Doric,
Ionic, and Corinthian or Composite. This orders were used to adorned several stories of a building, they were normally
in an ascending sequence from heaviest to most slender.
Doric order was assigned to the ground floor of the building,

Ionic order to the middle story, and
Corinthian order to the top story.
Iconography and Context: According to the Britannica,

"CONSTRUCTION OF THE COLOSSEUM WAS BEGUN SOMETIME BETWEEN AD 70 and 72 during the reign of
Vespasian; the structure was officially dedicated in AD 80 by Titus in a ceremony that included 100 days of games.
Later, in AD 82, Domitian completed the work by adding the uppermost story." The Colosseum was used by the
Roman Empire to entertain the masses of people who lived in the city. Gladiators were often prisoners of war or
criminals. Sometimes gladiators would fight one another and other times they would fight ravenous beasts. Enemies or
individuals who were perceived as threats (a good portion were Christians) to the Roman Empire sometimes were
thrown in the in the ring with wild animals. This was often done dramatically by utilizing elevators and trap doors that
would raise the animals into the arena. Sometimes these atrocities were committed while a massive water powered organ
made music that accompanied the events. This is one of the reasons why organ music does not become popular in the
Catholic Church until around 1500.

Pantheon. AD 118-125 Art 103A Term Paper
architect was possibly Emperor Hadrian Rome, Sara E. Foster
Rome, Italy Pantheon: the unknown truth
Classic Roman
Form, Formal, Physical
The Pantheon is noted as one of the best-preserved monuments because of the building and landscape
renovations that have been done throughout the centuries. It is surrounded by some of the original baths
built by Agrippa as well as a few smaller temples by Hadrian and a long courtyard that leads to a
church at the far end. According to William Mac Donald, the author of The Pantheon: design, meaning
and progeny, the Pantheon has three major parts to its structure - the porch, the structural niches and the
domed rotunda. The front of the building is the large porch with a series of columns that act as support
and design. The columns throughout the monument were constructed of carved granite using the
Corinthian order that was originally developed but the Greeks for interior use but soon afterward also
used for the exterior of temples and other monuments. The outer perimeter walls of the entirety are 20
feet thick that raise nearly 75 feet high. These walls were put together using concrete and wood
materials so that the architect and design crew could cover a large amount of interior space and create
vast apparent ceilings. The dome rotunda is 143 feet in diameter and 143 feet in height supported by a
circular wall known as the drum. The drum is deigned with block coffers that service as both esthetic
and structural purposes. Structurally the coffers are used as a compression system: the building is
stabilized by unabsorbed weight that is properly placed. There are a total of 143 coffers in 28 rows. The
Roman Art
dome consists of 9/10 th concrete that has been poured over an immersed hemispherical wooden form.
Both the interior and exterior walls are believed to be finished with alabaster porphyry or marble for
esthetic purposes. Coffers also give the human eye an illusion of the dome being lightweight and having
depth. To show the richness and importance of this culture here are a few other examples of the
materials used to create such a masterpiece. The floors were covered with a wide range of colored
marble designed in geometric shapes, the doorframes were made of bronzed metal and the original roof
was glided gold plates that were eventually replaced with lead plating.
Icon, Iconography, Symbol
The true iconography of the Pantheon is still questioned today but we do know that it is represented as
a great spiritual building. When Hadrian created the building it was a house for all gods, which meant it
was a non-religious monument. It housed the twelve major gods and goddesses: Jupiter, Juno, Neptune,
Minerva, Apollo, Diana, Mars, Venus, Vulcan, Vesta, Mercury and Ceres who all represent something
of good/bad nature in the world (Ebscohost). These gods are houses in the dome rotunda, which
presents the visitor with a sense of emptiness and apotheosis, a feeling one could float upward to escape
and commune with the gods. The circular design of the monument originally descends from two
sources: religious buildings and tombs. They were never intended for internal visitor use, only external
viewing because they questioned the safety of the structure and it was a sacred place that only priest
could enter.
Context, Social, Historical
According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, the cities had public squares that were surrounded by
buildings such as the Pantheon. The Roman’s built these to accommodate the vast expansion of the
Roman Empire. When designing the Pantheon they were highly influenced by the Greek and Etruscan
construction using arches and post and lintel; however the dome rotunda was primarily a Roman
invention (Ebscohost). The argument still stands on who the buildings architect and creator really was -
was it Marcus Agrippa or Hadrian? Before the Pantheon was built an earlier temple (in honor of the
Anthony and Cleopatra defeat) accompanied the site which was built by Agrippa in 27 BC and burnt
down in 110 BC. Then between 125 –128 CE Hadrian and still an unknown architect built the
Pantheon. Historians do believe there was an actual architect that helped him because at that time
Hadrian was just an amateur at what he did. Why then is the creator unknown? It is not clear whether
or not Hadrian kept the originally porch and roof or if he recreated the original which says the
following, "MÀGRIPPA`L`F`COS`TERTIVM`FECIT –Marcus Agrippa the son of Lucius, three times
consul, built this (Mac Donald, pg.13)." Though it is clear that Hadrian constructed the monumental
dome rotunda that makes the building so grand. When the Pantheon, a temple for all gods, was finished
it was used to house the twelve Olympian gods but in 609 CE Pope Boniface IV dedicated it as the
Christian church of St. Mary and the Martyrs. From that point in history that event brought the
destruction of all of pagan temples to this day.

Roman Art
Roman Art in Pompeii

Pompeii 79 CE:
Context: Pompeii- on August 24, 79 AD a volcano on Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried two entire
Roman resort towns near the coast under thousands of tons of volcanic ash. Poison gas was sprayed
into the air and as it went down the heated gas killed all the people. The bodies which were covered
with volcanic ash were destroyed but left a type of fossil impression in the dried ash and lava. The
result was that the town and some of its people were completely preserved for archeologists and
historians to uncover later. From the remains of the city we know how the people looked like, how they
lived and how they did business. They had organized business and residential districts and paved
streets. They even had hot and cold running water. The houses that were preserved by the ashes have
left us with a good idea of what kind of lifestyle these people might have lead.


Roman Art
These plaster forms were made by pouring plaster into the air pockets created by the bodies of Pompeiian who were covered with
volcanic ash. The bodies disintegrated or burned and left hollows. Some of the gestures and expressions are so life like that we
can almost guess as to what they were thinking and we can actually see some figures protecting other figures.

Form: The city was walled and
laid out in a logical grid line plan
that was divided into several zoned
sections that were defined by the
main roads named the upper and
lower decumanus and cardo
maxiumus. These names were
invented by modern archeologists.
The sections were zoned as our

own cities are today, with a forum
(civic areas and shopping centers,)
residential quadrants, entertainment
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areas with theaters and

amphitheaters and combined areas.
Iconography: One would think that

a city plan would not really be
symbolic of anything but on closer
inspection there is a lot of
symbolism. The city plan is
evolved from both Greek and
Etruscan culture's plans and in this
way indicates that the Romans
emulated them and saw themselves
as heirs to these cultures.
The triumphal arch (Herculaneum

Gate) which served as the entrance
to the town was basically a useless
arch that was there as a symbol.
The use of the arch and the
symbolic gate it covered was a way
of expressing just how Roman they
were.
The city plans also install order on

the plan of the city which
represents the Roman mission in
the world which they saw as
civilizing the barbarians and
bringing order to the world. It also
segregated, the way they spent their
time and divided the rich from the
poor, the sacred from the profane.
Form: The cobbled city streets had drainage ditches, sidewalks and were laid out in a standard size because axle lengths were
standardized throughout the empire. The standardized sizes allowed the installation of walkways (the three stones across the street)
that would allow pedestrians to walk above the street when it was filled with rain and avoid the horse poop and mud. The stones
also acted as a kind of "speed bump" because the carts would have to slow down to enable themselves to move through the ruts.
Iconography: The cliché "all roads lead to Rome" applies here in the idea that the Romans really believed that a solid civic
infrastructure symbolized order and civilization.
Street in Pompeii with stones for

walking across.

Roman Art

Form: Fresco is a term that literally means "fresh." There are two kinds, buon fresco and fresco secco. This painting painting
is made by coating a wall with plaster and while the wall is still damp, ground up pigments are mixed with water and lime and
painted on the wall. The paint soaks in and literally stains the wall up to a half an inch and becomes permanent. This is called
buon fresco (good fresh). Details with more expensive colors (such as blue made from lapis lazuli) are added with tempera paint
(egg yolks and glue) when the fresco is dry. This is called secco fresco (dry fresh).
This fresco depicts Pompeii's arena which was there version of the Colosseum, where gladiatorial events took place. The
building is rendered with the illusion of space called intuitive perspective and isometric perspective. (This kind of perspective is
not as illusionistic as the linear perspective that is invented during the Renaissance around 1400 CE.)
Brawl in the Pompeii amphitheater,

Iconography: Walls in both public and private homes were often decorated with frescos during the Roman era and it was a
Fresco from House I,3,23 Pompeii
symbol of the person's status to be able to afford such decoration. This fresco is rather like our posters and paintings of sports
c. 60-79 CE 5'7"x6'1"
today and it expresses the importance of such activities in their culture. Usually the gladiators who performed in such games
Naples National Museum
were originally criminals or enemies of the state, however, if they were successful they became heroes of a kind and their careers
Empire Period
were followed by fans.
Context: In 59 CE Pompeii hosted a game in which they competed with their neighbors the Nucerians. A brawl erupted and a
riot ensued which was similar to the soccer riots of today. The riots and loss of life and property were so severe that the central
government issued a decree that Pompeii was forbidden to have gladiatorial games for ten years.
The fresco shows the velarium a cloth awning that protected arenas like this as well as the double set of steps that allowed the
quick entrance and departure of the spectators.

Form: The veristic style of the Roman Patrician above is also expressed in Roman portrait busts. According to Gardner, the Romans, unlike the
Greeks, believed that a sculpture of the head alone was enough to fulfill the requirements of creating a portrait of an individual. The Greeks
believed that one needed the whole body for an accurate portrait. Nevertheless, in each of these busts, every feature is recorded faithfully, but, the

Roman Art
age of the sitter and the verism of the portrait was probably influenced somewhat by the gender of the sitter.
This sculpture was originally part of a larger figure that was hurt or destroyed in an earlier earthquake or eruption. The head was preserved and
placed on a stand however the nose had been broken off. The broken nose was replaced with a bit of plaster to fill in the broken off portion.
Iconography and Context: Portraiture like this was probably valuable in both an economic as well as in more sentimental and familial context and
that would explain why, rather than creating a new sculpture they repaired this one. This sculpture also provides us with a record of one of the
Portrait bust of a Boy catastrophes the people of Pompeii lived with before the final one of 79 CE.
from the
Popidous Family of
Pompeii
before 79 CE
plaster with traces of
encaustic paint
Form: Many of the streets of Pompeii were lined with two story town houses. These homes were made from brick and concrete
which was later veneered with stucco, plaster and even marble. The rooves were made from wood and often had awnings which
jutted out over the sidewalks. The fronts of these buildings usually contained shops that opened out on to the streets. The more
elaborate stores were two level and had windows that opened out above. Located through a short passageway was usually a more
elaborate or expensive dwelling that was the home of a wealthier family. (see the floor plan below or Stokstad figure 6-52)
Iconography: These home/shop organization was integral to and symbolized the economic health that supported the infrastructure
of Rome and its towns. To own such a home in itself demonstrated the wealth and prestige of the landlord. The types of shops
fronting the homes was also up to the discretion of the zoning of the town as well as the homeowner who lived behind the shop.
Context: These houses had hot and cold running water and a plumbing system that ran underneath the house. The center of the
house had an open skylight above the atrium which caught fresh water and was stored in a cistern usually underneath or at the rear
of the house's garden.


Roman Art
Form: The typical atrium style house of Pompeii was fronted by the shops (1). The structure usually
housed a main house and sometimes even an additional ones (7) was rented out. The fauces (latin for
throat) or vestibulum (2) was a thin passageway that led into the atrium (8) in which the an open
skylight above the atrium caught fresh water. A similar open air peristyle courtyard (9) was located
further in and the bedrooms, dining room, bathrooms, kitchen and other service areas radiated out
from. A vegetable garden in addition to the the flower garden provided delicacies such as fresh fruit
and staples such as vegetables.
Context: These atrium style houses were really apartment houses and commercial districts combined
into one structure. As such, they were an incredible investment for the wealthy owner. Not only were
they self sufficient in terms of food, the rental on the shops and additional dwellings often paid for
whatever loans and taxes owed on the complex.
Form: Mosaics were made from small blocks of stone, ceramic tile or glass called tesserae. These blocks were then pushed into either plaster,
for walls, or cement, for floors. The blocks, when placed together combined together like the pixels on a computer screen to make an image.
When one looks at the the images from a distance the blocks of color one next to the other mix because the eye would blend them together.
This is called optical mixing. Depending on the skill of the workman/artisan, the work could be extremely realistic of cartoonish. These were
a particularly durable form of decoration as they were impervious to staining and fading. Further up in this photo you can see the impluvium
(pool) of the atrium.
Iconography/Context: The location and subject of this mosaic makes a lot of sense. The image of the dog in the front hallway is apotropaic
and roughly the equivalent of an alarm sticker on a window or "beware of dog sign." In fact some mosaics are accompanied with the latin
"cave canum" which means literally translates "beware of dog" and indicates a high degree of literacy if they expected a thief to be able to read
the warning.
Mosaic in the Fauces of an
Atrium
Style House.

Roman Art
The next stop in the house was the atrium. The latin word for heart or chamber is atrium and this room is where the
water was gathered from an opening in the ceiling and then collected further back in the house in a cistern. In the
center of the atrium was the impluvium or pool that collected the water. In the image on the left you can see a
fountain and a sink.
This room, as almost every room in the house, had a mosaic floor, and frescoes on all the walls. Depending on the
home, some rooms even had special themes and addressed specific stories.
This room is where a guest could stop and wash up before meeting with the occupants. Bathing was an important
Two atriums from houses in Pompeii
part of Roman culture and there were even bathrooms with hot and cold running water. The pipes that moved the
water were made from a soft lead which in itself is a bit of health hazard and probably caused the early death of some
of the wealthier citizens of Pompeii who could afford such luxuries..
The lead pipes which moved the water through the

houses.
Form: These peristyle courtyards had ornate sculpture and flower gardens surrounded by a perimeter of stylos (latin for column).
The perimeter columns held up the roof overhang under which furniture was placed. The columns were often made of marble and
often there was marble veneer on the concrete and brick wall. The wall of the courtyard were often decorated with mosaics and or
Peristyle Court fresco.
Iconography/Context: The peristyle is almost misnamed because it is truly the atrium (latin for heart) of the house. This is where
the family gathered and in essence it was an outside living room. Here air and light flowed through the space but the occupants
would not be bothered by the noises and smells of the street.


Roman Art
Peristyle Court at the house of Vetii
Fresco from the House of the Baker,

The baker and his wife
Mosaic portrait from Pompeii Context: The sculpture we have seen already demonstrates the Roman propensity and desire for accurate portraiture.
This desire to have a likeness made was not limited to just the wealthy or upper class but also to anyone who might be
able to afford such work to be made.
The image on the top is a fresco. Fresco is a term that literally means "fresh." There are two kinds, buon fresco and
fresco secco. This painting painting is made by coating a wall with plaster and while the wall is still damp, ground up
pigments are mixed with water and lime and painted on the wall. The paint soaks in and literally stains the wall up to
a half an inch and becomes permanent. This is called buon fresco (good fresh). Details with more expensive colors
(such as blue made from lapis lazuli) are added with tempera paint (egg yolks and glue) when the fresco is dry. This
is called secco fresco (dry fresh).
Mosaics were made from small blocks of stone, ceramic tile or glass called tesserae. These blocks were then pushed

Roman Art
into either plaster, for walls, or cement, for floors. The blocks, when placed together combined together like the pixels
on a computer screen to make an image. When one looks at the the images from a distance the blocks of color one
next to the other mix because the eye would blend them together. This is called optical mixing. Depending on the
skill of the workman/artisan, the work could be extremely realistic of cartoonish. These were a particularly durable
form of decoration as they were impervious to staining and fading.
Iconography: The image on the left of the Baker and his wife depicts a couple how they would like to be seen. The
baker holds a scroll and his wife holds a wax tablet and a stylus that would have been used to scratch out notes and
practice writing. In all probability, the baker and his wife were either illiterate or semiliterate, yet they hold symbols
of their literacy and therefore intelligence. This is how they wanted to be seen.
In both images the portraits are verist images; however, as in the portrait of Augustus they were probably "prettied up"
a bit. Their features are a bit idealized and their hair a bit too styled.

Iconography: Frescoes like this one depicting fruit and glasses or pure water were symbolic of the pleasures of every day life and
perhaps of the delicacies one might desire. Fruit was not available all year and it is one of the fleeting pleasures. The depictions
of fruit and other delicacies, such as Herakleitos' Unswept Floor (fig 6-58) are references to the wealth of the patron and the skill
of the artist. The clear vessel of water is what is referred to as an artist's conceit or concetto (italian for conceit) because painting a
transparent vessel is one of the harder things to paint.
Formal: These two frescos depict idealized human figures, all standing in the classic contrapposto pose, rendered with light and
shadow. The use of light and shadow, or value structure, to depict volume is sometimes referred to as chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro
literally translates into Italian as light and shadow or dark and light.
In the fresco depicting Theseus and the minotaur with the Athenian youths, is fairly complex in how it depicts space. For
example, the figures are placed in and around an architectural structure and the body of the Minotaur is depicted in a foreshortened
pose. As the head and torso of the Minotaur project into the foreground they begin to look shorter than if the view was a strict
profile view.
Roman Art
Iconographic: Both of these images are powerful symbolic statements of the kinds of values the Romans held.
The Three Graces, represent the three most important qualities a Roman could possess beauty, grace, and intellect (which was
linked to virtue).
The image of Theseus links him to the Doryphoros and to other images of athletic youths who possess kalos. The Minotaur is a
composite creature, that symbolizes antithetical qualities to our human hero. The bull head represents certain negative qualities.
The Three Graces
Fresco from Pompeii before 79 CE Context: The story of Theseus and the Minotaur at the heart of the maze would have a certain amount of resonance for citizens of
the Roman empire because the maze represents the Minoan government lead by the evil King Minos and the Minotaur in its center,
is represents the heart of Minos's problems as a ruler.
(see the Legend of the Minotaur in Stokstad page 134). or go here : http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull20.html
Theseus and the slain Minotaur with the
Athenian youths.
Fresco from Pompeii before 79 CE
chiar.oscu.ro n, pl -ros [It, fr. chiaro clear, light + oscuro obscure, dark] (1686) 1: pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color 2 a:
the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art b: the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or character) 3: a 16th
century woodcut technique involving the use of several blocks to print different tones of the same color; also: a print made by this technique 4: the interplay of
light and shadow on or as if on a surface 5: the quality of being veiled or partly in shadow
fres.co n, pl frescoes
[It, fr. fresco fresh, of Gmc origin; akin to OHG frisc fresh] (1598)
1: the art of painting on freshly spread moist lime plaster with water-based pigments
2: a painting executed in fresco -- fresco vt
The term fresco comes from the Italian word for fresh. The paint is applied quickly in fresh patches of plaster that haven't had a chance to dry yet. This allows
the paint to sink into the plaster and stain it sometimes up to a quarter of an inch below the surface of the wall.

Roman Art
In buon fresco, which literally means "good fresh," the water color and lime (the mineral not the fruit) are painted directly on damp plaster that has just been
applied.
Fresco secco (Italian for "dry fresh") is a little less permanent and the paint sometimes can flake off the walls. Paint and especially details and expensive colors
are applied to sections of the mural that have already dried. The medium in this case is either tempera (egg and water) or some kind of glue usually made from
animal skin or some sort of dairy product.

Fresco is a method of painting water-based pigments on freshly applied plaster, usually on wall surfaces. The colours, which are made by grinding dry-
powder pigments in pure water, dry and set with the plaster to become a permanent part of the wall. Fresco painting is ideal for making murals because
it lends itself to a monumental style, is durable, and has a matte surface.
Buon', or "true," fresco is the most durable technique and consists of the following process. Three successive coats of specially prepared plaster, sand,
and sometimes marble dust are troweled onto a wall. Each of the first two rough coats is applied and then allowed to set (dry and harden). In the
meantime, the artist, who has made a full-scale cartoon (preparatory drawing) of the image that he intends to paint, transfers the outlines of the design
onto the wall from a tracing made of the cartoon. The final, smooth coat (intonaco) of plaster is then troweled onto as much of the wall as can be
painted in one session. The boundaries of this area are confined carefully along contour lines, so that the edges, or joints, of each successive section of
fresh plastering are imperceptible. The tracing is then held against the fresh intonaco and lined up carefully with the adjacent sections of painted wall,
and its pertinent contours and interior lines are traced onto the fresh plaster; this faint but accurate drawing serves as a guide for painting the image in
colour.
A correctly prepared intonaco will hold its moisture for many hours. When the painter dilutes his colours with water and applies them with
brushstrokes to the plaster, the colours are imbibed into the surface, and as the wall dries and sets, the pigment particles become bound or cemented
along with the lime and sand particles. This gives the colours great permanence and resistance to aging, since they are an integral part of the wall
surface, rather than a superimposed layer of paint on it. The medium of fresco makes great demands on a painter's technical skill, since he must work
fast (while the plaster is wet) but cannot correct mistakes by overpainting; this must be done on a fresh coat of plaster or by using the secco method.
Secco ("dry") fresco is a somewhat superficial process that dispenses with the complex preparation of the wall with wet plaster. Instead, dry, finished
walls are soaked with limewater and painted while wet. The colours do not penetrate into the plaster but form a surface film, like any other paint. Secco
has always held an inferior position to true fresco, but it is useful for retouching the latter.
The origins of fresco painting are unknown, but it was used as early as the Minoan civilization (at Knossos on Crete) and by the ancient Romans (at
Pompeii). The Italian Renaissance was the great period of fresco painting, as seen in the works of Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Correggio,
and many other painters from the late 13th to the mid-16th century. Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel and Raphael's Stanza murals in the
Vatican are the most famous of all frescoes. By the mid-16th century, however, the use of fresco had largely been supplanted by oil painting. The
technique was briefly revived by Diego Rivera and other Mexican Muralists in the first half of the 20th century.


Bauhaus

Bauhaus
Walter Gropius, "Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar," 1919: "Artists, sculptors, painters, we must all
return to the crafts! Let us then create a new guild
of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Let us desire,
conceive, and create the new structure of the
future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward
heaven from the hands of a million workers like the
crystal symbol of a new faith." www.arthistory.upenn.edu
Form: This three-story factory uses a steel frame,
allowing the facade to be made almost entirely of glass.
Iconography: The client's wish for an attractive façade

was solved by Gropius in a special way: by means of a
projected steel skeleton, which pulled the function of
support to the inside, thereby making possible a broad
dissolution of the exterior envelope into glass walls; the
idea of the 'curtain wall' was at this point first expressed
in a consistent manner."The Fagus shoe factory in
Alfred, Germany is a seminal building in the history of
modern architecture. Designed by Walter Gropius and
Adolf Meyer in 1911, This revolutionary technique set
new standards for industrial construction and is still used
in the building of every skyscraper. Fagus traces the
history of the building from 1911, when it was designed
and built, through the late 1920s, the period of final
collaboration between Gropius/Meyer and factory
management. It also emphasizes the Bauhaus idea of
industrial culture, in which architecture, interior design,
graphic design, and photography were interrelated with
the business philosophy of the company."
© 2000 Princeton Architectural Press, Inc.
(www.papress.com)
Context: "Walter Gropius, German-American architect,

one of the leaders of modern functional architecture. In
Germany his Fagus factory buildings (1910–11) at
Alfeld, with their glass walls, metal spandrels, and
discerning use of purely industrial features, were among
the most advanced works in Europe. After World War I,
Gropius became (1918) director of the Weimar School of
Art, reorganizing it as the Bauhaus. It was moved in
1925 to Dessau. The complete set of new buildings for it,
which Gropius designed (1926), remains one of his finest
achievements. He built the Staattheater at Jena (1923),
some experimental houses at Stuttgart (1927), and
designed residences, workers’ dwellings, and industrial
buildings. Driven out by the Nazis, he practiced (1934–
37) in London with Maxwell Fry and in 1937 emigrated
to America, where he headed the school of architecture
at Harvard until 1952. His influence on the dissemination
of functional architectural theory and the rise of the
International style was immense. Practicing his principles
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/Bauhaus.htm[8/17/2013 5:52:29 PM]

Bauhaus
of cooperative design, Gropius worked with a group of

young architects on the design of the Harvard graduate
center. He continued his architectural activity with this
group, the Architects Collaborative (TAC), in such
Walter Gropius and Adolph Meyer. Fagus Factory, works as the U.S. embassy at Athens, the Univ. of
Alfed-an-der-Leine, Germany. 1911-16 Baghdad (1961), and the Grand Central City building,
New York City (1963). His writings include The New
Architecture and the Bauhaus (tr.1935) and Scope of
World Architecture (1955).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.
"Gropius's first large building, the Fagus Shoe-Last

Factory in Alfred on the Leine in 1911... was
materialized due to his connection with Peter Behrens—
and in cooperation with Adolf Meyer... as had been the
case with most of his early structures. The starting point
for the young architect was the already existing site plan,
the ground plan, and construction plans of the architect
Eduard Werner, as well as the foundation, which had
already been laid. A loan from the American United
Shoe Machinery Corporation made the continuation of
the construction possible in 1911, and continued until
1912 step by step under the new concept of Walter
Gropius. The whole operational procedure was newly
thought through, according to the inner functions, and
then articulated in a three-dimensional form. The client's
wish for an attractive façade was solved by Gropius in a
special way: by means of a projected steel skeleton,
which pulled the function of support to the inside,
thereby making possible a broad dissolution of the
exterior envelope into glass walls; the idea of the 'curtain
wall' was at this point first expressed in a consistent
manner."
— from Udo Kultermann. Architecture in the 20th
Century. p32-33.
taken from www.greatbuildings.com

Form: This is a view of the BauHaus school
of design in Germany. A skeleton of

Bauhaus
reinforced concrete with brickwork,

mushroom-shaped ceilings on the lower level,
and roofs covered with asphalt tile that can be
walked upon.
Iconography: The Creator's Words "One of

the outstanding achievements of the new
constructional technique has been the
abolition of the separating function of the
wall. Instead of making the walls the element
of support, as in a brick-built house, our new
space-saving construction transfers the whole
load of the structure to a steel or concrete
framework. Thus the role of the walls
becomes restricted to that of mere screens
stretched between the upright columns of this
framework to keep out rain, cold, and noise.
...Systematic technical improvement in steel
and concrete, and nicer and nicer calculation
of their tensile and compressive strength, are
steadily reducing the area occupied by
supporting members. This, in turn, naturally
leads to a progressively bolder (i.e.wider)
opening up of the wall surfaces, which allows
rooms to be much better lit. It is, therefore,
only logical that the old type of window—a
hole that had to be hollowed out of the full
thickness of a supporting wall—should be
giving place more and more to the continuous
horizontal casement, subdivided by thin steel
mullions, characteristic of the New
Architecture. And as a direct result of the
growing preponderance of voids over solids,
glass is assuming an ever greater structural
importance....In the same way the flat roof is
superseding the old penthouse roof with its
tiled or slated gables. For its advantages are
obvious: (1) light normally shaped top-floor
rooms instead of poky attics, darkened by
dormers and sloping ceilings, with their
almost unutilizable corners; (2) the avoidance
of timber rafters, so often the cause of fires;
(3) the possibility of turning the top of the
house to practical account as a sun loggia,
open-air gymnasium, or children's
playground; (4) simpler structural provision
for subsequent additions, whether as extra
stories or new wings; (5) elimination of
unnecessary surfaces presented to the action
of wind and weather, and therefore less need
for repairs; (6) suppression of hanging gutters,
external rain-pipes, etc., that often erode
rapidly. With the development of air transport
the architect will have to pay as much

Bauhaus
attention to the bird's-eye perspective of his

houses as to their elevations. The utilization
of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of
re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony
deserts of our great towns;...Seen from the
skies, the leafy house-tops of the cities of the
Walter Gropius. Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925-26 future will look like endless chains of hanging
gardens."
—Walter Gropius. from Walter Gropius. The
New Architecture and the Bauhaus. p25-30.
(www.greatbuildings.com)
Context: Gropius' extensive facilities for the

Bauhaus at Dessau combine teaching, student
and faculty members' housing, an auditorium,
and office spaces. The pinwheel configuration
when viewed from the air represents in form
the propellers of the airplanes manufactured in
the Dessau area. This complex embodies
various technological and design oriented
advancements including a petchance for
glazing, the creation of an architecture of
transparency with the supporting structure
rising behind the facing skin. It was a radical
Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925-26 structure populated by progressive minds
touting a unique group-oriented approach to
learning.
—Darlene Levy. drawn from S. Giedion.
Walter Gropius: Work and Teamwork. p54-
56.
"The Bauhaus building provides an important
landmark of architectural history, even though
it was dependent on earlier projects of the
architect...as well as on the basic outlines and
concepts of Frank Lloyd Wright. "It consists
of three connected wings or bridges...School
and workshop are connected through a two-
story bridge, which spans the approach road
from Dessau. The administration was located
on the lower level of the bridge, and on the
upper level was the private office of the two
architects, Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer,

Bauhaus
which could be compared to the ship captain's

'command bridge' due to its location. The
dormitories and the school building are
connected through a wing where the assembly
hall and the dining room are located, with a
stage between."The basic structure of the
Bauhaus consists of a clear and carefully
thought-out system of connecting wings,
which correspond to the internal operating
system of the school. The technical
construction of the building... is demonstrated
by the latest technological development of the
time: a skeleton of reinforced concrete with
brickwork, mushroom-shaped ceilings on the
lower level, and roofs covered with asphalt
tile that can be walked upon. The construction
area consisted of 42,445 [cubic yards] (32,450
[cubic meters]) and the total cost amounted to
902,500 marks. Such an economical
achievement was possible only due to the
assistance of the Bauhaus teachers and
students, which at the same time, of course,
could be viewed as an ideal means of
education."
—from Udo Kultermann. Architecture in the
20th Century. p37-38.

Form: Collage of Hitler walking on the Bau
Iconography: Iwao Yamawaki was a Japanese adherent to the Bauhaus style, and
a photographer. This collage shows the nazi's trampling over the Bauhaus.
Context: "In 1932, the Nazis seized the power in Saxony-Anhalt and Bauhaus de
Dessau was going to be established in Berlin in an empty factory that Mies van
der Rohe made repaint in white. Hitler chancellor of Reich, Mies had an
interview with one of the "cultural experts" Nazis, Alfred Rosenberg, with the
autumn of 1933; it obtained the authorization to continue; but, considering that
Bauhaus could not continue its?uvre in "this atmosphere", it made the decision to
close the institution. "
(translated from German) "Iwao Yamawaki (1898-1987) studied architecture (at)
the Tokyo School OF kind,(Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko) in order to become active in
architecture later. At the same time (he) began to photograph with (his) 35mm
camera. In 1930 he gave his employment up in Japan, in order to apply at the
BauHaus in Germany. He was trained from 1930 to 1932 there in both
architecture and photography. After his return to Japan he began to further-obtain
contents of the BauHaus. Yamawaki gave up, after some time, his photography in
favor of working as an architect and a member of the art faculty at the university
Iwao Yamawaki, collage, 1932
of Tokyo. Up to his death he had different exhibitions of his architectural
photography and contributed writings for Japanese photo magazines."

Bauhaus
Form: Polished, bent, nickelled tubular steel frame, and leather or

fabric.
Iconography: "Breuer was inspired by the shape and form of a

bicycle handlebars when he created one of his most famous pieces,
theWassily Chair No B3 in 1925. It was designed and made for
Wassily Kandinsky'. The frame of the chair was made from
polished, bent, nickelled tubular steel, which later became chrome
plated. The seat came in canvas, fabric or leather in black section.
This chair has been widely copied."
(www.design-technology.org)
Context: "Marcel Lajos Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary in 1902,

and became on of the greatest architects and furniture designers of
the 20th century. Breuer used new technologies and new materials
in order to develop his 'International Style' of work. Breuer first
studied art in Vienna after winning a scholarship. Marcel was
unhappy with the institution and found work instead at a Vienese
architecture office. From 1920 to 1928 he was a student and teacher
at Germany's Bauhaus, a school of design where modern principles,
Marcel Breuer, metall-chair, 1925 technologies and the application of new materials were encouraged
in both the industrial and fine arts. During his time spent there
Marcel completed the carpentry apprenticeship. While there he
designed and made the African chair and the Slatted chair.After
completing his studies at the Bauhaus Marcel traveled to Paris,
where he worked in an architects office. After a year he was
appointed as head of the carpentry workshop at the Bauhaus. Breuer
was given the title of 'young master'. Breuer helped to develop
modular or unit construction. This is the combination of
Marcel Breuer standardised units to form a technically simple but functional
complete unit."
(www.design-technology.org)
Form: Metal teapot set, with

geometricized features
Iconography: The Bauhaus, as an art

school, was not just nterested in
function, though that was the most
important aspect of their designs, but
also that what was made had to please
the eye. When Marianne Brandt came
up with this teapot, her interpretation
was, "...This she interpreted as a
reaction to the over-ornate kitsch they
had grown-up with before the war. The
geometric effect is more measured in
her tea service of and teapot of 1924
also pictured below. The basic form of
the pot is very similiar to the modular
teapot developed by Theodor Bogler in
the Bauhaus Ceramic Workshop.The

Bauhaus
semi-circular ebony handles are

charactistic of the Bauhaus metal
workshop."
Context: " Marianne Brandt was born in

Chemnitz Germany and studied painting
and sculpture at the Grand-ducal
College of Fine Arts in Weimar. After
spending some time in Norway and
Paris, she returned to Weimar in 1924 to
enroll at the Bauhaus, where she
entered the metal workshop. When
László Moholy-Nagy, assisted by the
Marianne Brandt, tea set, 1924 silversmith Christian Dell, took over as
the metal workshop's Form Master from
Johannes Itten in 1923, function was
invoked as the source of form, Brandt
who was one of the workshop's most
talented apprentices later admitted that
while they were very concerned about
function (that vessels should pour
properly and be easy to clean),
geometric, elemental forms were in
themselves something of an obsession."
www.serial-design.com
Marianne Brandt

Form: Table lamp fashioned in the Bauhaus style out of glass and silver.
Iconography: The student's production clearly stood under the influence of Itten's
teachings: the main concern in the production of vessels and appliances was the
free study of form together with the experimentally acquired knowledge of metallic
materials and their possible treatment.When, in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy became
head of the workshop, the focus was directed towards more functional aspects.
Straightforward vessels reduced to elementary forms in brass, nickel-plated brass
or silver were produced. These were indeed conceived for industrial serial
production, but realized only as single pieces or in handcrafted series.
This was the period in which the first lamp models were produced, namely the
"Bauhaus lamp" by Carl Jakob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld. In Dessau, the
more professional and extensive workshop's equipment was capable of
accomodating a more rational serial production of vessels and appliances.
Context: "In line with the overall guidelines of the early Bauhaus, the metal
workshop in Weimar, which at first ran under the name of gold, silver, and copper
forge, taught traditional metal working techniques. Johannes Itten was the artistic
director during the first years, and then in 1922, the experienced silversmith
Christian Dell took on the position of master craftsman until 1925.
Already in 1926, the metal workshop mastered the design and production of all the
lighting requirements for the new Bauhaus building. In the following years, it
became more and more a "design laboratory" for new lighting equipment and,

Bauhaus
finally, when several industrial lighting manufacturers took the models into serial
production, it achieved the status of one of the most effective and successful
workshops at the Bauhaus. The production of some of the types, such as the
Kandem lamps by Marianne Brandt and Hin Bredendieck, was continued for many
years after the closure of the Bauhaus."
(www.bauhaus.de)
"The Bauhuas set the standards for a number of different types of light fixture. Its
range of hanging and ceiling lights were very successful. In 1926 Marianne Brandt
and Hans Przyrembel collaborated on the design of a counter-weighted hanging
light that was used extensively in the Bauhaus workshops and was mass-produced
by Schwintzer and Gräff from 1928 onward. In some models, a small shade was
placed beneath the light source to prevent dazzle. As many people objected to
naked aluminium, the shades were often spray-painted in colour. Brandt also
designed in 1926 a ceiling light based around a simple, spherical milk glass shade,
a component borrowed directly from industrial lighting and transposed into the
domestic context. In order to change the bulb, the shade can be removed from the
Karl J. Jucker and Wilhelm aluminium fixture by unhooking it. It was produced for a short while (1928-30) by
Wagenfeld, table lamp, 1923-24 Schwintzer and Gräff in berlin. Brandt also designed ceiling lights using concentric
rings of milk glass, which did not throw strong shadows or collect dust. The picture
right is of the Bauhaus Drafting Room in the then newly established Architecture
Department taken in 1928. Note the gleaming linoleum floor, one of a number of
new materials of the time. Brandt's and Przyrembel's counter-weighted hanging
lights were put to good use above each of the drafting tables. Task lighting was
another range developed. Marianne Brandt working with Hin Bredenieck, in1927
created the definitive form for small adjustable bedside and desk lights, with bell-
shaped lacquered steel shades (intended to give a directional focused and evenly
distributed source of light), gently curved necks and wedge-shaped feet from which
the cord disappears neatly out of at the rear, manufactured by Kandem (Körting &
Matthieson), Leipzig. Brandt's "Wandarm" (wall-arm) of 1927 was a typical piece
of Bauhaus ingenuity. Designed for hospital use, it is an adjustable reading light
mounted on a white reflective board (black was also available for a softer effect)
which allows indirect lighting, with a push-button switch mounted on the wall-
plate easily found by a drowzy patient. It was designed for ease of manufacture and
was mass-produced by a Stuttgart firm. The design minimized the amount of
soldering needed. All the elements could be cast, pressed and riveted, this reducing
labour costs and speeding up production. The very success of the metal workshop's
lighting fixtures made finding manufacturers for its tableware difficult as it was
tended to be pigeon-holed as a lighting department."
(www.serial-design.com)
Form: Metal tea strainers.
Iconography: These are metal tea strainers, used in the time before we had tea bags and
instant tea. A person would place the loose tea leaves into the 'ball' at the end of the rod,
clasp it shut, and set it into the hot water in order to diffuse the tea. However, it would be
rare for someone to have such a beautifully handcrafted set of four, as seen to the left,

Bauhaus
with a small dish as stand to catch the drips from the tea leaves as they are set up to cool
off before cleaning.
Context:Once again, these two designers are following the BauHaus edicts of form,
function, and design. While simple in nature, their very simplicity and clean lines make
them attractive as well as functional.
Otto Rittweger and

Wolfgang
Tuempel, strainer set, 1924


lesson_de_stijl
Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian: "De Stijl" Magazine

Theo van Doesburg tried from 1915 to 1917 to bring in new members for an alliance of Dutch artists. The purpose of
the alliance was to stand up as a group instead of standing up as individual artists. In 1917 the first number of the
magazine 'The Style' was launched. The idea for this magazine came from Theo van Doesburg. It was meant for
explaining his own work as well as the work of the other members of the alliance. For them the magazine was an
instrument to discuss new modern art and to spread their own ideas. Still there are several points of view about the
origin of The Style. If we look at the date of foundation, the first World War, we can point out the endeavor of the
society as base of the origin. At that time it was very chaotic in Holland. The people wanted peace, rest and harmony
again. The members of The Style tried to reflect in their work what in the entire social development could not be
achieved, The Ideal Harmony If we look at the former art periods, The Style seems a logical outcome of the Cubist
period (1907- 1914). The Cubist artists tried to order the reality. The result of ordering the reality often looks like a
harmonious totality. The cubists however, still used identifiable figures and elements in their paintings; their
paintings were still telling something. The Style carried the principal of ordering the reality through, by ordering the
reality even further. The paintings made by members of The Style do not show identifiable figures at all. These
paintings have a non-telling character, but are still understandable and reflecting something. The Style did not restrict
itself to the art of painting. The members wanted to realize the principals of The Style in many different artistic areas,
such as architecture, sculpture, design, etc.
Theo van Doesburg actually wanted to call the magazine 'The Straight Line', but influenced by the other members
the name became 'The Style' after all. The members thought that the word 'Style', preceded by the the word 'The' ,
suggests that it is the best, possibly even the only style, usable in the modern art and society.
The principals of The Style;

The Style is a variation of the abstract art, witch is characteristic for the
opinions about art of the modern times. This modern art had to be
non-illustrative and non-telling in contrast to the former art movements and
it's opinions. The modern art had to be able to stand on its own and had to be
understandable without referring to the concrete world. So it did not have to
reflect something identifiable to be understandable.
The Style is recognizable by the use of straight horizontal and vertical lines
as well as the use of the primary colors red, yellow and blue. They also used
the colors black, white and gray. The result of it all seems an almost
technically constructured totality. It was not the intention to tell something
concrete, but to show the world the ideal harmony.
The Style went back to the fundamental elements of the art: color and form, level and line. With these elements the
artist developed new sculptural language and with that the placed the ideal world opposite the reality. Most of the
artist used closed and open forms, density and space, color and form. By using these elements within one painting,
the ideal harmony could be reached. All elements have their own function in the totality.
The lines are the borders and make the open or closed forms. The lines are also used to create a certain space. The
border of the painting is not the end of the painting. We can use our fantasy to fill in the rest; to let it grow as big as
we want, as big as we can imagine. By using only the primary colors, the artist could create a 3-dimensional effect.
The colors attract immediate attention. Therefor the rest of the painting seems to go to the background. It looks like
the white forms are further back than the colored forms. That is how the artists created a front and a back in their
paintings, witch is held in harmony because of the use of
different sized forms. So the ideal harmony could only be reached by using the perfect proportion between: the size
of the colored forms ; the colored and uncolored forms the closed and open forms. By the use of ideal proportions,
the artists were able to create peace and balance in their work, witch reflects the ideal harmony in the most perfect
way. The members of the alliance saw art as the bridge between reality and harmony. If harmony was reached in
reality, art would lose its function." (culled directly from, http://www.the-artfile.com/uk/styles/stijl/stijl.htm)
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lesson_de_stijl

Form: Oil on canvas, geometric forms and shades of mostly
the primary colors
Iconography: Eliminating the real and visible from his

paintings, he extracted pure form and color from the
objective world. His aesthetic philosophy is, unsurprisingly,
as distilled as his paintings: "What do I want to express with
my work? Nothing else than that which every other artist
seeks: to achieve harmony through the balance of the
relationships between lines, colors, and planes. But only in
the clearest and strongest way." Mondrian never viewed the
black lines as edges: they weren't meant to contain the
colors, since doing so would create foreground and
background and thus interfere with the total unity of the
work. Instead, the lines moved through the rectangles of
color while remaining independent of them. Overtly basic
compositions of color and line, these paintings emphasize
the dynamic interaction of the essential elements of form
Piet Mondrian. Composition with Color Planes and and color.
Gray Lines 1, 1918
Oil on canvas 49 x 60.5 cm (19 1/4 x 23 7/8 in) Private
collection Context: According to www.artandculture.com,"The
Abstract Formalism or International Style or de Stijl members of the De Stijl movement were pious, self-effacing
artists bent on creating pure and accessible art. Although the
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian did not himself organize the
groups with which he is associated -- De Stijl, Cercle et
Carré (Circle and Square), and Abstraction-Création -- his
participation was essential to the growth of abstraction.
Early in his career Mondrian worked in the naturalist style,

but moved slowly toward innovations in color and
abstraction. From the Impressionist and Pointillist-style
landscapes and still lifes, composed around 1906,
Mondrian’s aesthetic quickly evolved into free, Fauvist-style
landscapes. A 1909 Amsterdam exhibition of these raw
landscapes was fiercely criticized, but Mondrian continued
to develop his style with an eye toward innovation. By 1911,
he had moved to Paris and launched himself into Cubism.
Mondrian's shift toward greater abstraction was inspired by a
desire to express universals.
Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie-Woogie. 1942–43. Van Doesburg and Mondrian were the theoretical engines
Oil on canvas, 50 x 50" (127 x 127 cm). behind De Stijl, whose artists strove for anonymity and
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. envisioned a collective art. For Mondrian, the tensions
Given anonymously. between modern technology and individuality were more a
Photograph ©1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New matter of perception than reality, and he believed that the
York. move from the particular to the abstract was the way to bring
Abstract Formalism or International Style or de Stijl together these two apparent opposites. Mondrian composed
his first plus-minus compositions -- paintings with rhythmic
horizontal and vertical lines -- in 1917, and by 1918 he had
created his first geometric grid works. But it was not until
1920, after the publication of his treatise "Le Neo
Plasticisme" (Neo-Plasticism), that he composed the first

lesson_de_stijl
heavily black-outlined colored rectangles. In 1921,

Mondrian further reduced his palette to three pure primary
colors plus black, white, and gray. After his 1940 emigration
to New York, the painter made his final stylistic refinement,
changing to a framework of black lines replaced by colored
lines and rows of small colorful rectangles. "Broadway
Boogie Woogie," painted just prior to Mondrian’s death in
1944, created a splash, serving as a catalyst for the
American abstractionists of the ‘50s and ‘60s."
- From David Sylvester, "About Modern Art: Critical

Essays, 1948-1997"
- Taken from www.artchive.com

Form: Oil on canvas. geometrical forms, solid, straight black lines with
a couple blocks of color, the rest is off white and grey.
Iconography: This is an example of a work done in the form of the

group of artists who ascribed to the 'De Stijl". It is using the elements
of horizontal and vertical, black and white, and primary colors. It is
abstraction distilled down to its' most basic. Note, however, that it is
intentionally not perfect. What the artist wants the viewer to realize is
that the longer it is looked at, the more one can see. The lines are of
varying widths, and in some cases do not follow all the way to the
edge of the canvas. The colors are not consistent all the way through, if
one looks closely, they begin to pick up the differences in shade and
values. It can be seen as well in the lower work that the color values
shift constantly, and though it may, at first glance, seem to be more
complicated than the top composition, it is just as basic and abstract.
The only difference being the creation of a three-dimensional illusion
made by overlapping objects.
Context: "Christian Emil Marie Küpper, who adopted the pseudonym

Theo van Doesburg, was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on August
30, 1883. His first exhibition of paintings was held in 1908 in the
Hague. In the early 1910s he wrote poetry and established himself as
Theo van Doesburg. an art critic. From 1914 to 1916 van Doesburg served in the Dutch
Simultaneous Countercomposition 1929 army, after which time he settled in Leiden and began his
Abstract Formalism or International Style or collaboration with the architects J. J. P. Oud and Jan Wils. In 1917
de Stijl they founded the group De Stijl [more] and the periodical of the same
name; other original members were Vilmos Huszár, Piet Mondrian,
Bart van der Leck, and Georges Vantongerloo. Van Doesburg executed
decorations for Oud’s De Vonk project in Noordwijkerhout in 1917.
In 1920 he resumed his writing, using the pen name I. K. Bonset and
later Aldo Camini. Van Doesburg visited Berlin and Weimar in 1921
and the following year taught at the Weimar Bauhaus [more], where
he associated with Raoul Hausmann, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, and Hans Richter. He was interested in Dada [more] at this
time and worked with Kurt Schwitters as well as Jean Arp, Tristan
Tzara, and others on the review Mécano in 1922. Exhibitions of the
architectural designs of Gerrit Rietveld, van Doesburg, and Cor van
Eesteren were held in Paris in 1923 at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie
l’Effort Moderne and in 1924 at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture.The

lesson_de_stijl
Landesmuseum of Weimar presented a solo show of van Doesburg’s

work in 1924. That same year he lectured on modern literature in
Prague, Vienna, and Hannover, and the Bauhaus published his
Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (Principles of Neo-Plastic
Art). A new phase of De Stijl was declared by van Doesburg in his
Theo van Doesburg manifesto of “Elementarism,” published in 1926. During that year he
[Color contruction in the 4th dimension of collaborated with Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp on the decoration of
space-time] 1924 the restaurant-cabaret L’Aubette in Strasbourg. Van Doesburg returned
Abstract Formalism or International Style or to Paris in 1929 and began working on a house at Meudon-Val-Fleury
de Stijl with van Eesteren. Also in that year he published the first issue of Art
concret, the organ of the Paris-based group of the same name. Van
Doesburg was the moving force behind the formation of the group
Abstraction-Création in Paris. The artist died on March 7, 1931, in
Davos, Switzerland." (www.guggenheim.org)

Form: Study painting for Schroder house construction. everything is geometricized

and with primary colors plus white and black.
Iconography: It can be seen from this study how the essence of DeStijl was at
work. Many right angles and cube forms, black and white and primary colors, and
simplicity.
Context: Rietveld was a part of the movement, in the form of architecture. Whlie
Mondrian and vanDoesburg were traditionally painters, Rietveld was a cabinet
maker and a carpenter. He brought the conceptual ideas of DeStijl to life in three
dimensional form.
Gerrit Rietveld. Schroder House
1924
Utrecht, Netherlands
Weightless Floating Walls
Abstract Formalism or
International Style or de Stijl

lesson_de_stijl

Form: a house with geometricized architecture,
overlapping rectangles, mainly white with black and
some primary colored rectangles to give it some life.
Iconography: "Gerrit Rietveld worked closely in

collaboration with the client for this house. More than
any other, this is either—in Banham's words—'a
cardboard Mondrian' or an enormous piece of furniture
masquerading as a house. All windows could only be
opened up completely, at right angles to frames,
repeating the devices by which the upper floor could be
transformed from one single space into a series of
smaller ones—the point being that in either positioning
of windows or moveable walls, the house retained its
neoplastic hypothesis."
—David Dunster. Key Buildings of the Twentieth
Century Volume 1: Houses 1900-1944. p24.
"Reaction to the house is best described as polar, either
people loved or hated the house. In many senses this is
what Truss Schröder wanted, to challenge peoples
traditional views. Most of the neighbours didn't like the
house as many would stand waiting for the house to fall
over, due to its radical construction. Even today many
people find its direct modernity alarming. Sometimes
the children were subjected to mocking because they
lived in a "looney house". (Overy, 1988, p78)
Rietveld's peers (especially Van Doesburg) praised the
house in terms of its achievement of De Stijl plastic
principles of architecture. Other professional peers such
as
Oud publicly denounced the building as harmful to
modern architecture; stating that it was lacking solidity;
was prone to wear and tear and would age badly .
(Overy,1988, p79) Privately Oud held the house in high
regard as an achievement ahead of its time. By the
1950's the Schröder house became entrenched as one
the greatest developments of modernism as it was the
first open-plan house. Up until the Schröder house
Western architecture had been "enclosed". Rietveld
however considered architecture as giving rhythm to a
corporeal experience of space which is connected to
"total space". Rietveld stated that the aim of his
architecture was to "preserve a free, light and unbroken
space, that gives clarity to our lives and contributes a
new sense of life". (Kuper, 1992, p39) As a spatial
theory Rietveld considered architecture as manifestation
of a specific visual form transcending the particular
human activity it housed. Rietveld's reinterpretation of
design was forged in the context of practical, pre-
aesthetic requirements - that the building must provide
functional and economic delineation of space.
(Buffinga, 1971, p5) This Functionalism was enunciated

lesson_de_stijl
by Rietveld as "eliminating everything that is

superfluous. This is also what the word means in a
social sense: it is a sort of spatial hygiene." (Kuper,
1992, p36) The expression of this Functional
architecture is related to the idea of "befreites wohnen"
meaning free or independent living.Rietveld's
background in furniture design served as the main basis
from which the conceptual functional and aesthetic
issues and his attitude to design were to shape the
design of the house. In many ways the furniture (such
as the red blue chair, 1922) and the Schröder house
were parallel. Rietveld once said :... when I got a
chance to make a house based on the same principles as
that (Red Blue - ed) chair, I seized it eagerly." (Overy,
1988, p61) The Schröder house was also the first truly
open plan house (with the movable partitions on the
first floor). It was from this manifestation of continuous
space that the house gave modernism the greatest
freedom from the previously enclosed nature of a
house. The concept was more than just a liberation of
the plan from structure (such as Le Corbusier's plan
libre) it was conscious effort to elevate architecture to a
realm where space and function were integral
components. Many of Rietveld's
spatial devices and organisational methods can be
traced throughout the canons of modernism, such as
Mies Van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. The
project was a manifestation of Rietveld's ideas about
housing and living. He perceived traditional housing as
a neutral space in which inhabitants conformed to the
passive environment. (Kuper, 1992, p100). Rietveld
Gerrit Rietveld. Schroder House 1924 considered that architects had a shallow conception of
Utrecht, Netherlands the specific requirements of housing and lifestyle. all
Weightless Floating Walls too often Architects reproduced generic housing types
Abstract Formalism or International Style or de Stijl without considering the relationship between house
owner and lifestyle, instead developing housing that had
degenerated into automatism. According to Rietveld
inhabiting a house must be conscious act, carefully
tailored to the needs of the inhabitants. (Kuper, 1992,
p100) Truus Schröder's conceived new life-style was
celebrated as a work of art (reinforced through the
environment) with the house providing a setting for a
masque celebrating the act of living. (Overy, 1988, p22)
Daily routines were emphasised by creating specially
designed fittings and built-in furniture, connecting the
activities conclusively to the principles of the
architecture.Adaptability became the key link within the
whole house. During the day, walls are rolled away so
that bedrooms merge into one living space. Also room

lesson_de_stijl
size related to time spent in them and the activity, and

activity spaces were merged such as the dining room
with the kitchen, and the corridor with the staircase.
Just as Rietveld's Red Blue chair is a proclamation of
sitting down ("sitting is a verb" is Rietveld's famous
remark), similarly the Schröder house is a manifestation

of an enlightened and active living. (Kuper, 1992,
p100)
Rietveld instead of imitating nature with ornamentation
sought to establish an interaction between house and
nature. Space and material were conceived in relation to
revealing reality; as nature and culture are fused by

achieving a symbiosis between outside and inside
spatial realms. (Overy, 1988, p27) The perception of
nature
through the open transition zones provide a discernible
contrasting link; between the primary colours of the
house and the assemblage of colours of the adjacent
park; the
plain smooth geometric and proportioned planes and the
unstructured organic forms. (Overy, 1988, p27)" (Full
text at, http://Sander.vanZoest.com/schroder-2.html)

Context: "No one had ever looked at this little lane

before this house was built here. There was a dirty
crumbling wall with weeds growing in front of it. Over
there was a small farm. It was a very rural spot, and this
sort of fitted in. It was a deserted place, where anyone
who wanted to pee just did it against this wall. It was a
real piece of no-man's-land. And we said, 'Yes, this is
just right, let's build it here.' And we took this plot of
ground and made it into a place with a reality of its
own. It didn't matter what it was, so long as something
was there, something clear. And that's what it became.
And that's always been my main aim: to give to a yet
unformed space, a certain meaning."
—Gerrit Rietveld. from Paul Overy, Lenneke Büller,

lesson_de_stijl
Frank den Oudsten, Bertus Mulder. The Rietveld

Schroder House. p52.
"...We didn't avoid older styles because they were ugly,
or because we couldn't reproduce them, but because our
own times demanded their own form, I mean, their own
manifestation. It was of course extremely difficult to
achieve all this in spite of the building regulations and
that's why the interior of the downstairs part of the
house is somewhat traditional, I mean with fixed walls.
But upstairs we simply called it and 'attic' and that's
where we actually made the house we wanted."
—Gerrit Rietveld. from Paul Overy, Lenneke Büller,
Frank den Oudsten, Bertus Mulder. The Rietveld
Schroder House. p73.
Form Wooden chair, laquer.
"The famous Red & Blue chair was designed in 1917. Nothing has
existed like that before. It marked the transition between the organic,
curving Art Noveau Style and the crisp, chic Art Deco. The Red & Blue
chair is composed out of a dramatic interplay of straight lines to form
patterns. The lines produce form by enclosing space, the structure has
very simple components and the striking colors are a reminder of
paintings by the artist Mondrian. Although there is no upholstery, the
chair is amazingly comfortable." www.dezignare.com
Context: This chair, or rather the duplicates of it, are still being sold
today. It has become increasingly popular as a symbol of DeStijl,
perhaps a testament to the thought that this movement may never truly
die out. As said on www.centraalmuseum.com, "With the Red-and-Blue
Chair, Rietveld reduced the armchair to its most elementary form. In
1918, he strove to create a chair without volume or mass, one that left
surrounding space unbroken. Rietveld also wanted to make furniture
that could be machine-produced. The famous colour scheme probably
only dated from around 1923, the colours adding to the strength of the
spatial character of the work. The superficial similarity to the work of
Mondrian made the Red-and-Blue Chair an icon of De Stijl design.
Rietveld himself attached no absolute value whatever to the primary
colours, making the same chair for Charley Toorop in pink and sea-
green, as well as a version for Paul Citroen in black with white trim on
the crosscuts."

lesson_de_stijl


lesson_lecorbusier

Le Corbusier

Form: This is the architectural design for 'modern' buildings that

Le Corbusier is credited with creating. It came about because of
hs discovery of using reinforced concrete, that is, the use of
steel rods throughout, which made the structures stronger and
gave an architect the ability to use less supporting beams within
the building itself.
Iconography: "Had Le Corbusier had his way, most of his

architectural activity would have been directed toward the
collective housing of the many. But as things turned out, he
spent most of his time designing villas and private mansions,
which were akin in style and spirit to the contemporary works
of Mallet-Stevens, Chareau, and Rietveld. Le Corbusier was a
rational theoretician, and he subjected his works to a cold,
standardized logic and an uncompromising functionalism. "The
twentieth century hasn't built for men," he once opined, "it has
Le Corbusier been built for money." Le Corbusier asserted that modern towns
-- which he called "stone deserts" -- are perishable because they
cannot adapt to meet the needs of populations in rapidly
progressing societies. He proposed that cities be pruned and that
those centers unfit for traffic be demolished. Once the old
patterns are destroyed, he argued, the new can be entirely
reconceptualized. Le Corbusier envisioned ideal dwellings for
universal populations. He conceived a vertical city, with
apartments that would open onto interior streets. Common
services -- from the laundry to the kindergarten, the
gymnasium, and the theaters -- would be located in specialized
sections. The individual apartment would differentiate collective
life from individual life, and would be small and functional."
(Taken from, www.artandculture.com)
Context: "Le Corbusier, the great Swiss Architect and city

planner is often mistaken as being of French origin. In
actuality, he was born on the 6th of October in 1887 as Charles
Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-fonds, a watch-making city
in Switzerland. He pioneered functionalist architecture with the
use of reinforced concrete and the concept of a house as a
"machine for living." He died in the Mediterranean in 1965."
(http://www.lecorbusier.com/)

Form:
Iconography:
Context: "The Architect,Le Corbusier. He was

convinced that the bold new industrial age required an
equally audacious style of architecture. And who better
to design it than him? Le Corbusier loved Manhattan.
He loved its newness, he loved its Cartesian regularity,
above all he loved its tall buildings. He had only one
reservation, which he revealed on landing in New York
City in 1935. The next day, a headline in the Herald
Tribune informed its readers that the celebrated architect
finds American skyscrapers much too small. Le
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lesson_lecorbusier
Corbusier always thought big. He once proposed

replacing a large part of the center of Paris with 18
sixty-story towers; that made headlines too. He was
born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887.
When he was 29, he went to Paris, where he soon after
adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Le Corbusier,
as his pseudonym. Jeanneret had been a small-town
architect; Le Corbusier was a visionary. He believed that
architecture had lost its way. Art Nouveau, all curves
and sinuous decorations, had burned itself out in a
brilliant burst of exuberance; the seductive Art Deco
style promised to do the same. The Arts and Crafts
movement had adherents all over Europe, but as the
name implies, it was hardly representative of an
industrial age. Le Corbusier maintained that this new
age deserved a brand-new architecture. "We must start
again from zero," he proclaimed. The new architecture
came to be known as the International Style. Of its
many partisans--among them Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany, Theo van
Doesburg in Holland--none was better known than Le
Le Corbusier Villa Savoye 1929 Corbusier. He was a tireless proselytizer, addressing the
Poissy-Sur Seine France public in manifestos, pamphlets, exhibitions and his own
magazine. He wrote books--dozens of them--on interior
decoration, painting and architecture. They resembled
instruction manuals. An example is his recipe for the
International Style: raise the building on stilts, mix in a
free-flowing floor plan, make the walls independent of
the structure, add horizontal strip windows and top it off
with a roof garden. But this makes him sound like a
technician, and he was anything but. Although he
dressed like a bureaucrat, in dark suits, bow ties and
round horn-rimmed glasses, he was really an artist (he
was an accomplished painter and sculptor). What is
most memorable about the austere, white-walled villas
that he built after World War I in and around Paris is
their cool beauty and their airy sense of space. "A house
is a machine for living in," he wrote. The machines he
admired most were ocean liners, and his architecture
spoke of sun and wind and the sea."

lesson_lecorbusier
Form:
Iconography:
Context: "By 1950 he had changed course, abandoning

Purism, as he called it, for something more robust and
sculptural. His spartan, lightweight architecture turned rustic,
with heavy walls of brick and fieldstone and splashes of
bright color. He discovered the potential of reinforced
concrete and made it his own, leaving the material crudely
unfinished, inside and out, the marks of wooden formwork
plainly visible. Concrete allowed Le Corbusier to explore
unusual shapes. The billowing roof of the chapel at Ronchamp
resembles a nun's wimple; the studios of the Carpenter Center
for Visual Arts at Harvard push out of the building like huge
cellos. For the state capital of Chandigarh in India, he created
a temple precinct of heroic structures that appear prehistoric.
Le Corbusier was the most important architect of the 20th
century. Frank Lloyd Wright was more prolific--Le Corbusier
built oeuvre comprises about 60 buildings--and many would
argue he was more gifted. But Wright was a maverick; Le
Corbusier dominated the architectural world, from that
halcyon year of 1920, when he started publishing his
magazine L'Esprit Nouveau, until his death in 1965. He
inspired several generations of architects--including this
author--not only in Europe but around the world. He was
more than a mercurial innovator. Irascible, caustic,
Calvinistic, Corbu was modern architecture's conscience."

lesson_lecorbusier

Form:
Iconography:
Context: "He was also a city planner. "Modern town planning

comes to birth with a new architecture," he wrote in a book titled
simply Urbanisme. "By this immense step in evolution, so brutal
and so overwhelming, we burn our bridges and break with the
past." He meant it. There were to be no more congested streets
and sidewalks, no more bustling public squares, no more untidy
neighborhoods. People would live in hygienic, regimented high-
rise towers, set far apart in a parklike landscape. This rational
city would be separated into discrete zones for working, living
and leisure. Above all, everything should be done on a big scale-
-big buildings, big open spaces, big urban highways. He called it
La Ville Radieuse, the Radiant City. Despite the poetic title, his
urban vision was authoritarian, inflexible and simplistic.
Wherever it was tried--in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier himself or
in Brasilia by his followers--it failed. Standardization proved
inhuman and disorienting. The open spaces were inhospitable;
the bureaucratically imposed plan, socially destructive. In the
U.S., the Radiant City took the form of vast urban-renewal
schemes and regimented public housing projects that damaged
the urban fabric beyond repair. Today these megaprojects are
being dismantled, as superblocks give way to rows of houses
fronting streets and sidewalks. Downtowns have discovered that
combining, not separating, different activities is the key to
success. So is the presence of lively residential neighborhoods,
old as well as new. Cities have learned that preserving history
makes a lot more sense than starting from zero. It has been an
expensive lesson, and not one that Le Corbusier intended, but it
too is part of his legacy."
BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI
taken from

lesson_lecorbusier
http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/lecorbusier.html
http://www.multimania.com/cesarigd/photoeg1.htm

FLWright
Frank Lloyd Wright

Form: "Fallingwater, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most
widely acclaimed works, was designed for the family of
Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann. The
key to the setting of the house is the waterfall over which it is
built. The falls had been a focal point of the family's
activities, and they had indicated the area around the falls as
as the location for a home. They were unprepared for Wright's
suggestion that the house rise over the waterfall, rather than
face it. But the architect's original scheme was adopted almost
without change. Completed with guest and service wing in
1939, Fallingwater was constructed of sandstone quarried on
the property and laid up by local craftsmen. The stone serves
to separate reinforced concrete "trays," forming living and
bedroom levels, dramatically cantilevered over the stream.
Fallingwater was the weekend home of the Kaufmann family
from 1937 until 1963, when the house, its contents, and
grounds were presented to the Western Pennsylvania
Conservancy by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. Fallingwater is the only
remaining great Wright house with its setting, original
furnishings, and art work intact. In 1986, New York Times
architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote: "This is a house that
summed up the 20th century and then thrust it forward still
further. Within this remarkable building Frank Lloyd Wright
recapitulated themes that had
preoccupied him since his career began a half century earlier,
but he did not reproduce them literally. Instead, he cast his net
wider, integrating European modernism and his own love of
nature and of structural daring, and pulled it all together into a
brilliantly resolved totality. Fallingwater is Wright's greatest
essay in horizontal space; it is his most powerful piece of
structural drama; it is his most sublime integration of man and
nature."
(culled from
http://www.inusa.com/tour/pa/laurel/fallingw.htm)

Iconography: "Architecture is the triumph of the Human

Imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man
into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric
pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is
at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes
Frank Lloyd Wright, touch upon when we use the word 'order'."
Falling Water (Kaufmann House) Bear Run, PA. 1936 -- Frank Lloyd Wright, 1930, 1937
"Perhaps the most well known of Wright's buildings is the
"Falling Water" house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. The house
is
surrounded by a dense forest, large rocks and a stream. What
makes the house special is the way it blends in with the
forest and water around it. The house is integrated with a
waterfall, and strong horizontal, sheltering roof lines
accentuate
the broad rocks below. Inside the house, a large fireplace
gives a friendly appearance, and windows offer a beautiful
view
of the foliage surrounding the building. Overall, the house
generates a feeling of being in touch with nature. "
Full text at
(http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~wiscengr/issues/apr97/wright.html)
Context: "Frank Lloyd Wright began his architectural career

in Chicago working in the firm of Adler and Sullivan
between 1887 and 1893. Louis Sullivan's famous dictum,
"form follows function", certainly had an impact on Wright's
conception of what he termed Organic Architecture. Wright
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FLWright
was also very influenced by Japanese architecture after he saw

a Japanese home that was constructed at the 1893 Columbian
Exposition in Chicago. He particularly responded to the
openness of the interiors of Japanese homes and how the
exterior, natural world was integrated with the interior.
Another important domestic influence was the contemporary
Arts and Crafts Movement and its emphasis on the warmth
and texture of wood. His design sense also shared much in
common with De Stijl, the contemporary art and design
movement in Holland that emphasized vertical and horizontal
elements in very rational and spare designs. Gerritt Rietveld's
Schroeder House of 1924 is an excellent example of De Stijl
architectural design. Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg
were two painters working in this style. Throughout his long
career of more than 70 years Frank Lloyd Wright received
relatively few commissions for large public buildings. The
majority of his work consists of single family homes. His
creativity and approach to the design problems associated
with domestic architecture were allowed to range freely in
creating a diverse and rich body of work. Wright's early
homes he dubbed Prairie Houses because of their inspiration
from the long flat horizontal planes and space of the
American Midwest. The Prairie Style houses exhibited the
characteristics of Wright's Organic Architecture and the Robie
House, built in Chicago in 1909, epitomized the early
maturation of his concepts. The Prairie Houses seemed to be
one with the horizontal landscape they rose out of. Frank
Lloyd Wright's Organic Architecture was first described in a
paper published in 1898. He first used the term "organic
architecture" in a talk given in 1894. He defined Organic
Architecture as architecture that is appropriate to time,
appropriate to place, and appropriate to man. By "appropriate
to time" Wright meant that the building should be of its own
era. That is a 20th century building should look like a 20th
century building, not an 18th century building. It should also
make appropriate use of the materials and technology
available to the builder. By "appropriate to place" Wright felt
that the building should be in harmony with its natural
environment. When possible the building should take
advantage of and work with, natural features of the site. By
"appropriate to man" he meant that
buildings should serve people, not the architect and not
fashion. He designed buildings that were conceived on a
human scale with the human body as the basic unit of
measure. "the reality of the building is the space within to be
lived in, not the walls and ceiling" The basic design elements
of his conception of Organic architecture may be summarized
by the following characteristics.
Open, well modulated, interior spaces
Informal design
Unity with nature and the space around the structure,
often created by using materials from the construction
site
Rich textures and surfaces
Built to a human scale
The E.J. Kaufmann House (Falling Water) in Bear Run,
Pennsylvania, is without a doubt the best known example or
Organic Architecture, and perhaps the highest manifestation
of these concepts.Frank Lloyd Wright first came to Arizona in
1927 in order to consult on the design of the Arizona
Biltmore.During his second visit when he worked on the
design of a resort hotel to be called San Marcos-in-the-Desert
he brought his family, draughtsmen, and students. They built

FLWright
a camp village in the desert made of tent-like structures. The

structures, made of canvas, let in a soft diffuse light to the
interiors that inspired Wright to develop new ways of lighting
interiors. He also liked the close relationship of the open, light
interiors with stark beauty and the broad expanse of the desert
they live in. In 1936, after contracting pneumonia in the harsh
Wisconsin winter, Wright decided to build a more permanent
winter home in the desert near Phoenix. A piece of property
in north-east Scottsdale was selected near the base of the
McDowell Mountains. The site of TaliesinWest, as the home
and studio came to be known, is on a rise with a sweeping
view of the desert to the south. Construction began in 1938.
"...Arizona needs its own architecture. The straight line and
broad plane should come here - of all places - to become the
dotted line,
the textured, broken plane, for in all the vast desert there is
not one hard, undotted line!"
The basic structure of Taliesin West is made of formed
concrete filled with local rocks picked up from the building
site. Wright incorporated his ideas inspired by the
translucency of the canvas used in the earlier desert camps
and many of the first roofs and walls at Taliesin were initially
made of canvas. Now the canvas has been replaced with glass
or fiberglass. The translucent walls and ceilings provide the
interiors with a wonderful diffuse light during the day and
bring in the desert sky at night. Click here for a description of
the buildings.
Taliesin West like the Prairie Houses and Falling Water
appears be one with its site - growing out of the desert with
forms that echo the
nearby McDowell Mountains and the vast expanse of the
surrounding landscape.Wright designed several private homes
in the Phoenix area. The Harold Price, Sr. House, built in
1954, is one of the most striking and most accessible, it's
right on Tatum Road north of Lincoln. The Price House is
built with inexpensive, common building materials, notably
concrete clock. Nonetheless, the house still maintains
Wright's basic design sensibilities with open, fluid spaces,
broad overhangs and the feeling that it belongs on the site.
The Price House compliments the site, and the landscape, in
the way that Fallingwater compliments the waterfall it sits
beside and over."
Taken directly from,
(http://www.coconino.edu/apetersen/_art221/flw.htm)


FLWright


Benton and Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Form: This early work of Pollocks is often compared to the wok of
Thomas Hart Benton, titled Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green
Valley. Though the palette is somewhat monochromatic, the scene is
traditional.
Iconography and Context:

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming on 28

January 1912. He was the fifth and youngest son of LeRoy
McCoy Pollock and Stella McClure Pollock. The family
left Cody when Pollock was less than a year old, and he
was raised in Arizona and California. After a series of
unsuccessful farming ventures, his father became a
surveyor and worked on road crews at the Grand Canyon
and elsewhere in the Southwest. Pollock, who sometimes
joined his father on these jobs, later remarked that
memories of the panoramic landscape influenced his
artistic vision.
While attending Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles,

Pollock was encouraged to pursue his early interest in art.
Two of his brothers, Charles and Sanford (known as
Thomas Hart Benton. Sande), were also developing as artists. Charles, the eldest,
Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. 1934 went to New York to study with the Regionalist painter
oil and tempera on canvas Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, and he
American Regionalism suggested that Jackson should join him. In 1930 Pollock
went east and enrolled in Benton's class at the League. It
was at about this time that he dropped his first name, Paul,
and began using his middle name.
Under Benton's guidance, Pollock analyzed Old Master

paintings and learned the rudiments of drawing and
composition. He also studied mural painting with Benton
and posed for his teacher's 1930-31 murals at the New
School for Social Research, where the Mexican muralist
José Clemente Orozco was at work on frescoes. Pollock's
first-hand experience of contemporary mural painting is
thought to have sparked his ambition to paint large scale
works of his own, although he would not realize that aim
until 12 years later.
During the 1930s, Pollock's work reflected Benton's

"American Scene" aesthetic, although enriched by a
brooding, almost mystical quality reminiscent of the work
of the visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whom
Jackson Pollock. Going West. 1934 Pollock admired. Orozco's influence also made itself felt,
especially after Pollock saw him at work on his dynamic
frescoes for Dartmouth College (1932-34).
http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/CAS/pkhouse.nsf/pages/pollock

Form: Jackson Pollock started to veer away from his more traditional style of painting at this point.
Iconography: Pollock was an extremely agitated and upset man. As an artist he was unable to achieve the degree
of proficiency with the paint that his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, had and could never get over his envy of
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Benton and Pollock
artists such as Picasso and Miro. In writing about the biographical movie of his life, Michael O'Sullivan of the
Washington Post puts it rather succinctly, "Rather than a sudden epi-phany, Pollock's arrival at the new approach
to painting is depicted as a difficult birth following a long series of artistic contractions. It's sometime in the late
1940s and Pollock -- after more than a decade of wrestling with his own crippling Picasso envy, his
unwillingness to imitate his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, and failed experiments with cubism, surrealism and
automatism -- has just stumbled on his signature style after accidentally spilling paint on the floor."
(www.delawareonline.com) It may be said that his work is his struggle in trying to reach that 'birth;, to get to the
place where he would eventually feel that his paintings had as much value as those of the artists he looked up to.
Context:

"With the advent of the New Deal's work-relief projects, Pollock and many of his contemporaries
were able to work as artists on the federal payroll. Under government aegis, Pollock enrolled in the
easel division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, which provided him with
a source of income for nearly eight years and enabled him to devote himself to artistic development.
Some of Pollock's WPA paintings are now lost, but those that survive--together with other canvases,
drawings and prints made during this period--illustrate his complex synthesis of source material and
Jackson Pollock. the gradual emergence of a deeply personal pictorial language. By the early 1940s, Native American
Birth. 1938 motifs and other pictographic imagery played a central role in his compositions, marking the
oil on canvas beginnings of a mature style.
mounted on
Even as his art was gaining in assurance and originality, Pollock was experiencing personal turmoil
plywood.
and recurring bouts of depression. He was also struggling to control his alcoholism, which would
46"x22"
continue to plague him throughout his life. His brothers Charles and Sande, with whom he shared
Abstract
living quarters at 46 East 8th Street in Manhattan, encouraged him to seek treatment, including
Expressionism
psychoanalysis. Although therapy was not successful in curbing Pollock's drinking or relieving his
depression, it introduced him to Jungian concepts that validated the subjective, symbolic direction
his art was taking. In late 1941, Sande wrote to Charles, who had left New York, that if Jackson
could "hold himself together his work will become of real significance. His painting is abstract,
intense, evocative in quality."

Form: Still in the stages before he created the works he would eventually become famous for, it is easy
to see the Picasso-inspired style of these two oil paintings. However, he was also influenced strongly by
the work of the Native Americans. In Male and Female, it is evident that he was influenced by the
Southwest culture, such as navajo rugs and Indian sand paintings.
Iconography: "It has been suggested that Pollock was influenced by Native American sand paintings,
made by trickling thin lines of colored sand onto a horizontal surface. It was not until 1947 that Pollock
began his "action'' paintings, influenced by
Surrealist ideas of "psychic automatism'' (direct expression of the unconscious). Pollock would fix his
canvas to the
floor and drip paint from a can using a variety of objects to manipulate the paint.

The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle (1943; 109.5 x 104 cm (43 x 41 in)) is an early Pollock,
but it shows the passionate intensity with which he pursued his personal vision. This
painting is based on a North American Indian myth. It connects the moon with the feminine
and shows the creative, slashing power of the female psyche. It is not easy to say what we
are actually looking at: a face rises before us, vibrant with power, though perhaps the
image does not benefit from labored explanations. If we can respond to this art at a fairly
primitive level, then we can also respond to a great abstract work such as Lavender Mist. If
we cannot, at least we can appreciate the fusion of colors and the Expressionist feeling of
urgency that is communicated. Moon-Woman may be a feathered harridan or a great
abstract pattern; the point is that it works on both levels."

Benton and Pollock
( www.oir.ucf.edu)
The Moon Woman 1942
Abstract Expressionism And, for Male and Female,
"This article demonstrates that Pollock drew his inspiration for Male and Female not from a
wellspring of psychic urges, but from a roll-out drawing of a relatively obscure stela from
Chavín de Huántar, Peru. With the skill of a shaman, Pollock transformed this monument's
two-thousand-year-old iconography into a modern idiom, preserving the original motifs in
the outlines of his "violent automatism." Even the organization of the stela is retained,
providing ample clues to the origin of Pollock's stylized male and female caimans. There
exists well-documented evidence that Pollock drew heavily from Native American sources.
His admiration of Navajo sand paintings, Northwest Coast masks, and pre-Columbian
Mexican imagery are all evident in his work before 1940. What remains undisclosed are the
striking parallels between Pollock's early "nonobjective" paintings and native Peruvian
bas-reliefs. Clear stylistic and iconographical affinities characterize not only in Male and
Female but also other paintings of the critical period from 1942 through the mid-forties.
Documentary evidence further buttresses this observable relationship. Both Robert
Motherwell and Lee Krasner distinctly remember Pollock's stated goal in the early forties
"to create a 'parallel' version of Picasso." Judging from the evidence, it seems likely that
Pollock intended to conjure up the native spirits of the New World, just as Picasso had
summoned forth African genies from the Old World." http://nmaa-
ryder.si.edu/journal/v11n3/v11n3doyon.html
Male and Female. 1942.
oil on canvas, 6'x4' Context:
Abstract Expressionism
"Jackson Pollock's painting Male and Female has long been recognized as a pivotal work
in the artist's career. Completed around 1942 shortly after Pollock underwent Jungian
analysis, the painting's imagery is generally attributed to the autonomic manifestation of
Jungian archetypes. Consequently, Male and Female is reproduced in numerous scholarly
publications, and is acclaimed as a significant step in Pollock's search for prelogical
expression—one which eventually culminates in his drip paintings."
(nmaa-ryder.si.edu)
Form: Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, coins, cigarettes, etc. At this time Pollock
was standing over the canvas he was painting on, and allowing the detritus that fell onto
it to become a part of the artwork itself.
Form, Iconography, and Context:

"Full Fathom Five is one of the earliest masterpieces of Pollock's drip

technique. The actual origins and initial development of this technique have
never been fully explained, except by reading back from fuller photographic
evidence produced about 1950, two or three years after this work was
painted. Like other practical breakthroughs in twentieth-century painting,
'creative accident' seems likely to have played an important part, as Pollock
probed and tested methods of paint application which promote the
continuousness of line rather than the broken lines inevitable in the constant
reloadings and readjustments of conventional brushwork. His solution was to
pour from a can of domestic paint along a stick resting inside the container,
so that a constant 'beam' of pigment came into contact with the canvas
(which he left unstretched on the studio floor). The character of the line was
determined by certain physical and material variables that could be
combined in almost infinite permutations: the viscosity of the paint
(controlled by thinning and dilution); the angle and hence speed of the

Benton and Pollock
pouring; and the dynamics of Pollock's bodily gestures, his sweep and
rhythm, especially in the wrist, arm and shoulder. 'Like a seismograph',
noted writer Wemer Haftmann 'the painting recorded the energies and states
Full Fathom 5. 1947 of the man who drew it.' In addition Pollock would flick, splatter and dab
Oil on canvas with nails, subsidiary colors on to the dominant linear configuration." (www.sai.msu.su)
tacks, buttons, coins, cigarettes, etc,
129 x 76.5 cm (50 7/8 x 30 1/8 in)
Context: It is most probable that Pollock was thinking of this Shakespeare sonnet as he worked; note the tempest-like appearance and
feel of the paint, both in texture and color.

Full Fathom Five

The Tempest (I, II, 329)
by William Shakespeare
FERDINAND.
Where should this music be? i'the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: - and, sure, it waits upon
Some god o'the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wrack,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,
Or hath it drawn me rather: - but 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL, sings.
Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Benton and Pollock
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

[Burden within. Ding-dong.]
Hark! now I hear them, - Ding-dong, bell.
FERDINAND.
The ditty does remember my drown'd father: -

This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes: - I hear it now above me.
Form: "Action" or "drip" painting on canvas.

At this point in hs career, Pollock was

begininng to truly come into his own with
his new style of 'action' painting. He began
to get into the rhythm of the movement
inherent in painting and allowed music to
influence him, "New York painter Jackson
Pollock(1912-1956) was an unquestionable
leader of the Abstract Expressionist
movement. His above 1950 work Autumn
Rhythm (Number 30), exemplifies the
careful balance between accident and
control that characterizes both his art and the
improvisational jazz of the period. Pollock
himself was an avowed jazz fan, often
attending live performance's at New York's
Five Spot club. Critic Ellen Landau notes
the influence of jazz on Pollock's painting:
As early as 1945...one prescient critic
compared the "flare, spatter and fury" of
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) 1950 Pollock's paintings to modern
oil on canvas 8'x17' music...Pollock loved jazz..."rocking and
Abstract Expressionism rolling" for days on end to Dizzy Gillespie,
Bird, Dixieland, and bebop. What
undoubtedly attracted him to this type of
sound was not just its rhythm and tempo,
but its naked presentation of honest and
deeply felt emotion...Pollock could tell his
wife that jazz was "the only other creative
thing happening in the country."
xroads.virginia.edu)
Context: (culled directly from an interview on pbs.org)
JIM LEHRER: Now a painter who changed American art.

Senior Producer Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN: The painting is violent, like a boxing match.
KIRK VARNEDOE, Museum of Modern Art: The way that things are
flung against the canvas -- the splat, the splatter-- there's a sense of
aggression in the picture.
JEFFREY BROWN: It's lyrical , like a ballet. (music in background)
KIRK VARNEDOE: There's something extremely fine and delicate about

a lot of these lines that is choreographed on some level of ecstasy.

Benton and Pollock
JEFFREY BROWN: It's dense, like a dream --.
KIRK VARNEDOE: There's no foreground, there's no background,

there's no tree, there's no dog, there's no recognizable anything in this
picture. And yet there's a sense of very complex space that's poised
between opposites.
JEFFREY BROWN: That is the view from curator Kirk Varnadoe of

"Autumn Rhythm," dripped, poured, and flung into existence by Jackson
Pollock in 1950, and now part of a Pollock retrospective at New York's
Museum of Modern Art. The music is from a CD put out by the museum,
the jazz Pollock listened to for days on end, from his own collection.
JACKSON POLLOCK: Sometimes I use a brush but often prefer using a

stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pollock_1-11.html

Pollock was invited to participate in a group exhibition of work by
French and American painters, including Picasso, Braque, Matisse and
other established masters. Among the virtually unknown Americans in
the group was Lenore Krassner--later known as Lee Krasner--who
became Pollock's lover and later his wife. The work she saw in
Pollock's studio convinced her of his extraordinary talent, and it was
not long before influential members of New York's avant-garde
intellegensia began to share her opinion. His work came to the
attention of Peggy Guggenheim, whose gallery, Art of This Century,
showed the most challenging new work by American and European
abstractionists and Surrealists. Guggenheim became Pollock's dealer
and patron, introducing his work to the small but avid audience for
vanguard painting.
In 1945 Guggenheim lent Pollock the down payment on a small

homestead in The Springs, a rural hamlet near East Hampton, Long
Island. This property, now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study
Center, would be Pollock's home for the rest of his life and the site of
his most innovative and influential work. Before moving to The
Springs, his imagery had been congested, his colors somber, and the
general mood of his paintings anxious and conflicted. Soon after
establishing his studio in the country, however, his colors brightened,
his compositions opened up, and his imagery reflected a new
responsiveness to nature. Soon he would pioneer the spontaneous
pouring technique for which he became world-renowned.

Although Pollock had first experimented with liquid paint at the

Siqueiros workshop in 1936, it would not become his primary medium
until more than ten years later. By 1947 he was creating densely
layered all-over compositions that earned both praise and scorn from
the critics. Some dismissed them as meaningless and chaotic, while
others saw them as superbly organized, visually fascinating and
psychologically compelling. Clement Greenberg, one of Pollock's most
ardent supporters, maintained that he was "the most powerful painter in
contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major
one." With several one-person exhibitions to his credit and work
included in important group shows, Pollock was receiving significant
attention. A profile in the 8 August 1949 issue of Life magazine
introduced his challenging art to a nationwide audience and cemented
his growing reputation as the foremost modern painter of his
generation.

Benton and Pollock
Pollock's radical breakthrough was accompanied by a period of

sobriety lasting two years, during which he created some of his most
beautiful masterpieces. In his barn studio, he spread his canvas on the
floor and developed his compositions by working from all four sides,
allowing the imagery to evolve spontaneously, without preconceptions.
Pollock described this technique as "direct" painting and likened it to
American Indian sand painting. He maintained, however, that the
method was "a natural growth out of a need," and that its only
importance was as "a means of arriving at a statement." The character
and content of that statement were then and remain controversial,
subject to widely varying interpretations--which is why Pollock's art
has retained its vitality in spite of changing tastes.
In 1951 Pollock's aesthetic underwent a shift in emphasis as he

abandoned non-objective imagery in favor of abstracted references to
human and animal forms. "When you're working out of your
unconscious," he explained, "figures are bound to emerge." He also
gave up color to create a series of stark black paintings on unprimed
canvas. Many of his admirers were ambivalent about his new direction,
which may account at least in part for Pollock's inability to remain
sober. For the next five years he would struggle unsuccessfully to solve
his drinking problem, while his art underwent a series of revisions,
some more successful than others. Color returned, gesture became
richer and more various, and Pollock once again veiled his imagery in
layers that obscured as much as they revealed.
By 1955, however, Pollock's personal demons had triumphed over his

artistic drive, and he stopped painting altogether. Ironically, his work
had begun to earn a respectable income for him and Krasner, who was
becoming increasingly estranged from her troubled, alcoholic husband.
In the summer of 1956 she took the opportunity of a trip to Europe to
re-evaluate their relationship, while Pollock remained at home with a
young mistress to distract him from the agonies of self-doubt and
inaction that plagued him. In Paris, on the morning of 12 August,
Krasner received a telephone call informing her that Pollock had died
the night before in an automobile accident. Driving drunk, he had
overturned his convertible, killing himself and an acquaintance and
seriously injuring his other passenger.

Bio written by Helen Harrison; Director, Pollock-Krasner House



Benton and Pollock


Dali
Dali

Excerpts from,
Baby Dali. by Robert Hughes. Time, 7/4/94, Vol. 144 Issue 1, p68, 3p, 3c, 1bw HTML
Full Text

Was any painter a worse embarrassment than Salvador Dali? Not even
Andy Warhol. Long before his physical death in 1989, old Avida Dollars --
Andre Breton's anagram of his name -- had collapsed into wretched
exhibitionism. Genius, Shocker, Lip-Topiarist: though he once turned
down an American businessman's proposal to open a string of what would
be called Dalicatessens, there was little else he refused to endorse, from
chocolates to perfumes. He was surrounded by fakes and crooks and
married to one of the greediest harpies in Europe: Gala, who made him the
indentured servant of his lost talent even as he treated her as his muse.
Nevertheless, Dali was an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the
late 1920s. Nothing can take that away from him. Other Surrealists --
especially Max Ernst and Dali's fellow Catalan Joan Miro -- were greater
magicians; but Dali's sharp, glaring, enameled visions of death, sexual
failure and deliquescence, of displaced religious mania and creepy organic
delight, left an ineradicable mark on our century when it, and he, were
young. Dali turned ``retrograde'' technique -- the kind of dazzlingly
detailed illusionism that made irreality concrete, as in The First Days of
Spring, 1929 -- toward subversive ends. His soft watches will never cease
to tick, not as long as the world has adolescent dandies and boy rebels in it.
..
Surrealism was fascinated by childhood, viewing it as the primal forest of

the imagination -- the place where all the id's most succulent and
aggressive life-forms ran rampant, before civilization paved them over.
Hence you could suppose that Dali's own childhood would be rich in
suggestion about his mature work. And so it was, in a way; but not the way
he meant it to be.
In his mythomaniac autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, he

took pains to spin out a fiction of his early originality. He wanted people to
think he'd been found like Moses in the bulrushes, a miracle child:
Salvador, Saviour. In part this did correspond to the truth. As Ian Gibson's
fascinating catalog essay on Dali's early life makes clear, little Salvador
was a horribly spoiled brat. Cosseted, deferred to, aware that a tantrum
could get him anything he wanted, he grew up with serious delusions of
creative omnipotence -- which, as time went by, coexisted with equally
serious problems of sexual impotence, caused (or so he said) by a book
with lurid illustrations of the effects of venereal disease that his father had
shown him. Dali turned out to be the exact opposite of Picasso's
phallicism. He was thrilled by softness, flaccidity. ``Nothing,'' he wrote,
``can be regarded as too slimy, gelatinous, quivering, indeterminate or
ignominious to be desired.'' . .
Hello Dali!
Dali went to art school in Madrid in the early 1920s. `Ì'll be a genius,'' he
wrote in his diary two years before that. ``Perhaps I'll be despised and
misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius.'' Cold and diligent, he
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/dali.htm[8/17/2013 6:00:26 PM]

Dali
figured out all his poses and provocations in advance. Politically, too, he
wanted to be shocking; later Dali would turn into an archconservative, the
living national treasure of Franco's long regime, but in the 1920s -- the
years of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship -- he was a vehement parlor red.
He even did jail time, briefly, when he was arrested as a reprisal against
his father's left-wing political activity.
There was, however, nothing particularly revolutionary about his paintings.

Seeking a credible genius costume, he did versions of Cubism, of De
Chirico's pittura metafisica, and developed his dry, classicizing realism in
such images as Seated Girl Seen from the Back, 1925. It is an easy matter
to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow
and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep
black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for
instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark
shadows cast by figures on a flat ground-plane, the idealized desert of his
paintings. Dali's obsession with Picasso reached a height of imitative
flattery with his pastiches of the older painter's massive ``classical'' women
in white fluted dresses. Likewise, when Dali the Surrealist was pupating,
there was hardly a trope in his pictures of 1927-28 that didn't come out of
Andre Masson, Ernst, Miro or Yves Tanguy.
But his originality as an artist began with his peculiar experiences of the
natural world, such as the contorted rocks at Cape Creus, near his boyhood
home, sculpted into fantastically ambiguous shapes by tide and weather;
like faces seen in the fire, these were the foundation stones of what Dali
called his ``paranoiac-critical method'' of seeking dream images. Dali's art
may not tap far into his unconscious, but it reveals a great deal about what
he imagined his unconscious to be.
Form: Oil on canvas.
Iconography: When compared to Rene Magrittes

Time Transfixed, an important point about surrealism
is made evident. Time is an ephemeral thing that
cannot be pinned down. Time is a mechanical
invention, one which we have Descartes to thank for,
and in essence, time often does not make sense. Dali
makes this point clear with the melting watches.
Time is an internal dialogue, as people, we have all
experienced the feeling that time is going by too
quickly, and sometimes, such as when we are
studying, writing essays, or doing research for an
online textbook, time can seem to move too slowly.
Ants are also a favorite of Dalis', and are a recurring
theme in most of his paintings, as well as a film he
did with Buñuel titled, Le Chien Andalou, in which
at one point, a man observes ants as they crawl out
of him through a hole in his palm. It can be assumed
that Dali is commenting on the silliness of time,
likening it to the seemingly pointless scurrying that
we observe ants doing...written about this work on
www.artchive.com "Over the next few years Dalí
devoted himself with passionate intensity to

Dali
developing his method, which he described as

'paranoiac-critical', a 'spontaneous method of
irrational knowledge based on the critical and
systematic objectivation of delirious associations and
interpretations'. It enabled him to demonstrate his
personal obsessions and fantasies by uncovering and
meticulously fashioning hidden forms within pre-
existing ones, either randomly selected (postcards,
beach scenes, photographic enlargements) or of an
accepted artistic canon (canvases by Millet, for
Salvador Dali. The Persistance of Memory. 1931 example). It was at this period that he was producing
oil on canvas 9"x13" MOMA works like The Lugubrious Game (1929), The
Persistence of Memory (1931) and Surrealist
Objects, Gauges of Instantaneous Memory (1932).
Flaccid shapes, anamorphoses and double-sided
figures producing a trompe-l'œil effect combine in
these works to create an extraordinary universe
where the erotic and the scatological jostle with a
fascination for decay - a universe that is reflected in
his other works of this period, including his symbolic
objects and poems (La Femme visible, 1930;
L'Amour et la mémoire, 1931) as well as the
screenplay for L'Age d'Or (1930).
Context: "It soon became apparent, however, that

there was an inherent contradiction in Dalí's
approach between what he himself described as
'critical paranoia' - which lent itself to systematic
interpretation - and the element of automatism upon
which his method depended. Breton soon had
Rene Magritte. Time Transfixed. 1939. misgivings about Dalí's monsters which only lend
oil on canvas 57"38" Chicago AI themselves to a limited, univocal reading. Dalí's
extreme statements on political matters, in particular
his fascination for Hitler, struck a false note in the
context of the Surrealist ethic and his relations with
the rest of the group became increasingly strained
after 1934. The break finally came when the painter
declared his support for Franco in 1939. And yet he
could boast that he had the backing of Freud himself,
who declared in 1938 that Dalí was the only
interesting case in a movement whose aims he
confessed not to understand. Moreover, in the eyes
of the public he was, increasingly as time went by,
the Surrealist par excellence, and he did his utmost
to maintain, by way of excessive exhibitionism in
every area, this enviable reputation."

Dali
( - Text from "ART20, The Thames and Hudson

Multimedia Dictionary of Modern Art")

Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: "Meeting Gala was, for Dali, a revelation and a terror. Here was
the personification of all his fantasies, and yet his fear and loathing of erotic
acts made it impossible for him to approach her. It was Gala who put an end to
his torture by proposing a walk one day, during which Dali confessed his love.
They eloped to Barcelona in 1929. Gala was to become a major influence in the
work of Dali. She was to feature in many of his works, often surrounded by
controversy. In The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Dali gave Christ the features
of Gala, and in many pictures he portrayed her as the Madonna. On other
occasions, she influenced some of his worse pieces, encouraging him to rush
out pictures purely for financial gain. This was a contributing factor to Dali's
expulsion from the surrealist movement." (www.bbc.co.uk)
Context: "His Rift with the Surrealists

It seems strange that Dali, who for many people is synonymous with
surrealism, should have had such a turbulent relationship with the movement.
Although at first he was welcomed into the movement, the surrealists objected
to some of Dali's work. They were scandalised when Dali painted The
Lugubrious Game, which included a man whose underpants were soiled, and
they were angry when he painted portraits for money instead of pursuing the
artistic dream. The final straw was Dali's consent to design advertisements for a
company making tights, and by the 1940s his links with the surrealists were
severed. Nevertheless, Dali considered himself to be a true surrealist. He once
said: The only difference between the surrealists and me is that I am a
surrealist. He considered his work to be true surrealism, and that the surrealist
group, by adopting a certain style and set of rules had disqualified its own
Salvador Dali. Gala Angelus. 1935
existence. The surrealist group, in turn, felt that his works had become no more
NYMOMA
than puzzles where the viewer searched for the double images rather than
looked at the paintings. It was Breton, the leader of the surrealists, who gave
Dali the nickname 'Avida Dollars', an anagram of Salvador Dali, and an
indication of the light they saw Dali in. Designing adverts and fashionable
clothes (for Dali saw a link between art and fashion) were not suitable
occupations for a surrealist; he was giving them a bad name, and the bad name
they gave back to him indicated their displeasure." full text at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A585344


lesson_earthworks
Earthworks

Form: Earthwork,
created out of natural
elements found
around the site, black
rock, salt crystal, and
earth.
Iconography:
According to the
Press release provided
by Dia Galleries, 'In
1970 gallerist and art
patron Virginia Dwan
provided Smithson
with the funds needed
to construct Spiral
Jetty. Using black
basalt rocks and earth
from the site, the
artist created a coil
1500 feet long and 15
feet wide that
stretches out
counterclockwise into
the translucent red
water. In 1972
Smithson explained
his fascination with
this rugged context: "I
like landscapes that
suggest prehistory. As
an artist it is
interesting to take on
the persona of a
geological agent and
actually become part
of that process rather
than overcome it."
Today Spiral Jetty is
submerged as it has
been for most of its
existence. Realizing,
after its completion,
that he had built it at
a time when the level
of the lake was
unnaturally low,
Smithson considered
adding further
material to ensure that
his artwork would be
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/earthworks.htm[8/17/2013 5:58:35 PM]

lesson_earthworks
visible more often. As

yet this has not been
done.'
Context: What makes

this earthwork
interesting is that it is
not created to be a
monument that stands
the test of time.
Instead, it is made to
reflect the ever-
changing form of the
earth itself. That is, it
is meant to be
exposed to the
Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty. 1969-70 elements and the
black rock, salt crystal, and earth spiral, whims of the tide. The
length 1,500' Great Salt Lake, Utah rocks and sand used
to create it will wear
away with time, as
does the earth, and the
tide ends up covering
the piece completely.
It is also extremely
successful in doing
what the artist set out
to do, in suggesting a
pre-historical
landscape. It looks
like something created
tens of thousands of
years ago, and the
way that it disappears
and then becomes
'discovered' again
suggests a type of
excavation and
discovery of things
long lost from a far
distant past.
"Financial backing provided by the prestigious Dwan Gallery to construct a piece of "land art." The
concept is to use expanses of open areas as a canvas to take art out of the confining galleries and onto the
open land." http://www.sltrib.com/specials/gsl/stories/jetty.ht
Form: These art the notes and drawings done by Robert Smithson in preparation
and planning for his earthwork 'spiral jetty.' It also describes the evolution of the
piece over the time of its' planning.
Iconography: These notes reflect a part of creating art that few people other than
the artist or his collaborators ever see. For many, a work of art seems to just
exist, as if its' execution and conception were flawless and simple. These few

lesson_earthworks
notes show a fraction of the time and thought that must be put into a work of this
magnitude and help us understand, too, that the end product does not always look
like the original idea.
Context: The fact that these notes were given freely by the artist to be displayed
and looked through show a willingness by the artist to share his creative process
with others. Because of the struggle and years of training a person must go
through in order to become a successful artist, many do not want to share their
'trade secrets' with others, especially those who are not artists because it seems
like they are giving away freely what they themselves had to put in years of time
to understand. However, by sharing the reality of the process and by letting the
public understand the amount of work it takes to create a piece, Robert Smithson
is creating more respect and preciousness for his work, because it becomes
evident to outsiders that art is not easy and it does take time and effort.

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Robert Smithson (1938B1973)

draft writing about his earthwork
Spiral Jetty, ca. 1970,
describing the evolution of the
piece.
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
Papers.
Donated by Nancy Holt, 1986-
1995.
Form: "Nancy Holt completed Sun Tunnels in

1976, in the Utah desert. Sun Tunnels is a
composition of 4 concrete tubes, each 18 feet
long and about 9 feet in diameter. the concrete
tubes are oriented to the rising and setting sun of
the summer solstice and the winter solstice. Holes
in the tubes cast light during the day as an
expression of star constellations. The Sun
Tunnels offer some practical advantage -
orientation within the landscape to the cardinal
directions, and shelter from the sun of the
desert." (lamar.colostate.edu)
Iconography: The Sun Tunnels are not strictly

an earthwork, per se, as they are created with
concrete and built to withstand the desert heat
and corrosive winds. However, this work does
connect with the earth in a celestial way, as it is
positioned to reflect the summer and winter
solstice as well as constellations.

lesson_earthworks
Context: By using the idea of tunnels, Nancy

Holt has created an environment wherein the
viewer steps into 'another world'. Inside this
concrete tube, the viewer is protected from the
desert, and in the harsh light of day is able to
gaze at the constellations shining on the interior
of the tube, a melding of the day and evening
skies.
Nancy Holt. Sun Tunnels, 1973-76 Lucin, Utah
© Photograph by Laurence Belingard, 1999
Form: Miles and miles of nylon erected into a
fence, running along the hills of Sonoma and
Marin. "The fabric for the fence was
originally woven to be used for automobile
safety air-bags. But the Nixon Whitehouse
allowed the car-makers to delay
implementation of the air-bag laws for more
than 10 years. That decision meant there was
lots of air-bag fabric available at a reasonable
price. " (www.christojeanneclaude.net)
Iconography: According to the website,

"Walking the length of the fence was an other-
worldly experience. Like chanting a mantra,
each panel was the same. But as one passed
onto the next panel, it changed slightly. It was,
after all, a new panel.
Time and space were altered by the rhythm of
passing panels. In the blink an eye, one could
walk 5 or 6 miles. Or so it seemed. Christo
said the Running Fence was a landscape with
"an obstructive membrana" in place to block
and alter the view, which transforms the ways
people perceive it." (also said about the fence
on www.ucl.ac.uk) " An essential part of
Christo's work is process. His Running Fence
consisted of 2050 panels of white nylon fabric
Christo and Jean-Claude. Running Fence. 1972-76 each 18 ft high and 6 ft wide held by cables
nylon fence, height 18' length 24.5 miles and hooks strung between steel poles. Twenty
Sonoma and Marin Counties four miles long it stood for two weeks in mid
September 1976 meandering its way across
the rolling countryside of north California
revealing and emphasizing the contours of the
land before finally dipping down and
disappearing into the sea. Connecting the
borders of the landscape, the sky to the sea,
the finished product was a piece of pure

lesson_earthworks
theatre: dazzling, dramatic, monumental: a

modern and transient version of the Great
Wall of China.
The work reflected on a number of issues: the nature of borders while ignoring all
borders; the character of the land: dividing yet uniting, softening yet breaking up
the contours, the rippling fabric creating a static yet mobile running line, a mobile
boundary for viewing the land in a new light and changing dramatically according
to the angle from which it was viewed. To see all the fence, apart from in the air,
required movement through the land. The spectator could no longer contemplate it
in a static and distanciated manner. The realisation of this work was the outcome
of 42 months of negotiation and legal struggles. Permission was required to cross
59 different ranches. There were eighteen public hearings, three sessions in the
Superior Courts of California, 450 pages of environmental impact statements,
innumerable media debates, disputes between different lobby groups etc. It
required hundreds of people from engineers to students to physically erect the
fence, an equally important part of the process."
Context: It can be difficult for a viewer to discern precisely what an artist is

trying to say when a work is of this magnitude, mainly because the idea, as well
as the work itself, can be overwhelmingly enormous. Though this work is not
made from the earth, it does subtly reflect the movement of the earth it is placed
on. The rolling of the hills, the sunlight reflecting through the nylon, and the
breeze moving it softly. It would be easy to imagine that this piece actually
belonged in the landscape it occupied, because while it may have been huge, it
was also unobtrusive and complementary to it.
Form: Documentary photographs of the creation of the

Running Wall.
Iconography: Like the notes for Robert Smithsons' Spiral

Jetty, the documentation of this work helps the viewer to
understand the amount of manpower needed to create a
work of monumental proportions. It also shows process in
the work, how the creation of the work itself is just a s
important as the end result.
Context: The creation of this work was laborious and

frustration. An Environmental Impact Report had to be
secured, permission granted to place the work on private
land, and 3 million dollars had to be spent in order to make
this work a reality. It seems like a lot of work for a piece
that lasted only two weeks, and now exists only on film and
in photographs, but it illustrates eloquently the drive and
desire of a creative individual to make their ideas a reality.

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Form: 3,100 Umbrellas, placed in Japan
and in California.There were 1340 in
Japan and 1760 in California. The blue
umbrellas were in Japan, and the yellow
were in California.
Iconography: "The umbrellas, free

standing dynamic modules, reflected the
availability of the land in each valley,
creating an invitational inner space, as
houses without walls, or temporary
Christo and Jean Claude, The Umbrellas, Japan and US 1984-1991 settlements and related to the ephemeral
19'8" Tall Umbrellas two inland character of the work of art. In the
Two valleys, one 19 kilometers (12 miles) long in Japan, precious and limited space of Japan, the
and the other 29 kilometers (18 miles) long in the USA. umbrellas were positioned intimately,
more facts close together and sometimes following
http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/christo/umbrella.html the geometry of the rice fields. In the
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/9173/umbrellas.html luxuriant vegetation enriched by water
year round, the umbrellas were blue. In
the California vastness of uncultivated
grazing land, the configuration of the
umbrellas was whimsical and spreading
in every direction.The brown hills are
covered by blond grass, and in that dry
landscape, The Umbrellas were yellow.
From October 9th, 1991 for a period of
eighteen days, The Umbrellas were
seen, approached, and enjoyed by the
public, either by car from a distance and
closer as they bordered the roads, or by
walking under The umbrellas in their
luminous shadows."
www.christojeanneclaude.net
Context: The umbrellas are not meant

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to be seen as analogous or
complementary to the landscapes they're
in, they are supposed to represent an
idea of the space available to people in
each landscape. Christos' work seems to
be representative of how man and
environment can work together, and
how culture is shaped by the landscape
it resides in.

Form: Notes and sketches for the planning

and execution of the Umbrella project. On
top is a map detailing where each umbrella
is to be placed, and below is eh artists'
conception of what the umbrella will look
like when it is opened.
Iconography:Here again, as with all of the

earthworks we've seen on this page, is an
example of he planning and forethought
required to tackle a project of this
scope.One can see that not only did the artist
have to undertake the idea of the umbrellas
themselves, but also that of correct
placement and securing the land for the
project.
Context: It must be remembered that what

is unique about Christos' work is he
additional problems he takes on while
attempting to construct them. There is not
only the initial idea, but the reality that he
wants his work to cover many different areas

lesson_earthworks
of land, and in this case, on two separate

continents and cultures. It is not only a
statement on the similarity of mankind, but
an example of how it is possible to bring
two diverse cultures together and show them
how much they reflect one another, though
they are thousands of miles apart.


Performance Art
Performance Art

Form: The artist, with a dead bunny. Smeared with felt, fat
and grease. or, alternately, honey and gold leaf.
Iconography: "The bridge between the earthly and spiritual

realms is represented in Beuys' work more often by animals,
which he thought of as "figures that pass freely from one level
of existence to another." In many cultures animals are
guardian spirits for shamans, companions on their celestial
journeys. Beuys often used animals in his actions, bringing
them along, so to speak, on his own journeys. He carried a
dead hare in several early performances, shared the stage with
a spectral white horse in the action Titus/Iphigenia (1969),
and most famously, spent a week in a gallery space with a
coyote in I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), an
action described as a "dialogue" with the animal. All of these
performances suggest the shaman's special affinity with
animals: he can understand their language, share their
particular abilities, even transform himself into one of them.
Beuys identified personally with several animals, most notably
the hare. He always carried a rabbit's foot or tuft of rabbit fur
as a talisman,and jokingly cited the pointed shape of his ears
as proof of his close relationship to the creature. He also had
an affinity for the stag, an animal with deep ties to Germanic
legend and northern myth; he sometimes referred to himself as
"stagleader. And in the multiple A Party for Animals (1969),
he simply declared himself to be an animal by including his
own name--along with those of the
elk, wolf, beaver, horse, stork, and many others--on the list of
the party's "active members." For Beuys, maintaining a close
relationship with animals was crucial for him so that he could
learn from what he believed was their superior intelligence
(intuition)." (By Joan Rothfuss, www.walkerart.org)
What we see in this piece is Beuys communicating with his
favorite animal, the rabbit, while covered with felt and fat.
However, what we can not be sure about is the particular
iconography of Beuys using a dead hare, rather than a living
one. Is he perhaps trying to say that a dead rabbit understands
art better than a living person? Perhaps. In fact, according to
an essay by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Some
conceptual artists do away with the art object by becoming the
art object. Live performance provides a perfect place to
express ideas directly to an audience. German artist Joseph
Beuys believed passionately that art should change the way
people think. To that end, he staged dramatic, usually shocking
presentations. His How to Explain Picture to a Dead Hare was
a performance in several parts. First, he covered his head in
honey and gold leaf. Then, Beuys picked up a dead hare and
walked it around an exhibition of his paintings and drawings.
Finally, sitting on a stool, he explained his works to the hare.
The artist explained, "even in death a hare has more sensitivity
and instinctive understanding than some men with their
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/performance_art.htm[8/17/2013 5:56:33 PM]

Performance Art
stubborn rationality." (www.philamuseum.org)
Context: He was in world war one, and was shot down. He

was burnt over 70% of his body and had been wrapped in fat
and felt to help him heal. When he got better, he decided he
would make art that was all about peace.....or, more in depth, is
a biography by Joan Rothfuss, Walker art curator..."Joseph
Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a city in northwestern
Joseph Beuys.
Germany near the Dutch border. He grew up in the nearby
How to Explain Art to a Dead Hare. 1965
towns of Kleve and Rindern, the only child in a middle class,
strongly Catholic family. During his youth he pursued dual
interests in the natural sciences and art, and he chose a career
in medicine. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in
order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio
operator and combat pilot, and during his years of active duty
he was seriously wounded numerous times. At the end of the
war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several
months, and returned to Kleve in 1945.
Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long
process and figures, at least obliquely, in much of his artwork.
Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural
materials grew out of a wartime experience--a plane crash in
the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars
who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and
Picture of the artist.
warm his body. While the story appears to have little
grounding in real events (Beuys himself downplayed its
importance in a 1980 interview), its poetics are strong enough
to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his
mythic biography. On his return from the war Beuys
abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in
the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He
graduated in 1952, and during the next years focused on
drawing--he produced thousands during the 1950s alone--and
reading, ranging freely through philosophy, science, poetry,
literature, and the occult. He married in 1959 and two years
later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his
alma mater. During the early 1960s, Düsseldorf developed into
an important center for contemporary art and Beuys became
acquainted with the experimental work of artists such as Nam
June Paik and the Fluxus group, whose public "concerts"
brought a new fluidity to the boundaries between literature,
music, visual art, performance, and everyday life. Their ideas
were a catalyst for Beuys' own performances, which he called
"actions," and his evolving ideas about how art could play a

Performance Art
wider role in society. He began to publicly exhibit his large-

scale sculptures, small objects, drawings, and room
installations. He also created numerous actions and began
making editioned objects and prints called multiples.
(www.walkerart.org)

Form: The artist, wrapped in felt and
holding a cane. Inside a gallery space with
a wild coyote. This type of performance art
is known as an 'action'.
Iconography: " Beuys' actions were often

described as intimate, autobiographical,
politically charged, and intense. Actions
would typically last 45 minutes to nine
hours, and though his actions were not
rehearsed, Beuys often created a score or
"partitur" (as opposed to a script) in which
he would plan the objects that would be
used and the sequence of the performance.
Beuys viewed each action as a new
version of a basic theme and an attempt to
make his philosophy more comprehensible.
He also believed that the less literal the
performances were, the easier it would be
for the audience members to translate his
message into their own lives. Beuys
traveled to the United States in 1974 and
performed an action entitled I like America
and America Likes Me at the René Block
Gallery in New York. The action actually
began at Kennedy Airport, where friends
wrapped him in felt and transported him to
the gallery in an ambulance. Beuys then
spent several days in a room with only a
felt blanket, a flashlight, a cane that looked
like a shepherd's staff, copies of the Wall
Street Journal (which were delivered
daily), and a live coyote. His choice of
employing a coyote was perhaps an
acknowledgment of an animal that holds
great spiritual significance for Native
Americans, or a commentary on a country
that through its Western expansion had
become "lost"America." (By Joan
Rothfuss, www.walkerart.org) This is a
good explanation for what happened, that
the viewer could see, but the meaning for
Beuys went much deeper. He was German-
born, and had a hard time with America
and how America treated him as an artist
and its' wildlife. In an essay written by

Performance Art
David Levi Strauss, this ambivalence is

studied in greater detail, "By most
accounts, the American audiences for
Beuys's public dialogues in January1974
(arranged by Ronald Feldman) also didn't
quite know how to take Beuys. His
reputation for provocation and controversy
had preceded him, but the substance of his
teachings had not, so much of the time of
these meetings was taken up by the most
preliminary clarification of terms. When
the dialogues did break through to more
substantive exchange, the audiences often
seemed caught on the horns of a
particularly (though not exclusively)
American dilemma: How can we embrace
Beuys's idealism (which is akin to our
own) without denying its profound
opposition to the materialism which also
defines us. For his part, Beuys was equally
ambivalent about America. As his
influence spread in Europe, he continually
declined invitations to come to the U.S. or
show in the U.S., saying he would not
come as long as the U.S. remained in
Vietnam. When he finally did come in
1974, he tried to engage Americans in two
very different kinds of dialogue. Four
months after his largely unsuccessful
public dialogues and lectures on his
Energy Plan for the Western Man in New
York, Minneapolis, and Chicago, Beuys
performed his first and only aktion in
America, and this second contact was
fittingly traumatic. You could say that a
reckoning has to be made with the coyote,
and only then can this trauma be lifted. (8)
For three days in May of 1974, Joseph
Beuys lived and communicated with a
coyote in a small room in the newly-
opened Rene Block Gallery at 409 West
Broadway in New York. Though actually
witnessed by only a handful of people, this
action, I Like America and America Likes
Me, awakened the interest and curiosity of
many who heard about it, far and wide.
Along with Beuys's golden-flaked honeyed
head in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead
Hare (1965), and the glowing white horse
and cymbals of Iphigenie/Titus Andronicus
(1969), images of the Coyote action are
among the most resilient and generative
images to come out of Beuys's
performance work. Caroline Tisdall, author

Performance Art
of the book documenting the Coyote

action, has elsewhere written, "The
represented environment must effect the
modern consciousness originally,
archetypically and beyond the times." (9)
Perhaps more than any other, Beuys's
American action was projected "beyond
the times." Fifteen years after the act and
three years after Beuys's death is perhaps a
good time to make an inquiry into the
further meanings of the Coyote action, and
to reconsider its significance.
Coyote in America
Coyote, ululating on the hill,
is it my fire that distresses you so?
Or the memories of long ago
when you were a man roaming the hills.
(10)
Native American Coyote tales speak of a
time long ago "when animals were people"
and everyone communicate with each
other. Though there are many different
kinds of Coyote tales, varying from place
to place and people to people, they flow
from a common, ancient source and
represent "one of man's earliest attempts to
make articulate the movement of the
Spirit." (11)
The Coyote of the Coyote tales is
primarily a transformer, an agent of
change
bringing order to chaos and chaos to
order. He is "the spirit of disorder, the
enemy of boundaries." (12) In much of
Western North America he fills the role of
Culture Hero and Trickster, found in
virtually all traditional societies. He is an
American Zeus, Prometheus, Orpheus, and
Hermes all rolled into one: mating to
create the human race, inventing death,
stealing fire to give to humans,
shapeshifter, androgyne, messenger and
guide to the Underworld. In whatever
guise, Coyote makes things happen. In
contrast to the virtuous gods and heroes of
some other traditions, the Coyote of
Coyote tales is by turns greedy, lecherous,
deceitful, vain, jealous, and gullible. The
poet Gary Snyder has pointed out the
"Rabelaisian-Dadaist overtones" of the
Coyote tales. (13) It is typical of Native
American thought that comic indirection
paradoxically indicates the way of right
action. There is more than a little Coyote

Performance Art
in Buster Keaton. During Sacred Time, the

time of Creation, Coyote taught humans
how to survive, and the incredible survival
of the coyote, both mythologically and
biologically, continues to be one of the
great American mysteries...The Coyote
action was performed in the shadow of the
twin towers of the World Trade Center, on
a postcard of which Beuys inscribed the
names "Cosmos" and "Damian" in one of
his multiples (made the same year as the
Coyote action), as a comment on the
commercialization of allopathy and as an
homage to the greatest physician in the
Joseph Beuys. history of Europe, Paracelsus, who was
I Like America and America Likes Me. 1974 born the year after Columbus "discovered
America," and assassinated 48 years later
by men in the employ of irate druggists
and doctors. Legend has it that Paracelsus
was captured by the Tartars while in
Russia and was schooled in their shamanic
healing arts. Beuys's intentions in the
Coyote action were primarily therapeutic.
Using shamanic techniques appropriate to
the coyote, his own characteristic tools,
and a widely syncretic symbolic language,
he engaged the coyote in a dialogue to get
to "the psychological trauma point of the
United States' energy constellation";
namely, the schism between native
intelligence and European mechanistic,
materialistic, and positivistic values. This
is the dialogue he tried and failed to have
with people in his Energy Plan for the
Western Man tour earlier that year. In
turning to the coyote, he moved from
verbal language to the language of action.
The conceptual simplicity of the Coyote
action--"a man in a room with a coyote"--
combines with its semiotic complexity to
allow entrances and readings at many
different levels."
(David Levi Strauss from his recent book
between dog & wolf, Essays on Art and
Politics, pubished by Autonomedia,
Brooklyn, NY, 1999
www.bockleygallery.com)

Context: An excerpt from the same essay

Performance Art
can be used to explain the context of what

he was doing in the gallery with the
coyote, "Upon arrival in the room with the
coyote, Beuys began an orchestrated
sequence of actions to be repeated over
and over in the next three days. A triangle
is struck three times to begin the sequence.
This triangle that Beuys wears pendant
around his neck is the alchemical sign for
fire (dry, fiery, choleric warmth), which
ancient glacial Eurasian shamans sorely
needed. It is also a sign for the feminine
element (earthy & mercurial) and for the
creative intellect, and it is the Pythagorean
symbol for wisdom. Striking its three sides
three times, Beuys calls himself, Coyote,
and the Audience to order. After the
triangle is struck, a recording of loud
turbine engine noise is played outside the
enclosure, signifying "indetermined
energy" and calling up a chaotic vitality.
At this point, Beuys pulls on his gloves,
reminiscent of the traditional bear-claw
gloves worn by "master of animals"
shamans such as those depicted on the
walls of Tros Freres, and gets into his fur
pelt/felt, wrapping it around himself so that
he disappear into it with the flashlight. He
then extends the crook of his staff out from
the opening at the top of the felt wrap, as
an energy conductor and receptor, antenna
or lightning rod. The conical shape of the
felt resembles a tipi, the nomadic shelter
which migrated. from Siberia to North
America with the hunters. Topped with the
crooked staff, it also recalls both the stag
and the shape of the lightning in Lightning
with Stag in Its Glare (1958-85), and is a
reference to the classic shamanic antlered
mask, also going back to the caves of the
Upper Paleolithic, as does Beuys's
"Eurasian staff," the shamanic phallos
(Coyote carried his around in a box on his
back) and staff of the psychopomp--
messenger and mediator. The felt
enclosure doubles as a sweat lodge for
Beuys, accumulating the heat necessary for
transformation. Beuys bends at the waist
and follows the movements of the coyote
around the room, keeping the receptor/staff
pointed in the coyote's direction at all
times. When the beam of the flashlight is
glimpsed from beneath the felt, we
recognize the figure of the Hermit from

Performance Art
the Tarot--an old man with a staff, holding

a lighted lamp half-hidden by t he great
mantle which envelopes him. This card in
the Tarot indicates wisdom,
circumspection, and protection. It refers to
the developed mind of man, the prudence
and foresight of learning, and is thought by
some to picture Hermes, the Messenger,
signifying active divine inspiration and
"unexpected current." (21) Arthur Edward
Waite gives the sense of the Hermit's
lantern as "where I am, you also may be."
(22) After awhile, Beuys emerges from the
felt and walks to the edge of the room,
marking the end of the sequence of
gestures. There is a pile of straw, another
piece of felt, and stacks of each day's Wall
Street Journal in the room. Beuys sleeps on
the coyote's straw; the coyote sleeps on
Beuys's felt. The copies of the Wall Street
Journal arrive each day from outside (like
the engine noise) and enter the dialogue as
evidence of the limits of materialist
thinking." (David Levi Strauss from his
recent book between dog & wolf, Essays
on Art and Politics, pubished by
Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY, 1999

Form: Performance piece involving metal wires inserted into the
artists' chest.
Iconography: Chris Burden put long metal wires into his chest and
had himself photographed with these wires protruding from his chest.
His performance pieces are often compared to the stunts performed on
the MTV show Jackass, in which young men perform asinine stunts
which often result in pain and laughter, all because they can. However,
it may also be said that he is part of the sub-culture known as the
'modern primitive', in which people engage in forms of piercing,
tattooing, bloodletting and ancient shamanic rituals such as suspension
in order to push their physical bodies to the limits of pain in order to
achieve a higher level of spirituality. The argument against including
him into this group is the fact that he chooses to display these rituals,
there is no preparation nor meditation beforehand, and it would appear
that there is a stronger argument for his work to be done for pure shock
value.
Context:" Quick, can you name the American artist who famously
stuffed himself into his campus locker and remained there for seven
days? If your answer is Chris Burden, then you know your modern
artists. Burden pulled the locker stunt as his MFA thesis project and
went on to stage many other similar conceptual/action art pieces

Performance Art
(including shooting himself in the leg as a one-off performance piece)

in the course of his long and colorful career. Burden belongs to a
generation of earnest, loopy, brave, comical, and visionary artists who
tried to change the way we look at art. In pursuit of this mission,
Burden also created installations, one of which is included in "Blurring
the Boundaries: Installation Art, 1969-1996," the new exhibition at the
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art. Burden's piece, titled The Reason for
Chris Burden. Doorway to Heaven. 1973 the Neutron Bomb, consists of 50,000 nickels with match tips glued to
their faces lying in perfectly symmetrical rows on a platform just
above the floor. It is a forceful image of order, power, and industry
which rises up to fill the space and overwhelm the viewer. Up close,
the nickels seem small, the explosive capabilities of the match heads
comical. Paradoxically, from further away, their combined energy is
cold and sinister. Using multiple perspectives to get at meaning and
altering the way a viewer interacts with a work is typical of installation
art. You cannot simply stand a short distance from the image and size
it up as with a conventional medium like painting. To begin with, it is
hard to know where to stand to really see the object. Instead, an
installation requires that you cross the boundaries of a conventional art
experience and become part of the work itself."
(www.austinchronicle.com)
Form: Artist, gun, bullet.
Iconography: If there were ever an argument for calling an artist a

jackass, this would be it. According to an article on www.disinfo.com,
"On November 19, 1971, 25-year-old performance artist Chris Burden
had one friend shoot him in the arm at close range, while another filmed
it. Burden made a few thousand off the sale of his accomplishment,
simply titled, "Shoot." His resulting medical bills surpassed $84,000."
However, though it may seem pointless, stupid and painful, there are
many in the performance art genre whom see it as a valid and important
form of self expression.

Context: According to a synopsis found at Electronic Arts Intermix,

which has documented his work on film..." Chris Burden's provocative,
often shocking conceptual performance pieces of the early 1970s retain

Performance Art
their raw and confrontational force in these dramatic visual records,

shot on Super-8, 16mm film, and half-inch video. Guided by the artist's
candid, explanatory comments on both the works and the
documentative process, these segments reveal the major themes of
Burden's work -- the psychological experience of danger, pain, and
physical risk, the aggressive abuse of the body as an art object, and the
psychology of the artist/spectator relationship. This compilation is an
historical document of one of the most extreme manifestations of 1970s
conceptual performance art. Included are the infamous Shoot (1971), in
which Burden allows himself to be shot in the arm." (www.eai.org)
Chris Burden. Shoot. 1975
Form: Chris Burden nailed himself to a Volkswagen Beetle and had other artists
drive it around.
Iconography: "in a small garage to the Speedway Avenue I stood on the rear
bumper of a people car. With the back on its tail lying, stretched I mean arms over
the roof. Nails were driven by my palms into the roof of the car. The garage gate
was opened and the car half from the garage was pushed onto the road. For two
minutes with full number of revolutions constantly, the machine for me cried.
After two minutes the engine was turned off and the car into the garage was
pushed back. The gate was closed." (Chris Burden, Transfixed, Venice,California,
23. April1974) (memopolis.uni-regensburg.de)
Chris Burden is again playing with the idea of mechanical objects, becoming a
part of the object, literally, and trying to 'feel' through the object. Much in the
same way in which Joseph Bueys had communed with the animal world , Chris
Burden was communing with the mechanical world.
Context: The artist is using non-living, mechanical objects and trying to infuse
Chris Burden. Transfixed. 1974 them with his living, organic presence. To hear his own interpretation and context
for this piece, please click the link beneath the photo of the work.
http://www.artnode.se/burden/


Performance Art


Pop
Pop Art, Raushenberg, Johns, Dine, Indiana, Demuth

Form: A collage created with found objects, paint, and pictures.
Iconography: A paper written by Mark Robinson, at the Baltimore Museum of

Art states that...."A work that epitomizes Rauschenberg's combine theory is
Canyon. Created in 1959, this piece combines fabric, cardboard, paper,
photographs, metal, paint and other elements with collage work and several
striking 3D elements -- namely, a stuffed bald eagle perched on a box and a
suspended pillow. The most striking elements of this work are, obviously, the
eagle and the pillow. Upon first seeing the work, the viewer is immediately drawn
in it, his or her curiosity sparked by this odd inclusion of "non-artistic" elements.
By attaching the eagle and pillow to the piece, Rauschenberg is making a
statement about the acceptance of everyday objects as possible materials for art
(he was no doubt influenced by Marcel Duchamp in this respect). The
incorporation of the eagle, perched and ready to attack, makes a bold statement
about the often-confrontational nature of Rauschenberg's work. The bald eagle
itself is an already loaded image, as it is often seen as a symbol of patriotism.
This eagle, however, is by no means patriotic -- it is a fierce creature,
recontextualized by its surroundings. The pillow, on the other hand, places an
emphasis on the more symbolic nature of Canyon. Visually, it seems to give
weight to the piece, almost pulling it down off the wall. More importantly,
however, it adds a sexual symbolism to the piece. It evokes images of male and
female sexuality -- namely the male genitalia and the female breasts. Because it
is a pillow, it is soft and comforting, a stark contrast to the confrontational eagle.
While the three-dimensional objects dominate the lower part of the piece, the top
is comprised primarily of a collage of many different types of media. This
collage, in fact, takes up nearly two-thirds of the canvas. Although easily
overlooked because of the visual dominance of the eagle and pillow, it provides
both a background and a context for the lower part of the piece. For example, the
photograph of the small child reaching upward is a direct reference to the perched
eagle below. Many of the elements included in the work make references to
popular culture -- a magazine spread, found domestic photographs and a picture
of the statue of liberty, to name a few. This further emphasizes Rauschenberg's
RAUSCHENBERG, Robert. theory about everyday objects as art. This is probably the most important theme
Canyon. 1959 presented in Canyon and it is shown with both subtlety and excess."
Combine on canvas 81 3/4 x 70 x (wmbc.umbc.edu)
24 in.
Collection Mr and Mrs Sonabend, Context: "Robert Rauschenberg began creating his combines in the 1950s. These
works have their origins in traditional paintings -- many of the early combines are
Paris
presented on a canvas and are hung on a wall. What sets the combines apart from
their painting brethren are their three-dimensionality. Eventually this focus was
taken to the extreme and many of the combines moved off the wall altogether and
became freestanding objects. Rauschenberg incorporated many elements other
than canvas and paint into these pieces. Elements of collage (which had been
present in his earlier works) were incorporated, as well as found objects. He
called this process "assemblage" (1). Rauschenberg "broke down barriers between
painting and sculpture by incorporating [these] everyday objects such as Coca-
Cola bottles, clothing, newspaper clippings, taxidermied animals, and
photographs" (2). In addition to breaking down barriers between painting and
sculpture, he was also breaking down barriers between the art world and the
outside world. By including objects like Coca-Cola bottles and newspaper
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/pop.htm[8/17/2013 5:57:02 PM]

Pop
clippings, he was making references to popular culture. This pop culture

referencing would later explode into the "pop-art" movement of the 1960s."
(wmbc.umbc.edu)
Collage Education
Rauschenberg’s Combines, now at the Met, are rich and dense in a way that has to be seen to be believed.

* By Mark Stevens

* Published Dec 18, 2005
Rauschenberg's Canyon (1959), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Early in the twentieth century, artists began jumping out art’s window. The Russian modernists soared into the
revolutionary sky. The Dadaists, arching an eyebrow, admired the cracked glass. The Cubists couldn’t stop blinking,
beautifully agog. At mid-century, Robert Rauschenberg went through the window with American gusto. He had an
appetite for the churning street outside, and he seemed full of jazzy slang. He was rude—vitally and impishly rude—in
a way no American painter (except the de Kooning of Woman I) had ever been before him. He’d put anything in art:
postcards, socks, street junk, paint, neckties, wire, cartoons, even stuffed animals. Especially stuffed animals. The
absurdist taxidermy was funny as well as provocative. The goat-and-rooster shtick made wicked fun of both the macho
posturing of the fifties and the holy pomposities then gathering around painting. Sometimes, art needs a good rooster
squawk.
Once through the window, Rauschenberg had one of the great, decade-long runs in American art, which is now the
subject of “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Paul Schimmel of the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—Nan Rosenthal oversaw the installation at the Met—the exhibit includes
67 works created between 1954 and 1964. Among them are both famous works (the goatish Monogram) and rarely
exhibited pieces. Rauschenberg himself invented the term “Combines” to describe a pungent style of mix-and-match
collage. In his oeuvre, this early decade of the Combines, especially the first five years, matters the most. It anticipates
much that came later, and it raises an important question: Are the Combines less than meets the eye, a slapdash
everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style that ultimately just celebrates energy for energy’s sake?
They’re more than meets the eye. My first impression of the show—before looking at the imagery—was one of a
controlled, formal richness. An artist in love with the hot and messy splash of inspiration, of course, but also one
who’s knotty, thoughtful, and considered. Rauschenberg mostly worked with what Rosenthal calls a “syncopated grid,”
a formal structure within which he weighted and composed lights, colors, and shapes. In an image like Canyon, for
example, he calculated how the weight of the hanging bag sets off the strength of the eagle’s wings as it pulls upward
into the image-laden sky. Reproductions don’t convey the tactile feeling of Rauschenberg’s color. His surfaces are
rich, steeped, time-marinated.
As you draw closer to a Combine, its imagery begins to come into focus, and everything starts to connect and connect
and connect. You find that not only do the blacks in Canyon rhyme with the bird’s wings; so does that ribbing in the
upper right, which mirrors the tips of the outstretched feathers. (And there’s wt., the abbreviation for “weight,” within
the same ribbed black.) Canyon takes its inspiration in part from a Rembrandt Ganymede that depicts an eagle pulling
a heavy, bawling boy into the air, one who looks rather like the child in the snapshot in the Combine; the hanging bag
evokes the boy’s buttocks. Connections zigzag across mental boundaries. Weight, for example, can be literal or
illusory, a matter of words, images, colors, and shapes.
There’s an argument that art should probe deeply, that it should rigorously edit experience in order to reach some
bedrock essence. Nothing wrong with that. Rauschenberg’s endless connections, some lighthearted and some not, do
something else. He celebrates the floating textures of consciousness—the way the mind moves, wanders, and joins
together. One of my favorite Combines, Hymnal, contains (among much else) a book, a piece of paisley that looks the
way hymns sound, and some ill-tempered graffiti. It can be good to concentrate on the hymn alone. It can also be
good, as you pick up the hymnal, to acknowledge the message scratched on the pew.

Pop
Robert Rauschenberg: Combines

Metropolitan Museum of Art.
December 20 through april 2.

Form: 'Assemblage' collage.
Iconography: At the Sir John Cass department of art,

Kirk Lake had this to write about this work done by
Raushenberg, "It is worth looking at one of
Rauschenberg's "combine paintings" in more detail.
In Rebus (1955) Rauschenberg set out to realise "a
concentration"
18 of the particular area of New York that he was in
at the time of its composition. This he did by
collaging items found in the vicinity into the painting
stating that "a picture is more like the real world
when it's made out of the real world."19 A statement
Burroughs would echo on numerous occasions and
one that reflects Schwitters' comments about
Merzbau quoted earlier. The title "Rebus" implies
that the picture represents some kind of solvable
conundrum and the critic Charles Stuckey went so far
as to deduce its literal meaning by decoding its
images until the painting read, "That reproduces
sundry cases of childish and comic coincidence to be
read by eyes opened finally to a pattern of abstract
problems."20 Whether this literal reading had
anything at all to do with Rauschenberg or his
intentions or was merely an example of over-analysis
and the need to put boundaries on that which appears
boundless is debatable but Stuckey accurately pin-
pointed the purpose of this kind of work by
concluding that the painter had "force[d] an
awareness of how we see, by making us share the
Robert Rauschenberg. Rebus, 1955 tangents and confusions, childish, comic, and
Combine painting: oil, paper, fabric, pencil, coincidental ones which [Rauschenberg] himself
crayon, newspaper, and printed reproductions endured while facing the abstract problems of making
on three canvases art."21 The importance of these random factors,
8 feet x 10 feet 10 1/2 inches (243,8 x 331,5 cm.) overall coincidences and jarring juxtapositions is integral to
Private collection Courtesy Guggenheim Museum, New York our understanding of the methodology and purpose of
these experiments as they mutated through Dada and
Surrealism, Cage and Rauschenberg and Burroughs
and Gysin and on into the Pop Artists, conceptualists
and contemporary multi-media artists."
(http://www.lgu.ac.uk/matrix2001/rp_timeline.html)
Context: A rebus is, by definition "A representation

of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often
presented as a puzzle." We can see by the linear way
in which Raushenberg had laid out this painting that
it can be read from left to right, and with pictures
forming a type of pictograph or cryptic language, it is
up to the viewer to solve the puzzle.

Pop
Form: Pillow, quilt, paint, wood, various other painting materials.
Iconography: According to Frazier Moore, Associated Press television writer in the South
Coast Today Newspaper..."As a young artist, he awoke one morning with an urge to paint but
no money for a canvas. Solution: He appropriated his own pillow and quilt caking them with
paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish, then mounting this concoction on a frame. "Bed" set off
fireworks in the art world." However, that would be too simplistic an explanation. It was widely
known that Raushenberg was gay, and the lover of the equally well known Jasper Johns. His
'Bed' assemblage create controversy in Italy, where they refused to display it because it was
'shocking'. In the contemporary gay community this creation is thought to represent a bed shared
b Raushenberg and Johns, and perhaps is reminiscent of the aftermath of their 'artistic
lovemaking'. Whatever the true reason behind the piece, it has remained one of the more
controversial pieces of his career, though by the standards of Modern Art today, it is not
shocking at all.
RAUSCHENBERG, Context: In Rauschenberg's own words about his artwork, "A pair of stockings isn't less suitable
to create an artwork, than nails, wood, turpentine, oil or cloth." and, "Rather I put my trust in
Robert Bed 1955 the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the
Combine painting unknown. It is then that I begin to work... when I don´t have the comfort and sureness and
6'2" x 31 1/2" x 6 certainty, sometimes Jack Daniels helps too."
1/2"
Mr and Mrs Leo
Castelli,
New York
Form: Asemblage of painting and objects on canvas.
Iconography: "Field Painting, for example, pivots references both to art-making and Johns’
own career. The primary colors red, yellow, and blue are spelled out in letters hinged
perpendicularly to the canvas, where they also appear in stencil-like doubles. Attached to
them are various studio tools. The Savarin coffee tin and Ballantine beer can both allude to
Johns' studio paraphernalia and to his appropriation of them as motifs in his work. Passages
of smeared and dripped paint, a footprint, light switch, and a neon “R” collude with other
visual codes to multiply the possibility of associations." ( www.nga.gov)

Context: 'Field Painting' as an art form was made most popular by Mark Rothko. It is a
technique by which large 'fields' of color are painted on a canvas, and they are supposed to
either recede or move forward when stared out, depending on whether they are warm or cool
colors, and what relation they are to each other. Johns' is playing a game, much like
Raushenberg, by playing with the words and their meanings in context to the images.
Johns. Field Painting.
1964

Form: Wood, canvas, encaustic, and newspaper

Pop
Iconography: "The story is 'I dreamt one night

that I painted the flag of America. The next day I
did it.' This sounds like an episode in the life of a
biblical prophet. At least one great painter of our
time, Francis Bacon, seems to have seen himself
as that: 'I don't think I'm gifted; I just think I'm
receptive ... I think I have this peculiar kind of
sensibility as a painter where things are handed to
me and I just use them . . . I suppose I'm lucky in
that images just drop in as if they were handed
down to me.' Johns might well have felt that
images were being handed down to him not only
when he first did the flag in 1954 but also when he
first did targets and the figure 5 in 1955 and
alphabets in 1956 and numbers and all-over grey
brushstrokes in 1957 and sculpmetal bulbs and
flashlights in 1958 and 0 through 9 and
polychromatic explosions with superimposed
stencilled words in 1959 and painted ale cans in
1960 and the map of the USA in 1961 and the
Skin drawings in 1962. It was as if for those nine
years Johns was in a perpetual state of grace. And
as if a voice from above then said: 'Jasper, we've
done enough for you; you're on your own now.'
Suddenly the boy genius had to become a man.
Hitherto the struggle had been confined to the
realisation of the image; from now on Johns was
going to have to hunt the image down. It is true
that the legendary passing encounters while out on
drives with the prototypes of the pavingstones and
the cross-hatching are about finds rather than
hunts - but they were still finds, not revelations.
(By the way, it was in 1963 that Johns first
consented to give a serious interview, as if he
Jasper Johns. Flag. 1955 were now responsible for what he did.)" (Take
wood, canvas, encaustic, and newspaper from www.artchive.com)
It can be difficult, at first, to look at a painting of
a symbol so easily recognized and reproduced as
the American flag and see it as fine art. But it
must be remembered that it is the materials used
and way that the objects were being created that
was unique for the time, and challenging.
Context: Johns may or may not be playing

another visual game with the viewers, it can be
hard to tell with a piece as straightforward in
imagery and meaning. There are no other
indicators to suggest that he had an alternate
agenda or political goal in creating the art. With
the artists cryptic explanation that he had dreamt
of painting the flag, the message becomes yet
more obscure, simplified down to a nonchalant
shrug of the shoulders, the answer to why? is
simply, 'because.'

Pop

Form: Plaster molds, paint, canvas.
Iconography: "....Something akin to this game of hide-and-seek with public

symbols happened with his target paintings. Everyone "knows" what a target
is--a test of a marksman's skill. But beneath its muteness a target is
supercharged with an imagery of aggression: every target implies a weapon
and someone aiming. This had an inescapable point in the mid-'50s, when
politicians and all the American media were pounding into the collective
imagination, like a 10-in. spike, the message that the whole nation was a target
for Russian thermonuclear weapons. This is part of the background to Johns'
targets, and a little further back is another form of "targeting"--the virulent
hatred and distrust of homosexuals as deviants and possible spies that the right
encouraged. Johns was a reserved, closeted gay, and a work like Target with
Four Faces, 1955, is all about threat and concealment. Its impassive, identical
plaster casts of faces are contained in a box with a hinged door, a "closet"
above the ominous target. Your gaze, in looking at them, is assimilated to the
eye of the inquisitor, hunting out what is concealed. It is a pessimistic and,
above all, defensive image." Taken from an article in Time magazine
(www.time.com)

Jasper Johns. Target with Four
Faces. 1955
wood, canvas, encaustic, newspaper Context: This work seems to be closer to Johns' personality and inner feelings
and plaster rather than just a word game or commentary. In it, he is expressing some of his
own feelings and issues in the most comfortable way he knows how, through
his art.

Form: Suit with paint on it.
Iconography: (taken directly from, enquirer.com) The green suit has been in Cincinnati before.
Maybe Jim Dine wore it here before he left in 1953 or perhaps when he came back to visit. The
coat slathered with green paint, trousers slashed with a knife in 1959, “Green Suit” appeared in
his first exhibition, Dine/Kitaj, at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1973. Now it is the earliest work
in Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, opening today at the museum. It's been 40 years
since Mr. Dine converted the worn-out corduroy suit into fine art. But as he looks at it at the
museum, he's still pondering its meaning. It's important to him that it is not a picture of a suit.
It's a garment that he wore and wore out. Having lost its first use, it became, with alterations, a
work of art. But it remained a suit. Dine is still pondering the meaning of "Green Suit." “Maybe,
in the next century, it will not be so important to have the physical object,” Mr. Dine says, but
“from where I sit it would be a shame if it were not a physical object. A CD-ROM is not going
to give me that much pleasure.” There is the key to enjoying the eccentric art of Jim Dine,
world class artist with roots in Cincinnati. Each work is a physical object. Not a picture. Not an
icon. Not a symbol or a message. When the “Green Suit” was shown in 1973, Cincinnatians may
have interpreted it as an angry rejection of their city and all it stood for. Mr. Dine was, or was
reputed to be, an angry young man fleeing a troubled youth to become one of a famed band of
artists about to throw the New York art world for a loop. Mellowed at 64, he's amused his
former reputation. “I left here when I was 18. I left here because I wanted to paint and I didn't
feel that this was a place where I could paint. There was nothing terrible about Cincinnati. My
young life growing up here certainly made me, as everyone's childhood does.”


Pop

Jim Dine. Green
Context:The artist is clearly influenced by Marquise de Sade's philosophy of assault of the
Suit. 1959
pleasures of the body. Jim Dine's creations make the viewer feel uncomfortable and repressed,
tied up with the ropes of his work; assaulted by a demented ego and polluted by a "Rent-an-
Artist from Hell, Inc." After Dine's many years of psychotherapy, we still experience his
pathological impulses of self-flagellation. In a video interview for WNET, the artist says, "I
don't want to be avant garde. I want to be nasty ... ugly ... sloppy ... excessive ... useless ...
unpleasant ... and most of all, persona non-grata." And so he succeeds with incredible
commercial results. (http://nyartsmagazine.com/30/42.html)
Form: Oil paintings, with an abstract, cubist, futurist and pop influence
on the subject matter.
Iconography: According to an article on the Smithsonian American Art

Museum web site "Street signs and house numbers, phone numbers and
initials…you use important numbers and letters everyday. When your
backpack gets lost in the locker room, a tag with your name on it tells
everyone that it is yours. If your best friend has a secret to tell, she knows
she can talk to you by dialing your telephone number. On a busy street, a
crossing sign lets you know where it's safe to cross. Words and numbers
are important to Robert Indiana, too. He has turned them into a language
of his own. He uses them to tell you what he's seen, what he's done, and
what he thinks. His artwork looks like road signs you might see along the
Robert Indiana. The Figure 5. 1963 highway. Sometimes they tell you about his life—the roads he's traveled
Robert Indiana. The American Dream. and what's happened to him along the way. Sometimes they show what
1963 he enjoys, like poems and surprising stories. And sometimes they
encourage us to do what he thinks we should—like "EAT" and "LOVE."
"Some people like to paint trees," he said. "I like to paint love. I find it
more meaningful than painting trees." Many people must agree with
him....... In 1973, the U.S. Postal Service put Robert Indiana's design on
the very first "LOVE" stamp. Over three hundred and twenty million of
these stamps were printed. Mail trucks carried letters with this small
"LOVE" sign on them along highways all across the country."
(http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/)
Context: "Robert Indiana is, by his own admission, a painter of signs. His
signs are more intrinsically signals than signs. Donald Goodall writes that
"in the end Indiana's signals, all matter-of-fact and plainspoken at first,
become elusive and suggestive of personal and public history. . . . We
look again, hard. And think about what the shapes have said." Indiana's
"words . . . circles, squares and rectangles, and colors which begin in the
sign-painter's kit" assume "unexpected brilliance or sensitivity, as these
are put in their new universe." They possess "the authority of the
irreducible. The most familiar images change character as we inspect this
symbiosis of reality and remembered experiences, of the prosaic and
speculative." Goodall suggests that Indiana's forms seem autobiographical,
recalling "visual experiences as a child which are alive in his mind,"
experience that the artist "equates with that optimistic illusion of hopeful

Pop
generations, the American Dream." Nevertheless, the painting's "symbolic

implication is not available to fast-transit comprehension. The sign says
what it is. Well and good. But the inner-content of Indiana's signals,
carefully planned and executed with artisan's skills, is sibylline."1" 1.
Donald B. Goodall, "Robert Indiana," exhibition catalog (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Art Museum, 1977), 7. (sheldon.unl.edu)

Iconography: "Born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth

studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia
intermittently between 1905 and 1908. It was in Philadelphia that the artist first
met the American poet and physician William Carlos Williams, the subject of
this painting. Demuth continued his art training during trips to Europe between
1907 and 1921. In 1925 he was included in a group exhibition organized by
Alfred Stieglitz, who later gave him a few one-man shows at his galleries.
When Demuth died at age fifty-one, after suffering from diabetes for much of
his life, an important and prolific career was cut short after only twenty years.
Demuth, a versatile artist, tailored his style to his subject matter. His delicate,
loosely handled watercolors of fruits and flowers pulsate with subtle,
exquisitely balanced color. His paintings of the modern urban and industrial
landscape, on the other hand, are tightly controlled, hard, and exact — in a
style aptly called Precisionism. Although these works show the influence of
Cubism and Futurism, their sense of scale and directness of expression seem
entirely American. "The Figure 5 in Gold" is one of a series of eight abstract
portraits of friends, inspired by Gertrude Stein's word-portraits, that Demuth
made between 1924 and 1929. This painting pays homage to a poem by
William Carlos Williams. Like Marsden Hartley's "Portrait of a German
Officer" and Arthur Dove's "Ralph Dusenberry," this portrait consists not of a
physical likeness of the artist's friend but of an accumulation of images
associated with him — the poet's initials and the names "Bill" and "Carlos" that
together form a portrait. Williams' poem "The Great Figure" describes the
experience of seeing a red fire engine with the number 5 painted on it racing
through the city streets. While Demuth's painting is not an illustration of
Williams's poem, we can certainly sense its "rain/and lights" and the "gong
clangs/siren howls/and wheels rumbling." The bold 5 both rapidly recedes and
races forward in space, and the round forms of the number, the lights, the street
lamp, and the arcs at the lower left and upper right are played against the
straight lines of the fire engine, the buildings, and the rays of light, infusing
the picture with a rushing energy that perfectly expresses the spirit of the
poem." (www.metmuseum.org)

Pop
Context: To understand more about Demuth and why and how he painted
what he did, it is important to delve a bit more deeply into his personal life.
"Blessed with a private income from his parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
coddled in childhood, lame, diabetic, vain, insecure, and brilliantly talented,
Demuth lacked neither admirers nor colleagues. He was well read (and had a
small talent as a writer, in the Symbolist vein) and his tastes were formed by
Pater, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and The Yellow Book; he gravitated to
Charles Demuth 1883-1963 Greenwich Village as a Cafe Royal dandy-in-embryo. Free of market worries,
The Figure 5 in Gold, 1928 he did a lot of work that was private in nature, for the amusement and
stimulation of himself and his gay friends, and much of it was unexhibitable -
at least until the 1980s. "Demuth was not a flaming queen, in fact he was rather
a discreet gay, but if he could not place his deepest sexual predilections in the
open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a
pornocratic culture so drenched in genital imagery that sly hints about
forbidden sex hardly compel attention, the skill with which he did this might
seem almost quaint. But in the teens and twenties the public atmosphere was of
course very different, and Demuth, like other artists in the avant-garde circle
that formed around the collectors Loulse and Walter Arensberg - especially
Marcel Duchamp, whose recondite sexual allegory The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even Demuth called "the greatest picture of our time" - took a
special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. To create a secret subject
matter, to disport oneself with codes, was to enjoy one's distance from (and rise
above) "straight" life. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick-rider's bicycle turns
into a penis, aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls in a cabaret but ogle
one another. "If these scenes of Greenwich Village bohemia were all that
Demuth did, he would be remembered as a minor American esthete,
somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley and Jules Pascin. But Demuth was an
exceptional watercolorist and his still-lifes and figure paintings, with their wiry
contours and exquisite sense of color, the tones discreetly manipulated by
blotting, are among the best things done in that medium by an American. They
quickly rise above the anecdotal and the "amusing." (culled from
www.artchive.com)

Pop Art II, Warhol, Hamilton, and Licthenstein.

Form: Collage
Iconography: richard hamilton is a British PopArt painter who was

influenced greatly by the abundance of images found in American media
and advertising. According to stokstad, because of his own brief stint into

Pop
an advertising career, and his association with the artist Marcel Duchamp,
Hamilton wanted to make a statement about the images people are
bombarded with and the superficial ideals they represent. When one looks
closely at this collage, many double entendres and visual games become
apparent rather quickly. First, there is he question asked by the title,
"What is it that makes this home so different, so appealing?" The fast
answer would be the physically perfect couple that reside there, the
'beefcake' man and the woman with her stripper-pasties and a lampshade
on her head, suggestive of a mindless party animal, a warm body.
Obviously, this is a commentary by the media on how people should look,
if they are to be considered attractive and successful. Of course, very few
people in American society will ever fit this ideal, thanks to the wonders
of genetics, but the image is a standard nonetheless. Next is the hugely
disproportionate Tootsie Roll Lollipop, strategically held by the man. It is
in color, unlike his body, and suggests an enormous phallic object,
pointing towards the woman who is seated on the couch. There is also a
canned ham on the table, suggestive perhaps of women's place in
advertising of being 'meat'. Ironically, the poster in the background is an
advertisement for a pulp romance novel entitled 'Young Romance' ,
commenting on the actual lack of any real romance between the two
people in the collage. There are a myriad of other symbols of the
trappings of what would be considered 'wealth' in a consumerist society, a
Ford emblem lays draped across the lampshade, a maid is vacuuming the
stairs with the latest model cleaner, a framed painting done in the Old
Master style hangs from the wall. There is a television with a woman
talking on the telephone, a reel-to-reel on the ground, a newspaper on the
chair and a new rug on the floor. All of these things are what was
considered necessary for the comfort and luxury of a 'modern' household.
Because of the heavy sarcasm found throughout the collage, it is evident
how ridiculous and arrogant Hamilton considered these 'necessities' of
suburban life to be, and how deeply ingrained in the minds of society that
the media had planted these images as a blueprint for a perfect life.
Context: A short biography of his life gives the viewer more of an

understanding of how and why his style developed along the lines that it
did, in the area that he was living n, (Taken from wwwPopArt,
www.fi.muni.cz)"Born in 1922 in London. In 1934 he attended evening
classes in art. In 1936 he worked in the publicity department of an
electrical company. He studied at WestminsterTechnical College and St.
Martin's School of Art. In 1937 he worked in the publicity department of
the Reimann Studios. From 1983 to 1940 he studied painting at the Royal
Academy Schools. He enrolled for a course in technical drawing and
worked as a draughtsman from 1941 to 1945. He was readmitted to the
Royal Academy Schools in 1946 but was expelled in the same year as a
result of apparently unsatisfactory work. He began his National Service.
In 1947 he married Terry O'Reilly. He
Richard Hamilton. Just What Is It That
studied painting at the Slade School of Art in 1948-51. His etchings from
Makes
Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? this period were exhibited at his first one-man exhibition at Gimpel Fils,
1950. The first exhibition he designed himself was Growth and Form at
1956, Collage 10"x9"
(Kunsthalle Museum, Tübingen, Germany) the ICA, London, 1951. In 1952 he became a teacher of silver work,
typography and industrial design at the
Central School of Arts and Crafts. One of his colleagues there was
Eduardo Paolozzi, with whom Hamilton was a founder member of the
Independent Group at the ICA. This was a group of artists and

Pop
intellectuals who met to discuss cultural change in the age of technology.

In 1953 he became a lecturer in the Fine Art Department
at the King's College in the University of Durham. In this post he worked
with Victor Pasmore and taught a course in basic design which was also
attended by art students. In 1955 he exhibited his paintings at the Hanover
Gallery, London. His paintings at this time were influenced by Cubism. In
the same year he devised and
designed the exhibition Man, Machine and Motion at the ICA. In 1956 he
made his first Pop collage as a design for the poster and catalog of the
exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery, which he had
helped to organize with other members of the Independent Group. From
1957 to 1961 he taught interior design at
the Royal College of Art. In 1960 he was awarded the William and
Norma Copley Foundation Prize for Painting. He also published a
typographical version of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box. His wife died in
a car accident in 1962. In 1963 he visited USA for the first time. In 1965
he began his reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp's Le
Grand Verre. He organized the Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery
in 1966. His works on the theme of the Guggenheim Museum were also
shown at the Robert Fraser Gallery. In 1969 he helped to make a film of
his work for the Arts Council. In 1970 he showed his Cosmetic Studies.
He was awarded the Talins Prize
International, Amsterdam, 1970. In 1977 and 1978 he collaborated with
Dieter Roth at Cadaqués. He was given his first comprehensive
retrospective exhibition in 1979 at the Tate Gallery, also shown at the
Kunsthalle, Berne. In 1974 he had retrospectives at the Guggenheim
Museum, New York, the Städtische Galerie, Munich, and the
Kunsthalle, Tübingen. In 1982 his writings, notes and documents were
published by Thames and Hudson, London."

Form: Brillo boxes. Also, silkscreened images of
Campbell soup cans.
Iconography: Andy Warhol was enthralled with

the simplicity and visual impact of labels.
According to stokstad, Warhol had worked as a
commercial illustrator in the 1950's, and left that
field to pursue art as a full time occupation in the
early 1960's. He knew, from working with
advertising, how persuasive a simple design could
be. There are many theories about the absolute
reason for the soup cans, it has been said that he
painted them because he ate Campbells soup for
lunch everyday. It has also been said that he painted
them because they were easy to do. Whatever the
reason, they ended up being his most famous and
instantly recognizable pieces. He was paid
handsomely for his work by Campbells' when his
paintings started to gain recognition. In one
instance, they sent him a can of their new Won Ton
soup to paint before it was released to the public.
Context: (From www.artchive.com) "Andy Warhol

Pop
began as a commercial illustrator, and a very

successful one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I.
Andy Warhol. Brillo Boxes Miller in a stylish blotty line that derived from Ben
Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962,
when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his
32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on,
most of Warhol's best work was done over a span
of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was
shot. And it all flowed from one central insight: that
in a culture glutted with information, where most
people experience most things at second or third
hand through TV and print, through images that
become banal and disassociated by repeated again
and again and again, there is role for affectless art.
You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling.
You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror.
Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to.
He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a
sort of collective American state of mind in which
celebrity - the famous image of a person, the
Andy Warhol. Campbell's Soup. famous brand name - had completely replaced both
1968 sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists, like Monet,
silkscreen on canvas had painted the same motif in series in order to
display minute discriminations of perception, the
shift of light and color form hour to hour on a
haystack, and how these could be recorded by the
subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup
cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about
sameness (though with different labels): same
brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as
product. They mimic the condition of mass
advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown.
They are much more deadpan than the object which
may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair
of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness,
this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the
object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there
in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn,
Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the

Pop
condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks

Andy Warhol. Campbell's Soup. 1962 eloquently about the condition of image overload in
a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by
using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the
imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen,
uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess.
What they suggested was not the humanizing touch
of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error
and of entropy..."- From "American Visions", by
Robert Hughes
Form: Silkscreened images of Marilyn Monroe, of

varying sizes and styles.
Iconography: Andy warhol enjoyed doing

silkcreend portraits of tragic American Icons.
Secondary, they were most often icons in the gay
male community, figures whom repressed gay men,
such as Warhol, could easily identify with. Marylin
Monroe is made to look like a drag queen in the
Warhol prints, everything female about her is
exaggerated almost comically. her hair is yellow,
not blonde. Her lipstick and eyeshadow are shown
as primary red and blue. She is almost surreal
looking. The gay community could identify her
because of the changes she went through physically
in order to attain her star status, she changed her
name from the midwestern Norma Jean, had plastic
surgery, dyed her brown hair......in short, did
everything she could to become the opposite of

Pop
what she was in reality. And for Marylin, it worked.

It is this kind of oppression to a male ideal that gay
men felt, but the sort of triumph they yearned for.
Context: It is well known that Andy Warhol was

gay, and so repressed that at times he seemed almost
asexual. He enjoyed surrounding himself with
beautiful, young, athletic people, with the types of
bodies and looks he himself could never have. It
may also be said that he surrounded himself with the
type of beautiful young men he could also never
have. He was, in his personal life, exceedingly
insecure about his own looks. He was short, balding,
and had terrible skin. He knew he wasn't a
'beautiful' person in the outward way he wanted to
be, and it tormented him. Thus, he became overly
obsessed with moving in the 'right' crowd and being
around all the 'right' people, a hobby that kept him
able to conveniently ignore, or repress, his
homosexuality.
Andy Warhol. Marilyn Diptych. 1968

silkscreen on canvas

Form: Hand Painted Acrylic images on
Canvas, meant to recreate the color
separation found in newspaper images.
Iconography: "In 1960 Lichtenstein was

appointed Assistant Professor at Douglas
College at Rutgers University of New
Jersey, which put him within striking
distance of New York. He met and had
long discussions with Allan Kaprow, and
he also met Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine,
Lucas Samaras and George Segal. He
attended a number of early 'Happenings',
but did not participate in them actively.
These contacts revived his interest in Pop

Pop
imagery, and a more immediate stimulus

Roy Lichtenstein. was provided by a challenge from one of
Oh no! A Dinner party for twelve. c 1964 his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse
oil on magma on canvas comic book and said; 'I bet you can't
paint as good as that.' In 1961
Lichtenstein produced about six paintings
showing characters from comic-strip
frames, with only minor changes of
colour and form from the original source
material. It was at this time that he first
made use of devices which were to
become signatures in his work - Ben-Day
dots, lettering and speech
balloons......"Lichtenstein's development
as a mature painter was marked by his
propensity for working in successive
series or thematic groups. The later
groups tended to be interpretations and to
some extent parodies of earlier Modernist
styles - Cubism, Futurism and
Surrealism. In the early 1980s
Lichtenstein created sculptural
maquettes constructed from flat shapes as
three-dimensional graphic imitations of
German Expressionist woodcuts. These,
like his series of painted or sculpted
brushstrokes of the 1980s, painstakingly
created an ironic suggestion of
spontaneity. In the late 1980s and early
1990s he returned to the use of Ben-Day
dots in a new and refined application of
his earlier style. Roy Lichtenstein died in
September 1997." (Culled directly from
www.artchive.com)
The bottom image, Reclining Nude, is an
appropriation of a picasso, or perhaps
even the modernist female sculpture done
by Henry Moore. It shows that
Lichtenstein was paying very close
attention to what was being created by
his contemporaries, and was using his
own unique style to put his own touch to

Pop
the art of the times.
Context: Though it would be easy at first

to think of Lichtensteins work as
simplistic because of its' cartoon images
and themes, his work is another aspect of
Pop Art, one that was exceedingly
appropriate for the times. He was making
a statement about aspects of society,
romantic relationships, war, even art, and
putting it into an easily recognizable
form. In the 1960's and 70's, Walt
Disney was a huge company, cartoons
did a booming business, both in film and
Roy Lichtenstein. Reclining Nude. 1977
in comic strips and books. It is little
wonder then that Lichtenstein chose to
capitalize on this form of expression as a
fine art.

Form: The top sculpture is made from Elmood,
and the bottom sculpture from stone. They are
both titled 'reclining figure,' as were many of
Moores' works, and both are modernist,
abstracted representations of a female form.
Iconography: Henry Moore is most commonly

known as an English Abstract sculptor.
according to www.wakefield.gov.uk, " His early
sculptures of the 1920s, show the influences of
Central American pre-Columbian art, and the
massive figures of the Italian Renaissance (he
particularly liked Michaelangelo's work). By the
1930s his works had become highly abstract,
consisting of simplified, rounded pieces carved
from wood, with numerous indentations and
holes often spanned with veils of thin metal
wires. His main themes include mother-and-
child and family groups, fallen warriors, and,
most characteristically, the reclining human
figure. Although he endured much criticism of
his early work, in 1948 he was awarded the
International Prize for Sculpture and his
reputation worldwide grew over the following
decades." By just looking at the two pieces to
the left, the viewer can tell that Moore had a
firm grasp of the human figure, he was able to
Moore, Henry
masterfully pare it down to its' most basic shape
Reclining Figure1935-36 Elmwood
and still retain the very essence of humanness.
h. 19; l. 35; d. 15 in.
The figures that he sculpts are sensual and

Pop
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

flowing, a testament of his respect for the
female form.
Context: "Henry Moore was born in Castleford,

in small terraced house in Roundhill Road on
30th July 1898. He attended Castleford
Grammar School on a scholarship and
subsequently became a teacher there. His
teaching was interrupted by the First World War
during which he fought in France and was
gassed.After the War he returned to his teaching
post but knew he wanted something better so he
began studying at the Leeds School of Art from
which he progressed to the Royal College of Art
in London. In 1924 He met Irina Radetsky, a
painting student at the college, whom
he married a year later. The couple lived in
Henry Moore. reclining Figure. 1932 Hampstead, where they mingled with many
aspiring young artists including another sculptor
from this area, Barbara Hepworth."
(www.wakefield.gov.uk) It is apparent that he
studied the Fine Arts and could have fallen in
love with Pre-Columbian sculpture through his
studies of Art and Art History. The influence of
this culture and the beauty of the forms
represented by it can be seen strongly in almost
any of his sculptural works.


Pop Sculpture
Pop Art Three; SCULPTURE!

Form: Plaster cast figures, bar setting, light, etc. Installation sculpture.
Iconography: The plaster figures created by Segal for this environment looked
eerily out of place. While they resemble people in the most basic of ways,
mimicking body language and facial expression, they are devoid of color or life,
making them feel cold and lacking personality when placed in a realistic, warm
environment. "...Because of his interest in the everyday world, Segal was
considered to be a founder of the Pop Art movement in the early sixties, but his
individual approach quickly distinguished him from the friends and colleagues
with whom he exhibited. Far removed from the wit and sophisticated detachment
of their art, the subject Segal deals with is the human condition, its solitude and
fragility, which he expresses with a strongly felt sympathy.....Plastered white,
frozen in stereotypical poses and installed in a realistic environment made even
more real by the addition of ready-made props evoking the urban decor, Segal's
figures, which convey his keen sense of observation, serve as symbols of a
humanity that is dominated by social and material contingencies. His works,
which juxtapose individuals and their surroundings, emanate an eerie feeling of
alienation. In addition to representing the banality of modern life, Segal has
created sculptural portraits, depiction's of intimate activities like bathing and
dressing, as well as overtly political subjects."
www.mbam.qc.ca (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Context: According to Stokstad, Segal began his artistic career by painting nude
George Segal. The Diner. 1964
figures on large canvases. Later he began to form figures from chicken wire,
burlap and plaster. When he became comfortable with the medium be began to
actually cast his figures from live models and placed them in environments of his
creation, creating a tension between the cold, hollow casts of people and an actual
environment that a living person could just as easily occupy.
Form: Bronze sculpture, white paint, barbed wire fencing.
Iconography: (Taken from www.chgs.umn.edu, Center for Holocaust

and Genocide studies) "George Segal's public sculpture, "The
Holocaust," sits in Legion of Honor Park in San Francisco overlooking
a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. Often visitors find the sculpture
an unexpected intrusion on the view, and an unfriendly reminder to
one of the most significant genocides of the 20th century. Segal's
outwork work is executed in bronze and painted white. It has been the
subject of graffiti, but Segal mentioned, at a 1998 conference at Notre
Dame University, that he did not find this a problem since graffiti was
a reminder that problems of prejudice have not been solved. Segal's
ensemble of bodies is not random. One can find a "Christ-like" figure
in the assemblage, reflecting on the Jewishness of Jesus, as well as a
woman holding an apple, a reflection on the idea of original sin and
the biblical connection between Jews and Christians, and raising the
question of this relationship during the Holocaust. The essential figure
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/pop_sculpture.htm[8/17/2013 5:57:32 PM]

Pop Sculpture
of the man standing at the fence is probably derived from Margaret

Bourke-White's famous Life Magazine 1945 photograph of the
liberation of Buchenwald."
Context: According to one art critic, "Pop Art is notoriously short on

conscience, like Andy Warhol at a disco. It derives its kick from a
culture moving too fast for reflection. It shows that products aimed at
transitory desires can outlive high-toned art, like Styrofoam that
refuses to biodegrade. Like Warhol's car crashes, however, it can get
pretty scary for all its cynicism. At his best, George Segal nurses his
fears and degradation well." www.haberarts.com. This work by Segal
is scary to see, and sobering as well when viewed in person. Segal is
taking his view of people as isolated and distant and magnifying it
about a thousand times by using an atrocity such as the Holocaust to
comment on exactly how cold and heartless a society can become.
George Segal, Holocaust

Form: Installation sculpture of various materials creating a frightening and
somewhat sickly looking display.
Iconography: According to the Oxford Dictionary of Art, "{Kienholz} belonged to

the California school of Funk art, using the bizarre and shoddy detritus of
contemporary life, and creating situations of a horrific and shockingly gruesome
character. His brutal images of murder, sex, death, and decay have both attracted
and repelled the imagination. A typical example of his work is The State Hospital
(Moderna Mus., Stockholm,1964-6), showing a mental patient strapped to his bed,
with his own self-image in a thought bubble strapped to the bunk above. Both
figures are modelled with revolting realism but have glass bowls for heads."
www.xrefer.com
Looking at this piece, one eels a sense of sickness and decay, Kienholz obviously
felt strongly about the treatment of the mentally ill who were confined to the
underfunded state hospitals, and was able to make a very strong statement with this
work. One would be hard pressed to find a viewer who on first glance would not
find this piece disturbing and thought provoking.
Context: Looking at the life, and death, of Edward Kienholz, it becomes clear what
kind of an artist he was and why he created the works that he did. In a short
biography found in the Art History Department of Tower Hill School in Delaware,

Pop Sculpture
we find this about Edward Kienholz "In 1994, Edward Kienholz died of a heart
attack at age 65. While this might have been the end of most people, Kienholz still
had one thing left to do: "His corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front
seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his
pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him and the ashes of his dog Smash in the
back. He was set for the afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by
his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big
Edward Kienholz. The State
hole."(Hughes) "Edward Kienholz's last piece of art was his burial (Hughes)."Such
Hospital (INTERIOR) 1966
Tableau: plaster casts, fiberglass, has been the legacy of Edward Kienholz. Born 1927 in Fairfield, Washington,
Kienholz received his education at Eastern Washington College of Education and
hospital beds,
bedpan, hospital table, goldfish briefly at Whitworth College, Spokane. He had no formal artistic training, but
gained skills and memories that would help further his works later in life. "He
bowls, live black fish,
earned his living as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, as the manager of a dance
lighted neon tubing, steel
band, as a dealer in secondary cars, a caterer, decorator, and a vacuum cleaner
hardware, wood,
paint 96 x 144 x 120 in. (243.8 x salesman (Staudek). After moving to Los Angeles in 1953, he founded the NOW
gallery in1956, a haven for local artists, and the Ferus Gallery in 1957. In1961, his
365.8 x 304.8 cm)
style of work began to change, and he created his first environment, Roxy's. He met
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Nancy
Reddin, later to be his fifth wife, in 1972, and began to create art in collaboration
with her. (Sheldon)In 1973 Kienholz was a Guest Artist of the German Academic
Exchange Service in Berlin. He eventually moved to Berlin with wife Nancy, and
spent half of the year in Berlin, half in Hope, Idaho. In 1975, he received a
Guggenheim Award, and in 1977 created The Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery
(Staudek). From 1954 to1994, he created 176 separate pieces of art (Heijnen)."
www.towerhill.org.
He had obviously seen much of society, and had a lot to say about it.


Pop Sculpture
Claes Oldenburg. Soft Toilet and

Medicine Cabinet. 1966
vinyl plexiglas and kapok
life size
Form: The toilets were created using the same kind of vinyl one would find
on a beanbag chair, It is soft and pliable, giving the works a 'droopy' look. The
clothespin and eraser were created with more durable materials such as steel,
as they are intended as permanent outside objects.
Iconography: What makes Oldenburg unique in the genre of Pop Art is his
sense of humor. He has things to say about society, but he does it by poking
fun instead of taking a more serious stance. As he says himself, "I am for an
art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something else than sit on its ass
in a museum." -- Claes Oldenburg, 1961. and, "The main reason for the
colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of
the vessel -- the object," Oldenburg has said.
"Perhaps I am more a still-life painter -- using the city as a tablecloth." At
another time he remarked,
"Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will
remain doubtful and inconsistent -- which is the way it should be. All that I
care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of
stimulating meaning." www.salon.com
It can almost be said that Oldenburg is the quintessential Pop Artist, one who
truly does not take anything seriously, but still has the ability to shock viewers
with the size and sheer fun of his work.

Context: (Taken from Salon Magazine, 2000) "Oldenburg, who turns 70 on

Jan. 29, has spent much of his life bending, inflating, melting and enlarging
the ordinary objects of 20th century American reality. Over the last four
decades, Oldenburg has made it his business to soften the hard, harden the soft
and transmute the modest into the monumental. He has created shirts and ties

Pop Sculpture
1972 drawing and dresses and ice cream cones and pies, and even the contents of an entire
store, out of plaster-soaked cloth and wire. Using vinyl stuffed with kapok, he
built pay telephones, typewriters, light switches and a complete bathroom --
sink, tub, scale and toilet. He constructed a catcher's mitt, 12 feet tall, out of
metal and wood, and built a four-and-a-half-story clothespin out of Cor-Ten
steel. In the last two decades, focusing almost exclusively on giant monuments,
he has created a 38-foot-tall flashlight, 10-story baseball bat, a 60-foot-long
umbrella, a three-story-high faucet with a 440-foot water-spewing red hose, a
40-foot-tall book of matches and a partially buried bicycle that would fill
most of a football field, among numerous other projects located from Tokyo to
Texas."
Clearly, for Claus Oldenburg, size does matter.
Claes Oldenburg. Clothespin. 1976
Typewriter Eraser 1998

Form: Found object, i.e. a urinal. The name R.Mutt has been painted on it and it is to be displayed as
shown, the part that would be mounted to the wall being used as the side it rests upon.
Iconography: Duchamp was, by the time he 'made' this piece of art, very contemptuous of the art world.
Her had already learned how to paint, and was quite good at it, but found it to be too filled with trickery
and illusions for his taste. He was more interested in the 'ready-made' objects of the world around him,
chairs, tables, bicycles, urinals. He saw an intrinsic craft in each of these everyday objects and wanted to
bring notice to the fact that these objects had been created, first in someone's imagination and then in
reality, the same way a painter created a masterpiece. By taking the urinal and placing it on its' back,
signing it, and putting it in a different environment, he was forcing people to view it differently. This act
outraged some and intrigued others. Is it art? Or, is it just a urinal? Is there a difference? Even today, this
piece is still being displayed and still having as strong as an impact as it did in years past. Ultimately, this
turned out to be one of Duchamps' most well-known and successful pieces.

Pop Sculpture
Context: By looking at his biography, one can get a better understanding of what inspired him to begin
working with found objects as a way of creative growth during the times in which he was practicing art.
According to www.beatmuseum.org, "Marcel Duchamp, French Dada artist, whose small but controversial
output exerted a strong influence on the development of 20th-century avant-garde art. Born on July 28,
1887, in Blainville, brother of the artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon and half brother of the painter Jacques
Villon, Duchamp began to paint in 1908. After producing several canvases in the current mode of Fauvism,
he turned toward experimentation and the avant-garde, producing his most famous work, Nude Descending
a Staircase, No. 2 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) in 1912; portraying continuous movement through a chain
of overlapping cubistic figures, the painting caused a furor at New York City's famous Armory Show in
1913. He painted very little after 1915, although he continued until 1923 to work on his masterpiece, The
Marcel Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923,Philadelphia Museum of Art), an abstract work, also
Duchamp known as The Large Glass, composed in oil and wire on glass, that was enthusiastically received by the
surrealists. In sculpture, Duchamp pioneered two of the main innovations of the 20th century kinetic art and
ready-made art. His "ready-mades" consisted simply of everyday objects, such as a urinal and a bottle rack.
His Bicycle Wheel (1913, original lost; 3rd version, 1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), an
early example of kinetic art, was mounted on a kitchen stool. After his short creative period, Duchamp was
content to let others develop the themes he had originated; his pervasive influence was crucial to the
development of surrealism, Dada, and pop art. Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955. He died in
Paris on October 1, 1968.

Form: Bronze cast sculpture, painted realistically to give the
appearance of actual Ale cans.
Iconography: As a Pop artist, Johns was interested mainly in taking

items from his everyday life that held an importance for him and
reappropriating them into fine art. He was not bitter or trying to make a
political statement as Kienholz did, nor was he as flippant and free-
spirited as Oldenburg. Simply, he wate to make a statement about
himself, what he could create and what held as important. What makes
his Painted Bronze a work of art s the craft that went into making it.
He had to sculpt and cast the pieces from plaster into bronze, refine it,
then painstakingly paint every small detail onto it. The skill needed to
create this piece was the same skill that Degas used to create his 'Small
Ballerina' bronze. The difference is what the meaning is to the different
artists, and the reflection of the time they were living in. ballerinas and
the ballet were important to Degas, and Ballentine ale was important to
Johns. The end result for either artist was a beautiful piece of sculpture.
Context: (Originally published in Modern Painters (Summer 1996)

"Johns's sculptures mostly date from a four-year period early in his
career, 1958-61, suggesting a short-lived interest. But although Johns's
enormous reputation rests on his painting and printmaking, the object
is a crucial aspect of his work. His paintings often include a collage
element, with plaster casts or found objects protruding from the
surface, or the support itself being an actual, identifiable object, such
as a crate or an inverted, stretched canvas. Furthermore, his sculptures,
which are mostly in his own collection, often feature as subjects in his

Pop Sculpture
paintings or prints: Painted Bronze (Savarin) 1960, for instance,

(brushes in a coffee tin which he had cast in bronze and then
proceeded to paint, quite convincingly but in such a way that they look
more like a three dimensional painting than the original) is a frequently
recurring motif in paintings and prints. Of course, this begs the
question (the sort of question champions of Johns find so pregnant and
exacting): is he painting his own sculpture, Painted Bronze (Savarin),
or is he painting an object in his studio, some brushes in a coffee tin,
which hitherto just happened also to be the subject of a sculpture,
Painted Bronze (Savarin)? Because Johns can offer seemingly little
else by way of aesthetic consolation, this sort of epistemological tease
can sometimes constitute the main interest in his work. And however
spiritually removed he is from the aesthetic that followed in his trail,
Johns was undoubtedly a prototype for the minimalists and
conceptualists. Donald Judd's dictum that art has only to be interesting
is
implicit in much appreciation of Johns." A short biography of Johns
shows his life as an artist was connected to others on the PopArt scene
of the 1960's and 70's, and helps to gives us an understanding of how
popart as a whole developed along the lines that it did, with the shared
ideas and idealism of the times." Born in 1930 at Augusta, Georgia. He
grew up in South Carolina. He was drafted into the army and stationed
in Japan. Between 1949 and 1951 he studied at the University of South
Carolina, Columbia. From 1952 to 1958 he worked in a bookshop in
Johns. Painted Bronze. 1960 New York. He also did display work with Robert Rauschenberg for
Bonwit Teller and Tiffany. In 1954 he painted his first flag picture. He
had his first one-man exhibition in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery,
New York. He was represented at the Venice Biennale during the same
year. His picture Grey Numbers also won the International Prize at the
Pittsburgh Biennale. In 1959 he took part with Rauschenberg in Allan
Kaprow's Happening Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. He was
included in the collective exhibition Sixteen Americans in the same
year at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1960 he began working with
lithographs. In 1961 he did his first large map picture and travelled to
Paris for an exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite. In 1964 he was given
a comprehensive retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York. The
catalog included texts by John
Cage and Alan Solomon. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in
the same year. In 1965 he had a retrospective at the Passadena Art
Museum, organized by Walter Hopps. During the same year he saw a
Duchamp exhibition and won a prize at the 6th International Exhibition
of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. In 1966 he had a one-man
exhibition of drawings at the National Collection of Fine Arts,
Washington. In 1967 he rented a loft in Canal Street and painted
Harlem Light using a tile motif. He also illustrated Frank O'Hara's
book of poems "In Memory of My Feelings". He was Artistic Adviser
for the composer John Cage and Merce
Cunningham's Dance Company until 1972, collaborating with Robert
Morris, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Bruce Naumann. In that year
he was represented at the documenta "4", Kassel, designed costumes
for Merce Cunningham's "Walkaround Time" and spent seven weeks at
the printers Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. In
1973 he met Samuel Beckett in Paris. He moved to Stony Point, N.Y.
He was given a comprehensive retrospective at the Whitney Museum

Pop Sculpture
of American Art, New York, in 1977, shown in 1978 at the Museum

Ludwig, Cologne, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Hayward
Gallery, London, and Seibu Museum of Art,Tokyo. He was represented
at the Venice Biennale in 1978. In 1979 the Kunstmuseum Basle put
on an exhibition of his graphic work which toured Europe. In 1988 he
was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale." (
www.fi.muni.cz)
Form: Huge sculpture of a puppy, created out of stainless steel and
thousands of different plants and flowers.
Iconography: (Taken from www.cavant-garde.com) "Jeff koons'

puppy is a staggering achievement of sculptural imagination,
horticultural dexterity and engineering skill. first created in 1992 for
a temporary exhibition in the german city of arolson, puppy was an
immediate sensation drawing huge crowds and critical acclaim. a
symbol, according to koons, of "love, warmth and happiness" this
contemporary masterpiece is a triumph of scale, colour and materials.
rising 43 feet tall from the puppy's paws to its alert ears, the sculpture
is formed from a series of stainless steel sections constructed to hold
over 25 tons of soil watered by an internal irrigation system. this
floral giant is composed of over seventy thousand plants, including
begonias, impatiens, petunias, marigolds and lobelias. once
described as 'the seventh wonder of the world', puppy was installed at
the museum of contemporary art in sydney australia in 1996. once
year later puppy traveled to bilbao in spain where it became a
permanent part of the guggenheim museum's collection and an icon
for basque city. organised by rockerfeller centre in association with
Jeff Koons. Puppy. c1985 the public art fund, this new york exhibition of puppy was made
possible by the efforts of many dedicated riggers, horticulturists and
volunteers working over a period of three weeks to install this
monumental work. puppy at rockerfeller centre is the first exhibition
of this public sculpture in the united states. born in 1955, jeff koons
is one of the world's most widely recognised artists. in the 1980's his
sculptures and photography explored contemporary american
iconography turning popular kitsch into high art. koons signature
work most often uses strikingly simple imagery transformed into
sculptures using the finest of materials."
Context: Koons is notorious for taking innocent seeming objects and

creating a new meaning for them by increasing their size, creating
them out of different or unexpected materials, and sometimes filling
them with double-meaning or messages. However, in the case of
Puppy, it would seem that his only quest was to create something
beautiful and decorative for the benefit of it being able to beautify a
space. This could be just art for the sake of being art, nothing more
or less, and like an Oldenburg statue is just a beautiful piece done on
an enormous scale, but lacking the irony and humor found in
Oldenburgs work.

Form: Stainless steel replica of a 1950's-60's travel bar set.
Iconography: "...an upper-class travel bar decanter for liquor cast in

Pop Sculpture
stainless steel (the proletariat silver according to Jeff Koons); part of

the Luxury and Degradaton show. Liquor is sealed inside, but it is
withheld, since to break the seal would be to break apart the work.
Playing on status objects empty of soul that suggest an artificial luxury,
and artificial value, vanitas imagery. Koons uses the strategy of
withholding, sealing the liquor inside where one can't get to it without
ruining the work; desire always out of reach as a metaphor for the
false promises of advertising and the way even status objects of
surplus can't fill the void or lack of missing moral values..... imagery
for an age of consumption to excess; the use of status objects as
support mechanisms for the individual and signs of class power. The
slick, shiny surfaces of the hyperreal, hollow at the core. " (Taken
from www.csulb.edu)
Context: As a consummate Pop Artist, Koons has taken a simple,

Jeff Koons. Travel Bar. 1986 everyday object and created a metaphor out of it. By making it all
cast stainless steel appear to be created out of silver he is emphasizing the upper-class
status of those wealthy enough to carry their liquor around with them,
putting a sheen on the fact that alcohol is often referred to as 'poor
mans' cocaine.' It's possible that one of the underlying messages is the
human reality of addiction and substance abuse, no matter how wealthy
one may be.

Form: Life-size porcelain scupture, gold leaf.
Iconography: (Taken from www.sfmoma.org) "For

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, from the artist's Banality
series, Koons directed Italian ceramicists to create a
greatly oversized figurine from a publicity photograph of
the celebrity and his chimpanzee. The performer and his
pet are posed as companions, wearing matching gold
band uniforms and an excess of makeup that stands in for
genuine facial expression. Bubbles is nestled in Jackson's
lap, their limbs confused to the point where one of the
legs of the chimp could easily be mistaken for a third
arm of the singer. They are instantly recognizable and
undeniably beautiful.Yet right at the cold, shiny surface
of their snow-white faces are rather disturbing issues of
race, gender, and sexuality that are often part and parcel
of our fascination with public personae. Over the course
Jeff Koons, Jackson and Bubbles of rising from child stardom in the early 1970s, as the
youngest member of The Jackson Five, to an
unsurpassable level of international fame in the eighties
and nineties, this cultural icon whom we know to be a
black man has come to more closely resemble a white
woman. The three-dimensional sculpture inhabits our
space, the space of the general (albeit museum-going)
public, but Michael Jackson himself is a man that we can
never know. No matter how much media attention he
receives, to the millions of people in whose
consciousness he resides he will never be more than the
flat character of tabloid reproductions and television.
Koons' use of ceramic points directly to the hollowness

Pop Sculpture
and fragility of celebrity status."
Context: "... in a series of works he called "Banality",

Koons creates sculptures of dimensions and details
monstrous and absurd.These works, like Michael Jackson
and Bubbles, demand attention by virtue of their size and
seductive porcelain surfaces, yet they disturb as well.
The dead white of Jackson's skin, his glamorous pose
with Bubbles in matching clothing invites a chilling
range of questions about celebrity and image making."
(www.broadartfoundation.org)

Form: Photo
Iconography: Taking his orientation along the lines of

mainstream culture to even further extremes, Koons, in
the late eighties, focused increasingly on the topic of
pornography. In 1991,at the height of his success, he
married the Italian porno star Cicciolina and made the
relationship the subject of his art. The series of works
Made in Heaven (1991), which shows Koons with his
wife as larger-than-Iife figures having sex, gained him
widespread international attention.(
www.absolutearts.com) If Koons is trying to make a
point about sex and desire being a motivating for in
society, then he has gone beyond symbolism and
suggestion with these works and began to give his
message out blatantly.
Context: (From www.eyestorm.com)"....These

product-based works are evidence of Koons' belief in
the artist as a socially accountable, sanctimonious
arbiter of taste: a kind of Holy Trinity of cultural
reproduction. Koons is at once the Father (the giver of
form), the Son (the messenger of everlasting life) and
the Holy Spirit (the creator of faith). Through such
debased metaphors as these we might come to
appreciate Koons' union with Ilona Staller: aka
LaCicciolina, an Italian porn star and politician whose
lack of inhibition Koons interpreted as a symbol of
Jeff Koons, Illona
moral freedom and purity. As such, her appearance in

Pop Sculpture
Koons' sculptures and photo-works marked the

ultimate consummation of his practice: the
transformation of the ultimate consumer product (a
human being) into a glowing object of worship. Koons
leads by example; showing that if he can achieve his
desire then, Hey, you can too! Koons and Staller were
married a year after she had begun appearing in his
work, emphasizing the genuine, 'innocent' nature of his
desire.......There is a profound faith in human desire
and agency at the core of Koons' work: a utilitarian
belief that everything we want and do is based on a
drive for sensual pleasure that transcends the pursuit of
mere sex, work, or money. Koons' earliest works from
the late 70s - when he was trading cotton on the New
York Stock Exchange to fund his art practice - were
mass-produced inflatable flowers and toys placed
carefully on mirrors, marrying a child-like naivety to
sexual metaphors and consumerism. From that point
onwards, the relationship between the selection,
production and display of commercial products became
ever more elaborate within Koons' work, and the
transformative role of the artist-as-savior grew ever
more pronounced. In the early 80s, Koons began
selecting and entombing various models of Hoover and
New Shelton vacuum cleaners in fluorescent-lit
Plexiglas vitrines, the products on display seeming at
once brand new (full of potential) and stillborn
(already dead)."

Form: A sterling silvr tea set surrounded by slave shackles.
Iconography: Fred Wilson is an African American artist

whose Pop Art Influence is mainly political and concerned
with exposing the racism found not only in the art world at
large, but also in the musuems and institutions America
holds as paragons of artistic virtue and knowledge. This
section of his work is 'found objects', that is to say objects
'found' in the storerooms and catalogue shelves of museums
and for some reason never displayed. He felt that people
needed to be aware of the oppression forced on minorities
and slaves in decades past, and how their labor helped to
shape what American society, and art, has become. Written
in the UCSF newspaper was this excerpt about his show
".....The exhibit was rich with the unexpected, from cigar
store Indians turning their backs on viewers and reward
posters for runaway slaves to a whipping post surrounded
by period chairs of different styles and slave shackles set
amid ornate silver serving vessels. Many of the objects had
been stored for decades and never displayed, let alone
allowed to shine or shatter any illusions. Others were moved
around and mixed in a sly or provocative fashion. All were
used to restore context and create a new chemistry between

Pop Sculpture
the objects, their display and the viewer."

(www.ucsf.edu)More was written as well in Maryland
where the exhibit was first shown,(Taken from the
Contemporary Arts Museum,)"....Wilson shook the art
world with his landmark Mining the Museum exhibition at
the MarylandHistorical Society (MHS) in Baltimore. The
MHS gave Wilson carte blanche, allowing him to research
the Society's collection, its history and its place within the
community. Wilson proceeded to reinstall the third floor
galleries in a way that revealed the latent racism that existed
there.3 Thousands of museum professionals saw the
exhibition, and its run was extended by popular demand.4
With this installation, Wilson brought a fresh eye to the
MHS, reconstructed its presentation of Maryland's past in a
new, more encompassing manner, and exposed how a
seemingly neutral institution might unwittingly reinforce
racist attitudes. Since then, Wilson has been invited into
museums all around the world to explore their collections
and practices and to offer a startling reappraisal through his
own reinstallations of their holdings." www.camh.org

Context: "On December 8, 1991, Fred Wilson gave a

gallery talk at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York.1 He greeted his audience in the lobby and had
lunch with them in the museum's restaurant. He then
excused himself, saying that he needed to change into a
costume and that they should meet him upstairs at the
entrance to the exhibition for his gallery talk. Wilson
changed into a Whitney guard's uniform and stood in the
gallery where he was to meet his group, waiting next to a
Fred Wilson. Mining the Museums, Slave Shackles. sign with his name on it that marked the point where the
c1990 tour was to begin. Though they looked for him, no one
"saw" Wilson. The artist's worst suspicions were confirmed-
as museum guard, he had become invisible. Wilson
eventually revealed himself to his audience and proceeded
to give his gallery talk Earlier that same year, in the spring
of 1991, Wilson had presented a two-part exhibition at
Metro Pictures and Gracie Mansion galleries in New York.
For these exhibitions, Wilson created a series of faux
museum installations that addressed cultural exploitation
and the underlying racism in museums. Utilizing such tools
of the trade as pedestals, vitrines, and wall labels, Wilson
demonstrated how ethnographic art, when removed from its
proper context, wrenched away from everything that shaped
its origins, is essentially neutralized. For example, in
Friendly Natives, skeletons are laid out for view in
Victorian-style mahogany vitrines with such labels as
"Someone's Mother," and "Someone's Sister."With Guarded
View, Wilson came at museum racism from a different
angle. Four mannequins are lined up in a row, displayed
together on a pedestal, each wearing, as the labels indicate,
the uniform of a different New York museum. From left to
right they are: The Jewish Museum, The Metropolitan

Pop Sculpture
Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the

Whitney Museum of American Art .2 Wilson, who grew up
in and around New York, is an avid museum-goer, and is
himself of African-American and Caribbean-Indian descent,
also
worked briefly as a museum guard at the Neuberger
Museum of Art while he attended the State University of
New York. He carried away from the experience a
dichotomous sense of both being on display and yet being
invisible. Years later, speaking to other artists who had held
similar jobs, he heard stories of guards and other museum
staff working together for decades without exchanging so
much as a hello. Wilson therefore set out to create a work
that would make viewers aware of this institutional racism."
www.camh.org


Rockwell
Norman Rockwell

Form: Oil on Canvas. Though he was, by all accounts a painter, he is often
referred to as an illustrator because of the work he did for various magazines.
His work is very detailed and realistic, he most often painted scenes that are
best described as 'Americana'. Working in the 40's and 50's, he was
influenced greatly by the scenes of the war and social unrest, but did not let
them make his paintings overtly political or depressing. Just the opposite, he
chose gentle, touching scenes from everyday life.
Iconography: Norman Rockwell was a family man. He had a strong moral

conscience when it came to family life and child-rearing. Often, he would
paint scenes of young boys at play, innocent and untouched by the worries of
the adult world. Here, he is painting a tender portrait of his daughter in a
scene that could very well be from his own observation. It shows a scene in
which the daughter emulates the father, trying to step into his shoes. She is
using his palette, grasped in her tiny hand it almost dwarfs her entire length.
The brush, too, is almost too big for her hands, and she is trying on her
fathers expression, one of observation and concentration as she tries to
accurately capture the look on her dolls face. There are no hidden meanings
or deep, tortured-artists statements to be made in this work, it is, very simply,
what you see is what you get.
Context: "Born in New York City in 1894, Norman Rockwell always wanted
to be an artist. At age 14, Rockwell enrolled in art classes at the New York
School of Art (formerly the Chase School of Art). Two years later, in 1910,
he left high school to study art at the National Academy of Design. He soon
transferred to the Art Students League, where he studied with Thomas
Fogarty and George Bridgman. Fogarty's instruction in illustration prepared
Rockwell for his first commercial commissions. From Bridgman, Rockwell
learned the technical skills on which he relied throughout his long career.
Rockwell found success early. He painted his first commission of four
Christmas cards before his sixteenth birthday. While still in his teens, he was
hired as art director of Boys' Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts
of America, and began a successful freelance career illustrating a variety of
young people's publications. At age 21, Rockwell's family moved to New
Rochelle, New York, a community whose residents included such famous
illustrators as J.C. and Frank Leyendecker and Howard Chandler Christy.
There, Rockwell set up a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe and
produced work for such magazines as Life, Literary Digest, and Country
Gentleman. In 1916, the 22-year-old Rockwell painted his first cover for The
Saturday Evening Post, the magazine considered by Rockwell to be the
"greatest show window in America." Over the next 47 years, another 321
Norman Rockwell. The Artist's Rockwell covers would appear on the cover of the Post. Also in 1916,
Daughter. c1940 Rockwell married Irene O'Connor; they would go on to divorce in 1930. The
'30s and '40s are generally considered to be the most fruitful decades of
Rockwell's career. In 1930 he married Mary Barstow, a schoolteacher, and
Picture of the couple had three sons: Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter. The family moved to
Norman Arlington, Vermont in 1939, and Rockwell's work began, more consistently,
Rockwell to reflect small-town American life.
in his In 1943, inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt's address to Congress,
studio. Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms paintings. They were reproduced in
four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post with essays by
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/rockwell.htm[8/17/2013 6:01:27 PM]

Rockwell
contemporary writers. Rockwell's interpretations of Freedom of Speech,

Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear proved to
be enormously popular. The works toured the United States in an exhibition
that was jointly sponsored by the Post and the U.S. Treasury Department and,
through the sale of war bonds, raised more than $130 million for the war
effort. Although the Four Freedoms series was a great success, 1943 also
brought Rockwell an enormous loss. A fire destroyed his Arlington studio as
well as numerous paintings and his collection of historical costumes and
props. In 1953, the Rockwell family moved from Arlington, Vermont, to
Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Six years later, Mary Barstow Rockwell died
unexpectedly. In collaboration with his son Thomas, Rockwell published his
autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, in 1960. The Saturday
Evening Post carried excerpts from the best-selling book in eight consecutive
issues, with Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait on the cover of the first. In 1961,
Rockwell married Molly Punderson, a retired teacher. Two years later, he
ended his 47-year association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to
work for Look magazine. During his 10-year association with Look, Rockwell
painted pictures illustrating some of his deepest concerns and interests,
including civil rights, America's war on poverty, and the exploration of space.
In 1973, Rockwell established a trust to preserve his artistic legacy by
placing his works in the custodianship of the Old Corner House Stockbridge
Historical Society, later to become the Norman Rockwell Museum at
Stockbridge. The trust now forms the core of the Museum's permanent
collections. In 1976, in failing health, Rockwell became concerned about the
future of his studio. He arranged to have his studio and its contents added to
the trust. In 1977, Rockwell received the nation's highest civilian honor, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his "vivid and affectionate portraits of our
country." He died at his home in Stockbridge on November 8, 1978, at the
age of 84." (www.nrm.org)
Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: Almost every religion that recognizes prayer is able to

associate themselves with this painting, "The American art world is
finally reevaluating Norman Rockwell, appreciating his skill and
subject matter so derided and dismissed as mere illustration by the
elites and radicals when he was alive. His characters no longer evoke
cornball sentimentalism, not even to the sophisticated critics. In fact,
some critics
now compare his work to that of the 19th century French satirist
Honore Daumier, and to the two splendid 17th century Dutch
painters, Jan Vermeer and Frans Hals. The final destination for the

Rockwell
traveling show is
the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York. Critics of yore
Norman Rockwell. Grace Before the Meal. are spinning over that one. In Rockwell paintings we find America's
c1950 Every family, the hometown boy and girl, mother and father,
grandmother and grandfather who built on the dream of our
Founding Fathers. They are as individualized as universalized, with
the fruits of the Declaration of Independence spilling onto our daily
lives.
When the Saturday Evening Post asked its readers in 1955 to pick
the Norman Rockwell cover they liked the best, most chose "Saying
Grace,'' a plain and homely grandmother and grandson are depicted
saying a blessing before a meal in a restaurant as others watch with
nonchalance. It's about faith and tolerance, the religious and secular
coexistent in the landscape of everyday life. The painting is free of
an overt message -- you'll find no preaching here
-- but it's an emblematic snapshot of continuity in a country where
social mores are forever changing. Prayer is part of the mix. So is the
gratitude for the bounty of the table." (Jewish World Review July 3,
2000/30 Sivan, 5760)
Context: As one of his earlier works, Rockwell still had the focus on
strong family values. He is here showing the generations of one
family coming together before a meal, the grandmother, the young
boy, and the older adolescents. It was a view of America that showed
it as safe, loving and strong in family.
It is also interesting to compare this image with a painting by the

same title by Chardin.
Jean- Baptiste Simeon Chardin-
Grace at Table (also called Benediction)
1740 o/c

Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: It is fairly evident what ideals Rockwell was commenting on with

this piece,“ Norman Rockwell's January 1962 Post cover was atypical of what
America had become accustomed to since he landed his first commission with the

Rockwell
magazine in 1916. It wasn't comical. In his realistic almost photographic style

Rockwell depicted of the backside of businessman standing in a gallery,
contemplating the meaning of a huge abstract painting that looked as if the artist
had dripped his multitude of oils from a stick or can onto the canvas while it was
lying on the floor. The illustrator's rendering of Abstract & Concrete must have
been indicative of what Rockwell, then 68, was pondering at the time. "How will
I be remembered? As a technician or artist? As a humorist or a visionary?" This
was the beginning of one of the most turbulent times in America. When the
seriousness of the 20th century would become even more serious. A century in
which the majority of those deemed as socially significant art critics would use
words like"master" to describe modernists like Jackson Pollack while scoffing at
the artisan most popular to the people.” …..”In the sixties his subjects broadened
to include political portraits, poverty, race relations and the space exploration.
"Without thinking
too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and
observed to
others who might not have noticed," he said. "My fundamental purpose is to
interpret
the typical American. I guess I am a story teller." (www.antiquetalk.com)
Norman Rockwell. Abstract and Context: Norman Rockwell was exceedingly talented. In his time he was seen as
Concrete. 1962 little more than an illustrator, his work derided by some as too generic and
‘sappy’. It is ironic then, that in the backlash from an artworld filled with
abstract, unreadable images, that his work is now being hailed as that on par with
a Caravaggio or Rembrandt. If we could say that he was looking into the future, it
would be safe to assume that this is Rockwell himself, looking at the art that had
cost him his ability to be viewed as a fine artist. In the end, however, it was the
same work that has now raised him onto a pedestal.

Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: Rockwell had seen a lot in his

lifetime, and entering old age he found himself
embroiled in the most controversial decades of
American history, dealing with integration, civil
rights, and political unrest. Rockwell, though a
paragon of whitebread America, believed firmly in
change, and that every human is equal. He shows
the little girl, head held high, embarking on a
journey that most adults would not dare take. In an
interview with Peter Rockwell, Norman
Rockwells’ son, Ray Suarez and Maureen Hart-
Hennesey have this to say about the work,..“
Though America was torn by rapid breakneck
economic and technological change, Depression
and war, Rockwell used his prodigious talent in
the service of business. The "Prayerful Silence,"
worthy of a Flemish master, sold raisins. His use
of models from his New England home towns
results in an America that is virtually all white.
The cities, teeming with immigrants from around

Rockwell
the world, and their children, the suffering and

desperation of the 30's, the lives of millions of
industrial workers rarely appeared. Instead, we got
Norman Rockwell. The Problem We All Live With. 1964 prom couples, cute as buttons; dogs that always
seem to stay puppies; lovable old codgers, and
grandmothers who look like, well, grannies -- a
world where it rarely rained-- that is, until the later
years. In 1963, Rockwell left "the Saturday
Evening Post" and began work for "Look"
magazine where he explored more controversial
issues such as housing integration and school
desegregation, as in this work, "The Problem we
all Live with."
MAUREEN HART-HENNESSEY:

"The Problem we all Live with" was inspired by Rockwell's remembering the story of ruby bridges, who is
the African American girl who was the only black child sent to desegregate an all-white school in New
Orleans, and this happened in 1960, and she really was tormented-- literally had to run a gauntlet every
day of white parents throwing things at her and yelling at her, and was accompanied to school every day
by the U.S. Marshals. But there's a real violence inherent, I think, in that scene. You can see where the
tomato has been thrown at the... At the child, and the words that are scrawled on the wall behind her that it
could explode at any moment-- and he really captures that.”
full text on http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec00/rockwell_7-4.html

Context:

“A controversial artist, even today. And controversy has followed him for decades. Prestigious bastions of
Art, 'High' and 'Low,' museums and galleries, have refused to show his retrospective. And even the
Chicago Tribune felt compelled to run dual reviews -- Pro and Contra -- of the current exhibition
scheduled to run until May 21st at the Chicago Historical Society. Norman Rockwell... Or, as many would
have it, Norman Rockwell !?! Yes, "Pictures for the American People" has arrived: Seventy oil paintings,
all 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as studies in oil and pencil, and photographs. One
should note that it isn't -- necessarily -- Norman Rockwell's politics or religious views that are so often
attacked or disdained. He was what in any milieu one would have to call 'a decent man,' and in many
instances, courageous.

Rockwell
His painting, The Problem We All Live With appeared on the cover of Look magazine on January 14, 1964.
It infuriated some, heartened the hopes of others, shamed many, and was met with indifference or scorn by
the Art Establishment. The Problem We All Live With strikes directly at the heart and exemplifies
Rockwell's hallmark approach: strong horizontals, close foreground, and, especially, telling details which
draw the viewer into concluding a narrative, one orchestrated to move him. The perceptive viewer notes
not only the confident posture and countenance of the young girl -- her escorts are cropped and
anonymous agents of the law -- but the writ in the pocket of the advancing guard, the contrast of
schoolbooks with the graffiti on the wall, the smashed tomato the least of projectiles launched in those
times). It is an approach common to centuries of fine art, emblematic and immediate. But Rockwell's
concern at this date is not doctrine, or delight: he stirs a decent empathy, a quietly powerful outrage.”
( www.artscope.net)


Rothko and Color Field Painting
Color Field Painting

Form: Rothko was the master at a form of painting titled 'color field'. Though
known as an Abstract Expressionist, it is his creation of these color field
paintings that he is best known for. They are created on huge canvases, and are
either one, two, or three horizontal rectangles of color on top of another base
color that covers the entire canvas. Their is a very deliberate juxtaposition of
warm and cool colors, whose placement next to one another creates its' own
type of optical illusion. A viewer may not just glance at a Rothko painting,
they must gaze at it for long periods of time in order to see the colors interact.
When the viewer begins to immerse themselves in these paintings, the cool
colors start to feel as though they are moving forward in the picture plane,
while the cool colors begin to recede. The painting seems to be moving,
creating its' own environment to pull the viewer into. Often, when one looks for
long periods of time at one of these paintings, they begin to feel a sense of
calm, as though the effort of looking at the painting has put them into a
meditative trance.
Iconography: "While it is the glowing, ovoid areas of color that the eye first
Mark Rothko 1903-1970 embraces in a typical Rothko, it is useful to become aware of how they are
Earth and Green c1950 contextualized with often dramatically emphasized horizons -- and borders.
These divisions are mostly two, often three (occasionally more). They define a
horizon gestalt between the areas of color; the borders the peripheral limitation
of our normal view of any horizon. We thus float at the center of a prospect
that falls out as below us, before us and above us -- the artist leaving us to our
own associations, but determining within his formal structures, the extent of the
world he wants those associations to inhabit. (Here the structure of the works
of the early 1940s is crucial -- for they remain latent after 1950.) Thus,
Rothko's tripartite and quadripartite compositions present a radical abstraction
of the planet in cross-section from below the viewer's feet up, the internal light
of that world provides it welcoming warmth or abject negation, as befits the
artist's moods. At the end of his life, the last, sad, bipartite images (MRCR
814-831), leave us with a single horizon between the black of space and the
earth's lithic interior -- all place of human grace on the surface under the sun
having slipped away from his despairing reach." (www.artchive.com)

Context: (Taken from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, on www.pbs.org ,full
transcript at http://www.pbs.org/newshour ) "Born Marcus Rothkowitz in
Russia in 1903, he and his family emigrated to Portland, Oregon, where Marcus
starred in school and was one of three immigrant seniors to get into Yale. After
two years, Rothko dropped out and by his and the century's mid-twenties, he
was working odd jobs in New York and becoming an artist. For 30 some odd
years that's what he was-an artist-an obscure one. But in the 1950's American
culture started to make its global mark. In painting, the style that carried the
day was abstract expressionism. Mark Rothko, one of its exemplars, was soon
considered an American master. Always melancholy, as Rothko became
celebrated and rich, he became more somber, in the end, seriously depressed.
He committed suicide in 1970 at age 67. The current exhibit begins with a side
of Rothko not often seen, since he destroyed much of his early work. Art
historian and Rothko biographer Dore Ashton got to know him when she was a
New York Times reporter on the art beat."
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/Rothko.htm[8/17/2013 5:59:24 PM]

PAUL SOLMAN: When the Federation rejected Rothko's proposal, he went

his own way. Soon, he became part of the burgeoning abstract New York
School, posing for Life Magazine as one of "The Irascibles" with the likes of
Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning in 1951. And from this period onward
Mark Rothkos are as recognizable as Norman Rockwells: variations on a
common, in his case transcendental, theme. But, might they not seem a bit-
monotonous?
DORE ASHTON: Some people respond, and they think, oh, how could he do
the same thing every day, but, of course, if you look at it from his point of
view, it's never the same. Each painting is an attempt to express a specific
feeling: joy, fear, all of those things.
PAUL SOLMAN: Rothko considered his work spiritual and wanted viewers to
be spiritually moved by it. And at the Rothko show some were. Nicole Asquith
and Ned Steiner actually wrote poems inspired by a 1953 Rothko entitled
"Number 61."
NICOLE ASQUITH: That long thirsted-for-horizon bleeds into the silent link,
smothered in its own blue chalk. White silent ghosts, withered and yellow,
glide by. The blue of my perception comes back to me-
NED STEINER: Light shines on the other side and is projected into the dark
room. Space hanging in space. The water separated from the waters.
PAUL SOLMAN: Lynn Metheny had a somewhat different way of putting it.
LYNN METHENY: It makes you feel very small in the face of these color
fields sort of encompassing you.
PAUL SOLMAN: So you're sort of in the paintings?
LYNN METHENY: Exactly. Exactly.
PAUL SOLMAN: He spoke about wanting people to be in the paintings.
That's why there are no frames and why it's-the paint is actually all the way
over on the sides.
LYNN METHENY: And I think, you know, the size of them as well helps that.
PAUL SOLMAN: Do you think you have a competitive advantage because

you're kind of short?
LYNN METHENY: Perhaps, perhaps.


Form: "It would be good if little places

could be set up all over the country, like a
little chapel where the traveler, or wanderer
could come for an hour to meditate on a
single painting hung in a small room, and
by itself."
Mark Rothko, 1954

Iconography: "The Rothko Chapel, on

Yupon Street and Sul Ross in Houston,
was commissioned by Dominique and John
de Menil.qv The building was originally
Rothko Chapel 1965 conceived as part of Philip Johnson's
campus design for the University of St.
Thomas, but became an independent
project when the Menils discontinued their
association with that institution. The
Menils commissioned a series of paintings
by Mark Rothko, who collaborated with
Johnson in the design of the structure. The
chapel itself is an austere structure without
windows; the skylight that Rothko insisted
upon proved to be a poor source for
lighting the paintings, and in 1978 a baffle
system was introduced. The chapel has an
octagonal floor plan in which fourteen
paintings are arrayed in eight panels. A
triptych of three abutted canvases hangs on
the north wall, the east wall, and the west
wall. The south wall holds a single canvas.
The remaining four canvases are placed on
the diagonal axes. The ascetic paintings are
limited in color to deep brown, purplish
red, and black and express what Rothko
called "the timelessness and tragedy of the
human condition." Art historian Robert
Rosenblum said of the works, "It is as if
the entire current of Western religious art
were finally devoid of its narrative
complexities and corporeal imagery,
leaving us with the dark, compelling
presences that pose an ultimate choice
between everything and nothing."
Dominique de Menil said that the works

evoke "the mystery of the cosmos, the
tragic mystery of our perishable condition,
[and] the silence of god, the unbearable
silence of God." The Rothko Chapel is
owned and directed by the Rothko Chapel
Board, of which Dominique de Menil is
president and Thompson L. Shannon
executive director. The chapel invited

individuals and religious groups of all

denominations, as well as non-believers, to
use its facilities. It has hosted Quakers,
Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants,
Hindus, Copts, Greek Orthodox, Sufis, and
Buddhists. In addition to providing a
neutral venue for such luminaries as the
Dalai Lama, who met there with
representatives of various religions and
disciplines during his visit in September
1979 to the United States, the chapel has
hosted performances by such religious
ritualists as the Whirling Dervishes of
Turkey (1978) and the Gyuto Tantric
Monks of Tibet (1985). The park in which
the Rothko Chapel is located contains
several sculptures from the Menil
Collection, including Barnett Newman's
sculpture Broken Obelisk, which is situated
in a reflecting pool opposite the chapel
entrance. John de Menil purchased this
monumental, twenty-six-foot-high work in
1968; it is dedicated to the memory of
Martin Luther King, Jr., who was
assassinated in that year. Newman
requested that the sculpture be blasted free
of its rust-proofing so that the Cor-Ten
steel surfaces could acquire a typical
Houston patina.
The Rothko Chapel sponsors colloquia

and since 1981 has presented awards for
demonstrations of a commitment to truth
and freedom. In 1988 the Second Oscar
Romero Award for work in the area of
human rights was presented to Paulo
Evaristo Cardinal Arns, Archbishop of Sâo
Paulo, at a chapel ceremony. The birthday
of Martin Luther King, Jr., was celebrated
there annually until it became a national
holiday in 1985; the United Nations
Declaration of Human rights continues to
receive annual recognition. In July 1973
the chapel sponsored "Traditional Modes of
Contemplation and Action," a colloquium
that brought together nineteen international
religious scholars and resulted in the
publication of Contemplation and Action in
World Religions. In October 1983 another
colloquium, "Ethnicities and Nations,"
brought anthropologists and other scholars
together to discuss problems faced by
traditional ethnic communities when they
are incorporated into modern nations. This

conference produced Ethnicities and

Nations: Processes of Interethnic Relations
in Latin America, Southeast Asia and the
Pacific. In the pursuit of better
understanding between religions and
cultural traditions the Rothko Chapel
works with such organizations as the
Monchanin Cross-Cultural Center in
Montréal, Quebec, the Center for Cross-
Cultural Studies in Santa Barbara,
California, the Fraternité St. Dominique in
Cotonou, Benin, the Department of Islamo-
Christian Studies in Beirut, Lebanon, and
the Instituto per le scienze religiose in
Bologna, Italy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dore Ashton, About

Rothko (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983). Kelly
Saenz, The Rothko Chapel:
The Slow Arrow of Beauty (M.A. thesis,
University of Texas at
Austin, 1980). Vertical Files, Barker
Texas History Center,
Austin.(www.tsha.utexas.edu)

Context: "...The third set, those now

installed in the "Rothko Chapel" of the de
Menil collection in Houston, are somewhat
more in keeping with the purpose of their
environment. They are arranged around the
essentially circular space, are fourteen in
number in emulation of the Christian
devotion of the Stations of the Cross (a
theme also taken up by Barnett Newman),
and clearly emphasize the sanctuary axis.
Here the traditional elements of the church
helped articulate the paintings -- as did
Rothko's already established reputation for
art with some sort of a "spiritual"
dimension. Let us recall that behind these
murals was the small gallery at the Phillips
Collection in Washington, DC, where, for
many years, a set of three, colorful Rothkos
were arranged in a small room that became
famous as a place of meditation -- as a
"chapel" of sorts. The perception of
Rothko's art as somehow conducive to
religious emotion began there, and was
taken up in the de Menil's commission. It
would be useful to ponder all this in terms

of traditional and modern ecclesiastical art,

but this is not the place for such a tangent.
I will simply wonder aloud at the piety that
would find the Rothko Chapel's bleakness
compelling to devotion."
(www.artchive.com)
Form: Franz kline was formally known as a an Abstract Expressionist.
His most well known pieces are these black and white calligraphy style
paintings, in which the emphasis is on the moment of creation. The
paint used is a quick drying enamel, which meant that each stroke is
permanent and filled with its' own importance. Much the same way that
Rothkos' work was seen as transcendent, so too did Klines work appear
to have its' own meditative qualities.
Iconography: Excerpted from The man who painted impact. by Robert

Hughes. Time, 1/23/95, Vol. 145 Issue 3, p54, 2p, 2bw HTML Full
Text
EVEN AMONG FAMOUS ARTISTS there are degrees of neglect.
Nobody could call the Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline
overlooked. Not when his pictures have sold for a million dollars and
Franz Kline (1910-1962). Painting 2. 1952 up. Not with his signature style recognizable in an eye blink, the black
girderlike slashes on the white ground. But compared with Jackson
Pollock, who has been a household word -- well, in some households
anyway -- for the past quarter-century, Kline is positively obscure. It's
like comparing Sal Mineo with James Dean. Both were in the movie
Rebel Without a Cause, but only one of them car-smashed his way
into permanent Valhalla. Kline died in 1961 at the early age of 51, and
since then he has not turned out to be a darling of the museums and
the art historians. The last full museum show of his work was back in
1985, and in Cincinnati, Ohio; it never came to New York City. So the
present show at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art,
``Franz Kline: Black & White, 1950-1961,'' breaks an unwelcome
silence on a strong, if admittedly somewhat limited, artist. It is really
the black-and-white works that bear Kline's claim to importance; he
was mainly an artist of impact, and when that kind of sensibility uses
color, it tends to over- or underuse it, in either case stressing its
declarative rather than its sensuous nature. But in monochrome he
could really cook. His early figurative work is not in the show, but it is
worth remembering for its origins. Born in Wilkes-Barre,
Kline. New York New York. 1953
Pennsylvania, Kline had an entirely traditional training at the Art
Students League in Boston, wanted to be an illustrator and studied for
a time (1936-38) in London. He was imbued with the thick-massed but
linear realism that came out of the Ashcan School and filled the
cartoons that John Sloan and others did for periodicals like the New
Masses. He doted on Krazy Kat (as did his friend Philip Guston) and
the superstylish illustrations of John Held Jr. The black-and-white
tradition was in his head, where it coexisted with a considerable range
of other references. People who knew him in the '40s and '50s
remember that Kline liked to talk about Gericault and Velazquez, about
old silver and 18th century political cartoons, rather than the gaseous
rodomontade of ``tragic chaos'' and `èxistential risk'' that got loaded
onto Abstract Expressionism by such artists as Barnett Newman and
such critics as Harold Rosenberg. In short, he was very interested in

style, a suspect idea then but one that his paintings are none the worse
for raising. We can't see Kline the way the art world did 40 years ago,
when critics wrote about his ``desperate shriek'' or his ``total and
instantaneous conversion'' to black and white. Ab Ex was less
Kline. Zinc Yellow, 1959 apocalyptic than its fans once thought, and Kline was not so at all. His
Oil on canvas, 93 x 79 1/2 inches black-and-white style was a real invention, but its roots are not hard to
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. see. If one was illustration, another was the black-and-white paintings
of de Kooning in the late '40s. An early Kline like Ninth Street, 1951,
with its traces of looping body shapes, makes that clear. Where it did
not come from, though, was where it was often said to have come
from: Oriental calligraphy. Of course, there is a superficial likeness
between Kline's structures and ideograms in sumi ink on silk,
especially in reproduction, when the particular qualities of paint and
surface are lost. But the things themselves are very different. ``People
sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,''
protested Kline, ``but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the
black, and the white is just as important.'' The black masses and bars
aren't just gestures, they're forms; the white isn't an absence but a
color. Sometimes the speed of the brush is important -- it leaves frayed
edges, something like the speed lines in cartoons, but in other
paintings, like the impressive Wotan, 1950, nothing moves or is meant
to. The big rectangle anchored by one edge to the top of the canvas has
a massive presence and thickness of paint, and its blunt authority looks
forward to what American minimalists would be doing a generation
later, in the '60s.

Context: "Franz Kline was born May 23, 1910, in Wilkes-Barre,

Pennsylvania. While enrolled at Boston University, he took art classes
at the Boston Art Students League from 1931 to 1935. In 1935, Kline
went to London and attended Heatherley’s Art School from 1936 to
1938. He settled permanently in New York in 1939. During the late
1930s and 1940s, Kline painted cityscapes and landscapes of the coal-
mining district where he was raised as well as commissioned murals
and portraits. Kline was fortunate to have the financial support and
friendship of two patrons, Dr. Theodore J. Edlich, Jr., and I. David
Orr, who commissioned numerous portraits and bought many other
works from him. In this period, he received awards in several National
Academy of Design Annuals. In 1943, Kline met Willem de Kooning
at Conrad Marca-Relli’s studio and within the next few years also met
Jackson Pollock. Kline’s interest in Japanese art began at this time. His

mature abstract style, developed in the late1940s, is characterized by

bold gestural strokes of fast-drying black and white enamel. His first
solo exhibition was held at the Egan Gallery, New York, in 1950. Soon
after, he was recognized as a major figure in the emerging Abstract
Expressionist movement. Although Kline was best-knownfor his
black-and-white paintings, he also worked extensively in color, from
the mid-1950s to the end of his life." (www.guggenheimcollection.org)

Form: Oil on canvas, Abstract Expressionist. Sometimes,

because of the loose brushwork and frenzied strokes he was
even referred to as an 'action painter', much like Jackson
Pollock. Excavation is one of his earliest works, where he
is alluding to a landscape and perhaps figures more than
actually representing them.
Iconography: (Seeing the face in the fire. by Robert

Hughes. Time, 5/30/94, Vol. 143 Issue 22, p62, 3p, 5c
HTML Full Text)
"De Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America

has ever had. One sees him as the consummate anti-
Duchamp, a permanent relief from over-theorized art, a
man so in touch with the sources of his pictorial pleasure
(the body of paint and the body of the world) that he can
render you dizzy with exhilaration. This isn't dumbness but
Willem de Kooning, Excavation a particular form of sensory intelligence that has always
Oil on canvas, 1950; 206.2 x 257.3 cm been rare in American art and came, in this case, from
Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize; gift of outside it. De Kooning arrived in the U.S. as an illegal
Mr. and Mrs. Noah Goldowsky and Edgar Kaufmann, immigrant from Rotterdam in 1926. He was a gifted
Jr., 1952.1 draftsman who had already achieved a high level of
academic training. But he gradually learned to connect that
to a modernist syntax, fusing the line of Ingres and the
fragmentation of the antique torso to 1930s Picasso and his
American derivatives like Arshile Gorky. Seated Figure
(Classic Male), 1940, shows the early stage of this process
to perfection. The forms through which De Kooning
reached abstraction were always connected to an earlier
kind of abstraction, that of academic drawing. If one were
forced to pick the best single picture De Kooning ever
painted, it would probably have to be Excavation, 1950:
that tangled, not-quite monochrome, dirty-cream image of -
- what? Bodies is the short answer: every one of the
countless forms that seem embedded in the paint, jostling
and slipping against one another in a tempo that seems to
get faster toward the corners, can be read as an elbow, a
thigh, a buttock, but never quite literally. There is even a set

of floating teeth -- the dentures the Women would soon be

sporting. De Kooning's characteristically hooked, recurving
line takes on an invigorating speed, charging and skidding
through the dense paint, slits open with the promise of
spatial depth, only to shut again. The only relief from the
close churning of forms is a curious ``window'' at the
middle of the painting -- red, white and blue -- that looks
like a blurred American flag. The work's space is not deep,
as the title might suggest, but shallow, like a bas-relief. You
keep expecting the image to fly apart into formal
incoherence, but it never does: it has the kind of control you
see in great drivers or skaters, a supple rigor that seems to
exist only on the edge of its own dissolution. One is
tempted to say that Excavation is the last great Cubist
painting, 30 years after Cubism petered out. All of De
Kooning's relation to Picasso is in it. Marla Prather's
catalog essay provides the intriguing gloss that the genesis
of Excavation began with a black-and-white film, Bitter
Rice, a classic of Italian neorealist cinema, starring Silvana
Mangano as a rice gatherer in the Po Delta; evidently De
Kooning ``responded'' (as what red-blooded Dutch-
American artist of 46 might not?) to a sequence of peasant
women in tight shorts mud-wrestling in the paddies. If true,
this tale illustrates clearly how De Kooning never
conceived of painting as a purely Apollonian art: fragments
of pop culture -- movies, ads, the immense bric-a-brac of
the American desire industry -- were always sailing into his
images and sticking there, like bugs on a windshield. The
extreme ``reductionist'' view of De Kooning's career, held
by Clement Greenberg and maintained by some critics
today, is that after 1950 it went kerflooie. Like Western
civilization itself, as his friend and chief critical promoter
Harold Rosenberg sardonically remarked, De Kooning was
always in decline. This katabasis is supposed to have begun
in the early '50s, with the Women series. Greenberg is said
to have opined to De Kooning that at this juncture in
history (meaning 40 years ago), you can't paint a human
face. Sure, said the painter, and you can't not paint one
either -- meaning, by this laconic koan, that no matter how
abstract you get, people will always tend to read images in
the work, like seeing faces in the fire. So why not come
right out with the figure? At least it might save the
abstractions from gliding into decoration, losing their
crankiness and urgency, which was, indeed, what New
York abstract painting did when lyric acrylic on unprimed
duck became all the rage in the 1960s. Abstract
Expressionism in the hands of its two masters, Pollock and
De Kooning, at least -- had a way of disappointing the
critics who wanted it to be more abstract than it was. Just as
Pollock's all-over paintings wouldn't be so great if they
weren't landscapes, full of wind and weather, light and
pollen, so De Kooning's work benefited from the grand
ghosts of Dutch baroque figure painting, who kept jolting
the artist's elbow.

Context: "Willem de Kooning, born in Rotterdam in 1904,

was apprenticed to a commercial arts and decorating firm
there from 1916 to 1921. From 1917 to 1921 he also studied
at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In
1926 he left Holland illegally for the United States by
working in the engine room of a ship and, newly arrived in
New Jersey, supported himself as a house painter. De
Kooning moved to New York City in 1927, and within a
few years he was friends with the artists John Graham,
Stuart Davis, David Smith, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock,
Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. From the late 1930s
through the 1950s his biomorphic abstractions (which
allude to figures and landscapes) and his series Women
placed him in the center of the Abstract Expressionist art
movement. The gestural style of painting and the visual
vocabulary of forms that he developed at this time
continued to inform his later work. De Kooning was an
accomplished draftsman as well as painter and made his
first sculptures in 1969. "Woman" belongs to his first series
of women, begun about 1940. Like other works in this
series, the colors are raucously bright — jarring hues of
green, ocher, blue, and orange — and the imagery is
tenuously balanced between realism and abstraction. An
awkwardly posed, somewhat grotesquely formed female
figure is broadly painted without modeling. The parts of her
body are reduced to independent abstract shapes and lines,
as is the spatially flattened environment in which she exists.
Her comical, masklike face, with smiling bow-shaped
lipsand large bulging eyes, adds to the light air of the
picture. Although de Kooning's image is recognizable as a
woman, the emphasis is on the abstract arrangement of
form, line, and color." (www.asartfoundation.org)

Form: Mainly abstract, expressionistic portraits or interpretations of women. It

is rumored that DeKooning was a horrible misogynist who hated women, and
by the looks of his works that deal with women, it is easy to believe this rumor
to be true. According to www.rogallery.com "In the late 1930s, De Kooning
worked for the WPA Federal Art Project and, for the first time, earned his living
as an artist. It was not until 1948, however, that he was ready for his first one-
man show of masterful black paintings with white-line drawing. That same
year, his friend Gorky committed suicide. It was a stunning blow to De Kooning
and yet, at the same time, a liberation. Paintings, sardonic and violent, began to
pour from his brush. In 1952, obsessed with interest in the human figure, De
Kooning began a long series of paintings of women, the most powerful work
that he had yet done.He explored the theme over and over again. Sometimes it
was woman as sex symbol; other times, as in Woman 1 (1952, Museum of

Modern Art), she is depicted as a repellent, sharp-fanged, horn-bosomed

vampire. Each time, De Kooning seemed to attack the canvas savagely, letting
paint drip and dribble down the surface. Since the 1960s, he has alternated
between pure abstractions and paintings of women. "Art never seems to make
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) me peaceful or pure," De Kooning once said. "I always seem to be wrapped up
Woman IV 1952, in the melodrama of vulgarity."
Iconography: It can be dficult to look at the paintings DeKooning does of

women and not see them as violent and disturbing. DeKooning was married,
and his wife was an artist as well. Miriam Shapiro, a prominent female artist,
has this to say of the Abstract Expressionist movement and the works of
DeKooning, "While in New York, Schapiro and Block spent much of their time
at the Cedar Club, which Schapiro described as "one of the strongholds of
Abstract Expressionism, presided over by the king - [Willem] DeKooning."
DeKooning, who gained considerable acclaim among Abstract Expressionists,
painted a number of aggressive and often dehumanizing paintings under the title
"Woman." These paintings have been since railed upon by feminist critics. "If
you were a man," said Schapiro, "you walked into the Cedar Club, you had lots
of confidence, [and] you made your way from table to table. I had a husband,
and therefore there was a sign on me that read: 'Don't bother her.'" While the
Abstract Expressionists plumbed the depths of their emotional potential through
painting, the emotional impact of the marginalization of their
female counterparts went wholly unexamined. The wife of Willem DeKooning,
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) Elaine De Kooning, was "a writer, [and] belonged to a group of critics,"
Woman 1954, oil on paper, explained Schapiro. "There were many women in the club, sitting quiet, and
25 3/4 in. by 19 5/8 in. [Elaine] knew that the wives of those artists were very good artists themselves."
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and As a result, Elaine De Kooning curated a show of all women artists, of which
Sculpture Miriam Schapiro was a part. "This was long before feminism," said Schapiro.
Garden, University of Nebraska- When feminism did begin to gain attention, a whole set of institutional and
Lincoln, psychological undercurrents in society found expression in the works of artists
F. M. Hall Collection and writers. "I remember," said Golden, "reading Betty Freidan's Feminine
1955.H-362 Mystique - I was on an airplane and I turned to the man next to me and said,
'Isn't this exciting?'"
(wildcat.arizona.edu)
Context: "The pupils of Woman I, 1950-1952, glare at you like a pair of black
head lamps. She has the worst overbite in all of Western art. She looks like a
school matron, seen in a bad dream, imposing and commonplace, and full of a
power that flows from the slashing brushstrokes into the body. De Kooning --
the ``slipping glimpser,'' as he called himself, open to a constant stream of
momentary impressions -- loved contradictory vernaculars, visual slang that

collided with the huge amount of high-art language that he had internalized
since his student days in the Dutch academy. Smiles from Camel ads; shoulders
from Ingres; pinup girls and Raphael's The School of Athens; high and low,
everywhere. It was his mode of reception, never intellectualized but often
Willem de Kooning. extremely funny. By the late 1950s, De Kooning was surrounded by imitators;
Portrait of a Woman. 1940 there was a ``look,'' a gestural rhetoric fatally easy to mimic, that they got from
him and reduced to parody. (The artists who would really make something of
his legacy were not in New York but in California: Richard Diebenkorn and
Wayne Thiebaud.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against him,
sons against the parent; but Rauschenberg's now classic Oedipal gesture of
rubbing out a De Kooning drawing could not erase the obvious fact that the
paint in his combine-pictures came straight out of the older Dutch master, drips,
clots and all. Such things make an artist feel old. As his followers were
becoming more prominent, De Kooning was easing himself out of Manhattan,
spending more and more time on the South Fork of Long Island. The flat potato
fields, beaches and glittering air of that tongue of land must often have
reminded him of the Dutch seacoast, but what mattered most to his paintings in
the late '50s was the experience of getting there, being driven up Route 495 --
fast movement through unscrolling American highway space. Hence the road
images of 1957-1958, in which the full-reach, broad-brush speed of the paint
becomes a headlong road movie, analogous to Jack Kerouac's writing (though
without its hectoring blither) or the photographs of De Kooning's friend Robert
Frank. See America now! And you do -- in abstraction; you feel its rush and
tonic vitality in the toppling blue strokes of Ruth's Zowie, 1957, which echo
Willem de Kooning Woman, 1943 Franz Kline's big-girder structures but move them into a pastoral context. What
Oil on board, De Kooning found at the end of this highway, however, when he moved
23 1/4 x 23 1/16 in. permanently to Long Island in 1963, was mostly suds and mayonnaise. The long
series of pink squidgy pictures -- landscapes, nudes splayed like frogs in
memory of Dubuffet, and female clam diggers -- that issued from his studio
over the next 15 years was lush and trivial. The drawing is submerged in weak,
declamatory, wambling brushstrokes; the color -- mostly pink -- is bright and
boring. Yet you could never write De Kooning off. He came back in the late
'70s with some big, rapturously congested landscape-body images with a deeper
tonal structure that, though they do not support the comparisons to late Monet,
Renoir, Bonnard `ànd, of course, Titian'' that David Sylvester makes in his
catalog essay, certainly confirm that the movement of De Kooning's talent was
not on-off, but ebb and flow. Then came the thin, pale, intensely lyrical
paintings of the early '80s, which spin away the congestion altogether, and for a
few years recapitulate the graphic intensity of his work in the 1940s, but in
terms of an almost Chinese delicacy, in the colors of famille-rose porcelain.
Looking at them is like seeing an old man's veins through his skin: the abiding
network of the style is set forth, but in its last physical form."Seeing the face in
the fire. by Robert Hughes. Time, 5/30/94, Vol. 143 Issue 22, p62, 3p, 5c
HTML Full Text
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

Woman IV 1952,

Woman 1954, oil on paper,
25 3/4 in. by 19 5/8 in.
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and
Sculpture
Garden, University of Nebraska-
Lincoln,
F. M. Hall Collection
1955.H-362

Form: "Composition serves as a bridge between the Women and de
Kooning’s next series of work, classified by critic Thomas Hess as the
Abstract Urban Landscapes (1955–58). According to the artist, “the
landscape is in the Woman and there is Woman in the landscapes.” Indeed,
Composition reads as a Woman obfuscated by de Kooning’s agitated
brushwork, clashing colors, and allover composition with no fixed
viewpoint. Completed while the artist had a studio in downtown New York,
Composition’s energized dashes of red, turquoise, and chrome yellow
suggest the frenetic pace of city life, without representing any identifiable
urban inhabitants or forms."( www.guggenheimcollection.org)
Iconography: This early work by DeKooning shows him at his abstract best.
Here it is evident that emotion ruled his paintbrush, as evidenced by his
slashing brushstrokes and violent colors. One would be interested to note,
however, that he did not do his paintings as quickly as it would appear. He
often spent hours agonizing over the strokes, wiping away the paint when it
angered him, leaving it when he felt it was right. This obsession with detail
and feeling in his work may be what adds to it the aura of unease and feeling
of psychological unrest.
Willem de Kooning. Composition, Context: This painting was done a few years after his close friends suicide,
1955. and it is apparent the frustration and unhappiness with which he seems to
Oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas, paint. There is, in popular culture, an ideal of an artist as a struggling,

79 1/8 x 69 1/8 inches. Solomon R. unbalanced, and unhappy head case. Though we as a society may
Guggenheim Museum. romanticize such notions of the awful muse that inspires such work, it can be
difficult to look at this work and not feel empathy for someone who is in
such obvious pain.


Photorealism

This work by Jan Van Eyck is the earliest example of Photorealism. Though
it may not seem so at first because of the highly stylized hands and faces of
the figures, and the somewhat stiff poses, it must be noticed how accurately
vanEyck represented the scene and the attention paid to the small details.
What very few people are aware of when viewing these portraits are the tools
that these artists' had at their disposal to help them accurately render what
they saw before them. By looking at this painting, it becomes clear that
vanEyck used a tool called the camera obscura, which was most commonly
used by fellow artist Vermeer in later decades. The artist would pose his
subjects in the setting he wished to portray them in, making certain there was
a light source that provided lighting from a single direction. In the case of
the Arnolfini Wedding, it was the window on the left hand side. In fact, if
one were to look at a collection of work by Vermeer, it could be noted that
in almost every painting the subject is seated by a window which is
providing all the light for the scene. After setting up his scene, the artist
would then draw a black curtain over the doorway of the room, effectively
creating a closed box with the scene and the people inside it. there is a hole
Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Wedding 1434 cut into the fabric and a camera obscura placed in front of it, the artist would
oil and tempera on oak 82x60cm then place his blank canvas in front of the lens and the scene in the room
for more on Arnolfini see would be accurately projected onto the canvas, upside down, but allowing
The Mystery of Marriage at this Website the artist to then make a rough tracing of where exactly the shapes were in
the room and their size in relation to one another. This was a fast way for the
artist to get an accurate layout of his whole painting and allow him to begin
to spend time on the small details that in the end, make the biggest
difference. The best example of this in the Arnolfini Wedding can be seen in
the mirror on the wall behind the couple being wed, which accurately reflects
them and the room, along with the cleric leading the wedding, whom is not
portrayed in the painting at all when viewed straight on. Also, there is the
remarkable chandelier, which would be nearly impossible to portray
accurately without the use of the camera obscura because of the difficult
perspective and amount of fine detail. This painting truly shows the effects
of the invention of optical devices such as the camera obscura and camera
lucida on the development of standards for painting, and are the beginning of
other optical devices such as the camera, video, projectors, and now digital
cameras which are widely used by artists' today in the development of their
work.

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Photorealism
Here are some diagrams which show what a small camera obscura looked
like, and give a short description of how it works. In fact, most modern
day projectors sold in craft stores and art stores are merely fancier
versions of the camera obscura, but work with exactly the same principle.
With the advent of our modern age where images are everywhere around
us, media ranging from posters to magazines and television and movies,
there have often been debates about the validity of an artist today using
Camera Obscura these means of tracing images in order to create a painting or other work
of fine art. Many have argued against the practice claiming that it cannot
truly be fine art if it is not created freehand, and relying only upon the
artists' own eyes. While it is true that in order for one to become a
successful artist one must spend years learning how to see and render
what is before them, it cannot be discounted that the practice of using
optical devices as tools has been around almost as long as the idea of
perspective was first realized.
By observing the work of Vermeer in relation to the work of Van Eyck, it can again
be seen how the camera obscura was used. Note that there is a strong light source
coming from one direction, most likely a window in the room, and how accurately
the face and hands of the young girl are portrayed, as well as the fine details of the
implements she was using while making lace. What is especially interesting about
this particular painting is the treatment of the red lace on her right hand side. While
the entire painting is almost painstakingly rendered in detail, the mass of red lace
belies an almost expressionistic portrayal, with quick loose strokes and what appears
to be almost pollock-esque drips of paint to suggest the threads. This may even be
seen as an early example of true expressionism, and while it may not seem to be very
earth shattering by today's' standards, in the early 1700's this was quite daring,
indeed.
Form: This portrait is a very straightforward and naturalistic representation. The

composition is simple and there is no great range of space. The value structure
initially is very Caravaggesque but on closer examination the range of value and the
subtlety of the tonal transitions is a bit more complicate. The same is true of the
color in this image. Vermeer does use some intense or saturated hues as well as a
Jan Vermeer. The Lacemaker 1669- few non-local colors in the face and hands.
70
Oil on canvas transferred to panel, This image is one of those images that tends to support Vermeer's use of the camera
23.9 x 20.5 cm obscura. If you look closely at the detail below of the red lace you will find that
Musée du Louvre, Paris Vermeer's lace becomes blobs of color rather than the red lines we would anticipate a

Photorealism
Dutch, Baroque painter rendering for individual strands. If you look closely at the details of any
photograph you will find that details become blurry in this same fashion.
Another facet of this detail also supports this conclusion. If you look closely at the
details of the strands you will also see that there are little disks or rings of color that
seem to have no purpose for being there. These disks are actually what one would
see if you looked through a cheap or poorly made lens on a camera. They are caused
by some imperfections in the lens condensing or refracting light in an odd fashion.
Iconography: Almost all of Vermeer's paintings are allegorical in some way. As

this the young woman makes lace her hands are propped up on a prayer book. This
juxtaposition of prayer book to her embroidery seems to pay homage to the cliché
that "idle hands are the work of the devil." This may be the case because there are
many accounts of Dutch housewives obsessive creation of lace ornamentation,
however, this was not just to keep their hands busy. Lacemaking was also a good
source of extra income for many housewives. If you look at almost any image from
Rembrandt to Vermeer you will see that the clothing usually included an ornate lace
collar and sometimes sleeves and other ornaments. So lace is also a sign of wealth
when it was worn.

Form: Black and white airbrush portrait.
Iconography: Chuck Close worked primarily from photographs of himself, taken in

black and white. He worked on this painting using the grid and transfer method, in
which he drew a grid over the original photograph, and then drew an identical grid
over a larger surface and copied the photograph square by square using his airbrush
until an accurate representation of the original photo had been achieved.
"Squaring" in painting, simple technique for transferring an image from

one surface to another (and sometimes converting the image from one
scale to another) by nonmechanical means. The original work to be
transferred is divided into a given number of squares; the same number of
squares is then marked off-- with charcoal or some other easily removable
medium--on the surface of the receiving area. The contents of each square
of the original are then drawn in the corresponding square of the
reproduction. The use of the grid ensures the accurate placement of images
Chuck Close Self Portrait 1968 onto the reproduction.
airbrush
The Egyptians used squaring at least 5,000 years ago. It has been used to
transfer cartoons onto murals, to transfer preparatory drawings onto
canvas paintings, and to alter the scale of any work in the same media.
According to Haber's Art Reviews (www.haberarts.com) ".....Through all those permutations, Close
is up to one thing. His portraits imitate the photograph, hoping to understand it and yet out to trump
it. He keeps trying harder and harder to fail, and he succeeds. He sticks to the formal, modernist
vocabulary with which he began. Like a printer or a factory, he reproduces it endlessly. Yet he trusts
only to his eye and hand. Close's very first black-and-white paintings were hardly all that precise.
Paradoxically, he depends on the photograph for their hand-made look. The sketchiness of an ear,
say, coincides with the blurring due to a narrow depth of field. Close is fascinated by how reality at
a third remove can seem so real. He is in love with a photograph's lack of authenticity and yet
determined to control it. Year after year he repeats his formal gesture, like Freud's child tossing a

Photorealism
ball over and over to confront a sense of loss. He has lost the comfort of art's humanity and his own
claim to genius, and again and again he replaces it with his outsize talent."
Though that is a somewhat lengthy and involved explanation for his work, it does bring the idea of
the photograph into the fine- art- painting dimension. Chuck Close did not run away from the idea of
photography, or try to hide the fact that he worked from photographs, as many artists do, but instead
embraced it and played with it and successfully made it work to his advantage.
Context: According to the Washington Post, "Using a black-and-white photograph overlaid with a
grid, Close created his earliest monumental paintings with an air brush and boundless patience. He
took as his guiding philosophy the idea
that, as he says, "the process will set you free."
The same image shrunken down so that your eye mixes the colors.
Form: Chuck Close used the same optical theories of optical mixing that
Seurat used in his pointalism but Close became very interested in the
formal qualities of the process. This image demonstrates how Close took
the idea of grid and transfer (sqaring) that we saw in Daumier's work and
makes the process more visible by making abstract designs within each
square.
Chuck Close, Bill II, a 1991

(portrait of William Wegman)
Oil on canvas. 36 x 30 inches.
Form: A later work by Chuck Close, done
in color and in oil, on a huge canvas.
Iconography: Watching the development

of Chuck Closes' paintings, the viewer is
able to see the ways in which an artist is
able to expand and experiment using the
photographs as a tool. Instead of being
confined to just creating an exact replica
of the photograph, Close is here showing
his skill as a painter and his knowledge of
color theory and how it works in creating
a realistic portrait. Much the way Seurat
created paintings by using painstaking
pinpoints of complementary color that are
mixed to create a picture by the viewers
eyes, Close is doing the same optical
trick. Using saturated colors in a mosaic
type pattern that, up close, wouldn't

Photorealism
translate into much, but from afar create a

breathtakingly realistic portrait of his
subject.
Context: A review of his later works

done by the Worcester Phoenix
Newspaper helps to give a perceptive on
his later works and how he developed the
distinctive style found in his color
works."....It's true that like all art students
of the `60s he started out wrestling with
abstract expressionism and trying to see
who would become the next Willem De
Kooning (1904-1997). But as his
classmates began to drift toward
minimalism, Close saw a fork in the road
and headed directly to figurative realism.
His breakthrough work in 1967 was a full
nude. Not all that unusual, except that Big
Nude was nine feet tall and 21 feet long.
From then on, he concentrated on what he
refers to as his "heads," monstrous close-
ups of peoples' faces, mostly his own, but
also friends, family, and other artists.
These time-consuming and slickly
Chuck Close executed images were almost too real and
Lucas, 1986-87, too scary, with flaring nostrils, bulging
oil & pencil on canvas, eyes, and every pockmark and wart
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. magnificently defined. Somewhere along
the way Close decided to let us in on how
he makes his paintings. He shows us the
expansion grid marks and indicates just
how he applies the paint. These were no
longer slavish blow-up copies of
photographs (they never really were), but
rather assemblages of thousands of
miniature paintings, put together much
like ancient Italian mosaics."

Form:
Photorealistic
painting done

Photorealism
with oil on
canvas.
What makes
Estes process
unique is that
he would set
up a tripod
and shoot
many photos
from the
same vantage
point and
combine the
views into a
single
image. What
this allows
him to do
with his
image is to
make a
painting that
has both the
qualities of a
Richard Estes, Cafe Express, 1975, oil on canvas,
photo but the
The Art Institute of Chicago.
completely
observed
details of a
painting. In
a phot, the
range of
focus of the
lense would
blur the
buildings in
the
background,
however, the
buildings in
the
background
here are in
sharp focus
because he
uses many
photos that
are focussed
on the
background.


Photorealism
Iconography: According to Stokstad, Estes can be classified as a 'super-realist' painter. His

paintings so closely resemble a photograph as to be almost indistinguishable from one. What is also
noted in Stokstad about his work is the elimination of all the people in the picture, which allowed
him to '(emphasize) his interest in the refined compositional arrangements.' Compared to what we
have been looking at so far in which the primary subject was a person or people, Estes' work creates
its' own eerie tension and suggests that he finds urban landscapes and city life to be cold and devoid
of human contact. Early n his career, Estes did a lot of figurative work and classic drawing, often
influenced by painters such as Edgar Degas and Edward Hopper. By knowing about his background
in classical art, it is easy to see how he has moved beyond the limitations of early figurative work,
and set forth an idea for himself that comments on what is important to him as well as challenges his
technical ability.
Context: According to a review of the work done by the the Smithsonian at the Hirsshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC "....Estes is one of the foremost proponents of the Photo-
Realist movement, a particular type of realism characterized by high finish, sharp details, and a
photographic appearance. This movement began in the mid-1960s in America with such artists as
Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Duane Hanson and Estes.
Photo-Realism evolved from two longstanding art-historical traditions: trompe l'oeil ("to fool the
eye") painting and the meticulous technique and highly finished surfaces of seventeenth-century
Dutch painting. Painters such as Vermeer greatly influenced Estes with their detailed observation of
reality and their use of technical devices, such as the camera obscura. More modern precedents for
Estes's painting can be found in the work of Charles Sheeler and the American Precisionist painters
of the 1930s, who often used photographic sources to ensure accuracy of line and form. Estes is one
of the foremost proponents of the Photo-Realist movement, a particular type of realism characterized
by high finish, sharp details, and a photographic appearance. This movement began in the mid-1960s
in America with such artists as Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Duane Hanson and Estes.
of the 1930s, who often used photographic sources to ensure accuracy of line and form."
Form: A photorealist painting, oil on canvas.
Iconography: Contrary to the title this painting shows the interior

of a diner shown through a plate glass window, the central savings
sign is reflected in the window instead of being the main focus of
the painting itself. Once again, Estes has eliminated the human
element from his scene, choosing instead to let the trappings of
society speak for him. It can be read that the diner is
representative of the working-man, empty now as they return to
their jobs, or possibly just waiting for the lunch crowd. The
shadow of the ever-present savings bank is a reminder that society
thrives and lives off the money that is spent or saved. This is why
people work, and these are the places that everything they work
hard for comes down to, places of food, comfort and commerce.
Context: The tension and meaning in this painting are derived

from the composition and subject matter. The horizontal lines and
Richard Estes, Central Savings, 1975, cold glare off the aluminum seats tend to give a feeling of
oil on canvas, emptiness. Only the buildings reflected in the glass have sunlight

Photorealism
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, reflecting off them, not the immediate picture plane the viewer
Kansas City, MO finds themselves in. This is another example of his view on
society as cold, bleak and impersonal.
Don Eddy, Untitled (4 VWs), 1971

acrylic on canvas, 66 x 95 in., private collection.

Form: Photorealist paintings done with acrylic on canvas. Highly rendered.
According to Nancy Hoffman Galleries, representatives of a collection of his
work,".... Eddy's painting technique is unique. He works in acrylic, first painting
the entire canvas green, then brown and then purple. With these three layers he
separates warm from cool colors. After the three layers of underpainting color,
Eddy often adds 20-30 transparent layers of glazing in different colors to achieve
the powerful visual impact of his palette."
Iconography: Don Eddy works with Acrylic as opposed to oil in these paintings
which is impressive because of the relative difficulty in achieving the same depth
out of the plastic based paints as opposed to oil based paints.
According to the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the campus of the university of
Nebraska

"...In his early years, Eddy became familiar with the

airbrush as a painting tool in his father's car-customizing
shop. His Photo-Realist paintings are totally airbrushed, and
he is considered a master of that technique. During the first
decade of his career, in the 1970s, his approach to painting
was primarily analytical as he painted cars, scrap yards and
showroom windows, then opulent shop fronts, silver and
crystal displays. The objects that filled the windows were
machine made--familiar parts of contemporary life. The
objects provided bright, reflective surfaces that distorted the
appearance of reality and created kaleidoscopic patterns of
refracted and ambient light and color. These images were
Don Eddy, Pontiac Showroom I, 1972 ideally suited to his camera (a mechanical device that
acrylic on canvas, 80 x 66 in. captures the imagery of light) with which Eddy had become
The Robert B. Mayer Family expert while working his way through college as a tourist
Collection, photographer.

Photorealism
Chicago
Eddy's introduction of windows into his work serves the
purpose of creating a triple situation: a window has a
surface, its transparency allows the appearance of a second
image, and it reflects a third vision. Because of the way the
eye functions, we never, in reality, see all three as separate
images at the same time. By incorporating information
gathered from several photographs and forcing it all onto
the single focused surface of his painting Eddy makes the
physiologically impossible seem logical. A camera cannot
achieve the same result because, like the eye, it focuses on
either foreground or background. In dealing with color,
Eddy does not strive for reality, preferring to paint from
black-and-white photographs and to create color systems
that are more concerned with formalist considerations. For
instance, an orange car situated behind a red one may be
Don Eddy, Harley Hub, 1970
reality, but a white car situated behind a blue one may work
acrylic on canvas, 28 x 28 in.
better as a painting.
private collection.
Eddy's work of the early 1980s indicates his reinvestment
in both vivid color and evocative content. His newest
paintings are multidimensional layers of ideas as complex
and personal as the artist's technique. His most recent work
is the most comprehensive in terms of the artist's themes of
nature, art history, personal experience and fatherhood. His
work is no longer simply photographic or realistic, but
contains elements of both--having abandoned the perceptual
world of the eye to move in spaces of the mind. As an
artist, Don Eddy is considered a thoughtful intellectual as
well as a disciplined craftsman.
Context: "A realist artist, sometimes called a photo-realist, Don Eddy works in
acrylic on canvas as well as in colored pencil on paper. Over the past decade
Eddy has moved from images of toys floating in front of landscapes and majestic
architectural interiors within the perimeters of one rectangular canvas to
juxtaposing images in triptych and polytypch configurations."
(www.nancyhoffmangallery.com)


lesson_supreme
Supreme Abstraction

Form: Oil on canvas. Geometrically abstract though still has a sense of depth. uses
dark muddy looking colors with bright saturated ones.
Iconography: "He sought to distill into painting, experiences of consciousness that

eluded representation. Malevich invented a language of geometric forms that
presented a wholly conceptual reality. It seems more than coincidental that he relied
upon the metaphor of flying in order to describe his radical innovation. Malevich
envisioned himself as an aviator who has flown through the blueness of the sky and
punctured it, piercing the firmament, coming to exist in a free infinite realm: "I have
torn through the blue lampshade of color limitations, and come out into the white;
after me, comrade aviators sail into the chasm-I have set up semaphores of
Suprematism. Sail forth! The white, free chasm, infinity is before us."
www.artpapers.org
With suprematist abstraction, Malevich is saying that he has found the purest from
of abstraction, and is intent on creating new realities with it.
Context:"Suprematism began in Russia c.1913 and was based around artist Kasimir
Malevich. It was first launched publicly in 1915 by him through both a manifesto
and exhibition titled '0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition' in Petrograd. Malevich built
up pictures from geometric shapes without reference to observed reality, producing
an art that expressed only pure aesthetic feeling rather than with a connection to
anything social, political or otherwise. To Malevich the purest form was the square
while other elements were rectangles, circles, triangles and the cross.Malevich
presented an art of dynamic purity to stir emotions and promote contemplation, and
dispense with subject matter (although some painting titles refer to reality eg.,
'Suprematist composition: Airplane Flying'), perspective and traditional painting
techniques. His paintings were carefully constructed with the focus centering on the
visual qualities of shape and space, free from the constraints of real world
objectivity. Suprematism promoted pure aesthetic creativity. Malevich, his
colleagues and students designed textiles, typography and architectural structures in
the Suprematist style, even to the extent of creating ideas for buildings and satellite
towns, which were never realised however due to their impractibility. Several of
Malevich's pupils became prominent Soviet artists although only Nikolai Suetin took
up the Suprematist style, developing Malevich's concepts int a practical system of
design which he applied to architecture, furniture, book production and ceramics.
Malevich, Kasimir The Aviator Although initially Malevich had a small group of followers (including Rodchenko,
1914 Tatlin, Gabo and Pevsner), it was always destined to be a short-lived movement
Oil on canvas 49 1/4 x 25 5/8 because of its rigid parameters and hence its limited creative potential. Malevich's
in. (125 x 65 cm.) assertion that art could be composed without reference to the real world was highly
State Tretyakov Gallery, influential both in Russia where it made possible Constructivism, and world-wide
Moscow where it became the catalyst for a variety of styles of abstract art, architectural forms
and utilitarian designs. Suprematism was a revolutionary movement, fundamental in
shaping a new artistic vision of the world, but by 1918 however, Constructivism had
replaced it as the preferred style. Although Malevich continued painting, by 1930 his
art had returned to the figuative."
(full text at http://users.senet.com.au/~dsmith/constructivism.htm)
"Born near Kiev; trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts;
1913 began creating abstract geometric patterns in style he called suprematism;
taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad 1919-21; published book, The
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lesson_supreme
Nonobjective World (1926),on his theory; first to exhibit abstract geometric

paintings; strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions; famous painting White on
White (1918) carries suprematist theories to absolute conclusion; Soviet politics
turned against modern art, and he died in poverty
and oblivion. He began working in an unexceptional Post-Impressionist manner, but
by 1912 he was painting peasant subjects in a massive`tubular' style similar to that of
Léger as well as pictures combining the fragmentation of form of Cubism with the
multiplication of the image of Futurism (The Knife Grinder, Yale Univ. Art Gallery,
1912). Malevich, however, was fired with the desire `to free art from the burden of
Malevich, Kasimir. the object' and launched the Suprematist movement, which brought abstract art to a
Suprematism 1915 geometric simplicity more radical than anything previously seen. He claimed that he
Oil on canvas 34 1/2 x 28 3/8 made a picture `consisting of nothing more than a black square on a white field' as
in. (87.5 x 72 cm.) early as 1913, but Suprematist paintings were first made public in Moscow in 1915
State Russian Museum, St. and there is often difficulty in dating his work. (There is often difficulty also in
Petersbur knowing which way up his paintings should be hung, photographs of early
exhibitions sometimes providing conflicting evidence.) Malevich moved away from
absolute austerity, tilting rectangles from the vertical, adding more colors and
introducing a suggestion
of the third dimension and even a degree of painterly handling, but around 1918 he
returned to his purest ideals with a series of White on White paintings. After this he
seems to have realized he could go no further along this road and virtually gave up
abstract painting, turning more to teaching, writing, and making three-dimensional
models that were important in the growth of Constructivism. In 1919 he started
teaching at the art school at Vitebsk, where he exerted a profound influence on
Lissitzky, and in 1922 he moved to Leningrad, where he lived for the rest of his life.
He visited Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, accompanying an exhibition of his works and
visited the Bauhaus. In the late 1920s he returned to figurative painting, but was out
of favor with a political system that now demanded Socialist Realism from its artists
and he died in neglect. However, his influence on abstract art, in the west as well as
Russia, was enormous. The best collection of his work is in the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam."
(full text at http://www.oir.ucf.edu/wm/paint/auth/malevich/)
Form: Oil, charcoal, and pastel on canvas.
Iconography: Although this peivce is

more realistic then his later peices, there is
still a hint of him moving toward his later
devices. The foreground seems to be a
combination of different color shapes.
Thre distinction comes when you add the
background to it. "The subject matter,
landscapes at first, became concentrated
on natural elements that best lent
themselves to communicate the language
of visual phenomena, such as trees,

lesson_supreme
windmills, water and dunes. Mixing

charcoal, pastel, watercolor or gouache,
the experimentation began early with his
drawings in which, as early as the 1899
'Forest', trees are treated as the natural
element 'parexcellence'. He felt that its
graphical form embodied the basis of the
art of drawing and of art in general: “I
find that the great line is the primordial
element in a subject; color comes
afterwards” (www.stargonaut.com)
Context: "For him it is not by imitation

that we can understand the significance of
life: it was more through analysis, or more
precisely through perpetual speculation:
“Experience is my only teacher”.
Therefore, the artistic path that started
with naturalistic representational
figuration of the old masters (during his
studies at the Fine Art Academy of
Amsterdam), going through virtually
every artistic movement (between 1900
and 1911), reached the logical destiny of
abstraction or neo-plasticity (from 1912
until his death). This coincided perfectly
with his mental and spiritual path, i.e. the
Theosophical doctrine that meant going
further than communicating with the
divine and aspiring at finding the secret of
creation — taking it further by
participating in the work of the ever-
expanding universe. “The artist is born
from the past and goes as far as his
imagination can take him”. During his
visit to Paris in 1911, his painting style
was even more profoundly impacted. The
fateful encounter with Van Gogh's
hatched lines and brilliant color as well as
the Cubists’ re-interpretation of plastic
form ushered him gradually into the
absolute simplification of his work.
Unlike the Impressionists, Pointillists and
Fauvists, who were concentrated on
breaking with the canons of color rather
than form, or even the Cubists, who broke
with tradition in forms but still used tones
of color, Mondrian pushed the
Piet Mondrian Landscape Near Amsterdam c1900 simplification further in both areas."
(www.stargonaut.com)
Mondrian is seen in almost every
important art movement of his time. What
is important about what we see here is the
fact that he was an exceedingly talented

lesson_supreme
artist, but that he is not known for these

early works, only for his later abstractions
such as "Broadway Boogie Woogie."
Since he studied art in the tradition of the
Old Masters while in Amsterdam, it can
be assumed that this is one of the studies
he did while living there.
"Our collective memory is marked forever

by Mondrian's colorful geometrical
abstractions, and this exhibition,
dedicated to his 1892-1914 period, clearly
brings out the extraordinary path this
'polyglot' of many an artistic language
chose. We see how, after many years of
experimentation, there resulted a
significant ‘quantum’ leap, abandoning
representational art. For those of us who
were only familiar with his apparently
simple geometrical compositions, his
versatility and facility with painting are
amazing, as can be seen from an early
1883 still-life composed ‘à la Chardin’
and executed like an old Dutch master.
He changed style and technique
incessantly, traveling through Realism,
Pointillism, Expressionism and Fauvism
to settle in the realm of Cubism and
formal abstraction. What at first seems
like an assimilation of the old masters by
an assiduous student, developed through
the years through intensive and inquisitive
research. We witness the discovery of the
mysterious world of visual phenomena,
its infinite source of interpretation, its
close relationship with the psyche, its
linkage with the spiritual, and its
universality of intelligence."
Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: We can see Mondrian moving away from his earliest style of
realism. Here he is using bright, saturated colors, pointallism, fauvism,
abstraction, a modge-podge of techniques to create this piece. The composition is
that of a VanGogh, the subject sits in the middle of the canvas, the movement is
created by the colors and the brushstrockes rather than asymetry.His use of a mill
as the subject shows he is still connected to his Old Master training, landscapes,
horses, trees, and windmills being favorites.
Context: The mill under the sun, shows Mondrian’s confrontation with this
classical hollandaise

lesson_supreme
theme. The painting reflects the influences of the “fauvism”, and Van Gogh’s
painting principles.The mill, appears against the light painted by several
superimpositions of paintbrushes. The use of the “pointillism technique” allows
Piet Mondrian. Molen (Mill); Mill Mondrian to dematerialize the form, and the utilization of“fauvism composition”
in Sunlight, to allow him reach new levels of abstract reality.
1908 Oil on canvas (http://www.fiu.edu/~andiaa/cg2/chronos.html)
114 x 87 cm (44 7/8 x 30 1/4 in)
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The
Hague

Form: Oil on canvas. abstract geometrical forms
Iconography: "Focusing inwards is rejected by

Mondrian when the object is rejected. Focusing
inwards is involvement. Involvement with objects
entails suffering. Growth is seen as an irresistible
force moving through the tree - a river of life,
spreading, demanding space into which it can
expand. Pictures such as The Red Tree reflect not
simply a tree seen now, but the way it has
evolved, has lived, has been formed, is still in
formation, will wither and die. In pictures such as
The Blue Tree the urgency of the need to grow is
such that it is as if the whole growth were
telescoped into one explosive moment like a
shellburst. Coursing with life, the trees are twisted
images of torment and despair.
Context: In the paintings of chrysanthemums -

that most centripetal of flowers - there is a sense
of concentration that is agonising. It is as if the
artist were trying to hypnotise himself by gazing
into this flower and as if he were trying to
hypnotise the flower into suspending its process
of growth, the process that will make the petals
fall away, the flowers wilt and die (as it is seen to

lesson_supreme
do in two of the paintings in the series). The rapt

quality of the image seems to embody a longing
to deny time, the flower is held together with a
sort of desperation. In the series of images of
trees that followed, the forces of growth can no
longer be held in."Intense involvement with living
things is involvement with death. If you follow
nature, wrote Mondrian in 1920, you have to
accept 'whatever is capricious and twisted in
nature'. If the capricious is beautiful, it is also
tragic: 'If you follow nature you will not be able to
vanquish the tragic to any real degree in your art.
It is certainly true that naturalistic painting makes
us feel a harmony which is beyond the tragic, but
it does not express this in a clear and definite
way, since it is not confined to expressing
relations of equilibrium. Let us recognise the fact
once and for all: the natural appearance, natural
form, natural colour, natural rhythm, natural
relations most often express the tragic . . . We
must free ourselves from our attachment to the
external, for only then do we transcend the tragic,
and are enabled consciously to contemplate the
repose which is within all things.' "Mondrian
could find a repose to contemplate in natural
things so long as he could see them with their
energy held in check, as with the
chrysanthemums. The object was tolerated so long
as it seemed to contain its energy. Looking at the
trees, he recognised the forces flowing out of
them - so that the tendency towards the
centrifugal first appears among these images - felt
the need to release those force from objects and
Piet Mondrian. Horizontal Tree c1909 objectify them in another way. Attachment had to
be transferred from natural objects to things not
subject to death. To an artificial tulip, which
would be everlasting. To lines which were not
lines tracing the growth in space of a tree but
were lines not matched in nature, lines proper to
art, lines echoing the bounding lines of the canvas
itself."
- From David Sylvester, "About Modern Art:
Critical Essays, 1948-1997"
www.artchive.com
"With the 1911 'Gray Tree', the artist-tree

reappeared to draw the 1912 'Apple Blossom', this
time beholding the sky with it's eye-shaped
leaves, such as the thousand eyes of knowledge
on the wings of a seraphim. And the primordial
essence of a tree was reached with the 1912 'Tree
Piet Mondrian. Flowering Apple Tree II', a web of lines and flat color abstracted into the
binary language of lines in which color became
captive. The many faces of his trees were

lesson_supreme
representative not only of all the different artistic

currents he observed and experimented with, but
corresponded also to his own interior
metamorphosis as a man, artist and philosopher. If
the trees in the 'Forest' bear the hallmark of the
Symbolists, the 'Blue Tree' has a hint of the
Pointillists, the 'Apple Blossom' is post-Cezanne
early figurative Cubist, and his 'Tree II' shows
that he was set to go even further than the
Cubists, just to be in harmony with himself and in
phase with his own philosophy that was so
influenced by his Theosophical beliefs: to achieve
knowledge, inspiration must be helped by
experimentation. He believed that the secret of
creation is revealed permanently and human
intelligence has a role in this revelation. Similar
to a tree, the artist is in fact a born 'Theosophist'
sitting at the edge of the universe in between the
‘rational’ of earthly philosophy and the
‘irrational’ of celestial theology. If a tree was
essentially line or the essential element of a visual
language and the primary artist of a landscape,
water and transparency were the receptacle, the
canvas, the finished work in which the colors
reflected and repeated in rhythmic echoes and,
above all, the element that offered the stabilizing
factor of equilibrium. For a Theosophist, even the
irrational is part of the cosmic order and
equilibrium where all elements fight for the final
harmony. Since the 1892 'Singel' of Amsterdam's
serpentine water, through the mirror-like water in
'Summer night' of 1906, the reflection in 'Gein:
Trees on the riverbank' of 1907, the melancholy
of dawn is transformed into the transparent
vertical and horizontal lines of an 'Oval
composition' of 1914, where capturing repetition
and reflection is essential, not the representation
of a natural phenomenon such as water."

Form: Oil on canvas.abstract geometrical
forms, dark lines with muddy and bright
colors are paired
Iconography: She notes in these paintings

by Mondrian, whose work has become
synonymous with the grid, two signal
opposing generative tendencies.
Composition No. 1, in which the lines
intersect just beyond the picture plane
(suggesting that the work is taken from a
larger whole), exemplifies a centrifugal

lesson_supreme
disposition of the grid; Tableau 2, whose

lines stop short of the picture’s edges
(implying that it is a self-contained unit),
evinces a centripetal tendency. Krauss
argues that these dual and conflicting
readings of the grid embody the central
conflict of Mondrian’s—and indeed of
Modernism’s—ambition: to represent
properties of materials or perception while
also responding to a higher, spiritual call.
“The grid’s mythic power,” Krauss asserts,
“is that it makes us able to think we are
dealing with materialism (or sometimes
science, or logic) while at the same time it
provides us with a release into belief (or
illusion, or fiction).”
(www.guggenheimcollection.org)

Context: We have now moved completely

away from his earliest works and nto the
Piet Mondrian. Composition 1916 realm of pure abstraction. "In 1918
Mondrian created his first “losangique”
paintings, such as the later Composition
No. 1, by tilting a square canvas 45
degrees. Most of these diamond-shaped
works were created in 1925 and 1926
following his break with the De Stijl group
over Theo van Doesburg’s introduction of
the diagonal. Mondrian felt that in so doing
van Doesburg had betrayed the
movement’s fundamental principles, thus
forfeiting the static immutability achieved
through stable verticals and horizontals.
Mondrian asserted,
however, that his own rotated canvases
maintained the desired equilibrium of the
grid, while the 45-degree turn allowed for
longer lines. Art historian Rosalind Krauss
Piet Mondrian. Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1, 1918 identifies the grid as “a structure that has
Oil on canvas 49 x 60.5 cm (19 1/4 x 23 7/8 in) Private collection remained emblematic of modernist
ambition.”
These begin the series of paintigs for
which Mondrian is best known. He has
created numerous works based on the
theme of 'Composition', always with grids
and various colors, though his earliest were
black and white. The importance of these
works cannot be denied, for though we see
that he was an extremely talented artist,
these are the only works with which his
name is now mst readily known. It begs us
to ask the question, does society have an
ever-inceasing penchant for simplistic art,

lesson_supreme
or is it just too jaded to be bothered with

the works of the Old Masters?


Ashcan

Title: The epic of the city.
Subject(s): ASHCAN school of art; METROPOLITAN Lives (Exhibition)
Source: Time, 2/19/96, Vol. 147 Issue 8, p62, 2p, 2c
Author(s): Hughes, Robert
Abstract: Profiles the Ashcan School of American painting. The exhibition `Metropolitan Lives: The
Ashcan Artists and Their New York,' at the National Museum of American Art in
Washington, D.C.; Background of the movement; Members including Robert Henri, John
Sloan, George Luks and Everett Shinn; The Ashcan School as the first art of urban America.
AN: 9602137653
ISSN: 0040-781X
Full Text Word Count: 1308
Database: Academic Search Elite
Notes: Check Periodical list for Ohlone Library holdings.
***
Section: THE ARTS/ART
THE EPIC OF THE CITY
AS THE CENTURY TURNED, THE ASHCAN PAINTERS

CHRONICLED A NEW FRONTIER: THE URBAN SCENE
UNTIL ABOUT 1880, THE ACCEPTed epic subject of American painting was
the Western frontier. By 1900 this had slid into nostalgia; it was no longer in
synch with social reality. Most Americans lived in cities, and the myth of the
West was just that: a myth, however durable. The real frontier was urban--a
place of hitherto unimagined overcrowding, of cultural collision enforced by
huge-scale immigration, of rapid change, where class ground against class like
the imperfect rollers of a giant machine. Its epitome was New York City--
Bagdad-on-the-Subway, as the writer O. Henry called it--a city in convulsive
and continuous transition, bursting at the seams with high spirits, misery and
spectacle.
The painters who reported on it were nicknamed the Ashcan School by a critic
in the 1930s, and the label has stuck. They were Robert Henri, John Sloan,
George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens and George Bellows, and
among them they created the first art of urban America. The current show at the
National Museum of American Art in Washington, "Metropolitan Lives: The
Ashcan Artists and Their New York," is a fine introduction to their work.
The group had formed around Henri in Philadelphia. Henri's original family
name was Cozad--he was a very distant relation of Mary Cassatt--but his father,
a riverboat gambler and property shark, had shot a man in Nebraska and had
moved East and changed his name to escape the judge and jury. Young Henri
(pronounced Hen-rye) became an artist through study at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which in the 1880s was still what its
chief teacher, the great realist Thomas Eakins, had made it: the best place in
America to learn direct, factual realist painting, based on incessant drawing of
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/19th_century/ashcan_school.html[1/21/2014 4:01:07 PM]

Ashcan
the naked body.
Henri made a pilgrimage to Paris in 1888 and absorbed a fairly academic style
of Impressionism during three years of study there. But it was his second trip to
Paris in the mid-1890s that confirmed his direction as an artist. Dissatisfied with
Impressionism as an art of insubstantial surfaces, he immersed himself in dark
tonal painting, based on Manet and Frans Hals. He wanted the image to be not a
shimmer of light but a lump in the mind, given urgency by slashing
brushstrokes and depth by strong contrast. He liked Hals' vulgarity and reflected
it in his portraits, one of the most spectacular of which is in this show--Salome,
1909, a portrait of a dancer known as Mademoiselle Voclezca. Her long leg,
thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and glinting through the overbrushed
black veil, had more oomph than a thousand of the virginal Muses and
personifications of Columbia painted by academics like Kenyon Cox.
In Philadelphia, Henri's worldly, rebellious, effusive nature made him a magnet

to younger artists, most of whom worked as illustrators for the Philadelphia
press--Sloan, Glackens, Shinn and Luks. They drank together, had long poker
sessions, bellowed poetry at one another and argued late into the night. Sloan
recalled 50 years later that Henri was "a catalyst, an enthusiast ... with the
pioneer's contempt for cant and aestheticism." Moreover, he was genuinely
interested in the young, and was to inspire several generations of students--not
only his younger contemporaries like Sloan and Bellows, but Edward Hopper
and Stuart Davis, the Dadaist Man Ray and, strange to say, Leon Trotsky, who
briefly studied art at the Ferrer School in New York when Henri was teaching
there.
By 1904, Henri and the rest had moved to New York, where an unparalleled
field of subjects for painter-journalists awaited them. The artist, they all
believed, must connect to the harsh facts of his society, especially in the city;
then his art would draw life and staying power from its common subject matter.
"His vest is slightly spotted; he is real," said Sloan approvingly of a visiting
Irish painter, J.B. Yeats, father of the poet. Luks boasted that he could paint
with a shoestring dipped in lard and tar. The artist, smearing oily gunk on a
cloth with bristles, is immersed in mess--a manual worker of images. This
makes him one with the city and its people. For poetic spirit, he should emulate
Walt Whitman, learning to embrace the body of the city and contain multitudes,
dirt and all. The masculine realism of Winslow Homer inspired all the Ashcan
artists--they, especially Henri and Bellows, wanted to be Homers of the city.
The most talented painters among them were Henri, Bellows and Sloan.
Glackens turned into a late-blooming Impressionist, and Shinn was essentially
an illustrator, while Luks' coarse, rhetorical talent produced a lot of
formulaically macho painting leavened only by a few significant works, such as
The Wrestlers, 1905.
Bellows died in 1925, at only 43, and all his best paintings were finished by
1913, the year of the Armory Show. They were the works of a fast-eyed,
brilliantly responsive artist whose style looked modern, and in some respects
was modern, without offending American conservatives. Bellows' reputation as
a radical had more to do with his lowlife subjects and journalistic speed than
with any avant-gardeness in the work. His political ideas, like those of Sloan
and Henri, were in some general way socialist-anarchist without being
particularly militant. He leaned toward a pastoral, unthreatening vision of the

Ashcan
disorganized poor, spiced with humor, as in his portraits of tough Irish street
urchins or the famous Forty-Two Kids, 1909--not, alas, in this show--depicting
a swarm of knobby pale boys horsing around and diving into the Hudson from a
broken-down pier.
He had a terrific nose for a story. One of the biggest in New York circa 1909
was illicit prizefighting, and Bellows made intensely vivid and memorable
images of it. Ashcan painting, in its description of the Darwinian world of fists
evoked by American realist writers like Frank Norris and Jack London, lagged
behind literature by 10 years or more, but its attachment to images of clash and
struggle aligned it squarely with the American cultural ideology of the day--
Theodore Roosevelt's praise of the strenuous life.
The most lyrical--but also the most politically acerbic--of the Ashcan artists
was Sloan. A fervent admirer of the social vision of French lithographers,
especially Gavarni and Daumier, he kept his satire for the illustrations he did for
The Masses and other left-wing magazines. His painted world was more
amiable, with its fleshy, rosy girls in dance halls or promenading in Washington
Square Park--a Brooklyn Fragonard whispering to a Hester Street Renoir. Sloan
saw his people as part of a larger totality, the carnal and cozy body of the city
itself, where even the searchlight on top of Madison Square Garden, he wrote,
"was scratching the belly of the sky and tickling the building." He liked the
roaring dynamism of the El, and in Election Night, 1907, he combined it with a
flushed, disorderly crowd in a sort of modern kermis.
Sloan was, as Willem de Kooning would say of himself many years later, a
slipping glimpser, with a strong sense of the fleeting moment in which people
are caught unawares--arguments on the fire escape, a woman pegging out the
wash, lovers furtively embracing on the tenement roof. And though his vision
was less flamboyant than Henri's or Bellows', he clearly had a deep effect on
younger painters like Reginald Marsh and Hopper. His moments of voyeuristic
detachment were amplified in Hopper's glimpses of disconnected urban souls
seen through windows. One wants to see more of Sloan; when will some
American museum give him the retrospective he deserves?
~~~~~~~~
By ROBERT HUGHES
Top of Page
The Ashcan School and "The Eight"

1913 ARMORY SHOW.
Everett Shin,
Robert Henri,
William Glackens,

Ashcan
John Sloan,
George Bellows,
Ernest Lawson
Maurice Prendergart.
Robert Henri 1865-1929

Snow in New York 1902
32 x 25 3/4 in
The Spielers by George Luks.

Ashcan
Bellows, George Cliff Dwellers 1913

Oil on canvas 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (102.2 x 107 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Subway Rush Hour

Langston Hughes
Mingled
breath and smell
so close
John Sloan Six O'Clock Winter 1912 mingled
black and white
so near
no room for fear
1951

Ashcan
Daumier, Honore Third Class Carriage

Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada

John Sloan Hairdresser’s Window 1907

Ashcan
CAILLEBOTTE,Gustave 1848-94
Paris, A Rainy Day,1876-77 o/c Chicago,A.I

Sloan, John McSorley's Bar 1912

Oil on canvas 26 x 32 in. (66 x 81.3 cm)
Detroit Institute of Arts
Edouard Manet. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

1882. Oil on canvas. 37"x51"
Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, UK.

Ashcan

William Glackens
Hammersteins Roof Garden 1901
Cassatt, Mary. At the Opera.

1880. Oil on canvas. 32 x 26 in.
Boston: Museum of Fine Arts.


Ashcan

Excerpted from:
PAINTINGS of George Bellows, The (Exhibition)
Source: Time, 8/3/92, Vol. 140 Issue 5, p68, 2p, 1c

ENERGETIC, FULL OF JUICE, BRILliant m flashes but

in the long haul a most uneven talent, George Bellows
died of appendicitis in 1925 at the age of 42 with a
reputation among-Americans that was not going to
survive.
He appealed to "sound" taste in his day--and then got

flattened from behind by the avant-garde as it developed
Bellows, George after the 1913 Armory Show, which he had helped
Stag at Sharkey's organize: road kill, as it were, on art history's Route 66. He
1909 didn't quite have the empirical genius of the older Winslow
Oil on canvas Homer, to whom his early work strongly relates; nor did
36 1/4 x 48 1/4 in. (92.1 x 122.6 cm) he quite possess the visionary force of Marsden Hartley,
The Cleveland Museum of Art with whom he shared a love of romantic, elemental
images--sea, rock, the buffeting air of Maine.
What he did have (but began to lose in his early 30s) was
an abundant response to the physical world, a libidinous
sense of fat-nuanced paint, sure tonal structure and a
narrative passion for the density of life in New York City.
If these attributes couldn't turn him into a major modernist,

they certainly make him an artist worth revisiting. Hence
the retrospective of paintings jointly organized by the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and the Amon Carter
Museum in Fort Worth, which runs at the Whitney
Museum in New York City until the end of August.
Bellows studied at the New York School of Art under

Robert Henri, the American realist disciple of Frans Hals
and Edward Manet. "My life begins at this point," he said
of his apprenticeship to Henri. He soon developed a tough,
pragmatic repertoire based on realist drawing and tonal
composition. He was by far the most gifted younger
member of the Ashcan School, a loose group that included
John Sloan, George Luks and William Glackens. Not one
of them ever painted an ash can, but they did believe, in a
general way, that the artist should work from life as it was
lived in the big dirty city and stay away from highfalutin
Thomas Eakins Between Rounds 1899 symbolism.
Oil on canvas 50.125 x 38.25
in Philadelphia Museum of Art Their gods were Manet, Daumier, Goya and Hals; among
Americans, Homer and Eakins. None were more direct
than Bellows, who in the peak years of his youth became
the entranced recorder of New York, the "real" city of
tough mud larking kids, of crowded tenements and
teeming icy streets, of big bridges and sudden breaks in

Ashcan
the wall of buildings that revealed tugboats and a dragging

tide.
Bellows' most powerful image of the city as compressor of

violence was the boxing ring. Prize fighting was made
illegal in New York State in 1900. But that did not dispose
of the semi-clandestine "club nights," with battling pugs
drawn from the hard, desperate edge of Irish, Polish,
Italian and Jewish street gangs--kids who would pound
each other to hash for a purse under the eyes of a flushed,
yelling house. The sport was barely a notch up from the
bareknuckle slugging of Georgian England.
Starting in 1907, Bellows made a small series of boxing

pictures, of which the most gripping is Stag at Sharkey's
(1909), an image of orgiastic energy, the boxers' faces
reduced to speed blurs of bloody paint, the bodies starkly
gleaming under the carbide lights, locked m a triangle, the
strain of muscles so assimilated into the physical life of
the paint strokes that the pigment runs over their contours.
Bellows' contemporaries found such images "Hogarthian,"
but the closer ancestor of Stag at Sharkey's is late Goya. In
particular the frieze of spectators' heads, yelling, gaping,
sly, stupefied, brings to mind the faces in Goya's Witches'
Sabbath or his Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of
San Isidro.
PAINTINGS of George Bellows, The (Exhibition)

Dada
Dada, Duchamp Style!


The ARMORY SHOW, formally International Exhibition Of

Modern Art, an exhibition of painting and sculpture held from
Feb. 17 to March 15, 1913, at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory
in New York City. The show, a decisive event in the
development of American art, was originally conceived by its
organizers, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors,
as a selection of representational works exclusively by
American artists, members both of the National Academy of
Design and of the more progressive Ashcan School and The
Eight. The election of Arthur B. Davies as president of the
association changed this conception. A member of The Eight,
Davies produced pleasant, Romantic paintings that enjoyed the
respect of almost all of the American art establishment. He was
also a man with a broad, highly developed taste, capable of
appreciating trends in art far more radical than his own style,
and he was aware of developments in Europe. Davies, with the
help of Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, spent a year, much of it in
Europe, assembling a collection that was later called a
"harbinger of universal anarchy." The exhibition traveled to
New York City, Chicago, and Boston and was seen by
approximately 300,000 Americans. Of the 1,600 works
included in the show, about one-third were European, and
attention became focused on them. The selection was almost a
history of European Modernism. Beginning with J.-A.-D.
Ingres and Eugène Delacroix, the exhibition displayed works by
Impressionists, Symbolists, Postimpressionists, Fauves, and
Cubists. Although the sculpture section was weak and the
Expressionists were poorly represented, the show exposed the
American public for the first time to advanced European art.
American art suffered by contrast.
Reactions to the show were varied. Marcel Duchamp's Cubist

painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" was popularly
described as "an explosion in a shingle factory"; and Henri
Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, and Walter Pach were hanged in
effigy by Chicago art students. Yet this show became the basis
of many important private American collections.
For American art, the show had results more difficult to gauge.
Stuart Davis exemplified one artist's reaction: "The Armory
Show was the greatest shock to me--the greatest single
influence I have experienced in my work." Similarly, the artists
Joseph Stella, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Arthur Dove
were encouraged by the Armory Show to continue their avant-
garde direction. American painting in general, however,
continued to be dominated by the realists--the Ashcan School
and its successors, American Scene painting and Social
Realism--until some 30 years later.
"Armory Show." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-

ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc.
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Dada
November 24, 2002.

Form: This oil painting is done in a cubist style but also borrows somewhat
what from the moving fluid cubsim that one sees in the works of Italian
Futurists such as Giaccomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. The painting itself
is kind of ugly and portrays the movement of a man descending some steps.
The image is somewhat based on the time lapse photos taken by Eakins and
Muybridge that record the same things.
The use of ugly browns and the poorly copied style in which he borrows
from Picasso and Braquetend to prove out what one of my professors once
said, "Duchamp was a mediocre painter and because of this he became more
of a conceptual artist."
Marcel Duchamp.
Nude Descending Staircase #2. 1912 Iconography: The iconography of this image also borrows heavily from
Muybridge, the cubists, and the futurists, but at the time, the time lapse
image of human movement, recorded in a cubist vocabulary was seen as
groundbreaking and avante garde. Perhaps, if one wanted to read heavily
inot this image, it's possible to conclude that Duchamp's meaning is similar
to the futurists and that the image is meant to portray not just a man but
rather mankind's movement or humanity as it changes and flows.
Context: When people first saw Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase #2.
at the New York Armory Show they were provoked, offended, and
somewhat amused. The newspapers even ran a cartoon ridiculing the
painting. (See left)

Marcel Duchamp
b. July 28, 1887, Blainville, Fr.
d. Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly
French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of
art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by "Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (1912), he painted few other
pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led

Dada
him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic

revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the
1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a
U.S. citizen in 1955.
Early years
Although Duchamp's father was a notary the family had an artistic tradition stemming from his grandfather, a
shipping agent who practiced engraving seriously. Four of the six Duchamp children became artists. Gaston,
born in 1875, was later known as Jacques Villon, and Raymond, born in 1876, called himself Duchamp-Villon.
Marcel, the youngest of the boys, and his sister Suzanne, born in 1889, both kept the name Duchamp as artists.
When Marcel arrived in Paris in October 1904, his two elder brothers were already in a position to help him.
He had done some painting at home, and his "Portrait of Marcel Lefrançois" shows him already in possession
of a style and of a technique. During the next few years, while drawing cartoons for comic magazines,
Duchamp passed rapidly through the main contemporary trends in painting--Postimpressionism, the influence
of Paul Cézanne, Fauvism, and finally Cubism. He was merely experimenting, seeing no virtue in making a
habit of any one style. He was outside artistic tradition not only in shunning repetition but also in not
attempting a prolific output or frequent exhibition of his work. In the Fauvist style Marcel painted some of his
best early work three or four years after the Fauvist movement itself had died away. The "Portrait of the Artist's
Father" is a notable example. Only in 1911 did he begin to paint in a manner that showed a trace of Cubism.
He had then become a friend of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a strong supporter of Cubism and of
everything avant-garde in the arts. Another of his close friends was Francis Picabia, himself a painter in the
most orthodox style of Impressionism until 1909, when he felt the need of complete change. Duchamp shared
with him the feeling that Cubism was too systematic, too static and "boring." They both passed directly from
"semirealism" to a "nonobjective" expression of movement. There they met "Futurism" and "Abstractionism,"
which they had known before only by name.
The "Nude." To an exhibition in 1911 Duchamp sent a "Portrait" that was composed of a series of five almost
monochromatic, superimposed silhouettes. In this juxtaposition of successive phases of the movement of a
single body appears the idea for the "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2." The main difference between the
two works is that in the earlier one the kangaroo-like silhouettes can be distinguished. In the "Nude," on the
other hand, there is no nude at all but only a descending machine, a nonobjective and virtually cinematic effect
that was entirely new in painting.
When the "Nude" was brought to the 28th Salon des Indépendants in February 1912, the committee, composed
of friends of the Duchamp family, refused to hang the painting. These men were not reactionaries and were
well accustomed to Cubism, yet they were unable to accept the novel vision. A year later at the Armory Show
in New York City, the painting again was singled out from among hundreds that were equally shocking to the
public. Whatever it was that made the work so scandalous in Paris, and in New York so tremendous a success,
prompted Duchamp to stop painting at the age of 25. A widely held belief is that Duchamp introduced in his
work a dimension of irony, almost a mockery of painting itself, that was more than anyone could bear and that
undermined his own belief in painting. The title alone was a joke that was resented. Even the Cubists did their
best to flatter the eye, but Duchamp's only motive seemed to be provocation.
Years later, Duchamp is viewed as a sort of beacon or icon of the artistic avante garde. "Time Magazine" art critic wrote
the following article about Duchamp that seems to indicate that Duchamp is a kind of hero of modern art.

Excerpts from,
Days of antic weirdness. by Robert Hughes. Time, 01/27/97, Vol. 149 Issue
4, p70, 2p, 4c HTML Full Text

Dadaism--its name made of baby-talk syllables, its intent to

disorient bourgeois expectations of culture by any means

Dada
possible--was a short-lived but fecund movement born and

raised in Europe in the century's teens. It was more like a tiny
religion than an art event, with a proselytizing spirit, a code of
behavior, a core of the faithful, and a hope of transforming
existence. It relied on irrationality, negation, sarcastic humor.
Its most durable legacy lay in French Surrealism (the Surrealist
fascination with the unconscious was largely inherited from
Dada, and several artists, most notably Max Ernst, began as
Dadas and drafted themselves into the Surrealist movement).
Dada left its traces in America, but never struck deep roots
there. It never acquired the criticality, the indignation or the
longing for social subversion that marked it in Europe. It
devolved into amusing in-jokes and tended to preciosity and
quirkiness. This grew out of the tiny clique of self-professed
illuminati that sustained it. Its sense of humor never grew as
robust as the work of the professional funny guys who helped
inspire it, like Rube Goldberg or the Marx Brothers. In
America the Dadas were plagued by the thought that American
popular culture was more Dada than Dada could be. And in
fact they were right.
The movement, such as it was, had only one (relatively)

heavyweight American in its membership, the painter,
photographer and objectmaker Man Ray. Its spirit was best
exemplified by two foreign artists who enriched the New York
scene by visiting it--the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp and the
French-Cuban Francis Picabia. Their impact goes back to the
far-famed Armory Show of modern art, held in 1913, which
first gave a mass American audience a chance to see
modernism.
In the fire storm of ridicule and puzzlement set off by the

Armory Show, which 300,000 people saw during the course of
its run, Duchamp in particular benefited, on the basis of a
single picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. It
became the star freak of the show--its bearded lady, its dog-
faced boy. People compared it to a Navajo rug, a cyclone in a
shingle factory, an earthquake in the subway. A dull brown
Marcel Duchamp. painting in a Cubist idiom, its overlapping planes were partly
Nude Descending Staircase #2. 1912 derived from the motion-analysis photos of Etienne-Jules
Marey. Its very title was ironic, almost insupportable. Nudes, in
art, were not supposed to move, let alone walk downstairs.
They were meant to stand or lie as still as statues. Movement
suggested indecency, even though this nude had no detectable
sexual traits.
As a picture, the Nude is neither poor nor great, but its fame
today is the fossil of the huge notoriety it acquired as a puzzle-
picture in 1913. It is lodged in history because it embodied the
belief that the new, revolutionary work of art has to be scorned
and stoned like a prophet by the uncomprehending crowd. In
the cult of the problematic, as distinct from the enjoyable,
Duchamp rapidly became a saint, and the Nude is one of his
Thomas Eakins 1884
prime relics. So are his "readymades"--a snow shovel or a
ceramic urinal designated as works of art, sardonic jokes that

Dada
have been done seven-eighths to death by decades of critical

interpretation, but that nonetheless are the ancestors of every
piece of "appropriation" art done by Americans from early
Jasper Johns down to the present day.
Reactions to the show were varied. Marcel Duchamp's Cubist

painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" was popularly
described as "an explosion in a shingle factory"; and Henri
Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, and Walter Pach were hanged in
effigy by Chicago art students. Yet this show became the basis
of many important private American collections.
"Armory Show." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-

ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc.
November 24, 2002.
In 1913 Duchamp began to produce "ready-mades", mundane objects taken out of context by the artist, made unusable for
their original purpose and presented as works of art. Talking about "ready-mades" Duchamp said,

"In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn . . . In New York in
1915 I bought a hardware store shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that
time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation. A point which I want very
much to establish is that the choice of these 'readymades' was never dictated by esthetic delectation. This
choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad
taste. I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit
the production of 'readymades' to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, for the spectator even more
than for the artist, art is a habit-forming drug and I wanted to protect my 'readymades' against such
contamination."
http://www.walkerart.org/resources/res_pc_duchamp.html
Robert A. Baron writes,
The most well known act of degrading a famous work of art is probably Marcel
Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., a cheap postcard-sized reproduction of the Mona Lisa
upon which in 1919 the artist drew a mustache and a thin goatee beard. On one
hand L.H.O.O.Q. must be understood as one of Duchamp's "readymade" works of
art—works that he didn't make, but which . . . [force] the observer to see
ordinary objects from new perspectives. In this way their innate aesthetic contents
would make themselves manifest-as happens in one of his more infamous works:
the urinal turned on its side and rebaptized "Fountain." However, to most
observers, instead of elevating the ordinary, Marcel's Mona Lisa works in the
opposite direction; it defaces (literally) that which has been cherished, and brings
a famous work down to the level of vulgar vandalism and cheap reproduction.
The title makes the point, too, but obscurely, since when pronounced in French
Marcel Duchamp. "L.H.O.O.Q." reports as a pun on the phrase "Elle a chaud au cul," which
L.H.O.O.Q. 1919. translates colloquially as "She is hot in the ass."
Drawing on photographic
reproduction.
7.75 x 4.125" (19.7 x 10.5
cm).

Dada
Please go to this link to learn more about Duchamp's "Fountain."

Marcel Duchamp. The Fountain. 1917 http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artworks/1466.html
Form:
Iconography:
Context:

Although Duchamp carefully avoided art circles, he

remained in contact with the Surrealist group in
Paris, composed of many of his former Dadaist
friends. When in 1934 he published the Green Box,
containing a series of documents related to "The

Dada
Large Glass," the Surrealist poet André Breton

perceived the importance of the painting and wrote
the first comprehensive study of Duchamp, which
appeared in the Paris magazine Minotaure in 1935.
From that time on there was a closer association
between the Surrealists and Duchamp, who helped
Breton to organize all the Surrealist exhibitions
from 1938 to 1959. Just before World War II he
assembled his Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase containing
68 small-scale reproductions of his works. When
the Nazis occupied France, he smuggled his
material across the border in the course of several
trips. Eventually he carried it to New York City,
where he joined a number of the Surrealists in
exile, including Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves
Tanguy. He was instrumental in organizing the
Surrealist exhibition in New York City in October
and November of 1942.
Marcel Duchamp.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. 1915- Unlike his co-exiles, he felt at home in America,
23 where he had many friends. During the war, the
oil and lead wire on glass. 9'x5' exhibition of "The Large Glass" at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York City, helped to revive his
reputation, and a special issue of the art magazine
View was devoted to him in 1945. Two years later
he was back in Paris assisting Breton with a
Surrealist exhibition, but he returned to New York
City promptly and spent most of the remainder of
his life there. After his marriage to Teeny Sattler in
1954, he lived more than ever in semiretirement,
content with chess and with producing, as the spirit
moved him, some strange and unexpected object.
Form: This is a photo taken by the famous photographer Man Ray of Marcel
Duchamp dressed as female who he called Rrose Selavy, which is basically a pun. Of
slight interest is the textile design which is an art deco design that also calls to mind
the designs placed in Gustav Klimt's paintings. The form of this image is less
importnat than its context and iconography which are linked together.
Iconography and Context: Duchamp loved the idea of double meanings. In 1920
Duchamp had already created some of his so called "ready mades" which take
everyday objects and transform them into something else. Here, Duchamp took
himself as a sort of "ready made" and had a bit of fun with identity, gender, and puns
when he created this alter ego in 1920.
In essence, he is playing with the French phrase "selavy" which means "leave it be" or
"what will be, will be" and coupling it with the name Rose, that he intentionally
misspells to mke the "r" sound a bit like a growl. He is basically being like a drag
queen who is not necessarily "gay." Sort of like the skits that Milton Berl did in the
Rrose Selavy photo by Man Ray 1950's.

Dada
Marcel Duchamp
¹avant-garde n [F, vanguard] (1910): an intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts esp. in the arts -- avant-
gard.ism n -- avant-gard.ist n ²avant-garde adj (1925): of or relating to an avant-garde <~ writers>

Hoch and Dada

Hannah Hoch...Dada

Form:
Iconography:
Context:
Hannah Hoch,
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar-Beer
Belly of the Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
Hannah Hoch, The Beautiful Woman. 1919
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Hoch and Dada
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
Hannah Hoch. Scenes from the Ethnographic Museum. 1930's

Hoch and Dada
Form:
Iconography:
Context:

Theatre of the Absurd
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
Scene from "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett.

Directed by Roger Blin. Theatre de Babylone, Paris, 1952.

Theatre of the Absurd

Hoch and Dada
Scene from "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett.

Directed by Roger Blin. Theatre de Babylone, Paris, 1952.

Surrealism

Form:
Iconography:
Context:
René Magritte, The Treason of Images 1928-1929 oil/canvas 21"x28"
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
André Breton, Object Poem, 1941

Excerpted from,
The rebel dreams of Oedipus Max. by Robert Hughes. Time, 4/22/91,
Vol. 137 Issue 16, p87, 2p, 2c, 1bw
Like a conspiratorial uncle, the Surrealist speaks anew to the

subversiveness of youth
Every artist needs some source of inspiration. Max Ernst, the lyric
German subversive who was born 100 years ago, had one that carried
him through most of his life. He hated his father, a pious Catholic art
teacher who worked in a school for deaf and mute children in a small
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Surrealism
forest town south of Cologne. Indeed, Ernst wanted to kill Papa and
what he thought he represented: the authority of age, religion, the state
and the image.
At six, little Oedipus Max, the future Dadaist, had a dream, an

obsessive vision: "I see in front of me a panel crudely painted with
large black strokes on a red ground, imitating the grain of mahogany . .
. In front of this panel a black and shiny man is making slow, comic
and joyously obscene gestures. This strange fellow has the mustache of
my father ... He smiles and takes out of the pocket of his trousers a
large pencil made of some soft material . . . breathing loudly, he hastily
traces some black lines on the panel of false mahogany. He quickly
gives it new, surprising and despicable forms."
New, surprising, despicable--not a bad thumbnail note for Ernst's own

art, especially as seen by others. We have reason to thank the large soft
pencil of the man with the mustache. Ernst was not a great formal
artist, not by a very long chalk But in the 1920s and '30s especially, he
was a brilliant maker of images. Their strength and edginess radiate
like new in the centenary Ernst exhibit, organized by art historian
Werner Spies, which is at London's Tate Gallery this month and moves
in mid-May to Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie. Long after the art movements
to which Ernst contributed have passed into history, his images
continue to detonate in the mind like unexploded land mines left on the
old battlefield of modernism. If the young love Dada and Surrealism,
Max Ernst, Two Children are and early Ernst in particular, it is because of his healthy desire to
Threatened by a Nightingale 1924 murder Papa's culture.
Oil on wood with wooden elements
69.8 x 57 x 11.4 cm His means for doing so was collage, which means simply "gluing."
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Ernst cut photos and engravings from magazines, catalogs, albums,
marrying things that didn't belong together. Collage was a static
relative of film cutting, then in its infancy. Seventy years later,
America sees in collage because it grew up spinning the TV dial. No
such fragmentation of images was built into the culture of France or
Germany in the 1920s. The relations between image and thing seemed
solid. Here was something to overturn, and collage was the lever. Ernst
fell on the common vein of reproductory images like a miner
discovering a virgin reef.
Essentially untrained as a painter, he fell in with the German

Expressionists in 1910-12 by sheer brightness of character. He knew
August Macke, whose ideas about pantheistic nature were to
reverberate in Ernst's work right up to its end. Macke was killed in the
trenches. Ernst survived the war and emerged from its troglodytic
lunacy with a deep hatred of Kaiser and country.
His first collage painting, Celebes, 1921, is one of his funniest. It

started life as an anthropological photo of an African corn bin. This
reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he saw a swollen human figure in
it--a failed behemoth, which he associated with the absurd and nasty
Ernst "Frottage" image c1925 king of Alfred Jarry's proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roil Add to that a
dirty children's rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in
English would have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in
Sumatra that tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked

Surrealism
woman in the foreground foreshadows the title of Ernst's great collage-

narrative of 1929, La Femme 100 Tetes, or The Hundred-Headless
Woman. She languidly beckons the dumb pachyderm to further erotic
fiascoes.
The technical question of who "invented" collage fades to

unimportance when you look at what Ernst did with it. Some Surrealist
collages look as dated as Victorian screens, but his tiny, rigorous
visions never do. By making realities collide, he slips you into a
parallel world whose features are both precise and ineffably odd, where
things are not what they seem. Ernst loved images that enumerated
things: mechanical and scientific drawing, illustrations from 1900
boulevardier magazines, old catalogs. Their factual neutrality made
their paradoxes weirder. Sometimes this serves mainly Lyrical ends as
in the Klee-like plant-personages that rear up on the tiny horizon of
Always the Best Man Wins, 1920. And sometimes it discloses an erotic
fury, a Dionysiac madness bursting the collar studs and corsets of life,
as in the collage-narrative The Dream of a Little Girl Who Wanted to
Become a Nun, 1929-30. In a secular age with its "therapeutic"
religions, we find it hard to imagine the power of blasphemy to the
Surrealists. All the same, Ernst came up with the funniest antireligious
joke in modern art--the famous (and, alas, rarely seen) parody of a
Renaissance Madonna, in which Mary is whaling Jesus on his bare
bottom before a trio of witnesses, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Ernst
himself.
Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ
Child Before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Ernst's work was continuously open to chance. The arresting drawings
of his 1925 Natural History were made by laying sheets of paper on the
wooden floor of his hotel room in a French seaside town and going
Paul Eluard, and the painter 1926
over them with the (paternal?) soft pencil; the resulting images, altered
Oil on canvas 196 x 130 cm
and edited, received the name frottages, or rubbings. The name of the
Museum Lodging, Cologne
town, by an exquisite coincidence, was Pornic.
His desire to freeze accident remained with Ernst until the end of his
life. After he escaped from Europe to America in 1941--his ticket was
paid by Peggy Guggenheim, who was sexually obsessed by Ernst--he
lived for some years in Arizona, whose vast skies and mesas repeated
the visions inscribed in certain Ernsts of the '30s like The Petrified
City. There he made paintings by swinging a can with a hole in it over
a canvas; these rhythmical dribbles were seen by Jackson Pollock. . .
~~~~~~~~
By ROBERT HUGHES


Surrealism
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
René Magritte, The Rape 1934
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
Man Ray,
Ingres' Violin
(Le Violin d'Ingres), 1924

Surrealism
Form:
David, Madame Recamier, 1800
Iconography:
Context:
René Magritte, Madame Recamier, 1939
Form:
Iconography:
Context:

Surrealism
The Broken Column, 1944
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
Henry Ford Hospital, 1932
Form:
Iconography:
Context:

Surrealism
The Two Fridas, 1939


lesson_surrealism_bacon
Bringing home the Francis Bacon


Francis Bacon. Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1954
Iconography:
Context:
Velasquez
Form:
Iconography:
Context:
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lesson_surrealism_bacon
Francis Bacon: Pope Surrounded by Sides of Beef 1954

( Compare to Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox.)
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Dali
Dali

Excerpts from,
Baby Dali. by Robert Hughes. Time, 7/4/94, Vol. 144 Issue 1, p68, 3p, 3c, 1bw HTML
Full Text

Was any painter a worse embarrassment than Salvador Dali? Not even
Andy Warhol. Long before his physical death in 1989, old Avida Dollars --
Andre Breton's anagram of his name -- had collapsed into wretched
exhibitionism. Genius, Shocker, Lip-Topiarist: though he once turned
down an American businessman's proposal to open a string of what would
be called Dalicatessens, there was little else he refused to endorse, from
chocolates to perfumes. He was surrounded by fakes and crooks and
married to one of the greediest harpies in Europe: Gala, who made him the
indentured servant of his lost talent even as he treated her as his muse.
Nevertheless, Dali was an important artist for about 10 years, starting in the
late 1920s. Nothing can take that away from him. Other Surrealists --
especially Max Ernst and Dali's fellow Catalan Joan Miro -- were greater
magicians; but Dali's sharp, glaring, enameled visions of death, sexual
failure and deliquescence, of displaced religious mania and creepy organic
delight, left an ineradicable mark on our century when it, and he, were
young. Dali turned ``retrograde'' technique -- the kind of dazzlingly
detailed illusionism that made irreality concrete, as in The First Days of
Spring, 1929 -- toward subversive ends. His soft watches will never cease
to tick, not as long as the world has adolescent dandies and boy rebels in it.
..
Surrealism was fascinated by childhood, viewing it as the primal forest of

the imagination -- the place where all the id's most succulent and
aggressive life-forms ran rampant, before civilization paved them over.
Hence you could suppose that Dali's own childhood would be rich in
suggestion about his mature work. And so it was, in a way; but not the way
he meant it to be.
In his mythomaniac autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, he

took pains to spin out a fiction of his early originality. He wanted people to
think he'd been found like Moses in the bulrushes, a miracle child:
Salvador, Saviour. In part this did correspond to the truth. As Ian Gibson's
fascinating catalog essay on Dali's early life makes clear, little Salvador
was a horribly spoiled brat. Cosseted, deferred to, aware that a tantrum
could get him anything he wanted, he grew up with serious delusions of
creative omnipotence -- which, as time went by, coexisted with equally
serious problems of sexual impotence, caused (or so he said) by a book
with lurid illustrations of the effects of venereal disease that his father had
shown him. Dali turned out to be the exact opposite of Picasso's
phallicism. He was thrilled by softness, flaccidity. ``Nothing,'' he wrote,
``can be regarded as too slimy, gelatinous, quivering, indeterminate or
ignominious to be desired.'' . .
Hello Dali!
Dali went to art school in Madrid in the early 1920s. `Ì'll be a genius,'' he
wrote in his diary two years before that. ``Perhaps I'll be despised and
misunderstood, but I'll be a genius, a great genius.'' Cold and diligent, he

Dali
figured out all his poses and provocations in advance. Politically, too, he
wanted to be shocking; later Dali would turn into an archconservative, the
living national treasure of Franco's long regime, but in the 1920s -- the
years of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship -- he was a vehement parlor red.
He even did jail time, briefly, when he was arrested as a reprisal against
his father's left-wing political activity.
There was, however, nothing particularly revolutionary about his paintings.

Seeking a credible genius costume, he did versions of Cubism, of De
Chirico's pittura metafisica, and developed his dry, classicizing realism in
such images as Seated Girl Seen from the Back, 1925. It is an easy matter
to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow
and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep
black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for
instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark
shadows cast by figures on a flat ground-plane, the idealized desert of his
paintings. Dali's obsession with Picasso reached a height of imitative
flattery with his pastiches of the older painter's massive ``classical'' women
in white fluted dresses. Likewise, when Dali the Surrealist was pupating,
there was hardly a trope in his pictures of 1927-28 that didn't come out of
Andre Masson, Ernst, Miro or Yves Tanguy.
But his originality as an artist began with his peculiar experiences of the
natural world, such as the contorted rocks at Cape Creus, near his boyhood
home, sculpted into fantastically ambiguous shapes by tide and weather;
like faces seen in the fire, these were the foundation stones of what Dali
called his ``paranoiac-critical method'' of seeking dream images. Dali's art
may not tap far into his unconscious, but it reveals a great deal about what
he imagined his unconscious to be.
Iconography: When compared to Rene Magrittes

Time Transfixed, an important point about surrealism
is made evident. Time is an ephemeral thing that
cannot be pinned down. Time is a mechanical
invention, one which we have Descartes to thank for,
and in essence, time often does not make sense. Dali
makes this point clear with the melting watches.
Time is an internal dialogue, as people, we have all
experienced the feeling that time is going by too
quickly, and sometimes, such as when we are
studying, writing essays, or doing research for an
online textbook, time can seem to move too slowly.
Ants are also a favorite of Dalis', and are a recurring
theme in most of his paintings, as well as a film he
did with Buñuel titled, Le Chien Andalou, in which
at one point, a man observes ants as they crawl out
of him through a hole in his palm. It can be assumed
that Dali is commenting on the silliness of time,
likening it to the seemingly pointless scurrying that
we observe ants doing...written about this work on
www.artchive.com "Over the next few years Dalí
devoted himself with passionate intensity to

Dali
developing his method, which he described as

'paranoiac-critical', a 'spontaneous method of
irrational knowledge based on the critical and
systematic objectivation of delirious associations and
interpretations'. It enabled him to demonstrate his
personal obsessions and fantasies by uncovering and
meticulously fashioning hidden forms within pre-
existing ones, either randomly selected (postcards,
beach scenes, photographic enlargements) or of an
accepted artistic canon (canvases by Millet, for
Salvador Dali. The Persistance of Memory. 1931 example). It was at this period that he was producing
oil on canvas 9"x13" MOMA works like The Lugubrious Game (1929), The
Persistence of Memory (1931) and Surrealist
Objects, Gauges of Instantaneous Memory (1932).
Flaccid shapes, anamorphoses and double-sided
figures producing a trompe-l'œil effect combine in
these works to create an extraordinary universe
where the erotic and the scatological jostle with a
fascination for decay - a universe that is reflected in
his other works of this period, including his symbolic
objects and poems (La Femme visible, 1930;
L'Amour et la mémoire, 1931) as well as the
screenplay for L'Age d'Or (1930).
Context: "It soon became apparent, however, that

there was an inherent contradiction in Dalí's
approach between what he himself described as
'critical paranoia' - which lent itself to systematic
interpretation - and the element of automatism upon
which his method depended. Breton soon had
Rene Magritte. Time Transfixed. 1939. misgivings about Dalí's monsters which only lend
oil on canvas 57"38" Chicago AI themselves to a limited, univocal reading. Dalí's
extreme statements on political matters, in particular
his fascination for Hitler, struck a false note in the
context of the Surrealist ethic and his relations with
the rest of the group became increasingly strained
after 1934. The break finally came when the painter
declared his support for Franco in 1939. And yet he
could boast that he had the backing of Freud himself,
who declared in 1938 that Dalí was the only
interesting case in a movement whose aims he
confessed not to understand. Moreover, in the eyes
of the public he was, increasingly as time went by,
the Surrealist par excellence, and he did his utmost
to maintain, by way of excessive exhibitionism in
every area, this enviable reputation."

Dali
( - Text from "ART20, The Thames and Hudson

Multimedia Dictionary of Modern Art")

Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: "Meeting Gala was, for Dali, a revelation and a terror. Here was
the personification of all his fantasies, and yet his fear and loathing of erotic
acts made it impossible for him to approach her. It was Gala who put an end to
his torture by proposing a walk one day, during which Dali confessed his love.
They eloped to Barcelona in 1929. Gala was to become a major influence in the
work of Dali. She was to feature in many of his works, often surrounded by
controversy. In The Sacrament of the Last Supper, Dali gave Christ the features
of Gala, and in many pictures he portrayed her as the Madonna. On other
occasions, she influenced some of his worse pieces, encouraging him to rush
out pictures purely for financial gain. This was a contributing factor to Dali's
expulsion from the surrealist movement." (www.bbc.co.uk)
Context: "His Rift with the Surrealists

It seems strange that Dali, who for many people is synonymous with
surrealism, should have had such a turbulent relationship with the movement.
Although at first he was welcomed into the movement, the surrealists objected
to some of Dali's work. They were scandalised when Dali painted The
Lugubrious Game, which included a man whose underpants were soiled, and
they were angry when he painted portraits for money instead of pursuing the
artistic dream. The final straw was Dali's consent to design advertisements for a
company making tights, and by the 1940s his links with the surrealists were
severed. Nevertheless, Dali considered himself to be a true surrealist. He once
said: The only difference between the surrealists and me is that I am a
surrealist. He considered his work to be true surrealism, and that the surrealist
group, by adopting a certain style and set of rules had disqualified its own
Salvador Dali. Gala Angelus. 1935
existence. The surrealist group, in turn, felt that his works had become no more
NYMOMA
than puzzles where the viewer searched for the double images rather than
looked at the paintings. It was Breton, the leader of the surrealists, who gave
Dali the nickname 'Avida Dollars', an anagram of Salvador Dali, and an
indication of the light they saw Dali in. Designing adverts and fashionable
clothes (for Dali saw a link between art and fashion) were not suitable
occupations for a surrealist; he was giving them a bad name, and the bad name
they gave back to him indicated their displeasure." full text at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A585344


Benton and Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Form: This early work of Pollocks is often compared to the wok of
Thomas Hart Benton, titled Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green
Valley. Though the palette is somewhat monochromatic, the scene is
traditional.

Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming on 28

January 1912. He was the fifth and youngest son of LeRoy
McCoy Pollock and Stella McClure Pollock. The family
left Cody when Pollock was less than a year old, and he
was raised in Arizona and California. After a series of
unsuccessful farming ventures, his father became a
surveyor and worked on road crews at the Grand Canyon
and elsewhere in the Southwest. Pollock, who sometimes
joined his father on these jobs, later remarked that
memories of the panoramic landscape influenced his
artistic vision.
While attending Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles,

Pollock was encouraged to pursue his early interest in art.
Two of his brothers, Charles and Sanford (known as
Thomas Hart Benton. Sande), were also developing as artists. Charles, the eldest,
Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. 1934 went to New York to study with the Regionalist painter
oil and tempera on canvas Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League, and he
American Regionalism suggested that Jackson should join him. In 1930 Pollock
went east and enrolled in Benton's class at the League. It
was at about this time that he dropped his first name, Paul,
and began using his middle name.
Under Benton's guidance, Pollock analyzed Old Master

paintings and learned the rudiments of drawing and
composition. He also studied mural painting with Benton
and posed for his teacher's 1930-31 murals at the New
School for Social Research, where the Mexican muralist
José Clemente Orozco was at work on frescoes. Pollock's
first-hand experience of contemporary mural painting is
thought to have sparked his ambition to paint large scale
works of his own, although he would not realize that aim
until 12 years later.
During the 1930s, Pollock's work reflected Benton's

"American Scene" aesthetic, although enriched by a
brooding, almost mystical quality reminiscent of the work
of the visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, whom
Jackson Pollock. Going West. 1934 Pollock admired. Orozco's influence also made itself felt,
especially after Pollock saw him at work on his dynamic
frescoes for Dartmouth College (1932-34).

Form: Jackson Pollock started to veer away from his more traditional style of painting at this point.
Iconography: Pollock was an extremely agitated and upset man. As an artist he was unable to achieve the degree
of proficiency with the paint that his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, had and could never get over his envy of

Benton and Pollock
artists such as Picasso and Miro. In writing about the biographical movie of his life, Michael O'Sullivan of the
Washington Post puts it rather succinctly, "Rather than a sudden epi-phany, Pollock's arrival at the new approach
to painting is depicted as a difficult birth following a long series of artistic contractions. It's sometime in the late
1940s and Pollock -- after more than a decade of wrestling with his own crippling Picasso envy, his
unwillingness to imitate his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, and failed experiments with cubism, surrealism and
automatism -- has just stumbled on his signature style after accidentally spilling paint on the floor."
(www.delawareonline.com) It may be said that his work is his struggle in trying to reach that 'birth;, to get to the
place where he would eventually feel that his paintings had as much value as those of the artists he looked up to.
Context:

"With the advent of the New Deal's work-relief projects, Pollock and many of his contemporaries
were able to work as artists on the federal payroll. Under government aegis, Pollock enrolled in the
easel division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, which provided him with
a source of income for nearly eight years and enabled him to devote himself to artistic development.
Some of Pollock's WPA paintings are now lost, but those that survive--together with other canvases,
drawings and prints made during this period--illustrate his complex synthesis of source material and
Jackson Pollock. the gradual emergence of a deeply personal pictorial language. By the early 1940s, Native American
Birth. 1938 motifs and other pictographic imagery played a central role in his compositions, marking the
oil on canvas beginnings of a mature style.
mounted on
Even as his art was gaining in assurance and originality, Pollock was experiencing personal turmoil
plywood.
and recurring bouts of depression. He was also struggling to control his alcoholism, which would
46"x22"
continue to plague him throughout his life. His brothers Charles and Sande, with whom he shared
Abstract
living quarters at 46 East 8th Street in Manhattan, encouraged him to seek treatment, including
Expressionism
psychoanalysis. Although therapy was not successful in curbing Pollock's drinking or relieving his
depression, it introduced him to Jungian concepts that validated the subjective, symbolic direction
his art was taking. In late 1941, Sande wrote to Charles, who had left New York, that if Jackson
could "hold himself together his work will become of real significance. His painting is abstract,
intense, evocative in quality."

Form: Still in the stages before he created the works he would eventually become famous for, it is easy
to see the Picasso-inspired style of these two oil paintings. However, he was also influenced strongly by
the work of the Native Americans. In Male and Female, it is evident that he was influenced by the
Southwest culture, such as navajo rugs and Indian sand paintings.
Iconography: "It has been suggested that Pollock was influenced by Native American sand paintings,
made by trickling thin lines of colored sand onto a horizontal surface. It was not until 1947 that Pollock
began his "action'' paintings, influenced by
Surrealist ideas of "psychic automatism'' (direct expression of the unconscious). Pollock would fix his
canvas to the
floor and drip paint from a can using a variety of objects to manipulate the paint.

The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle (1943; 109.5 x 104 cm (43 x 41 in)) is an early Pollock,
but it shows the passionate intensity with which he pursued his personal vision. This
painting is based on a North American Indian myth. It connects the moon with the feminine
and shows the creative, slashing power of the female psyche. It is not easy to say what we
are actually looking at: a face rises before us, vibrant with power, though perhaps the
image does not benefit from labored explanations. If we can respond to this art at a fairly
primitive level, then we can also respond to a great abstract work such as Lavender Mist. If
we cannot, at least we can appreciate the fusion of colors and the Expressionist feeling of
urgency that is communicated. Moon-Woman may be a feathered harridan or a great
abstract pattern; the point is that it works on both levels."

Benton and Pollock
( www.oir.ucf.edu)
The Moon Woman 1942
Abstract Expressionism And, for Male and Female,
"This article demonstrates that Pollock drew his inspiration for Male and Female not from a
wellspring of psychic urges, but from a roll-out drawing of a relatively obscure stela from
Chavín de Huántar, Peru. With the skill of a shaman, Pollock transformed this monument's
two-thousand-year-old iconography into a modern idiom, preserving the original motifs in
the outlines of his "violent automatism." Even the organization of the stela is retained,
providing ample clues to the origin of Pollock's stylized male and female caimans. There
exists well-documented evidence that Pollock drew heavily from Native American sources.
His admiration of Navajo sand paintings, Northwest Coast masks, and pre-Columbian
Mexican imagery are all evident in his work before 1940. What remains undisclosed are the
striking parallels between Pollock's early "nonobjective" paintings and native Peruvian
bas-reliefs. Clear stylistic and iconographical affinities characterize not only in Male and
Female but also other paintings of the critical period from 1942 through the mid-forties.
Documentary evidence further buttresses this observable relationship. Both Robert
Motherwell and Lee Krasner distinctly remember Pollock's stated goal in the early forties
"to create a 'parallel' version of Picasso." Judging from the evidence, it seems likely that
Pollock intended to conjure up the native spirits of the New World, just as Picasso had
summoned forth African genies from the Old World." http://nmaa-
ryder.si.edu/journal/v11n3/v11n3doyon.html
Male and Female. 1942.
oil on canvas, 6'x4' Context:
"Jackson Pollock's painting Male and Female has long been recognized as a pivotal work
in the artist's career. Completed around 1942 shortly after Pollock underwent Jungian
analysis, the painting's imagery is generally attributed to the autonomic manifestation of
Jungian archetypes. Consequently, Male and Female is reproduced in numerous scholarly
publications, and is acclaimed as a significant step in Pollock's search for prelogical
expression—one which eventually culminates in his drip paintings."
(nmaa-ryder.si.edu)
Form: Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, coins, cigarettes, etc. At this time Pollock
was standing over the canvas he was painting on, and allowing the detritus that fell onto
it to become a part of the artwork itself.
Form, Iconography, and Context:

"Full Fathom Five is one of the earliest masterpieces of Pollock's drip

technique. The actual origins and initial development of this technique have
never been fully explained, except by reading back from fuller photographic
evidence produced about 1950, two or three years after this work was
painted. Like other practical breakthroughs in twentieth-century painting,
'creative accident' seems likely to have played an important part, as Pollock
probed and tested methods of paint application which promote the
continuousness of line rather than the broken lines inevitable in the constant
reloadings and readjustments of conventional brushwork. His solution was to
pour from a can of domestic paint along a stick resting inside the container,
so that a constant 'beam' of pigment came into contact with the canvas
(which he left unstretched on the studio floor). The character of the line was
determined by certain physical and material variables that could be
combined in almost infinite permutations: the viscosity of the paint
(controlled by thinning and dilution); the angle and hence speed of the

Benton and Pollock
pouring; and the dynamics of Pollock's bodily gestures, his sweep and
rhythm, especially in the wrist, arm and shoulder. 'Like a seismograph',
noted writer Wemer Haftmann 'the painting recorded the energies and states
Full Fathom 5. 1947 of the man who drew it.' In addition Pollock would flick, splatter and dab
Oil on canvas with nails, subsidiary colors on to the dominant linear configuration." (www.sai.msu.su)
tacks, buttons, coins, cigarettes, etc,
129 x 76.5 cm (50 7/8 x 30 1/8 in)
Context: It is most probable that Pollock was thinking of this Shakespeare sonnet as he worked; note the tempest-like appearance and
feel of the paint, both in texture and color.

Full Fathom Five

The Tempest (I, II, 329)
by William Shakespeare
FERDINAND.
Where should this music be? i'the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: - and, sure, it waits upon
Some god o'the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wrack,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,
Or hath it drawn me rather: - but 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL, sings.
Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Benton and Pollock
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

[Burden within. Ding-dong.]
Hark! now I hear them, - Ding-dong, bell.
FERDINAND.
The ditty does remember my drown'd father: -

This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes: - I hear it now above me.
Form: "Action" or "drip" painting on canvas.

At this point in hs career, Pollock was

begininng to truly come into his own with
his new style of 'action' painting. He began
to get into the rhythm of the movement
inherent in painting and allowed music to
influence him, "New York painter Jackson
Pollock(1912-1956) was an unquestionable
leader of the Abstract Expressionist
movement. His above 1950 work Autumn
Rhythm (Number 30), exemplifies the
careful balance between accident and
control that characterizes both his art and the
improvisational jazz of the period. Pollock
himself was an avowed jazz fan, often
attending live performance's at New York's
Five Spot club. Critic Ellen Landau notes
the influence of jazz on Pollock's painting:
As early as 1945...one prescient critic
compared the "flare, spatter and fury" of
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) 1950 Pollock's paintings to modern
oil on canvas 8'x17' music...Pollock loved jazz..."rocking and
Abstract Expressionism rolling" for days on end to Dizzy Gillespie,
Bird, Dixieland, and bebop. What
undoubtedly attracted him to this type of
sound was not just its rhythm and tempo,
but its naked presentation of honest and
deeply felt emotion...Pollock could tell his
wife that jazz was "the only other creative
thing happening in the country."
xroads.virginia.edu)
Context: (culled directly from an interview on pbs.org)
JIM LEHRER: Now a painter who changed American art.

Senior Producer Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN: The painting is violent, like a boxing match.
KIRK VARNEDOE, Museum of Modern Art: The way that things are
flung against the canvas -- the splat, the splatter-- there's a sense of
aggression in the picture.
JEFFREY BROWN: It's lyrical , like a ballet. (music in background)
KIRK VARNEDOE: There's something extremely fine and delicate about

a lot of these lines that is choreographed on some level of ecstasy.

Benton and Pollock
JEFFREY BROWN: It's dense, like a dream --.
KIRK VARNEDOE: There's no foreground, there's no background,

there's no tree, there's no dog, there's no recognizable anything in this
picture. And yet there's a sense of very complex space that's poised
between opposites.
JEFFREY BROWN: That is the view from curator Kirk Varnadoe of

"Autumn Rhythm," dripped, poured, and flung into existence by Jackson
Pollock in 1950, and now part of a Pollock retrospective at New York's
Museum of Modern Art. The music is from a CD put out by the museum,
the jazz Pollock listened to for days on end, from his own collection.
JACKSON POLLOCK: Sometimes I use a brush but often prefer using a

stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june99/pollock_1-11.html

Pollock was invited to participate in a group exhibition of work by
French and American painters, including Picasso, Braque, Matisse and
other established masters. Among the virtually unknown Americans in
the group was Lenore Krassner--later known as Lee Krasner--who
became Pollock's lover and later his wife. The work she saw in
Pollock's studio convinced her of his extraordinary talent, and it was
not long before influential members of New York's avant-garde
intellegensia began to share her opinion. His work came to the
attention of Peggy Guggenheim, whose gallery, Art of This Century,
showed the most challenging new work by American and European
abstractionists and Surrealists. Guggenheim became Pollock's dealer
and patron, introducing his work to the small but avid audience for
vanguard painting.
In 1945 Guggenheim lent Pollock the down payment on a small

homestead in The Springs, a rural hamlet near East Hampton, Long
Island. This property, now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study
Center, would be Pollock's home for the rest of his life and the site of
his most innovative and influential work. Before moving to The
Springs, his imagery had been congested, his colors somber, and the
general mood of his paintings anxious and conflicted. Soon after
establishing his studio in the country, however, his colors brightened,
his compositions opened up, and his imagery reflected a new
responsiveness to nature. Soon he would pioneer the spontaneous
pouring technique for which he became world-renowned.

Although Pollock had first experimented with liquid paint at the

Siqueiros workshop in 1936, it would not become his primary medium
until more than ten years later. By 1947 he was creating densely
layered all-over compositions that earned both praise and scorn from
the critics. Some dismissed them as meaningless and chaotic, while
others saw them as superbly organized, visually fascinating and
psychologically compelling. Clement Greenberg, one of Pollock's most
ardent supporters, maintained that he was "the most powerful painter in
contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major
one." With several one-person exhibitions to his credit and work
included in important group shows, Pollock was receiving significant
attention. A profile in the 8 August 1949 issue of Life magazine
introduced his challenging art to a nationwide audience and cemented
his growing reputation as the foremost modern painter of his
generation.

Benton and Pollock
Pollock's radical breakthrough was accompanied by a period of

sobriety lasting two years, during which he created some of his most
beautiful masterpieces. In his barn studio, he spread his canvas on the
floor and developed his compositions by working from all four sides,
allowing the imagery to evolve spontaneously, without preconceptions.
Pollock described this technique as "direct" painting and likened it to
American Indian sand painting. He maintained, however, that the
method was "a natural growth out of a need," and that its only
importance was as "a means of arriving at a statement." The character
and content of that statement were then and remain controversial,
subject to widely varying interpretations--which is why Pollock's art
has retained its vitality in spite of changing tastes.
In 1951 Pollock's aesthetic underwent a shift in emphasis as he

abandoned non-objective imagery in favor of abstracted references to
human and animal forms. "When you're working out of your
unconscious," he explained, "figures are bound to emerge." He also
gave up color to create a series of stark black paintings on unprimed
canvas. Many of his admirers were ambivalent about his new direction,
which may account at least in part for Pollock's inability to remain
sober. For the next five years he would struggle unsuccessfully to solve
his drinking problem, while his art underwent a series of revisions,
some more successful than others. Color returned, gesture became
richer and more various, and Pollock once again veiled his imagery in
layers that obscured as much as they revealed.
By 1955, however, Pollock's personal demons had triumphed over his

artistic drive, and he stopped painting altogether. Ironically, his work
had begun to earn a respectable income for him and Krasner, who was
becoming increasingly estranged from her troubled, alcoholic husband.
In the summer of 1956 she took the opportunity of a trip to Europe to
re-evaluate their relationship, while Pollock remained at home with a
young mistress to distract him from the agonies of self-doubt and
inaction that plagued him. In Paris, on the morning of 12 August,
Krasner received a telephone call informing her that Pollock had died
the night before in an automobile accident. Driving drunk, he had
overturned his convertible, killing himself and an acquaintance and
seriously injuring his other passenger.

Bio written by Helen Harrison; Director, Pollock-Krasner House



Benton and Pollock


Rockwell
Norman Rockwell

Form: Oil on Canvas. Though he was, by all accounts a painter, he is often
referred to as an illustrator because of the work he did for various magazines.
His work is very detailed and realistic, he most often painted scenes that are
best described as 'Americana'. Working in the 40's and 50's, he was
influenced greatly by the scenes of the war and social unrest, but did not let
them make his paintings overtly political or depressing. Just the opposite, he
chose gentle, touching scenes from everyday life.
Iconography: Norman Rockwell was a family man. He had a strong moral

conscience when it came to family life and child-rearing. Often, he would
paint scenes of young boys at play, innocent and untouched by the worries of
the adult world. Here, he is painting a tender portrait of his daughter in a
scene that could very well be from his own observation. It shows a scene in
which the daughter emulates the father, trying to step into his shoes. She is
using his palette, grasped in her tiny hand it almost dwarfs her entire length.
The brush, too, is almost too big for her hands, and she is trying on her
fathers expression, one of observation and concentration as she tries to
accurately capture the look on her dolls face. There are no hidden meanings
or deep, tortured-artists statements to be made in this work, it is, very simply,
what you see is what you get.
Context: "Born in New York City in 1894, Norman Rockwell always wanted
to be an artist. At age 14, Rockwell enrolled in art classes at the New York
School of Art (formerly the Chase School of Art). Two years later, in 1910,
he left high school to study art at the National Academy of Design. He soon
transferred to the Art Students League, where he studied with Thomas
Fogarty and George Bridgman. Fogarty's instruction in illustration prepared
Rockwell for his first commercial commissions. From Bridgman, Rockwell
learned the technical skills on which he relied throughout his long career.
Rockwell found success early. He painted his first commission of four
Christmas cards before his sixteenth birthday. While still in his teens, he was
hired as art director of Boys' Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts
of America, and began a successful freelance career illustrating a variety of
young people's publications. At age 21, Rockwell's family moved to New
Rochelle, New York, a community whose residents included such famous
illustrators as J.C. and Frank Leyendecker and Howard Chandler Christy.
There, Rockwell set up a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe and
produced work for such magazines as Life, Literary Digest, and Country
Gentleman. In 1916, the 22-year-old Rockwell painted his first cover for The
Saturday Evening Post, the magazine considered by Rockwell to be the
"greatest show window in America." Over the next 47 years, another 321
Norman Rockwell. The Artist's Rockwell covers would appear on the cover of the Post. Also in 1916,
Daughter. c1940 Rockwell married Irene O'Connor; they would go on to divorce in 1930. The
'30s and '40s are generally considered to be the most fruitful decades of
Rockwell's career. In 1930 he married Mary Barstow, a schoolteacher, and
Picture of the couple had three sons: Jarvis, Thomas, and Peter. The family moved to
Norman Arlington, Vermont in 1939, and Rockwell's work began, more consistently,
Rockwell to reflect small-town American life.
in his In 1943, inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt's address to Congress,
studio. Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms paintings. They were reproduced in
four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post with essays by

Rockwell
contemporary writers. Rockwell's interpretations of Freedom of Speech,

Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear proved to
be enormously popular. The works toured the United States in an exhibition
that was jointly sponsored by the Post and the U.S. Treasury Department and,
through the sale of war bonds, raised more than $130 million for the war
effort. Although the Four Freedoms series was a great success, 1943 also
brought Rockwell an enormous loss. A fire destroyed his Arlington studio as
well as numerous paintings and his collection of historical costumes and
props. In 1953, the Rockwell family moved from Arlington, Vermont, to
Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Six years later, Mary Barstow Rockwell died
unexpectedly. In collaboration with his son Thomas, Rockwell published his
autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, in 1960. The Saturday
Evening Post carried excerpts from the best-selling book in eight consecutive
issues, with Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait on the cover of the first. In 1961,
Rockwell married Molly Punderson, a retired teacher. Two years later, he
ended his 47-year association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to
work for Look magazine. During his 10-year association with Look, Rockwell
painted pictures illustrating some of his deepest concerns and interests,
including civil rights, America's war on poverty, and the exploration of space.
In 1973, Rockwell established a trust to preserve his artistic legacy by
placing his works in the custodianship of the Old Corner House Stockbridge
Historical Society, later to become the Norman Rockwell Museum at
Stockbridge. The trust now forms the core of the Museum's permanent
collections. In 1976, in failing health, Rockwell became concerned about the
future of his studio. He arranged to have his studio and its contents added to
the trust. In 1977, Rockwell received the nation's highest civilian honor, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his "vivid and affectionate portraits of our
country." He died at his home in Stockbridge on November 8, 1978, at the
age of 84." (www.nrm.org)
Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: Almost every religion that recognizes prayer is able to

associate themselves with this painting, "The American art world is
finally reevaluating Norman Rockwell, appreciating his skill and
subject matter so derided and dismissed as mere illustration by the
elites and radicals when he was alive. His characters no longer evoke
cornball sentimentalism, not even to the sophisticated critics. In fact,
some critics
now compare his work to that of the 19th century French satirist
Honore Daumier, and to the two splendid 17th century Dutch
painters, Jan Vermeer and Frans Hals. The final destination for the

Rockwell
traveling show is
the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York. Critics of yore
Norman Rockwell. Grace Before the Meal. are spinning over that one. In Rockwell paintings we find America's
c1950 Every family, the hometown boy and girl, mother and father,
grandmother and grandfather who built on the dream of our
Founding Fathers. They are as individualized as universalized, with
the fruits of the Declaration of Independence spilling onto our daily
lives.
When the Saturday Evening Post asked its readers in 1955 to pick
the Norman Rockwell cover they liked the best, most chose "Saying
Grace,'' a plain and homely grandmother and grandson are depicted
saying a blessing before a meal in a restaurant as others watch with
nonchalance. It's about faith and tolerance, the religious and secular
coexistent in the landscape of everyday life. The painting is free of
an overt message -- you'll find no preaching here
-- but it's an emblematic snapshot of continuity in a country where
social mores are forever changing. Prayer is part of the mix. So is the
gratitude for the bounty of the table." (Jewish World Review July 3,
2000/30 Sivan, 5760)
Context: As one of his earlier works, Rockwell still had the focus on
strong family values. He is here showing the generations of one
family coming together before a meal, the grandmother, the young
boy, and the older adolescents. It was a view of America that showed
it as safe, loving and strong in family.
It is also interesting to compare this image with a painting by the

same title by Chardin.
Jean- Baptiste Simeon Chardin-
Grace at Table (also called Benediction)
1740 o/c

Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: It is fairly evident what ideals Rockwell was commenting on with

this piece,“ Norman Rockwell's January 1962 Post cover was atypical of what
America had become accustomed to since he landed his first commission with the

Rockwell
magazine in 1916. It wasn't comical. In his realistic almost photographic style

Rockwell depicted of the backside of businessman standing in a gallery,
contemplating the meaning of a huge abstract painting that looked as if the artist
had dripped his multitude of oils from a stick or can onto the canvas while it was
lying on the floor. The illustrator's rendering of Abstract & Concrete must have
been indicative of what Rockwell, then 68, was pondering at the time. "How will
I be remembered? As a technician or artist? As a humorist or a visionary?" This
was the beginning of one of the most turbulent times in America. When the
seriousness of the 20th century would become even more serious. A century in
which the majority of those deemed as socially significant art critics would use
words like"master" to describe modernists like Jackson Pollack while scoffing at
the artisan most popular to the people.” …..”In the sixties his subjects broadened
to include political portraits, poverty, race relations and the space exploration.
"Without thinking
too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and
observed to
others who might not have noticed," he said. "My fundamental purpose is to
interpret
the typical American. I guess I am a story teller." (www.antiquetalk.com)
Norman Rockwell. Abstract and Context: Norman Rockwell was exceedingly talented. In his time he was seen as
Concrete. 1962 little more than an illustrator, his work derided by some as too generic and
‘sappy’. It is ironic then, that in the backlash from an artworld filled with
abstract, unreadable images, that his work is now being hailed as that on par with
a Caravaggio or Rembrandt. If we could say that he was looking into the future, it
would be safe to assume that this is Rockwell himself, looking at the art that had
cost him his ability to be viewed as a fine artist. In the end, however, it was the
same work that has now raised him onto a pedestal.

Form: Oil on canvas
Iconography: Rockwell had seen a lot in his

lifetime, and entering old age he found himself
embroiled in the most controversial decades of
American history, dealing with integration, civil
rights, and political unrest. Rockwell, though a
paragon of whitebread America, believed firmly in
change, and that every human is equal. He shows
the little girl, head held high, embarking on a
journey that most adults would not dare take. In an
interview with Peter Rockwell, Norman
Rockwells’ son, Ray Suarez and Maureen Hart-
Hennesey have this to say about the work,..“
Though America was torn by rapid breakneck
economic and technological change, Depression
and war, Rockwell used his prodigious talent in
the service of business. The "Prayerful Silence,"
worthy of a Flemish master, sold raisins. His use
of models from his New England home towns
results in an America that is virtually all white.
The cities, teeming with immigrants from around

Rockwell
the world, and their children, the suffering and

desperation of the 30's, the lives of millions of
industrial workers rarely appeared. Instead, we got
Norman Rockwell. The Problem We All Live With. 1964 prom couples, cute as buttons; dogs that always
seem to stay puppies; lovable old codgers, and
grandmothers who look like, well, grannies -- a
world where it rarely rained-- that is, until the later
years. In 1963, Rockwell left "the Saturday
Evening Post" and began work for "Look"
magazine where he explored more controversial
issues such as housing integration and school
desegregation, as in this work, "The Problem we
all Live with."
MAUREEN HART-HENNESSEY:

"The Problem we all Live with" was inspired by Rockwell's remembering the story of ruby bridges, who is
the African American girl who was the only black child sent to desegregate an all-white school in New
Orleans, and this happened in 1960, and she really was tormented-- literally had to run a gauntlet every
day of white parents throwing things at her and yelling at her, and was accompanied to school every day
by the U.S. Marshals. But there's a real violence inherent, I think, in that scene. You can see where the
tomato has been thrown at the... At the child, and the words that are scrawled on the wall behind her that it
could explode at any moment-- and he really captures that.”
full text on http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec00/rockwell_7-4.html

Context:

“A controversial artist, even today. And controversy has followed him for decades. Prestigious bastions of
Art, 'High' and 'Low,' museums and galleries, have refused to show his retrospective. And even the
Chicago Tribune felt compelled to run dual reviews -- Pro and Contra -- of the current exhibition
scheduled to run until May 21st at the Chicago Historical Society. Norman Rockwell... Or, as many would
have it, Norman Rockwell !?! Yes, "Pictures for the American People" has arrived: Seventy oil paintings,
all 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as studies in oil and pencil, and photographs. One
should note that it isn't -- necessarily -- Norman Rockwell's politics or religious views that are so often
attacked or disdained. He was what in any milieu one would have to call 'a decent man,' and in many
instances, courageous.

Rockwell
His painting, The Problem We All Live With appeared on the cover of Look magazine on January 14, 1964.
It infuriated some, heartened the hopes of others, shamed many, and was met with indifference or scorn by
the Art Establishment. The Problem We All Live With strikes directly at the heart and exemplifies
Rockwell's hallmark approach: strong horizontals, close foreground, and, especially, telling details which
draw the viewer into concluding a narrative, one orchestrated to move him. The perceptive viewer notes
not only the confident posture and countenance of the young girl -- her escorts are cropped and
anonymous agents of the law -- but the writ in the pocket of the advancing guard, the contrast of
schoolbooks with the graffiti on the wall, the smashed tomato the least of projectiles launched in those
times). It is an approach common to centuries of fine art, emblematic and immediate. But Rockwell's
concern at this date is not doctrine, or delight: he stirs a decent empathy, a quietly powerful outrage.”
( www.artscope.net)


Color Field Painting

Form: Rothko was the master at a form of painting titled 'color field'. Though
known as an Abstract Expressionist, it is his creation of these color field
paintings that he is best known for. They are created on huge canvases, and are
either one, two, or three horizontal rectangles of color on top of another base
color that covers the entire canvas. Their is a very deliberate juxtaposition of
warm and cool colors, whose placement next to one another creates its' own
type of optical illusion. A viewer may not just glance at a Rothko painting,
they must gaze at it for long periods of time in order to see the colors interact.
When the viewer begins to immerse themselves in these paintings, the cool
colors start to feel as though they are moving forward in the picture plane,
while the cool colors begin to recede. The painting seems to be moving,
creating its' own environment to pull the viewer into. Often, when one looks for
long periods of time at one of these paintings, they begin to feel a sense of
calm, as though the effort of looking at the painting has put them into a
meditative trance.
Iconography: "While it is the glowing, ovoid areas of color that the eye first
Mark Rothko 1903-1970 embraces in a typical Rothko, it is useful to become aware of how they are
Earth and Green c1950 contextualized with often dramatically emphasized horizons -- and borders.
These divisions are mostly two, often three (occasionally more). They define a
horizon gestalt between the areas of color; the borders the peripheral limitation
of our normal view of any horizon. We thus float at the center of a prospect
that falls out as below us, before us and above us -- the artist leaving us to our
own associations, but determining within his formal structures, the extent of the
world he wants those associations to inhabit. (Here the structure of the works
of the early 1940s is crucial -- for they remain latent after 1950.) Thus,
Rothko's tripartite and quadripartite compositions present a radical abstraction
of the planet in cross-section from below the viewer's feet up, the internal light
of that world provides it welcoming warmth or abject negation, as befits the
artist's moods. At the end of his life, the last, sad, bipartite images (MRCR
814-831), leave us with a single horizon between the black of space and the
earth's lithic interior -- all place of human grace on the surface under the sun
having slipped away from his despairing reach." (www.artchive.com)

Context: (Taken from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, on www.pbs.org ,full
transcript at http://www.pbs.org/newshour ) "Born Marcus Rothkowitz in
Russia in 1903, he and his family emigrated to Portland, Oregon, where Marcus
starred in school and was one of three immigrant seniors to get into Yale. After
two years, Rothko dropped out and by his and the century's mid-twenties, he
was working odd jobs in New York and becoming an artist. For 30 some odd
years that's what he was-an artist-an obscure one. But in the 1950's American
culture started to make its global mark. In painting, the style that carried the
day was abstract expressionism. Mark Rothko, one of its exemplars, was soon
considered an American master. Always melancholy, as Rothko became
celebrated and rich, he became more somber, in the end, seriously depressed.
He committed suicide in 1970 at age 67. The current exhibit begins with a side
of Rothko not often seen, since he destroyed much of his early work. Art
historian and Rothko biographer Dore Ashton got to know him when she was a
New York Times reporter on the art beat."

PAUL SOLMAN: When the Federation rejected Rothko's proposal, he went

his own way. Soon, he became part of the burgeoning abstract New York
School, posing for Life Magazine as one of "The Irascibles" with the likes of
Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning in 1951. And from this period onward
Mark Rothkos are as recognizable as Norman Rockwells: variations on a
common, in his case transcendental, theme. But, might they not seem a bit-
monotonous?
DORE ASHTON: Some people respond, and they think, oh, how could he do
the same thing every day, but, of course, if you look at it from his point of
view, it's never the same. Each painting is an attempt to express a specific
feeling: joy, fear, all of those things.
PAUL SOLMAN: Rothko considered his work spiritual and wanted viewers to
be spiritually moved by it. And at the Rothko show some were. Nicole Asquith
and Ned Steiner actually wrote poems inspired by a 1953 Rothko entitled
"Number 61."
NICOLE ASQUITH: That long thirsted-for-horizon bleeds into the silent link,
smothered in its own blue chalk. White silent ghosts, withered and yellow,
glide by. The blue of my perception comes back to me-
NED STEINER: Light shines on the other side and is projected into the dark
room. Space hanging in space. The water separated from the waters.
PAUL SOLMAN: Lynn Metheny had a somewhat different way of putting it.
LYNN METHENY: It makes you feel very small in the face of these color
fields sort of encompassing you.
PAUL SOLMAN: So you're sort of in the paintings?
LYNN METHENY: Exactly. Exactly.
PAUL SOLMAN: He spoke about wanting people to be in the paintings.
That's why there are no frames and why it's-the paint is actually all the way
over on the sides.
LYNN METHENY: And I think, you know, the size of them as well helps that.
PAUL SOLMAN: Do you think you have a competitive advantage because

you're kind of short?
LYNN METHENY: Perhaps, perhaps.


Form: "It would be good if little places

could be set up all over the country, like a
little chapel where the traveler, or wanderer
could come for an hour to meditate on a
single painting hung in a small room, and
by itself."
Mark Rothko, 1954

Iconography: "The Rothko Chapel, on

Yupon Street and Sul Ross in Houston,
was commissioned by Dominique and John
de Menil.qv The building was originally
Rothko Chapel 1965 conceived as part of Philip Johnson's
campus design for the University of St.
Thomas, but became an independent
project when the Menils discontinued their
association with that institution. The
Menils commissioned a series of paintings
by Mark Rothko, who collaborated with
Johnson in the design of the structure. The
chapel itself is an austere structure without
windows; the skylight that Rothko insisted
upon proved to be a poor source for
lighting the paintings, and in 1978 a baffle
system was introduced. The chapel has an
octagonal floor plan in which fourteen
paintings are arrayed in eight panels. A
triptych of three abutted canvases hangs on
the north wall, the east wall, and the west
wall. The south wall holds a single canvas.
The remaining four canvases are placed on
the diagonal axes. The ascetic paintings are
limited in color to deep brown, purplish
red, and black and express what Rothko
called "the timelessness and tragedy of the
human condition." Art historian Robert
Rosenblum said of the works, "It is as if
the entire current of Western religious art
were finally devoid of its narrative
complexities and corporeal imagery,
leaving us with the dark, compelling
presences that pose an ultimate choice
between everything and nothing."
Dominique de Menil said that the works

evoke "the mystery of the cosmos, the
tragic mystery of our perishable condition,
[and] the silence of god, the unbearable
silence of God." The Rothko Chapel is
owned and directed by the Rothko Chapel
Board, of which Dominique de Menil is
president and Thompson L. Shannon
executive director. The chapel invited

individuals and religious groups of all

denominations, as well as non-believers, to
use its facilities. It has hosted Quakers,
Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants,
Hindus, Copts, Greek Orthodox, Sufis, and
Buddhists. In addition to providing a
neutral venue for such luminaries as the
Dalai Lama, who met there with
representatives of various religions and
disciplines during his visit in September
1979 to the United States, the chapel has
hosted performances by such religious
ritualists as the Whirling Dervishes of
Turkey (1978) and the Gyuto Tantric
Monks of Tibet (1985). The park in which
the Rothko Chapel is located contains
several sculptures from the Menil
Collection, including Barnett Newman's
sculpture Broken Obelisk, which is situated
in a reflecting pool opposite the chapel
entrance. John de Menil purchased this
monumental, twenty-six-foot-high work in
1968; it is dedicated to the memory of
Martin Luther King, Jr., who was
assassinated in that year. Newman
requested that the sculpture be blasted free
of its rust-proofing so that the Cor-Ten
steel surfaces could acquire a typical
Houston patina.
The Rothko Chapel sponsors colloquia

and since 1981 has presented awards for
demonstrations of a commitment to truth
and freedom. In 1988 the Second Oscar
Romero Award for work in the area of
human rights was presented to Paulo
Evaristo Cardinal Arns, Archbishop of Sâo
Paulo, at a chapel ceremony. The birthday
of Martin Luther King, Jr., was celebrated
there annually until it became a national
holiday in 1985; the United Nations
Declaration of Human rights continues to
receive annual recognition. In July 1973
the chapel sponsored "Traditional Modes of
Contemplation and Action," a colloquium
that brought together nineteen international
religious scholars and resulted in the
publication of Contemplation and Action in
World Religions. In October 1983 another
colloquium, "Ethnicities and Nations,"
brought anthropologists and other scholars
together to discuss problems faced by
traditional ethnic communities when they
are incorporated into modern nations. This

conference produced Ethnicities and

Nations: Processes of Interethnic Relations
in Latin America, Southeast Asia and the
Pacific. In the pursuit of better
understanding between religions and
cultural traditions the Rothko Chapel
works with such organizations as the
Monchanin Cross-Cultural Center in
Montréal, Quebec, the Center for Cross-
Cultural Studies in Santa Barbara,
California, the Fraternité St. Dominique in
Cotonou, Benin, the Department of Islamo-
Christian Studies in Beirut, Lebanon, and
the Instituto per le scienze religiose in
Bologna, Italy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dore Ashton, About

Rothko (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983). Kelly
Saenz, The Rothko Chapel:
The Slow Arrow of Beauty (M.A. thesis,
Austin, 1980). Vertical Files, Barker
Texas History Center,
Austin.(www.tsha.utexas.edu)

Context: "...The third set, those now

installed in the "Rothko Chapel" of the de
Menil collection in Houston, are somewhat
more in keeping with the purpose of their
environment. They are arranged around the
essentially circular space, are fourteen in
number in emulation of the Christian
devotion of the Stations of the Cross (a
theme also taken up by Barnett Newman),
and clearly emphasize the sanctuary axis.
Here the traditional elements of the church
helped articulate the paintings -- as did
Rothko's already established reputation for
art with some sort of a "spiritual"
dimension. Let us recall that behind these
murals was the small gallery at the Phillips
Collection in Washington, DC, where, for
many years, a set of three, colorful Rothkos
were arranged in a small room that became
famous as a place of meditation -- as a
"chapel" of sorts. The perception of
Rothko's art as somehow conducive to
religious emotion began there, and was
taken up in the de Menil's commission. It
would be useful to ponder all this in terms

of traditional and modern ecclesiastical art,

but this is not the place for such a tangent.
I will simply wonder aloud at the piety that
would find the Rothko Chapel's bleakness
compelling to devotion."
(www.artchive.com)
Form: Franz kline was formally known as a an Abstract Expressionist.
His most well known pieces are these black and white calligraphy style
paintings, in which the emphasis is on the moment of creation. The
paint used is a quick drying enamel, which meant that each stroke is
permanent and filled with its' own importance. Much the same way that
Rothkos' work was seen as transcendent, so too did Klines work appear
to have its' own meditative qualities.
Iconography: Excerpted from The man who painted impact. by Robert

Hughes. Time, 1/23/95, Vol. 145 Issue 3, p54, 2p, 2bw HTML Full
Text
EVEN AMONG FAMOUS ARTISTS there are degrees of neglect.
Nobody could call the Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline
overlooked. Not when his pictures have sold for a million dollars and
Franz Kline (1910-1962). Painting 2. 1952 up. Not with his signature style recognizable in an eye blink, the black
girderlike slashes on the white ground. But compared with Jackson
Pollock, who has been a household word -- well, in some households
anyway -- for the past quarter-century, Kline is positively obscure. It's
like comparing Sal Mineo with James Dean. Both were in the movie
Rebel Without a Cause, but only one of them car-smashed his way
into permanent Valhalla. Kline died in 1961 at the early age of 51, and
since then he has not turned out to be a darling of the museums and
the art historians. The last full museum show of his work was back in
1985, and in Cincinnati, Ohio; it never came to New York City. So the
present show at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art,
``Franz Kline: Black & White, 1950-1961,'' breaks an unwelcome
silence on a strong, if admittedly somewhat limited, artist. It is really
the black-and-white works that bear Kline's claim to importance; he
was mainly an artist of impact, and when that kind of sensibility uses
color, it tends to over- or underuse it, in either case stressing its
declarative rather than its sensuous nature. But in monochrome he
could really cook. His early figurative work is not in the show, but it is
worth remembering for its origins. Born in Wilkes-Barre,
Kline. New York New York. 1953
Pennsylvania, Kline had an entirely traditional training at the Art
Students League in Boston, wanted to be an illustrator and studied for
a time (1936-38) in London. He was imbued with the thick-massed but
linear realism that came out of the Ashcan School and filled the
cartoons that John Sloan and others did for periodicals like the New
Masses. He doted on Krazy Kat (as did his friend Philip Guston) and
the superstylish illustrations of John Held Jr. The black-and-white
tradition was in his head, where it coexisted with a considerable range
of other references. People who knew him in the '40s and '50s
remember that Kline liked to talk about Gericault and Velazquez, about
old silver and 18th century political cartoons, rather than the gaseous
rodomontade of ``tragic chaos'' and `èxistential risk'' that got loaded
onto Abstract Expressionism by such artists as Barnett Newman and
such critics as Harold Rosenberg. In short, he was very interested in

style, a suspect idea then but one that his paintings are none the worse
for raising. We can't see Kline the way the art world did 40 years ago,
when critics wrote about his ``desperate shriek'' or his ``total and
instantaneous conversion'' to black and white. Ab Ex was less
Kline. Zinc Yellow, 1959 apocalyptic than its fans once thought, and Kline was not so at all. His
Oil on canvas, 93 x 79 1/2 inches black-and-white style was a real invention, but its roots are not hard to
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. see. If one was illustration, another was the black-and-white paintings
of de Kooning in the late '40s. An early Kline like Ninth Street, 1951,
with its traces of looping body shapes, makes that clear. Where it did
not come from, though, was where it was often said to have come
from: Oriental calligraphy. Of course, there is a superficial likeness
between Kline's structures and ideograms in sumi ink on silk,
especially in reproduction, when the particular qualities of paint and
surface are lost. But the things themselves are very different. ``People
sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,''
protested Kline, ``but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the
black, and the white is just as important.'' The black masses and bars
aren't just gestures, they're forms; the white isn't an absence but a
color. Sometimes the speed of the brush is important -- it leaves frayed
edges, something like the speed lines in cartoons, but in other
paintings, like the impressive Wotan, 1950, nothing moves or is meant
to. The big rectangle anchored by one edge to the top of the canvas has
a massive presence and thickness of paint, and its blunt authority looks
forward to what American minimalists would be doing a generation
later, in the '60s.

Context: "Franz Kline was born May 23, 1910, in Wilkes-Barre,

Pennsylvania. While enrolled at Boston University, he took art classes
at the Boston Art Students League from 1931 to 1935. In 1935, Kline
went to London and attended Heatherley’s Art School from 1936 to
1938. He settled permanently in New York in 1939. During the late
1930s and 1940s, Kline painted cityscapes and landscapes of the coal-
mining district where he was raised as well as commissioned murals
and portraits. Kline was fortunate to have the financial support and
friendship of two patrons, Dr. Theodore J. Edlich, Jr., and I. David
Orr, who commissioned numerous portraits and bought many other
works from him. In this period, he received awards in several National
Academy of Design Annuals. In 1943, Kline met Willem de Kooning
at Conrad Marca-Relli’s studio and within the next few years also met
Jackson Pollock. Kline’s interest in Japanese art began at this time. His

mature abstract style, developed in the late1940s, is characterized by

bold gestural strokes of fast-drying black and white enamel. His first
solo exhibition was held at the Egan Gallery, New York, in 1950. Soon
after, he was recognized as a major figure in the emerging Abstract
Expressionist movement. Although Kline was best-knownfor his
black-and-white paintings, he also worked extensively in color, from
the mid-1950s to the end of his life." (www.guggenheimcollection.org)

Form: Oil on canvas, Abstract Expressionist. Sometimes,

because of the loose brushwork and frenzied strokes he was
even referred to as an 'action painter', much like Jackson
Pollock. Excavation is one of his earliest works, where he
is alluding to a landscape and perhaps figures more than
actually representing them.
Iconography: (Seeing the face in the fire. by Robert

Hughes. Time, 5/30/94, Vol. 143 Issue 22, p62, 3p, 5c
HTML Full Text)
"De Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America

has ever had. One sees him as the consummate anti-
Duchamp, a permanent relief from over-theorized art, a
man so in touch with the sources of his pictorial pleasure
(the body of paint and the body of the world) that he can
render you dizzy with exhilaration. This isn't dumbness but
Willem de Kooning, Excavation a particular form of sensory intelligence that has always
Oil on canvas, 1950; 206.2 x 257.3 cm been rare in American art and came, in this case, from
Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize; gift of outside it. De Kooning arrived in the U.S. as an illegal
Mr. and Mrs. Noah Goldowsky and Edgar Kaufmann, immigrant from Rotterdam in 1926. He was a gifted
Jr., 1952.1 draftsman who had already achieved a high level of
academic training. But he gradually learned to connect that
to a modernist syntax, fusing the line of Ingres and the
fragmentation of the antique torso to 1930s Picasso and his
American derivatives like Arshile Gorky. Seated Figure
(Classic Male), 1940, shows the early stage of this process
to perfection. The forms through which De Kooning
reached abstraction were always connected to an earlier
kind of abstraction, that of academic drawing. If one were
forced to pick the best single picture De Kooning ever
painted, it would probably have to be Excavation, 1950:
that tangled, not-quite monochrome, dirty-cream image of -
- what? Bodies is the short answer: every one of the
countless forms that seem embedded in the paint, jostling
and slipping against one another in a tempo that seems to
get faster toward the corners, can be read as an elbow, a
thigh, a buttock, but never quite literally. There is even a set

of floating teeth -- the dentures the Women would soon be

sporting. De Kooning's characteristically hooked, recurving
line takes on an invigorating speed, charging and skidding
through the dense paint, slits open with the promise of
spatial depth, only to shut again. The only relief from the
close churning of forms is a curious ``window'' at the
middle of the painting -- red, white and blue -- that looks
like a blurred American flag. The work's space is not deep,
as the title might suggest, but shallow, like a bas-relief. You
keep expecting the image to fly apart into formal
incoherence, but it never does: it has the kind of control you
see in great drivers or skaters, a supple rigor that seems to
exist only on the edge of its own dissolution. One is
tempted to say that Excavation is the last great Cubist
painting, 30 years after Cubism petered out. All of De
Kooning's relation to Picasso is in it. Marla Prather's
catalog essay provides the intriguing gloss that the genesis
of Excavation began with a black-and-white film, Bitter
Rice, a classic of Italian neorealist cinema, starring Silvana
Mangano as a rice gatherer in the Po Delta; evidently De
Kooning ``responded'' (as what red-blooded Dutch-
American artist of 46 might not?) to a sequence of peasant
women in tight shorts mud-wrestling in the paddies. If true,
this tale illustrates clearly how De Kooning never
conceived of painting as a purely Apollonian art: fragments
of pop culture -- movies, ads, the immense bric-a-brac of
the American desire industry -- were always sailing into his
images and sticking there, like bugs on a windshield. The
extreme ``reductionist'' view of De Kooning's career, held
by Clement Greenberg and maintained by some critics
today, is that after 1950 it went kerflooie. Like Western
civilization itself, as his friend and chief critical promoter
Harold Rosenberg sardonically remarked, De Kooning was
always in decline. This katabasis is supposed to have begun
in the early '50s, with the Women series. Greenberg is said
to have opined to De Kooning that at this juncture in
history (meaning 40 years ago), you can't paint a human
face. Sure, said the painter, and you can't not paint one
either -- meaning, by this laconic koan, that no matter how
abstract you get, people will always tend to read images in
the work, like seeing faces in the fire. So why not come
right out with the figure? At least it might save the
abstractions from gliding into decoration, losing their
crankiness and urgency, which was, indeed, what New
York abstract painting did when lyric acrylic on unprimed
duck became all the rage in the 1960s. Abstract
Expressionism in the hands of its two masters, Pollock and
De Kooning, at least -- had a way of disappointing the
critics who wanted it to be more abstract than it was. Just as
Pollock's all-over paintings wouldn't be so great if they
weren't landscapes, full of wind and weather, light and
pollen, so De Kooning's work benefited from the grand
ghosts of Dutch baroque figure painting, who kept jolting
the artist's elbow.

Context: "Willem de Kooning, born in Rotterdam in 1904,

was apprenticed to a commercial arts and decorating firm
there from 1916 to 1921. From 1917 to 1921 he also studied
at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. In
1926 he left Holland illegally for the United States by
working in the engine room of a ship and, newly arrived in
New Jersey, supported himself as a house painter. De
Kooning moved to New York City in 1927, and within a
few years he was friends with the artists John Graham,
Stuart Davis, David Smith, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock,
Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. From the late 1930s
through the 1950s his biomorphic abstractions (which
allude to figures and landscapes) and his series Women
placed him in the center of the Abstract Expressionist art
movement. The gestural style of painting and the visual
vocabulary of forms that he developed at this time
continued to inform his later work. De Kooning was an
accomplished draftsman as well as painter and made his
first sculptures in 1969. "Woman" belongs to his first series
of women, begun about 1940. Like other works in this
series, the colors are raucously bright — jarring hues of
green, ocher, blue, and orange — and the imagery is
tenuously balanced between realism and abstraction. An
awkwardly posed, somewhat grotesquely formed female
figure is broadly painted without modeling. The parts of her
body are reduced to independent abstract shapes and lines,
as is the spatially flattened environment in which she exists.
Her comical, masklike face, with smiling bow-shaped
lipsand large bulging eyes, adds to the light air of the
picture. Although de Kooning's image is recognizable as a
woman, the emphasis is on the abstract arrangement of
form, line, and color." (www.asartfoundation.org)

Form: Mainly abstract, expressionistic portraits or interpretations of women. It

is rumored that DeKooning was a horrible misogynist who hated women, and
by the looks of his works that deal with women, it is easy to believe this rumor
to be true. According to www.rogallery.com "In the late 1930s, De Kooning
worked for the WPA Federal Art Project and, for the first time, earned his living
as an artist. It was not until 1948, however, that he was ready for his first one-
man show of masterful black paintings with white-line drawing. That same
year, his friend Gorky committed suicide. It was a stunning blow to De Kooning
and yet, at the same time, a liberation. Paintings, sardonic and violent, began to
pour from his brush. In 1952, obsessed with interest in the human figure, De
Kooning began a long series of paintings of women, the most powerful work
that he had yet done.He explored the theme over and over again. Sometimes it
was woman as sex symbol; other times, as in Woman 1 (1952, Museum of

Modern Art), she is depicted as a repellent, sharp-fanged, horn-bosomed

vampire. Each time, De Kooning seemed to attack the canvas savagely, letting
paint drip and dribble down the surface. Since the 1960s, he has alternated
between pure abstractions and paintings of women. "Art never seems to make
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) me peaceful or pure," De Kooning once said. "I always seem to be wrapped up
Woman IV 1952, in the melodrama of vulgarity."
Iconography: It can be dficult to look at the paintings DeKooning does of

women and not see them as violent and disturbing. DeKooning was married,
and his wife was an artist as well. Miriam Shapiro, a prominent female artist,
has this to say of the Abstract Expressionist movement and the works of
DeKooning, "While in New York, Schapiro and Block spent much of their time
at the Cedar Club, which Schapiro described as "one of the strongholds of
Abstract Expressionism, presided over by the king - [Willem] DeKooning."
DeKooning, who gained considerable acclaim among Abstract Expressionists,
painted a number of aggressive and often dehumanizing paintings under the title
"Woman." These paintings have been since railed upon by feminist critics. "If
you were a man," said Schapiro, "you walked into the Cedar Club, you had lots
of confidence, [and] you made your way from table to table. I had a husband,
and therefore there was a sign on me that read: 'Don't bother her.'" While the
Abstract Expressionists plumbed the depths of their emotional potential through
painting, the emotional impact of the marginalization of their
female counterparts went wholly unexamined. The wife of Willem DeKooning,
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) Elaine De Kooning, was "a writer, [and] belonged to a group of critics,"
Woman 1954, oil on paper, explained Schapiro. "There were many women in the club, sitting quiet, and
25 3/4 in. by 19 5/8 in. [Elaine] knew that the wives of those artists were very good artists themselves."
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and As a result, Elaine De Kooning curated a show of all women artists, of which
Sculpture Miriam Schapiro was a part. "This was long before feminism," said Schapiro.
Garden, University of Nebraska- When feminism did begin to gain attention, a whole set of institutional and
Lincoln, psychological undercurrents in society found expression in the works of artists
F. M. Hall Collection and writers. "I remember," said Golden, "reading Betty Freidan's Feminine
1955.H-362 Mystique - I was on an airplane and I turned to the man next to me and said,
'Isn't this exciting?'"
(wildcat.arizona.edu)
Context: "The pupils of Woman I, 1950-1952, glare at you like a pair of black
head lamps. She has the worst overbite in all of Western art. She looks like a
school matron, seen in a bad dream, imposing and commonplace, and full of a
power that flows from the slashing brushstrokes into the body. De Kooning --
the ``slipping glimpser,'' as he called himself, open to a constant stream of
momentary impressions -- loved contradictory vernaculars, visual slang that

collided with the huge amount of high-art language that he had internalized
since his student days in the Dutch academy. Smiles from Camel ads; shoulders
from Ingres; pinup girls and Raphael's The School of Athens; high and low,
everywhere. It was his mode of reception, never intellectualized but often
Willem de Kooning. extremely funny. By the late 1950s, De Kooning was surrounded by imitators;
Portrait of a Woman. 1940 there was a ``look,'' a gestural rhetoric fatally easy to mimic, that they got from
him and reduced to parody. (The artists who would really make something of
his legacy were not in New York but in California: Richard Diebenkorn and
Wayne Thiebaud.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns reacted against him,
sons against the parent; but Rauschenberg's now classic Oedipal gesture of
rubbing out a De Kooning drawing could not erase the obvious fact that the
paint in his combine-pictures came straight out of the older Dutch master, drips,
clots and all. Such things make an artist feel old. As his followers were
becoming more prominent, De Kooning was easing himself out of Manhattan,
spending more and more time on the South Fork of Long Island. The flat potato
fields, beaches and glittering air of that tongue of land must often have
reminded him of the Dutch seacoast, but what mattered most to his paintings in
the late '50s was the experience of getting there, being driven up Route 495 --
fast movement through unscrolling American highway space. Hence the road
images of 1957-1958, in which the full-reach, broad-brush speed of the paint
becomes a headlong road movie, analogous to Jack Kerouac's writing (though
without its hectoring blither) or the photographs of De Kooning's friend Robert
Frank. See America now! And you do -- in abstraction; you feel its rush and
tonic vitality in the toppling blue strokes of Ruth's Zowie, 1957, which echo
Willem de Kooning Woman, 1943 Franz Kline's big-girder structures but move them into a pastoral context. What
Oil on board, De Kooning found at the end of this highway, however, when he moved
23 1/4 x 23 1/16 in. permanently to Long Island in 1963, was mostly suds and mayonnaise. The long
series of pink squidgy pictures -- landscapes, nudes splayed like frogs in
memory of Dubuffet, and female clam diggers -- that issued from his studio
over the next 15 years was lush and trivial. The drawing is submerged in weak,
declamatory, wambling brushstrokes; the color -- mostly pink -- is bright and
boring. Yet you could never write De Kooning off. He came back in the late
'70s with some big, rapturously congested landscape-body images with a deeper
tonal structure that, though they do not support the comparisons to late Monet,
Renoir, Bonnard `ànd, of course, Titian'' that David Sylvester makes in his
catalog essay, certainly confirm that the movement of De Kooning's talent was
not on-off, but ebb and flow. Then came the thin, pale, intensely lyrical
paintings of the early '80s, which spin away the congestion altogether, and for a
few years recapitulate the graphic intensity of his work in the 1940s, but in
terms of an almost Chinese delicacy, in the colors of famille-rose porcelain.
Looking at them is like seeing an old man's veins through his skin: the abiding
network of the style is set forth, but in its last physical form."Seeing the face in
the fire. by Robert Hughes. Time, 5/30/94, Vol. 143 Issue 22, p62, 3p, 5c
HTML Full Text

Woman IV 1952,

Woman 1954, oil on paper,
25 3/4 in. by 19 5/8 in.
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and
Sculpture
Garden, University of Nebraska-
Lincoln,
F. M. Hall Collection
1955.H-362

Form: "Composition serves as a bridge between the Women and de
Kooning’s next series of work, classified by critic Thomas Hess as the
Abstract Urban Landscapes (1955–58). According to the artist, “the
landscape is in the Woman and there is Woman in the landscapes.” Indeed,
Composition reads as a Woman obfuscated by de Kooning’s agitated
brushwork, clashing colors, and allover composition with no fixed
viewpoint. Completed while the artist had a studio in downtown New York,
Composition’s energized dashes of red, turquoise, and chrome yellow
suggest the frenetic pace of city life, without representing any identifiable
urban inhabitants or forms."( www.guggenheimcollection.org)
Iconography: This early work by DeKooning shows him at his abstract best.
Here it is evident that emotion ruled his paintbrush, as evidenced by his
slashing brushstrokes and violent colors. One would be interested to note,
however, that he did not do his paintings as quickly as it would appear. He
often spent hours agonizing over the strokes, wiping away the paint when it
angered him, leaving it when he felt it was right. This obsession with detail
and feeling in his work may be what adds to it the aura of unease and feeling
of psychological unrest.
Willem de Kooning. Composition, Context: This painting was done a few years after his close friends suicide,
1955. and it is apparent the frustration and unhappiness with which he seems to
Oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas, paint. There is, in popular culture, an ideal of an artist as a struggling,

79 1/8 x 69 1/8 inches. Solomon R. unbalanced, and unhappy head case. Though we as a society may
Guggenheim Museum. romanticize such notions of the awful muse that inspires such work, it can be
difficult to look at this work and not feel empathy for someone who is in
such obvious pain.


Jim Dine and Pop Art

Form: "In 1960 at Reuben Gallery, Dine created
Car Crash, which lasted about 15 minutes; he had
experienced a crash himself the year before. In an
enclosed space in which found objects, all
painted white, were arrayed, Dine, dressed in
silver with silver face paint and red lipstick, kept
drawing anthropomorphic cars on a blackboard.
He seemed to want to speak, to explain, but only
grunted. He drew obsessively, breaking the chalk,
in an effort to communicate."
(www.findarticles.com)
Iconography: Spectators entered an

Environment completely covered in white - white
paint, white cloth, white paper - and took seats in
a U-shaped row of chairs that they found around
them. Looking up, they saw what appeared to be
an 8 foot tall girl clothed in white (it was actually
a regular girl sitting on a ladder, hidden under her
white garments). They watched as a series of
happenings occurred involving a man in silver
with a hat of "headlights" that were pointed to
and for over the audience, and two other
performers, a woman, dressed as a man in a
white suit and a man, dressed as a woman in a
white evening dress. The man and woman
carried flashlights under their arms and whenever
they lit upon the man in silver he grunted as if in
pain, and moved, as if seeking to hide from
them. Throughout the performance, various
sounds of car motors, honking and screeching
tires could be heard, accompanied at times by the
girl on the white ladder reciting a series of words
regarding cars, with a random yet somewhat,
Jim Dine. Car Crash. sexual content.
November 1960 (www.comm.unt.edu)
Context: "A native Cincinnatian born in June

1935, Dine was raised by his maternal
grandparents, who took him in after his mother
died when he was 12 and his remarried father did
not want to provide a home. While still at Walnut
Hills High School, Dine took night classes at
Cincinnati Art Academy, then spent one year at
University of Cincinnati before transferring to
Ohio University, where he graduated in 1957.
Two years later, he moved to New York City.
After briefly teaching art, he began to make his
reputation in the Happenings movement, a form
of usually bizarre performance art - ''painter's
theater,'' in his words - that sought to break down
barriers between life and art."
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/dine_and_pop.html[1/21/2014 4:05:17 PM]

(www.cincypost.com)

Form: A representation of the artists bathrobe, created in mixed media.
Iconography: "Throughout his career Jim Dine incorporated common objects into
his work that were meaningful in his own life--such as tools, bathrobes, and hearts.
Through repetition over time these objects take on meaning for the viewer as well as
the artist." (www.nga.gov) Jim Dine had a great love for hs everyday objects, the
things in which he lived and worked. By creating a work that is based on his own
favorite bathrobe, he is creating a very intimate self portrait of himself. In essence,
who he is as a person and as an artist. On guggenheim.org, the work is interpreted
thusly, "Dine also began to address his identity and physicality through images of
thickly painted palettes (or actual palettes affixed to canvases) and oversize color
charts, which suggest the basic artifacts of his profession and the presence of the
artist. Such references to the self became more direct in 1964 in a series of
assemblages featuring images of men's suits and in another series based on an
illustration of a bathrobe that Dine saw in a newspaper advertisement. A typical
Self Portrait. 1964 mixed media example is Palette (Self-Portrait No. 1) (1964), in which the robe is sharply
delineated and decorated with physical objects (a chain, a watch) and seems to
anticipate inhabitation by the artist's body. Dine went further in exploring his ideas
about objects in a series of painted, three-dimensional sculptures of tools, furniture,
and boots that he began making during a two-year hiatus from painting, starting in
1966. The cool objectivity of the Pop art movement, with which such pedestrian
imagery was irrevocably linked, contrasted with the intimate articulations of Dine's
work and provoked art historian Alan Solomon's 1967 essay about Dine, "Hot Artist
in a Cool Time."
Context: "Dine incorporated images of everyday objects in his art, but he diverged
from the coldness and impersonal nature of pop art by making works that fused
personal passions and everyday experiences. His repeated use of familiar and
personally significant objects, such as a robe, hands, tools, and hearts, is a signature
of his art. In his early work, Dine created mostly assemblages in which he attached
actual objects to his painted canvases." (www.e-fineart.com)
Robe 1976
Form: Paint on canvas, set up to resemble a traditional color chart.
Iconography: Jim Dine did series that were based on his own life as an artist
and the things that were important to him. He did a series of these studies of
color charts in preparation for a major painting entitled 'red devil color chart'.
The drips and somewhat haphazard application of the paint into the squares
may be a statement on how his art 'drips' into his everyday life, how it colors
everything he does. An excerpt from the Guggenheim museum states.... "and
oversize color charts, which suggest the basic artifacts of his profession and

the presence of the artist."
Context: This painting was done in 1963, when Jim Dine was helping to shape
the Pop Art movement and was doing repetitive series of works such as color
charts, palletes, shoes, clothing, etc. His work at this point was dealing directly
with the things that are used in everyday life.
Jim Dine. Study for a Color Chart.
1963
Form: Tools attached to a painted canvas.
Iconography: According to NY arts magazine, in an article published in March

1999, "Dine belonged to the group of pioneers who experimented with
"happenings" and Conceptual Art in the late 1950's. Dine manipulated everyday
tools with a child's aggressive handling of toys. He spilled color over his tools and
spray-painted objects from his grandfather's hardware store. The most impressive
work of this period is Five Feet of Colorful Tools-a yellowish canvas dominated
by an assemblage of polychrome hanging tools set against their bright gun-sprayed
shadows. The Jim Dine exhibition exceeds all expectations: ambiguous, annoying,
assaulting, exacerbating and embarrassingly banal."
Context: This piece is following Jim Dines early love affair with the everyday
object. Taking it and manipulating it so that it becomes a work of art.
Jim Dine. Tools and Canvas.

c1960

Form: Etching with watercolor additions
Iconography: Jim Dine was adept at printmaking as well as painting and

collage. This piece goes along with the earlier work he did, 'Tools and
Canvas'. He is taking the everyday objects which he uses, whether in daily
life or for his art, and rendering them with artistic grace into an etching. He
was so entranced with these seemingly mundane objects that he eventually
decided they were all his "self portraits."
Context: "As an avid printmaker, Dine's virtuosity, penchant for innovation,

and ability to tap into the vagaries of the human psyche has resulted in
countless works of indisputable power and beauty. During the last fifteen
years, Dine's imagery has evolved in extraordinary ways. New iconic

elements - the owl, raven, ape, cat, and Pinocchio - supplement his signature
repertory of hearts, hands, skulls, tools, and robes. He continually turns to
familiar images such as the Venus de Milo, trees, and flowers to evoke a
variety of emotional responses. Each one of these old and new motifs
resonates with the artist's life experiences, to such a degree that he has
openly declared them self-portraits. Now into the twenty first century, Dine
Chinese Scissors 1974 continues to dazzle with iconic and technical innovations that build on and
enhance his earlier efforts." (taken from www.absolutearts.com)
Form: Acrylic on canvas, with the addition of a blue C clamp.
Iconography: Once again, he is using easily recognizable and familiar

icons, in this case, a heart. Most of Jim Dines work is happy, meant to
show an affinity for something or some ideal. This work, however, has
a bit of an ominous feel to it, with the addition of the clamp in the
center of the heart. It would seem to suggest something squeezing or
'clamping' the heart, perhaps a type of physical or emotional pain. The
heart is also painted a dark, scarlet red and is covered with other layers
of browns, blues and blacks, the colors most generally associated with
depression. Without an outside frame of reference the viewer is left to
discern for themselves what the underlying message may be. There is
nothing else on the canvas to suggest what the source of pain may be,
or indeed, if the clamp is indicative of pain at all.
Context: Entering the 1980's, a period in American life best known for
its' excess, greed, and materialism, Dines work became more of a
commentary on what he observed in the world, and began to have a
much more political slant to it. It would lead some to infer that the
Blue Clamp 1981 change in societal values towards the material is what causes ones'
heart to hurt. Or it could be as simple as the passing of time makes the
artist realize his own mortality.

Form: Hand colored lithograph.
Iconography: Here Jim Dine is once again using his robe motif, which he has been
fond of throughout his career. Since we know that he considered these images to be
self portraits, we may safely assume that this is a comment on self. The title would
suggest that he is calling himself an atheist, but as the viewer examines the print
closer, they may notice that the tree sprouting from the top of the robe is being
threatened by a large and sharp-looking saw. It may be suggestive that if one is to
become an atheist, they are cutting their own self down, destroying a life. It ma even
be as simple as a proclamation for his love of nature, to cut down a tree would show

a disrespect for God, the destruction of a living thing makes one akin to an atheist. In
either interpretation, it would be difficult to make a case for the artist himself as an
atheist, since he professed a love for the simple things in life and appreciated the
inherent beauty of nature.
Context: Again, the symbols of the artists' own life are used and re-used in different
scenarios in order to create a new meaning. In this case, late in the 1980s, he is
becoming more blatant in his goal, more about his beliefs and less about the objects
Atheism 1986 themselves.

Form: Monotype print.
Iconography: Jim Dine wife, Nancy Dine, is figured prominently in his work
throughout his career. The early hearts he created, both in sculpture and in
prints and painting, are dedicated to her, as well as numerous figure studies
and installation pieces. This piece of art is a divergence from his usual
symbols, but can nonetheless be said to be extremely representative of his life.
She can be said to be as much of a self portrait for her husband as the robes
and tools, since her influence on his life was so great, and his love for her was
so strong. It is important to note that he created this print of her as she looked.
Historically, an artist will tend to flatter a female subject by fudging the facial
features, smoothing the skin, in essence making her look beautiful and
unrealistic. By making a true representation of his wife, he is saying that he
loves her unconditionally for who she is in his life, she is no an image to be
toyed with.
Context: Jim Dines wife was always involved with his career, supporting it
and playing a vital role in its' management. It is no wonder that he chooses to
honor her by including her in the art itself, because she was the reason much
Nancy 1980's
of it was done in the first place.


Performance Art
Performance Art

Form: The artist, with a dead bunny. Smeared with felt, fat
and grease. or, alternately, honey and gold leaf.
Iconography: "The bridge between the earthly and spiritual

realms is represented in Beuys' work more often by animals,
which he thought of as "figures that pass freely from one level
of existence to another." In many cultures animals are
guardian spirits for shamans, companions on their celestial
journeys. Beuys often used animals in his actions, bringing
them along, so to speak, on his own journeys. He carried a
dead hare in several early performances, shared the stage with
a spectral white horse in the action Titus/Iphigenia (1969),
and most famously, spent a week in a gallery space with a
coyote in I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), an
action described as a "dialogue" with the animal. All of these
performances suggest the shaman's special affinity with
animals: he can understand their language, share their
particular abilities, even transform himself into one of them.
Beuys identified personally with several animals, most notably
the hare. He always carried a rabbit's foot or tuft of rabbit fur
as a talisman,and jokingly cited the pointed shape of his ears
as proof of his close relationship to the creature. He also had
an affinity for the stag, an animal with deep ties to Germanic
legend and northern myth; he sometimes referred to himself as
"stagleader. And in the multiple A Party for Animals (1969),
he simply declared himself to be an animal by including his
own name--along with those of the
elk, wolf, beaver, horse, stork, and many others--on the list of
the party's "active members." For Beuys, maintaining a close
relationship with animals was crucial for him so that he could
learn from what he believed was their superior intelligence
(intuition)." (By Joan Rothfuss, www.walkerart.org)
What we see in this piece is Beuys communicating with his
favorite animal, the rabbit, while covered with felt and fat.
However, what we can not be sure about is the particular
iconography of Beuys using a dead hare, rather than a living
one. Is he perhaps trying to say that a dead rabbit understands
art better than a living person? Perhaps. In fact, according to
an essay by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Some
conceptual artists do away with the art object by becoming the
art object. Live performance provides a perfect place to
express ideas directly to an audience. German artist Joseph
Beuys believed passionately that art should change the way
people think. To that end, he staged dramatic, usually shocking
presentations. His How to Explain Picture to a Dead Hare was
a performance in several parts. First, he covered his head in
honey and gold leaf. Then, Beuys picked up a dead hare and
walked it around an exhibition of his paintings and drawings.
Finally, sitting on a stool, he explained his works to the hare.
The artist explained, "even in death a hare has more sensitivity
and instinctive understanding than some men with their

Performance Art
stubborn rationality." (www.philamuseum.org)
Context: He was in world war one, and was shot down. He

was burnt over 70% of his body and had been wrapped in fat
and felt to help him heal. When he got better, he decided he
would make art that was all about peace.....or, more in depth, is
a biography by Joan Rothfuss, Walker art curator..."Joseph
Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a city in northwestern
Joseph Beuys.
Germany near the Dutch border. He grew up in the nearby
How to Explain Art to a Dead Hare. 1965
towns of Kleve and Rindern, the only child in a middle class,
strongly Catholic family. During his youth he pursued dual
interests in the natural sciences and art, and he chose a career
in medicine. In 1940 he joined the military, volunteering in
order to avoid the draft. He was trained as an aircraft radio
operator and combat pilot, and during his years of active duty
he was seriously wounded numerous times. At the end of the
war he was held in a British prisoner-of-war camp for several
months, and returned to Kleve in 1945.
Coming to terms with his involvement in the war was a long
process and figures, at least obliquely, in much of his artwork.
Beuys often said that his interest in fat and felt as sculptural
materials grew out of a wartime experience--a plane crash in
the Crimea, after which he was rescued by nomadic Tartars
who rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt to heal and
Picture of the artist.
warm his body. While the story appears to have little
grounding in real events (Beuys himself downplayed its
importance in a 1980 interview), its poetics are strong enough
to have made the story one of the most enduring aspects of his
mythic biography. On his return from the war Beuys
abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled in
the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture. He
graduated in 1952, and during the next years focused on
drawing--he produced thousands during the 1950s alone--and
reading, ranging freely through philosophy, science, poetry,
literature, and the occult. He married in 1959 and two years
later, at the age of 40, was appointed to a professorship at his
alma mater. During the early 1960s, Düsseldorf developed into
an important center for contemporary art and Beuys became
acquainted with the experimental work of artists such as Nam
June Paik and the Fluxus group, whose public "concerts"
brought a new fluidity to the boundaries between literature,
music, visual art, performance, and everyday life. Their ideas
were a catalyst for Beuys' own performances, which he called
"actions," and his evolving ideas about how art could play a

Performance Art
wider role in society. He began to publicly exhibit his large-

scale sculptures, small objects, drawings, and room
installations. He also created numerous actions and began
making editioned objects and prints called multiples.
(www.walkerart.org)

Form: The artist, wrapped in felt and
holding a cane. Inside a gallery space with
a wild coyote. This type of performance art
is known as an 'action'.
Iconography: " Beuys' actions were often

described as intimate, autobiographical,
politically charged, and intense. Actions
would typically last 45 minutes to nine
hours, and though his actions were not
rehearsed, Beuys often created a score or
"partitur" (as opposed to a script) in which
he would plan the objects that would be
used and the sequence of the performance.
Beuys viewed each action as a new
version of a basic theme and an attempt to
make his philosophy more comprehensible.
He also believed that the less literal the
performances were, the easier it would be
for the audience members to translate his
message into their own lives. Beuys
traveled to the United States in 1974 and
performed an action entitled I like America
and America Likes Me at the René Block
Gallery in New York. The action actually
began at Kennedy Airport, where friends
wrapped him in felt and transported him to
the gallery in an ambulance. Beuys then
spent several days in a room with only a
felt blanket, a flashlight, a cane that looked
like a shepherd's staff, copies of the Wall
Street Journal (which were delivered
daily), and a live coyote. His choice of
employing a coyote was perhaps an
acknowledgment of an animal that holds
great spiritual significance for Native
Americans, or a commentary on a country
that through its Western expansion had
become "lost"America." (By Joan
Rothfuss, www.walkerart.org) This is a
good explanation for what happened, that
the viewer could see, but the meaning for
Beuys went much deeper. He was German-
born, and had a hard time with America
and how America treated him as an artist
and its' wildlife. In an essay written by

Performance Art
David Levi Strauss, this ambivalence is

studied in greater detail, "By most
accounts, the American audiences for
Beuys's public dialogues in January1974
(arranged by Ronald Feldman) also didn't
quite know how to take Beuys. His
reputation for provocation and controversy
had preceded him, but the substance of his
teachings had not, so much of the time of
these meetings was taken up by the most
preliminary clarification of terms. When
the dialogues did break through to more
substantive exchange, the audiences often
seemed caught on the horns of a
particularly (though not exclusively)
American dilemma: How can we embrace
Beuys's idealism (which is akin to our
own) without denying its profound
opposition to the materialism which also
defines us. For his part, Beuys was equally
ambivalent about America. As his
influence spread in Europe, he continually
declined invitations to come to the U.S. or
show in the U.S., saying he would not
come as long as the U.S. remained in
Vietnam. When he finally did come in
1974, he tried to engage Americans in two
very different kinds of dialogue. Four
months after his largely unsuccessful
public dialogues and lectures on his
Energy Plan for the Western Man in New
York, Minneapolis, and Chicago, Beuys
performed his first and only aktion in
America, and this second contact was
fittingly traumatic. You could say that a
reckoning has to be made with the coyote,
and only then can this trauma be lifted. (8)
For three days in May of 1974, Joseph
Beuys lived and communicated with a
coyote in a small room in the newly-
opened Rene Block Gallery at 409 West
Broadway in New York. Though actually
witnessed by only a handful of people, this
action, I Like America and America Likes
Me, awakened the interest and curiosity of
many who heard about it, far and wide.
Along with Beuys's golden-flaked honeyed
head in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead
Hare (1965), and the glowing white horse
and cymbals of Iphigenie/Titus Andronicus
(1969), images of the Coyote action are
among the most resilient and generative
images to come out of Beuys's
performance work. Caroline Tisdall, author

Performance Art
of the book documenting the Coyote

action, has elsewhere written, "The
represented environment must effect the
modern consciousness originally,
archetypically and beyond the times." (9)
Perhaps more than any other, Beuys's
American action was projected "beyond
the times." Fifteen years after the act and
three years after Beuys's death is perhaps a
good time to make an inquiry into the
further meanings of the Coyote action, and
to reconsider its significance.
Coyote in America
Coyote, ululating on the hill,
is it my fire that distresses you so?
Or the memories of long ago
when you were a man roaming the hills.
(10)
Native American Coyote tales speak of a
time long ago "when animals were people"
and everyone communicate with each
other. Though there are many different
kinds of Coyote tales, varying from place
to place and people to people, they flow
from a common, ancient source and
represent "one of man's earliest attempts to
make articulate the movement of the
Spirit." (11)
The Coyote of the Coyote tales is
primarily a transformer, an agent of
change
bringing order to chaos and chaos to
order. He is "the spirit of disorder, the
enemy of boundaries." (12) In much of
Western North America he fills the role of
Culture Hero and Trickster, found in
virtually all traditional societies. He is an
American Zeus, Prometheus, Orpheus, and
Hermes all rolled into one: mating to
create the human race, inventing death,
stealing fire to give to humans,
shapeshifter, androgyne, messenger and
guide to the Underworld. In whatever
guise, Coyote makes things happen. In
contrast to the virtuous gods and heroes of
some other traditions, the Coyote of
Coyote tales is by turns greedy, lecherous,
deceitful, vain, jealous, and gullible. The
poet Gary Snyder has pointed out the
"Rabelaisian-Dadaist overtones" of the
Coyote tales. (13) It is typical of Native
American thought that comic indirection
paradoxically indicates the way of right
action. There is more than a little Coyote

Performance Art
in Buster Keaton. During Sacred Time, the

time of Creation, Coyote taught humans
how to survive, and the incredible survival
of the coyote, both mythologically and
biologically, continues to be one of the
great American mysteries...The Coyote
action was performed in the shadow of the
twin towers of the World Trade Center, on
a postcard of which Beuys inscribed the
names "Cosmos" and "Damian" in one of
his multiples (made the same year as the
Coyote action), as a comment on the
commercialization of allopathy and as an
homage to the greatest physician in the
Joseph Beuys. history of Europe, Paracelsus, who was
I Like America and America Likes Me. 1974 born the year after Columbus "discovered
America," and assassinated 48 years later
by men in the employ of irate druggists
and doctors. Legend has it that Paracelsus
was captured by the Tartars while in
Russia and was schooled in their shamanic
healing arts. Beuys's intentions in the
Coyote action were primarily therapeutic.
Using shamanic techniques appropriate to
the coyote, his own characteristic tools,
and a widely syncretic symbolic language,
he engaged the coyote in a dialogue to get
to "the psychological trauma point of the
United States' energy constellation";
namely, the schism between native
intelligence and European mechanistic,
materialistic, and positivistic values. This
is the dialogue he tried and failed to have
with people in his Energy Plan for the
Western Man tour earlier that year. In
turning to the coyote, he moved from
verbal language to the language of action.
The conceptual simplicity of the Coyote
action--"a man in a room with a coyote"--
combines with its semiotic complexity to
allow entrances and readings at many
different levels."
(David Levi Strauss from his recent book
between dog & wolf, Essays on Art and
Politics, pubished by Autonomedia,
Brooklyn, NY, 1999

Context: An excerpt from the same essay

Performance Art
can be used to explain the context of what

he was doing in the gallery with the
coyote, "Upon arrival in the room with the
coyote, Beuys began an orchestrated
sequence of actions to be repeated over
and over in the next three days. A triangle
is struck three times to begin the sequence.
This triangle that Beuys wears pendant
around his neck is the alchemical sign for
fire (dry, fiery, choleric warmth), which
ancient glacial Eurasian shamans sorely
needed. It is also a sign for the feminine
element (earthy & mercurial) and for the
creative intellect, and it is the Pythagorean
symbol for wisdom. Striking its three sides
three times, Beuys calls himself, Coyote,
and the Audience to order. After the
triangle is struck, a recording of loud
turbine engine noise is played outside the
enclosure, signifying "indetermined
energy" and calling up a chaotic vitality.
At this point, Beuys pulls on his gloves,
reminiscent of the traditional bear-claw
gloves worn by "master of animals"
shamans such as those depicted on the
walls of Tros Freres, and gets into his fur
pelt/felt, wrapping it around himself so that
he disappear into it with the flashlight. He
then extends the crook of his staff out from
the opening at the top of the felt wrap, as
an energy conductor and receptor, antenna
or lightning rod. The conical shape of the
felt resembles a tipi, the nomadic shelter
which migrated. from Siberia to North
America with the hunters. Topped with the
crooked staff, it also recalls both the stag
and the shape of the lightning in Lightning
with Stag in Its Glare (1958-85), and is a
reference to the classic shamanic antlered
mask, also going back to the caves of the
Upper Paleolithic, as does Beuys's
"Eurasian staff," the shamanic phallos
(Coyote carried his around in a box on his
back) and staff of the psychopomp--
messenger and mediator. The felt
enclosure doubles as a sweat lodge for
Beuys, accumulating the heat necessary for
transformation. Beuys bends at the waist
and follows the movements of the coyote
around the room, keeping the receptor/staff
pointed in the coyote's direction at all
times. When the beam of the flashlight is
glimpsed from beneath the felt, we
recognize the figure of the Hermit from

Performance Art
the Tarot--an old man with a staff, holding

a lighted lamp half-hidden by t he great
mantle which envelopes him. This card in
the Tarot indicates wisdom,
circumspection, and protection. It refers to
the developed mind of man, the prudence
and foresight of learning, and is thought by
some to picture Hermes, the Messenger,
signifying active divine inspiration and
"unexpected current." (21) Arthur Edward
Waite gives the sense of the Hermit's
lantern as "where I am, you also may be."
(22) After awhile, Beuys emerges from the
felt and walks to the edge of the room,
marking the end of the sequence of
gestures. There is a pile of straw, another
piece of felt, and stacks of each day's Wall
Street Journal in the room. Beuys sleeps on
the coyote's straw; the coyote sleeps on
Beuys's felt. The copies of the Wall Street
Journal arrive each day from outside (like
the engine noise) and enter the dialogue as
evidence of the limits of materialist
thinking." (David Levi Strauss from his
recent book between dog & wolf, Essays
on Art and Politics, pubished by
Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY, 1999

Form: Performance piece involving metal wires inserted into the
artists' chest.
Iconography: Chris Burden put long metal wires into his chest and
had himself photographed with these wires protruding from his chest.
His performance pieces are often compared to the stunts performed on
the MTV show Jackass, in which young men perform asinine stunts
which often result in pain and laughter, all because they can. However,
it may also be said that he is part of the sub-culture known as the
'modern primitive', in which people engage in forms of piercing,
tattooing, bloodletting and ancient shamanic rituals such as suspension
in order to push their physical bodies to the limits of pain in order to
achieve a higher level of spirituality. The argument against including
him into this group is the fact that he chooses to display these rituals,
there is no preparation nor meditation beforehand, and it would appear
that there is a stronger argument for his work to be done for pure shock
value.
Context:" Quick, can you name the American artist who famously
stuffed himself into his campus locker and remained there for seven
days? If your answer is Chris Burden, then you know your modern
artists. Burden pulled the locker stunt as his MFA thesis project and
went on to stage many other similar conceptual/action art pieces

Performance Art
(including shooting himself in the leg as a one-off performance piece)

in the course of his long and colorful career. Burden belongs to a
generation of earnest, loopy, brave, comical, and visionary artists who
tried to change the way we look at art. In pursuit of this mission,
Burden also created installations, one of which is included in "Blurring
the Boundaries: Installation Art, 1969-1996," the new exhibition at the
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art. Burden's piece, titled The Reason for
Chris Burden. Doorway to Heaven. 1973 the Neutron Bomb, consists of 50,000 nickels with match tips glued to
their faces lying in perfectly symmetrical rows on a platform just
above the floor. It is a forceful image of order, power, and industry
which rises up to fill the space and overwhelm the viewer. Up close,
the nickels seem small, the explosive capabilities of the match heads
comical. Paradoxically, from further away, their combined energy is
cold and sinister. Using multiple perspectives to get at meaning and
altering the way a viewer interacts with a work is typical of installation
art. You cannot simply stand a short distance from the image and size
it up as with a conventional medium like painting. To begin with, it is
hard to know where to stand to really see the object. Instead, an
installation requires that you cross the boundaries of a conventional art
experience and become part of the work itself."
(www.austinchronicle.com)
Form: Artist, gun, bullet.
Iconography: If there were ever an argument for calling an artist a

jackass, this would be it. According to an article on www.disinfo.com,
"On November 19, 1971, 25-year-old performance artist Chris Burden
had one friend shoot him in the arm at close range, while another filmed
it. Burden made a few thousand off the sale of his accomplishment,
simply titled, "Shoot." His resulting medical bills surpassed $84,000."
However, though it may seem pointless, stupid and painful, there are
many in the performance art genre whom see it as a valid and important
form of self expression.

Context: According to a synopsis found at Electronic Arts Intermix,

which has documented his work on film..." Chris Burden's provocative,
often shocking conceptual performance pieces of the early 1970s retain

Performance Art
their raw and confrontational force in these dramatic visual records,

shot on Super-8, 16mm film, and half-inch video. Guided by the artist's
candid, explanatory comments on both the works and the
documentative process, these segments reveal the major themes of
Burden's work -- the psychological experience of danger, pain, and
physical risk, the aggressive abuse of the body as an art object, and the
psychology of the artist/spectator relationship. This compilation is an
historical document of one of the most extreme manifestations of 1970s
conceptual performance art. Included are the infamous Shoot (1971), in
which Burden allows himself to be shot in the arm." (www.eai.org)
Chris Burden. Shoot. 1975
Form: Chris Burden nailed himself to a Volkswagen Beetle and had other artists
drive it around.
Iconography: "in a small garage to the Speedway Avenue I stood on the rear
bumper of a people car. With the back on its tail lying, stretched I mean arms over
the roof. Nails were driven by my palms into the roof of the car. The garage gate
was opened and the car half from the garage was pushed onto the road. For two
minutes with full number of revolutions constantly, the machine for me cried.
After two minutes the engine was turned off and the car into the garage was
pushed back. The gate was closed." (Chris Burden, Transfixed, Venice,California,
23. April1974) (memopolis.uni-regensburg.de)
Chris Burden is again playing with the idea of mechanical objects, becoming a
part of the object, literally, and trying to 'feel' through the object. Much in the
same way in which Joseph Bueys had communed with the animal world , Chris
Burden was communing with the mechanical world.
Context: The artist is using non-living, mechanical objects and trying to infuse
Chris Burden. Transfixed. 1974 them with his living, organic presence. To hear his own interpretation and context
for this piece, please click the link beneath the photo of the work.
http://www.artnode.se/burden/


Performance Art


Pop
Pop Art, Raushenberg, Johns, Dine, Indiana, Demuth

Form: A collage created with found objects, paint, and pictures.
Iconography: A paper written by Mark Robinson, at the Baltimore Museum of

Art states that...."A work that epitomizes Rauschenberg's combine theory is
Canyon. Created in 1959, this piece combines fabric, cardboard, paper,
photographs, metal, paint and other elements with collage work and several
striking 3D elements -- namely, a stuffed bald eagle perched on a box and a
suspended pillow. The most striking elements of this work are, obviously, the
eagle and the pillow. Upon first seeing the work, the viewer is immediately drawn
in it, his or her curiosity sparked by this odd inclusion of "non-artistic" elements.
By attaching the eagle and pillow to the piece, Rauschenberg is making a
statement about the acceptance of everyday objects as possible materials for art
(he was no doubt influenced by Marcel Duchamp in this respect). The
incorporation of the eagle, perched and ready to attack, makes a bold statement
about the often-confrontational nature of Rauschenberg's work. The bald eagle
itself is an already loaded image, as it is often seen as a symbol of patriotism.
This eagle, however, is by no means patriotic -- it is a fierce creature,
recontextualized by its surroundings. The pillow, on the other hand, places an
emphasis on the more symbolic nature of Canyon. Visually, it seems to give
weight to the piece, almost pulling it down off the wall. More importantly,
however, it adds a sexual symbolism to the piece. It evokes images of male and
female sexuality -- namely the male genitalia and the female breasts. Because it
is a pillow, it is soft and comforting, a stark contrast to the confrontational eagle.
While the three-dimensional objects dominate the lower part of the piece, the top
is comprised primarily of a collage of many different types of media. This
collage, in fact, takes up nearly two-thirds of the canvas. Although easily
overlooked because of the visual dominance of the eagle and pillow, it provides
both a background and a context for the lower part of the piece. For example, the
photograph of the small child reaching upward is a direct reference to the perched
eagle below. Many of the elements included in the work make references to
popular culture -- a magazine spread, found domestic photographs and a picture
of the statue of liberty, to name a few. This further emphasizes Rauschenberg's
RAUSCHENBERG, Robert. theory about everyday objects as art. This is probably the most important theme
Canyon. 1959 presented in Canyon and it is shown with both subtlety and excess."
Combine on canvas 81 3/4 x 70 x (wmbc.umbc.edu)
24 in.
Collection Mr and Mrs Sonabend, Context: "Robert Rauschenberg began creating his combines in the 1950s. These
works have their origins in traditional paintings -- many of the early combines are
Paris
presented on a canvas and are hung on a wall. What sets the combines apart from
their painting brethren are their three-dimensionality. Eventually this focus was
taken to the extreme and many of the combines moved off the wall altogether and
became freestanding objects. Rauschenberg incorporated many elements other
than canvas and paint into these pieces. Elements of collage (which had been
present in his earlier works) were incorporated, as well as found objects. He
called this process "assemblage" (1). Rauschenberg "broke down barriers between
painting and sculpture by incorporating [these] everyday objects such as Coca-
Cola bottles, clothing, newspaper clippings, taxidermied animals, and
photographs" (2). In addition to breaking down barriers between painting and
sculpture, he was also breaking down barriers between the art world and the
outside world. By including objects like Coca-Cola bottles and newspaper

Pop
clippings, he was making references to popular culture. This pop culture

referencing would later explode into the "pop-art" movement of the 1960s."
(wmbc.umbc.edu)
Collage Education
Rauschenberg’s Combines, now at the Met, are rich and dense in a way that has to be seen to be believed.

* By Mark Stevens

* Published Dec 18, 2005
Rauschenberg's Canyon (1959), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Early in the twentieth century, artists began jumping out art’s window. The Russian modernists soared into the
revolutionary sky. The Dadaists, arching an eyebrow, admired the cracked glass. The Cubists couldn’t stop blinking,
beautifully agog. At mid-century, Robert Rauschenberg went through the window with American gusto. He had an
appetite for the churning street outside, and he seemed full of jazzy slang. He was rude—vitally and impishly rude—in
a way no American painter (except the de Kooning of Woman I) had ever been before him. He’d put anything in art:
postcards, socks, street junk, paint, neckties, wire, cartoons, even stuffed animals. Especially stuffed animals. The
absurdist taxidermy was funny as well as provocative. The goat-and-rooster shtick made wicked fun of both the macho
posturing of the fifties and the holy pomposities then gathering around painting. Sometimes, art needs a good rooster
squawk.
Once through the window, Rauschenberg had one of the great, decade-long runs in American art, which is now the
subject of “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Organized by Paul Schimmel of the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—Nan Rosenthal oversaw the installation at the Met—the exhibit includes
67 works created between 1954 and 1964. Among them are both famous works (the goatish Monogram) and rarely
exhibited pieces. Rauschenberg himself invented the term “Combines” to describe a pungent style of mix-and-match
collage. In his oeuvre, this early decade of the Combines, especially the first five years, matters the most. It anticipates
much that came later, and it raises an important question: Are the Combines less than meets the eye, a slapdash
everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style that ultimately just celebrates energy for energy’s sake?
They’re more than meets the eye. My first impression of the show—before looking at the imagery—was one of a
controlled, formal richness. An artist in love with the hot and messy splash of inspiration, of course, but also one
who’s knotty, thoughtful, and considered. Rauschenberg mostly worked with what Rosenthal calls a “syncopated grid,”
a formal structure within which he weighted and composed lights, colors, and shapes. In an image like Canyon, for
example, he calculated how the weight of the hanging bag sets off the strength of the eagle’s wings as it pulls upward
into the image-laden sky. Reproductions don’t convey the tactile feeling of Rauschenberg’s color. His surfaces are
rich, steeped, time-marinated.
As you draw closer to a Combine, its imagery begins to come into focus, and everything starts to connect and connect
and connect. You find that not only do the blacks in Canyon rhyme with the bird’s wings; so does that ribbing in the
upper right, which mirrors the tips of the outstretched feathers. (And there’s wt., the abbreviation for “weight,” within
the same ribbed black.) Canyon takes its inspiration in part from a Rembrandt Ganymede that depicts an eagle pulling
a heavy, bawling boy into the air, one who looks rather like the child in the snapshot in the Combine; the hanging bag
evokes the boy’s buttocks. Connections zigzag across mental boundaries. Weight, for example, can be literal or
illusory, a matter of words, images, colors, and shapes.
There’s an argument that art should probe deeply, that it should rigorously edit experience in order to reach some
bedrock essence. Nothing wrong with that. Rauschenberg’s endless connections, some lighthearted and some not, do
something else. He celebrates the floating textures of consciousness—the way the mind moves, wanders, and joins
together. One of my favorite Combines, Hymnal, contains (among much else) a book, a piece of paisley that looks the
way hymns sound, and some ill-tempered graffiti. It can be good to concentrate on the hymn alone. It can also be
good, as you pick up the hymnal, to acknowledge the message scratched on the pew.

Pop
Robert Rauschenberg: Combines

Metropolitan Museum of Art.
December 20 through april 2.

Form: 'Assemblage' collage.
Iconography: At the Sir John Cass department of art,

Kirk Lake had this to write about this work done by
Raushenberg, "It is worth looking at one of
Rauschenberg's "combine paintings" in more detail.
In Rebus (1955) Rauschenberg set out to realise "a
concentration"
18 of the particular area of New York that he was in
at the time of its composition. This he did by
collaging items found in the vicinity into the painting
stating that "a picture is more like the real world
when it's made out of the real world."19 A statement
Burroughs would echo on numerous occasions and
one that reflects Schwitters' comments about
Merzbau quoted earlier. The title "Rebus" implies
that the picture represents some kind of solvable
conundrum and the critic Charles Stuckey went so far
as to deduce its literal meaning by decoding its
images until the painting read, "That reproduces
sundry cases of childish and comic coincidence to be
read by eyes opened finally to a pattern of abstract
problems."20 Whether this literal reading had
anything at all to do with Rauschenberg or his
intentions or was merely an example of over-analysis
and the need to put boundaries on that which appears
boundless is debatable but Stuckey accurately pin-
pointed the purpose of this kind of work by
concluding that the painter had "force[d] an
awareness of how we see, by making us share the
Robert Rauschenberg. Rebus, 1955 tangents and confusions, childish, comic, and
Combine painting: oil, paper, fabric, pencil, coincidental ones which [Rauschenberg] himself
crayon, newspaper, and printed reproductions endured while facing the abstract problems of making
on three canvases art."21 The importance of these random factors,
8 feet x 10 feet 10 1/2 inches (243,8 x 331,5 cm.) overall coincidences and jarring juxtapositions is integral to
Private collection Courtesy Guggenheim Museum, New York our understanding of the methodology and purpose of
these experiments as they mutated through Dada and
Surrealism, Cage and Rauschenberg and Burroughs
and Gysin and on into the Pop Artists, conceptualists
and contemporary multi-media artists."
(http://www.lgu.ac.uk/matrix2001/rp_timeline.html)
Context: A rebus is, by definition "A representation

of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often
presented as a puzzle." We can see by the linear way
in which Raushenberg had laid out this painting that
it can be read from left to right, and with pictures
forming a type of pictograph or cryptic language, it is
up to the viewer to solve the puzzle.

Pop
Form: Pillow, quilt, paint, wood, various other painting materials.
Iconography: According to Frazier Moore, Associated Press television writer in the South
Coast Today Newspaper..."As a young artist, he awoke one morning with an urge to paint but
no money for a canvas. Solution: He appropriated his own pillow and quilt caking them with
paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish, then mounting this concoction on a frame. "Bed" set off
fireworks in the art world." However, that would be too simplistic an explanation. It was widely
known that Raushenberg was gay, and the lover of the equally well known Jasper Johns. His
'Bed' assemblage create controversy in Italy, where they refused to display it because it was
'shocking'. In the contemporary gay community this creation is thought to represent a bed shared
b Raushenberg and Johns, and perhaps is reminiscent of the aftermath of their 'artistic
lovemaking'. Whatever the true reason behind the piece, it has remained one of the more
controversial pieces of his career, though by the standards of Modern Art today, it is not
shocking at all.
RAUSCHENBERG, Context: In Rauschenberg's own words about his artwork, "A pair of stockings isn't less suitable
to create an artwork, than nails, wood, turpentine, oil or cloth." and, "Rather I put my trust in
Robert Bed 1955 the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the
Combine painting unknown. It is then that I begin to work... when I don´t have the comfort and sureness and
6'2" x 31 1/2" x 6 certainty, sometimes Jack Daniels helps too."
1/2"
Mr and Mrs Leo
Castelli,
New York
Form: Asemblage of painting and objects on canvas.
Iconography: "Field Painting, for example, pivots references both to art-making and Johns’
own career. The primary colors red, yellow, and blue are spelled out in letters hinged
perpendicularly to the canvas, where they also appear in stencil-like doubles. Attached to
them are various studio tools. The Savarin coffee tin and Ballantine beer can both allude to
Johns' studio paraphernalia and to his appropriation of them as motifs in his work. Passages
of smeared and dripped paint, a footprint, light switch, and a neon “R” collude with other
visual codes to multiply the possibility of associations." ( www.nga.gov)

Context: 'Field Painting' as an art form was made most popular by Mark Rothko. It is a
technique by which large 'fields' of color are painted on a canvas, and they are supposed to
either recede or move forward when stared out, depending on whether they are warm or cool
colors, and what relation they are to each other. Johns' is playing a game, much like
Raushenberg, by playing with the words and their meanings in context to the images.
Johns. Field Painting.
1964

Form: Wood, canvas, encaustic, and newspaper

Pop
Iconography: "The story is 'I dreamt one night

that I painted the flag of America. The next day I
did it.' This sounds like an episode in the life of a
biblical prophet. At least one great painter of our
time, Francis Bacon, seems to have seen himself
as that: 'I don't think I'm gifted; I just think I'm
receptive ... I think I have this peculiar kind of
sensibility as a painter where things are handed to
me and I just use them . . . I suppose I'm lucky in
that images just drop in as if they were handed
down to me.' Johns might well have felt that
images were being handed down to him not only
when he first did the flag in 1954 but also when he
first did targets and the figure 5 in 1955 and
alphabets in 1956 and numbers and all-over grey
brushstrokes in 1957 and sculpmetal bulbs and
flashlights in 1958 and 0 through 9 and
polychromatic explosions with superimposed
stencilled words in 1959 and painted ale cans in
1960 and the map of the USA in 1961 and the
Skin drawings in 1962. It was as if for those nine
years Johns was in a perpetual state of grace. And
as if a voice from above then said: 'Jasper, we've
done enough for you; you're on your own now.'
Suddenly the boy genius had to become a man.
Hitherto the struggle had been confined to the
realisation of the image; from now on Johns was
going to have to hunt the image down. It is true
that the legendary passing encounters while out on
drives with the prototypes of the pavingstones and
the cross-hatching are about finds rather than
hunts - but they were still finds, not revelations.
(By the way, it was in 1963 that Johns first
consented to give a serious interview, as if he
Jasper Johns. Flag. 1955 were now responsible for what he did.)" (Take
wood, canvas, encaustic, and newspaper from www.artchive.com)
It can be difficult, at first, to look at a painting of
a symbol so easily recognized and reproduced as
the American flag and see it as fine art. But it
must be remembered that it is the materials used
and way that the objects were being created that
was unique for the time, and challenging.
Context: Johns may or may not be playing

another visual game with the viewers, it can be
hard to tell with a piece as straightforward in
imagery and meaning. There are no other
indicators to suggest that he had an alternate
agenda or political goal in creating the art. With
the artists cryptic explanation that he had dreamt
of painting the flag, the message becomes yet
more obscure, simplified down to a nonchalant
shrug of the shoulders, the answer to why? is
simply, 'because.'

Pop

Form: Plaster molds, paint, canvas.
Iconography: "....Something akin to this game of hide-and-seek with public

symbols happened with his target paintings. Everyone "knows" what a target
is--a test of a marksman's skill. But beneath its muteness a target is
supercharged with an imagery of aggression: every target implies a weapon
and someone aiming. This had an inescapable point in the mid-'50s, when
politicians and all the American media were pounding into the collective
imagination, like a 10-in. spike, the message that the whole nation was a target
for Russian thermonuclear weapons. This is part of the background to Johns'
targets, and a little further back is another form of "targeting"--the virulent
hatred and distrust of homosexuals as deviants and possible spies that the right
encouraged. Johns was a reserved, closeted gay, and a work like Target with
Four Faces, 1955, is all about threat and concealment. Its impassive, identical
plaster casts of faces are contained in a box with a hinged door, a "closet"
above the ominous target. Your gaze, in looking at them, is assimilated to the
eye of the inquisitor, hunting out what is concealed. It is a pessimistic and,
above all, defensive image." Taken from an article in Time magazine
(www.time.com)

Jasper Johns. Target with Four
Faces. 1955
wood, canvas, encaustic, newspaper Context: This work seems to be closer to Johns' personality and inner feelings
and plaster rather than just a word game or commentary. In it, he is expressing some of his
own feelings and issues in the most comfortable way he knows how, through
his art.

Form: Suit with paint on it.
Iconography: (taken directly from, enquirer.com) The green suit has been in Cincinnati before.
Maybe Jim Dine wore it here before he left in 1953 or perhaps when he came back to visit. The
coat slathered with green paint, trousers slashed with a knife in 1959, “Green Suit” appeared in
his first exhibition, Dine/Kitaj, at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1973. Now it is the earliest work
in Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, opening today at the museum. It's been 40 years
since Mr. Dine converted the worn-out corduroy suit into fine art. But as he looks at it at the
museum, he's still pondering its meaning. It's important to him that it is not a picture of a suit.
It's a garment that he wore and wore out. Having lost its first use, it became, with alterations, a
work of art. But it remained a suit. Dine is still pondering the meaning of "Green Suit." “Maybe,
in the next century, it will not be so important to have the physical object,” Mr. Dine says, but
“from where I sit it would be a shame if it were not a physical object. A CD-ROM is not going
to give me that much pleasure.” There is the key to enjoying the eccentric art of Jim Dine,
world class artist with roots in Cincinnati. Each work is a physical object. Not a picture. Not an
icon. Not a symbol or a message. When the “Green Suit” was shown in 1973, Cincinnatians may
have interpreted it as an angry rejection of their city and all it stood for. Mr. Dine was, or was
reputed to be, an angry young man fleeing a troubled youth to become one of a famed band of
artists about to throw the New York art world for a loop. Mellowed at 64, he's amused his
former reputation. “I left here when I was 18. I left here because I wanted to paint and I didn't
feel that this was a place where I could paint. There was nothing terrible about Cincinnati. My
young life growing up here certainly made me, as everyone's childhood does.”


Pop

Jim Dine. Green
Context:The artist is clearly influenced by Marquise de Sade's philosophy of assault of the
Suit. 1959
pleasures of the body. Jim Dine's creations make the viewer feel uncomfortable and repressed,
tied up with the ropes of his work; assaulted by a demented ego and polluted by a "Rent-an-
Artist from Hell, Inc." After Dine's many years of psychotherapy, we still experience his
pathological impulses of self-flagellation. In a video interview for WNET, the artist says, "I
don't want to be avant garde. I want to be nasty ... ugly ... sloppy ... excessive ... useless ...
unpleasant ... and most of all, persona non-grata." And so he succeeds with incredible
commercial results. (http://nyartsmagazine.com/30/42.html)
Form: Oil paintings, with an abstract, cubist, futurist and pop influence
on the subject matter.
Iconography: According to an article on the Smithsonian American Art

Museum web site "Street signs and house numbers, phone numbers and
initials…you use important numbers and letters everyday. When your
backpack gets lost in the locker room, a tag with your name on it tells
everyone that it is yours. If your best friend has a secret to tell, she knows
she can talk to you by dialing your telephone number. On a busy street, a
crossing sign lets you know where it's safe to cross. Words and numbers
are important to Robert Indiana, too. He has turned them into a language
of his own. He uses them to tell you what he's seen, what he's done, and
what he thinks. His artwork looks like road signs you might see along the
Robert Indiana. The Figure 5. 1963 highway. Sometimes they tell you about his life—the roads he's traveled
Robert Indiana. The American Dream. and what's happened to him along the way. Sometimes they show what
1963 he enjoys, like poems and surprising stories. And sometimes they
encourage us to do what he thinks we should—like "EAT" and "LOVE."
"Some people like to paint trees," he said. "I like to paint love. I find it
more meaningful than painting trees." Many people must agree with
him....... In 1973, the U.S. Postal Service put Robert Indiana's design on
the very first "LOVE" stamp. Over three hundred and twenty million of
these stamps were printed. Mail trucks carried letters with this small
"LOVE" sign on them along highways all across the country."
(http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/)
Context: "Robert Indiana is, by his own admission, a painter of signs. His
signs are more intrinsically signals than signs. Donald Goodall writes that
"in the end Indiana's signals, all matter-of-fact and plainspoken at first,
become elusive and suggestive of personal and public history. . . . We
look again, hard. And think about what the shapes have said." Indiana's
"words . . . circles, squares and rectangles, and colors which begin in the
sign-painter's kit" assume "unexpected brilliance or sensitivity, as these
are put in their new universe." They possess "the authority of the
irreducible. The most familiar images change character as we inspect this
symbiosis of reality and remembered experiences, of the prosaic and
speculative." Goodall suggests that Indiana's forms seem autobiographical,
recalling "visual experiences as a child which are alive in his mind,"
experience that the artist "equates with that optimistic illusion of hopeful

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generations, the American Dream." Nevertheless, the painting's "symbolic

implication is not available to fast-transit comprehension. The sign says
what it is. Well and good. But the inner-content of Indiana's signals,
carefully planned and executed with artisan's skills, is sibylline."1" 1.
Donald B. Goodall, "Robert Indiana," exhibition catalog (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Art Museum, 1977), 7. (sheldon.unl.edu)

Iconography: "Born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth

studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia
intermittently between 1905 and 1908. It was in Philadelphia that the artist first
met the American poet and physician William Carlos Williams, the subject of
this painting. Demuth continued his art training during trips to Europe between
1907 and 1921. In 1925 he was included in a group exhibition organized by
Alfred Stieglitz, who later gave him a few one-man shows at his galleries.
When Demuth died at age fifty-one, after suffering from diabetes for much of
his life, an important and prolific career was cut short after only twenty years.
Demuth, a versatile artist, tailored his style to his subject matter. His delicate,
loosely handled watercolors of fruits and flowers pulsate with subtle,
exquisitely balanced color. His paintings of the modern urban and industrial
landscape, on the other hand, are tightly controlled, hard, and exact — in a
style aptly called Precisionism. Although these works show the influence of
Cubism and Futurism, their sense of scale and directness of expression seem
entirely American. "The Figure 5 in Gold" is one of a series of eight abstract
portraits of friends, inspired by Gertrude Stein's word-portraits, that Demuth
made between 1924 and 1929. This painting pays homage to a poem by
William Carlos Williams. Like Marsden Hartley's "Portrait of a German
Officer" and Arthur Dove's "Ralph Dusenberry," this portrait consists not of a
physical likeness of the artist's friend but of an accumulation of images
associated with him — the poet's initials and the names "Bill" and "Carlos" that
together form a portrait. Williams' poem "The Great Figure" describes the
experience of seeing a red fire engine with the number 5 painted on it racing
through the city streets. While Demuth's painting is not an illustration of
Williams's poem, we can certainly sense its "rain/and lights" and the "gong
clangs/siren howls/and wheels rumbling." The bold 5 both rapidly recedes and
races forward in space, and the round forms of the number, the lights, the street
lamp, and the arcs at the lower left and upper right are played against the
straight lines of the fire engine, the buildings, and the rays of light, infusing
the picture with a rushing energy that perfectly expresses the spirit of the
poem." (www.metmuseum.org)

Pop
Context: To understand more about Demuth and why and how he painted
what he did, it is important to delve a bit more deeply into his personal life.
"Blessed with a private income from his parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
coddled in childhood, lame, diabetic, vain, insecure, and brilliantly talented,
Demuth lacked neither admirers nor colleagues. He was well read (and had a
small talent as a writer, in the Symbolist vein) and his tastes were formed by
Pater, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and The Yellow Book; he gravitated to
Charles Demuth 1883-1963 Greenwich Village as a Cafe Royal dandy-in-embryo. Free of market worries,
The Figure 5 in Gold, 1928 he did a lot of work that was private in nature, for the amusement and
stimulation of himself and his gay friends, and much of it was unexhibitable -
at least until the 1980s. "Demuth was not a flaming queen, in fact he was rather
a discreet gay, but if he could not place his deepest sexual predilections in the
open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a
pornocratic culture so drenched in genital imagery that sly hints about
forbidden sex hardly compel attention, the skill with which he did this might
seem almost quaint. But in the teens and twenties the public atmosphere was of
course very different, and Demuth, like other artists in the avant-garde circle
that formed around the collectors Loulse and Walter Arensberg - especially
Marcel Duchamp, whose recondite sexual allegory The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even Demuth called "the greatest picture of our time" - took a
special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. To create a secret subject
matter, to disport oneself with codes, was to enjoy one's distance from (and rise
above) "straight" life. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick-rider's bicycle turns
into a penis, aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls in a cabaret but ogle
one another. "If these scenes of Greenwich Village bohemia were all that
Demuth did, he would be remembered as a minor American esthete,
somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley and Jules Pascin. But Demuth was an
exceptional watercolorist and his still-lifes and figure paintings, with their wiry
contours and exquisite sense of color, the tones discreetly manipulated by
blotting, are among the best things done in that medium by an American. They
quickly rise above the anecdotal and the "amusing." (culled from
www.artchive.com)

Pop Art II, Warhol, Hamilton, and Licthenstein.

Form: Collage
Iconography: richard hamilton is a British PopArt painter who was

influenced greatly by the abundance of images found in American media
and advertising. According to stokstad, because of his own brief stint into

Pop
an advertising career, and his association with the artist Marcel Duchamp,
Hamilton wanted to make a statement about the images people are
bombarded with and the superficial ideals they represent. When one looks
closely at this collage, many double entendres and visual games become
apparent rather quickly. First, there is he question asked by the title,
"What is it that makes this home so different, so appealing?" The fast
answer would be the physically perfect couple that reside there, the
'beefcake' man and the woman with her stripper-pasties and a lampshade
on her head, suggestive of a mindless party animal, a warm body.
Obviously, this is a commentary by the media on how people should look,
if they are to be considered attractive and successful. Of course, very few
people in American society will ever fit this ideal, thanks to the wonders
of genetics, but the image is a standard nonetheless. Next is the hugely
disproportionate Tootsie Roll Lollipop, strategically held by the man. It is
in color, unlike his body, and suggests an enormous phallic object,
pointing towards the woman who is seated on the couch. There is also a
canned ham on the table, suggestive perhaps of women's place in
advertising of being 'meat'. Ironically, the poster in the background is an
advertisement for a pulp romance novel entitled 'Young Romance' ,
commenting on the actual lack of any real romance between the two
people in the collage. There are a myriad of other symbols of the
trappings of what would be considered 'wealth' in a consumerist society, a
Ford emblem lays draped across the lampshade, a maid is vacuuming the
stairs with the latest model cleaner, a framed painting done in the Old
Master style hangs from the wall. There is a television with a woman
talking on the telephone, a reel-to-reel on the ground, a newspaper on the
chair and a new rug on the floor. All of these things are what was
considered necessary for the comfort and luxury of a 'modern' household.
Because of the heavy sarcasm found throughout the collage, it is evident
how ridiculous and arrogant Hamilton considered these 'necessities' of
suburban life to be, and how deeply ingrained in the minds of society that
the media had planted these images as a blueprint for a perfect life.
Context: A short biography of his life gives the viewer more of an

understanding of how and why his style developed along the lines that it
did, in the area that he was living n, (Taken from wwwPopArt,
www.fi.muni.cz)"Born in 1922 in London. In 1934 he attended evening
classes in art. In 1936 he worked in the publicity department of an
electrical company. He studied at WestminsterTechnical College and St.
Martin's School of Art. In 1937 he worked in the publicity department of
the Reimann Studios. From 1983 to 1940 he studied painting at the Royal
Academy Schools. He enrolled for a course in technical drawing and
worked as a draughtsman from 1941 to 1945. He was readmitted to the
Royal Academy Schools in 1946 but was expelled in the same year as a
result of apparently unsatisfactory work. He began his National Service.
In 1947 he married Terry O'Reilly. He
Richard Hamilton. Just What Is It That
studied painting at the Slade School of Art in 1948-51. His etchings from
Makes
Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? this period were exhibited at his first one-man exhibition at Gimpel Fils,
1950. The first exhibition he designed himself was Growth and Form at
1956, Collage 10"x9"
(Kunsthalle Museum, Tübingen, Germany) the ICA, London, 1951. In 1952 he became a teacher of silver work,
typography and industrial design at the
Central School of Arts and Crafts. One of his colleagues there was
Eduardo Paolozzi, with whom Hamilton was a founder member of the
Independent Group at the ICA. This was a group of artists and

Pop
intellectuals who met to discuss cultural change in the age of technology.

In 1953 he became a lecturer in the Fine Art Department
at the King's College in the University of Durham. In this post he worked
with Victor Pasmore and taught a course in basic design which was also
attended by art students. In 1955 he exhibited his paintings at the Hanover
Gallery, London. His paintings at this time were influenced by Cubism. In
the same year he devised and
designed the exhibition Man, Machine and Motion at the ICA. In 1956 he
made his first Pop collage as a design for the poster and catalog of the
exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery, which he had
helped to organize with other members of the Independent Group. From
1957 to 1961 he taught interior design at
the Royal College of Art. In 1960 he was awarded the William and
Norma Copley Foundation Prize for Painting. He also published a
typographical version of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box. His wife died in
a car accident in 1962. In 1963 he visited USA for the first time. In 1965
he began his reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp's Le
Grand Verre. He organized the Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery
in 1966. His works on the theme of the Guggenheim Museum were also
shown at the Robert Fraser Gallery. In 1969 he helped to make a film of
his work for the Arts Council. In 1970 he showed his Cosmetic Studies.
He was awarded the Talins Prize
International, Amsterdam, 1970. In 1977 and 1978 he collaborated with
Dieter Roth at Cadaqués. He was given his first comprehensive
retrospective exhibition in 1979 at the Tate Gallery, also shown at the
Kunsthalle, Berne. In 1974 he had retrospectives at the Guggenheim
Museum, New York, the Städtische Galerie, Munich, and the
Kunsthalle, Tübingen. In 1982 his writings, notes and documents were
published by Thames and Hudson, London."

Form: Brillo boxes. Also, silkscreened images of
Campbell soup cans.
Iconography: Andy Warhol was enthralled with

the simplicity and visual impact of labels.
According to stokstad, Warhol had worked as a
commercial illustrator in the 1950's, and left that
field to pursue art as a full time occupation in the
early 1960's. He knew, from working with
advertising, how persuasive a simple design could
be. There are many theories about the absolute
reason for the soup cans, it has been said that he
painted them because he ate Campbells soup for
lunch everyday. It has also been said that he painted
them because they were easy to do. Whatever the
reason, they ended up being his most famous and
instantly recognizable pieces. He was paid
handsomely for his work by Campbells' when his
paintings started to gain recognition. In one
instance, they sent him a can of their new Won Ton
soup to paint before it was released to the public.
Context: (From www.artchive.com) "Andy Warhol

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began as a commercial illustrator, and a very

successful one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I.
Andy Warhol. Brillo Boxes Miller in a stylish blotty line that derived from Ben
Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962,
when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his
32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. From then on,
most of Warhol's best work was done over a span
of about six years, finishing in 1968, when he was
shot. And it all flowed from one central insight: that
in a culture glutted with information, where most
people experience most things at second or third
hand through TV and print, through images that
become banal and disassociated by repeated again
and again and again, there is role for affectless art.
You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling.
You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror.
Not that Warhol worked this out; he didn't have to.
He felt it and embodied it. He was a conduit for a
sort of collective American state of mind in which
celebrity - the famous image of a person, the
Andy Warhol. Campbell's Soup. famous brand name - had completely replaced both
1968 sacredness and solidity. Earlier artists, like Monet,
silkscreen on canvas had painted the same motif in series in order to
display minute discriminations of perception, the
shift of light and color form hour to hour on a
haystack, and how these could be recorded by the
subtlety of eye and hand. Warhol's thirty-two soup
cans are about nothing of the kind. They are about
sameness (though with different labels): same
brand, same size, same paint surface, same fame as
product. They mimic the condition of mass
advertising, out of which his sensibility had grown.
They are much more deadpan than the object which
may have partly inspired them, Jasper Johns's pair
of bronze Ballantine ale cans. This affectlessness,
this fascinated and yet indifferent take on the
object, became the key to Warhol's work; it is there
in the repetition of stars' faces (Liz, Jackie, Marilyn,
Marlon, and the rest), and as a record of the

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condition of being an uninvolved spectator it speaks

Andy Warhol. Campbell's Soup. 1962 eloquently about the condition of image overload in
a media saturated culture. Warhol extended it by
using silk screen, and not bothering to clean up the
imperfections of the print: those slips of the screen,
uneven inkings of the roller, and general graininess.
What they suggested was not the humanizing touch
of the hand but the pervasiveness of routine error
and of entropy..."- From "American Visions", by
Robert Hughes
Form: Silkscreened images of Marilyn Monroe, of

varying sizes and styles.
Iconography: Andy warhol enjoyed doing

silkcreend portraits of tragic American Icons.
Secondary, they were most often icons in the gay
male community, figures whom repressed gay men,
such as Warhol, could easily identify with. Marylin
Monroe is made to look like a drag queen in the
Warhol prints, everything female about her is
exaggerated almost comically. her hair is yellow,
not blonde. Her lipstick and eyeshadow are shown
as primary red and blue. She is almost surreal
looking. The gay community could identify her
because of the changes she went through physically
in order to attain her star status, she changed her
name from the midwestern Norma Jean, had plastic
surgery, dyed her brown hair......in short, did
everything she could to become the opposite of

Pop
what she was in reality. And for Marylin, it worked.

It is this kind of oppression to a male ideal that gay
men felt, but the sort of triumph they yearned for.
Context: It is well known that Andy Warhol was

gay, and so repressed that at times he seemed almost
asexual. He enjoyed surrounding himself with
beautiful, young, athletic people, with the types of
bodies and looks he himself could never have. It
may also be said that he surrounded himself with the
type of beautiful young men he could also never
have. He was, in his personal life, exceedingly
insecure about his own looks. He was short, balding,
and had terrible skin. He knew he wasn't a
'beautiful' person in the outward way he wanted to
be, and it tormented him. Thus, he became overly
obsessed with moving in the 'right' crowd and being
around all the 'right' people, a hobby that kept him
able to conveniently ignore, or repress, his
homosexuality.
Andy Warhol. Marilyn Diptych. 1968

silkscreen on canvas

Form: Hand Painted Acrylic images on
Canvas, meant to recreate the color
separation found in newspaper images.
Iconography: "In 1960 Lichtenstein was

appointed Assistant Professor at Douglas
College at Rutgers University of New
Jersey, which put him within striking
distance of New York. He met and had
long discussions with Allan Kaprow, and
he also met Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine,
Lucas Samaras and George Segal. He
attended a number of early 'Happenings',
but did not participate in them actively.
These contacts revived his interest in Pop

Pop
imagery, and a more immediate stimulus

Roy Lichtenstein. was provided by a challenge from one of
Oh no! A Dinner party for twelve. c 1964 his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse
oil on magma on canvas comic book and said; 'I bet you can't
paint as good as that.' In 1961
Lichtenstein produced about six paintings
showing characters from comic-strip
frames, with only minor changes of
colour and form from the original source
material. It was at this time that he first
made use of devices which were to
become signatures in his work - Ben-Day
dots, lettering and speech
balloons......"Lichtenstein's development
as a mature painter was marked by his
propensity for working in successive
series or thematic groups. The later
groups tended to be interpretations and to
some extent parodies of earlier Modernist
styles - Cubism, Futurism and
Surrealism. In the early 1980s
Lichtenstein created sculptural
maquettes constructed from flat shapes as
three-dimensional graphic imitations of
German Expressionist woodcuts. These,
like his series of painted or sculpted
brushstrokes of the 1980s, painstakingly
created an ironic suggestion of
spontaneity. In the late 1980s and early
1990s he returned to the use of Ben-Day
dots in a new and refined application of
his earlier style. Roy Lichtenstein died in
September 1997." (Culled directly from
www.artchive.com)
The bottom image, Reclining Nude, is an
appropriation of a picasso, or perhaps
even the modernist female sculpture done
by Henry Moore. It shows that
Lichtenstein was paying very close
attention to what was being created by
his contemporaries, and was using his
own unique style to put his own touch to

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the art of the times.
Context: Though it would be easy at first

to think of Lichtensteins work as
simplistic because of its' cartoon images
and themes, his work is another aspect of
Pop Art, one that was exceedingly
appropriate for the times. He was making
a statement about aspects of society,
romantic relationships, war, even art, and
putting it into an easily recognizable
form. In the 1960's and 70's, Walt
Disney was a huge company, cartoons
did a booming business, both in film and
Roy Lichtenstein. Reclining Nude. 1977
in comic strips and books. It is little
wonder then that Lichtenstein chose to
capitalize on this form of expression as a
fine art.

Form: The top sculpture is made from Elmood,
and the bottom sculpture from stone. They are
both titled 'reclining figure,' as were many of
Moores' works, and both are modernist,
abstracted representations of a female form.
Iconography: Henry Moore is most commonly

known as an English Abstract sculptor.
according to www.wakefield.gov.uk, " His early
sculptures of the 1920s, show the influences of
Central American pre-Columbian art, and the
massive figures of the Italian Renaissance (he
particularly liked Michaelangelo's work). By the
1930s his works had become highly abstract,
consisting of simplified, rounded pieces carved
from wood, with numerous indentations and
holes often spanned with veils of thin metal
wires. His main themes include mother-and-
child and family groups, fallen warriors, and,
most characteristically, the reclining human
figure. Although he endured much criticism of
his early work, in 1948 he was awarded the
International Prize for Sculpture and his
reputation worldwide grew over the following
decades." By just looking at the two pieces to
the left, the viewer can tell that Moore had a
firm grasp of the human figure, he was able to
Moore, Henry
masterfully pare it down to its' most basic shape
Reclining Figure1935-36 Elmwood
and still retain the very essence of humanness.
h. 19; l. 35; d. 15 in.
The figures that he sculpts are sensual and

Pop
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

flowing, a testament of his respect for the
female form.
Context: "Henry Moore was born in Castleford,

in small terraced house in Roundhill Road on
30th July 1898. He attended Castleford
Grammar School on a scholarship and
subsequently became a teacher there. His
teaching was interrupted by the First World War
during which he fought in France and was
gassed.After the War he returned to his teaching
post but knew he wanted something better so he
began studying at the Leeds School of Art from
which he progressed to the Royal College of Art
in London. In 1924 He met Irina Radetsky, a
painting student at the college, whom
he married a year later. The couple lived in
Henry Moore. reclining Figure. 1932 Hampstead, where they mingled with many
aspiring young artists including another sculptor
from this area, Barbara Hepworth."
(www.wakefield.gov.uk) It is apparent that he
studied the Fine Arts and could have fallen in
love with Pre-Columbian sculpture through his
studies of Art and Art History. The influence of
this culture and the beauty of the forms
represented by it can be seen strongly in almost
any of his sculptural works.


Pop Sculpture
Pop Art Three; SCULPTURE!

Form: Plaster cast figures, bar setting, light, etc. Installation sculpture.
Iconography: The plaster figures created by Segal for this environment looked
eerily out of place. While they resemble people in the most basic of ways,
mimicking body language and facial expression, they are devoid of color or life,
making them feel cold and lacking personality when placed in a realistic, warm
environment. "...Because of his interest in the everyday world, Segal was
considered to be a founder of the Pop Art movement in the early sixties, but his
individual approach quickly distinguished him from the friends and colleagues
with whom he exhibited. Far removed from the wit and sophisticated detachment
of their art, the subject Segal deals with is the human condition, its solitude and
fragility, which he expresses with a strongly felt sympathy.....Plastered white,
frozen in stereotypical poses and installed in a realistic environment made even
more real by the addition of ready-made props evoking the urban decor, Segal's
figures, which convey his keen sense of observation, serve as symbols of a
humanity that is dominated by social and material contingencies. His works,
which juxtapose individuals and their surroundings, emanate an eerie feeling of
alienation. In addition to representing the banality of modern life, Segal has
created sculptural portraits, depiction's of intimate activities like bathing and
dressing, as well as overtly political subjects."
www.mbam.qc.ca (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Context: According to Stokstad, Segal began his artistic career by painting nude
George Segal. The Diner. 1964
figures on large canvases. Later he began to form figures from chicken wire,
burlap and plaster. When he became comfortable with the medium be began to
actually cast his figures from live models and placed them in environments of his
creation, creating a tension between the cold, hollow casts of people and an actual
environment that a living person could just as easily occupy.
Form: Bronze sculpture, white paint, barbed wire fencing.
Iconography: (Taken from www.chgs.umn.edu, Center for Holocaust

and Genocide studies) "George Segal's public sculpture, "The
Holocaust," sits in Legion of Honor Park in San Francisco overlooking
a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. Often visitors find the sculpture
an unexpected intrusion on the view, and an unfriendly reminder to
one of the most significant genocides of the 20th century. Segal's
outwork work is executed in bronze and painted white. It has been the
subject of graffiti, but Segal mentioned, at a 1998 conference at Notre
Dame University, that he did not find this a problem since graffiti was
a reminder that problems of prejudice have not been solved. Segal's
ensemble of bodies is not random. One can find a "Christ-like" figure
in the assemblage, reflecting on the Jewishness of Jesus, as well as a
woman holding an apple, a reflection on the idea of original sin and
the biblical connection between Jews and Christians, and raising the
question of this relationship during the Holocaust. The essential figure

Pop Sculpture
of the man standing at the fence is probably derived from Margaret

Bourke-White's famous Life Magazine 1945 photograph of the
liberation of Buchenwald."
Context: According to one art critic, "Pop Art is notoriously short on

conscience, like Andy Warhol at a disco. It derives its kick from a
culture moving too fast for reflection. It shows that products aimed at
transitory desires can outlive high-toned art, like Styrofoam that
refuses to biodegrade. Like Warhol's car crashes, however, it can get
pretty scary for all its cynicism. At his best, George Segal nurses his
fears and degradation well." www.haberarts.com. This work by Segal
is scary to see, and sobering as well when viewed in person. Segal is
taking his view of people as isolated and distant and magnifying it
about a thousand times by using an atrocity such as the Holocaust to
comment on exactly how cold and heartless a society can become.
George Segal, Holocaust

Form: Installation sculpture of various materials creating a frightening and
somewhat sickly looking display.
Iconography: According to the Oxford Dictionary of Art, "{Kienholz} belonged to

the California school of Funk art, using the bizarre and shoddy detritus of
contemporary life, and creating situations of a horrific and shockingly gruesome
character. His brutal images of murder, sex, death, and decay have both attracted
and repelled the imagination. A typical example of his work is The State Hospital
(Moderna Mus., Stockholm,1964-6), showing a mental patient strapped to his bed,
with his own self-image in a thought bubble strapped to the bunk above. Both
figures are modelled with revolting realism but have glass bowls for heads."
www.xrefer.com
Looking at this piece, one eels a sense of sickness and decay, Kienholz obviously
felt strongly about the treatment of the mentally ill who were confined to the
underfunded state hospitals, and was able to make a very strong statement with this
work. One would be hard pressed to find a viewer who on first glance would not
find this piece disturbing and thought provoking.
Context: Looking at the life, and death, of Edward Kienholz, it becomes clear what
kind of an artist he was and why he created the works that he did. In a short
biography found in the Art History Department of Tower Hill School in Delaware,

Pop Sculpture
we find this about Edward Kienholz "In 1994, Edward Kienholz died of a heart
attack at age 65. While this might have been the end of most people, Kienholz still
had one thing left to do: "His corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front
seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his
pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him and the ashes of his dog Smash in the
back. He was set for the afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by
his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big
Edward Kienholz. The State
hole."(Hughes) "Edward Kienholz's last piece of art was his burial (Hughes)."Such
Hospital (INTERIOR) 1966
Tableau: plaster casts, fiberglass, has been the legacy of Edward Kienholz. Born 1927 in Fairfield, Washington,
Kienholz received his education at Eastern Washington College of Education and
hospital beds,
bedpan, hospital table, goldfish briefly at Whitworth College, Spokane. He had no formal artistic training, but
gained skills and memories that would help further his works later in life. "He
bowls, live black fish,
earned his living as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, as the manager of a dance
lighted neon tubing, steel
band, as a dealer in secondary cars, a caterer, decorator, and a vacuum cleaner
hardware, wood,
paint 96 x 144 x 120 in. (243.8 x salesman (Staudek). After moving to Los Angeles in 1953, he founded the NOW
gallery in1956, a haven for local artists, and the Ferus Gallery in 1957. In1961, his
365.8 x 304.8 cm)
style of work began to change, and he created his first environment, Roxy's. He met
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Nancy
Reddin, later to be his fifth wife, in 1972, and began to create art in collaboration
with her. (Sheldon)In 1973 Kienholz was a Guest Artist of the German Academic
Exchange Service in Berlin. He eventually moved to Berlin with wife Nancy, and
spent half of the year in Berlin, half in Hope, Idaho. In 1975, he received a
Guggenheim Award, and in 1977 created The Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery
(Staudek). From 1954 to1994, he created 176 separate pieces of art (Heijnen)."
www.towerhill.org.
He had obviously seen much of society, and had a lot to say about it.


Pop Sculpture
Claes Oldenburg. Soft Toilet and

Medicine Cabinet. 1966
vinyl plexiglas and kapok
life size
Form: The toilets were created using the same kind of vinyl one would find
on a beanbag chair, It is soft and pliable, giving the works a 'droopy' look. The
clothespin and eraser were created with more durable materials such as steel,
as they are intended as permanent outside objects.
Iconography: What makes Oldenburg unique in the genre of Pop Art is his
sense of humor. He has things to say about society, but he does it by poking
fun instead of taking a more serious stance. As he says himself, "I am for an
art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something else than sit on its ass
in a museum." -- Claes Oldenburg, 1961. and, "The main reason for the
colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of
the vessel -- the object," Oldenburg has said.
"Perhaps I am more a still-life painter -- using the city as a tablecloth." At
another time he remarked,
"Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will
remain doubtful and inconsistent -- which is the way it should be. All that I
care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of
stimulating meaning." www.salon.com
It can almost be said that Oldenburg is the quintessential Pop Artist, one who
truly does not take anything seriously, but still has the ability to shock viewers
with the size and sheer fun of his work.

Context: (Taken from Salon Magazine, 2000) "Oldenburg, who turns 70 on

Jan. 29, has spent much of his life bending, inflating, melting and enlarging
the ordinary objects of 20th century American reality. Over the last four
decades, Oldenburg has made it his business to soften the hard, harden the soft
and transmute the modest into the monumental. He has created shirts and ties

Pop Sculpture
1972 drawing and dresses and ice cream cones and pies, and even the contents of an entire
store, out of plaster-soaked cloth and wire. Using vinyl stuffed with kapok, he
built pay telephones, typewriters, light switches and a complete bathroom --
sink, tub, scale and toilet. He constructed a catcher's mitt, 12 feet tall, out of
metal and wood, and built a four-and-a-half-story clothespin out of Cor-Ten
steel. In the last two decades, focusing almost exclusively on giant monuments,
he has created a 38-foot-tall flashlight, 10-story baseball bat, a 60-foot-long
umbrella, a three-story-high faucet with a 440-foot water-spewing red hose, a
40-foot-tall book of matches and a partially buried bicycle that would fill
most of a football field, among numerous other projects located from Tokyo to
Texas."
Clearly, for Claus Oldenburg, size does matter.
Claes Oldenburg. Clothespin. 1976
Typewriter Eraser 1998

Form: Found object, i.e. a urinal. The name R.Mutt has been painted on it and it is to be displayed as
shown, the part that would be mounted to the wall being used as the side it rests upon.
Iconography: Duchamp was, by the time he 'made' this piece of art, very contemptuous of the art world.
Her had already learned how to paint, and was quite good at it, but found it to be too filled with trickery
and illusions for his taste. He was more interested in the 'ready-made' objects of the world around him,
chairs, tables, bicycles, urinals. He saw an intrinsic craft in each of these everyday objects and wanted to
bring notice to the fact that these objects had been created, first in someone's imagination and then in
reality, the same way a painter created a masterpiece. By taking the urinal and placing it on its' back,
signing it, and putting it in a different environment, he was forcing people to view it differently. This act
outraged some and intrigued others. Is it art? Or, is it just a urinal? Is there a difference? Even today, this
piece is still being displayed and still having as strong as an impact as it did in years past. Ultimately, this
turned out to be one of Duchamps' most well-known and successful pieces.

Pop Sculpture
Context: By looking at his biography, one can get a better understanding of what inspired him to begin
working with found objects as a way of creative growth during the times in which he was practicing art.
According to www.beatmuseum.org, "Marcel Duchamp, French Dada artist, whose small but controversial
output exerted a strong influence on the development of 20th-century avant-garde art. Born on July 28,
1887, in Blainville, brother of the artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon and half brother of the painter Jacques
Villon, Duchamp began to paint in 1908. After producing several canvases in the current mode of Fauvism,
he turned toward experimentation and the avant-garde, producing his most famous work, Nude Descending
a Staircase, No. 2 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) in 1912; portraying continuous movement through a chain
of overlapping cubistic figures, the painting caused a furor at New York City's famous Armory Show in
1913. He painted very little after 1915, although he continued until 1923 to work on his masterpiece, The
Marcel Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1923,Philadelphia Museum of Art), an abstract work, also
Duchamp known as The Large Glass, composed in oil and wire on glass, that was enthusiastically received by the
surrealists. In sculpture, Duchamp pioneered two of the main innovations of the 20th century kinetic art and
ready-made art. His "ready-mades" consisted simply of everyday objects, such as a urinal and a bottle rack.
His Bicycle Wheel (1913, original lost; 3rd version, 1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), an
early example of kinetic art, was mounted on a kitchen stool. After his short creative period, Duchamp was
content to let others develop the themes he had originated; his pervasive influence was crucial to the
development of surrealism, Dada, and pop art. Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955. He died in
Paris on October 1, 1968.

Form: Bronze cast sculpture, painted realistically to give the
appearance of actual Ale cans.
Iconography: As a Pop artist, Johns was interested mainly in taking

items from his everyday life that held an importance for him and
reappropriating them into fine art. He was not bitter or trying to make a
political statement as Kienholz did, nor was he as flippant and free-
spirited as Oldenburg. Simply, he wate to make a statement about
himself, what he could create and what held as important. What makes
his Painted Bronze a work of art s the craft that went into making it.
He had to sculpt and cast the pieces from plaster into bronze, refine it,
then painstakingly paint every small detail onto it. The skill needed to
create this piece was the same skill that Degas used to create his 'Small
Ballerina' bronze. The difference is what the meaning is to the different
artists, and the reflection of the time they were living in. ballerinas and
the ballet were important to Degas, and Ballentine ale was important to
Johns. The end result for either artist was a beautiful piece of sculpture.
Context: (Originally published in Modern Painters (Summer 1996)

"Johns's sculptures mostly date from a four-year period early in his
career, 1958-61, suggesting a short-lived interest. But although Johns's
enormous reputation rests on his painting and printmaking, the object
is a crucial aspect of his work. His paintings often include a collage
element, with plaster casts or found objects protruding from the
surface, or the support itself being an actual, identifiable object, such
as a crate or an inverted, stretched canvas. Furthermore, his sculptures,
which are mostly in his own collection, often feature as subjects in his

Pop Sculpture
paintings or prints: Painted Bronze (Savarin) 1960, for instance,

(brushes in a coffee tin which he had cast in bronze and then
proceeded to paint, quite convincingly but in such a way that they look
more like a three dimensional painting than the original) is a frequently
recurring motif in paintings and prints. Of course, this begs the
question (the sort of question champions of Johns find so pregnant and
exacting): is he painting his own sculpture, Painted Bronze (Savarin),
or is he painting an object in his studio, some brushes in a coffee tin,
which hitherto just happened also to be the subject of a sculpture,
Painted Bronze (Savarin)? Because Johns can offer seemingly little
else by way of aesthetic consolation, this sort of epistemological tease
can sometimes constitute the main interest in his work. And however
spiritually removed he is from the aesthetic that followed in his trail,
Johns was undoubtedly a prototype for the minimalists and
conceptualists. Donald Judd's dictum that art has only to be interesting
is
implicit in much appreciation of Johns." A short biography of Johns
shows his life as an artist was connected to others on the PopArt scene
of the 1960's and 70's, and helps to gives us an understanding of how
popart as a whole developed along the lines that it did, with the shared
ideas and idealism of the times." Born in 1930 at Augusta, Georgia. He
grew up in South Carolina. He was drafted into the army and stationed
in Japan. Between 1949 and 1951 he studied at the University of South
Carolina, Columbia. From 1952 to 1958 he worked in a bookshop in
Johns. Painted Bronze. 1960 New York. He also did display work with Robert Rauschenberg for
Bonwit Teller and Tiffany. In 1954 he painted his first flag picture. He
had his first one-man exhibition in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery,
New York. He was represented at the Venice Biennale during the same
year. His picture Grey Numbers also won the International Prize at the
Pittsburgh Biennale. In 1959 he took part with Rauschenberg in Allan
Kaprow's Happening Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. He was
included in the collective exhibition Sixteen Americans in the same
year at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1960 he began working with
lithographs. In 1961 he did his first large map picture and travelled to
Paris for an exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite. In 1964 he was given
a comprehensive retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York. The
catalog included texts by John
Cage and Alan Solomon. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in
the same year. In 1965 he had a retrospective at the Passadena Art
Museum, organized by Walter Hopps. During the same year he saw a
Duchamp exhibition and won a prize at the 6th International Exhibition
of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. In 1966 he had a one-man
exhibition of drawings at the National Collection of Fine Arts,
Washington. In 1967 he rented a loft in Canal Street and painted
Harlem Light using a tile motif. He also illustrated Frank O'Hara's
book of poems "In Memory of My Feelings". He was Artistic Adviser
for the composer John Cage and Merce
Cunningham's Dance Company until 1972, collaborating with Robert
Morris, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Bruce Naumann. In that year
he was represented at the documenta "4", Kassel, designed costumes
for Merce Cunningham's "Walkaround Time" and spent seven weeks at
the printers Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. In
1973 he met Samuel Beckett in Paris. He moved to Stony Point, N.Y.
He was given a comprehensive retrospective at the Whitney Museum

Pop Sculpture
of American Art, New York, in 1977, shown in 1978 at the Museum

Ludwig, Cologne, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Hayward
Gallery, London, and Seibu Museum of Art,Tokyo. He was represented
at the Venice Biennale in 1978. In 1979 the Kunstmuseum Basle put
on an exhibition of his graphic work which toured Europe. In 1988 he
was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale." (
www.fi.muni.cz)
Form: Huge sculpture of a puppy, created out of stainless steel and
thousands of different plants and flowers.
Iconography: (Taken from www.cavant-garde.com) "Jeff koons'

puppy is a staggering achievement of sculptural imagination,
horticultural dexterity and engineering skill. first created in 1992 for
a temporary exhibition in the german city of arolson, puppy was an
immediate sensation drawing huge crowds and critical acclaim. a
symbol, according to koons, of "love, warmth and happiness" this
contemporary masterpiece is a triumph of scale, colour and materials.
rising 43 feet tall from the puppy's paws to its alert ears, the sculpture
is formed from a series of stainless steel sections constructed to hold
over 25 tons of soil watered by an internal irrigation system. this
floral giant is composed of over seventy thousand plants, including
begonias, impatiens, petunias, marigolds and lobelias. once
described as 'the seventh wonder of the world', puppy was installed at
the museum of contemporary art in sydney australia in 1996. once
year later puppy traveled to bilbao in spain where it became a
permanent part of the guggenheim museum's collection and an icon
for basque city. organised by rockerfeller centre in association with
Jeff Koons. Puppy. c1985 the public art fund, this new york exhibition of puppy was made
possible by the efforts of many dedicated riggers, horticulturists and
volunteers working over a period of three weeks to install this
monumental work. puppy at rockerfeller centre is the first exhibition
of this public sculpture in the united states. born in 1955, jeff koons
is one of the world's most widely recognised artists. in the 1980's his
sculptures and photography explored contemporary american
iconography turning popular kitsch into high art. koons signature
work most often uses strikingly simple imagery transformed into
sculptures using the finest of materials."
Context: Koons is notorious for taking innocent seeming objects and

creating a new meaning for them by increasing their size, creating
them out of different or unexpected materials, and sometimes filling
them with double-meaning or messages. However, in the case of
Puppy, it would seem that his only quest was to create something
beautiful and decorative for the benefit of it being able to beautify a
space. This could be just art for the sake of being art, nothing more
or less, and like an Oldenburg statue is just a beautiful piece done on
an enormous scale, but lacking the irony and humor found in
Oldenburgs work.

Form: Stainless steel replica of a 1950's-60's travel bar set.
Iconography: "...an upper-class travel bar decanter for liquor cast in

Pop Sculpture
stainless steel (the proletariat silver according to Jeff Koons); part of

the Luxury and Degradaton show. Liquor is sealed inside, but it is
withheld, since to break the seal would be to break apart the work.
Playing on status objects empty of soul that suggest an artificial luxury,
and artificial value, vanitas imagery. Koons uses the strategy of
withholding, sealing the liquor inside where one can't get to it without
ruining the work; desire always out of reach as a metaphor for the
false promises of advertising and the way even status objects of
surplus can't fill the void or lack of missing moral values..... imagery
for an age of consumption to excess; the use of status objects as
support mechanisms for the individual and signs of class power. The
slick, shiny surfaces of the hyperreal, hollow at the core. " (Taken
from www.csulb.edu)
Context: As a consummate Pop Artist, Koons has taken a simple,

Jeff Koons. Travel Bar. 1986 everyday object and created a metaphor out of it. By making it all
cast stainless steel appear to be created out of silver he is emphasizing the upper-class
status of those wealthy enough to carry their liquor around with them,
putting a sheen on the fact that alcohol is often referred to as 'poor
mans' cocaine.' It's possible that one of the underlying messages is the
human reality of addiction and substance abuse, no matter how wealthy
one may be.

Form: Life-size porcelain scupture, gold leaf.
Iconography: (Taken from www.sfmoma.org) "For

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, from the artist's Banality
series, Koons directed Italian ceramicists to create a
greatly oversized figurine from a publicity photograph of
the celebrity and his chimpanzee. The performer and his
pet are posed as companions, wearing matching gold
band uniforms and an excess of makeup that stands in for
genuine facial expression. Bubbles is nestled in Jackson's
lap, their limbs confused to the point where one of the
legs of the chimp could easily be mistaken for a third
arm of the singer. They are instantly recognizable and
undeniably beautiful.Yet right at the cold, shiny surface
of their snow-white faces are rather disturbing issues of
race, gender, and sexuality that are often part and parcel
of our fascination with public personae. Over the course
Jeff Koons, Jackson and Bubbles of rising from child stardom in the early 1970s, as the
youngest member of The Jackson Five, to an
unsurpassable level of international fame in the eighties
and nineties, this cultural icon whom we know to be a
black man has come to more closely resemble a white
woman. The three-dimensional sculpture inhabits our
space, the space of the general (albeit museum-going)
public, but Michael Jackson himself is a man that we can
never know. No matter how much media attention he
receives, to the millions of people in whose
consciousness he resides he will never be more than the
flat character of tabloid reproductions and television.
Koons' use of ceramic points directly to the hollowness

Pop Sculpture
and fragility of celebrity status."
Context: "... in a series of works he called "Banality",

Koons creates sculptures of dimensions and details
monstrous and absurd.These works, like Michael Jackson
and Bubbles, demand attention by virtue of their size and
seductive porcelain surfaces, yet they disturb as well.
The dead white of Jackson's skin, his glamorous pose
with Bubbles in matching clothing invites a chilling
range of questions about celebrity and image making."
(www.broadartfoundation.org)

Form: Photo
Iconography: Taking his orientation along the lines of

mainstream culture to even further extremes, Koons, in
the late eighties, focused increasingly on the topic of
pornography. In 1991,at the height of his success, he
married the Italian porno star Cicciolina and made the
relationship the subject of his art. The series of works
Made in Heaven (1991), which shows Koons with his
wife as larger-than-Iife figures having sex, gained him
widespread international attention.(
www.absolutearts.com) If Koons is trying to make a
point about sex and desire being a motivating for in
society, then he has gone beyond symbolism and
suggestion with these works and began to give his
message out blatantly.
Context: (From www.eyestorm.com)"....These

product-based works are evidence of Koons' belief in
the artist as a socially accountable, sanctimonious
arbiter of taste: a kind of Holy Trinity of cultural
reproduction. Koons is at once the Father (the giver of
form), the Son (the messenger of everlasting life) and
the Holy Spirit (the creator of faith). Through such
debased metaphors as these we might come to
appreciate Koons' union with Ilona Staller: aka
LaCicciolina, an Italian porn star and politician whose
lack of inhibition Koons interpreted as a symbol of
Jeff Koons, Illona
moral freedom and purity. As such, her appearance in

Pop Sculpture
Koons' sculptures and photo-works marked the

ultimate consummation of his practice: the
transformation of the ultimate consumer product (a
human being) into a glowing object of worship. Koons
leads by example; showing that if he can achieve his
desire then, Hey, you can too! Koons and Staller were
married a year after she had begun appearing in his
work, emphasizing the genuine, 'innocent' nature of his
desire.......There is a profound faith in human desire
and agency at the core of Koons' work: a utilitarian
belief that everything we want and do is based on a
drive for sensual pleasure that transcends the pursuit of
mere sex, work, or money. Koons' earliest works from
the late 70s - when he was trading cotton on the New
York Stock Exchange to fund his art practice - were
mass-produced inflatable flowers and toys placed
carefully on mirrors, marrying a child-like naivety to
sexual metaphors and consumerism. From that point
onwards, the relationship between the selection,
production and display of commercial products became
ever more elaborate within Koons' work, and the
transformative role of the artist-as-savior grew ever
more pronounced. In the early 80s, Koons began
selecting and entombing various models of Hoover and
New Shelton vacuum cleaners in fluorescent-lit
Plexiglas vitrines, the products on display seeming at
once brand new (full of potential) and stillborn
(already dead)."

Form: A sterling silvr tea set surrounded by slave shackles.
Iconography: Fred Wilson is an African American artist

whose Pop Art Influence is mainly political and concerned
with exposing the racism found not only in the art world at
large, but also in the musuems and institutions America
holds as paragons of artistic virtue and knowledge. This
section of his work is 'found objects', that is to say objects
'found' in the storerooms and catalogue shelves of museums
and for some reason never displayed. He felt that people
needed to be aware of the oppression forced on minorities
and slaves in decades past, and how their labor helped to
shape what American society, and art, has become. Written
in the UCSF newspaper was this excerpt about his show
".....The exhibit was rich with the unexpected, from cigar
store Indians turning their backs on viewers and reward
posters for runaway slaves to a whipping post surrounded
by period chairs of different styles and slave shackles set
amid ornate silver serving vessels. Many of the objects had
been stored for decades and never displayed, let alone
allowed to shine or shatter any illusions. Others were moved
around and mixed in a sly or provocative fashion. All were
used to restore context and create a new chemistry between

Pop Sculpture
the objects, their display and the viewer."

(www.ucsf.edu)More was written as well in Maryland
where the exhibit was first shown,(Taken from the
Contemporary Arts Museum,)"....Wilson shook the art
world with his landmark Mining the Museum exhibition at
the MarylandHistorical Society (MHS) in Baltimore. The
MHS gave Wilson carte blanche, allowing him to research
the Society's collection, its history and its place within the
community. Wilson proceeded to reinstall the third floor
galleries in a way that revealed the latent racism that existed
there.3 Thousands of museum professionals saw the
exhibition, and its run was extended by popular demand.4
With this installation, Wilson brought a fresh eye to the
MHS, reconstructed its presentation of Maryland's past in a
new, more encompassing manner, and exposed how a
seemingly neutral institution might unwittingly reinforce
racist attitudes. Since then, Wilson has been invited into
museums all around the world to explore their collections
and practices and to offer a startling reappraisal through his
own reinstallations of their holdings." www.camh.org

Context: "On December 8, 1991, Fred Wilson gave a

gallery talk at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York.1 He greeted his audience in the lobby and had
lunch with them in the museum's restaurant. He then
excused himself, saying that he needed to change into a
costume and that they should meet him upstairs at the
entrance to the exhibition for his gallery talk. Wilson
changed into a Whitney guard's uniform and stood in the
gallery where he was to meet his group, waiting next to a
Fred Wilson. Mining the Museums, Slave Shackles. sign with his name on it that marked the point where the
c1990 tour was to begin. Though they looked for him, no one
"saw" Wilson. The artist's worst suspicions were confirmed-
as museum guard, he had become invisible. Wilson
eventually revealed himself to his audience and proceeded
to give his gallery talk Earlier that same year, in the spring
of 1991, Wilson had presented a two-part exhibition at
Metro Pictures and Gracie Mansion galleries in New York.
For these exhibitions, Wilson created a series of faux
museum installations that addressed cultural exploitation
and the underlying racism in museums. Utilizing such tools
of the trade as pedestals, vitrines, and wall labels, Wilson
demonstrated how ethnographic art, when removed from its
proper context, wrenched away from everything that shaped
its origins, is essentially neutralized. For example, in
Friendly Natives, skeletons are laid out for view in
Victorian-style mahogany vitrines with such labels as
"Someone's Mother," and "Someone's Sister."With Guarded
View, Wilson came at museum racism from a different
angle. Four mannequins are lined up in a row, displayed
together on a pedestal, each wearing, as the labels indicate,
the uniform of a different New York museum. From left to
right they are: The Jewish Museum, The Metropolitan

Pop Sculpture
Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the

Whitney Museum of American Art .2 Wilson, who grew up
in and around New York, is an avid museum-goer, and is
himself of African-American and Caribbean-Indian descent,
also
worked briefly as a museum guard at the Neuberger
Museum of Art while he attended the State University of
New York. He carried away from the experience a
dichotomous sense of both being on display and yet being
invisible. Years later, speaking to other artists who had held
similar jobs, he heard stories of guards and other museum
staff working together for decades without exchanging so
much as a hello. Wilson therefore set out to create a work
that would make viewers aware of this institutional racism."
www.camh.org


Photorealism

This work by Jan Van Eyck is the earliest example of Photorealism. Though
it may not seem so at first because of the highly stylized hands and faces of
the figures, and the somewhat stiff poses, it must be noticed how accurately
vanEyck represented the scene and the attention paid to the small details.
What very few people are aware of when viewing these portraits are the tools
that these artists' had at their disposal to help them accurately render what
they saw before them. By looking at this painting, it becomes clear that
vanEyck used a tool called the camera obscura, which was most commonly
used by fellow artist Vermeer in later decades. The artist would pose his
subjects in the setting he wished to portray them in, making certain there was
a light source that provided lighting from a single direction. In the case of
the Arnolfini Wedding, it was the window on the left hand side. In fact, if
one were to look at a collection of work by Vermeer, it could be noted that
in almost every painting the subject is seated by a window which is
providing all the light for the scene. After setting up his scene, the artist
would then draw a black curtain over the doorway of the room, effectively
creating a closed box with the scene and the people inside it. there is a hole
Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Wedding 1434 cut into the fabric and a camera obscura placed in front of it, the artist would
oil and tempera on oak 82x60cm then place his blank canvas in front of the lens and the scene in the room
for more on Arnolfini see would be accurately projected onto the canvas, upside down, but allowing
The Mystery of Marriage at this Website the artist to then make a rough tracing of where exactly the shapes were in
the room and their size in relation to one another. This was a fast way for the
artist to get an accurate layout of his whole painting and allow him to begin
to spend time on the small details that in the end, make the biggest
difference. The best example of this in the Arnolfini Wedding can be seen in
the mirror on the wall behind the couple being wed, which accurately reflects
them and the room, along with the cleric leading the wedding, whom is not
portrayed in the painting at all when viewed straight on. Also, there is the
remarkable chandelier, which would be nearly impossible to portray
accurately without the use of the camera obscura because of the difficult
perspective and amount of fine detail. This painting truly shows the effects
of the invention of optical devices such as the camera obscura and camera
lucida on the development of standards for painting, and are the beginning of
other optical devices such as the camera, video, projectors, and now digital
cameras which are widely used by artists' today in the development of their
work.


Photorealism
Here are some diagrams which show what a small camera obscura looked
like, and give a short description of how it works. In fact, most modern
day projectors sold in craft stores and art stores are merely fancier
versions of the camera obscura, but work with exactly the same principle.
With the advent of our modern age where images are everywhere around
us, media ranging from posters to magazines and television and movies,
there have often been debates about the validity of an artist today using
Camera Obscura these means of tracing images in order to create a painting or other work
of fine art. Many have argued against the practice claiming that it cannot
truly be fine art if it is not created freehand, and relying only upon the
artists' own eyes. While it is true that in order for one to become a
successful artist one must spend years learning how to see and render
what is before them, it cannot be discounted that the practice of using
optical devices as tools has been around almost as long as the idea of
perspective was first realized.
By observing the work of Vermeer in relation to the work of Van Eyck, it can again
be seen how the camera obscura was used. Note that there is a strong light source
coming from one direction, most likely a window in the room, and how accurately
the face and hands of the young girl are portrayed, as well as the fine details of the
implements she was using while making lace. What is especially interesting about
this particular painting is the treatment of the red lace on her right hand side. While
the entire painting is almost painstakingly rendered in detail, the mass of red lace
belies an almost expressionistic portrayal, with quick loose strokes and what appears
to be almost pollock-esque drips of paint to suggest the threads. This may even be
seen as an early example of true expressionism, and while it may not seem to be very
earth shattering by today's' standards, in the early 1700's this was quite daring,
indeed.
Form: This portrait is a very straightforward and naturalistic representation. The

composition is simple and there is no great range of space. The value structure
initially is very Caravaggesque but on closer examination the range of value and the
subtlety of the tonal transitions is a bit more complicate. The same is true of the
color in this image. Vermeer does use some intense or saturated hues as well as a
Jan Vermeer. The Lacemaker 1669- few non-local colors in the face and hands.
70
Oil on canvas transferred to panel, This image is one of those images that tends to support Vermeer's use of the camera
23.9 x 20.5 cm obscura. If you look closely at the detail below of the red lace you will find that
Musée du Louvre, Paris Vermeer's lace becomes blobs of color rather than the red lines we would anticipate a

Photorealism
Dutch, Baroque painter rendering for individual strands. If you look closely at the details of any
photograph you will find that details become blurry in this same fashion.
Another facet of this detail also supports this conclusion. If you look closely at the
details of the strands you will also see that there are little disks or rings of color that
seem to have no purpose for being there. These disks are actually what one would
see if you looked through a cheap or poorly made lens on a camera. They are caused
by some imperfections in the lens condensing or refracting light in an odd fashion.
Iconography: Almost all of Vermeer's paintings are allegorical in some way. As

this the young woman makes lace her hands are propped up on a prayer book. This
juxtaposition of prayer book to her embroidery seems to pay homage to the cliché
that "idle hands are the work of the devil." This may be the case because there are
many accounts of Dutch housewives obsessive creation of lace ornamentation,
however, this was not just to keep their hands busy. Lacemaking was also a good
source of extra income for many housewives. If you look at almost any image from
Rembrandt to Vermeer you will see that the clothing usually included an ornate lace
collar and sometimes sleeves and other ornaments. So lace is also a sign of wealth
when it was worn.

Form: Black and white airbrush portrait.
Iconography: Chuck Close worked primarily from photographs of himself, taken in

black and white. He worked on this painting using the grid and transfer method, in
which he drew a grid over the original photograph, and then drew an identical grid
over a larger surface and copied the photograph square by square using his airbrush
until an accurate representation of the original photo had been achieved.
"Squaring" in painting, simple technique for transferring an image from

one surface to another (and sometimes converting the image from one
scale to another) by nonmechanical means. The original work to be
transferred is divided into a given number of squares; the same number of
squares is then marked off-- with charcoal or some other easily removable
medium--on the surface of the receiving area. The contents of each square
of the original are then drawn in the corresponding square of the
reproduction. The use of the grid ensures the accurate placement of images
Chuck Close Self Portrait 1968 onto the reproduction.
airbrush
The Egyptians used squaring at least 5,000 years ago. It has been used to
transfer cartoons onto murals, to transfer preparatory drawings onto
canvas paintings, and to alter the scale of any work in the same media.
According to Haber's Art Reviews (www.haberarts.com) ".....Through all those permutations, Close
is up to one thing. His portraits imitate the photograph, hoping to understand it and yet out to trump
it. He keeps trying harder and harder to fail, and he succeeds. He sticks to the formal, modernist
vocabulary with which he began. Like a printer or a factory, he reproduces it endlessly. Yet he trusts
only to his eye and hand. Close's very first black-and-white paintings were hardly all that precise.
Paradoxically, he depends on the photograph for their hand-made look. The sketchiness of an ear,
say, coincides with the blurring due to a narrow depth of field. Close is fascinated by how reality at
a third remove can seem so real. He is in love with a photograph's lack of authenticity and yet
determined to control it. Year after year he repeats his formal gesture, like Freud's child tossing a

Photorealism
ball over and over to confront a sense of loss. He has lost the comfort of art's humanity and his own
claim to genius, and again and again he replaces it with his outsize talent."
Though that is a somewhat lengthy and involved explanation for his work, it does bring the idea of
the photograph into the fine- art- painting dimension. Chuck Close did not run away from the idea of
photography, or try to hide the fact that he worked from photographs, as many artists do, but instead
embraced it and played with it and successfully made it work to his advantage.
Context: According to the Washington Post, "Using a black-and-white photograph overlaid with a
grid, Close created his earliest monumental paintings with an air brush and boundless patience. He
took as his guiding philosophy the idea
that, as he says, "the process will set you free."
The same image shrunken down so that your eye mixes the colors.
Form: Chuck Close used the same optical theories of optical mixing that
Seurat used in his pointalism but Close became very interested in the
formal qualities of the process. This image demonstrates how Close took
the idea of grid and transfer (sqaring) that we saw in Daumier's work and
makes the process more visible by making abstract designs within each
square.
Chuck Close, Bill II, a 1991

(portrait of William Wegman)
Oil on canvas. 36 x 30 inches.
Form: A later work by Chuck Close, done
in color and in oil, on a huge canvas.
Iconography: Watching the development

of Chuck Closes' paintings, the viewer is
able to see the ways in which an artist is
able to expand and experiment using the
photographs as a tool. Instead of being
confined to just creating an exact replica
of the photograph, Close is here showing
his skill as a painter and his knowledge of
color theory and how it works in creating
a realistic portrait. Much the way Seurat
created paintings by using painstaking
pinpoints of complementary color that are
mixed to create a picture by the viewers
eyes, Close is doing the same optical
trick. Using saturated colors in a mosaic
type pattern that, up close, wouldn't

Photorealism
translate into much, but from afar create a

breathtakingly realistic portrait of his
subject.
Context: A review of his later works

done by the Worcester Phoenix
Newspaper helps to give a perceptive on
his later works and how he developed the
distinctive style found in his color
works."....It's true that like all art students
of the `60s he started out wrestling with
abstract expressionism and trying to see
who would become the next Willem De
Kooning (1904-1997). But as his
classmates began to drift toward
minimalism, Close saw a fork in the road
and headed directly to figurative realism.
His breakthrough work in 1967 was a full
nude. Not all that unusual, except that Big
Nude was nine feet tall and 21 feet long.
From then on, he concentrated on what he
refers to as his "heads," monstrous close-
ups of peoples' faces, mostly his own, but
also friends, family, and other artists.
These time-consuming and slickly
Chuck Close executed images were almost too real and
Lucas, 1986-87, too scary, with flaring nostrils, bulging
oil & pencil on canvas, eyes, and every pockmark and wart
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. magnificently defined. Somewhere along
the way Close decided to let us in on how
he makes his paintings. He shows us the
expansion grid marks and indicates just
how he applies the paint. These were no
longer slavish blow-up copies of
photographs (they never really were), but
rather assemblages of thousands of
miniature paintings, put together much
like ancient Italian mosaics."

Form:
Photorealistic
painting done

Photorealism
with oil on
canvas.
What makes
Estes process
unique is that
he would set
up a tripod
and shoot
many photos
from the
same vantage
point and
combine the
views into a
single
image. What
this allows
him to do
with his
image is to
make a
painting that
has both the
qualities of a
Richard Estes, Cafe Express, 1975, oil on canvas,
photo but the
The Art Institute of Chicago.
completely
observed
details of a
painting. In
a phot, the
range of
focus of the
lense would
blur the
buildings in
the
background,
however, the
buildings in
the
background
here are in
sharp focus
because he
uses many
photos that
are focussed
on the
background.


Photorealism
Iconography: According to Stokstad, Estes can be classified as a 'super-realist' painter. His

paintings so closely resemble a photograph as to be almost indistinguishable from one. What is also
noted in Stokstad about his work is the elimination of all the people in the picture, which allowed
him to '(emphasize) his interest in the refined compositional arrangements.' Compared to what we
have been looking at so far in which the primary subject was a person or people, Estes' work creates
its' own eerie tension and suggests that he finds urban landscapes and city life to be cold and devoid
of human contact. Early n his career, Estes did a lot of figurative work and classic drawing, often
influenced by painters such as Edgar Degas and Edward Hopper. By knowing about his background
in classical art, it is easy to see how he has moved beyond the limitations of early figurative work,
and set forth an idea for himself that comments on what is important to him as well as challenges his
technical ability.
Context: According to a review of the work done by the the Smithsonian at the Hirsshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC "....Estes is one of the foremost proponents of the Photo-
Realist movement, a particular type of realism characterized by high finish, sharp details, and a
photographic appearance. This movement began in the mid-1960s in America with such artists as
Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Duane Hanson and Estes.
of the 1930s, who often used photographic sources to ensure accuracy of line and form. Estes is one
of the foremost proponents of the Photo-Realist movement, a particular type of realism characterized
by high finish, sharp details, and a photographic appearance. This movement began in the mid-1960s
in America with such artists as Malcolm Morley, Chuck Close, Duane Hanson and Estes.
of the 1930s, who often used photographic sources to ensure accuracy of line and form."
Form: A photorealist painting, oil on canvas.
Iconography: Contrary to the title this painting shows the interior

of a diner shown through a plate glass window, the central savings
sign is reflected in the window instead of being the main focus of
the painting itself. Once again, Estes has eliminated the human
element from his scene, choosing instead to let the trappings of
society speak for him. It can be read that the diner is
representative of the working-man, empty now as they return to
their jobs, or possibly just waiting for the lunch crowd. The
shadow of the ever-present savings bank is a reminder that society
thrives and lives off the money that is spent or saved. This is why
people work, and these are the places that everything they work
hard for comes down to, places of food, comfort and commerce.
Context: The tension and meaning in this painting are derived

from the composition and subject matter. The horizontal lines and
Richard Estes, Central Savings, 1975, cold glare off the aluminum seats tend to give a feeling of
oil on canvas, emptiness. Only the buildings reflected in the glass have sunlight

Photorealism
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, reflecting off them, not the immediate picture plane the viewer
Kansas City, MO finds themselves in. This is another example of his view on
society as cold, bleak and impersonal.
Don Eddy, Untitled (4 VWs), 1971

acrylic on canvas, 66 x 95 in., private collection.

Form: Photorealist paintings done with acrylic on canvas. Highly rendered.
According to Nancy Hoffman Galleries, representatives of a collection of his
work,".... Eddy's painting technique is unique. He works in acrylic, first painting
the entire canvas green, then brown and then purple. With these three layers he
separates warm from cool colors. After the three layers of underpainting color,
Eddy often adds 20-30 transparent layers of glazing in different colors to achieve
the powerful visual impact of his palette."
Iconography: Don Eddy works with Acrylic as opposed to oil in these paintings
which is impressive because of the relative difficulty in achieving the same depth
out of the plastic based paints as opposed to oil based paints.
According to the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the campus of the university of
Nebraska

"...In his early years, Eddy became familiar with the

airbrush as a painting tool in his father's car-customizing
shop. His Photo-Realist paintings are totally airbrushed, and
he is considered a master of that technique. During the first
decade of his career, in the 1970s, his approach to painting
was primarily analytical as he painted cars, scrap yards and
showroom windows, then opulent shop fronts, silver and
crystal displays. The objects that filled the windows were
machine made--familiar parts of contemporary life. The
objects provided bright, reflective surfaces that distorted the
appearance of reality and created kaleidoscopic patterns of
refracted and ambient light and color. These images were
Don Eddy, Pontiac Showroom I, 1972 ideally suited to his camera (a mechanical device that
acrylic on canvas, 80 x 66 in. captures the imagery of light) with which Eddy had become
The Robert B. Mayer Family expert while working his way through college as a tourist
Collection, photographer.

Photorealism
Chicago
Eddy's introduction of windows into his work serves the
purpose of creating a triple situation: a window has a
surface, its transparency allows the appearance of a second
image, and it reflects a third vision. Because of the way the
eye functions, we never, in reality, see all three as separate
images at the same time. By incorporating information
gathered from several photographs and forcing it all onto
the single focused surface of his painting Eddy makes the
physiologically impossible seem logical. A camera cannot
achieve the same result because, like the eye, it focuses on
either foreground or background. In dealing with color,
Eddy does not strive for reality, preferring to paint from
black-and-white photographs and to create color systems
that are more concerned with formalist considerations. For
instance, an orange car situated behind a red one may be
Don Eddy, Harley Hub, 1970
reality, but a white car situated behind a blue one may work
acrylic on canvas, 28 x 28 in.
better as a painting.
private collection.
Eddy's work of the early 1980s indicates his reinvestment
in both vivid color and evocative content. His newest
paintings are multidimensional layers of ideas as complex
and personal as the artist's technique. His most recent work
is the most comprehensive in terms of the artist's themes of
nature, art history, personal experience and fatherhood. His
work is no longer simply photographic or realistic, but
contains elements of both--having abandoned the perceptual
world of the eye to move in spaces of the mind. As an
artist, Don Eddy is considered a thoughtful intellectual as
well as a disciplined craftsman.
Context: "A realist artist, sometimes called a photo-realist, Don Eddy works in
acrylic on canvas as well as in colored pencil on paper. Over the past decade
Eddy has moved from images of toys floating in front of landscapes and majestic
architectural interiors within the perimeters of one rectangular canvas to
juxtaposing images in triptych and polytypch configurations."
(www.nancyhoffmangallery.com)


Bay Area Art
Bay Area Art!

Form: Oil on canvas. This piece was done with very thick
impastos of paint, one of Thiebaud's signature techniques for
some of his oil paintings. He was as interested in the texture
of the paint as he was in the compositions themselves.
Iconography: Thiebaud is interested in capturing scenes of

Americana, easily recognizable and in most cases with the
ability to let the viewer bring up their own memories of
childhood or simple pleasures. His work is not photo-
realistic, but in this case it is 'real' in it's own way. He has
captured the 3-dimensional aspect of the gumballs and
machines through his masterful use of paint. In life, the paint
is so thick that it literally projects off the canvas. He has also
chosen to represent the machines in a pure form, simplified
down to their basic shape and function. He is not interested
in making any deep statement about what a gumball machine
can 'potentially' mean, it just is what it is, simple and
unassuming. The colors used are saturated, bright and almost
stark, perhaps to further remind the viewer that these are
sugary confections, man-made and impossibly colorful. It is
also interesting how he has used a symmetrical composition
and still managed to make it interesting and engaging to the
viewer. It may be because he has used three gumball
machines instead of one, or because the choice of color and
lack of background make it easy for the eye to rest for long
periods of time on any point of the painting. Regardless of
the cause, it is a strong piece of work.
Context: ..."Born in 1920 at Mesa, Arizona. Before becoming

an artist in 1947, he worked as a sign painter, cartoonist,
commercial artist, illustrator, designer and publicity manager
Wayne Thiebaud, 1920 - Three Machines , 1963
in New York and California. From 1942 to 1945 he served in
oil on canvas 30 x 36 1/2 (76.2 x 92.7 cm) inches
the Air Force and painted murals for the army. In 1949-50 he
studied at the San José State University and from 1950 to
1953 at the California State University, Sacramento. In 1951
he had his first one-man exhibition at the Crocker Art
Gallery,
Sacramento, California. From 1954 to 1957 he produced
eleven educational films, for which he won the Scholastic
Art Prize in 1961. From 1951 to 1961 he taught at
Sacramento City College, and from 1960 to 1976 at the
University of California, Davis. He has had many exhibitions
in the USA, including one at the Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1981. In 1972 he was in the
documenta "5", Kassel. " (taken from www.fi.muni.cz)
Form: Color etching, aquatint on paper. Symmetrical,
with the figure in the middle. No background, and the
clown in the foreground. A few bright colors but the
over all tone is bleak and dark.
Iconography: Again, Thiebaud has used a symmetrical

composition in placing the clown in the center of the
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/bay_area.html[1/21/2014 4:06:08 PM]

Bay Area Art
page. Though he is depicting what may be seen as

another piece of Americana, this particular portrait fails
to be as benign as the gumball machines or his other
works depicting cakes, pies, or lipstick tubes. The
portrait of the clown is almost sad, he is not smiling and
his eyes appear bleak, dark and recessed. There is a lack
of background to put the clown into any kind of
context, the viewer is unsure where he is or what his
purpose is. It forces the viewer to focus solely on the
clown as a person. He is facing the viewer full on,
almost confronting them. Unlike most portraits, where
the viewer is invited to behave almost voyeuristically,
this one engages the viewer. Further humanizing the
clown is the addition of the strap that holds the nose in
place, reaffirming for the viewer that there is a man
underneath that costume, that the clown is not in itself
an independent entity.
Context: Thiebaud's' background as a cartoonist and

Wayne Thiebaud, Clown, 1979 Color etching and aquatint illustrator is evident in this piece. It is created in a
traditional media, etching, in which the lines are the
most important element. How they are used to compose
a form as well as add shadow an depth is extremely
important in the setting the mood of a work. Since line
is primarily used in illustration, it is easy to see how
masterful Thiebaud is at using it. He is able to create a
sense of depth and emotion well, while still maintaining
the feel of an illustration, as opposed to a portrait.
Form: transparent and opaque watercolor, colored chalks, and charcoal over etching
and aquatint. The paint quality and type on this piece is much different than those of
his oil paintings. Whereas his oil paintings depend on the thickness of the paint to
create a sense of depth and richness, his cityscapes use thin washes and a variety of
paint quality (from transparent to opaque) to create the light, shadows, and ambiance
of the city.
Iconography: The viewer can easily get a feel for the sometimes imposing hills and
steep streets that comprise the landscape of the city. He has also mastered the feel of
the unique San Francisco climate, affected by its' proximity to the bay. The light
tends to be filtered through the ever-present fog, creating softer shadows tinged with
blues and grays, and it is evident by his ability to capture that feeling that he is
intimately familiar with it.
Context: As a bay area artist, this work along with his other cityscapes shows how
Wayne Thiebaud, Steep Street,
truly connected he is with San Francisco. The viewer can almost feel that while
1993
Thiebaud's place of residence is currently in Sacramento, and he has spent time in
transparent and opaque
other Bay Area cities, he is comfortable and familiar with San Francisco. He is also
watercolor, colored chalks,
adept at capturing the feel of the city, with its' unique geography and history.
and charcoal over etching and
aquatint 55.4 x 40.1 cm
(image); 86.3 x 65.4 cm (sheet)
inches

Bay Area Art

Form: Oil on canvas. The paint quality for this piece is thin, the brushwork is
quick and instinctual, the emphasis is not on precision, but on feeling. The
shapes and colors are geometricized, though still in a recognizable form. The
brushwork is loose and visible.
Iconography: Some art critics place this piece as a landscape of Ocean Park, in
Santa Monica California, and others who place it squarely in San Francisco. It
is known that Diebenkorn's' parent lived on Telegraph hill in San Francisco and
that he spent his younger years there. For comparison, we will look at this
cityscape in comparison with Thiebaud's cityscape, and see how the
composition, light, and paint quality compare. Like Thiebaud's view of the
city, there is a distortion to how sharply the streets slope and a sense of
unreality to the landscape. In both paintings it is clear that in reality a city
could never exist as distorted as these are shown, but they still manage to make
sense. There is a different light quality to Diebenkorn's work, perhaps because
he is showing a residential suburb, the light has a brighter quality, less affected
by the fog, and the shadows cast are darker and more gray than they are blue.
Compositionally, Diebenkorn uses more of the canvas to show a smaller
segment of the city. Instead of showing a big slice of it with the surrounding
geography, he is giving us an intimate glimpse into a quiet neighborhood. the
picture plane has been nicely divided into thirds, with all the pertinent 'action'
happening on the far left, and open fields to the right where the viewer can
'rest' their eyes.
Context: According to his unofficial biography, "Richard Diebenkorn was born

in Portland, Oregon in 1922, and attended school in Berkeley, California. He
went to New York in the 1940's, where he met William Baziotes and Robert
Diebenkorn, Richard
Motherwell, immersing himself in the Abstract Expressionist milieu. In the
Cityscape I (Landscape No. 1) 1963
1950's, Diebenkorn painted abstractions marked by strong compositions and
Oil on canvas 60 1/4 x 50 1/2 in
gestural brushwork. His work alternated between abstraction and figuration,
San Francisco Museum of Modern
but always with vibrant colors defining planar compositions. The figurative
Art
work is composed of large areas of color to form spaces into which Diebenkorn
placed a simplified standing or seated figure. In the mid-1960's, Diebenkorn
turned away from imagery to the abstract Ocean Park series. These paintings
are vertical, geometric abstractions of subtle line with visible evidence of
reworking, reminders of the previous permutations of each work. The canvases
are suffused with California light and color, and with coastal allusions to sky,
ocean, seaside and sun. Each work is a self-contained chromatic universe,
although every painting in the series is connected through color and
compositional similarities." (taken from www.acquavellagalleries.com)

Form: Oil on canvas. Geometric abstraction, the brushwork on this piece is
more linear and deliberate than with his cityscape. The colors are washed out
and diluted looking, instead of bright saturated colors. This piece is

Bay Area Art
geometrical forms and color. The paint quality for this piece is thin, the
brushwork is quick and instinctual, the emphasis is not on precision, but on
feeling. Vertical, geometric abstractions of subtle line with visible evidence of
reworking.
Iconography: Ocean Park No. 54 is abstract, the colors and shapes only
alluding to light, shadow, houses and sea, but never actually representing them.
The colors are those that can be easily associated with an ocean side
community, faded blue for the sky and ocean, tans and yellows for sand and
earth, and various pastel hues to represent the houses one would find in an
ocean side community.
Context: This work has the same subject matter as his cityscape, but in a
different form. Whereas Diebenkorn's' cityscape was more literal, with the
Diebenkorn, Richard Ocean Park No. buildings and landscape easily recognizable. The abstract works were a natural
progression for Diebenkorn. He was moving from a style in which he had
54. 1972
become adept, representation, and progressing toward a style that was more
Oil on canvas 100 x 81 in
challenging to the viewer, harder to decipher while still carrying the same
San Francisco Museum of Modern
feelings and meanings as his earlier works.
Art
God is in the vectors. by Robert Hughes. Time, 12/08/97, Vol. 150 Issue 24, p98, 3p, 3c
THE LUMINOUS ARCHITECTURE OF RICHARD DIEBENKORN'S PAINTINGS
Foot for square foot, the current retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's paintings at New York
City's Whitney Museum of American Art offers more aesthetic pleasure than any other show--
at least of contemporary art--in town. Which isn't to say the Whitney has done the subject full
justice. Its heart being where it is, the museum needed lots and lots of space to present a mass
of trivia and threadbare junk from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pa., pointlessly
documenting the pallid maestro's effect on advertising and fashion, under the title "The
Warhol Look/Glamour Style Fashion." So the Whitney's out-of-house curator, Jane
Livingston, found the space for Diebenkorn whittled down to one floor and a small entry
gallery of the museum, which is nothing like enough for a just overview of the man's pictorial
achievement.
Except for an excellent show of his drawings curated by John Elderfield at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1988, Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, never had a fair deal from New York
museums. The city's cultural establishment viewed him as, well, a California artist--a bit of an
outsider, a bit marginal, insufficiently difficult or radical, too easy on the eye, whatever.
Diebenkorn, one of the most flintily self-critical artists who ever lived in America, took this
in his stride, and his oeuvre (closed, alas, too early) handily answers his detractors. Nobody
who cares about painting as an art--as distinct from propaganda, complaint or "cutting edge"
ephemera--could be indifferent to Diebenkorn's work or to the long, intense and fascinating
dialogue with the modernist past it embodies.
Born in Portland, Ore., in 1922, Diebenkorn was raised in San Francisco and got his first art
education there--a process interrupted by his enlistment in the Marine Corps. This, however,
turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since he was posted to Quantico, Va., and while there
was able regularly to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One
painting there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916. Though
Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse (and Mondrian, and

Bay Area Art
Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist pantheon) for the rest of
his working life, this particular Matisse, with its simultaneous inside-outside view, thrilled
and inspired him: "I noticed its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room yet
the surface is right there...right up front."
Discharged from the military in 1945, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine
Arts. Over the next several years, he moved between the East and West coasts. His work from
the late '40s to the early '50s was essentially abstract, though with strong overtones of
landscape space and color. A considerable influence of Willem de Kooning bore on it. De
Kooning, Diebenkorn felt, "had it all, could outpaint anybody, at least until the mid-'60s,
when he began to lose it." But Diebenkorn's friendship with the Bay Area painter David Park,
who bravely refused to accept the reigning dictum in the American avant-garde that
radicalism had to mean abstraction, pointed him still closer toward the figurative.
By 1957, Diebenkorn's figurative phase was well and truly under way, all its parts integrated,
in landscape, figure painting and still life. But it's necessary to realize, and the show makes
this quite clear, that for all his shifts between degrees of abstraction and figuration,
Diebenkorn remained essentially the same artist; he wasn't someone trying on different suits
to see which ones fit.
In hindsight one can see the components of his culminating achievement, the Ocean Park
series, forming in a small, early landscape like Seawall, 1957. First, the clear marine light that
seems to bathe all the forms, whether sharply cut (the tawny beach and wedges of black
shadow on the left) or vaguer (the tract of scribbled green grass on the right). Second,
Diebenkorn's decisiveness about tonal structure and the way sharp contrast can be used both to
hollow out the space of the painting and to create a firm, flat pattern. And third, a breezy
lyricism of feeling that was especially Diebenkorn's, an exhilaration at the material fullness of
the world, translated into terms of pigment.
Edward Hopper was one of Diebenkorn's inner jury of admired masters--no other American
painter except de Kooning influenced him as much. What he liked in Hopper, Diebenkorn
once laconically said, was "the diagonals." Not the mood: you can't extract a Hopperish
melancholy from Woman in a Window, 1957, though her face is averted. What she might be
thinking doesn't count; she's a model, not a narrative. What does count is the confluence of
vectors--the square window with its two planes of blue sea and sky, the tabletop rushing away
to the right at a shallow angle, the triangle of the arm propping the head, and the woman's left
hand drooping over the upper arm, its slack spiky fingers echoed in the red-and-blue stripes
of a cloth draped over the chair arm. All these angles, beautifully integrated, give the image an
architecture that solidifies the passing moment, a firmness to which Hopper's diagonals
pointed the way.
This virile structure enabled Diebenkorn to explore all manner of nuances, shifts of tone,
transparencies and textural quirks in the areas of color it defined. It let the picture bear
provisional or openly corrected passages, without degenerating into niggle, mess and muddle.
Structure was the key, not just to Diebenkorn's forthrightness as a painter but to his delicacy
as well. And it survives even in the little still lifes, which are hardly more than visual nouns--
a glass of water on a gray cloth, with orange poppies in it; a knife in another glass, bent by
refraction--rendered with the immediacy and verve one associates with Manet's asparagus and
peonies.
The precondition of his structure, in turn, was drawing. Diebenkorn drew incessantly. It wasn't
only that he belonged to the last generation of American artists to be raised in a culture of
drawing. He loved the act. Drawing was sifting the world's disorder. It was making sense of
random agglomerations of things, unconscious postures of the body. (In all his drawings and

Bay Area Art
paintings of his wife Phyllis, you only rarely get the sense that she was actually posing.) Every
painter has favorite shapes and gestures, which, unless they encounter some resistance, can
turn into mannerisms. Diebenkorn's style certainly grew some mannerisms, but drawing--the
continuous friction against obdurate motifs--prevented them from getting ingrown, turning
into tics.
The climax of Diebenkorn's work was, by general consent, the Ocean Park series, which he
began in 1967. Ocean Park is part of Santa Monica, the beachside suburb of Los Angeles
where he had his studio. From its high crystalline light, its big calm planes of sea and sky, its
cuts and interlacings of highway divider and curb and gable and yellow sand, Diebenkorn
produced a marvelous synthesis that, though prolonged through more than 140 large canvases,
had very few weak moments.
In the Ocean Parks, with their pentimenti and layering left exposed to view, one sees the
summation of Diebenkorn's admiration for Matisse's way of leaving the picture with the traces
of its own making. This reworking leaves an impression of curiosity, not indecision. The
paintings are broadly brushed and then "tuned" by passages of fine, but not fidgety, detail. The
color, glazed or discreetly scumbled, is luminous--now diffuse like sea fog, now hard and
bright as direct sun. The Ocean Parks radiate an Apollonian calm, an uncoercive authority.
They are the creations of a man with a fully integrated temperament, candid but not showy.
There is nothing else quite like them in modern painting, in America or the world.
~~~~~~~~
By ROBERT HUGHES
Form: Oil on canvas. Thick, busy brushwork. Dark, muted and non-local colors.
Occasional touches of saturated colors, such as true red or blue. The figure is set just
to the right of the middle, so as not to make it symmetrical
Iconography: The figures is shown alone drinking coffee. The feeling is somber and
contemplative because of the dark colors. The look on the figure's face is relaxed and
peaceful, and looks like she's deep in thought, closing her eyes to take a drink from
her coffee. Her legs are crossed and she's sitting alone by the window. She's relaxed
and comfortable being a lone in thought.
Context: As one of Diebenkorn' early works, this is a good example of where he

started, and how it led to his abstractions. Hints of this interest lay within the
painting itself, in the loose brush quality and large areas of used to represent a pillow,
or wall, or window ledge. It is easy to imagine what his work would have looked like
had he continued to apply just a bit more color, or just a few more lines, moving it
away from the representational and more towards the abstract. This is a figurative,
representational work done by Richard Diebenkorn before his cityscapes and Ocean
Park works. It shows how he was influenced by works such as Willem de Kooning's'
Woman IV, and many of Edward Hoppers' Americana-inspired genre scenes. The
influence from De Kooning can be seen in the quick, messy brushwork, non-local
color palette, and occasional use of saturated color for visual interest. The scene
depicted, however, is very reminiscent of Edward Hoppers' Nighthawks (1942) or
Richard Diebenkorn. Coffee.
Chop Suey (1929). In both paintings Hopper is depicting individuals at rest, in a
1959
coffeehouse or eating establishment, partaking of sustenance in a sort of quiet
oil on canvas
solitude. The difference in feeling between Hoppers work and Diebenkorn's', in that
regard, is that while Hopper is showing people engaging in personal reflection while
surrounded by others, Diebenkorn's' person is shown as an individual, alone and with
nothing else to engage herself with besides the coffee in her hands.

Bay Area Art

Elmer Bischoff American , 1916 - 1991Yellow Lampshade, 1969 oil on canvas
70 x 80 (177.8 x 203.2 cm) inchesGift of Nan Tucker McEvoy
in memory of her mother, Phyllis de Young Tucker 1992.10
Form: Oil on canvas, liberal use
of non-local color and an
impressionist palette. The
brushwork is quick and loose
and more suggestive of form
than truly descriptive. He uses
bright touches of saturated
color. There are two figures
facing each other, both
standing. Between them is a
table with a lamp on it, the lamp
has a yellow lamp shade.
Iconography: Even though the

figures are standing still, and it
seems to be an everyday genre
scene, the piece seems alive
with action. All the bright
colors and the way it was
painted promotes an energy that
is buzzing around the painting.
Even though its an abstract
painting, it feels as if you could
enter the room. By allowing the
brushwork to remain evident,
and with liberal use of color
and line, he was able to lend
movement into a scene where the people themselves seem to be standing still, engaged in quiet conversation. This
ability to create movement, not by the figures, but with the paint, is one that causes the viewer to become absorbed
and interested in the painting not only for the overt message the artist is sending, but for the less evident, but equally
strong, message in the brushstroke.
Context: Bischoff was best known for his figurative work. He began his career by creating beautiful abstract-
surrealist works, which lent themselves well towards the development of the loose brushstrokes and bright touches
of saturated color which gave his figurative work a strong, energetic quality.
( Culled directly and extensively from www.absolutearts.com)
"......the work of Elmer Bischoff, the artist who, with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, is credited
with launching the Bay Area figurative movement."... "Elmer Bischoff's role in the Bay Area figurative
movement was central. He was a Bay Area native: born and raised in the Elmwood district of Berkeley,
the son of a successful architectural designer who made frequent visits to Southern California for design
ideas, taking his talented son with him to make sketches of homes in Pasadena and Brentwood.
Rejecting his father's proffered career in architecture, Bischoff studied art at the University of California
under the Berkeley School modernists Worth Ryder, Erle Loran and Margaret Peterson, where he
became a self professed disciple of Picasso. Following the war, he joined David Park, Hassel Smith and
Douglas MacAgy on the faculty at California School of Fine Arts (CSFA; now the San Francisco Art
Institute), where he also played trumpet in the Studio 13 Jazz Band with other faculty members (Park

Bay Area Art
played piano).
Bischoff's lifelong residency in the Bay Area would be interrupted only by a three-year teaching
engagement at Yuba College in Marysville, California after he had resigned in protest from CSFA
following Hassel Smith's dismissal. This would be an intensely productive period, and his return to San
Francisco in 1956 would be followed in 1957 by a seminal group exhibit at the Oakland Art Museum
(precursor to Oakland Museum of California) titled Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting. By
1959 his work was being handled by New York dealer George Staempfli, he had received a Ford
Foundation grant, and he had moved into a permanent studio on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
Throughout the sixties Bischoff continued taking his figurative work in a succession of new directions,
drawing praise for his heated, emotionally charged paintings of isolated figures and his ambiguous,
atmospheric interior studies of figures, frequently focusing on couples. He accepted a teaching position
at U.C. Berkeley and, for the first time, traveled extensively. But by the early 1970s Elmer Bischoff
would again reinvent himself as an artist, beginning to work in a new medium--acrylic--and painting in
a style of gestural abstraction that evoked elements of Kandinsky and Miró but also referred back to his
earlier interest in surrealism and the cartoons of George Herriman. In their improvisatory bravura, the
paintings were signature Bischoff. The artist Christopher Brown would later remark that the mood of
these canvases was so lively that they have the look of noise. (Bischoff referred to this break from
figurative work as leaving a church and entering a gymnasium.) He would continue to explore this style
until his death at age 74 in 1991 in Alta Bates Hospital, Berkeley. "


Feminist Art

Form: The paint quality for this portrait is typical of Alice Neel's' work. It is applied in thin washes, almost
giving it the appearance of a watercolor. The line quality is quick and nervous, somewhat spidery, looking
as though it was done quickly
and instinctually. The composition is symmetrical, with the figure being set right in the center of the picture
plane.
The color is non-local and seemingly chosen at random. Her paintings are very process oriented, which
means that it is more important for the artist to be involved in the process of making the painting as opposed
to the final painting . It looks unfinished because only the figure is painted in any realistic way, and the
background and chair are flat.
Iconography: She did not try to glamorize or objectify any of her models, everyone was shown as she
saw them. Though Andy Warhol was a famous artist in his own right, she showed him as the fragile human
he was, frail, with flaccid muscle tone due to his illness.. He is wearing the corset that was a constant
necessity after his surgery, and she is showing him vulnerable, eyes closed and hands clasped loosely in his
lap as though he has resigned himself to the less than perfect physical condition he was in.
Context: This is a portrait of Andy Warhol shortly after he had been stabbed. Her painting style is
described in Stokstad as subjective and 'penetrating', as a result they were often too much for the aesthetic
of the time. The fact that he looks resigned to his less then perfect image is significant because his career
was based on media images and the glorification of beauty. In "The Andy Warhol Diaries," by Pat Hackett,
it is clearly shown that he constantly surrounded himself by beautiful people and things, and strove for a
Alice Neel (American, 1900-- level of physical perfection that was clearly out of his reach. Though bald, his vanity led him to don his
1984) trademark wig, shown in the painting carefully arranged, trying his best to maintain his dignity and illusion
Andy Warhol, 1970 of youth. In Stokstad, it is noted that Alice Neel had lived a life filled with crises and strife. One of her
Oil on canvas 60" x 40" children had died while still an infant, and the other was abducted by a former husband. She was a self-
Whitney Museum of taught artist with no formal training. Early on, she adopted an Expressionistic style that featured distorted,
American Art, subjective portraits of close friends, couples, and mothers with their children. In the 1930's her style
New York, Gift of Timothy softened somewhat, though she never lost her penchant for being subjective. She socialized with well
Collins known artists, writers and critics and in the 1960's began to feature many of them in her work. It is through
the lens of her early life that one can see how she relished showing people as they truly were. She had
never lived an easy life, and clearly saw and portrayed the reality of the human condition in her paintings.

Form: The paint quality for this work is again thin, but appears much less 'washy' looking than many
of her other paintings. The lines are still quick and loosely rendered, giving it an agitated, nervous
feel. She is again staying with the symmetrical composition, the subjects are in the very center of the
painting. The disadvantage to this type of composition is that it tends to make the painting less
interesting to the eye. The colors are non-local, saturated and somewhat randomly applied, especially
in the flesh tones. The figures and chair they are sitting on look distorted.
Iconography: Alice Neel has not tried to make her subject physically beautiful. Instead, she has
shown her as she appeared in real life. The 'beauty' in the subject comes from Nochlin's' aggressive
stare, erect posture, and arms placed protectively around and behind her daughter. Her body language
is tense and formal, legs crossed and stiff. In contrast, and perhaps because of her mothers protection,
the daughter is loose and informal. Her legs and arms are at ease and her facial expression suggests
curiosity and wonder.
Context: This is a painting of Linda Nochlin and her daughter, Daisy. According to Stokstad, Linda
Nochlin was a professor at Vassar and wrote an essay in 1971 entitled "Why have there been no great
women artists?", which helped to bring attention to feminist art history and argued that women had
been 'deprived the opportunity to achieve greatness by their exclusion from the male dominated
Alice Neel (American, 1900--1984) institutional systems of training, patronage, and criticism that set the standards of professional
accomplishment.' Alice Neel is showing Nochlin as protective and loving toward her daughter,
Linda Nochlin and Daisy, 1973 Oil underscoring the belief that Nochlin held about creating a more equal future for her daughter as well
on canvas as all the other young woman growing up in that time period, as well as beyond. There is a measure
55-7/8" x 44" of tenderness and wistfullness shown in the painting, most likely because of the death of Alice Neel's'
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth one child and kidnapping of the other. It is showing a strong, educated woman who is also fulfilling
K. Sweetser Fund the role of a mother as well as a feminist, and succeeding at both.
Form: Photostat, high contrast photograph overlaid with text. This is a collage type of
esthetic made popular first by the Dada artists such as Hannah Hoch and others. The images
are overlaid with text which can also be read iconographically.
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/20th_century/feminist_art.htm[1/21/2014 4:06:17 PM]

Feminist Art
Iconography: It almost appears as if the artist has randomly chosen photographs and
phrases. This almost Dada like technique of fusing random association with commercial
process links Kruger to the Pop Art movement as well. According to Stokstad, Barbara
Kruger felt that the media created myths concerning female ideals of beauty, consumerism,
and culture. Her goal with this work was to show that in our society, what the media tells
people is that the possession of goods is what creates a person. It is a blatant statement on
what the artist perceives as the American media ideals of ownership equaling success. In
terms of feminism, it is a statement about the myth that American women are 'shopaholics',
interested more in acquiring clothing and jewels than an education. The hand in the
photograph is male, and it is interesting to note that it's holding what can be read as a credit
card in a confrontational manner, right into the forefront of the picture plane. This has the
effect of creating a strong statement, not a suggestion. Her use of a red card with white
lettering makes the text as stark as the underlying image.
Context: In Stokstad, it is noted that Barbara Kruger had experience as a designer and photo
editor for women's magazines. She was born in 1945 and was growing up in the generation
where the feminist movement began to take shape. She began creating these works in the
1970's, and she wanted to 'undermine the media with it's own devices.' Going back to the
creation of myths by the media, she had declared that the goal of her work was to "break
myths, not create them." It is important to note that in the 1960's and 70's, media images of
women in magazines focused on stereotypical images of women creating a perfect home life
for their husbands, finishing dinner in time to fix a martini for the hard working man. At this
time as well, the magazine Playboy had started to gain momentum, placing women in a
compliant 'sex-kitten' role, good only for an arm adornment to a successful, wealthy male. It
Barbara Kruger. Untitled. 1987 is in this atmosphere that Barbara Kruger fought to make these media images work against
themselves, showing the hypocrisy behind the accepted imagery.
"Her groundbreaking feminist public art pieces often use humor to talk back, and confront
the master narrative. What does that mean? She confronts the ideology promoted by our
culture and the exclusion of discourse. She encourages individuality and individual thinking,
not following dominant ideologies, and resisting impositions of culture. She points out
errors of representations that are one sided and fail to take into consideration the diversity
inherent (but usually ignored) in our culture.) All day we look at images like advertisements
that do nothing but make us slaves to materialism, but then you see her stuff and it says "I
shop therefore I am" getting people to question what really am I doing?"
(www.girltalkback.org/workshops/ phunarticle.htm).
http://www.aliceneel.com/
Form: Photostat, high contrast black and white photograph overlaid with snatches of text which can also
be read iconographically.
Iconography: Using a high contrast black and white photograph of a sculpture that resembles a greek
statue, the artist shows an ideal of 'female beauty'. The text to the left of the picture reads, "Your gaze
hits the side of my face." This is a play on words that recalls an art historical term, "male gaze." The
term refers to the fact that in earlier times, classically trained artists were male, and the paintings they
did of women were done through their eyes, their 'male gaze', so to speak. Often, the early classical
paintings showed women as objects, the were often prostitutes, concubines, or the wives of rich patrons.
The women of these paintings were also objectified and often made to appear much more attractive than
they truly were. Therefore, it can be seen that the irony of this work is in the use of a 'classical' Greek
sculpture, and the use of the phrase as an attack. The words 'hits the side of my face.' brings up mental
images of violence, specifically of men against women. It can mean either a mental or physical violence,
but more than likely it is showing that the way women are leered at by men, looked at as sexual objects,
can be as violent as a physical slap to the face. By seeing women as nothing more than an object, it is
violence to them by dehumanizing them.
Context: The artist again uses her unique background as an editor and as an educated artist to create this
work. She is not so much dealing with a broad media-induced myth as she is with what she perceives to
be a direct objectification of women by men through what the media glorifies them as. In this case, it is
Barbara Kruger. Untitled. 1980
women as cool, unfeeling objects or statues. They are there to be gazed upon in any way the male sees
fit.
Form: ten parts, analysis of fecal stains and feeding charts. Perspex units, liners, faeces, white card,
and ink. This is a multi-part installation work. This is a collage type of esthetic made popular first by
the Dada artists such as Hannah Hoch and others. The images are overlaid with snatches of text

Feminist Art
which can also be read iconographically.
Iconography: It almost appears as if the artist has randomly chosen photographs and phrases. This
almost Dada like technique of fusing random association with commercial process links Mary Kelly
like Kruger to the Pop Art movement as well. In "Post-Partum-Document" Kelly uses the
conceptualist procedure of documentation to introduce an interrogation of the subject. The
"Introduction" and the six following sections deal with the relationship of the working mother with
her (male) child. The use of all the objects, is a sort of memorabilia to the mother, showing her what
once was with her child. The writing and not so random images is how she ( the mother) is dealing
with the separation from her child and the differences between their sex.
Context: "Mary Kelly (*1941, USA) lived in London between 1968 and the early eighties then in New
York City until 1996 and is presently Professor and Chair of the Art Department at the University of
California, Los Angeles. Kelly has always been active in several fields at the same time, as
theoretician with a special interest in psychoanalysis and feminism, as an educator, curator and artist."
(http://www.gfound.or.at/RUECK/altpro/kelly_e.htm)
"Post-Partum Document" is a seminal work of the seventies in which the mother-child motif is
addressed in a radically new way. The work itself consists of a total of 139 individual parts and was
exhibited by the Generali Foundation in its entirety for the first time in 1998. This was also the first
showing of the work in the German speaking world. The artist observes the emergence of gender
difference and broaches the controversial topic of female fetishism. Psychoanalysis, in particular its
linguistic reformulation by Jacques Lacan, represents an important reference for this work. "Post-
Partum Document" has been widely exhibited and intensely debated since the shock of its first
appearance in the 1970s. "Mary Kelly has succeeded in creating a multi-faceted artwork documenting
one of Modernism's central and most symptomatic blind spots: women as artist and mother."
http://www.gfound.or.at/RUECK/altpro/kelly_e.htm
Mary Kelly
Post-Partum Document I,
Prototype, 1974
ten parts
Analysis of fecal stains and
feeding charts
Perspex units, liners, faeces, white
card, ink
36,3 x 28,7 x 3,5 cm each

Feminist Art
Form: Collage using acrylic and fabric. This image is constructed to share many of the same qualities
as a traditional crafted quilt. Because of the nature of the art work, the artist has coined the term
"femmage" to describe this uniquely female oriented piece.
Iconography: By taking the 'craft' of quilt making out of the context of necessity of housekeeping and
providing warmth for a family, she is showing it as an art form that has been used by generations of
women to tell stories, teach, and comment on social climates. It is a craft that has always been unique
to women, but never recognized as an art form by patriarchal society. She is making a strong statement
about a woman's place by taking traditional 'feminine' objects, 'yarn, silk, taffeta, lace, etc.' and placing
them on contemporary art works, elevating them out of their 'household' states.
http://acg2.fullcoll.edu/artcollection/htmlPAGES/ArtistIndexHTML/schapiroBIO.htm
Context: This "femmage" was part of a collective art work Miriam Shapiro did with fellow feminist
artist Judy Chicago and students at CalArts. She wanted to use materials that had been historically
used by women to create quilts, which had not been seen in the past as art forms.
Miriam Shapiro was born in 1926 and received her first degree in 1945, going on to receive two more
Miriam Shapiro, "Coeur Des degrees, an M.A. and an M.F.A. in 1946 and 1949 respectively. She was very much influenced by
Fleurs", 1980, acrylic, fabric and feminism and specifically feminist art. She taught a Feminist Art program at CalArts and strongly
o/c. believed in educating people about the history of women's art.
femmage
Form: Installation piece, in situ. Various rooms decorated differently. Also was a performance piece in
some of the rooms.
Iconography: The themes in the different rooms at Womanhouse all had one thing in common, that
women understood them, and that they showed the plight of woman kind. "Womanhouse explored and
challenged - with a complex mixture of longing, nostalgia, horror, and rage - the domestic role historically
assigned to women in middle-class American society." http://www.JudyChicago.com/
Context: Excerpted from the essay

"From Finish Fetish to Feminism: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in California Art History" by Laura
Meyer.
From the catalogue "Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History" published by
UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in association with University of California
Press, 1996.
Women's labor formed the subject matter of Womanhouse, a large scale cooperative project executed [as
part of] the Feminist Art Program at CalArts where Judy Chicago, in collaboration with CalArts instructor
Miriam Schapiro (Chicago had moved the program which she founded in 1970 at Fresno State College to
CalArts in the fall of 1971), [took] an abandoned Hollywood house [and] transformed [it] into a series of
fantasy environments. Manual labor of the sort typically performed by men was an integral part of the
Bridal Staircase from project, however, since the dilapidated house needed to be repaired and renovated before the artists could
Womanhouse 1971. Judy begin their work on the environments. Students installed window casings, rebuilt broken furniture and
Chicago's banisters, refinished floors, plastered walls, and painted.
"Menstruation Bathroom," was http://www.JudyChicago.com/
first
created in "Womanhouse" in Judy Chicago was born in 1939 and attended graduate school at UCLA. It was at this time that she began
the 70's to develop feminine imagery in her paintings and sculpture. Throughout her art career she has always
and was re-created in 1995 at been interested in and involved in themes that are uniquely female and symbolic. She, along with Miriam
the Shapiro, was on the forefront of bringing female imagery and objects into the mainstream art world.
Museum of Contemporary
Art in Los Angeles. A look through the house:
http://www.judychicago.com/scripts/shopplus.cgi?
DN=judychicago.com&CARTID=29769336940&ACTION
Form: Mixed media installation. An
equilateral triangular shaped table with 13
place settings to each side and
embroidered cloth. There is an ornate
runner underneath the specially designed
napkins for the individual place settings.
The middle of the table has tile which lists
999 names of women. Some examples of

Feminist Art
place settings are the Goddess Ishtar,

Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, and
Renaissance painter Artemesia
Gentileschi. Every place setting features a
fourteen inch wide plate that is painted
with an abstract design that is
representative of female genitalia.
Iconography: She put an enormous

amount of symbolism into this work, the table is a triangle to represent an 'equalized world
sought by feminism.' It was placed on a triangular platform which had been set with
triangular tiles that have the names of 999 influential women. She used the number thirteen
as a symbol of occult power, such as thirteen men whom had been seated at the table at the
last supper, and thirteen as the number of witches in a coven; hence there were thirteen
places at each side of the table. The women that she represented were a mixture of real and
mythical, and spanned through time and history. The reason for the female genitalia on the
plates was, in her words because "that is all (the women at the table) had in
common....They were from different periods, classes, ethnicities, geographies, experiences,
but what kept them within the same historical space" was the fact of their biological sex.
She also thought the women were best represented by these plates because, "they had been
swallowed up and obscured by history instead of being recognized and honored." She used
mediums that had been the traditional domain of women, such as needlework and china
painting, again reinforcing the significance that women have always had in the art world.
Context: According to Stokstad, this was a collaborative effort headed and conceptualized
by Judy Chicago. It took five years to complete, and involved hundreds of artists, both male
and female. Her goal was to pay homage to influential women throughout history. One of
the settings, depicts Mary Wollstonecraft, a leading feminist writer who died while giving
Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party. 1973-79 birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley, who grew up to write the well known novel
White tile floor inscribed in gold with 999 Frankenstein.
women's names; triangular table with
painted porcelain, Judy Chicago has always had symbolic female imagery in her work, as well as
sculpted porcelain plates and needlework, consideration for the importance of women as craftsmen and artists in their own right
each side 48' throughout time. The sheer size, time and effort that it took to create this piece speaks
volumes about how important recognition of the power of creative women was to her, and
how strongly she felt that women needed to be given credit and equality for their part in
shaping art history.
Form: Hand thrown and sculpted ceramic plate, painted and glazed. The plate is sculpted
to look like a vagina and is inscribed with a feminine style cursive text. The plate has an
organic abstract look to it. It's mostly reddish brown with some pink to it.
Iconography: The plate has an organic flow, with its depiction of a vagina. Together with
the words, and a fellow artist's name, Chicago is making a statement about the female in a
male dominated society. Because women are seen mostly by their ability to reproduce, and
as objects for the male to ogle, Chicago is focusing on the bare roots of femininity, and is
giving power to the female voice. She's validating the female, and saying its ok to to be
female, its empowering to be female. She's also throwing a question out to society, why
aren't women allowed the same social and political power as is allowed men. The color
and the style of it is probably relating to Georgia O'Keefe's own work.
Context: Before the twenty first century and even still today in some places women are
important, only because of their reproductive organs, and the ability to make new life.
Other than that a woman was considered useless, or an object to be owned, just there to
look pretty. Chicago goes against this by showing only the reproductive organ, in an
abstract way. She's giving women a power. The juxtaposition of image and text seems

Feminist Art
almost a random association. However, the text directly relates to the content. This plate is
taken from the piece "Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago. While all the plates set at the table
had abstract vaginal imagery, what makes this plate truly ironic is that it is the setting for
Georgia O'Keefe, a prominent female artist whose paintings of flowers and vegetation
from the 1920's and on were often viewed by art critics to be overtly sexual and
representative of female genitalia. While O'Keefe denied any sexual imagery in her work,
she became an important female artist of her time, and one of the few to be recognized in
galleries and museums. O'Keefe has spoken of frustration with the art world to be slow as
accepting her as an artist in her own right, and had painted a series of 'masculine' city-
scapes in an attempt to make her way into the art world of the time, but ultimately couldn't
Judy Chicago, deny herself the pull to create art that was meaningful to herself as an artist. There has
"Dinner Party-Place Setting, been speculation that her work was sexual in order to appeal to the male dominated art
Ceramic Plate of Georgia O'Keefe", world, and that her denial of it was her way of controlling her paintings and keeping
1974-1979. critics at bay.
By writing about politics and sexuality on the setting for this plate, Chicago is showing
her knowledge and admiration of O'Keefe's work. It is evident that Chicago knew of her
importance in the world of art and art history as a contemporary feminist, and sought to
pay homage to O'Keefe as an extraordinary and creative woman.
Form: Photographs, self portraits of the artist in various settings and poses. To are black
and white and two are colored. The setting of the photo on the top is an old style, and the
figure is lounging back.. The second from the top, there's a look of fear on her face, and its
an asymmetrical piece. The third photo down is black and white and she is lounging out
looking away from the viewer. The bottom shows a head shot of her in a city. the look on
her face again is scared
Iconography : All self portraits are showing the artist in a stereotypical roles of women that
are in society. They are targeted for a male-gaze. The look on her face in the bottom and
second from top is scared. This plays into the stereo type that women can't be alone in a big
new place, they need a man to help them along. The second from the bottom shows her
lounging and open for anyone, a man, to take her. The photograph on the top shows her in
old style clothing and an old style setting, it looks like an old european painting. With all of
her photographs, it seems she's commenting on the female role in society at any time. The
pose and look about her in the first and third photo, shows how women were and in some
cases still are viewed as objects that a man could own. The first photo could also be a
statement on preserving beauty, since she looks much older than in the rest.

Context: (Taken directly from

http://www.williams.edu:803/WCMA/artnet/kids/sherman_info.html )"Cindy Sherman's
first photographs, begun in 1977, were small black and white pictures known as the
"Untitled Film Still" series. They explored stereotypes of women in films of the 1950's and

Feminist Art
1960's. More recently, Cindy Sherman created much larger color photographs re-staging
various European portrait paintings of the fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
The Williams College Museum of Art's Untitled is one example of the kind of grand and
theatrical photos Sherman created which comment on art of the past. Much of this old-
master series was done during a stay in Rome, where Cindy Sherman saw many such
paintings."
According to Stokstad, in untitled film still #21, ( bottom most picture) she wanted to show
herself as a "young innocent apparently recently arrived in the big city" She is trying to
show how film and media have portrayed females as helpless, needing a man to take care
of them. In an art historical context, she is very much commenting on the 'male gaze'. The
woman she represents in each photograph is the paragon of the feminine ideal. Always
groomed, seductive and available to be looked upon by the male eye.
Cindy Sherman moved to New York in 1977 and began creating her photographs there. In
Stokstad, it is noted that she had said she was "making fun" of the female role models from
her childhood as well as engaging in a pure form of play that she had loved while growing
up." There has been speculation too that Sherman viewed the role of a female in society to
be somewhat of a masquerade, complete with make-up and costumes. In her later works,
she abandons her soft, pretty images of femininity and the pictures become more lurid. She
started to exaggerate the makeup or dress on her self portraits, and eventually began to just
take pictures that were almost abstract, but dealt with 'visceral depictions of vomit, body
parts, and grotesque fairy tales.' (www.guggenheimcollection.org) Some feminists argue
that this was her way of dealing with the aging process, and what society would view as a
loss of 'beauty'. Others' contend that she felt trapped by her label as a feminist, and wanted
to escape the confines of a category. Whichever is correct, or even if neither view is, her
photographs may have evolved into something deemed not sale-able by the art world, and
considered offensive by some, but they still dealt with issues of womanhood, body image,
and voyeurism.
Cindy Sherman
untitled 1978
Audrey Flack, "Marilyn", 1977
Form: Oil over acrylic on canvas, photo realism. The piece includes both still-life
and portraiture. Looks like a photograph, there are smooth value transitions and the
brush work doesn't show. The colors are vibrant. There are many fruit, and other
expensive looking possessions. The book in he center has writing on it.
Iconography: This work is a vanitas, a reminder of death. The composition is

arranged to make the viewer think about how fleeting life is and what those vanities
do for you when you're gone. The vanities are the fruit, the jewelry and the make-
up. Fruit and flowers don't last very long, especially cut open fruit. Make-up and all
the other possessions are only things you use why you're a live to show power,
wealth, or beauty. The various timepieces, like the watch and the hour glass also
symbolize time, as in time running out. According to the artist, " This work shows
Marilyn in transition: She has a touch of softness and innocence, but a trace of pain
in her brow that is not present in the photograph. On the left is a distorted reflection.
The mirror shows Marilyn as ghostlike and threatened by lipsticks as weapons
destroying the living goddess. A picture of Flack and her brother is in the middle
showing Flack's emotional attachment to the subject and time." (Flack 85-86).
There is text on the book that tells a biography or short story of a time in Marilyn's
life.
"Text from the center of the picture:
About four or five months after she moved into the orphanage, she fell into a
depressed mood. It came on during a rainy day. Rain always made her think of her father and set up a desire to wander. On the way back
from school she slipped away and fled. She didn't know where she was running to and wandered aimlessly in the slashing rainstorm. A
policeman found her and took her to the police station. She was brought back to Mrs. Dewey's office. She was changed into dry clothes.
She expected to be beaten. Instead Mrs. Dewey took her in her arms and told her she was pretty. Then she powdered Norma Jean's nose
and chin with a powder puff.
In 1950, Marilyn told the story of the powder puff to Sonia Wolfson, a publicity woman at 20th Century Fox and then confided. "This

Feminist Art
was the first time in my life I felt loved - no one had ever noticed my face or hair or me before".
(http://www.batguano.com/bgma/flack.html) This story is iconic of who Marilyn is and where she came from and gives us an insight to
how she might have viewed her fame.
Let us assume it even happened in some fashion. For it gives a glimpse as the powder goes on and the mirror comes up of a future artist
conceiving a grand scheme in the illumination of an instant - one could paint oneself into an instrument of ones will! Noticed my face or
hair" - her properties - " or me....."

Context: This is one of her most famous works, (cda.mrs.umn.edu) "To Flack, Marilyn Monroe represented a deep pain and a deep
beauty. She affected both men and women equally, and that is why Flack considers this painting androgynous. (Flack 86). "In terms of
feminist works, this is to gain a comment on the male gaze. Marylin Monroe was the absolute ideal of feminine beauty in her time, and
even today is revered as a 'sex symbol'. Because of Marilyn's role as a movie star, her early pin-up centerfold for playboy, and the
countless photographs taken of her, she was always accessible to the ever-present male eye.
Audrey Flack was born in 1931 and attended Cooper union in the early fifties. According to her biography, she identified herself early on
in her career as an Abstract Expressionist, but felt that she had to be "one of the boys" in order to fit in. Further it is stated that while she
wasn't treated any differently as a student, she felt that her goal of becoming a professional artist was not taken seriously and that by most
other students, visitors and teachers, she was treated as a 'sex object'. She became rebellious in her paintings, and it wasn't until after
college that she began to truly pursue photo realism. It may have been her feelings of frustration over her perceived 'sex object' status as a
student that pushed her towards photo realism, in an effort to prove her skill. This is, however, only speculation, but it cannot be denied
that her paintings are filled with feminine imagery and symbolism.
Form: Oil on canvas, addition of real birdcages. The paint quality in
her work is very thin and washy. The artist uses a lot of turpentine and
allows the pant to drip wherever it wants throughout the process of
painting. Three seated women with fans and real birdcages. The focus
is on the three women in the middle, with not much depth behind them.
The colors are muddy and dark looking.
Iconography: This painting shows three fujins, or concubines. The

artist, Hung Liu, took a photograph of these woman and projected it
onto a large canvas. From there, she applied the paint directly onto the
canvas where the photograph was being shown. What makes this
panting different from a mere copy of an old photograph is the
symbolism that she infuses into it. Besides adding an occasional bit of
color to the clothing and fans, she has also added the bird cages along
the bottom, one for each fujin. She uses the creation of space so you
are focused only on the figures in the center. Aside from the few bright
colors used as accents to show how the dress was, the majority of her
colors are dark or muddy, that show a realness and sadness to the
piece. The figures faces are mask like to illustrate the roles these
women were forced to fill.
Context: What she is very blatantly depicting is the subjugation of the

women, basically sex slaves. They are basically beautiful birds, caged
and unable to escape their fate as concubines. they are also depicted
seated, which is significant because at this time in history, in China,
women's feet were bound to signal class. The smaller the feet the more
beautiful the woman was considered. the drawback, besides
disfiguration, is the inability to walk any distance at any length of time.
Again, like a bird with clipped wings, they are kept captive by the very
thing which, if left unmolested would allow them to escape. Its ironic
how these women are being pampered royally but are still in a basic
HUNG LIU American, b. China, 1948 sense, slaves.
Three Fujins, 1995
oil on canvas, three bird cages 96 x 126 x 12 inches (triptych) (taken
Collection of Ellen and Gerry Sigal, Washington, D.C. fromhttp://www.indiana.edu/~easc/lending_library/program/CW04.htm)
"Born in China in 1948, painter Hung Liu was a high school student
when the Cultural Revolution began. After four years of re-education"
as a peasant worker, she received formal art training in the strict
Russian Social Realist style and produced propaganda art for Mao's
new society. Liu emigrated to the U.S. in 1984. In her work today she
comments upon traditional Chinese society, particularly the subjugation

Feminist Art
of
women. For a show at the Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York, she
paints a series of works depicting the famous 'Last Emperor' and his
court. The program focuses on Three Fujins, a painting of the
Emperor's three concubines, which uses virtually all of the major
principles of design and addresses the questions of unity and variety in
both composition and theme."

Form: Oil on canvas, using thin washes of paint, letting it drip
through the painting. There is one central figure placed in the
background, with the emphasis on the figures to the side in the
foreground. The artist uses dark, earth toned colors. There is an
addition of cigar boxes in front of the figures in the front.
Iconography: Hung Liu is making a social and political statement

about the emperors court and the subjugation and degradation of
the people who were forced to live and work there. Traditionally in
paintings the emperor or king would be the biggest most important
figure in the piece. Hung Liu makes the eunuchs the general focus
by pushing them up to the foreground, making them bigger and
pushing the emperor into the faded, unimportant background. The
use of dark, earth toned colors gives it a sad and somber feeling,
inviting the viewer to experience the humiliation and suffering that
the lower classes had to go through. The drips which are a
signature of Hung Liu bring about a more somber feeling, and
gives it beaten up quality of a worn photograph, which shows their
plight even more.
Context: Inspired from an ancient photograph, Hung Liu is

making a strong statement about subjugation. A eunuch is a
servant who has had their genitals removed in order to emasculate
them. This is done so that there is no chance of them becoming
aroused. It nullifies any chance of the emperors concubines
becoming impregnated by them, and creates an 'ideal' bodyguard.
Because they are seen as androgynous, they are also of little threat
to the emperor himself. Besides being used as bodyguards, they did
HUNG LIU. Five Eunuchs, 1995 oil on canvas, mixed media all the heavy work around the Forbidden City. While it would seem
70 x 96 x 4 inches Collection of Bernice and Harold Steinbaum, New that this painting is not particularly feminist, in reality it is making
York a huge statement on how women were viewed. By castrating the
men, the emperor had effectively turned them into 'women'. In that
social structure, that was as low as one could get. Male babies
were, and in some cases still are, much more highly prized than
females. To bring a female into a family often meant shame, and if
there was already a female child, the new baby was often put to
death. The irony of the cigar boxes is two-fold. Besides
representing the missing genitals of each man, when the genitals
were removed they were kept in jars. When the emperor was
overthrown and the eunuchs released from their servitude, they
wee given the jars containing their genitals.
Form: Oil on canvas, thin washes of paint that have been allowed to drip down through the
rest of the painting. Three figures who seem to have a tenseness in their faces, one of
which is blowing bubbles who looks relaxed and in the moment. The colors are earth toned
and not very bright. The drips are black, thin and pallid.
Iconography: Though it would seem that Hung Liu is portraying a happy scene, it is again a
bleak social commentary. In this painting Hung Liu is showing a rare image of a group of
peasant men engaging in an activity other than work. It is interesting to note how the men
seem to be shielded, almost hiding behind the foliage, and the two men seem to be
crouching with a look of guilt or fear on their face as though they know they should be
working but cannot resist the moment of freedom afforded them by an activity other than

Feminist Art
work. The title suggests a sort of psychological wistfulness, it may connotate that for the
man who is actually blowing the bubbles, it's the way he would like to see himself, able to
live a care-free life where he is forever blowing bubbles.
Context: In communist China, there was little time for play, hard work was a requirement
Hung Liu I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles for survival. The overt message of a happy leisure activity is underscored by the reality of
2001 the time. The tenseness in the faces, the use of black, thin, pallid looking drips of paint to
Oil on canvas 80 x 80 inches form the figures suggests the sickness of the communist society they were living in.
http://www.renabranstengallery.com/liu.html
Form: A portrait of an asian woman. Lithograph and collage with Chinese paper cut-outs,
with thin washes of paint that have been allowed to drip through the piece. Despite the
bright colors used for the clothing and head dress, over all the colors are dark and muddy
looking.
Iconography: Hung Liu is depicting a portrait of a young bride on her wedding day, using
an old anonymous photograph. Even though she's using a technique other than just
painting, the artist is still able to capture the intense feelings of apprehension on the young
woman's face. The dark colors gives a somber and even sad feeling which seems to echo
the look on the woman's face. She is wearing red, which is the traditional color for
weddings in many asian customs. Her hair is pulled up into her head-dress, and despite the
weight of it, her stature is still erect and watchful. It has been observed by some art
historians that she may also be depicting a Japanese war bride, but more than likely it is
again a representation of a Chinese bride on her wedding day.
Context: Women, in China, were possessions. Brides were bought and sold, not for their
personalities, but for what they could provide their potential husbands in land, dowry,
cattle, labor and ability to bear children. It was important in rural China that not only could
Hung Liu Unofficial Portraits (The Bride) a woman work in the fields, but also supply her husband with sons to help with labor and
2001 carry on the family name. Often, if a woman did not become pregnant, it was considered
Lithograph with collage, ed. of 30 30 x 30 her fault, even if the male was, in fact, impotent or infertile. If the woman did not
inches satisfactorily produce heirs, she was often beaten and sometimes put to death.


lesson_earthworks
Earthworks

Form: Earthwork,
created out of natural
elements found
around the site, black
rock, salt crystal, and
earth.
Iconography:
According to the
Press release provided
by Dia Galleries, 'In
1970 gallerist and art
patron Virginia Dwan
provided Smithson
with the funds needed
to construct Spiral
Jetty. Using black
basalt rocks and earth
from the site, the
artist created a coil
1500 feet long and 15
feet wide that
stretches out
counterclockwise into
the translucent red
water. In 1972
Smithson explained
his fascination with
this rugged context: "I
like landscapes that
suggest prehistory. As
an artist it is
interesting to take on
the persona of a
geological agent and
actually become part
of that process rather
than overcome it."
Today Spiral Jetty is
submerged as it has
been for most of its
existence. Realizing,
after its completion,
that he had built it at
a time when the level
of the lake was
unnaturally low,
Smithson considered
adding further
material to ensure that
his artwork would be

lesson_earthworks
visible more often. As

yet this has not been
done.'
Context: What makes

this earthwork
interesting is that it is
not created to be a
monument that stands
the test of time.
Instead, it is made to
reflect the ever-
changing form of the
earth itself. That is, it
is meant to be
exposed to the
Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty. 1969-70 elements and the
black rock, salt crystal, and earth spiral, whims of the tide. The
length 1,500' Great Salt Lake, Utah rocks and sand used
to create it will wear
away with time, as
does the earth, and the
tide ends up covering
the piece completely.
It is also extremely
successful in doing
what the artist set out
to do, in suggesting a
pre-historical
landscape. It looks
like something created
tens of thousands of
years ago, and the
way that it disappears
and then becomes
'discovered' again
suggests a type of
excavation and
discovery of things
long lost from a far
distant past.
"Financial backing provided by the prestigious Dwan Gallery to construct a piece of "land art." The
concept is to use expanses of open areas as a canvas to take art out of the confining galleries and onto the
open land." http://www.sltrib.com/specials/gsl/stories/jetty.ht
Form: These art the notes and drawings done by Robert Smithson in preparation
and planning for his earthwork 'spiral jetty.' It also describes the evolution of the
piece over the time of its' planning.
Iconography: These notes reflect a part of creating art that few people other than
the artist or his collaborators ever see. For many, a work of art seems to just
exist, as if its' execution and conception were flawless and simple. These few

lesson_earthworks
notes show a fraction of the time and thought that must be put into a work of this
magnitude and help us understand, too, that the end product does not always look
like the original idea.
Context: The fact that these notes were given freely by the artist to be displayed
and looked through show a willingness by the artist to share his creative process
with others. Because of the struggle and years of training a person must go
through in order to become a successful artist, many do not want to share their
'trade secrets' with others, especially those who are not artists because it seems
like they are giving away freely what they themselves had to put in years of time
to understand. However, by sharing the reality of the process and by letting the
public understand the amount of work it takes to create a piece, Robert Smithson
is creating more respect and preciousness for his work, because it becomes
evident to outsiders that art is not easy and it does take time and effort.

lesson_earthworks

lesson_earthworks
Robert Smithson (1938B1973)

draft writing about his earthwork
Spiral Jetty, ca. 1970,
describing the evolution of the
piece.
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
Papers.
Donated by Nancy Holt, 1986-
1995.
Form: "Nancy Holt completed Sun Tunnels in

1976, in the Utah desert. Sun Tunnels is a
composition of 4 concrete tubes, each 18 feet
long and about 9 feet in diameter. the concrete
tubes are oriented to the rising and setting sun of
the summer solstice and the winter solstice. Holes
in the tubes cast light during the day as an
expression of star constellations. The Sun
Tunnels offer some practical advantage -
orientation within the landscape to the cardinal
directions, and shelter from the sun of the
desert." (lamar.colostate.edu)
Iconography: The Sun Tunnels are not strictly

an earthwork, per se, as they are created with
concrete and built to withstand the desert heat
and corrosive winds. However, this work does
connect with the earth in a celestial way, as it is
positioned to reflect the summer and winter
solstice as well as constellations.

lesson_earthworks
Context: By using the idea of tunnels, Nancy

Holt has created an environment wherein the
viewer steps into 'another world'. Inside this
concrete tube, the viewer is protected from the
desert, and in the harsh light of day is able to
gaze at the constellations shining on the interior
of the tube, a melding of the day and evening
skies.
Nancy Holt. Sun Tunnels, 1973-76 Lucin, Utah
© Photograph by Laurence Belingard, 1999
Form: Miles and miles of nylon erected into a
fence, running along the hills of Sonoma and
Marin. "The fabric for the fence was
originally woven to be used for automobile
safety air-bags. But the Nixon Whitehouse
allowed the car-makers to delay
implementation of the air-bag laws for more
than 10 years. That decision meant there was
lots of air-bag fabric available at a reasonable
price. " (www.christojeanneclaude.net)
Iconography: According to the website,

"Walking the length of the fence was an other-
worldly experience. Like chanting a mantra,
each panel was the same. But as one passed
onto the next panel, it changed slightly. It was,
after all, a new panel.
Time and space were altered by the rhythm of
passing panels. In the blink an eye, one could
walk 5 or 6 miles. Or so it seemed. Christo
said the Running Fence was a landscape with
"an obstructive membrana" in place to block
and alter the view, which transforms the ways
people perceive it." (also said about the fence
on www.ucl.ac.uk) " An essential part of
Christo's work is process. His Running Fence
consisted of 2050 panels of white nylon fabric
Christo and Jean-Claude. Running Fence. 1972-76 each 18 ft high and 6 ft wide held by cables
nylon fence, height 18' length 24.5 miles and hooks strung between steel poles. Twenty
Sonoma and Marin Counties four miles long it stood for two weeks in mid
September 1976 meandering its way across
the rolling countryside of north California
revealing and emphasizing the contours of the
land before finally dipping down and
disappearing into the sea. Connecting the
borders of the landscape, the sky to the sea,
the finished product was a piece of pure

lesson_earthworks
theatre: dazzling, dramatic, monumental: a

modern and transient version of the Great
Wall of China.
The work reflected on a number of issues: the nature of borders while ignoring all
borders; the character of the land: dividing yet uniting, softening yet breaking up
the contours, the rippling fabric creating a static yet mobile running line, a mobile
boundary for viewing the land in a new light and changing dramatically according
to the angle from which it was viewed. To see all the fence, apart from in the air,
required movement through the land. The spectator could no longer contemplate it
in a static and distanciated manner. The realisation of this work was the outcome
of 42 months of negotiation and legal struggles. Permission was required to cross
59 different ranches. There were eighteen public hearings, three sessions in the
Superior Courts of California, 450 pages of environmental impact statements,
innumerable media debates, disputes between different lobby groups etc. It
required hundreds of people from engineers to students to physically erect the
fence, an equally important part of the process."
Context: It can be difficult for a viewer to discern precisely what an artist is

trying to say when a work is of this magnitude, mainly because the idea, as well
as the work itself, can be overwhelmingly enormous. Though this work is not
made from the earth, it does subtly reflect the movement of the earth it is placed
on. The rolling of the hills, the sunlight reflecting through the nylon, and the
breeze moving it softly. It would be easy to imagine that this piece actually
belonged in the landscape it occupied, because while it may have been huge, it
was also unobtrusive and complementary to it.
Form: Documentary photographs of the creation of the

Running Wall.
Iconography: Like the notes for Robert Smithsons' Spiral

Jetty, the documentation of this work helps the viewer to
understand the amount of manpower needed to create a
work of monumental proportions. It also shows process in
the work, how the creation of the work itself is just a s
important as the end result.
Context: The creation of this work was laborious and

frustration. An Environmental Impact Report had to be
secured, permission granted to place the work on private
land, and 3 million dollars had to be spent in order to make
this work a reality. It seems like a lot of work for a piece
that lasted only two weeks, and now exists only on film and
in photographs, but it illustrates eloquently the drive and
desire of a creative individual to make their ideas a reality.

lesson_earthworks

Form: 3,100 Umbrellas, placed in Japan
and in California.There were 1340 in
Japan and 1760 in California. The blue
umbrellas were in Japan, and the yellow
were in California.
Iconography: "The umbrellas, free

standing dynamic modules, reflected the
availability of the land in each valley,
creating an invitational inner space, as
houses without walls, or temporary
Christo and Jean Claude, The Umbrellas, Japan and US 1984-1991 settlements and related to the ephemeral
19'8" Tall Umbrellas two inland character of the work of art. In the
Two valleys, one 19 kilometers (12 miles) long in Japan, precious and limited space of Japan, the
and the other 29 kilometers (18 miles) long in the USA. umbrellas were positioned intimately,
more facts close together and sometimes following
http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/christo/umbrella.html the geometry of the rice fields. In the
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/9173/umbrellas.html luxuriant vegetation enriched by water
year round, the umbrellas were blue. In
the California vastness of uncultivated
grazing land, the configuration of the
umbrellas was whimsical and spreading
in every direction.The brown hills are
covered by blond grass, and in that dry
landscape, The Umbrellas were yellow.
From October 9th, 1991 for a period of
eighteen days, The Umbrellas were
seen, approached, and enjoyed by the
public, either by car from a distance and
closer as they bordered the roads, or by
walking under The umbrellas in their
luminous shadows."
www.christojeanneclaude.net
Context: The umbrellas are not meant

lesson_earthworks
to be seen as analogous or
complementary to the landscapes they're
in, they are supposed to represent an
idea of the space available to people in
each landscape. Christos' work seems to
be representative of how man and
environment can work together, and
how culture is shaped by the landscape
it resides in.

Form: Notes and sketches for the planning

and execution of the Umbrella project. On
top is a map detailing where each umbrella
is to be placed, and below is eh artists'
conception of what the umbrella will look
like when it is opened.
Iconography:Here again, as with all of the

earthworks we've seen on this page, is an
example of he planning and forethought
required to tackle a project of this
scope.One can see that not only did the artist
have to undertake the idea of the umbrellas
themselves, but also that of correct
placement and securing the land for the
project.
Context: It must be remembered that what

is unique about Christos' work is he
additional problems he takes on while
attempting to construct them. There is not
only the initial idea, but the reality that he
wants his work to cover many different areas

lesson_earthworks
of land, and in this case, on two separate

continents and cultures. It is not only a
statement on the similarity of mankind, but
an example of how it is possible to bring
two diverse cultures together and show them
how much they reflect one another, though
they are thousands of miles apart.


Gothic/Early Renaissance
Transition from the Romanesque and Byzantine or "Greek Manner"

to the Late Gothic and Renaissance Styles in Painting and Sculpture

Form:
This altarpiece is painted in tempera on wood. At five feet, the representation of
St. Francis is depicted as nearly life-size. Art of the Byzantine period largely
influenced Italian Gothic art. There is no depth to St. Francis. He is two-
dimensional and at the front of the picture plane. His feet are not standing on the
ground but seem to be floating just above it.
Iconography:
St. Francis is situated in the center of the painting - a position usually reserved for
Christ or the Virgin Mary. The identification with Christ is further enhanced with
the clearly displayed stigmata on his raised blessing hand. The three knots on his
rope belt represent chastity, poverty and obedience. He is flanked on either side by
angels and is surrounded by boxes containing major events in his life.
Context:
This altarpiece was completed in 1235, less than ten years after Francis’
canonization. St. Francis taught that studying nature was a way to understand God
and religious ideas should be discovered through human experience of the world.
These observations were partially responsible for the reflection on nature rather
than most art of its time and were a prototype for new works. This led to new
observations of nature in art and the beginnings of scientific study.
Written by Annette Abbott
Bonaventura Berlinghieri, Context continued: Many paintings like this have a rather Byzantine flavor or style
"St. Francis Altarpiece" 1235 to how they are painted. This formulaic attempts to emulate Greek icons is what
tempera on wood 60' x 42' (approx. 5" x 3.5) Vasari (an art hsitorian from the late 16th C) called the maniera greca in Italy.
Byzantine Style (maniera greca) painted during the
Gothic Period
According to the Brittanica
from Francis Of Assisi, Saint

The Franciscan rule of life.
Although he was a layman, Francis began to preach to the townspeople. Disciples were attracted to him, and he
composed a simple rule of life for them. In 1209, when the group of friars (as the mendicant disciples were called)
numbered 12, they went to Rome to seek the approval of Pope Innocent III, who, although hesitant at first, gave
his oral approbation to their rule of life. This event, which according to tradition occurred on April 16, marked the
official founding of the Franciscan order. The friars, who were actually street preachers with no possessions of any
kind and with only the Porziuncola as a center, preached and worked first in Umbria and then, as their numbers
grew, in the rest of Italy.
The early Franciscan rule of life, which has not survived, set as the aim of the new life, "To follow the teachings
of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps." Probably no one in history has ever set himself so seriously
as did Francis to imitate the life of Christ and to carry out so literally Christ's work in Christ's own way. This is
the key to the character and spirit of St. Francis. To neglect this point is to show an unbalanced portrait of the
saint as a lover of nature, a social worker, an itinerant preacher, and a lover of poverty.
Certainly the love of poverty is part of his spirit, and his contemporaries celebrated poverty either as his "lady," in
the allegorical Sacrum Commercium (Eng. trans., Francis and His Lady Poverty, 1964), or as his "bride," in the
fresco of Giotto in the lower church of S. Francesco at Assisi. It was not, however, mere external poverty he
sought but the total denial of self (as in Letter of Paul to the Philippians 2:7).
He considered all nature as the mirror of God and as so many steps to God. He called all creatures his "brothers"
and "sisters," and in his "Canticle of the Creatures" (less properly called by such names as the "Praises of
Creatures" or the "Canticle of the Sun") he referred to "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon," the wind and water, and
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/gothic_to_early_renaissance/late_gothic_to_early_renaissance.htm[7/31/2013 12:58:34 AM]

even "Sister Death." His long and painful illnesses were nicknamed his sisters, and he begged pardon of "Brother
Ass the body" for having unduly burdened him with his penances. Above all, his deep sense of brotherhood under
God embraced his fellow men, for "he considered himself no friend of Christ if he did not cherish those for whom
Christ died."
"The Franciscan rule of life.." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001
Britannica.com Inc. November 16, 2002.

Context and Critical points of view: The previous section is a a biography of St. Francis's life however, Francis represents a pivotal
figure that represents the transition in thinking between the Gothic period and the Renaissance.
Previous to the life of St. Francis, the Catholic Church was the sole source of information about God for the layman (every day non-
clergy). The Church interpreted, interceded and imposed a very clear point of view about God's teachings and was the sole source of
biblical interpretation. In fact, laymen were not even allowed to own a Bible, not that they could afford one since they were hand
written and very expensive. This point of view and religious/political system meant that everyday people could not actually "know"
God for themselves and supported and maintained a point of view that one was born to a place on this earth that was unchangeable.
Francis's point of view that "To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps." Breaks with this tradition
and demonstrates the beginning of a point of view in which the lay person could not only have a direct experience of God but also alter
their behavior in accordance with their knowledge without needing to consult the Church for interpretation. This is important and
interesting because aside form the ideas exhibited in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, this represents the beginning of a change in the
way of thinking and the stirrings of individual critical thought. The art that follows, after the Byzantine period and in the late Gothic
and Early Renaissance exhibits a new and critical point of view of the world.

Form: This sculpture is both naturalistic and stylized. The rendering of the face and
hands was an attempt by the sculptor to represent convincing human forms however, the
faces show no real expression and the bodies are completely covered with stylized
drapery that conceals both figures bodies. The child Jesus is not rendered as a child buy
rather a stiff looking miniature adult. The poses of both figures are stiff and fairly
wooden but in the case of Mary, this is appropriate if you look at her role in terms of
the work's iconography.
Iconography: This image of Mary is significant in it's iconography because it is a

perfect example of the Gothic depiction of Mary as the "Throne of Wisdom." Here she
not only serves as a mother but as a platform or throne for her child. Stokstad discusses
her pose as regal and that her throne like posture is symbolic of the old testament
references to the Lion Throne of King Solomon who is known as a wise and fair ruler
and judge. See Stokstad for a more complete discussion of the iconography.
Context: Smaller and more portable works like this served as portable symbols of the
faith. The iconography associated with such symbols and the creation of smaller and
more portable objects grows over time and has a strong influence on the creation of
altars and other religious items in the Renaissance. The works of such late Gothic/Early
Renaissance artists such as Giotto and his teacher Cimabue are most certainly a product
of this era although as we'll see they changed the schema considerably.
Virgin and Child,

from the Auvergne region, France. c1150-
1200
Oak with polychromy, height 31",
Metropolitan Museum of Art
French Romanesque
Form: The overall composition of this work is symmetrical. The largest figures of Mary and
Jesus are at the center of the composition and they are flanked by two rows of angels overlapped
as if they are standing on bleachers. Beneath the structure of the throne are several
representations of older men with halos. In order to create space, Cimabue uses the same

convention of vertical perspective we saw in Pisano's pulpit. The figures that are highest up in
the picture plane are furthest back.
This painting was rendered with tempera paint and gold leaf. Tempera is a medium which is
made from egg (sometimes just the yolk sometimes the whites) glue and ground up minerals that
serve as pigment or colorant. The egg actually glues or binds the pigments to the surface. The
paint is applied in small distinct brush strokes that show the brushwork when looked at closely.
Tempera originally came from the verb temper--that is, "to bring to a desired
consistency"; dry pigments are made usable by "tempering" them with a binding and
adhesive vehicle. Such painting was distinguished from fresco painting, the colours
for which contained no binder. Eventually, after the rise of oil painting, the word
gained its present meaning.
The standard tempera vehicle is a natural emulsion, egg yolk, thinned with water.
Variants of this vehicle have been developed to widen its use. Among the man-made
emulsions are those prepared with whole egg and linseed oil, with gum, and with
wax.
Cimabue, Virgin and Child The special ground for tempera painting is a rigid wood or wallboard panel coated
Enthroned, with several thin layers of gesso, a white, smooth, fully absorbent preparation made
from the Church of Santa Trinita, of burnt gypsum (or chalk, plaster of Paris, or whiting) and hide (or parchment) glue.
Florence A few minutes after application, tempera paint is sufficiently resistant to water to
c 1280. Tempera and gold on wood, allow overpainting with more colour. Thin, transparent layers of paint produce a clear,
12' 7"x7'4" luminous effect, and the colour tones of successive brushstrokes blend optically.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence Modern tempera paintings are sometimes varnished or overpainted with thin,
Byzantine Style (maniera greca) transparent oil glazes to produce full, deep-toned results, or they are left unglazed for
painted during the Gothic Period blond effects.
The background is gold leaf on a wooden panel that has been painted with a a combination of
glue and marble dust or chalk referred to as gesso. The gold leaf is then incised and punctured
with designs. Gold leaf has also been added to the drapery as a means to highlight the folds.

Make sure you read in Stokstad Technique: Cenini on Painting

The rendering of color and value in this painting is fairly limited. There is no distinct source of light and very
little tonal variation on the faces or drapery of the individual figures and there are no real differences of character
or appearance from one face to the next.
Cimabue's rendition of the Virgin is very similar to the one from Auvergne. This painting, like the sculpture, is
both naturalistic and stylized. Again the rendering of the face and hands was an attempt by the sculptor to
represent convincing human forms however, the faces show no real expression and the bodies are completely
covered with an almost Byzantine style of drapery that almost completely conceals both figures' bodies. The child
Jesus is not rendered as a child buy rather a stiff looking miniature adult. The poses of both figures are stiff and
fairly wooden but in the case of Mary, this is appropriate if you look at her role in terms of the work's
iconography.
Iconography: As in the French Gothic sculpture Mary is depicted as the "Throne of Wisdom." The arrangement
of the composition places Mary at the center of the image and in the most important location. So the use of
symmetry and the placement of figures can indicate their status. Notice that Mary is framed and as such "backed
up" by the angels. The less important figures of the prophets are literally beneath her and Jesus.

Color and the gold leaf used also serve as iconographic reminders of Mary and Jesus' status. Gold leaf and red and
blue pigments were made from precious stones and materials and are symbols of there status.
Context: Stokstad relates that this work probably set the standard for monumental panel paintings. Cimabue was
one of the best known and sought after artists of his day and although he stuck to the old Byzantine conventions of
depicting the human figure in a caricaturish manner he was still innovative in his illusionistic techniques. He was
also an artist of the times and the production and patronage concerning such works of art was going through a bit
of a change at the end of the Gothic era.
Artist's during the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods were reliant on three major groups for patronage, the
church, the aristocracy and the new wealthy merchant class. Wealthy merchants, such as the Enrico Scrovegni,
often would contribute frescoes and altar paintings to churches as a form of indulgence. Often these merchants
were wealthy enough to and commission artists to decorate a private altar for their own homes.
During the Gothic period, artists and fine furniture makers were on the same social and economic
level. Each group belonged to guilds that one paid dues to and were governed by certain rules. A
master who would often have a group of assistants and apprentices working for them ran these shops.
Apprentices were children anywhere between the ages of 11-20 years old. Sometimes the parents of a
child would pay the master of a shop a monthly or yearly fee in order for the master to teach the child
a trade. The child was expected to do work in the shop and when they had earned enough respect or
mastery of skills, the master would then advance them on to more complex tasks. After learning
these skills for a long enough time, an exceptional child might learn enough to open their own shop;
however, some apprentices, as adults remained as an assistant in their master's shop.
How Paintings were commissioned and bought.
The patron and artist negotiate the price. The cost is established by how many figures
are present in the painting, the size, the amount of gold leaf and the colors that are used.
The artist orders a wood panel from a furniture maker. It is very important that the wood
is "gassed out." This means the older the wood, the more petrified, the better. This can
be the most expensive part.
Panel is prepared by apprentices or an assistant by coating it with gesso. Gesso is a

mixture of chalk or calcium carbonate (marble dust) mixed with rabbit skin glue.
Now the paint is made. For tempera, egg yolk is mixed with ground-up minerals
(sometimes even semiprecious stones) to make a very durable paint.
When all this is done and the painting is complete, there is a procession from the artist's
studio to the church.
At this time the altarpiece for the high altar was finished and the picture which
was called the "Madonna with the large eyes" or Our Lady of Grace, that now
hangs over the altar of St. Boniface, was taken down. Now this Our Lady was
she who had hearkened to the people of Siena when the Florentines were routed
at Monte Aperto, and her place was changed because the new one was made,
which is far more beautiful and devout and larger, and is painted on the back
with the stories of the Old and New Testaments. And on the day that it was
carried to the Duomo the shops were shut, and the bishop conducted a great and
devout company of priests and friars in solemn procession, accompanied by the
nine signiors, and all the officers of the commune, and all the people, and one
after another the worthiest with lighted candles in their hands took places near
the picture, and behind came the women and children with great devotion. And
they accompanied the said picture up to the Duomo, making the procession
around the Campo, as is the custom, all the bells ringing joyously, out of
reverence for so noble a picture as this. And this picture Duccio di Niccolò the
painter made, and it was made in the house of the Muciatti outside the gate a
Stalloreggi . And all that day persons, praying God and His Mother, who is our
advocate, to defend us by their infinite mercy from every adversity and all evil,
and keep us from the hands of traitors and of the enemies of Siena.

This account reminds us how we should remember the integral role of a major
work like this in the civic life of the city. Notice also how the adoration devoted
to this new image is comparable to that shown the relics of a patron saint of a
community. It is important to remember that the Virgin was the patron saint of
Siena, and as such she was the center of the civic and religious life of the city.
Kneeling beside the throne of the Virgin are the other patron saints of Siena:
Ansanus, Sabinus, Crescentius, and Victor. The order of the altarpiece and the
privileged position given to the Sienese saints, especially the Virgin, would have
been clearly understood to reflect the ideal order of the city of Siena which would
stand before it in the Duomo. The civic implications are further brought out by
the original inscription: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD BESTOW PEACE ON
SIENA AND SALVATION ON DUCCIO WHO PAINTED THEE.
The reference in the account above to the Madonna with the Large Eyes , or in
Italian --Madonna degli Occhi Grossi-- relates to a painting done about 1200:
This work was seen to be a miracle working image. The Sienese appeals to this image of their patron saint were believed to
have lead to the salvation of the city from the Florentines in the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. Why do you think the Sienese
would have wanted to have replaced such a revered image with the Duccio altarpiece?
quoted directly from:

Make sure you read in Stokstad Technique: Cenini on Painting
Form: Giotto's painting of the Virgin child shows some marked

formal differences. Giotto is a kind of special effects master. His
paintings are more three dimensional. He also uses more contrasts
of light and shadow. This is called chiaroscuro. He also uses
overlapping of the figures to create a sense of space. Compare to
Duccio or Cimabue's paintings in which the figures that
accompany Mary seem to be standing on bleachers as if for a
class photo. Giotto also uses more life like gestures. The figures
interact and tend to regard one another. Notice the tilted heads in
adoration of the Virgin. The figure of Mary is more life like and
even dresses more in the Italian style. Notice her hair is slightly
uncovered and her clothing reveals the anatomy beneath almost
like the wet drapery style of the ancient Greeks. The throne is

also more convincingly rendered it looks looks like an actual

architectural structure.
Iconography: In an overt description of the iconography Giotto's

rendition of this then seems identical to Cimabue's but on closer
inspection, the naturalism and illusionism of the work is symbolic
of some of the fundamental changes that were occurring during
the late Gothic to Renaissance periods.
The naturalism relates to the study and pursuit of humanism. The

ideas of Christian and Catholic though go through a radical
change with the canonization of St. Francis. The idea that one
should and could emulate the life and behavior of Christ meant
that art needed to relate more to the individual and strike a chord
of compassion. The heightened realism of such images were
designed to create a sense of sympathy or empathy with the
religious characters they portrayed.
Context: Giotto was the student of Cimabue and considered a

genius by Michelangelo and other later Renaissance painters.
Giotto di Bondone, Virgin and Child Enthroned, Make sure you read about his life in "Liaisons."
(Ognissanti Altar,) c 1310.
Tempera and gold on wood, 10'8"x6'8"
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Late Gothic or Early Renaissance
Tempera
A tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and thinned with water. It is a
very ancient medium, having been in constant use in most world cultures, until in Europe it
was gradually superseded, during the Renaissance, by oil paints. Tempera was the original
mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenean Greece, and China
and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. It was employed on a variety of
supports, from the stone stelae (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls
of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the vellum leaves
of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
True tempera is made by mixture with the yolk of fresh eggs, although manuscript
illuminators often used egg white and some easel painters added the whole egg. Other
emulsions have been used, such as casein glue with linseed oil, egg yolk with gum and
linseed oil, and egg white with linseed or poppy oil. Individual painters have experimented
with other recipes, but few of these have proved successful; all but William Blake's later

tempera paintings on copper sheets, for instance, have darkened and decayed, and it is
thought that he mixed his pigment with carpenter's glue.
Distemper is a crude form of tempera made by mixing dry pigment into a paste with water,
which is thinned with heated glue in working or by adding pigment to whiting, a mixture of
fine-ground chalk and size. It is used for stage scenery and full-size preparatory cartoons for
murals and tapestries. When dry, its colours have the pale, mat, powdery quality of pastels,
with a similar tendency to smudge. Indeed, damaged cartoons have been retouched with
pastel chalks.
Egg tempera is the most durable form of the medium, being generally unaffected by
humidity and temperature. It dries quickly to form a tough film that acts as a protective skin
to the support. In handling, in its diversity of transparent and opaque effects, and in the satin
sheen of its finish, it resembles the modern acrylic resin emulsion paints.
Traditional tempera painting is a lengthy process. Its supports are smooth surfaces, such as
planed wood, fine set plaster, stone, paper, vellum, canvas, and modern composition boards
of compressed wood or paper. Linen is generally glued to the surface of panel supports,
additional strips masking the seams between braced wood planks. Gesso, a mixture of plaster
of paris (or gypsum) with size, is the traditional ground. The first layer is of gesso grosso, a
mixture of coarse, unslaked plaster and size. This provides a rough, absorbent surface for ten
or more thin coats of gesso sotile, a smooth mixture of size and fine plaster previously slaked
in water to retard drying. This laborious preparation results, however, in an opaque, brilliant
white, light-reflecting surface, similar in texture to hard, flat icing sugar.
The design for a large tempera painting traditionally was executed in distemper on a thick
paper cartoon. The outlines were pricked with a perforating wheel so that when the cartoon
was laid on the surface of the support, the linear pattern was transferred by dabbing, or
"pouncing," the perforations with a muslin bag of powdered charcoal. The dotted contours
traced through were then fixed in paint. Medieval tempera painters of panels and manuscripts
made lavish use of gold leaf on backgrounds and for symbolic features, such as haloes and
beams of heavenly light. Areas of the pounced design intended for gilding were first built up
into low relief with gesso duro, the harder, less absorbent gesso compound used also for
elaborate frame moldings. Background fields were often textured by impressing the gesso
duro, before it set, with small, carved, intaglio wood blocks to create raised, pimpled, and
quilted repeat patterns that glittered when gilded. Leaves of finely beaten gold were pressed
onto a tacky mordant (adhesive compound) or over wet bole (reddish-brown earth pigment)
that gave greater warmth and depth when the gilded areas were burnished.
Colours were applied with sable brushes in successive broad sweeps or washes of
semitransparent tempera. These dried quickly, preventing the subtle tonal gradations possible
with watercolour washes or oil paint; effects of shaded modelling had therefore to be
obtained by a crosshatching technique of fine brush strokes. According to the Italian painter
Cennino Cennini, the early Renaissance tempera painters laid the colour washes across a
fully modelled monochrome underpainting in terre vert (olive-green pigment), a method
developed later into the mixed mediums technique of tempera underpainting followed by
transparent oil glazes.
The luminous gesso base of a tempera painting, combined with the accumulative effect of
overlaid colour washes, produces a unique depth and intensity of colour. Tempera paints dry
lighter in value, but their original tonality can be restored by subsequent waxing or
varnishing. Other characteristic qualities of a tempera painting, resulting from its fast drying
property and disciplined technique, are its steely lines and crisp edges, its meticulous detail
and rich linear textures, and its overall emphasis upon a decorative flat pattern of bold colour
masses.
The great Byzantine tradition of tempera painting was developed in Italy in the 13th and
14th centuries by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto. Their flattened picture space,
generously enriched by fields and textures of gold leaf, was extended by the Renaissance
depth perspectives in the paintings of Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli,
Sandro Botticelli, and Vittore Carpaccio. By that time, oil painting was already challenging

the primacy of tempera, Botticelli and some of his contemporaries apparently adding oil to
the tempera emulsion or overglazing it in oil colour.
Following the supremacy of the oil medium during succeeding periods of Western painting,
the 20th century saw a revival of tempera techniques by such U.S. artists as Ben Shahn,
Andrew Wyeth, and George McNeil and by the British painter Edward Wadsworth. It would
probably have been the medium also of the later hard-edge abstract painters had the new
acrylic resin paints not proved more easily and quickly.

Gesso according to the Brittanica,

(Italian: "gypsum," or "chalk"), fluid, white coating composed of plaster of paris, chalk,
gypsum, or other whiting mixed with glue, applied to smooth surfaces such as wood panels,
plaster, stone, or canvas to provide the ground for tempera and oil painting or for gilding and
painting carved furniture and picture frames. In Medieval and Renaissance tempera painting,
the surface was covered first with a layer of gesso grosso (rough gesso) made with coarse,
unslaked plaster, then with a series of layers of gesso sottile (finishing gesso) made with fine
plaster slaked in water, which produced an opaque, white, reflective surface.
In the 14th century, Giotto, the notable Italian painter, used a finishing gesso of parchment
glue and slaked plaster of paris. In medieval tempera painting, background areas intended for
gilding were built up into low relief with gesso duro (hard gesso), a less absorbent
composition also used for frame moldings, with patterns often pressed into the gesso with
small carved woodblocks. Modern gesso is made of chalk mixed with glue obtained from the
skins of rabbits or calves.
The Church San Francesco at Assisi
Transition from the Romanesque and Byzantine or "Greek Manner" to the Late Gothic and Renaissance Styles in Painting and Sculpture

Form:
This altarpiece is painted in tempera on wood. At five feet, the representation of
St. Francis is depicted as nearly life-size. Art of the Byzantine period largely
influenced Italian Gothic art. There is no depth to St. Francis. He is two-
dimensional and at the front of the picture plane. His feet are not standing on the
ground but seem to be floating just above it.
Iconography:
St. Francis is situated in the center of the painting - a position usually reserved for
Christ or the Virgin Mary. The identification with Christ is further enhanced with
the clearly displayed stigmata on his raised blessing hand. The three knots on his
rope belt represent chastity, poverty and obedience. He is flanked on either side by
angels and is surrounded by boxes containing major events in his life.
Context:
This altarpiece was completed in 1235, less than ten years after Francis’
canonization. St. Francis taught that studying nature was a way to understand God
and religious ideas should be discovered through human experience of the world.
These observations were partially responsible for the reflection on nature rather
than most art of its time and were a prototype for new works. This led to new
observations of nature in art and the beginnings of scientific study.
Written by Annette Abbott

Bonaventura Berlinghieri,
"St. Francis Altarpiece" 1235

tempera on wood 60' x 42' (approx. 5" x 3.5)

from Francis Of Assisi, Saint

The Franciscan rule of life.
Although he was a layman, Francis began to preach to the townspeople. Disciples were attracted to him, and he
composed a simple rule of life for them. In 1209, when the group of friars (as the mendicant disciples were called)
numbered 12, they went to Rome to seek the approval of Pope Innocent III, who, although hesitant at first, gave
his oral approbation to their rule of life. This event, which according to tradition occurred on April 16, marked the
official founding of the Franciscan order. The friars, who were actually street preachers with no possessions of any
kind and with only the Porziuncola as a center, preached and worked first in Umbria and then, as their numbers
grew, in the rest of Italy.
The early Franciscan rule of life, which has not survived, set as the aim of the new life, "To follow the teachings
of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps." Probably no one in history has ever set himself so seriously
as did Francis to imitate the life of Christ and to carry out so literally Christ's work in Christ's own way. This is
the key to the character and spirit of St. Francis. To neglect this point is to show an unbalanced portrait of the
saint as a lover of nature, a social worker, an itinerant preacher, and a lover of poverty.
Certainly the love of poverty is part of his spirit, and his contemporaries celebrated poverty either as his "lady," in
the allegorical Sacrum Commercium (Eng. trans., Francis and His Lady Poverty, 1964), or as his "bride," in the
fresco of Giotto in the lower church of S. Francesco at Assisi. It was not, however, mere external poverty he
sought but the total denial of self (as in Letter of Paul to the Philippians 2:7).
He considered all nature as the mirror of God and as so many steps to God. He called all creatures his "brothers"
and "sisters," and in his "Canticle of the Creatures" (less properly called by such names as the "Praises of
Creatures" or the "Canticle of the Sun") he referred to "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon," the wind and water, and
even "Sister Death." His long and painful illnesses were nicknamed his sisters, and he begged pardon of "Brother
Ass the body" for having unduly burdened him with his penances. Above all, his deep sense of brotherhood under
God embraced his fellow men, for "he considered himself no friend of Christ if he did not cherish those for whom
Christ died."
"The Franciscan rule of life.." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001

Context and Critical points of view: The previous section is a a biography of St. Francis's life however, Francis represents a pivotal
figure that represents the transition in thinking between the Gothic period and the Renaissance.
Previous to the life of St. Francis, the Catholic Church was the sole source of information about God for the layman (every day non-
clergy). The Church interpreted, interceded and imposed a very clear point of view about God's teachings and was the sole source of
biblical interpretation. In fact, laymen were not even allowed to own a Bible, not that they could afford one since they were hand
written and very expensive. This point of view and religious/political system meant that everyday people could not actually "know"
God for themselves and supported and maintained a point of view that one was born to a place on this earth that was unchangeable.
Francis's point of view that "To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps." Breaks with this tradition
and demonstrates the beginning of a point of view in which the lay person could not only have a direct experience of God but also alter
their behavior in accordance with their knowledge without needing to consult the Church for interpretation. This is important and
interesting because aside form the ideas exhibited in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, this represents the beginning of a change in the
way of thinking and the stirrings of individual critical thought. The art that follows, after the Byzantine period and in the late Gothic
and Early Renaissance exhibits a new and critical point of view of the world.

The Lower Church

Form:
The building in this image and the others like it are rendered with the
illusion of space called intuitive perspective and isometric perspective.
(This kind of perspective is not as illusionistic as the linear perspective
that is invented during the Renaissance around 1400 CE.)

St Francis Giving his Mantle to a Poor Man

RENOUNCES WORLDLY GOODS
First panel shows Saint Francis removing his clothing in the middle
of a town and renouncing his material wealth
Gesture and movement of the figures is life-like.
The overall scene makes sense in terms of the picture plane's space.
Overlapping of figures and the size scale difference from foreground
to background show Giotto's attempts to create a more rational sense
of space.
"This is the fifth of the twenty-eight scenes (twenty-five of
which were painted by Giotto) of Legend of Saint Francis.
This scene gives an opportunity to examine one of the most

important of Giotto's innovations. Although the mastery of the
method of representing the third dimension is of fundamental
importance, there are other innovations which are no less
significant to the development of Western painting. Among these
must be included the use of eloquent gesture, the communication
of strong emotions through attitude and facial expression, In the
Renunciation of Worldly Goods, St Francis' father expresses his
anger in his grimace, in his gesture of lifting the hem of his
gown (as if he were about to dash at his son), and in his
clenched fist; the effect is heightened by the gesture of his
friend, who holds him back by the arm. Within the limits of the
dignity and self-restraint that Giotto impresses on all his
characters, the father's anger is expressed clearly and vividly."
St Francis Renounces His Wordly Goods http://gallery.euroweb.hu/html/g/giotto/assisi/upper/legend/

scenes_1/franc05.html


Form:
The building in this image and the others like it are rendered with the
illusion of space called intuitive perspective and isometric perspective.
(This kind of perspective is not as illusionistic as the linear perspective
that is invented during the Renaissance around 1400 CE.)
Francis Drives Out the Demons from Arezzo

According to the Brittanica:

Perspective is a method of graphically depicting three-dimensional objects and spatial relationships on

a two-dimensional plane or on a plane that is shallower than the original (for example, in flat relief).
In Western art, illusions of perceptual volume and space are generally created by use of the linear
perspectival system, based on the observations that objects appear to the eye to shrink and parallel
lines and planes to converge to infinitely distant vanishing points as they recede in space from the
viewer. Parallel lines in spatial recession will appear to converge on a single vanishing point, called
one-point perspective. Perceptual space and volume may be simulated on the picture plane by
variations on this basic principle, differing according to the number and location of the vanishing
points. Instead of one-point (or central) perspective, the artist may use, for instance, angular (or
oblique) perspective, which employs two vanishing points.
Another kind of system--parallel perspective combined with a viewpoint from above--is traditional in
Chinese painting. When buildings rather than natural contours are painted and it is necessary to show
the parallel horizontal lines of the construction, parallel lines are drawn parallel instead of converging,
as in linear perspective. Often foliage is used to crop these lines before they extend far enough to
cause a building to appear warped.
The early European artist used a perspective that was an individual interpretation of what he saw rather
than a fixed mechanical method. At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, early in the 15th century,
the mathematical laws of perspective were discovered by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who
worked out some of the basic principles, including the concept of the vanishing point, which had been
known to the Greeks and Romans but had been lost. These principles were applied in painting by
Masaccio (as in his "Trinity" fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence; c. 1427), who within a short
period brought about an entirely new approach in painting. A style was soon developed using
configurations of architectural exteriors and interiors as the background for religious paintings, which
thereby acquired the illusion of great spatial depth. In his seminal Della pittura (1436; On Painting),
Leon Battista Alberti codified, especially for painters, much of the practical work on the subject that
had been carried out by earlier artists; he formulated, for example, the idea that "vision makes a
triangle, and from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems no larger than a point."

Linear perspective dominated Western painting until the end of the 19th century, when Paul Cézanne
flattened the conventional Renaissance picture space. The Cubists and other 20th-century painters
abandoned the depiction of three-dimensional space altogether and hence had no need for linear
perspective.
Linear perspective plays an important part in presentations of ideas for works by architects, engineers,
landscape architects, and industrial designers, furnishing an opportunity to view the finished product
before it is begun. Differing in principle from linear perspective and used by both Chinese and
European painters, aerial perspective is a method of creating the illusion of depth by a modulation of
colour and tone.
Linear Perspective
Demonstration of 1 point and 2 point perspectives

Linear perspective is a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space
and distance on a flat surface. The system originated in Florence, Italy in the
early 1400s. The artist and architect Brunelleschi demonstrated its principles, but
another architect and writer, Leon Battista Alberti was first to write down rules
of linear perspective for artists to follow. Leonardo da Vinci probably learned
Alberti's system while serving as an apprentice to the artist Verrocchio in
Florence.
To use linear perspective an artist must first imagine the picture surface as an
"open window" through which to see the painted world. Straight lines are then
drawn on the canvas to represent the horizon and "visual rays" connecting the
viewer's eye to a point in the distance.
The horizon line runs across the canvas at the eye level of the viewer. The
horizon line is where the sky appears to meet the ground.
The vanishing point should be located near the center of the horizon line. The
vanishing point is where all parallel lines (orthogonals) that run towards the
horizon line appear to come together like train tracks in the distance.
Orthogonal lines are "visual rays" helping the viewer's eye to connect points
around the edges of the canvas to the vanishing point. An artist uses them to
align the edges of walls and paving stones.
Please visit this site for more of an explanantion.

http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/art/linear.html
Two Point Perspective

1) To draw a simple shape in two point perspective you start with a

single line across the picture plane called the horizon line. 2 Then add two vanishing points. Place one at each end of the
horizon line. Then draw a vertical line as big as you want the
first box.

3) Next, add converging lines from the top and bottom of the vertical
line and draw two vertical lines which will become the back corners of 4) After erasing some of the horizon line (the part behind the
the box. box) it looks like a three dimensional form.

A page with a great example of two point perspective.

http://www.proviso.k12.il.us/EAST/GeometryWorld/2PER.HTM

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris a Rainy Day, 1877

Here's an example of two point perspective in a painting. This painting actually has multiple points on the horizon line but I've traced
most of the orthagonals to the two most dominant ones in the black and white illustration.
Here's how Giotto kind of had it right.
Here's where the lines should have gone.

While at mass one day, Francis listened to the reading of Matthew 10:7-10
where Jesus tells his apostles to go and preach God’s word. He felt this was a
personal calling. Though he lived a simple life, as he started preaching, he
began to attract a following of men who also wished to denounce their wealth
and preach God’s word. These men traveled to Rome to speak with the Pope.
Pope Innocent III gave permission for them to live the life they chose. This
event marked the beginning of the Franciscan order.
This fresco is the seventh of twenty-eight scenes of Saint Francis. It shows St

Francis and the friars bending on their knees before Pope Innocent III. With the
introduction of soft pinks and blues, we can witness Giotto abandoning the
former Byzantine style whose gold images were rigid and almost cartoon-like
(scroll up and compare to Berlinghieri’s altarpiece). The arches at the top of the
painting provide an illusion of depth while delivering the image of Francis and
the Pope closer to the viewer. Lines above the eye level tend to incline and
move down while below the eye level, they move up. This allows the viewer to
feel as if he were personally in the picture rather than being a spectator of the
event.

This is the fifteenth of the twenty-eight paintings of St Francis. While walking

with a companion, Francis saw some birds at the side of the road and stopped to
preach to them. It is said that more birds joined them from nearby trees and
stood at his feet to listen. This is the sermon he delivered to them in 1220:

My little sisters, the birds, much bounden are ye unto God, your
creator, and always in every place ought ye to praise him, for that he
hath given you liberty to fly about everywhere, and hath also given
you double and triple rainment; moreover he preserved your seed in
the ark of Noah, that your race might not perish out of the world; still
more are ye beholden to him for the element of the air which he hath
appointed for you; beyond all this, ye sow not, neither do you reap;
and God feedeth you, and giveth you the streams and fountains for
your drink; the mountains and valleys for your refuge and the high
trees whereon to make your nests; and because ye know not how to
spin or sow, God clotheth you, you and your children; wherefore your
creator loveth you much, seeing that he hath bestowed on you so
many benefits; and therefore, my little sisters, beware of the sin of

ingratitude, and study always to give praises unto God.
The simplicity of this painting reveals much about Giotto as a narrative artist.
He reduces imagery to its barest elements without losing any part of the story.
There are no architectural or decorative elements - only two men, two trees, and
a handful of birds. We also see him breaking away from the old style by
making the painting asymmetrical. Until now, all paintings of Jesus, Mary or a
saint featured them in the center of the picture facing its viewer. His standing in
profile and to the side once again allows us to feel like we are more than
viewing an image – we are witnessing an event.
STIGMATA
In 1224 Saint Francis climbed a mountain to begin a 40 day fast. During

this fast, he saw a vision and experienced wounds in his hands and the
side of his body – duplicating those that appeared on Christ when he was
crucified. Such wounds are referred to as stigmata.
This fresco is painted as if it were a low relief sculpture. Here, Giotto

uses light and shadow on the landscape to add depth. Such use of light
and shade is a distinguishing aspect of Renaissance art.

Francis Receives the Stigmata
from Brittanica: Giotto di Bondone
The Assisi Problem
The central problem in Giotto studies, the attribution of the Assisi frescoes, may be summed up as the

question whether Giotto ever painted at Assisi and, if so, what? There can be no reasonable doubt that
he did work at Assisi, for a long literary tradition goes back to the Compilatio chronologica of
Riccobaldo Ferrarese, who wrote in or before 1319, when Giotto was alive and famous. Later writers
down to Vasari expanded this and made it clear that Giotto's works were in the great double church of
San Francesco (St. Francis). By Vasari's time, several frescoes in both upper and lower churches were
attributed to Giotto, the most important being the cycle of 28 scenes from the life of St. Francis of
Assisi in the nave of the upper church and the "Franciscan Virtues" and some other frescoes in the
lower church. (Some of the frescoes in the St. Francis cycle were damaged by earthquakes that struck
Assisi on Sept. 26, 1997.)
The majority of these scenes, mostly narrative, are revolutionary in their expression of reality and
humanity. In these frescoes, the emphasis is on the dramatic moment of each situation, and, with details
of dress and background at a minimum, the inner reality of human emotion is intensified through crucial
gestures and glances. In the 19th century, however, it was observed that all these frescoes, though
similar in style, could not be by the same hand, and the new trend toward skepticism of Vasari's
statements led to the position that rejected all the Assisi frescoes and dated the St. Francis cycle to a
period after Giotto's death. This extreme view has been generally abandoned, and, indeed, a dated
picture of 1307 can be shown to derive from the St. Francis cycle. Nevertheless, many scholars prefer
to accept the idea of an otherwise totally unknown Master of the St. Francis legend, on the grounds that
the style of the cycle is irreconcilable with that of the later Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, which are
universally accepted as Giotto's. This involves the idea that the works referred to (in Giotto's lifetime)
by Riccobaldo cannot be identified with anything now extant and must have perished centuries ago, so
that the early 15th-century sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, Vasari, and others mistakenly transferred the
existing St. Francis cycle to Giotto. Five hundred years of tradition are thus written off.
Still more difficult, if Giotto did not paint the St. Francis frescoes, major works of art, then they must
be attributed to a painter who cannot be shown to have created anything else, whose name has
disappeared without trace, although he was of the first rank, and, odder still, was formed by the
combined influences of Cimabue, the Florentine sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio, and the Roman painter
Pietro Cavallini--influences which coalesce at Assisi and may be taken as the influences that formed
Giotto himself.
Arising out of the fusion of Roman and Florentine influences in the Assisi frescoes, there was later a
tendency to see the hand of Giotto, as a very young man, in the works of the Isaac Master, the painter
of two scenes of "Isaac and Esau" and "Jacob and Isaac" in the nave above the St. Francis cycle. If this
theory is accepted, it is easy to understand that Giotto, as a young man, made such a success of this
commission that he was entrusted with the most important one, the official painted biography of St.
Francis based on the new official biography written around 1266 by St. Bonaventura. In fact, the whole
of today's mental picture of St. Francis stems largely from these frescoes. Clearly, a man born in 1276
was less likely to have received such a commission than one 10 years older, if, as was always thought,
the commission was given in 1296 or soon after by Fra Giovanni di Muro, general of the Franciscans.
The works in the Lower Church are generally regarded as productions of Giotto's followers (there are,
indeed, resemblances to his works at Padua), and there is real disagreement only over the "Legend of
St. Francis." The main strength of the non-Giotto school lies in the admittedly sharp stylistic contrasts
between the St. Francis cycle and the frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua, especially if the Assisi
frescoes were painted 1296-c. 1300 and those of the Arena c. 1303-05; for the interval between the two
cycles is too small to allow for major stylistic developments. This argument becomes less compelling
when the validity of the dates proposed and the Roman period c. 1300 are taken into account. As
already mentioned, the Assisi frescoes may have been painted before 1296 and not necessarily
afterward, and the Arena frescoes are datable with certainty only in or before 1309, although probably
painted c. 1305-06; clearly, a greater time lag between the two cycles can help to explain stylistic
differences, as can the experiences that Giotto underwent in what was probably his second Roman
period.
"The Assisi Problem." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001


Gothic and Late Gothic Paintings

The transition from the Byzantine or "Greek Manner" to the Late Gothic and Renaissance Styles.

Form: Before you read this section, read in Stokstad the section
called, Technique, Cennini on Panel Painting.
Form: The overall composition of this work is symmetrical. The

largest figures of Mary and Jesus are at the center of the
composition and they are flanked by two rows of angels and
Saints overlapped as if they are standing on bleachers. In order to
create space, Duccio uses the same convention of vertical
perspective we saw in Pisano's pulpit. The figures that are highest
up in the picture plane are furthest back.
This painting was rendered with tempera paint and gold leaf.
Tempera is a medium which is made from egg (sometimes just the
yolk sometimes the whites) glue and ground up minerals that serve
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Virgin and Child in Majesty (Maestà)
as pigment or colorant. The egg actually glues or binds the
main panel from the Maestà Altarpiece, from Siena Cathedral
pigments to the surface. The paint is applied in small distinct
1308-11 Tempera and gold on wood, 7'x13' (214 x 412 cm)
brush strokes that show the brushwork when looked at closely.
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena
The background is gold leaf on a wooden panel that has been
painted with a a combination of glue and marble dust or chalk
referred to as gesso. The gold leaf is then incised and punctured
with designs (Stokstad calls this punchwork.) Gold leaf has also
been added to the drapery as a means to highlight the folds.
The rendering of color and value in this painting is fairly limited.

There is no distinct source of light and very little tonal variation
on the faces or drapery of the individual figures and there are no
real differences of character or appearance from one face to the
next.
Duccio's rendition of the Virgin is very similar to the one from

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Virgin and Child in Majesty (Maestà) Auvergne and Cimabue's. This painting, like the sculpture, is
Stories of the Passion (Maestà, reverse of the top panel called both naturalistic and stylized. Again the rendering of the face and
"verso") hands was an attempt by the sculptor to represent convincing
1308-11Tempera on wood, 212 x 425 cm human forms however, the faces show no real expression and the
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena bodies are completely covered with an almost Byzantine style of

drapery that almost completely conceals both figures' bodies. The
Links to more about this altar child Jesus is not rendered as a child buy rather a stiff looking
miniature adult. The poses of both figures are stiff and fairly
http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg3/gg3-main1.html wooden but in the case of Mary, this is appropriate if you look at
http://www.hol.gr/cgfa/duccio/ her role in terms of the work's iconography.
Iconography: As in the French Gothic sculpture Mary is depicted as the "Throne of Wisdom." The
arrangement of the composition places Mary at the center of the image and in the most important
location. So the use of symmetry and the placement of figures can indicate their status. Notice that
Mary is framed and as such "backed up" by the angels. The less important figures of the prophets are
literally beneath her and Jesus.
Color and the gold leaf used also serve as iconographic reminders of Mary and Jesus' status. Gold leaf
and red and blue pigments were made from precious stones and materials and are symbols of there
status.
Context: According to the Brittanica,
Maestà (Italian: "Majesty"), double-sided altarpieces executed for the cathedral of Siena by
the Italian painter Duccio. The first version (1302), originally in the Palazzo Pubblico in
Siena, is now lost. The second version (Oct. 9, 1308-June 9, 1311), painted for the cathedral

of Siena and one of the largest altarpieces of its time, consisted of a wide frontal panel with
the Virgin and Child adored by the patrons of Siena and surrounded by saints and angels.
Beneath was a predella with seven scenes from the childhood of Christ; above were
pinnacles with scenes from the life of the Virgin; and on the back were scenes from the life
of Christ. The main panel and the bulk of the narrative scenes are now in the Museo
dell'Opera Metropolitana, Piazza del Duomo, Siena, but isolated panels from the altarpiece
have found their way to the National Gallery, London; the Frick Collection, New York City;
and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The work in which the genius of Duccio unfolds in all its brilliant fullness and the one to
which the painter owes his greatest fame, however, is the "Maestà," the altarpiece for the
main altar of the cathedral of Siena. He was commissioned to do this work on Oct. 9, 1308,
for a payment of 3,000 gold florins, the highest figure paid to an artist up to that time. On
June 9, 1311, the whole populace of Siena, headed by the clergy and civil administration of
the city, gathered at the artist's workshop to receive the finished masterpiece. They carried it
in solemn procession to the accompaniment of drums and trumpets to the cathedral. For
three days alms were distributed to the poor, and great feasts were held. Never before had the
birth of a work of art been greeted with such public jubilation and never before had there
been such immediate awareness that a work was truly a masterpiece and not just a reflection
of the religious fervor of the people. Duccio himself was aware of the work's significance; he
signed the throne of the Virgin with an invocation that was devout yet proud for the time:
"Holy Mother of God, grant peace to Siena, and life to Duccio because he has painted you
thus."
The "Maestà" is in the form of a large horizontal rectangle, surmounted by pinnacles, and
with a narrow horizontal panel, or predella, as its base. It is painted on both sides. The entire
central rectangle of the front side is a single scene showing the Madonna and Child
enthroned in the middle of a heavenly court of saints and angels with the four patron saints
of Siena kneeling at their feet. The back is subdivided into 26 compartments that illustrate
the Passion of Christ. The front and back of the predella contain scenes of the infancy and
the ministry of Jesus, and the pinnacles, crowning the entire work, represent events after the
Resurrection. In all, there are 59 narrative scenes.
The rigorous symmetry with which the groups of adoring figures at the sides of the Virgin
are arranged in the imposing scene of the central panel is inspired by compositions of the
Byzantine tradition and gives evidence of Duccio's keen architectural sensibility by its power
to draw attention to the "Maestà" as the true focal point of the cathedral's spatial and
structural organization. Like elements of a living architecture, the 30 figures, through the
slightest of gestures and turnings of the head, are intimately related, their positions repeated
to give a feeling of intense lyrical contemplation. The consonance of feeling that arises from
this contemplation gives the facial features of each a distinct, spiritual beauty, reminiscent,
especially the faces of the angels, of the more idealistic creations of Hellenistic art. The
Madonna, slightly larger than the other figures, seated on a magnificent and massive throne
of polychrome marbles, inclines her head gently as if trying to hear the prayer of the faithful.
Duccio thus succeeds in reconciling perfectly the Byzantine ideal of power and dignity with
the underlying tenderness and mysticism of the Sienese spirit. The scenes in the predella,
pinnacles, and back are filled with the Byzantine iconographic schemes from which Duccio
finds it difficult to detach himself, and they are developed with a deeper concern for their
narrative significance. The scenes are not, however, merely descriptions or chronicles. They
include many touches from daily life, which provide a lyrical synthesis that harmonizes the
character and gestures of the figures with their landscape and architectural surroundings.
Briitanica Encyclopedia
At this time the altarpiece for the high altar was finished and the picture which was called
the "Madonna with the large eyes" or Our Lady of Grace, that now hangs over the altar of
St. Boniface, was taken down. Now this Our Lady was she who had hearkened to the people
of Siena when the Florentines were routed at Monte Aperto, and her place was changed
because the new one was made, which is far more beautiful and devout and larger, and is
painted on the back with the stories of the Old and New Testaments. And on the day that it
was carried to the Duomo the shops were shut, and the bishop conducted a great and devout

company of priests and friars in solemn procession, accompanied by the nine signiors, and
all the officers of the commune, and all the people, and one after another the worthiest with
lighted candles in their hands took places near the picture, and behind came the women and
children with great devotion. And they accompanied the said picture up to the Duomo,
making the procession around the Campo, as is the custom, all the bells ringing joyously,
out of reverence for so noble a picture as this. And this picture Duccio di Niccolò the
painter made, and it was made in the house of the Muciatti outside the gate a Stalloreggi .
And all that day persons, praying God and His Mother, who is our advocate, to defend us
by their infinite mercy from every adversity and all evil, and keep us from the hands of
traitors and of the enemies of Siena.
This account reminds us how we should remember the integral role of a major work like this
in the civic life of the city. Notice also how the adoration devoted to this new image is
comparable to that shown the relics of a patron saint of a community. It is important to
remember that the Virgin was the patron saint of Siena, and as such she was the center of the
civic and religious life of the city. Kneeling beside the throne of the Virgin are the other
patron saints of Siena: Ansanus, Sabinus, Crescentius, and Victor. The order of the altarpiece
and the privileged position given to the Sienese saints, especially the Virgin, would have
been clearly understood to reflect the ideal order of the city of Siena which would stand
before it in the Duomo. The civic implications are further brought out by the original
inscription: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD BESTOW PEACE ON SIENA AND SALVATION
ON DUCCIO WHO PAINTED THEE.
The reference in the account above to the Madonna with the Large Eyes , or in Italian --
Madonna degli Occhi Grossi-- relates to a painting done about 1200:
This work was seen to be a miracle working image. The Sienese appeals to this image of
their patron saint were believed to have lead to the salvation of the city from the Florentines
in the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. Why do you think the Sienese would have wanted to
have replaced such a revered image with the Duccio altarpiece?
Quoted directly from:

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Arth213/Duccio.html
Form: In general the composition is fairly

symmetrical yet it is very crowded and almost
seems disorganized. Most of the figures are placed
in the foreground of the picture plane and the space
created is not very illusionistic. Space is created by
placing the figures in the foreground lower in the
picture plane. In order to show the recession of
space, the figures are layered and the placed in a
vertical perspective.
The rendering of each of the figures is fairly

naturalistic and the clothing, drapery and poses are

somewhat reminiscent of Nicola Pisano's Nativity,
from the Baptistery Pulpit panel and carvings such
from the Parthenon's pediment. Several of the
figures, such as the main one which depicts Mary
and the child (Jesus) are repeated because several
Duccio di Buoninsegna scenes are simultaneously being represented. This
The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, 1308/1311 kind of continuous narrative is common in
This panel in the National Gallery, Washington DC Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance
art.

Iconography: This is a nativity scene that at first appears to take place in a manger but it also contains the baptism
of Christ as well. The center of the scene Mary reclines in a pose very reminiscent of the Goddesses from
Parthenon. In the lower left foreground of the image is the baptism of Christ.
The next major difference is in the style and amount of artwork. In general, the Gothic style is extremely
organized, diagrammatic, and stylized. It tends to take cues from Byzantine and Romanesque art, in which the
figures' relative size to another figure is based upon its' importance in the spiritual hierarchy. For example, when
Jesus or an Angel is shown, they are relatively larger than all the other figures whom are depicted in a particular
scene. This shows how important they are, they loom above the mere mortals, faithful and sinners alike.
Context: It is easy to guess that Duccio probably used, almost directly Nicola Pisano's Nativity, from the
Baptistery Pulpit panel as his schema. This was not considered plagiarism by the Gothic artists but rather a
compliment and a continuation of a time honored Byzantine tradition. Her pose and drapery almost exactly mimic
Nicola Pisano's Nativity, from the Baptistery Pulpit panel but the drapery is somewhat less lifelike. This also
demonstrates the desire to continue older visual traditions and to not always have a revolutionary and innovative
stylistic break with earlier traditions.
Form: Probably the most significant stylistic and formal element of note is the awkward
construction of space. Here, Duccio attempts to create some sort of space but is a bit
confused as to how to do it. He uses vertical perspective to create space initially. He
places the figures that are closest to the viewer the lowest in the picture plane and those
further back higher up. The use of vertical perspective seems to tip the ground plane up
and places the viewer in a helicopter or tower in which they are about 15 feet off the
ground looking down on the scene.
He also uses overlapping and a size scale difference between foreground and
background. Some of the figures in the crowd overlap and hide the figure's behind them
but this really doesn't happen with the figures of the apostles, probably because he
wanted to make sure the viewer was able to see all their faces. The figures in the
background are significantly smaller but the scale of the building and the way in which
the apostles who follow Jesus are bunched up is a bit illogical. There is not enough
space on the ground for all the apostles nor the crowds to be standing together.
Context: In order to understand the iconography of this scene one needs to go to the
Bible passage on which it is modeled first:
Matthew Chapter 21

1
When they drew near Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives,
Jesus sent two disciples,
2
saying to them, "Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an
ass tethered, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them here to me.
3
And if anyone should say anything to you, reply, 'The master has need of them.'
Then he will send them at once."
Duccio di Buoninsegna, (Maestà) 4
detail Christ Entering Jerusalem This happened so that what had been spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled:
(Maestà, reverse of the top panel called 5
"verso") "Say to daughter Zion, 'Behold, your king comes to you, meek and riding on an ass,
1308-11Tempera on wood and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.'"
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena 6
The disciples went and did as Jesus had ordered them.
7
They brought the ass and the colt and laid their cloaks over them, and he sat upon
them.
8
The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches
from the trees and strewed them on the road.
9
The crowds preceding him and those following kept crying out and saying:
"Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord;
hosanna in the highest."
10
And when he entered Jerusalem the whole city was shaken and asked, "Who is this?
"
11 And the crowds replied, "This is Jesus the prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee."
Iconography: Most of the iconography is fairly standard in this image. Jesus is depicted
in he usual manner, he has a beard and is depicted, as his apostles with a beautiful
nimbus of gold around his head. His halo is literally the light of divine knowledge which
radiates from him. The royal red and blue colors he wears and the gold leaf are all meant
to emphasize his status, however, he is also humble. He rides a common beast of burden
to show his connection to all men.
Links to more about this altar

http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg3/gg3-main1.html
http://www.hol.gr/cgfa/duccio/
Duccio paints with tempera paint. According to the Brittanica.

Tempera
A tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and thinned with water. It is a
very ancient medium, having been in constant use in most world cultures, until in Europe it
was gradually superseded, during the Renaissance, by oil paints. Tempera was the original
mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenean Greece, and China
and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. It was employed on a variety of
supports, from the stone stelae (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls
of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the vellum leaves
of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
True tempera is made by mixture with the yolk of fresh eggs, although manuscript
illuminators often used egg white and some easel painters added the whole egg. Other
emulsions have been used, such as casein glue with linseed oil, egg yolk with gum and
linseed oil, and egg white with linseed or poppy oil. Individual painters have experimented
with other recipes, but few of these have proved successful; all but William Blake's later
tempera paintings on copper sheets, for instance, have darkened and decayed, and it is
thought that he mixed his pigment with carpenter's glue.
Distemper is a crude form of tempera made by mixing dry pigment into a paste with water,
which is thinned with heated glue in working or by adding pigment to whiting, a mixture of
fine-ground chalk and size. It is used for stage scenery and full-size preparatory cartoons for
murals and tapestries. When dry, its colours have the pale, mat, powdery quality of pastels,
with a similar tendency to smudge. Indeed, damaged cartoons have been retouched with
pastel chalks.
Egg tempera is the most durable form of the medium, being generally unaffected by
humidity and temperature. It dries quickly to form a tough film that acts as a protective skin
to the support. In handling, in its diversity of transparent and opaque effects, and in the satin
sheen of its finish, it resembles the modern acrylic resin emulsion paints.
Traditional tempera painting is a lengthy process. Its supports are smooth surfaces, such as
planed wood, fine set plaster, stone, paper, vellum, canvas, and modern composition boards
of compressed wood or paper. Linen is generally glued to the surface of panel supports,
additional strips masking the seams between braced wood planks. Gesso, a mixture of plaster
of paris (or gypsum) with size, is the traditional ground. The first layer is of gesso grosso, a
mixture of coarse, unslaked plaster and size. This provides a rough, absorbent surface for ten
or more thin coats of gesso sotile, a smooth mixture of size and fine plaster previously slaked
in water to retard drying. This laborious preparation results, however, in an opaque, brilliant
white, light-reflecting surface, similar in texture to hard, flat icing sugar.
The design for a large tempera painting traditionally was executed in distemper on a thick
paper cartoon. The outlines were pricked with a perforating wheel so that when the cartoon
was laid on the surface of the support, the linear pattern was transferred by dabbing, or
"pouncing," the perforations with a muslin bag of powdered charcoal. The dotted contours
traced through were then fixed in paint. Medieval tempera painters of panels and manuscripts
made lavish use of gold leaf on backgrounds and for symbolic features, such as haloes and
beams of heavenly light. Areas of the pounced design intended for gilding were first built up
into low relief with gesso duro, the harder, less absorbent gesso compound used also for
elaborate frame moldings. Background fields were often textured by impressing the gesso
duro, before it set, with small, carved, intaglio wood blocks to create raised, pimpled, and
quilted repeat patterns that glittered when gilded. Leaves of finely beaten gold were pressed
onto a tacky mordant (adhesive compound) or over wet bole (reddish-brown earth pigment)
that gave greater warmth and depth when the gilded areas were burnished.
Colours were applied with sable brushes in successive broad sweeps or washes of

semitransparent tempera. These dried quickly, preventing the subtle tonal gradations possible
with watercolour washes or oil paint; effects of shaded modelling had therefore to be
obtained by a crosshatching technique of fine brush strokes. According to the Italian painter
Cennino Cennini, the early Renaissance tempera painters laid the colour washes across a
fully modelled monochrome underpainting in terre vert (olive-green pigment), a method
developed later into the mixed mediums technique of tempera underpainting followed by
transparent oil glazes.
The luminous gesso base of a tempera painting, combined with the accumulative effect of
overlaid colour washes, produces a unique depth and intensity of colour. Tempera paints dry
lighter in value, but their original tonality can be restored by subsequent waxing or
varnishing. Other characteristic qualities of a tempera painting, resulting from its fast drying
property and disciplined technique, are its steely lines and crisp edges, its meticulous detail
and rich linear textures, and its overall emphasis upon a decorative flat pattern of bold colour
masses.
The great Byzantine tradition of tempera painting was developed in Italy in the 13th and
14th centuries by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto. Their flattened picture space,
generously enriched by fields and textures of gold leaf, was extended by the Renaissance
depth perspectives in the paintings of Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli,
Sandro Botticelli, and Vittore Carpaccio. By that time, oil painting was already challenging
the primacy of tempera, Botticelli and some of his contemporaries apparently adding oil to
the tempera emulsion or overglazing it in oil colour.
Following the supremacy of the oil medium during succeeding periods of Western painting,
the 20th century saw a revival of tempera techniques by such U.S. artists as Ben Shahn,
Andrew Wyeth, and George McNeil and by the British painter Edward Wadsworth. It would
probably have been the medium also of the later hard-edge abstract painters had the new
acrylic resin paints not proved more easily and quickly.

Kenney Mencher: Giotto and the Arena Chapel, a video and transcript for my students
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Saturday, August 24, 2013 About Me
Giotto and the Arena Chapel, a video and transcript for my students
Kenney Mencher
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Prof. Kenney Mencher

Department of Art and Art History
Director Louie Meager Art Gallery
Ohlone College, 43600 Mission Blvd.
Fremont, California 94539
Phone:
Office (510) 979-7916
Cell (510) 390-3952
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http://www.kenney-mencher.com/
http://kenney-mencher.blogspot.com/
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kmencher
I'm a fine artist and an art historian.

I'm always looking for interesting art
historical facts and ideas. I also like
reading and fiction so every once in
a while I have fiction contests where
I give away original art.
I grew up in NYC but now in live the

San Francisco Bay area. Where I
In this next section I want to talk about to really important figures, the artist Giotto and the author Dante. These two make art, teach, curate, and blog.
historical figures have a direct impact on the creation of the decoration of the Chapel in Padua called the Arena Chapel. In View my complete profile
order to understand these two historic figures’ works have to look at the social and economic world of the Renaissance.
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Giotto is a Proto Renaissance painter. This means that Giotto is working in a transitional period between the Gothic and the Kenney Mencher
Renaissance periods. His work exhibits qualities of the late Gothic and also some innovative new things that were happening
during the Renaissance. The main patron for this family was the Scrovegni family.
EnricoScrovegni was the grandson of amending Reginaldo. He hired Giotto to paint the interior of this Chapel as an
indulgence meeting that what he was hoping was the church and God would forgive his grandfather Reginaldo for being
what was called the userer. This is a common practice during the Renaissance what would happen is a person would go to the
church and ask the church if there was something that they could do in order to indulge the church and get forgiveness for
sins. One way in which the church so-called forgave sins was to was to ask a patron, the patron is a person who pays for
work of art, to decorate a church by hiring a top artist. What this person was hoping was that by indulging the church they
could buy their ancestor out of years of purgatory or hell.
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It’s kind of a contradiction in terms to see Reginaldo Scrovegni depicted on the walls of the arena Chapel in Padua but it also Bubbles
relates to the author Dante whose handwriting is all over the arena Chapel in a reference to his epic poem the Divine My Art Appreciation Videos
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Dante was a famous Florentine who was exiled from Florence for siding with a wrong or less powerful political party during sale.
the 13 century. While in exile and living in Padua Italy he began his work on an epic poem that was written in vernacular R.I.P. Ruth Asawa (1926-2013)
Italian. The poem that within imaginary epic journey that Dante took during the middle of his years into the several rounds
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of hell heaven and purgatory. It starts with the journey down into the underworld in which he’s ushered down by a a series of
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large monstrous animals. When he gets to the first level of purgatory he is met by the classical poet Virgil. The reason why First Friday Artist T...
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Dante’s version of the afterworld is based more or less on a series of gases and miss apprehensions about what the Bible says
and it is also combined with the classical view of the world. Probably one of the most important things about it is that sort of
popular culture view of the afterlife that’s also based on classical teachings doesn’t really exist in the Bible. The fact that it’s
written in Italian also made it much more accessible to the population at that point in time and serve to elevate Dante as one
of the first and foremost writers of the Renaissance.

The fact that it was written in Italian meant that artists and intellectuals were able to read his version and they sort of
combined it with images from medieval last judgment and developed a further iconography during the Renaissance of the
betrayal of the afterlife which Giotto the artist picked up on. He people this afterworld with a series of characters and people
that he knew from Florence. In some cases it was an indictment of some of his enemies but it was also an indictment of some
of his friends because he put both his friends and enemies both in hell and in heaven.
In his first meeting in purgatory Dante meets to characters from Florence and Paolo and Francesca. The theme of Paolo and
Francesca is a theme that shared in many works of art and you also see it in the Gates of hell by the sculptor Rodin. The
story goes something like this when Dante sees Paolo and Francesca floating in the sky of purgatory he calls to them and
asks them what’s wrong. Francesca floats down to him and explains to him that she committed the sin, but you get the
feeling from her description that she doesn’t really believe it’s a sin. Person wasn’t sitting around one afternoon reading
Boccaccio’s book the Decameron . She’s described as reading this cam run for pleasure with her brother-in-law. She literally
says something like she was reading it for pleasure and you get the feeling that she was actually reading it for the dirty parts.
This inflamed Francesca and Paolo and just before they were about to kiss her husband came in and murdered both his
brother and her. The result they ended up in purgatory.
Purgatory for Francesca and Paolo means that they are floating around in the sky out-of-control but they cannot touch each
other nor can they really see each other. They basically float around in the sky with their backs to each other three or 4 feet
away from each other almost within arms length. If they try to get away from each other they are forced to stay that single 4
feet away from each other but if they try to touch each other they also cannot touch each other. In essence they got what they
desired their out of control and in this state of not being able to get to one another. One gets the feeling that if they admitted
their sin they might graduate out of purgatory and maybe make it to heaven and that’s the whole point. Dante’s kind of
giving you a view of what sin really is.
In addition to putting Francesca and Paolo and hell Dante also places various clergy members in hell with their heads and
holes also in purgatory. He’s kind of giving you examples that even the clergy can go to heaven and even the clergy can go
to hell that everyone is not always on the right path. The ideas that Dante’s kind of giving you a feeling of what his life is
like at this sort of existential turn point in the middle of his life. In essence what he’s trying to do is find the right path and
show you through literature how to attain the kingdom of heaven.
Another set of characters that Dante puts in purgatory or hell are the actual Scrovegni family. It’s interesting because Giotto
also includes Reginaldo Scrovegni in his fresco the Last Judgment. In EnricoScrovegni is standing just left of the crucifix
holding up an image of the Arena Chapel itself. In fact this somehow relates to the fact that Dante puts Reginaldo Scrovegni
in the seventh circle of hell which is a place where the evil and violent go to. So in essence what EnricoScrovegni and John
torture to do is renovate Reginaldo’s reputation that was established I Dante in the Divine Comedy.

This somewhat relates to one of the smaller frescoes in the Chapel which is an allegorical figure of avarice and charity. These
images of virtues and vices contain emblems and icons that are very similar to some of the ones that are in Dante’s script
here’s a passage,
Despondency was bursting from their eyes this side them that their hands kept fending off, at times the flames, at times
the burning soil not otherwise do dogs in summer now with muzzle now with paw when they are bitten by fleas or
gnats or by sharp gadfly. When I set my eyes upon the faces of some who the painful fire falls, I recognized no one but
I did notice that from the neck of each purse was hung that had a special color or an emblem and their eyes seemed to
feast upon these pouches.
What he’s describing is actually the purses and the color of the purses which is emblematic of the Scrovegni family.

If you look at the Arena Chapel, you’ll see that it’s arranged almost like a comic strip but the comic strip has more meaning
than that. It’s arranged in a way that you can actually understand that there’s a hierarchy in place as well. It’s meant to
describe the actions of the ideal person who was Jesus but it’s also meant to describe the actions of on ideal people and how
and where they are in the world.

For example there’s a series of frescoes that are painted in Brown’s this is also referred to as monochromatic or in
“grisailles” French for in gray. These monochromatic frescoes are also painted as if they look like marble. They look like a
series of marble sculptures and each one represents the virtues and vices if you look closely at them you’ll see that they
almost stand as columns or supporters for the frescoes that are above them. The frescoes that sit atop the virtues and vices
represent the life and times of Jesus Christ. These monochromatic paintings are sort of faux finish they are in essence trompe
“l’oeil” which means in French to fool the eye. In some ways illusionistic painting like this is a way of getting out of using
real materials like marble but it also shows the artists virtuosity in depicting textures and light. In essence this kind of
painting shows the artists abilities.
Let’s start with the Last Judgment. The theme of the Last Judgment, is one that has been used for thousands of years in
Christian art. There’s even one that’s kind of a last judgment in Egyptian art and even has scales and it like some of the ones
that we’ve been looking. The basic design of it is structured in such a way that it symmetrical. First one needs to look at the
organization of the fresco in order to understand how these things work.

Like it’s Romanesque predecessor Giotto’s Last Judgment is designed to be symmetrical you can divided town the center it
also has three layers to it at the bottom are the elect or people being pulled out of their graves for the last judgment that is on
the right-hand side of Jesus but also on our left-hand side. We can also see this in the Romanesque version however the
people being lifted out of their graves are all on the bottom level of the Romanesque sculpture. We see in the center of each
work of art the figure of Jesus larger than all of the other figures this is called hieratic scale. Everyone on the right-hand side

of Jesus seems to be being saved or entering the Kingdom of Heaven. Everyone on the left-hand side of Jesus is in a bit of
trouble and if you look at the bottom level to the left of Jesus you’ll see that that represents hell. The top layer represents
heaven with the disciples and the apostles surrounding Jesus advising him and also trying to intercede on our behalf. This
means that their actually talking to Jesus on our behalf and asking him to let us into heaven that’s why Catholics often pray
to Saints because the same might have more influence with Jesus than our own prayers.


The overall structure of scenes of Last Judgment all adhere to this basic schema. In Giotto’s version however he adds some
extra things that are probably based on Dante. For example, in hell there’s a River fire and the devil is represented much how
Dante describes him in the Divine Comedy. One of the things that seems to be influenced most by Dante but it also exists in
earlier frescoes is that there’s a figure who looks like he might be clergy member in hell seemingly blessing a figure whose
offering him a bag of money. This in some ways could also represent Reginaldo Scrovegni and could be a sarcastic statement
that indulgence is not working and that the fresco will not really get him out of hell.

Focusing in on Satan he is riding on the backs of dragons he’s eating people and then excreting them out and that is they are
hell this is what they suffer from. This very much matches some of Dante’s descriptions as well. There’s even a River of fire.
It also recalls classical descriptions of Hades or the afterworld. We’ll see similar kinds of images in the work of
Michelangelo.

Looking at the cycle of frescoes as a whole series of stories you can dissected in a sort of narrative cycle or a structural
analysis. In some ways it’s very similar to how we read comic books. In this case some foundational kinds of images are
placed at the very bottoms in this case the virtues and vices, but we also see wedge between the virtues and vices and at the
top level the life and times of Mary and her parents are the life and times of Jesus. It’s almost like the story or bands the two
bands that describe the life and times of Jesus are the cream inside and Oreo cookie the most important ideas. The virtues
and the vices are the foundation on which Jesus is ideas are built and the Catholic faith, Jesus is in the center of everything,
including the Last Judgment, and Jesus his parents and family are above him and it seems as if there wisdom is sort of
trickling down to him as a on the entire story. Study the diagram and notice how things are arranged in such a way that the
story concerning Jesus is at eyelevel and the most visible thing and Jesus is the most visible figure In the Last Judgment. He
is the largest figure in the faith.

We also need to take a look the frescoes in terms of their formal qualities. This means how they physically look and how
illusionistic they are. We’ve already discussed the trompe l’oeil aspects of the virtues and vices they look a little bit like
sculpture from for instance the Panathenaic procession from ancient Greece. But their other things that make the frescoes
very illusionistic.
Especially in the Last Judgment we get a sense of foreshortening, which is a way of shortening the figures as the project out
of the picture plane and also we get more realistic anatomy. Giotto is also giving you a sense of light and shadow which is
referred to as chiaroscuro in his painting. Even with some of the more architectural things like the chairs that the apostles are
sitting on seem to almost have a sense of perspective although in this case it’s intuitive perspective not linear perspective. In
essence job to is doing something different than his teacher Cimabue. He’s using accurate anatomy he’s using a little bit of
intuitive perspective and he’s also using shading also refer to as chiaroscuro which defines even the drapery on the bodies.

Focusing in on one of the frescoes that depicts Jesus entering the city of Jerusalem you’ll see that the iconography is pretty
standard and also resembles very much this Bible passage.
Matthew chapter 21.
When they drew near Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the mount of olives, Jesus sent two disciples,
saying to them, go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass tethered, and a colt
with her. Untie them and bring them here to me. And if anyone should say anything to you, reply the
master has need of them that he will send them at once. This happened so that you been spoken through
the prophet might be fulfilled say to say to daughter Zion, behold, your King comes to you, meek and
riding on an ass, and on a colt, the foal a beast of burden the disciples went and did as Jesus had ordered
them. They brought the ass and the colt and laid their cloaks over them, and he sat upon them the very
large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on
the road. The crowds preceded him and those following kept crying out and saying was added to the son
of David blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord Hosanna in the highest and when he entered
Jerusalem the whole city was shaken and asked who is this and the crowds replied. This is Jesus the
prophet, from Nazareth in Galilee.
The Bible passage as well as some stained-glass windows and other depictions that we’ve looked at, all seem very much in
line with the iconography we see here. The boys are up in the trees cutting Palm leaves and string them on the ground. There
are people taking off their cloaks. Throwing them all on the ground to protect or to honor the pathway of Jesus but Giotto
does something a little bit different. First of all there’s the formal stuff such as shading and more realistic anatomy but he
also seems to give a sense of humanity to the figures. In the lower right-hand corner there’s one figure they can’t seem to get
his cloak off fast enough. The donkey which is clearly described in the passage is smiling. Both of these things are kind of
jokes. The same way putting the clergy and hell is.

The architecture almost seems to be three-dimensional again it’s an intuitive perspective. Probably the most important thing
though is a sense of humanistic gesture and how all of the figures relate to one another. The figures behind Jesus are
overlapping and you can’t see each one of them this is almost how it really looks. Each of the figures is actually looking at
Jesus and responding to him in a way that you and I might relate to the even have facial expressions.
Another panel that’s really important is the panel showing the Lamentation or the Entombment of Jesus.
This is a very common theme in religious art entombment or lamentation kind of scene in which there figure surrounding the
already dead Jesus and honoring him. In this instance Giotto does things that are a little bit different than some of the other
painters though and it will be taken up by later Renaissance artist some of the things that he does.
In the sky floating above the dead Christ are series of Angels who all have facial expressions and seem to be expressing
emotion. Their bodies are foreshortened they seem to be really swooping down and flying up and he really understands the
volumes of their torsos.
The next level you can see the role of figures who are surrounding Jesus each have individual facial expressions their
anatomy is accurate. One figure in attempt to show foreshortening even has his arms outstretched as he stands above Jesus in
a pose that only seems to say “I can’t believe he’s dead.” Jesus is anatomy is almost heroic in a classical way he’s very well-
muscled. In the foreground Giotto does something slightly different also. He puts to the figures with their backs to the viewer
it’s almost like a detective movie from today. The backs of those figure seem to block your view and you want to look
around them to be able to see him and to experience what they’re experiencing. It’s a way of pulling you into the painting.
Probably one of the most innovative things that Giotto does in this painting is also to refer to the story of Mary Magdalene
washing Jesus’s feet and drying his feet with her hair but it wasn’t in this episode that were looking at. If you recall that
happens earlier in the life and times of Jesus. In essence what Giotto is doing is identifying her figure and separating her
from the others by showing you that he understands some of the things that happen in the Bible.

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Renaissance Art
Perspective
Webster's dictionary defines "perspective" in a variety of ways:
2 a: the interrelation in which a subject or its parts are mentally viewed <places the issues in proper ~>; also: point of view b:
the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance <urge you to maintain your ~ and to view your own
task in a larger framework --W. J. Cohen>
So perspective is really just a point of view. This section will deal with a variety of points of view. Visual systems such a
linear perspective will be discussed as well theological, humanistic and neoplatonic points of view.

space, picture plane, and overlapping
Paintings on a flat two dimensional space employ different ways of creating space. Before the Renaissance period
artists looked at a picture as a kind of window. The front of this window is sometimes referred to as the picture
plane. As you look through the front of the plane, like a window, you will see things that are in the foreground or
front of the picture, then in the middle ground, and finally the background. In this painting in particular, this artist,
named Cimabue, is trying to create the illusion of space by layering or overlapping one figure in front of another,
Cimabue, Madonna Enthroned however, you can see that he really does not create the illusion of space or deep space too convincingly.
c1280
Late Gothic Italian
Giotto, a student of Cimabue, is one of the first Italian artists to really try to create
some sort of space in the picture plane. If you look at this painting you can see
that he has claerly created a foreground, where the men and the donkey are, a mid-
ground, where the mountains start to rise, and then a background where the
buildings are. He creates this illusion in several ways.
One way is that he overlaps or layers the figures. The other is that he uses
dimunution. Things in the background diminish, or get smaller. Giotto creates
space is that he changes the size of things as they move back in space. The
buildings and mountains are much smaller than the people are in the foreground.
This difference in size is refered to as a size scale relationship.
The building in this image and the others like it are rendered with the illusion of
space called intuitive perspective and isometric perspective. (This kind of
perspective is not as illusionistic as the linear perspective that is invented during
the Renaissance around 1400 CE.)
Giotto, St Francis Giving his Mantle to a Poor Man, c1305

Late Gothic sometimes his style is considered Different artists and different cultures through out time have tried their hand at
Proto Renaissance or Early Renaissance creating the illusion of space or realism in their art.

file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/1300_1700/perspective.htm[7/31/2013 11:18:40 AM]

Renaissance Art

Perspective is a method of graphically depicting three-dimensional objects and spatial

relationships on a two-dimensional plane or on a plane that is shallower than the original (for
example, in flat relief).
Perceptual methods of representing space and volume, which render them as seen at a
particular time and from a fixed position and are characteristic of Chinese and most Western
painting since the Renaissance, are in contrast to conceptual methods. Pictures drawn by
young children and primitives (untrained artists), many paintings of cultures such as ancient
Egypt and Crete, India, Islam, and pre-Renaissance Europe, as well as the paintings of many
modern artists, depict objects and surroundings independently of one another--as they are
known to be, rather than as they are seen to be--and from the directions that best present their
most characteristic features. Many Egyptian and Cretan paintings and drawings, for example,
show the head and legs of a figure in profile, while the eye and torso are shown frontally .
Fowling Scene from the tomb of Nebamun This system produces not the illusion of depth but the sense that objects and their
1400 BCE - 1350 BCE surroundings have been compressed within a shallow space behind the picture plane.
Thebes, Egypt
Dynasty 18
In Western art, illusions of perceptual volume and space are generally created by
use of the linear perspective system, based on the observations that objects
appear to the eye to shrink and parallel lines and planes to converge to infinitely
distant vanishing points as they recede in space from the viewer. Parallel lines in
spatial recession will appear to converge on a single vanishing point, called one-
point perspective. Perceptual space and volume may be simulated on the picture
plane by variations on this basic principle, differing according to the number and
location of the vanishing points. Instead of one-point (or central) perspective, the
artist may use, for instance, angular (or oblique) perspective, which employs two
vanishing points.
Linear perspective is a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance
Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1495-7 Milan, on a flat surface. The system originated in Florence, Italy in the early 1400s. The artist
Santa Maria delle Grazie and architect Brunelleschi demonstrated its principles, but another architect and writer,
Leon Battista Alberti was first to write down rules of linear perspective for artists to
follow. Leonardo da Vinci probably learned Alberti's system while serving as an
apprentice to the artist Verrocchio in Florence.
To use linear perspective an artist must first imagine the picture surface as an "open
window" through which to see the painted world. Straight lines are then drawn on the
canvas to represent the horizon and "visual rays" connecting the viewer's eye to a point in
the distance.
The horizon line runs across the canvas at the eye level of the viewer. The horizon line is
where the sky appears to meet the ground.
The vanishing point should be located near the center of the horizon line. The vanishing
point is where all parallel lines (orthogonals) that run towards the horizon line appear to
come together like train tracks in the distance.
Orthogonal lines are "visual rays" helping the viewer's eye to connect points around the
edges of the canvas to the vanishing point. An artist uses them to align the edges of walls
and paving stones.
Please visit this site for more of an explanation.

http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/art/linear.html

Renaissance Art
The early European artist used a perspective that was an individual interpretation of what he saw
rather than a fixed mechanical method. At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, early in the 15th
century, the mathematical laws of perspective were discovered by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi,
who worked out some of the basic principles, including the concept of the vanishing point, which had
been known to the Greeks and Romans but had been lost. These principles were applied in painting
by Masaccio (as in his "Trinity" fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence; c. 1427), who within a
short period brought about an entirely new approach in painting. A style was soon developed using
configurations of architectural exteriors and interiors as the background for religious paintings, which
thereby acquired the illusion of great spatial depth. In his seminal Della pittura (1436; On Painting),
Leon Battista Alberti codified, especially for painters, much of the practical work on the subject that
had been carried out by earlier artists; he formulated, for example, the idea that "vision makes a
triangle, and from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems no larger than a point."
Linear perspective dominated Western painting until the end of the 19th century, when Paul Cézanne
flattened the conventional Renaissance picture space. The Cubists and other 20th-century painters
abandoned the depiction of three-dimensional space altogether and hence had no need for linear
perspective.
Linear perspective plays an important part in presentations of ideas for works by architects, engineers,
landscape architects, and industrial designers, furnishing an opportunity to view the finished product
before it is begun. Differing in principle from linear perspective and used by both Chinese and
Masaccio, Trinity with Donors,
European painters, aerial perspective is a method of creating the illusion of depth by a modulation of
c1425 - 8?
color and tone.
fresco in the
Church of Santa Maria Novella,
Florence
21'x10'5"
Dennis Hwang, a student from Stanford was so taken with the three dimensional quality of the image that he
designed a virtual reality image that simulates another view of Masaccio's fresco.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs99d-98/online_projects.html

Form: This is a tremendous work of art. The figures in the work are just
slightly bigger than life size. The overall composition of the works is
symmetrical and the composition within the arch is based on a stable pyramidal
form. While not strictly in accordance with the rules of perspective, this form
is a visual device that draws the eye back into the picture plane.
The figures of God the Father, The Spirit (which is a Dove that doubles for
God's collar) and the crucified Jesus are placed with a Roman triumphal arch
complete with Pantheon like coffers and ionic columns on the edges. Moving
out of the arch on either side are two flattened pilasters (squared off half
columns) that have corinthian capitals.
The work is executed in one point perspective with the horizon line placed
right on the level of the first trompe l’oeil ledge at the viewer's eye level. The
figures representing the two donors or patrons are located on a ledge about six
feet off the ground, just outside of the arch slightly above the viewer's point of

Renaissance Art
view. Beneath the ledge/horizon line is a painted skeleton representing a tomb.
Iconography: Symbolically speaking this image is packed with all kinds of

different perspectives.
The linear perspective is both a formal device, which creates space, and a way
of including the viewer. The fact that the use of linear perspective is used
actually symbolizes that the real subject of the painting is not the Trinity but
rather the Renaissance man's relationship to it. This leads us to discuss the
various themes that are hidden within the obvious meaning behind the fresco.
Masaccio, Trinity with Donors, c1425 - 8? It's almost a shopping list of ideas.
fresco in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence idealism
neoplatonism
21'x10'5"
humanism
theology
Overall, the fresco does represent a theological (religious) point of view. More specifically it represents a
unification of the Trinity as expressed in the Catholic Nicene Creed.
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; and in
one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of his Father, of the substance of
the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of
one substance with the Father.
The Brittanica refers to Masaccio's Trinity as "rational, human-scaled and human-centred, and inspired by the
ancient world." This statement illustrates that beyond a theological point of view, the naturalistic life-size scale
and placement of the figures of God the Father, The Spirit, within a Roman triumphal arch complete with Pantheon
like coffers and ionic columns on the edges, represents how the Renaissance person was framing their view of the
world within a classicizing and humanistic point of view. Jesus' body is idealized and he looks almost as if he is a
Greek god. God the Father looks like a Greek or Roman philosopher and these representations make reference to
the new ideas concerning neoplatonism and humanism.
The neoplatonic aspect, deals with the concept of humankind's ability to be perfected to an ideal state. One that is
more spiritual and mental than flesh. The humanistic point of view deals with the concept that while humankind is
spiritual it is also physical and emotional. When the body of Christ is depicted as a real human's body, the artist is
showing you a point of view based on a more human and possibly even fallible point of view of the world. The
perfectibility of man and the ideal conception of a what a perfect person should be is discussed in Mencher,
Liaisons 109-112 Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) Il Cortegiano (The Courtier) Excerpts from "The First Book
of the Courtier" and William Shakespeare c1600 excerpts from Hamlet 115-117All of these points of view are
pulled together in by the appearance and text above the skeleton.
Above the skeleton is inscribed, "What I was you are. What I am, you will become." This idea that we are to be
reminded of our mortality and frailty is a reminder or a lesson referred to as a memento mori. A literal reminder of
death. This them is taken up not just in the visual arts but also in literature and theatrical productions. Read
Mencher, Liaisons, William Shakespeare c1600 excerpts from Hamlet115-117 for another example. What kinds
of iconography to they both share?
Context: Masaccio. Tribute Money, and Expulsion, fresco c1427 are prime examples of
many of the innovations that marked 15th century Italian art. In addition to demonstrating
all of the formal views concerning perspective, these frescoes also express all of the more

Renaissance Art
philosophical points of view.
The Brancacci Chapel. Shortly after completing the Pisa Altarpiece, Masaccio
began working on what was to be his masterpiece--the frescoes of the Brancacci
Chapel (c. 1427) in the Florentine Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. He was
commissioned to finish painting the chapel's scenes of the stories of St. Peter
after Masolino (1383-1447) had abandoned the job, leaving only the vaults and
several frescoes in the upper registers finished. Previously, Masaccio and
Masolino were engaged in some sort of loose working relationship. They had
already collaborated on a "Madonna and Child with St. Anne" (Uffizi Gallery,
Florence) in which the style of Masaccio, who was the younger of the two, had a
profound influence on that of Masolino. It has been suggested, but never proven,
that both artists were jointly commissioned to paint the Brancacci Chapel. The
question of which painter executed which frescoes in the chapel posed one of the
Masaccio. Tribute Money, and Expulsion, fresco most discussed artistic problems of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is now
c1427 generally thought that Masaccio was responsible for the following sections: the
Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine Florence, "Expulsion of Adam and Eve" (or "Expulsion from Paradise"), "Baptism of the
Neophytes," "The Tribute Money," "St. Peter Enthroned," "St. Peter Healing the
Italy, Italian Renaissance Sick with His Shadow," "St. Peter Distributing Alms," and part of the
"Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus." (A cleaning and restoration of the
Brancacci Chapel frescoes in 1985-89 removed centuries of accumulated grime
and revealed the frescoes' vivid original colours.)
There are other forms of perspective and one of them, which is slightly later development used by Masaccio but perfected by Leonardo is called
aerial perspective. According to the Brittanica,

Aerial perspective also called ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE, method of
creating the illusion of depth, or recession, in a painting or drawing by
modulating color to simulate changes effected by the atmosphere on the
colours of things seen at a distance. Although the use of aerial perspective has
been known since antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci first used the term aerial
perspective in his Treatise on Painting, in which he wrote: "Colours become
weaker in proportion to their distance from the person who is looking at
them." It was later discovered that the presence in the atmosphere of moisture
and of tiny particles of dust and similar material causes a scattering of light as
it passes through them, the degree of scattering being dependent on the
wavelength, which corresponds to the color, of the light. Because light of
short wavelength--blue light--is scattered most, the colours of all distant dark
objects tend toward blue; for example, distant mountains have a bluish cast.
Masaccio. Tribute Money, and Expulsion, fresco c1427 Light of long wavelength--red light--is scattered least; thus, distant bright
Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine Florence, Italy, Italian objects appear redder because some of the blue is scattered and lost from the
Renaissance light by which they are seen.
The intervening atmosphere between a viewer and, for example, distant

mountains, creates other visual effects that can be mimicked by landscape
painters. The atmosphere causes distant forms to have less distinct edges and
outlines than forms near the viewer, and interior detail is similarly softened or
blurred. Distant objects appear somewhat lighter than objects of similar tone
lying closer at hand, and in general contrasts between light and shade appear
less extreme at great distances. All these effects are more apparent at the base
of a mountain than at its peak, since the density of the intervening atmosphere
Photo of atmospheric perspective is greater at lower elevations.
"aerial perspective." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM.

Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 19, 2002.
The picture plane is further unified by its value structure or shading. This use of light and
shadow to create a dramatic and consistent picture plane is referred to as chiaroscuro.

Renaissance Art
Chiaroscuro (from Italian chiaro, "light"; scuro, "dark"),

technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they
define three-dimensional objects.
Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists used chiaroscuro
effects, but in European painting the technique was first brought to its full
potential by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century in such paintings as his
"Adoration of the Magi" (1481; Uffizi, Florence). Thereafter, chiaroscuro
became a primary technique for many painters, and by the late 17th century the
term was routinely used to describe any painting, drawing, or print that depends
for its effect on an extensive gradation of light and darkness.
chiaroscuro
The scene depicted in "The Tribute Money" is consistently lit from the upper
right and thus harmonizes with the actual lighting of the chapel, which comes
from a window on the wall to the right of the fresco. The mountain background
of the fresco is convincingly rendered using aerial perspective; an illusion of
depth is created by successively lightening the tones of the more distant
mountains, thereby simulating the changes effected by the atmosphere on the
colours of distant objects. In "The Tribute Money," with its solid, anatomically
convincing figures set in a clear, controlled space lit by a consistent fall of
light, Masaccio decisively broke with the medieval conception of a picture as a
world governed by different and arbitrary physical laws. Instead, he embraced
the concept of a painting as a window behind which a continuation of the real
world is to be found, with the same laws of space, light, form, and perspective
that obtain in reality. This concept was to remain the basic idiom of Western
painting for the next 450 years.
"chiaroscuro." and "Masaccio" Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM.


Although Giotto uses the technique somewhat in his paintings, notice how chiaroscuro is
employed by Masaccio in the image on the left to make the figures appear more life like.
Also notice how Masaccio has become so involved with perspective that the halo atop the
apostles heads are represented as an elliptical plates floating above rather than the more
traditional circle of light that surrounds the heads of Giotto's and Cimabue's figures.

Context and Iconography: In order to really understand this next section you need to know the story of
the Tribute Money. I think that what Masaccio was doing was following the lessons and type of
sermons that would have been delivered in Church. In these sermons, two stories concerning the testing
of Jesus might have been combined.

Matthew Chapter 17

24 When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the temple tax approached
Peter and said, "Doesn't your teacher pay the temple tax?"
25 "Yes," he said. When he came into the house, before he had time to speak,
Jesus asked him, "What is your opinion, Simon? From whom do the kings of the
earth take tolls or census tax? From their subjects or from foreigners?"
26 When he said, "From foreigners," Jesus said to him, "Then the subjects are
exempt.
27 But that we may not offend them, go to the sea, drop in a hook, and take the
first fish that comes up. Open its mouth and you will find a coin worth twice the
temple tax. Give that to them for me and for you."
Matthew Chapter 22
15 Then the Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap him in speech.

Renaissance Art
16 They sent their disciples to him, with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we
know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance
with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not
regard a person's status.
17 Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar
or not?"
18 Knowing their malice, Jesus said, "Why are you testing me, you hypocrites?
19 Show me the coin that pays the census tax." Then they handed him the Roman
coin.
20 He said to them, "Whose image is this and whose inscription?"
21 They replied, "Caesar's." At that he said to them, "Then repay to Caesar what
belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God."
22 When they heard this they were amazed, and leaving him they went away.
Masaccio also uses linear perspective to focus the attention on the viewer to
the central figure of Christ. In addition to this, he also places the heads of the
apostles on the horizon line almost as if they were ducks in a shooting gallery.
The Tribute Money is a continuous narrative. Meaning that all the episodes
of the story are united in one picture plane, such as we see in Nicola Pisano's
Nativity, however in Masaccio's image the space makes more sense. He also
divides the story in three segments by using linear perspective.
The vanishing point also divides the picture plane in two sections. On the left
we see the mountains and natural world depicted almost as an infinite place.
To the right of the picture plane, and on the left hand of Jesus, the place where
the damned are traditionally placed are the manmade structures of the city.
What this may represent is a concept that is expressed by the story of the
Tribute Money as interpreted by St. Augustine 354-430. According to the
Brittanica, Augustine's, "adaptation of classical thought to Christian teaching
created a theological system of great power and lasting influence. His
numerous written works, the most important of which are Confessions and
City of God, shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the
foundation for much of medieval and modern Christian thought."

St. Augustine, came up with a concept in which he viewed the universe and man's existence as divided in two worlds. One
was the City of Man which was temporary and fallible. This is represented by the architecture and the place in which the tax
collectors stands and collects what is "due Caesar." The other world is the City of God which goes on forever and in which
god will provide for the faithful. This is where Peter pulls the coin from the fishes mouth.
Stokstad points out that this story was also used as a propagandistic tool and a way of instilling patriotism for Florence and
raising funds.
Form: These two nude figures are depicted in an anatomically accurate manner. The angel of Michael above
escorts them out of a triumphal arch and out into a seemingly featureless landscape. The bodies are arranged in
expressive poses.
The torso of the angel floating above has been somewhat foreshortened.
See foreshortening in Mantegna's work.

See foreshortening in Giotto's work.
Iconography: The classical arch symbolizes the figures expulsion from a classical and ideal world: the Garden of
Eden. The expression of there bodies ties in with some of the ideas of human expression that one can see in
monuments like the Parthenon's metopes and the Ara Pacis Augustae, except in this case, Masaccio uses the
language of gesture to directly communicate what each one of these figures is feeling. My Professor Broderick,
from Lehman college, suggested that the figure of Adam is ashamed of himself in a more internal way and therefore

Renaissance Art
hides his face from us and from God. In contrast to this, Eve, is more superficially ashamed and hides her body.
For Broderick, this was an expression of male and female roles during the Renaissance.

One way of dealing with perspective and foreshortening is to use mechanical

devices to help the artist figure out how perspective works.
In the central image, Durer is using a device based on a treatise by Alberti.

This device allows the artist to abstract the image and chart the image into a
series of squares. This gives the artist many more reference points and allows
him to check and measure the way things are foreshortened.
This machine is based on a device that artists used to make multiple copies of
the same image or to enlarge a drawing accurately for placement on a wall or
canvas. This process is called "grid and transfer" or "squaring." According
to the Brittanica,
"Squaring" in painting, simple technique for transferring an image

from one surface to another (and sometimes converting the image
from one scale to another) by non mechanical means. The original
work to be transferred is divided into a given number of squares;
the same number of squares is then marked off-- with charcoal or
some other easily removable medium--on the surface of the
receiving area. The contents of each square of the original are then
drawn in the corresponding square of the reproduction. The use of
the grid ensures the accurate placement of images onto the
reproduction.
Albrecht Durer, Alberti's Veil c1500
The Egyptians used squaring at least 5,000 years ago. It has been
used to transfer cartoons onto murals, to transfer preparatory
drawings onto canvas paintings, and to alter the scale of any work
in the same media.
This process was used extensively during the Renaissance. Check this out:
http://www.clevelandart.org/techniques/squaring.html

Renaissance Art
also see this
http://www.aliciastrose.com/f-process.html
Two Point Perspective

1) To draw a simple shape in two point perspective you start with a single
line across the picture plane called the horizon line. 2 Then add two vanishing points. Place one at each end of the
horizon line. Then draw a vertical line as big as you want the first
box.
3) Next, add converging lines from the top and bottom of the vertical line
and draw two vertical lines which will become the back corners of the box. 4) After erasing some of the horizon line (the part behind the box) it
looks like a three dimensional form.

A page with a great example of two point perspective.

http://www.proviso.k12.il.us/EAST/GeometryWorld/2PER.HTM

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris a Rainy Day, 1877

French, Impressionism
Here's an example of two point perspective in a painting. This painting actually has multiple points on the horizon line but I've traced most of the
orthagonals to the two most dominant ones in the black and white illustration.
Here's how Giotto kind of had it right.

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Here's where the lines should have gone.


Renaissance Art
Cimabue, Virgin and Child Enthroned,

Giotto di Bondone, Virgin and Child Enthroned, from the Church of Santa Trinita, Florence
(Ognissanti Altar,) c 1310. c 1280. Tempera and gold on wood, 12' 7"x7'4" Masaccio, Madonna Enthroned, 1426,
Tempera and gold on wood, 10'8"x6'8" Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence oil on panel, 56x29"
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence London, National Gallery
These two works of art on the left are ones that you have already studied extensively. Compare these two works to this one by Masaccio. Think
about and be prepared to relate the concepts you have just learned about to them.
hu.man.ism n (1832) 1 a: devotion to the humanities: literary culture b: the revival of classical letters, individualistic and
critical spirit, and emphasis on secular concerns characteristic of the Renaissance 2: humanitarianism 3: a doctrine, attitude, or
way of life centered on human interests or values; esp: a philosophy that usu. rejects supernaturalism and stresses an
individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason -- hu.man.ist n or adj -- hu.man.is.tic adj --
hu.man.is.ti.cal.ly adv
me.men.to mo.ri n, pl memento mori [L, remember that you must die] (1596): a reminder of mortality; esp: death's-head
me.men.to n, pl -tos or -toes [ME, fr. L, remember, imper. of meminisse to remember; akin to L ment-, mens mind--more at
mind] (1580): something that serves to warn or remind; also: souvenir
Neo.pla.to.nism n (1845) 1: Platonism modified in later antiquity to accord with Aristotelian, post-Aristotelian, and oriental
conceptions that conceives of the world as an emanation from an ultimate indivisible being with whom the soul is capable of
being reunited in trance or ecstasy 2: a doctrine similar to ancient Neoplatonism -- Neo.pla.ton.ic adj -- Neo.pla.to.nist n
trompe l’oeil - (French: "deceive the eye"), in painting, the representation of an object with such verisimilitude as to deceive
the viewer concerning the material reality of the object. This idea appealed to the ancient Greeks who were newly
emancipated from the conventional stylizations of earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly painted such realistic grapes that
birds tried to eat them. The technique was also popular with Roman muralists. Although trompe l’oeil never achieved the
status of a major artistic aim, from the early Renaissance on, European painters occasionally fostered illusionism by painting
false frames out of which the contents of a still life or portrait appeared to spill, or by creating window-like images suggesting
actual openings in the wall or ceiling. (Brittanica)
Value Structure
Is the lightness or darkness of a color or shade. Chiaroscuro and tenebrism both employ the use quick shifts of light and dark.
Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a color. It is a variable that can substantially alter a color's appearance, and as we
will see later, it is also an important factor in achieving legibility with type and color. A hue changes in value when either
white or black are added to it. A color with added white is called a tint (fig.7) ; a color with added black is called a shade
(fig.8). Generally speaking, pure hues that are normally light in value (yellow, orange, green) make the best tints, white pure
hues that are normally dark in value (red, blue, violet) make the most desirable shades. The palettes colors below shoes a
spectrum of tints and shades based on the hues from the colors clearly shows that changes in value greatly expand color

Renaissance Art
possibilities.

fig.7 fig.8
The Northern Renaissance

Jan Van Eyck and Perspective

Form: The first thing one is struck with when looking at this painting is how "real"
it looks. Van Eyck was one of the first painters to really use oil paint. For this
reason sometimes he is attributed by some sources as the inventor of oil paint.
Stokstad doesn't mention this specifically about this painting but I think that it was
probably painted first in tempera paint and then glazed in succesive layers with oil
paint.

Oil paints are made by mixing dry pigment powder with refined linseed oil
to a paste, which is then milled in order to disperse the pigment particles
throughout the oil vehicle. According to the 1st-century Roman scholar
Pliny the Elder, whose writings the Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van
Eyck are thought to have studied, the Romans used oil colours for shield
painting. The earliest use of oil as a fine-art medium is generally attributed
to 15th-century European painters, such as Giovanni Bellini and the van
Eycks, who glazed oil colour over a glue-tempera underpainting. It is also
thought probable, however, that medieval manuscript illuminators had been
using oil glazes in order to achieve greater depth of colour and more subtle
tonal transitions than their tempera medium allowed.
"Oil." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-

2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 19, 2002.

Part of the images reality is also based on the fact that the image appears to have
some sort of depth, however, if one was to really diagram the image and trace all the
orthagonals in the image you will discover that rather than having a single vanishing
point or horizon line, this image has a zone where the lines kind of converge.
Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Wedding 1434 Compare Masaccio's use of perspective with Van Eyck below.
oil and tempera, 33x22.5" London National Gallery

Renaissance Art
MASACCIO 1401-1428 Trinity with Donors c1428 Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Wedding 1434
Florence,S.Maria Novella 16' tall fresco oil and tempera

Iconography: Traditionally this image was interpreted by Irwin Panofsky, a
mid twentieth century art historian as a wedding contract.


Renaissance Art
The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini, commonly called the

Arnolfini Wedding, is van Eyck's most famous work. The subject
is obvious, given the pose of the couple. It may, however, be
confusing to the modern viewer that he chose to portray them in
their bed chamber, instead of in a church. Here, it is necessary to
keep in mind that everything portrayed in this picture has symbolic
meaning. The fact that the woman appears to be pregnant is
symbolic of the holy purpose of their matrimony of bringing
children into the world. This also explains the choice of the color
of her dress (green representing fertility), and the fact that she is
pulling her dress up in the front (signifying that she is willing to
bear children). Other specifically sybolic imagery includes the dog
who stands between them (fidelity to each other; loyalty to God),
the sandals which have been removed (signifying that they are
standing on holy ground), and the single candle in the candelabra
(the presence of Christ in their union). A detail of the back wall
reveals a convex mirror which reflects their backs and two other
persons (probably the priest and the artist). A signature above
which says "Jan van Eyck was here" testifies to the artist's presence
during the ceremony, and it is possible that the purpose of the
painting is partly a matter of documenting the legality of their
matrimony.
http://www.urtonart.com/history/Renaissance/northrenaiss.htm
However, this interpretation of this iconography has come into question about
ten years ago when Craig Harbison published his book, "Jan van Eyck: The
Play of Realism." (London: Reaktion Books,) 1995.
Visit this website to get the opposing point of view on this image:
From the Open University Website: Read The Mystery of Marriage at this
Website
Context and Iconography: Some of the debate about the iconography of this image stems form the development of new subject matter in art because
of the rise of a new class of people. The new merchant classes were now beginning to commission artists to paint their portraits. In the process of
including every day people in these images an element called genre began to show up in art. Genre in French means a kind, but art historians have
assigned a different meaning to the word. A genre element is one in which an everyday person or objects appear in the painting. Unfortunately for
art historians, the introduction of genre elements introduces some confusion into the interpretation of some of these images. In general though, the
introduction of genre is symbolic of the rising of a new class of people who are patrons of the arts in Europe.

The Renaissance in Flanders c1400s
Perspectives: The Every Day or "God is in the Details"

Paul, Herman and Jean Limbourg. (The Limbourg Form: This book is tiny! At 8" by 5" the artist had a very small area to work with in
Brothers) rendering his subjects, yet each image is extremely detailed and realistic. The figures
Le Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry 8"x5" 1413 clothing, postures, and environments such as landscapes and homes were extreemly carefully
tempera on parchment French Renaissance and accurately rendered. Nevertheless, the artists who painted these did not bother with the
strict conventions of linear perspective that we see in Italian art from the same period.
The space is constructed using a combination of intuitive perspective, some linear and
vertical perspective. Atmospheric perspective is out of the question.
Iconography: The depiction of genre scenes, the depiction of everyday life and everyday
events, is a convention that really begins with Giotto's and Assisi's humanism. If one sees
the face of God in every event and every interactaction, well then one might behave. The
realer it looks, the more we can personally realte to it and the more pursuasive it might be.
God is then in the everyday details. However, the lack of linear and atmospheric
perspectives of these images is iconic or at the very least somewhat symbolic of a very
Northern idea, that "God is in the details" in another way as well.

Renaissance Art
For the Limbourg brothers, the idea that images should be didactic first is a prime concern.
Even though the images are very real looking and therefore we can relate to them because the
realism is so pursuasive and the clothing so accurate it was more imortant that the ideas were
clear. Sometimes realism was sacrificed for clarity.
These pages are out of what's called a "Book of Hours." According to the Brittanica, a
"Book of Hours" was,
devotional book widely popular in the later Middle Ages. The book of hours began
to appear in the 13th century, containing prayers to be said at the canonical hours
in honour of the Virgin Mary. The growing demand for smaller such books for
family and individual use created a prayerbook style enormously popular among
the wealthy. The demand for the books was crucial to the development of Gothic
illumination. These lavishly decorated texts, of small dimensions, varied in content
according to their patrons' desires.
One of the most splendid examples, the Trés Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry,
was created in northern France and the Low Countries during the 14th and 15th
centuries. Now held in Chantilly at the Musée Condé, it is an excellent pictorial
March
record of the duke's spectacular residences, with magnificent calendar pages
illuminated by the Pol de Limbourg and his brothers (c. 1414-18), as well as many
biblical scenes and illustrations of the lives of the saints.
Most likely, the use of the book of hours and specifically this one is based on this Bible
passage from Ecclesiastes. The passage and the pages might share the following. In almost
all of the images from this manuscript there are images of work in the foreground of the
image. In the background are images of castles and churches. It might be possible to
conclude, at the risk of reading too much into things, that the kingdom of heaven awaits after
all the hard work of living a righteous life is done.
Ecclesiastes Chapter 3
1
There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the
heavens.
2
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.
3
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to tear down, and a time to build.
4
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
5
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them; a time to embrace, and a time to be
far from embraces.
6
A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
7
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak.
8
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
February 9
Paul, Herman and Jean Limbourg. (The Limbourg What advantage has the worker from his toil?
Brothers) 10
Le Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry 8"x5" 1413 I have considered the task which God has appointed for men to be busied about.

Renaissance Art
tempera on parchment French Renaissance 11

genre He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their
hearts, without men's ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has
done.
12
I recognized that there is nothing better than to be glad and to do well during life.
13
For every man, moreover, to eat and drink and enjoy the fruit of all his labor is a gift of
God.
14
I recognized that whatever God does will endure forever; there is no adding to it, or
taking from it. Thus has God done that he may be revered.
15
1 What now is has already been; what is to be, already is; and God restores what would
otherwise be displaced.
16
And still under the sun in the judgment place I saw wickedness, and in the seat of
justice, iniquity.
17
And I said to myself, both the just and the wicked God will judge, since there is a time
for every affair and on every work a judgment.
18
I said to myself: As for the children of men, it is God's way of testing them and of
showing that they are in themselves like beasts.
19
For the lot of man and of beast is one lot; the one dies as well as the other. Both have
the same life-breath, and man has no advantage over the beast; but all is vanity.
20
Both go to the same place; both were made from the dust, and to the dust they both
return.
21
Who knows if the life-breath of the children of men goes upward and the life-breath of
beasts goes earthward?
22
And I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to rejoice in his work; for this is
his lot. Who will let him see what is to come after him?
If you count your time on earth and keep track of the days and seasons, well then there is still a possibilty of making it into heaven. The book of
hours and its tracking of the heavenly bodies and the seasons also refers to Aquinas ideas having to do with the harmony of the universe.
Context:
Limburg also spelled LIMBOURG (all b. after 1385, Nijmegen, Brabant [now in The Netherlands]--d. by 1416), three Flemish brothers
who were the most famous of all late Gothic illuminators. They synthesized the achievements of contemporary illuminators into a style
characterized by subtlety of line, painstaking technique, and minute rendering of detail. The sons of a sculptor, Arnold van Limburg, they
were also the nephews of Jean Malouel, court painter to the Duke of Burgundy, and are sometimes known by the name "Malouel." The
brothers worked together, and although the most celebrated appears to have been the eldest brother, Pol, it is difficult to distinguish their
individual styles.
About 1400 the brothers were apprenticed to a goldsmith in Paris, and between 1402 and 1404 Pol and Jehanequin were working for the
Duke of Burgundy in Paris, possibly on the illustration of a Bible moralisée now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Some time after
Burgundy's death in 1404, they entered the service of his brother, the Duke de Berry, and it was for him that their most lavishly
illustrated books of hours (the popular form of private prayer book of the period) were produced. The Belles Heures (or Les Heures
d'Ailly; now in The Cloisters, New York) show the influence of the Italianate elements of the contemporary French artist Jacquemart de
Hesdin's illuminations. The Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (Musée Condé, Chantilly, Fr.), considered their greatest work, is one of
the landmarks of the art of book illumination and ranks among the supreme examples of the International Gothic style. It is essentially a
court style, elegant and sophisticated, combining naturalism of detail with overall decorative effect. An awareness of the most
progressive international currents of the time, particularly those deriving from Italy, suggests that at least one of the brothers visited
there. The Très Riches Heures was left unfinished in 1416 but was completed about 1485 by Jean Colombe.
The Limburg brothers were among the first to render specific landscape scenes with accuracy. Their art did much to determine the course
that Early Netherlandish art was to take during the 15th century.
"LIMBOURG." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 26, 2002.

Renaissance Art
Form: This image shares much in common with the Arnolfini portrait. The
first thing one is struck with when looking at this painting is how "real" it
looks. This too was probably painted first in tempera paint and then glazed
in succesive layers with oil paint.

Oil paints are made by mixing dry pigment powder with refined
linseed oil to a paste, which is then milled in order to disperse the
Robert Campin (the Master of Flemalle) Merode Altarpiece c. 1425 pigment particles throughout the oil vehicle. According to the 1st-
century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, whose writings the
Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck are thought to have
studied, the Romans used oil colours for shield painting. The
earliest use of oil as a fine-art medium is generally attributed to
15th-century European painters, such as Giovanni Bellini and the
van Eycks, who glazed oil colour over a glue-tempera
underpainting. It is also thought probable, however, that medieval
manuscript illuminators had been using oil glazes in order to
achieve greater depth of colour and more subtle tonal transitions
than their tempera medium allowed.
"Oil." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright

© 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 19, 2002.

Part of the images reality is also based on the fact that the image appears to
have some sort of depth, however, if one was to really diagram the image and
trace all the orthagonals in the image you will discover that rather than having
a single vanishing point or horizon line, this image has a zone where the lines
kind of converge. Campin chooses to do away with the perspective system
but I'm not sure if it's on purpose or because he hasn't chosen to master it and
Stokstad avoids the issue by saying that Campin is perpetuating the
international Gothic style.

Iconography: This painting is overtly a genre scene. The idea behind making this scene look like a scene from everyday life is meant to make the
viewer identify with the message of the image. If a person who sees this image identifies with Mary and sees that Mary lives in a home similar to
their own they may feel like it is possible to be like her. Therefore, all the objects and trappings of the home could also have similar meanings and
therefore, "God is in the details" in another way as well. For this reason, the iconography is important and often has a dual or submerged meaning
sometimes referred to as submerged symbolism.
If this image looks familiar to you it's probably because it is very similar in for to some earlier paintings of Annunciations we have looked at.
The Merode Altarpiece was created by Robert Campin, a Flemish artist (previously known as "the Master of Flemale"). The picture is a
triptych, composed in three hinged panels (the outer wings can be closed over the middle panel, and probably has another painting on
the closed wings). A particularly northern aspect of this painting are the many details, which are rich with symbolic meaning. The central
panel focuses on Mary, who is absorbed in her reading. The angel Gabriel comes to her, announcing that she will be the mother of the
Christ child. Symbols of her purity include the vase of white lillies, the open biblical text, (Mencher's note: the open biblical text is
probably a book or hours like the Limbourg brothers) and the white linen. Close inspection also reveals an image of Christ on the Cross,
floating from the direction of the circular windows, and the extinguished candle probably also relates to his death. The tilted perspective
of the room allows all of the contents to be seen more easily than if he had used linear perspective (which has, by now, spread to the
north, but not always used). Note also the gothic details evident in the architecture. To the left, a couple kneels at Mary's doorway to
witness the scene (these are the donors who paid for the painting), and the right panel reveals Joseph working in his workshop. He is
building mouse-traps, which is symbolic of Jesus' "trapping" of evil.
http://www.urtonart.com/history/Renaissance/northrenaiss.htm
The iconography of flowers plays particularly strong into this image because in the left hand panel we have an image of who is most likely the
patrons of the image who are kneeling just outside of the door. This patron could be in the guise of a Saint, perhaps Peter, because of the key, or
John the Evangelist. The flowers he is almost kneeling on are violets. Violets, although royal in color, grow close to the earth and are often
walked on. In this way, these flowers represent Mary, who is both royal an humble. The rose bush behind them also may represent Mary because

Renaissance Art
images, such as the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals, represent Mary and her passion.

Context: You've probably noticed that the caption above gives two names: Robert Campin and the Master of Flemalle. This is because there
originally was a series of paintings attributed on the basis of style to a single painter but historians didn't know his name but they knew he was from
Flemalle. Later on researchers discovered,
Documents show that Campin was established as a master painter in Tournai in 1406. Two pupils are mentioned as entering his studio in
1427--Rogelet de la Pasture (generally identified with the great Rogier van der Weyden) and Jacques Daret. The only documented work
by Jacques Daret, an altarpiece executed for the Abbey of St. Vaast near Arras, shows close stylistic analogies with works by Rogier van
der Weyden on one hand and works earlier in style by the Master of Flémalle on the other. Both seem to proceed from common models,
for they obviously are not copies of one another. As the Tournai records give the name of Campin as master of both Daret and Rogier, it
has been generally assumed that the Master of Flémalle may be reasonably identified with Campin. Some scholars, however, have
stylistically considered the works ascribed to the Master of Flémalle as early works by Rogier himself.
"Campin, Robert." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 19, 2002.
And so the debate goes on.
Context and Iconography: Art historians have often described this image as one that is full of "submerged symbolism." This means that the
symbolism of the image is not exactly clear and many historians invent complex theories in which to interpret the introuction of such elements as
mouse traps. One historian has proposed that the mouse traps represent that Jesus is the rat catcher of heaven.
Some of the debate about the iconography of this image stems form the development of new subject matter in art because of the rise of a new class
of people. The new merchant classes were now beginning to commission artists to paint their portraits. In the process of including every day
people in these images an element called genre began to show up in art. Genre in French means a kind, but art historians have assigned a different
meaning to the word. A genre element is one in which an everyday person or objects appear in the painting. Unfortunately for art historians, the
introduction of genre elements introduces some confusion into the interpretation of some of these images. In general though, the introduction of
genre is symbolic of the rising of a new class of people who are patrons of the arts in Europe.

Form: The use of oil paint to create an incredible level of realism is quite
evident in this image. Here, the artist shows off again by showing how well
he is able to paint the textures and surfaces of all of these loveley items.
Iconography: We see all the images of wealth and power. Petrus Christus has
probably even included a "cameo" shot of the patrons of the image next to the
Saint. Everyday life is transposed on the story of Saint Eloy who payed a
ransom for his fellow brothers out of his own pocket. The elevation of a
goldsmith, or moneylender, who is roughly the equivalent of our bankers is
certainly a way of giving one's profession a positive spin. Manuel Santos
Redondo discusses this in the passage below.
St. Eloy (Eligius) in His Shop, 1449, by Petrus Christus,[xxix] is

the clear representation of a goldsmith working in his shop and
attending two clients: a rich, well-born bridal couple. It seems to be
a representation of the goldsmith's trade, with the excuse of the
portrait of a saint (hardly a subtle ploy, since St. Eloy is the patron
of goldsmith's guild). The goldsmith sits behind a window sill
extended to form a table, a pair of jeweler's scales in one hand, a
ring in the other. Only his halo suggests that the painting deals
with legend. On the right is a display of examples of the
goldsmith's craft. The picture may very well have been painted for
a goldsmith's guild (the one in Antwerp)
Petrus Christus. Saint Eloy (Eligius) in his Shop.1449

Oil on oak panel, 38"x33" (98 x 85 cm) Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York
Flemish, Renaissance
St. Eligius is the Patron of metalworkers. As a maker of reliquaries he has become one of the most popular saints of the Christian West.

Renaissance Art
Eligius (also known as Eloy) was born around 590 near Limoges in France. He became an extremely skillful metalsmith and was
appointed master of the mint under King Clothar of the Franks. Eligius developed a close friendship with the King and his reputation as
an outstanding metalsmith became widespread. It is important to notice that most prominent features in the life of St. Eligius can be
seen both as indications of sanctity and the best professional characteristics of a good goldsmith. In the goldsmith's trade, skills were as
important as reliability, as Adam Smith notices in Wealth of Nations: “The wages of goldsmiths and jewelers are every-where superior
to those of many other workmen, not only of equal, but of much superior ingenuity; on account of the precious materials with they are
intrusted”.[xxx] Eligius is praised for both qualities. From his biography, we can see how important this reliability of his goldsmith
was, for the king to become Eligius' protector: "The king gave Eligius a great weight of gold. Eligius began the work immediately and
from that which he had taken for a single piece of work, he was able to make two. Incredibly, he could do it all from the same weight for
he had accomplished the work commissioned from him without any fraud or mixture of siliquae, or any other fraudulence. Not claiming
fragments bitten off by the file or using the devouring flame of the furnace for an excuse."[xxxi] The portrait Saint Eligius by Petrus
Christus is a fine example of the “occupational portrait”, describing a goldsmith's shop, the only religious connection being the halo and
the fact than the saint is the patron of the guild.
The moneychanger and his wife: from scholastics to accounting,

by Manuel Santos Redondo
http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/cee/doc/00-23/0023.htm
Context: About the artist: Petrus Christus 1420-1472/73, Bruges
Born in Baerle, a village in Brabant, in the early 1400s, PetrusChristus came to the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Bruges in 1444, when
he purchased citizenship. His earliest extant works date from around 1445. They are deeply influenced by the supersharp delineations of
Jan van Eyck. It used to be thought that Christus studied with Jan, but it is now known that he arrived in Bruges too late to have had
any direct encounters with the master. Nevertheless, the many copies he made of Jan's work (several of which are included in this
exhibition) suggest that he had access to Jan's workshop after his death.
Exhibition notes. by Roger Kimball New Criterion, May94, Vol. 12 Issue 9, p55, 2p HTML Full Text
by Manuel Santos Redondo says this about

Quentin Massys'[i]The Moneychanger and his Wife, dated 1514. On the table
are placed coins, a set of scales, and various other tools of their trade. ("various
other tokens of their wealth", says the art historian Jean-Claude Frère, 1997, p.
186. This is our first difference in interpretation). The man is weighing gold
coins with great care. At that time, coins with the same face value varied in the
amount of gold they contained (and therefore in their real exchange value),
because it was a normal practice to file them down, clip them, or to shake them
together in a bag in order to collect the gold dust they produced. So, the
moneychanger is simply going about his business, not counting his money as a
miser would do. And, if you look at his face, it is not the face of a miser, but the
face of a concentrating working man, carefully carrying out his job. His wife is
looking at the coins and scales too; but she has a book in her hands. The book is
a religious one, an illustrated "book of hours". Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, the
historian of economic thought who first brought economists attention to the
Spanish Scholastics of the "School of Salamanca", considers Massys painting an
illustration of the intention of the Scholastics to make compatible the commercial
MASSYS, Quentin. also called Metsys practices of their time with the Church's doctrine on usury. According to her
The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514 interpretation, Massys painting portrays the money lender at work and, at the
Oil on panel, 71 x 68 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris same time, discussing with his wife the fairness of a particular commercial deal,
helped by consulting the religious book his wife is reading.[ii]
Many other interpretations of Massys’s work consider this picture as to be a moralizing one, in a much stronger sense than that of Grice-
Hutchinson's view. The Encarta Encyclopedia says: "In The Moneychanger and his Wife, the subtly hinted conflict between avarice and
prayer represented in the couple illustrates a new satirical quality in his paintings."[iii] (It is curious that the "Web Gallery of Art",
together with the Encarta article, provides this contradictory explanation:"The painting remains in the Flemish tradition of van Eyck,
with the addition of a profane sense of beauty, sign of a new world").[iv) Another scholar says this about Massys: "Painters also began
to treat new subjects. Men like Quentin Massys, for example, played an active role in the intellectual life of their cities and began to
mirror the ethical concerns expressed by humanist thinkers with new paintings that used secular scenes to impart moralizing messages.
Vivid tableaux warned against gambling, lust, and other vices."[v]
At the bottom of the painting there is a circular mirror; we can see the tiny figure of a man wearing a turban. For some reason, the
following is the explanation of the art historian Jean-Claude Frère: "a side window, under which we can just make out the tiny figure of
a thief. He would seem to be spying on the couple as they count their gold, while they would seem to be oblivious to his presence,
blinded by their greed".[vi] Let us leave aside the greed and concentrate on the tiny man. Is he a thief? I don't know. But I'm sure he is

Renaissance Art
not "spying on the couple as they count their gold": I am not an art historian, but it seems clear to me that the man is inside the room, he
is reading a book and looking out of the window to the street. In think that this is not a casual mistake: it is consistent with art
historians’ interpretation.
Symbolism, a source of moralistic interpretation My view is that art historians explanation of The Moneychanger and his Wife as a
satirical work containing symbolic allusions hidden from contemporary observers, is merely a reflection of their own prejudices
concerning certain economic activities. Let us consider the serious arguments supporting the symbolic explanations of paintings of the
Flemish Renaissance, in order to be able to judge when a painting has this meaning and when has not. The famous art historian Erwin
Panofsky held that the Early Flemish painters had to reconcile the "new naturalism" with a thousand years of Christian tradition. Based
on St. Tomas Aquinas, who thought that physical objects were "corporeal metaphors for spiritual things", Panofsky (Early Netherlandish
Painting, 1953) maintains that "in early Flemish painting the method of disguised symbolism was applied to each and every object, man
made or natural".
The moneychanger and his wife: from scholastics to accounting,

by Manuel Santos Redondo
http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/cee/doc/00-23/0023.htm
genre n [F, fr. MF, kind, gender--more at gender] (1770) 1: a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a
particular style, form, or content 2: kind, sort 3: painting that depicts scenes or events from everyday life usu. realistically

Mantegna's Use of Perspective in Italy

Form, From the left hand side of the image are the two profile views of Mary
and St. John who lean over the body of Jesus who is rendered in an idealized
and muscular fashion
The shroud which partially covers the lower part of the body accentuates the
form of the anatomy beneath the drapery.
The most striking aspect of this image is the fact that the portrayal of Christ
from a radical point of view. This view is called foreshortening which you
have already encountered in Giotto's Lamentation. According to the
Brittanica, foreshortening is a,
method of rendering a specific object or figure in a picture in

depth. The artist records, in varying degrees, the distortion that is
seen by the eye when an object or figure is viewed at a distance or
at an unusual angle.
In a photograph of a recumbent figure, for instance, those parts of

it, such as the feet, that are nearest the lens will seem unnaturally
large, those at a distance, such as the head, unnaturally small. The
artist may either record this effect exactly, producing a startling
illusion of reality that seems to violate the picture plane (surface of
Andrea Mantegna, The Dead Christ, c1490-1501, the picture), or modify it, slightly reducing the relative size of the
tempera on canvas 20"x31" nearer part of the object, so as to make a less aggressive assault on
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy the viewer's eye and to relate the foreshortened object more
Italian Renaissance harmoniously to the rest of the picture. Insofar as foreshortening is
basically concerned with the persuasive projection of a form in an
illusionistic way, it is a type of perspective, but the term
foreshortening is almost invariably used in relation to a single
object, or part of an object, rather than to a scene or group of
objects.
Iconography: The muscular and idealized quality of the figure probably

relates back to the new humanistic and neoplatonic concepts now being used
by the REnaissance artists. Here Mantegna is getting you to identify with the
more human qualities of the earthly or corporal body of Christ.
In fact, the draper reveals how fully human he is. To paraphrase the ideas

Renaissance Art
from The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, by

Leo Steinberg, images of Jesus which accentuate how earthly nature, notice
how the genitals are somewhat highlighted by the drapery, are an attempt to
show the dual nature of Jesus. Jesus was both of the flesh and spirit and the
depiction of his ability to function fully as a carnal being is an attempt to
demonstrate that Jesus made a choice to follow a more fully Platonic or ideal
path.
Even though the figure is foreshortened, there is a bit of a problem in how the
foreshortening is portrayed. If you compare the foreshortening in Mantegna's
work to the drawing below, you may notice that the feet are a bit too small in
Mantegna's work and this appears to be done on purpose. Why do you think
this is so? What purpose do you think it might serve?
According to this site (I'm not sure how accurate it is but it sure is a great idea), http://www.sindone.org/en/icono/mantegna.htm
The body of Christ is partially covered by the shroud, it lays on a reddish stone with light white veins. (the anointing rock). . .
Although this rock is never mentioned in the gospels, it appears in Costantinopolis as a passion relic in about 1170. The description
which coincides with the painting of Mantegna was transmitted in reports made by pilgrims. It was believed it came from Ephesus
(Mary of Magdala took it there from Jerusalem) and the white veins were produced by the tears of Our Lady weeping next to the body of
her dead son.
The boldness of the view makes the scene more dramatic; the vision from the top to the bottom and from the depth gives prominence to
the nail open wounds which are no longer bleeding. The flesh beneath the torn skin is depicted by the precision of an anatomist. On the
left there are some characters: Mary is weeping, John is praying and Mary of Magdala perhaps is sorrowful. On the right there is a small
flask of ointment and an opening towards a dark room: both signs of the imminent burial.
Stokstad gives a very good description and discussion of the form,

iconography and context surrounding this room. So I won't attempt to repeat
those ideas here. This section will consist of a guided viewing of some of the
more important or interesting details surrounding this room.
Robert Hughes comments,
Taking classical sculpture as his model, Mantegna populated the

new world of the Renaissance
Andrea Mantegna has never been easy to approach, alive or dead.

A The "rock-born giant," as Bernard Berenson called him, with his
dedication to archaeology and his obsession with empirical vision,
was one of the quintessential artists of the early Italian
Renaissance. He was innovative, flinty and tough-minded, without
an iota of sentiment.
This son of a Paduan carpenter, who rose to become the cynosure

of every humanist eye in northern Italy, once sent a gang of thugs
to bash up a printer who fell foul of him, and then had the poor
man denounced for sodomy--a crime that, in 15th century Venice,
carried the death penalty. Mantegna could also be sardonic and
Mantegna, Camera Picta (Camera degli Sposi) Ducal Palace, disrespectful to tardy patrons, up to and including the Pope
Mantua, Italy. 1474 himself. When Innocent VIII hired him to decorate the chapel of
the Villa Belvedere in the Vatican, he was puzzled to see, tacked
onto allegorical roundels of the Seven Virtues, an eighth that held
the sketched-in figure of an old woman. What did she signify?

Renaissance Art
asked the Pontiff. "Ingratitude," snapped Mantegna, who had not

yet been paid.
You must go to his work; most of it cannot come to you--not the

murals and not many of the paintings either, most of which are
now considered too frail to travel. Neither the St. Luke Altarpiece
nor The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, that unsurpassably
bitter and poignant image of the corpse on the stone slab, can leave
the Brera in Milan, and the Louvre will never lend the Madonna
della Vittoria to another museum.
A Genius Obsessed by Stone. by Robert Hughes. Time, 2/24/92,

"Arrival of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga," fresco
Vol. 139 Issue 8, p70, 2p, 3c HTML Full Text
by Andrea Mantegna, completed 1474
Perhaps of even greater significance were his achievements in the

field of fresco painting. Mantegna's invention of total spatial
illusionism by the manipulation of perspective and foreshortening
began a tradition of ceiling decoration that was followed for three
centuries. Mantegna's portraits of the Gonzaga family in their
palace at Mantua (1474) glorified living subjects by conferring
upon them the over life-size stature, sculptural volume, and studied
gravity of movement and gesture normally reserved for saints and
heroes of myth and history.
This image really does demonstrate many of the concepts from the above
passages. Mantegna is showing off for us all of his "special effects."
We see his use of atmospheric and linear perspectives in the background as
well as a bit of humanistic perspective in the gestures. His foreshortening of
the horse and dogs' bodies is almost "show offy."
The landscape behind the figures is almost an attempt to show off the
perspective of the land holding Gonzaga family, but, the landscape he portrays
is actually a mountainous and craggy invented landscape. The landscape
around Padua was flat and fairly featureless.
The putti (cherubs) surrounding the main doorway elevating the familial
inscription, are references to the classical past and could almost be a reference
to their lineage in much the same way was accomplished in the portrait of
Augustus. In fact the Roman tradition of verism is clearly expressed
throughout the room and the architectural details refer back to the
ornamentation on the ara pacis.
The images and medallions on the ceiling are also probably designed
with a similar intention to the portrait of Augustus. Here is a kind
of made up reference to the ancestors of the Gonzaga family, which,
they would have us believe, can be traced all the way back to the
Roman Republican period. Again the Roman tradition of verism is
clearly expressed throughout the room and the architectural details
refer back to the ornamentation on the ara pacis, to support these
ideas.

Renaissance Art
This image is located above the mantel of the

fireplace far enough above eye level that the
viewer must look up at it. From this point of view
one can almost look up the tunics of the men who
stand above you. Mantegna has also used a
consistent use of chiaroscuro across the picture
plane to unify it and make it believable.
In this portrait image (see Stokstad for details)

Mantegna shows both his strengths and
weaknesses with the human form. In some ways
he gets an excellent likeness of each of the
characters and their gestures and the foreshortening
of the human form is well executed. Nevertheless,
there are some areas where he has some awkward
patches. The troll like child (click to enlarge) to
the right of Barbara von Hohenzollern is one. At
times the anatomy of the figures seems a bit stiff.
sotto in su (Italian: "from below

to above"), in drawing and
painting, extreme foreshortening
of figures painted on a ceiling or
other high surface so as to give
the illusion that the figures are
suspended in air above the
viewer. It is an approach that
was especially favored by
Baroque and Rococo painters,
particularly in Italy, in the 17th
and 18th centuries.
The peacock is probably a classical

reference to Juno or Minerva, the putti are
similar again to those found on the base of
the image of Augustus. The image of the
African is probably a reference to the
sophisticated international qualities of the
family or perhaps even an attempt to make
the image a bit exotic.


Renaissance Art
Donatello
Form: This lifesize bronze sculpture stands in a contrapposto stance. His musculature is that of a young
boy, probably around the age of thirteen or so. The hat he wears (described by Stokstad as jaunty) is
anachronistic and possibly out of place even for a shepherd boy from Italy in the 15th century. David
stands atop the bearded and helmeted head of Goliath who he has just vanquished.

Renaissance Art
Iconography and Context: According to Janson, "this is the first life sized free standing sculpture since
antiquity." The figures size and pose are almost direct references to the classical tradition of casting
idealized athletic figures in bronze with the lost wax process as evinced by the Doryphoros and Riace
Bronzes (although they would not have been familiar with the bronzes since they were discovered in the
1970's). In this way, Donatello would have combined the Bible story of David and Goliath with the
classical and humanistic concept of kalos. In effect, he was uniting both a theological and
neoplatonic/humanistic point of view.
The iconography also points towards a political point of view. The Italian city states were constantly at
war with each other. For example, Florence thought of themselves as the "David" to Rome's Goliath. In
this case, David is standing atop Goliath's head who sports a helmet. According to Janson's Art History,
the "elaborate helmet of Goliath with visor and wings, (is) a unique and implausible feature that can only
refer to the dukes of Milan, who had threatened Florence." For Janson, the hat David sports is then a
reference to peace.
You may find Donatello's David a little bit ridiculous looking in his sun hat and almost effeminate stance
and you are in good company. Irving Stone's the chapter entitled "The Giant" from the book The Agony
and the Ecstasy excerpted in Liaisons (page 164) Michelangelo explains why he thinks Donatello's
version of David is ridiculous.
Stone quotes the Bible extensively in his passage. Read the whole thing for yourself here and (I know
it's a crazy idea), maybe you might even want to look it up in Liaisons!
Donatello. David. c1425-1430. Bronze,
height 5'2"
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
1 Samuel
Chapter 17 (David and Goliath)
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/1samuel/1samuel17.htm
1
The Philistines rallied their forces for battle at Socoh in Judah and camped between Socoh and Azekah at Ephes-dammim.
2
Saul and the Israelites also gathered and camped in the Vale of the Terebinth, drawing up their battle line to meet the Philistines.
3
The Philistines were stationed on one hill and the Israelites on an opposite hill, with a valley between them.
4
A champion named Goliath of Gath came out from the Philistine camp; he was six and a half feet tall.

Renaissance Art
5
He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a bronze corselet of scale armor weighing five thousand shekels,
6
1 and bronze greaves, and had a bronze scimitar slung from a baldric.
7
2 The shaft of his javelin was like a weaver's heddle-bar, and its iron head weighed six hundred shekels. His shield-bearer went before him.
8
He stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel: "Why come out in battle formation? I am a Philistine, and you are Saul's servants. Choose one of
your men, and have him come down to me.
9
If he beats me in combat and kills me, we will be your vassals; but if I beat him and kill him, you shall be our vassals and serve us."
10
The Philistine continued: "I defy the ranks of Israel today. Give me a man and let us fight together."
11
Saul and all the men of Israel, when they heard this challenge of the Philistine, were dismayed and terror-stricken.
12
3 (David was the son of an Ephrathite named Jesse, who was from Bethlehem in Judah. He had eight sons, and in the days of Saul was old
and well on in years.
13
The three oldest sons of Jesse had followed Saul to war; these three sons who had gone off to war were named, the first-born Eliab, the
second son Abinadab, and the third Shammah.
14
David was the youngest. While the three oldest had joined Saul,
15
David would go and come from Saul to tend his father's sheep at Bethlehem.
16
(Meanwhile the Philistine came forward and took his stand morning and evening for forty days.
17
(Now Jesse said to his son David: "Take this ephah of roasted grain and these ten loaves for your brothers, and bring them quickly to your
brothers in the camp.
18
Also take these ten cheeses for the field officer. Greet your brothers and bring home some token from them.
19
Saul, and they, and all Israel are fighting against the Philistines in the Vale of the Terebinth."
20
Early the next morning, having left the flock with a shepherd, David set out on his errand, as Jesse had commanded him. He reached the
barricade of the camp just as the army, on their way to the battleground, were shouting their battle cry.
21
The Israelites and the Philistines drew up opposite each other in battle array.
22
David entrusted what he had brought to the keeper of the baggage and hastened to the battle line, where he greeted his brothers.
23
While he was talking with them, the Philistine champion, by name Goliath of Gath, came up from the ranks of the Philistines and spoke as
before, and David listened.
24
When the Israelites saw the man, they all retreated before him, very much afraid.
25
The Israelites had been saying: "Do you see this man coming up? He comes up to insult Israel. If anyone should kill him, the king would give
him great wealth, and his daughter as well, and would grant exemption to his father's family in Israel."
26
David now said to the men standing by: "What will be done for the man who kills this Philistine and frees Israel of the disgrace? Who is this
uncircumcised Philistine in any case, that he should insult the armies of the living God?"
27
They repeated the same words to him and said, "That is how the man who kills him will be rewarded."
28
When Eliab, his oldest brother, heard him speaking with the men, he grew angry with David and said: "Why did you come down? With whom
have you left those sheep in the desert meanwhile? I know your arrogance and your evil intent. You came down to enjoy the battle!"
29
David replied, "What have I done now?--I was only talking."
30
Yet he turned from him to another and asked the same question; and everyone gave him the same answer as before.
31
The words that David had spoken were overheard and reported to Saul, who sent for him.)
32

Renaissance Art
Then David spoke to Saul: "Let your majesty not lose courage. I am at your service to go and fight this Philistine."
33
But Saul answered David, "You cannot go up against this Philistine and fight with him, for you are only a youth, while he has been a warrior
from his youth."
34
Then David told Saul: "Your servant used to tend his father's sheep, and whenever a lion or bear came to carry off a sheep from the flock,
35
I would go after it and attack it and rescue the prey from its mouth. If it attacked me, I would seize it by the jaw, strike it, and kill it.
36
Your servant has killed both a lion and a bear, and this uncircumcised Philistine will be as one of them, because he has insulted the armies of
the living God."
37
David continued: "The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear, will also keep me safe from the clutches of this
Philistine." Saul answered David, "Go! the LORD will be with you."
38
Then Saul clothed David in his own tunic, putting a bronze helmet on his head and arming him with a coat of mail.
39
David also girded himself with Saul's sword over the tunic. He walked with difficulty, however, since he had never tried armor before. He said
to Saul, "I cannot go in these, because I have never tried them before." So he took them off.
40
Then, staff in hand, David selected five smooth stones from the wadi and put them in the pocket of his shepherd's bag. With his sling also
ready to hand, he approached the Philistine.
41
With his shield-bearer marching before him, the Philistine also advanced closer and closer to David.
42
When he had sized David up, and seen that he was youthful, and ruddy, and handsome in appearance, he held him in contempt.
43
The Philistine said to David, "Am I a dog that you come against me with a staff?" Then the Philistine cursed David by his gods
44
and said to him, "Come here to me, and I will leave your flesh for the birds of the air and the beasts of the field."
45
David answered him: "You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the
God of the armies of Israel that you have insulted.
46
Today the LORD shall deliver you into my hand; I will strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will leave your corpse and the
corpses of the Philistine army for the birds of the air and the beasts of the field; thus the whole land shall learn that Israel has a God.
47
All this multitude, too, shall learn that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves. For the battle is the LORD'S, and he shall deliver you
into our hands."
48
The Philistine then moved to meet David at close quarters, while David ran quickly toward the battle line in the direction of the Philistine.
49
David put his hand into the bag and took out a stone, hurled it with the sling, and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone embedded
itself in his brow, and he fell prostrate on the ground.
50
(Thus David overcame the Philistine with sling and stone; he struck the Philistine mortally, and did it without a sword.)
51
Then David ran and stood over him; with the Philistine's own sword (which he drew from its sheath) he dispatched him and cut off his
head.When they saw that their hero was dead, the Philistines took to flight.
52
Then the men of Israel and Judah, with loud shouts, went in pursuit of the Philistines to the approaches of Gath and to the gates of Ekron, and
Philistines fell wounded along the road from Shaaraim as far as Gath and Ekron.
53
On their return from the pursuit of the Philistines, the Israelites looted their camp.
54
4 David took the head of the Philistine and brought it to Jerusalem; but he kept Goliath's armor in his own tent.
55
(When Saul saw David go out to meet the Philistine, he asked his general Abner, "Abner, whose son is that youth?" Abner replied, "As truly
as your majesty is alive, I have no idea."
56
And the king said, "Find out whose son the lad is."
57
So when David returned from slaying the Philistine, Abner took him and presented him to Saul. David was still holding the Philistine's head.
58

Renaissance Art
Saul then asked him, "Whose son are you, young man?" David replied, "I am the son of your servant Jesse of Bethlehem."

Points of view are very important in Donatello's work. Stokstad gives a
fantastic formal analysis of this work in her book but the most important
formal point I think you should know is that linear perspective is introduced
into relief sculpture. Stokstad even describes the varying levels of relief as a
way of creating depth, which is not unlike linear perspective. A good
example of this is in the Ara Pacis in Rome. The Bible passage below should
provide you with enough context to understand my contextual analysis which
comes after.
Mark
Chapter 6
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/mark/mark6.htm
17
Herod was the one who had John arrested and bound in prison on
account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, whom he had
married.
18
John had said to Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's
wife."
19
Herodias harbored a grudge against him and wanted to kill him but was
unable to do so.
20
Herod feared John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man, and
Donatello, The Feast of Herodabout 1425(60 cm sq) kept him in custody. When he heard him speak he was very much
Baptismal Font, Cathedral, Siena, Italy perplexed, yet he liked to listen to him.
21
She had an opportunity one day when Herod, on his birthday, gave a
banquet for his courtiers, his military officers, and the leading men of
Galilee.
22
Herodias's own daughter came in and performed a dance that delighted
Herod and his guests. The king said to the girl, "Ask of me whatever
you wish and I will grant it to you."
23
He even swore (many things) to her, "I will grant you whatever you ask
of me, even to half of my kingdom."
24
She went out and said to her mother, "What shall I ask for?" She replied,
"The head of John the Baptist."
25
The girl hurried back to the king's presence and made her request, "I
want you to give me at once on a platter the head of John the Baptist."
26
The king was deeply distressed, but because of his oaths and the guests
he did not wish to break his word to her.
27
So he promptly dispatched an executioner with orders to bring back his
head. He went off and beheaded him in the prison.
28
He brought in the head on a platter and gave it to the girl. The girl in
turn gave it to her mother.
29
When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body and laid
it in a tomb.

Context and Iconography: Overall, the image uses linear perspective to unify the image but still uses some of the old traditional tools of the
continuous narrative that we see in Nicola Pisano's Nativity and Masaccio's work. In the background, through the arches, servants carry the head on

Renaissance Art
a tray.
The next sets of perspective Donatello expresses is a Catholic and Neoplatonic one as well as one dominated by a male point of view of the world
that some historians refer to as the "male gaze."
The passage above describes the immorality of King Herod. Not only is he a king who rejects the teachings of Jesus, he also supports immoral and
sexually indiscreet behaviors such as incest and improper marriage. Ultimately, it is Herod's lust for his daughter that leads to his sin of beheading
John. This story presents women in a way which might be referred to as a femme fatale. According to Webster's a femme fatale a "disastrous
woman." "A seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations." and "a woman who attracts men by an aura of charm and
mystery."
Similar tales, such as "Judith and Holofernes" and "Suzanna and the Elders" (both excerpted from the Old Testament in Liaisons pages 197-214)
depict men's lust for women as responsible for powerful men's demise. The depiction of women in this way is interesting because it is a theme that
becomes a popular one throughout the Renaissance and ties very neatly into the concept of Platonic love. By the time the 20th century rolls around
depictions of women with heads on trays become so commonplace that the story of "Judith and Holofernes" and the "Dance of Salome" become
indistinguishable.

Form: Points of view are very important in Donatello's work. Notice how the image
on the left has been photographed from a point of view in which the viewer is looking
at the work from a point of view in which they are on the same level with the
sculpture. The image on the right is taken from below as the sculpture would have
been seen in its original context.
Notice how the image on the left feels imbalanced and the head is a little too large and
placed oddly. However, when you look at the image in the way that it was supposed
to be viewed it looks correct. This is because Renaissance artists like Donatello
compensated for the viewer's point of view or perspective when creating works of art.
In the essay below, Dennis Nolasco also explains how the sculpture expresses a civic
perspective and the point of view of the merchants who commissioned it into account.
Donatello, St. Mark 1411-13

Orsanmichele and is in the Arte dei Linauiulo e Rigattieri
niche
Florence, Italy

Dennis Nolasco
Art History 103B
April 16, 2001
The Vigilance of St. Mark over the Florentine People
Quattrocento (15th century) Florence was in a peculiar situation during the first decade of the 1400s. Florence, at that time, was controlled by
guilds and the citizens truly valued their prosperity and liberty. It also had the most powerful of the free merchant guilds and controlled quite a bit
of trade. As a result, Florence was constantly under siege by its neighbors and some of the attacks were seemingly halted by divine intervention.
These dire circumstances led to the creation of artworks such as Donatello's St. Mark. A truly revolutionary statue, this piece single-handedly
changed the state of the arts in Italy from Gothic to “fully Renaissance.” (Hartt 100) By analyzing St. Mark further through its form, iconography,
and context, one can empathize with Donatello and his fellow Florentines. The St. Mark signifies true Renaissance art and reflects the humanism,
spirit and ideals of the Florentine people of the time.
Donatello's St. Mark is an impressive seven feet nine inches and is carved of marble. It was begun around 1411 and finished in 1413. According
to Hartt, the statue is located in the Florentine church Orsanmichele and is in the Arte dei Linauiulo e Rigattieri niche. The figure stands in a
contrapposto pose and is robed in wet drapery. He holds a book (probably a Bible) in his left, is barefooted and seems to be standing on a
cushion. The statue is in an apse, which is heavily decorated and also made of marble. The apse is in the shape of a Gothic arch and is decorated
appropriately. A griffin sits below the statue and in front of a flower motif. The same motif is patterned behind the statue. There are faux columns
on top of pedestals to either side of St. Mark, which do not seem to represent any Greek order. The columns actually have three parts, the topmost
having a small Gothic arch crowned with small figures. A bust of a man resides within the arch. He has a halo behind his head, has his right hand

Renaissance Art
held forward and holds a book in his left hand. Below and to either side of the center bust are side profiles of two men, which are surrounded by
the same motif that decorates the rest of the piece.
Despite all the decorations, St. Mark still stands at the center of attention. To begin with, he has a stern and imposing stare about him. The statue
seems to be concentrating on something beyond the viewer's peripheral view. This symbolizes St. Mark's constant vigil of Florence and the land
beyond; always wary of what moves Florence's neighbors might be up to. The figure also has a full mustache and beard. An iconographic analysis
reveals that beards have been a symbol of wisdom and knowledge since the time of ancient Greece. St. Mark also holds a book and wears a robe.
The symbol of the book can be read in a couple different ways. The most obvious interpretation would be a Bible, because St. Mark was the
author to one of the Gospels. This implies the saints closeness with heaven and God. Another interpretation could be that of a record book.
According to Encarta Online, Mark was the “patron saint of notaries” and also served as a translator for St. Peter. This could be a symbol of
learning and record keeping. Most Renaissance artwork of saints usually has them outfitted in robes. It is probably due to the fact that priests and
monks dress in a similar fashion--which again represents the figure's affinity to the spiritual world. St. Mark also stands in the classic contrapposto
pose. This is a pose in which the body takes on a natural s-curve. The pose was adopted from ancient Greek and Roman statues and exemplifies
the neo-platonism and humanism of the Florentine people. Neo-platonism is the rebirth of the higher ideals of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
Similarly, humanism is “A new realism based on the study of humanity and nature, an idealism found in the study of Classical forms.” (Tansey
683) The columns can also be thought of in this way, because it is only used for decorative purposes and just serves to remind the Quattrocento
Florentines of their mastery over classical forms. Finally, the Gothic arch with the figures serves a purpose similar to the main statue of St. Mark.
The major iconographic differences would be the raised hand, halo, and arch; these respectively may suggest peace, enlightenment, and a
connection to heaven.
With all that the Quattrocento Florentines had to endure at the time, one may wonder why they chose to create icons of peace and not use their
resources to help protect their city-state from harm. Quattrocento Florentines were no Spartans of old; whenever they tried to do battle with their
enemies, they would fail miserably in combat. (Hartt 105) Their pride was in their powerful artisan guilds, resilience, and . . . divine intervention.
Florence had been desired by a host of conquerors and was several times on the edge of defeat, if not but for miracles of some sort. Natural
disaster and disease would often befall upon Florence's enemy before they could seize her gates. The Florentines did not take this lightly and
thought that God had intervened on their behalf because of what their city represented--freedom. (Hartt 104) With this mindset, artists began to
create truly natural, expressive and humanistic art, and Donatello was at the forefront of this movement. Donatello wanted to create a piece that
captured Florence's spirit and resilience. He did this perfectly. The iconographic analysis revealed that the saint seemed to be a vigil of some sort.
A contextual analysis further reinforces this. St. Mark seems ready to leap into action and protect the people of Florence from the dangers that
lurked abroad. Unsurprisingly, the St. Mark was actually commissioned by the guild of linen drapers. (Tansey 683) As one can see, it is a perfect
piece for the reintroduction of wet-drapery (clothing that seemed to follow the natural curves of the body). Moreover, the most likely meaning of
the flower motifs would probably have to do with the guild of linen drapers. The linen drapers were, in all likelihood, just as thankful for the
supposed divine intervention as the other Florentines, and they thanked God by commissioning the statue.
Gothic statues similar to St. Mark were actually commissioned before the birth of the Renaissance in the 1300s; nevertheless, a few enlightened
individuals were already reveling in the classical ideas of neo-platonism that had originated during this time. In any event, Gothic art still survived
and influenced many artists. It wasn't until the time of Donatello and his radical St. Mark when true Renaissance art was fully realized in
Quattrocento Florence. In part, due to amazing miracles that happened, the Florentine people suddenly embraced their humanity and tried to give
expression to this overwhelming sensation. Donatello realized this and became a major player in actualizing this newfound feeling through his St.
Mark, and inspired many of his contemporaries (and later artists) to further push in the direction of humanism in art. An embodiment of true neo-
platonic ideals--perseverance, spirituality, and freedom--the creation of the St. Mark truly gave birth to the Renaissance for those that lived in
Quattrocento Florence.
Works Cited
Hartt, Frederick, and Carole Gold Calo, ed. “Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence.”
Viewpoints: Readings in Art History. 2nd ed. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2001
“Mark, Saint,” Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001

16 Aug. 2001 <http://encarta.msn.com>
Tansey, Richard G., and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. 10th ed. Fort
Worth: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996.

Ghiberti's Perspective in Sculpture

Context:
Few buildings in Florence have as much significance to the life of the city as the Baptistry. Opposite the west
facade of the Duomo, the Baptistry is at the religious center of Florence. The building was dedicated to St.
John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence. It is in this building up until recent years that every Florentine

Renaissance Art
citizen received the sacrament of Baptism. This building is thus critical in the religious and social identity of
the city.
The current building was probably built between 1059 and 1150 , and it is an excellent example of Tuscan
Romanesque architecture. In the thirteenth century, it was believed that the building was built as early as the
mid-sixth century and had been designed as a copy of Lateran Baptistry in Rome, the most important
baptistry in Christendom. Another legend, developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth century, traced the
foundation of the Baptistry back to a Roman temple of Mars that was subsequently rededicated to St. John
the Baptist. The Baptistry was thus the principal monument in Florence associated with the ancient Roman
foundation of the city.
The Arte del Calimala, the wool merchants' guild, from as early as 1157 but at least by 1182 was given
responsibility for the maintenance and embellishment of the building. The Calimala was the wealthiest and
most influential of the major guilds. Established in the twelfth century, the guild was composed of dealers
and refiners of foreign cloth and the wool importers as well as importers of silk, brocade, jewels, and other
precious materials from the Levant. Until the late twelfth century, the Calimala also represented to the
bankers, but they withdrew to form their own guild, the Arte del Cambio. The retail dealers were joined in
1247 by importers of goods from Levant to form the Arte della Seta. Despite these split-offs, the Calimala
was still the most prestigious guild in Florence. During the thirteenth century, the Calimala had
commissioned Coppo di Marcolvaldo to decorate the octagonal dome of the building:
Dr Farber Oneonta College

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Arth213/baptistry_competition.html
Ghiberti, Lorenzo. BRUNELLESCHI, Filippo.

Competition Panel, Abraham, 1401 Competition Panel, Abraham, 1401

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Arte del Calimala initiated
another major project: the creation of three magnificent, bronze entrance doors
for building. In 1330, Andrea Pisano (c. 1290-1348) was commissioned to do
the first set of doors on the south side. Pisano completed the project in 1336:
An economic crash between 1339 to 1346, political upheaval, and the outbreak
of the Black Death in 1348 led to the suspension of plans to complete the two
remaining doors. During the winter of 1400 - 1401, the consuls of the
Calimala decided to open a competition for another set of doors. These were
originally intended for the East door. These doors, facing the west entrance of
the Duomo, were the most important doors. Just as the competition was
initiated Milanese troops under the leadership of Gian Galeazzo Visconti were
threatening Florence. Some see the motivation of the Calimala to revive the

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door project as an attempt to bolster civic unity and pride by embellishing one
of the city's most important monuments. Another factor frequently cited for
initiating the competition was Calimala's rivalry with the Arte della Lana, the
Woolworkers Guild, which was given authority over the fabric of the Duomo.
The Arte della Lana was at that moment engaged in the project of decorating
the west facade of the Duomo, directly opposite the east entrance of the
Baptistry.
This combination of factors -- the history of the building, the Arte del
Calimala's patronage, the fame of Andrea Pisano's doors-- made this an
extremely desirable commission. As stated by Richard Krautheimer (Lorenzo
Ghiberti, p. 34): "The most important group of patrons in Florence called for a
trial piece for the new bronze door which would eventually decorate the most
illustrious building in the city and which would, besides, have the privilege of
standing alongside the only important bronze sculpture theretofore produced in
Florence."
Lorenzo, Ghiberti "The Gates of Paradise" Florence,
Baptistry The competitors were expected to submit panels representing the Old
Eastern Door, 1425-52 in situ Testament story of the Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaac. It depicts the moment
when Abraham, ordered by God to sacrifice his only son, is about to plunge
Notice that the viewers have to look up to see some of the knife into Isaac's neck, but his hand is stayed at the last moment by an
the panels. In the section below is a discussion of how angel. This story of divine deliverance would undoubtedly have resonated with
Ghiberti distorts the image to compensate for the Florentines, whose city had been delivered by the sudden death Gian Galeazzo
viewer's point of view just like in Donatello's St. Mark. Visconti in September of 1402.
Stokstad states that Ghiberti was the winner, but, I read Ghiberti in his account of the competition records the name of seven
in a tour book that both Brunelleschi and Ghiberti won competitors, all from Tuscany: Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Jacopo
the commission and were expected to share it. The tour della Quercia, Simone da Colle, Niccolò d'Arezzo, Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti,
book explained that Brunelleschi was a sore loser and and Francesco di Valdambrino. Two of the competition panels have been
gave up the commission so that he wouldn't have to preserved: one by Lorenzo Ghiberti and the other by Filippo Brunelleschi.
work with Ghiberti.
Dr Farber Oneonta College
http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Arth213/baptistry_competition.html

The Arrangement of the Narrative
A semiotic or structuralist analysis
The diagram below explains that Ghiberti actually had

"program" or design for the creation and flow of the
overall narrative associated with the doors very similar in
nature to the way in which Giotto arranged the Arena
Chapel.
The arrangement of the panels actually adds to the overall

door's meaning. In order to better understand this art
historians use a the same theory that literary analysts do to
study the interrelationship of the stories or narratives. This
Eve Adam kind of analysis is called a semiotic or structural
analysis. By looking at this wall as a whole, and
Genesis
Unidentified Cain and interpreting the relationship of panel image to the others, it
Adam, Expulsion

Renaissance Art
Ezekiel? Jeremiah? Joab? is possible to come up with a deeper understanding of the

Eve, Sibyl Abel Sin set of frescoes as a whole. In this case the overall
Expulsion
meaning of the Doors relate to their function as portals
Renewed into the Church and therefore into heaven. The order and
Elias? Noah Jonah Hannah? Abraham Samson pact theme of the doors narrative relates to the Catholic
Covenant conception of a spiritual journey to heaven.
Isaac Unidentified Joseph
Rebecca For example, the top set of images represents scenes from
Unidentified Distribution Unidentified the Old Testament. The main themes are expulsion and
Praying Prophet
Rachel? of Grain Covenant sin. This refers to our "original sin" and how we lost
Prophet Essau and
(self- Revealing Prophet heaven.
his Dogs
portrait) Himself
Blessing Next we are saved through a renewed compact or covenant
Moses with God. The central panels define and explain the
Joshua Leaders
Miriam Moses Aaron Joshua Gideon
Jericho Deliverance covenant.
and Laws
Leaders This top set of scenes acts as a kind of thematic
Judith David Nathan Daniel Solomon Bileam framework in which to view spiritual life and our journey.
Kings
They are almost parallel to the early Christian conception
Noah Puarphara of the typological exegesis from the Sarcophagus of
Junius Bassus c359 CE.
Beneath these stories and surrounding them are depictions

of prophets who guide us and the Kings from the Old
Testament who have established the foundation that all this
is built on. This foundation is very similar in content and
structure to the caryatids from the Acropolis and the seven
virtues and vices from the Arena Chapel.
An interesting little detail is that Ghiberti gives himself a

little cameo appearance on the doors almost like the donors
form the outer framework of Masaccio's Trinity with
Donors.
Form: Points of view are very important in Ghiberti's work in the same way that they are in
Donatello's. In fact, Stokstad places Donatello's The Feast of Herod right next to
Ghiberti's Jacob and Essau. Stokstad gives a fantastic formal analysis of Donatello's The
Feast of Herod in her book and Ghiberti's panel shares a lot in common with it. The most
important formal point I think you should know is that linear perspective is introduced into
relief sculpture. Stokstad even describes the varying levels of relief as a way of creating
depth, which is not unlike linear perspective. A good example of this is in the Ara Pacis in
Rome.
Like Donatello's St. Mark this panel is designed to be viewed from a specific point of
view. Notice how the image on the top has been photographed from a point of view in
which the viewer is looking at the work on the same level with the sculpture. The image
below is taken from below as the sculpture would have been seen in its original context.
Notice how the image on on top feels imbalanced and the head is a little too large and
Lorenzo Ghiberti The Gates of Paradise 1425-52 placed oddly. The figures are actually leaning out at the top and lower relief at their
Jacob and Esau, Florence Cathedral bottoms. However, when you look at the image in the way that it was supposed to be
viewed it looks correct. This is because Renaissance artists like Donatello and Ghiberti
compensated for the viewer's point of view or perspective when creating works of art.
Overall, the image uses linear perspective to unify the image but still uses some of the old
traditional tools of the continuous narrative that we see in Nicola Pisano's Nativity and
Masaccio's work.
Iconography: Symbolically speaking this image is packed with all kinds of different
perspectives.
It's almost a shopping list of ideas.

neoplatonic
classic
humanist
theological


Renaissance Art

The classical and platonic ideas are evidenced in the architectural structures in the image, the contrapposto poses and the uses of wet drapery.
The humanist and theological/Catholic point of view is expressed partially by the Bible passage about Jacob and Essau in Liaisons 15-21
(Selections from Genesis-Jacob and Esau) which describes a story in which Jacob who has wronged his older brother must work hard to win back
his good graces, like Jesus, Essau forgives his brother and invites him back into the family. Here again is a typological exegesis but with a very
humanistic bent. We can imagine how it might have felt to be either character.
The linear perspective is both a formal device, which creates space, and a way of including the viewer. The fact that the use of linear perspective is
used actually symbolizes that the real theological and humanistic subject of the relief. It is not just the story of "Jacob and Essau" but rather the
Renaissance man's relationship to it and what he can learn from it. This leads us to discuss the various themes that are hidden within the obvious
meaning behind the image: a message that to get into the kingdom of heaven one has to wrestle and work hard but that forgiveness is also a
component.

"Man is the measure of all things."

Form: The formal qualities of this drawing are not as significant as the iconographic and contextual
qualities it represents. The drawing is a fine representation of the human head and face and demonstrates a
Leonardo da Vinci, Self Portrait, 1512 close attention to proportion, detail, and texture. The diagonal lines that run from the upper left hand corner
of the drawing and flow down to the lower right unify the drawing and make a cohesive value structure by
flowing along like waves against the direction of the light source which is coming from the upper right
hand corner. The use of line and cross hatch marks to create texture and chiaroscuro are typical of
Leonardo's style especially in his drawing and are complimented in their contrast to the types of lines that
he uses to depict the hair which are long, flowing and curvilinear.
Iconography: This drawing was probably a fairly quick "sketch" by Leonardo and the artist probably did
not intend for the drawing to be deeply symbolic, nevertheless, to us it is. Because the drawing was drawn
from direct observation it is a snapshot of Leonardo's penetrating gaze. As a viewer it is easy to imagine
that this drawing and his facial expression sum up some of the qualities of this intense individual.
Interestingly enough, he looks kind of grumpy in the drawing but most accounts describe him as a witty
and charming individual.
One of the skills that most painters needed to develop during the Renaissance period was the ability to paint
portraits and accurate likenesses. Often this skill was developed by painting with a the only model that one
might have available which is one's self. The humanistic and platonic idea of perfectability also gave rise
to self reflection and observation. A portrait then is not just about the immediate apprearance but also it is
a symbol of the person. In this image we see that Leonardo is studying himself and also demonstrating his
ability to create a strong physical likeness as well a psychological likeness.
Context: Here is Leonardo's letter to the Duke of Milan asking for employment,
To My Lord the Duke of Milan, Florence, 1482
Most Illustrious Lord,
Having until now sufficiently studied and examined the experiments of all those who claim to be experts and inventors of war machines,
and having found that their machines do not differ in the least from those ordinarily in use, I shall make so bold, without wanting to
cause harm to anyone, as to address myself to Your Excellency to divulge my secrets to him, and offer to demonstrate to him, at his
pleasure, all the things briefly enumerated below :
1. I have the means to construct light, solid and sturdy bridges, easy to transport, in order to follow and if necessary rout the enemy, and
other even more solid which resist fire and storm, simple to remove and lay down. And the means to burn and destroy those of the
enemy.
2. For the siege of a stronghold, I know how to clear the moats of water and construct an infinite number of bridges, battering-rams and
scaling-ladders and other machines useful for this sort of enterprise.
3. Item, if a stronghold could not be reduced by bombardment, because of the height of its slopes or the strength of its position, I have
the means of destroying any citadel or other emplacement whose foundations do not rest upon the ground.
4. I also have methods for making mortars that are simple and practical to move, that throw rubble in an almost steady stream, causing
much fear and terror in the enemy camp with their smoke, as well much damage and confusion.
5. Item, I also have the means, using tunnels and twisting secret passageways, dug noiselessly, of arriving at a determined point, even if
this meant going under moats and rivers.

Renaissance Art
6. Item, I shall make sure and invincible covered wagons, which will penetrate the ranks of the enemy with their artillery, and that group
of armed men does not yet exist which can stop them; infantry can then follow them unharmed and unobstructed.
7. Item, if necessary I shall make siege guns, mortars and other machines, of beautiful and practical shape, completely different from
what is generally in use.
8. Wherever the use of cannon is impossible, I shall forge catapults, mangonels, trabocchi and other admirably effective engines,
generally little used. In short, according to the situation, I shall manufacture an indefinite number of various machines, both offensive
and defensive.
9. And if, by chance, the engagement took place at sea, I have plans for the construction of engines quite suited to attack or defense, of
vessels which resist the fire of the largest guns, powder, and smoke.
1O. In time of peace, I believe I am capable of giving you as much satisfaction as anyone, whether it be in architecture, for the
construction of public or private buildings, or in bringing water from one place to another. Item, I can sculpt in marble, bronze or
terracotta; while in painting, my work is the equal of anyone¹s. What is more, I shall undertake the execution of the bronze horse which
will be the immortal glory, eternal homage, to the beloved memory My Lord Your Father, and to the illustrious house of Sforza. And if
one or another of the things listed above seems impossible or impractical, I should be pleased to demonstrate on your grounds or in any
other place which may please Your Excellency, of whom I beg to remain the most humble servant.
Leonardo da Vinci
quoted from Artists on Art, from the 14th to the 20th Century, edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, (New York, Pantheon
Books)
Notice that he begins his letter by telling the Duke all about his abilities as a scientist, inventor, and strategist and end at the end of the letter he says
"Oh by the way, I'm an artist too." What this anecdote indicates is that Leonardo was the quintessential Renaissance man. Although this story
indicates that Leonard is portraying himself as a scientist philosopher and architect first, this is just a dramatic way of introducing himself.
Leonardo new full well that his reputation as an artist preceded him.
A link to a biography about Leonardo.

Form: The Last Supper is a mural in bad condition. Leonardo used a
combination of materials to paint this fresco and his experiment failed almost
immediately. Leonardo painted a lead white primer on top of the plaster wall
to slow the drying and so he could paint more slowly. It's not clear why the
two didn't adhere but possibly the moisture of the plaster wall rejected the oil
based primer on its surface and kept it from creating a tight cohesive bond.
As a result the paint almost immediately began to flake. For some detail
views of the fresco and its context see this page.
The figures are life sized and placed in a single frieze like band on one side of
the table. The apostles are also arranged into four groups of three figures
each. Each figure in the group is posed or arranged in a unique manner and
exhibits a unique emotional gesture. The composition is symmetrical with
Christ at it's center and arranged using one point perspective whose vanishing
point converges behind Christ's head. Almost all of the figures, except for the
single figure of Judas have their heads' placed on the horizon line.
The use of linear perspective is exaggerated and further complimented by the

arrangement of the coffers in the ceiling, the doors along each side of the
room and the atmospheric perspective of the landscape through the windows.
This is further exaggerated by the gesture of Christ's body in the center whose
arms are outstretched and whose body forms a triangular shape that points
back towards the window and the vanishing point.
Iconography: The figures size and placement in a single frieze like band on
one side of the table. Serve two purposes. First, they arrange the figures in
such a way that the monks who would eat in this room felt as if they were
pulling up a chair and eating with Jesus and the apostles. Second, the
arrangement also refers to the classical friezes that Leonardo would have
studied and this reference would not have been lost on the viewers.
Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1495-7 Milan, The apostles arrangement into four groups of three figures is a reference to the
Santa Maria delle Grazie sacred number of the trinity which represents the father, son, and the holy

Renaissance Art
spirit. This symbolism could also be part of why there are three windows in
the background and is also part of why Christ's figure is arranged in the three
sided triangular form.
For Leonardo and his contemporaries, humanism or the human experience of

religion was the key to unlocking the world. Since the study of man and his
experience was so important it makes sense that human gesture and pose is
central to understanding this painting. Here's a quote from Leonardo's
notebook in which he discusses how to compose groups of figures in
historical pictures:

When you have thoroughly learned perspective and have fixed in

your memory all the various parts and forms of things, you should
often amuse yourself, when you take a walk for recreation, by
watching and taking note of the attitudes and actions of men as they
talk and dispute, or laugh or come to blows one with another - both
their actions and those of the bystanders who either intervene or
stand looking on at these things; noting them down with rapid
strokes in this way, in a little pocket book, which you ought
always to carry with you.
quoted from Artists on Art, from the 14th to the 20th

Century, edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves,
(New York, Pantheon Books)
As you can see, Leonardo believed in drawing from figures from observation
and that he particularly was interested in communicating emotion and
experience through gesture. Christ's pose, with his arms outstretched is
further invitation to the scene and an indication in which he is willing
participant in his sacrifice. Each apostles' figure is posed or arranged in a
unique manner and exhibits a unique emotional gesture. This refers back to
the viewer and how the viewer might have had a similar reaction to one of the
apostles. This is a humanistic way of looking at the story because the viewer
is supposed to look for a figure that he best identifies with. The composition
is arranged using one point perspective whose vanishing point converges
behind Christ's head which places him in the most important and literally the
most central location in the image. All of the figures, except for the single
figure of Judas have their heads' placed on the horizon line and this is
symbolic of Judas status as a betrayer and therefore "beneath" the other
apostles.
1) The door was enlarged in 1652
2) Half a dozen well meaning restorers seem to have been its worst
enemy.
3) A protective curtain hung by friars in 1768
trapped humidity and abraded the mural when opened for visitors.
4) To ward against sunlight, nearby windows are now boarded.
5) Post world war rebuilding added central heating which
stabilized the environment.
6) The foundations of the structure were strengthened.
(Source: National Geographic Magazine)
Context: Since Leonardo was a scientist as well as a painter he attempted to try mixing tempera, oil
paint and fresco in this painting. The result was that the mural almost immediately had a really bad
"dandruff" problem.
The drawing condenses misfortunes the "Last Supper" has suffered and reveals modern correction.
Leonardo painted a lead white primer on top of the plaster wall to slow the drying and so he could paint
more slowly. It's not clear why the two didn't adhere but possibly the moisture of the plaster wall
rejected the oil based primer on its surface and kept it from creating a tight cohesive bond.
Form: This is a fairly small pen and ink drawing, depicting a nude male figure whose body is inscribed within several
geometric forms. The rendering utilizes contour drawing rather than much attempt to portray value or chiaroscuro.
In the margins of the pages are inscribed in reverse (or mirror writing) Leonardo's observations about Vitruvius's'

Renaissance Art
text. The drawing is an interpretation of these ideas which are quoted in Stokstad. (Make sure you read them!)
Iconography: In a more general sense, this drawing represents Leonardo and his contemporaries neoplatonic and
humanistic ideologies which can be traced back to the writings of Vitruvius and classical thinking. The most relevant
humanistic "sound bite" from that era being, "Man is the measure of all things." In this drawing we see that Leonardo
takes this idea almost quite literally and scientifically.
In addition to the idea of "man" in a general sense, Leonardo, consistent with classical thinking, chooses to represent
the nude male figure rather than the nude female. This choice is quite deliberate because much of the thinking
concerning classical humanism revolves around the specifically male experience of the world.
Context: Leonardo's notebooks are precisely and this is why Bill Gates has bought them all up and now owns all the
rights to them. Aside from their initial value as antique works by a master, they are an invaluable source of
Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, information for modern scholars concerning both how Leonardo thought about the world and also how an artist from
Study of proportions, c1492 the Renaissance might have thought. Within its pages are his observations concerning science, art, his inventions of
flying machines, his studies of anatomy, observations of his fellow man and commentaries on other's ideas and texts.
from Vitruvius's
De Architectura (1st
century BCE)
Pen and ink, 13"x 9"
Gallerie dell'Accademia,
Venice
In Stokstad you can read the quote from Vitruvius' treatise. Here's another quote from Leonardo that applies to how he thought about the human
figure in a rationalistic and scientific manner.

From chin to the starting of the hair is a tenth part of the figure.
From the chin to the top of the head is an eighth part.
And from the chin to the nostrils is a third a part of the face.
And the same from the nostrils to the eyebrows, and from the eyebrows to the starting of the hair.
If you set your legs so far apart as to take the fourteenth part from the height, and you open and raise your arms until you touch the line
of the crown of the head with your middle fingers, you must know that the center of the circle formed by the extremities of the
outstretched limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will form an equilateral triangle.
The span of a man's outstretched arms is equal to his height.
quoted from Artists on Art, from the 14th to the 20th Century, edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, (New York, Pantheon
Books)
Vitruvius
fl. 1st century BC in full MARCUS VITRUVIUS POLLIO, Roman architect, engineer, and author of the celebrated treatise De
architectura (On Architecture), a handbook for Roman architects. Little is known of Vitruvius' life, except what can be gathered from his
writings, which are somewhat obscure on the subject. Although he nowhere identifies the emperor to whom his work is dedicated, it is
likely that the first Augustus is meant and that the treatise was conceived after 27 BC. Since Vitruvius describes himself as an old man,
it may be inferred that he was also active during the time of Julius Caesar. Vitruvius himself tells of a basilica he built at Fanum (now
Fano).
De architectura was based on his own experience, as well as on theoretical works by famous Greek architects such as Hermogenes. The
treatise covers almost every aspect of architecture, but it is limited, since it is based primarily on Greek models, from which Roman
architecture was soon decisively to depart in order to serve the new needs of proclaiming a world empire. De architectura is divided into
10 books dealing with city planning and architecture in general; building materials; temple construction and the use of the Greek orders;
public buildings (theatres, baths); private buildings; floors and stucco decoration; hydraulics; clocks, mensuration, and astronomy; and
civil and military engines. Vitruvius' outlook is essentially Hellenistic. His wish was to preserve the classical tradition in the design of
temples and public buildings, and his prefaces to the separate books of his treatise contain many pessimistic remarks about the
contemporary architecture. Most of what Pliny says in his Natural History about Roman construction methods and wall painting was
taken from Vitruvius, though unacknowledged. Vitruvius' expressed desire that his name be honoured by posterity was realized.
Throughout the antique revival of the Renaissance, the classical phase of the Baroque, and in the Neoclassical period, his work was the
chief authority on ancient classical architecture.
The text of De architectura with an English translation is published in the Loeb Classical Library in two volumes.

Renaissance Art
"Vitruvius." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 11, 2002.
Even though it was against the law, Leonardo was still able to obtain corpses and dissect them. Leonardo's
studies of anatomy initially make sense from a rationalistic point of view for artists. He states in one of his
Anatomical studies from Leonardo's notebooks,
notebooks
It is a necessary thing for a painter, in order to be able to fashion limbs correctly in the positions and actions
which they can represent in the nude, to know anatomy of sinews, bones, muscles, and tendons in order to
know, in the various different movements and impulses, which sinew or muscle is the cause of each
movement and to make only those prominent and thickened, and not the others all over the limb, as do many
who, in order to appear great draftsmen, make their nudes wooden and without grace, so that it seems rather
as if you were looking at a sack of nuts than a human form or a bundle of radishes rather than the muscles of
nudes.
quoted from Artists on Art, from the 14th to the 20th Century, edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco
Treves, (New York, Pantheon Books)
So then, you may ask yourself, why did he choose to study an unborn child in the womb. The answer is that
he was a Renaissance man an interested also in pure science.
A flying machine by Leonardo.

Form: This is a large drawing on brown paper that uses the brown of the paper as part of its
value structure. The medium brown tone of the paper served as the middle tones of the drawing
and then the lights and darks were established with chalk and charcoal.
In several sections of the drawing, Leonardo has chosen to leave sections unfinished in terms of
value and we can see contour lines that indicate the forms. Some of the contour lines are rough
and several have some "false" starts and corrections he made.
The overall composition is fits the figures in a pyramidal form in the foreground of the image.
The relationship of the figures although placed within a stable triangular form is still somewhat
awkward and it looks almost as if Leonardo has collaged the figures together. In the
background of the image is an idealized landscape.
Iconography: The iconography of the image deals with the holy family in a humanistic
fashion. This holy family and its gestures are meant to relate to your own family and this ties
in with the Catholic humanist ideal of seeing the image of Christ in the world that surrounds
you and with the concept of traditional family values.
The concept of faith, sacrifice, wisdom and idealism are related almost in a river like flow from
Anne all the way down to St. John. The start or source of this knowledge comes from "God the
Father" who is not represented but pointed towards by St. Anne, Mary's mother on whom Mary
sits. In some ways, this refers back to the "throne of wisdom" them that was evidenced in
Giotto and Cimabue's painting but in this case, Leonardo's drawing is a correction of the
original schema. In this case, St. Anne becomes the original throne on which Mary rests.
From Anne comes Mary, who offers her child to the world and he in turn offers his blessing, in
the form of a gesture, and therefore wisdom, to the apostle John who will go and relate the
"good news" to his followers.

Renaissance Art
From another perspective, this image also communicates the point of view of the Renaissance
audience about the roles of women. The women in this image are in some ways representative
of the "ideal" woman. Clearly an image like this incorporates the point of view that
motherhood is a very high calling. Since images like this were primarily commissioned by
male patrons and made by male artists some historians have named this phenomena the "male
gaze."
Context: This large drawing is neither a study of a finished drawing for presentation in the
Leonardo, Virgin and St. Anne with the Christ strictest sense. Although in some ways it is both. This drawing is a cartoon and is a planning
Child drawing or design. In some ways it's a form of carbon paper. The drawing would have been
and the Young John the Baptist. c 1500-1 used in a similar fashion to the paper designs dress makers use. The drawing would have been
Charcoal heightened with white on brown paper, pierced with a pin or awl along its main contours and then the image would have been
54x39" (139x101 cm) transferred to a canvas or board by "pouncing" charcoal or chalk through the holes created by
National Gallery, London the pin.
Stokstad explains that there is no finished painting associated with this drawing, however,
Leonardo has several paintings that are very similar to it. It was not unknown of and actually a
fairly common practice to recycle old cartoons, and the basic designs of paintings over and over
again. For example, Cimabue has several version of the seated Madonna that look almost
identical but for minor differences in color, iconography the number of angels and the apostles
who accompany her. This may account for the weird interrelationship and tangle of legs
between Mary and Anne in the image. It is possible that Leonardo recycled and collaged some
old ideas and figures in this cartoon. Another painting that shares many of these qualities with
this cartoon is Leonardo's Virgin and St. Anne with the Christ Child, 1510 now in the Louvre.

Iconography: This work shares almost the same exact content as the cartoon above; however, in this the
St. John is substituted with a lamb. The lamb is symbolic of Christ as the Lamb of God and of his
preordained sacrifice.
Some minor changes dealing with the gestures and poses of the figures are in evidence. Most noticeably
is Anne's. In this version she does not chose to gesticulate towards the heavens but instead places her
hand on her hip in to compliment this self assured and calm gesture she smiles benevolently down on her
progeny.
Formal: An element that blurs the line between iconography and formalism is the use of the triangular or
pyramidal organization of the figures. This shape is both iconic of the Trinity and it is a visual device
which pulls the eye back into the picture plane and stabilizes the composition.
The "cut and paste" of the three figures, especially in how the figure of Mary relates to the figure of St.
Anne, can probably be traced back to the use of older studies or cartoons which Leonardo has combined.
This painting also shares a lot in common with his Mona Lisa. The shared qualities involved deal with
his creation of space by using two devices, the use of atmospheric or aerial perspective and the use of
sfumato.

Alberti's system of linear perspective failed to solve many problems related to the effective
portrayal of depth by limiting it to a horizon line and by giving the appearance that the various

Renaissance Art
planes in a painting are stacked much like a stage set.3 By careful observation of nature as the
Leonardo, Virgin and St. Anne with the ultimate teacher, Leonardo solves these problems, "Perspective is divided into three parts, of
Christ Child. 1510 which the first is concerned solely with the outlines of the bodies; the second in the diminution
Oil on wood, 168,5 x 130 cm of colors at varying distances; the third in the loss of definition of bodies at various
Musée du Louvre, Paris distances."4 Leonardo observed and defined atmospheric perspective and color perspective
which in combination are often referred to as "aerial perspective."
Leonardo explains color perspective this way, ". . . through variations in the air we are made
aware of the different distances of various buildings. . . therefore make the first building. . . its
own color; the next most distant make more blue. . . at another distance bluer yet and that
which is five time more distant make five times more blue."5 This principle is demonstrated in
the background of Mona Lisa: the ground and hills directly behind the subject are painted in
warm tones of reddish browns and tans. As the landscape recedes the mountains and water
become progressively more blue. Leonardo also noted that air is more dense closest to the
earth, therefore the bases of hills will always appear lighter than the summit; he applies this
theory to the hills behind the sitter's shoulders which start out a tan color and become dark
brown.6
Leonardo's optical observations delineated atmospheric perspective in this way: "[t]hat thing
will be less evident that is furthest removed from the eye. The boundaries of things in the
second plane will not be discerned like those in the first."7 This theory is especially well
developed in the backgrounds of Mona Lisa and Madonna and Saint Anne, which become less
and less detailed as the images recede until they become so distant to the eye that they
disappear in the atmosphere. Leonardo's establishment of these principles brought to an end
the medieval system of absolute color and allowed artists to compress miles of landscape onto
a flat picture plane.8
Endnotes
1. Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, (New Haven and others: Yale University Press,
1989), 197.
2. Serge Bramly, Leonardo: Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci, Sian Reynolds, trans.,
(New York: Harper and Collins Publishers, 1991),
3. William V. Dunning, Changing Image of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in
Photo of atmospheric perspective Painting, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 42.
4. Kemp, 16.
5. Kemp, 80.
6. Kemp, 83-84.
7. Kemp, 85-87.|
8. Marcia Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68.
The following is part of an essay excerpted from an art historical magazine published by Chico
State called "Contrapposto" which can be found at
http://www.csuchico.edu/art/contrapposto/contrapposto99/pages/contents.html
"What Insights do Leonardo's Writings Shed on His Work?" by S. Lee Hager go to this site
for the full essay
http://www.csuchico.edu/art/contrapposto/contrapposto99/pages/essays/art345/hagerl.html
"Man is the measure?"

Women's roles during the Renaissance
Context and Iconography: The Male Gaze
The series of images at the left are almost major landmarks in understanding the
Renaissance conception of the difference between male and female roles. Images
such as these and the writings of Reniassance authors, such as those by Castiglione
and Christine de Pizan are in some ways representative of the "ideal" roles for each
gender. Since images like this were primarily commissioned by male patrons and
made by male artists some historians have named this phenomena the "male gaze."

Renaissance Art
Leonardo and his contemporaries literally believed that, "Man is the measure of all
things." In this drawing we see that Leonardo takes this idea almost quite literally
and scientifically. Leonardo, consistent with classical thinking, chooses to represent
the nude male figure rather than the nude female. This choice is quite deliberate
because much of the thinking concerning classical humanism revolves around the
specifically male experience of the world. In fact, authors like Castiglione
specifically look on men who have,

. . .such a countenance as this is, will I have our Courtier to have, and
Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, Giotto di Bondone, not be so soft and womanish as many procure to have: that do not only
Study of proportions, c1492 Virgin and Child Enthroned, curl the hair, and pick the brows, but also pamper themselves in every
from Vitruvius's De (Ognissanti Altar,) c 1310. point like the most wanton and dishonest women in the world. One
Architectura Tempera and gold on wood, would think that in the way they walk, stand, and in all their gestures so
(1st century BCE) 10'8"x6'8" tender and weak, that their limbs were ready to fall apart. Their
Pen and ink, 13"x 9" Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence pronunciation and language are effeminate. These men, seeing that nature
Gallerie dell'Accademia, has not made them women, ought not to be esteemed in place of good
Venice women, but like common Harlots to be banished, not only out of
princes’ courts, but also out of the company of Gentlemen. To come
therefore to the quality of the person,
Catiglione, Excerpt from the "Courtier"
Images of Mary can almost always be traced back to the Gothic depiction of Mary
as the "Throne of Wisdom." In most images, such as in these by Giotto and
Leonardo, she not only serves as a mother but as a platform or throne for her child.
Stokstad refers to this as symbolic of the old testament references to the Lion
Throne of King Solomon who is known as a wise and fair ruler and judge, but it is
also a communication of the male conceived ideal of what the perfect woman
should be.
Even when the Renaissance artist breaks with tradition and begins to think critically
about the new roles of men and women, as in the Arnolfini wedding portrait and
Leonardo, Virgin and St. Christine de Pizan's writings, we still can see that both support the concept that
Anne there are appropriate roles for males and females in the world.
Jan van Eyck Arnolfini
with the Christ Child. 1510 Wedding 1434
Oil on wood, 168,5 x 130 cm oil and tempera on oak
God has similarly ordained man and woman to serve Him in different
82x60cm offices and also to aid and comfort one another, each in their ordained
Musée du Louvre, Paris
task, and to each sex has given a fitting and appropriate nature and
inclination to fulfill their offices. Inasmuch as the human species often
errs in what it is supposed to do, God gives men strong and hardy bodies
for coming and going as well as for speaking boldly. And for this reason,
men with this nature learn the laws - and must do so - in order to keep
the world under the rule of justice and, in case anyone does not wish to
obey the statutes which have been ordained and established by reason of
law, are required to make them obey with physical constraint and force
of arms, a task which women could never accomplish. Nevertheless,
though God has given women great understanding
Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies 1405
In the case of the Arnolfini portrait, the role is that of the good wife. Notice that
being a wife is also being a good mother and we can see this symbolically in
Giovanna Cenami's swelling belly and bunched up drapery which symbolizes
Albrecht Durer, Adam and pregnancy according to Panofsky.
BALDUNG GRIEN, Hans
Eve. 1504 Aristotle and Phyllis 1513 Both Castiglione and de Pizan seem to warn us off of changing the male and female
engraving 9"x7" Woodcut, 33 x 23,6 cm roles and sticking to what we know or is prescribed in the Bible. In fact, many
Philadelphia Museum of Art
images of females who break out of these traditional roles, such as the biblical
women, Eve, Judith, and Suzanne and the not so biblilical Phyllis are responsible

Renaissance Art
for our down fall and in this case of Eve for our "original sin."

Form: This is a simple sketch in pen and ink that was probably a prelimionary drawing for
an engraving or a painting. The anatomy is rather stiff and less gestural than those of his
contempoarry Italian counterparts.
Space is created through a size scale relationship of foreground to background and a

variation of marks in the nackground buildings indicates a use of atmospheric perspective.
Grien uses cross contour lines (lines that literally follow the direction across the curves of
the trunks) to indicate the texture of the tree and cross hatching to develop the value
structure of the figures and their drapery in the foreground. These linear techniques would
have been important for a printmaker to master.
Iconography: The them of an "ill matched couple," which usually depicts a young and
beautiful maiden in the company of an older man is a common them in Renaissance art of
the North. In many images the younger woman has her hand on the purse of the older man
but in this case the subject matter of the image is a young beautiful woman dressed in
Renaissance clothing of the Northern style riding around or taming an older man. Images
like this were meant to be a warning to men of the power of inappropriate passion and a
warning against the sexual powers of young woman.
Context: More specifically this relates to the story of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and
Phyllis, the wife of his pupil Alexander the Great. According to the Brittanica,
"in late 343 or early 342 Aristotle, at about the age of 42, was invited by Philip
II of Macedon to his capital at Pella to tutor his 13-year-old son, Alexander. As
the leading intellectual figure in Greece, Aristotle was commissioned to prepare
Alexander for his future role as a military leader. As it turned out, Alexander
was to dominate the Greek world and defend it against the Persian Empire."
This union of older philosopher master was the beginning of a nearly lifelong advisory
position for Aristotle.
Alexander respected the superior intellect of Aristotle in all things and felt that Aristotle
represented the ideal intellectual who represented a total mastery of the intellectual over the
physical self. (Remember the Apollonian Dionysian conflict?)
Hans Baldung Grien,
Phyllis questioned Aristsotles absolute control and according to legend made a bet with
Aristotle and Phyllis. 1503
Alexander that she could show him that passion was stronger than reason. She began to
pen and ink
flirt with Aristotle. After inflaming Aristotle with lust, he began to beg for a sexual trist.
Phyllis informed Alexander that she had the proof he sought and instructed Alexander to
hide in the bushes and watch while she literally mad an "ass" out of Aristotle.
In order to get what he wanted, Aristotle had to agree to do whatever Phyllis wanted. She
instructed Aristotle to get down on all fours and allow her to ride him around the
courtyard.

Form: In this variation of the theme, the two figures are nude and the total environment is
much more worked out. This image indicates a fairly good use of anatomy and perspective
and shows more of a development of the mark making discussed in Grien's drawing. The
development of the vocabulary of marks would have been important for Grien to be able to
make a high quality engraving.

Engraving
In engraving, the design is cut into metal with a graver or burin. The burin is a
steel rod with a square or lozenge-shaped section and a slightly bent shank. The
cutting is accomplished by pushing the burin into the metal plate. The deeper it
penetrates into the metal, the wider the line; variations in depth create the
swelling tapering character of the engraved line. After the engraving is finished,
the slight burr raised by the graver is cleaned off with a scraper. The engraved
line is so sharp and clean that it asserts itself even if cut over a densely etched
area. In the print, the engraved line is notable for its precision and intensity. In
engraving, the hand does not move freely in any direction but pushes the graver
forward in a line; a change of direction is achieved by the manipulation of the

Renaissance Art
plate with the other hand. Although copper, zinc, aluminum, and magnesium
plates are used--and in the past soft iron and even steel were used--the best all-
around metal is copper. It has the most consistent structure and is neither too soft
nor too hard.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
BALDUNG GRIEN, Hans

Aristotle and Phyllis 1513
Woodcut, 33 x 23,6 cm

Context: In the North, places like Germany, France and Holland, the art market was a bit
different than in Italy. Although the Reformation did not officially begin until 1518, there
were stirrings of it earlier than that.
In Northern towns and cities, there was a different distrubution of wealth and probably a
larger upper middle class than in Italy. In addition to these factors, the main patron for the
arts was in Italy in the Churches of Rome, Padua and Florence. Since individuals could
afford to buy work for smaller prices many artists sought out this different market. The
print market allowed artists to sell multiple copies of the same images to a larger number of
people and make as much money from it as the sale of one or two paintings.
This also freed some of the artists from the typical more Catholic or overtly religious
iconography of much of the art of the South and allowed them to explore other kinds of
imagery and subjects.

Iconography: Stokstad describes the iconography of this image as a "moral lesson on the power
of evil" but more than that, Stokstad discusses the use of images of witches in his images as an
expression of evil. It is interesting that this is one of the roles that older, perhaps unattractive
woman were accused of during the Renaissance and well into the 1800's. In some ways, the
depiction of witches in the art of the Renaissance represents the anti-ideal for a woman. In this
way, woman are still provided with a role model of what not to become.


Renaissance Art
Form and Context:
Woodcut is the technique of printing designs from planks of wood. . . It is one of the
oldest methods of making prints from a relief surface, having been used in China to
decorate textiles since the 5th century AD. In Europe, printing from wood blocks on
textiles was known from the early 14th century, but it had little development until
paper began to be manufactured in France and Germany at the end of the 14th century.
. . In Bavaria, Austria, and Bohemia, religious images and playing cards were first
made from wood blocks in the early 15th century, and the development of printing
from movable type led to widespread use of woodcut illustrations in the Netherlands
and in Italy. With the 16th century, black-line woodcut reached its greatest perfection
with Albrecht Dürer and his followers Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein. In the
Netherlands Lucas van Leyden and in Italy Jacopo de' Barbari and Domenico
Campagnola, who were, like Dürer, engravers on copper, also made woodcuts.
As wood is a natural material, its structure varies enormously and this exercises a
strong influence on the cutting. Wood blocks are cut plankwise. The woods most often
used are pear, rose, pine, apple, and beech. The old masters preferred fine-grained
hardwoods because they allow finer detail work than softwoods, but modern
printmakers value the coarse grain of softwoods and often incorporate it into the
design.
Hans Baldung Grien. Stupified Groom.

(Bewitched Groom)
1544. Woodcut 13"x 7"
State Museum of Berlin
The printing of woodcuts is a relatively simple process because it does not require
great pressure. Although presses are used, even hand rubbing with a wooden spoon
can produce a good print. The ink used to print woodcuts must be fairly solid and
sticky, so that it lies on the surface without flowing into the hollows. The printing ink
can be deposited on the relief either with dabbers or with rollers. Thinner papers are
particularly suitable for woodcuts because they make rich prints without heavy
pressure.

Renaissance Art
TIZIANO Vecellio (Titian) The Venus of Urbino 1538 Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italian Renaissance
In the background of Titian’s painting entitled "The Venus of Urbino" (1538) are two women looking inside or placing things inside a chest. This
chest or cassone is most likely a dowry chest, in which case the women are then preparing the chest with gifts for the upcoming nuptials. Venus,
the goddess of beauty, nude in the foreground, presides over the event, but there’s something wrong with this picture. Venus is really the Duke of
Urbino’s courtesan (mistress) and the title of the painting is just a disguise to make a nearly pornographic portrait palatable. This kind of double
meaning in a painting is common during the Renaissance especially in portrayals of women.
What is also interesting about this images is that the artist chose to juxtapose the eroticized female form with commodities or luxury items. By
playing the textures and body of the female against expensive fabrics, fur, fruit, and dowery chest containing the family jewels and porcelain, the
artist is also making the human female form another commodity which can be bought and sold. In this way, the wealth of the patron is also
eroticized. This device is played off again and again throughout the history of art.
The cassone is a familiar object in the upper class Renaissance home. Provided by the bride’s family and kept throughout her life the chest is
symbol of her marriage. The decorations on the chest are designed to educate the woman who owns it. The images that adorn cassoni relate familiar
classical and biblical narratives concerning the lives of great women. For example, San Francisco’s "Legion of Honor" has a panel from a cassone
by Jacopo del Sellaio that depicts the "Legend of Brutus and Portia," circa 1485. Both Plutarch (AD 46-119), a Greek historian, and Shakespeare
(1554-1616) in his play "Julius Caesar," depict Portia as a strong and loyal wife. In Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar," Portia exclaims, "Think you I am
no stronger than my sex, Being so fathered and so husbanded?" (Act 2, i, 319-320) and stabs herself in the leg to prove to Brutus that she can bear
any discomfort for him. After she learns of Brutus’ defeat, she kills herself by swallowing hot coals. Another cassone from the Louvre depicts the
Old Testament story of Queen Esther and her self-sacrificing patriotic acts that saved the Jewish people. The subtext of these tales is not just loyalty
but self-sacrificing loyalty in the face of adversity.
Titian's painting has been the subject of much observation. It's interesting that so much positive "press" has been associated with this image
considering how much it has been vilified in the past. Mark Twain, in his biography Tramp Abroad, recorded his response to his encounter with
the Titian painting:
You enter [the Uffizi] and proceed to that most-visited little gallery that exists in the world --the Tribune-- and there, against
the wall, without obstructing rap or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world
possesses -- Titian's Venus. It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed --no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and
hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude there would be a fine howl --but there the Venus lies for anybody to gloat over that
wants to --and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and art has its privileges. I saw a young girl stealing furtive
glances at her; I saw young men gazing long and absorbedly at her, I saw aged infirm men hang upon her charms with a
pathetic interest. How I should like to describe her --just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up in the world...yet the
world is willing to let its sons and its daughters and itself look at Titian's beast, but won't stand a description of it in

Renaissance Art
words....There are pictures of nude women which suggest no impure thought -- I am well aware of that. I am not railing at
such. What I am trying to emphasize is the fact that Titian's Venus is very far from being one of that sort. Without any
question it was painted for a bagnio and it was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. In truth, it is a trifle too
strong for any place but a public art gallery.
Now that you know how Twain felt about this work. This poem by Browning discusses a similar painting. It is used by the narrator of the poem
as a point of departure to discuss how he feels about his last wife and how he feels women should behave. As you read it, try to relate the painting
above to it.

"My Last Duchess" - Robert Browning - 1842 28 Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
29 She rode with round the terrace - all and each
1 That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, 30 Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
2 Looking as if she were alive. I call 31 Or blush, at least. She thanked men, - good! but thanked
3 That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf's hands 32 Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked
4 Worked busily a day, and there she stands. 33 My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
5 Will't please you sit and look at her? I said 34 With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
6 "Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read 35 This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
7 Strangers like you that pictured countenance, 36 In speech - which I have not - to make your will
8 The depth and passion of its earnest glance, 37 Quite clear to such an one, and say "Just this
9 But to myself they turned (since none puts by 38 Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
10 The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) 39 Or there exceed the mark" - and if she let
11 And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, 40 Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
12 How such a glance came there; so, not the first 41 Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse -
13 Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not 42 E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
14 Her husband's presence only, called that spot 43 Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
15 Of joy into the Duchess' cheek; perhaps 44 Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
16 Fra Pandolf chanced to say, "Her mantle laps 45 Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
17 Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint 46 Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
18 Must never hope to reproduce the faint 47 As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
19 Half-flush that dies along her throat." Such stuff 48 The company below, then. I repeat,
20 Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 49 The Count your master's known munificence
21 For calling up that spot of joy. She had 50 Is ample warrant that no just pretense
22 A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad, 51 Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
23 Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er 52 Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
24 She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. 53 At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
25 Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast, 54 Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
26 The dropping of the daylight in the West, 55 Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
27 The bough of cherries some officious fool 56 Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.

Annie Yang
Art History-Term Paper
Professor Mencher
July 17, 2001
The First Celebrated Woman Artist of the Renaissance:
The Renaissance is a period known as the "rebirth of the classics". Indeed this age, about 1300 CE to
1600 CE, went back to the ideals that Greeks and Romans valued. One social norm that was still present
in the 1500s was that of gender roles. Viewed under the male gaze, women were still obligated to be
proper housewives. Because the male gaze, which was art made in terms of the male view, was so
Sofonisba Anguissola, Self Portrait of the dominant during that time, women didn’t do much than give birth. However, Sofonisba Anguissola was
Artist fortunate enough to be born the eldest of a Cremona nobleman who "was fully committed to the
with Sisters and Governess. 1555 education of his daughters, and obtained for them the best teachers available," (Recognition pg. 25).
(The Chess Game) Sofonisba was so talented in painting that she later studied with Bernardino Campi and was even
oil on canvas, 27"x37" praised by Michelangelo. After her father died, she was the sole guardian and benefactor to her six
Nardowe Museum, Poznan, Poland siblings. "The Chess Game" (1555) is one painting that shows how she got her "claim to fame". First of
all, "The Chess Game" seems to exhibit some form of Renaissance art, which might have made it
accepted. Her style of painting, by iconographic analysis, is well within the boundaries of the male
gaze, which was similar to the writings of Christine de Pizan (radical, yet still within the status quo).
Also, the historical background from which she was from and her soap opera-like life added to her

Renaissance Art
increased popularity. In order for Sofonisba Anguissola to be acknowledged as a Renaissance female

artist, she needed to be accepted as an artist with knowledge of basic art skills, considered a traditional
female as viewed by the male gaze, but also loved by all.
"The Chess Game" is an oil painting on canvas that displays her vast knowledge of art. I say this
because "she colors within the lines" and was a conservative artist, not "crossing the line" at any time.
During the Renaissance, more specifically the 1550s, the use of chiaroscuro, perspective, and depth
perception were already common. Sofonisba used chiaroscuro on parts of the face by making one side
appear lighted and the other with a cast shadow. From her picture, you can tell that she has training and
practice from this relatively new style of painting. Also, she uses the new technique of perspective
incredibly well and therefore; proving her advanced learning. The lines on the chessboard, along with
the edges of the table that it’s on both can be drawn back to a vanishing point somewhere in the
background. Anguissola masters depth perception by her use of a foreground, background, and a "side
ground". The foreground consists of three of her four younger sisters. The background is a faint outline
of hills while the "side ground" is made up with shrubbery and her maid. The placement of these
objects show that she understands the fact that as distance increases, so does fuzziness. Her knowledge
of Renaissance art techniques is the reason she is accepted as an artist.
Self Portrait at the Spinaret with
Governess c1555 Being accepted as an artist, Sofonisba Anguissola then needed to be accepted as a 16th century woman.
Many of the desired qualities a woman should have are, coincidently?, depicted in her sisters in this
In many of her self portraits Sofinisba is same work of art. After doing a lot of research (including three books all published in 1976) , I have
not depicted come to realize that "The Chess Game" is actually a painting of Sofonisba’s sisters Lucia, Minerva, and
painting but rather pursuing an activity
Europa and not a self-portrait in the traditional sense. I realized that she might have not painted under
that would
the male gaze for a personal ad for herself, but instead through her sisters by use of iconographic
have been a "proper" kind of pursuit.
symbols. As the oldest daughter, the younger sisters must have looked up to her. It seems that Sofonisba
Notice that
drew this picture either when she was present at this chess game or after it had occurred. For this
she is depicted with her chaperone who
reason, we can deduce that she acts like a mother because she is taking care of them. We still know that
was
she is intelligent because she must have been the one who taught her little sisters the game of chess. We
also a close friend.
also know that she is still "in control"because of the fact that her sisters are well dressed in silk and still
have a governess around. The sisters all seem healthy and not skin and bones like one would expect and
therefore money is not a problem. These symbols show "the unknown" Anguissola through the male
gaze indirectly through "the known information" of the painting. So in a way, she is still "promoting"
herself in this picture even though she’s not in it. Painting under and in reference to the themes of
popular preference allow for Sofonisba to be accepted now as a woman in the Renaissance.
The last and foremost reason that Sofonisba Anguissola is an internationally known Renaissance painter
was because of her social life. Contextually speaking, her educational background, family history, and
social life all contributed to her popularity. Her educational background not only included an art
apprenticeship, but also learning Latin and how to play musical instruments. Success was reached partly
due to her family history and mainly because she was born into nobility. A noble birth means she had
already a head start even before some male artists. Her father sent one of her drawings to Michelangelo
and the positive response was sure to be another explanation to her fame. This incident is what gave her
a chance to be an official court painter for Phillip II of Spain in 1559. Some say that Anguissola didn’t
become famous for just her artistic talent and recognition, but because of her public life. In 1570, she
Self Portrait married a Sicilian noble named Fabrizio de Moncada, went to Italy went him, and supposedly received a
large sum of money from him. I guess the personal ad from all of her self-portraits and the indirect ad
from "The Chess Game" paid off! Fabrizio died and after he did, she went back to Genoa on a ship. At
the end of her ship "adventure", she agreed to marry the ship’s captain Lomellini. Her soap opera life,
confirmed by, "The publicity that her spectacular and romantic career attracted must have instilled in the
minds of other talented young women the idea that an artistic career was possible," (1550-1950 pg.106).
Even though Sofonisba may not have been known for her artwork, at least by now she was well known.
She probably was accepted by society as an artist, female, and at this point an intelligent, enjoyed
person.
Sofonisba Anguissola was not in the painting "The Chess Game", but through formal, iconographic, and
contextual analysis, her life, as she wanted it to be seen, was shown. We see that she had to go through
a series of acceptances by society to now be admired. Accepted by society as an artist was mainly due
Portrait of Anguissola's brother and sisters to the proper art, language, and music education she had the privilege of getting. As for her acceptance
c1555 as a female in the Renaissance, I claim that she painted in a male gaze style that was somewhat
untraditional (showing women in a different way), but still socially acceptable. By not pushing the
Images like this tend to lend authority to
extremes too far, I believe she got the appreciation of both men and women. Anguissola almost painted
Annie's
the male gaze and the "female gaze" all at once. The male gaze was that she was still all that a man

Renaissance Art
idea that the "Chess Game" is really a

wanted in a woman (motherly, intelligent, and pretty). The female gaze may have not come from the
portrait
painting itself, but instead her life. She was the first female Renaissance artist to get the credit she
of her regard for her siblings rather than
deserved, even if most of her success came from her soap-opera life. Women in art began to grow, as
an outright self portrait.
more followed in Sofonisba’s footsteps. Because of her, they knew how to be accepted as a female artist

and simply emulated what she did. "A grand love story unfolds, too, as she overcame many obstacles to
win her beloved husband," (Internet: Burke, Kathleen), but Sofonisba Anguissola also overcame many
obstacles to become famous as the first celebrated woman artist of the Renaissance.
Works Cited
Anguissola, Sofonisba. "The Chess Game". Muzeum Nardowe, Pozna?.
Burke, Kathleen. "Sofonisba Anguissola: Renaissance Painter Extraordinaire" Smithsonian Magazine

(May 1995): Online Internet. 1995.
Available at: http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues95/may95/anguissola.html
Harris, Ann Sutherland and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists: 1550-1950 First Edition. New York:
Random House Inc., 1976.
Petersen, Karen and J.J Wilson. Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal From the Early Middle
Ages to the Twentieth Century. New York: University Press, 1976.
Sparrow, Walter Shaw. Women Painters of the World. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1976: pg. 24-27.

Perugino's Perfect Plan

Context:
Pietro Perugino
b. c. 1450,, Città della Pieve, near Perugia, Romagna
d. , February/March 1523, Fontignano, near Perugia
byname of PIETRO DI CRISTOFORO VANNUCCI Italian early Renaissance
painter of the Umbria school, the teacher of Raphael. His work (e.g., "Giving of the
Keys to St. Peter," 1481-82, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Rome) anticipated High
Renaissance ideals in its compositional clarity, sense of spaciousness, and economy
of formal elements.
The first certain work by Perugino is a "Saint Sebastian," at Cerqueto, near Perugia.
This fresco, or mural painted on plaster with water-dissolved pigments, dates from
1478 and is typical of Perugino's style. He must have attained a considerable
reputation by this time, since he probably worked for Pope Sixtus IV in Rome,
1478-79, on frescoes now lost. Sixtus IV also employed him to paint a number of
the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace. Completed between 1481
and 1482, three narrative scenes behind the altar were destroyed by Michelangelo in
1535-36 in order to use the space for his fresco of the "Last Judgment." Of the
scenes completely by Perugino's own hand, only the fresco "Giving of the Keys to
St. Peter" has survived. The simple and lucid arrangement of the composition reveals
the centre of narrative action, unlike the frescoes in the same series by the Florentine
painter Sandro Botticelli, which, in comparison, appear overcrowded and confused
in their narrative focus. After completing his work in the Sistine Chapel, Perugino
Pietro Perugino, Delivery of the Keys to Saint returned to Florence, where he was commissioned to work in the Palazzo della
Peter, Signoria. In 1491 he was invited to sit on the committee concerned with finishing
(bottom most image) the Florence cathedral.
Fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.
"Perugino." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001
1482. 11'5.5" x 18'

Make sure you read Stokstad's analysis of this work.
Form: Perugino's fresco is an excellent synthesis of many different kinds of

formal perspectives. The use of linear perspective in this image places the

Renaissance Art
vanishing point directly in the center of the picture plane and directly in the
doorway of the temple in the center of the image. The linear perspective is
further enhanced by the use of the gridlike pavement that stretches across the
picture plane and the use of atmospheric perspective. There is also a
consistent use of chiaroscuro across the picture plane which unifies the
illusion of a consistent space.
Iconography and Context: First and foremost this image provides us with a
theological perspective in that the image centers around Jesus' passing his
authority down to Peter. In this instance, the point of view is decidedly
Catholic in how it supports the Roman papacy of Sixtus IV.
We also see an idealistic and neoplatonic perspective in the depiction of an

idealized or an imaginary space (which Stokstad discusses in some detail) and
the depiction of ideal and classical architectural forms. Notice that the
buildings in the background are based on Roman building forms.
The two structures flanking the center building are both Roman triumphal
Pietro Perugino, Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter, arches. The use of arches for a monument is an expression of Roman
Fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome. 1482. 11'5.5" x 18' technology and therefore Roman genius. The triumphal arch is a common
symbol that is dedicated to the victories of particular emperors.
The building in the center looks very much like the Pantheon in Rome and
this is no accident. The use and creation of central plan churches really took
off during the Renaissance.
The image above is an interpretation of the following from the Matthew 16
Matthew
Chapter 16
13
When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"
14
They replied, "Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets."
15
He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"
16
Simon Peter said in reply, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."
17
Jesus said to him in reply, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
18
And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
19
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth
shall be loosed in heaven."
20
Then he strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Messiah.
21
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the
scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.
22
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, "God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."
23
He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."
24
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.
25
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
26
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?
27
For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father's glory, and then he will repay everyone according to his conduct.
28
Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

Renaissance Art
During the Renaissance the ideal church plan tended to be centralized; that is, it was
symmetrical about a central point, as is a circle, a square, or a Greek cross (which has
four equal arms). Many Renaissance architects came to believe that the circle was the
most perfect geometric form and, therefore, most appropriate in dedication to a perfect
God.
Part of the reason for this was because of Leon Battista Alberti's treatise. According to the
Brittanica, Alberti wrote several treatises, his first,
The book On Painting, which he wrote in 1435, set forth for the first time the rules for
drawing a picture of a three-dimensional scene upon the two-dimensional plane of a panel
or wall. It had an immediate and profound effect upon Italian painting and relief work,
giving rise to the correct, ample, geometrically ordered space of the perspectival
Renaissance style. Later perspectival theorists, such as the painter Piero della Francesca
and Leonardo, elaborated upon Alberti's work, but his principles remain as basic to the
projective science of perspective as Euclid's do to plane geometry.
He then restored,
the classic text of Vitruvius, architect and architectural theorist of the age of the Roman
emperor Augustus. With customary thoroughness, Alberti embarked upon a study of the
architectural and engineering practices of antiquity that he continued when he returned to
Rome in 1443 with the papal court. By the time Nicholas V became pope in 1447, Alberti
was knowledgeable enough to become the Pope's architectural adviser. The collaboration
between Alberti and Nicholas V gave rise to the first grandiose building projects of
Renaissance Rome, initiating among other works the reconstruction of St. Peter's and the
Vatican Palace. As the Este prince was now dead, it was to Nicholas V that Alberti
dedicated in 1452 the monumental theoretical result of his long study of Vitruvius. This
was his De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture), not a restored text of Vitruvius
Raphael Marriage Of The Virgin 1509 oil but a wholly new work, that won him his reputation as the "Florentine Vitruvius." It
on panel became a bible of Renaissance architecture, for it incorporated and made advances upon
the engineering knowledge of antiquity, and it grounded the stylistic principles of
Notice that the same iconography of the classical art in a fully developed aesthetic theory of proportionality and harmony.
central plan church is used in Raphael's work
as well who was Perugino's teacher. "Alberti, Contribution to philosophy, science, and the arts." Britannica 2001 Standard
Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 30, 2002.
OK. So now you probably want to know who Vitruvius was. Vitruvius's ideas were first published
in his De architectura. The De architectura was then republished many times during the
Renaissance and used by such artists as Leonardo who expresses Vitruvius's ideas in his Vitruvian
Man.
Vitruvius
fl. 1st century BC in full MARCUS VITRUVIUS POLLIO, Roman architect, engineer, and author of the celebrated treatise De
architectura (On Architecture), a handbook for Roman architects. Little is known of Vitruvius' life, except what can be gathered from his
writings, which are somewhat obscure on the subject. Although he nowhere identifies the emperor to whom his work is dedicated, it is
likely that the first Augustus is meant and that the treatise was conceived after 27 BC. Since Vitruvius describes himself as an old man,
it may be inferred that he was also active during the time of Julius Caesar. Vitruvius himself tells of a basilica he built at Fanum (now
Fano).
De architectura was based on his own experience, as well as on theoretical works by famous Greek architects such as Hermogenes. The
treatise covers almost every aspect of architecture, but it is limited, since it is based primarily on Greek models, from which Roman
architecture was soon decisively to depart in order to serve the new needs of proclaiming a world empire. De architectura is divided into
10 books dealing with city planning and architecture in general; building materials; temple construction and the use of the Greek orders;
public buildings (theatres, baths); private buildings; floors and stucco decoration; hydraulics; clocks, mensuration, and astronomy; and
civil and military engines. Vitruvius' outlook is essentially Hellenistic. His wish was to preserve the classical tradition in the design of
temples and public buildings, and his prefaces to the separate books of his treatise contain many pessimistic remarks about the
contemporary architecture. Most of what Pliny says in his Natural History about Roman construction methods and wall painting was
taken from Vitruvius, though unacknowledged. Vitruvius' expressed desire that his name be honoured by posterity was realized.
Throughout the antique revival of the Renaissance, the classical phase of the Baroque, and in the Neoclassical period, his work was the
chief authority on ancient classical architecture.
The text of De architectura with an English translation is published in the Loeb Classical Library in two volumes.

Renaissance Art
"Vitruvius." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November 11, 2002.
Form: This small temple is a kind of cross between the Pantheon and the Parthenon. It has a dome and
is a central plan like the Pantheon but uses a different order, the Doric as in the Parthenon. It is also
contained within a small courtyard that was not part of its original design. Originally, the building was
to be placed in a circular colonnaded courtyard which was designed to "set off" the design of the temple
itself. According to the Brittanica, the building was "specifically inspired by the temple of Vesta at
Donato Bramante, Tempietto. Tivoli."
in the courtyard of San Pietro in
Iconography: The use of a classical design that refers back to the Parthenon and Pantheon is designed to
Montorio in Rome
give the building an antique and therefore authoritative and classic feel. The circular shape is almost like
1502
a target from above and would have been even more powerful as an icon if Bramante's original plans had
been followed. As it is, the buildings shape and design are also very appropriate because the symmetrical
design plays into its function which was to focus the attention of the monument on the site where St.
Peter was supposedly martyred.
Context: The construction of the Tempietto was commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. It's
name is actually an affectionate kind of nickname. Tempietto is an Italian nickname for small temple.
This building is specifically important in terms of context because it allowed Bramante to explore some
ideas that he would later on use in his design of St. Peter's Cathedral which was rebuilt, at least at first, in
central style plan.

Vesta at Tivoli engraving by Piranesi
Raphael

from Raphael
Last years in Rome.
Raphael was called to Rome toward the end of 1508 by Pope Julius II at the
suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante. At this time Raphael was little
known in Rome, but the young man soon made a deep impression on the volatile
Julius and the papal court, and his authority as a master grew day by day.
Raphael was endowed with a handsome appearance and great personal charm in
addition to his prodigious artistic talents, and he eventually became so popular
that he was called "the prince of painters."

Renaissance Art
Raphael spent the last 12 years of his short life in Rome. They were years of
feverish activity and successive masterpieces. His first task in the city was to
paint a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized rooms in the Vatican papal
apartments in which Julius himself lived and worked; these rooms are known
simply as the Stanze. The Stanza della Segnatura (1508-11) and Stanza
d'Eliodoro (1512-14) were decorated practically entirely by Raphael himself; the
murals in the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514-17), though designed by Raphael, were
largely executed by his numerous assistants and pupils.
The decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura was perhaps Raphael's greatest
work. Julius II was a highly cultured man who surrounded himself with the most
illustrious personalities of the Renaissance. He entrusted Bramante with the
construction of a new basilica of St. Peter to replace the original 4th-century
church; he called upon Michelangelo to execute his tomb and compelled him
against his will to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; and, sensing the
genius of Raphael, he committed into his hands the interpretation of the
philosophical scheme of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura. This theme
was the historical justification of the power of the Roman Catholic church
through Neoplatonic philosophy.
The four main fresco walls in the Stanza della Segnatura are occupied by the
"Disputa" and the "School of Athens" on the larger walls and the "Parnassus"
and "Cardinal Virtues" on the smaller walls. The two most important of these
frescoes are the "Disputa" and the "School of Athens." The "Disputa," showing a
celestial vision of God and his prophets and apostles above a gathering of
representatives, past and present, of the Roman Catholic church, equates through
its iconography the triumph of the church and the triumph of truth.
"Last years in Rome.." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM.

Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. December 3, 2002.
Stanza della Segnatura
Raphael School of Athens 1509-1510
fresco
The "School of Athens" is a complex allegory of secular knowledge, or
philosophy, showing Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers, past and
present, in a splendid architectural setting; it illustrates the historical continuity
of Platonic thought. The "School of Athens" is perhaps the most famous of all
Raphael's frescoes, and one of the culminating artworks of the High Renaissance.
Here Raphael fills an ordered and stable space with figures in a rich variety of
poses and gestures, which he controls in order to make one group of figures lead
to the next in an interweaving and interlocking pattern, bringing the eye to the
central figures of Plato and Aristotle at the converging point of the perspectival
space. The space in which the philosophers congregate is defined by the pilasters
and barrel vaults of a great basilica that is based on Bramante's design for the
new St. Peter's in Rome. The general effect of the fresco is one of majestic calm,
clarity, and equilibrium.


Renaissance Art
Raphael put portraits of important and

influential people in the painting as a
way to express the idea that the new
Papal court was an updated, yet
Catholic, school of Athens.
Raphael uses Leonardo's face as a model

for Plato, who gestures up.
Zoroaster, Ptolemy, Raphael and Sodoma
One of the skills that most painters needed to develop

during the Renaissance period was the ability to paint
portraits and accurate likenesses. Often this skill was
developed by painting with a the only model that one
might have available which is one's self. The
humanistic and platonic idea of perfectability also
gave rise to self reflection and observation and in this
case, self aggrandizement. A portrait then is not just
about the immediate apprearance but also it is a
symbol of the person. In this image we see that the
artist is studying himself and also demonstrating his
ability to create a strong physical likeness as well a Raphael, Self Portrait, 1506
psychological likeness.
Michelangelo
Form: This just over lifesize sculpture of a dying or bound "slave" shows us a powerful naturalistic figure carved in
marble. The anatomy is slightly distorted in that the head is a touch too small. The figure's posture is also an
exaggerated contrapposto that was referred to as a serpenata referring to the snake like writhing and counter posture
of the figure which is characteristic of Michelangelo's work. These are some of the characteristics you can see

Renaissance Art
throughout Michelangelo's works and is a quality that we also see in the artists of the Mannerist movement who
follow after him. Charles Baudelaire's poem Beacons provides a description that is both a formal description and an
symbolic analysis:

Michelangelo, a vague plane where one sees

Hercules mingled with Christ,
Powerful phantoms which in their twilights
Tear their shrouds by stretching their fingers;
Baudelaire's interpretation is not too far off the mark if you compare this sculpture against this stanza dedicated to
Michelangelo.
Marylin Stokstad devotes almost six pages of her survey to this giant, and if you've done the readings out of
Liaisons, you've probably have an impression of Michelangelo as a moody, tortured and melancholy artist. This
sculpture is an excellent work to begin with because it in some ways is the perfect symbol of what Michelangelo
strove for and often could not accomplish.
Context: This was meant to be part of a greater work that Michelangelo was called from Florence to Rome to create
by Pope Julius II in 1505. It was meant to be a monumental work which would have been placed within the nave of
the future reconstruction of St. Peter's. It was never completed and Michelangelo was pulled off the project to work
on the small chapel of Pope Sixtus called the Sistine Chapel in 1506. Michelangelo fought against this new
commission and much of the novel The Agony and the Ecstasy outlines the struggle between the Pope and
Michelangelo over these two projects. In short, Michelangelo was the loser in the battle and felt trapped and
tormented by the Pope.
Iconography: There are various interpretations of this sculpture since it was designed as one of the works that was
to be on Julius' tomb. The most apologetic to the Pope is that he freed Italy from ignorance and anarchy and that
the sculpture is symbolic of the forthcoming liberation. Another, proposed by Janson, is that the sculptures were
part of a series that represented the arts and were now shackled because of the Pope's death, but I like the more
contemporary psychological interpretation. This sculpture is probably a representation of Michelangelo's emotions.
He felt enslaved to the Pope and to his projects.
Michelangelo, Dying Slave,
c1513 There is also the possibility that Michelangelo was also tortured by a carnal desire to be with men. This is
evidenced in the poems and sonnets he composed for a you beautiful man named Tommasso Calvierri (who did not
return his affections) and in the various sensuous male nudes he sculpted over his career. One only needs to
compare these images of males to his females to get the idea.

On the left are two images. The top one is a documented self
portrait. In this image we can see Michelangelo uses heavy
chiaroscuro and a deep penetrating gaze to create an image
that is honest but also a bit dramatic. Notice that he includes
his shattered nose that you read about in both Vasari and
Stone's accounts.
One of the skills that most painters needed to develop during

the Renaissance period was the ability to paint portraits and
accurate likenesses. Often this skill was developed by
painting with a the only model that one might have available
which is one's self. The humanistic and platonic idea of
perfectability also gave rise to self reflection and observation.
A portrait then is not just about the immediate appearance but
also it is a symbol of the person. In this image we see that
the artist is studying himself and also demonstrating his
ability to create a strong physical likeness as well a
If the likeness is at all accurate one can then relate it to this

image of St. Bartholomew from the Last Judgment in the
Sistine Chapel which was painted in 1535. More than twenty
years after the completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-
1512).
Michelangelo, Self Portrait
The Saint was flayed alive for his troubles and if you look

Renaissance Art
Michelangelo, Detail of the Last Judgment, closely at the skin you may see that it looks a bit like Mike.
c1535 Further support for my interpretation of the Dying Slave
Sistine Chapel, Rome image above.

Stokstad discusses at length the circumstances and context
surrounding this sculpture for the Tomb of Julius.
Form: This image of Moses is extremely naturalistic and also

exhibits a bit of the serpentine movement that we see in his other
work. The posture of the figure and the proportions are also a bit
exaggerated because this work was meant to be seen from below.
This is one of the characteristics you can see throughout
Michelangelo's works and is a quality that we also see in the
artists of the Mannerist movement who follow after him.
Some of the details that show Michelangelo's virtuosity are the

fingers that are intertwined with the fabric and hair and the deep
undercutting and details of the hair itself. Often Michelangelo will
show fingers pressed into hair, fabric or flesh and these materials
seem to be responding to the pressure. This what is referred to as
an artist's conceit or concetto (italian for conceit) because it is hard
to do and shows his skill as an artist.
The pose is one in which the figures seem to be on the brink of

movement, almost as if they are about to rise out of the chairs.
Michelangelo. Moses, Tomb of Julius This pose can be seen throughout the body of Michelangelo's work
II. and can be directly related to the two classical works with which
c1513-1515. Marble, height 7'8.5" he would have been very familiar. The Laocoon and His Sons
Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, group newly excavated in Rome in 1506 and another fragment of
Rome sculpture, also in the Vatican collection called the Belvedere torso.
Iconography: The Renaissance understanding of classicism and its

kalos is strongly represented in Moses. Michelangelo has unified
the head of Greek philosopher, with the body of an athlete to form
a Christian Old Testament superman.
The horns on Moses' head refer to a mistranslation. As many

artists, he was misled by the translation of the word keren (plural
karnaim), which in Hebrew can mean both “horn” and “ray.”
Exodus xxxiv. 30, “All the children of Israel saw

Moses, and the skin of his face shone,” translated in the
Hagesandros, Polydoros, Vulgate, “Corn ta esset facies sua.” Rays of light were
and Athanadoros of Rhodes. called horns. Hence in Habakkuk (iii. 4) we read of
Laocoon and His Sons, probably the God, “His brightness was as the light, and He had horns
original [rays of light] coming out of His hand.” Michel Angelo
of the 1st C. CE or a Roman copy. depicted Moses with horns, following the Vulgate.
Marble ht 8' Musei Vaticani, Rome Belvedere Torso
Excavated 1506 c300-50 BCE- probably 1C BCE http://www.bartleby.com/81/11704.html
"Apollonius son of Nestor an
Athenian"
The Sistine Chapel is the papal chapel in the Vatican Palace that was erected in 1473-81 by the architect Giovanni dei Dolci
for Pope Sixtus IV (hence its name). It is famous for its Renaissance frescoes by Michelangelo.
The Sistine Chapel is a rectangular brick building with six arched windows on each of the two main (or side) walls and a
barrel-vaulted ceiling. The chapel's exterior is drab and unadorned, but its interior walls and ceiling are decorated with
frescoes by many Florentine Renaissance masters. The frescoes on the side walls of the chapel were painted from 1481 to
1483. On the north wall are six frescoes depicting events from the life of Christ as painted by Perugino, Pinturicchio, Sandro
Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandajo, and Cosimo Rosselli. On the south wall are six other frescoes depicting events from the life
of Moses by Perugino, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Domenico and Benedetto Ghirlandajo, Rosselli, Luca Signorelli, and

Renaissance Art
Bartolomeo della Gatta. Above these works, smaller frescoes between the windows depict various popes. For great ceremonial
occasions the lowest portions of the side walls were covered with a series of tapestries depicting events from the Gospels and
the Acts of the Apostles. These were designed by Raphael and woven in 1515-19 at Brussels.
. . .The frescoes on the ceiling, collectively known as the Sistine Ceiling, were commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1508 and
were painted by Michelangelo in the years from 1508 to 1512. They depict incidents and personages from the Old Testament.
The "Last Judgment" fresco on the west wall was painted by Michelangelo for Pope Paul III in the period from 1534 to 1541.
These two gigantic frescoes are among the greatest achievements of Western painting. A 10-year-long cleaning and restoration
of the Sistine Ceiling completed in 1989 removed several centuries' accumulation of dirt, smoke, and varnish. Cleaning and
restoration of the "Last Judgment" was completed in 1994.
As the pope's own chapel, the Sistine Chapel is the site of the principal papal ceremonies and is used by the Sacred College of
Cardinals for their election of a new pope when there is a vacancy.
"Sistine Chapel." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. December 3,
2002.

The Arrangement of the Narrative A semiotic or structuralist analysis
The diagram below explains that Michelangelo actually had "program" or design for the creation and flow of the overall narrative
associated with the ceiling very similar in nature to the way in which Giotto arranged the Arena Chapel and Ghiberti's doors.
The ceiling is entirely decorated with Old Testament stories, in keeping with the narrative as a typology. Over all the divisions in the
ceilings are painted trompe l’oeil frames that create distinctions between each story and allow for the organization of the panels. In
order to better understand the overall meaning of the narrative order of these stories, art historians use a the same theory that literary
analysts do to study the interrelationship of the stories or narratives. This kind of analysis is called a semiotic or structural analysis.
By looking at this wall as a whole, and interpreting the relationship of panel image to the others, it is possible to come up with a deeper
understanding of the set of frescoes as a whole. In this case the overall meaning of the frescoes relate to the Bible as it might have been
interpreted by St. Augustine 354-430. According to the Brittanica, Augustine's, "adaptation of classical thought to Christian teaching
created a theological system of great power and lasting influence. His numerous written works, the most important of which are
Confessions and City of God, shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much of medieval and modern
Christian thought."
St. Augustine, came up with a concept in which he

viewed the universe and man's existence as divided in
two worlds. One was the City of Man which was
temporary and fallible.
This is represented by the way in which the ceiling and

the chapel's space is divided.
Across the center of the chapel is a screen (called a rood

screen). Marked on the diagram as thick black line.
Since the Sistine Chapel was the Pope's private chapel
and only he and the clergy are allowed on the side of the
screen closest to the altar. This divides the worshippers
from the clergy.
On the clergy's side of the screen all the Old Testament

stories deal with Heaven. This is the "City of God"
which goes on forever and in which god will provide for
the faithful. This is where man was before sin.
On the other side of the screen is where we are allowed

to stand. Notice how it is quite literally the "City of
Man." The three episodes depicted on the ceiling which
depict sin are where we are allowed to stand.
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Built 1475-1481

painted by
Michelangelo between 1508-12

The center set of images represents scenes from the Old

Renaissance Art
Testament. The main themes are expulsion and sin. This refers
to our "original sin" and how we lost heaven.
Surrounding these scenes are images of the prophets and Sibyls

(prophets from Ancient Greece) and serve as a kind of thematic
framework in which to view the center scenes.
Beneath these stories and surrounding them are depictions of

ancestors of Christ and the Old Testament prophets who guide
us. Included in this are the Sibyls (prophets from Ancient
Greece) who have established the Classical foundation that all
this is built on. This foundation is very similar in content and
structure to the caryatids from the Acropolis, the seven virtues
and vices from the Arena Chapel and Ghiberti's doors.
All of these elements are further framed by the illusion of

classical architecture which surrounds each scene. This is very
similar to the the triumphal arch that serves as the framework of
Masaccio's Trinity with Donors.

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Built 1475-1481 painted by Michelangelo
between 1508-12

Form: This reproduction is one of the best for demonstrating Michelangelo's
use of intense or saturated colors on the ceiling. After the cleaning of the
chapel, many art historians were disturbed by the purity and exaggerated
nature of his color. If one looks very closely at the images, Michelangelo
sometimes would put pure strokes of color one next to the other so that when
the viewer saw it from below the colors would mix because the eye would
blend them together. This is called optical mixing. Mosaics also use this
quality but and is one of the first instance of its use in painting that we know
of.
This is one of the central panels from the Sistine Chapel and perhaps one of

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the most important. The figures are well over life size and they are muscular
God Creating Adam and idealized. The figure of Adam is posed in a reclining languid attitude
with the hand and finger extended towards God's finger.
The figure of God is surrounded by some kind of veil and contains figures that
range in age from infancy to young adulthood. God is depicted in motion as
an older bearded male. God's body is draped in a semi transparent veil which
allows the viewer to see the overall youthful musculature and detail without
revealing the genitals.
Iconography: The idealized musculature and nudity are references to the

classical humanistic tradition within which Michelangelo was working. The
concept of kalos is significant in that God is represented as both youthful and
beautiful as well as aged and wise as evidenced by his beard. The fact that
God is clothed is a "nod" to the more conservative conventions of the day in
which it would have been unacceptable to depict God as nude. It could also
be a reference to the Platonic concept that God is genderless.
The fingers of God and Adam do not touch. The juxtaposition (comparison)
in Adam's languid almost lazy pose and God's active one is symbolic of the
moment just before Adam is brought to life. This is one of the characteristics
you can see throughout Michelangelo's works and is a quality that we also see
in the artists of the Mannerist movement who follow after him.
Context: This image, as in many others, especially his Last Judgment were
always considered a bit controversial because of the nudity. At times,
Michelangelo did take some abuse for his use of nude figures. He was
Mosaic portrait from Pompeii79 CE accused of impropriety for them.

Form: Scattered throughout the frescoes, almost as framing devices are the nude
figures of young athletic looking men. These ignudi (singular ignudo) all are derived
somewhat from the poses of the Laocoon Group and from the Belvedere Torso. In
fact, if you look at these ignudi throughout the ceiling, they all seem to be the
Belvedere torso with different arms, legs and heads pasted on them.
Iconography: The bunches of acorns found close to each figure and scattered
throughout the ceiling's decorations are symbols of Pope Julius' family name the della
Rovere (oak in Italian).
Again as in all the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel the concept of kalos is important.
The idealized musculature and nudity are references to the classical humanistic
tradition within which Michelangelo was working but in addition to this these heroic
figures are adjusted to fit in with a Christian point of view. According to art
Belvedere Torso historian Irwin Panofsky (remember he did the analysis of the Arnolfini portrait) these
c300-50 BCE- probably nude figures are representations of the "athletes of god" and as such they are classical
1C BCE wingless angels.
"Apollonius son of
Nestor an Athenian"
Form: Placed within regular intervals in trompe l’oeil niches
are a series of female figure all with scrolls and books. They
are depicted as having extremely masculine looking
musculature and form but they are actually labeled in a painted
plaque underneath each figure as a "Sibyl." It seems obvious
from the preliminary drawing below that Michelangelo studied
nude males for these figures. We also know from looking at
Michelangelo's Pieta that he was capable of depicting feminine
looking women but he made the choice in these figures and
others to depict women as extremely strong looking.

Iconography: The appearance of strength is a depiction of

symbolic strength. These Sibyls (prophets from Ancient
Greece) who have established the Classical foundation that all

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this is built on. In order to "hold up" there prophetic points of

view, symbolized by the large books and scrolls, these figures
would have to have been powerful. As such they are holding
Libyan Sibyl up the foundations of Christianity and this is very similar in
content and structure to the caryatids from the Acropolis, the
seven virtues and vices from the Arena Chapel and Ghiberti's

doors.

On the north wall are six frescoes depicting events from the life of Christ as painted by Perugino,
Pinturicchio, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandajo, and Cosimo Rosselli. . . Above these works,
smaller frescoes between the windows depict various popes. Above the Popes are images that represent
the ancestors of Christ and they, like the Sibyls, function as symbolic caryatids who support the narrative
of the images above them.
PERUGINO, Pietro
Charge to Saint Peter (Handling of the
Keys)
1481-1483 Vatican, Sistine Chapel,
fresco
Raphael

from Raphael
Last years in Rome.
Raphael was called to Rome toward the end of 1508 by Pope Julius II at the
suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante. At this time Raphael was little
known in Rome, but the young man soon made a deep impression on the volatile
Julius and the papal court, and his authority as a master grew day by day.
Raphael was endowed with a handsome appearance and great personal charm in
addition to his prodigious artistic talents, and he eventually became so popular
that he was called "the prince of painters."

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Raphael spent the last 12 years of his short life in Rome. They were years of
feverish activity and successive masterpieces. His first task in the city was to
paint a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized rooms in the Vatican papal
apartments in which Julius himself lived and worked; these rooms are known
simply as the Stanze. The Stanza della Segnatura (1508-11) and Stanza
d'Eliodoro (1512-14) were decorated practically entirely by Raphael himself; the
murals in the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514-17), though designed by Raphael, were
largely executed by his numerous assistants and pupils.
The decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura was perhaps Raphael's greatest
work. Julius II was a highly cultured man who surrounded himself with the most
illustrious personalities of the Renaissance. He entrusted Bramante with the
construction of a new basilica of St. Peter to replace the original 4th-century
church; he called upon Michelangelo to execute his tomb and compelled him
against his will to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; and, sensing the
genius of Raphael, he committed into his hands the interpretation of the
philosophical scheme of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura. This theme
was the historical justification of the power of the Roman Catholic church
through Neoplatonic philosophy.
The four main fresco walls in the Stanza della Segnatura are occupied by the
"Disputa" and the "School of Athens" on the larger walls and the "Parnassus"
and "Cardinal Virtues" on the smaller walls. The two most important of these
frescoes are the "Disputa" and the "School of Athens." The "Disputa," showing a
celestial vision of God and his prophets and apostles above a gathering of
representatives, past and present, of the Roman Catholic church, equates through
its iconography the triumph of the church and the triumph of truth.

Stanza della Segnatura
fresco

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Raphael put portraits of important and

influential people in the painting as a
way to express the idea that the new
Papal court was an updated, yet
Catholic, school of Athens.
Raphael uses Leonardo's face as a model

for Plato, who gestures up.
Zoroaster, Ptolemy, Raphael and Sodoma
One of the skills that most painters needed to develop

during the Renaissance period was the ability to paint
portraits and accurate likenesses. Often this skill was
developed by painting with a the only model that one
might have available which is one's self. The
humanistic and platonic idea of perfectability also
gave rise to self reflection and observation and in this
case, self aggrandizement. A portrait then is not just
about the immediate apprearance but also it is a
symbol of the person. In this image we see that the
artist is studying himself and also demonstrating his
ability to create a strong physical likeness as well a Raphael, Self Portrait, 1506
The Northern Renaissance Part 2
Bosch
Context: Even though the Reformation doesn't officially start until Luther publishes his writings around 1516-20 there
are strains of the ideas and Luther and his writings are probably the result of years of moving in that direction in the

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North. Many of Luther's ideas can be seen to evolve in the Northern art of the mid 1400's. It makes sense that the
critical and often sarcastic imagery we saw in Metsys' The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514 and the ideas expressed in
Petrus Christus. Saint Eloy (Eligius) in his Shop. 1449 evolve into a critical point of view about the main religious
institution controlling their lives.

Hiëronymus Bosch,
b. c. 1450,, 's Hertogenbosch, Brabant [now in The Netherlands]
d. Aug. 9, 1516, 's Hertogenbosch
also spelled JHERONIMUS BOS, pseudonym of JEROME VAN AEKEN, also spelled AQUEN, OR
AKEN, also called JEROEN ANTHONISZOON, brilliant and original northern European painter of the late
Middle Ages whose work reveals an unusual iconography of a complex and individual style. Although at first
recognized as a highly imaginative "creator of devils" and a powerful inventor of seeming nonsense full of
satirical meaning, Bosch demonstrated insight into the depths of the mind and an ability to depict symbols of
life and creation.
Bosch was a pessimistic and stern moralist who had neither illusions about the rationality of human nature
nor confidence in the kindness of a world that had been corrupted by man's presence in it. His paintings are
sermons, addressed often to initiates and consequently difficult to translate. Unable to unlock the mystery of
the artist's works, critics at first believed that he must have been affiliated with secret sects. Although the
themes of his work were religious, his choice of symbols to represent the temptation and eventual
ensnarement of man in earthly evils caused many critics to view Bosch as a practitioner of the occult arts.
More recent scholarship views Bosch as a talented artist who possessed deep insight into human character
and as one of the first artists to represent abstract concepts in his work. A number of exhaustive
interpretations of Bosch's work have been put forth in recent years, but there remain many obscure details.
"Bosch, Hiëronymus." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001

Britannica.com Inc. December 3, 2002.
BOSCH, Hieronymus.
Death and the Miser c. Notice that Bosch's iconography is a problem for art historians and each one attempts to interpret it according to what
1490 they know. Below you will find several points of view as to what the iconography may or may not mean. Read these
Oil on wood, 93 x 31 cm different accounts and decide for yourself.
National Gallery of Art,
Washington
Form and Iconography: The use of oil paint to create an incredible level of
realism is quite evident in this image. Here, the artist shows off again by
showing how well he is able to paint the textures and surfaces but he is
also demonstrating his ability to create space.
In some ways, this scene is a genre scene. It takes place in what looks to
be a domestic setting and the central character is one that the viewer would
be expected to identify with.
Bosch often worked with almost incomprehensible or bizarre

iconography. It seems, like the submerged symbolism of Robert
Campin's Merode Altarpiece c. 1425 he is inventing or using a now lost
lexicon of iconography.
The interior of this composition is formed to look almost as if the scene is

taking place within the nave of a vaulted cathedral. This is probably done
almost as a sarcastic reference to the Gothic style Church. To the left of
the doorway in which a skeleton is entering is a Romanesque or Gothic
capital and column.
This image seems to be a sarcastic play on the iconography associated

with annunciation scenes such as those by Robert Campin's Merode
Altarpiece c. 1425. Almost as in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in
this scene, a miser is being visited on his death bed by a variety of
fantastic creatures. Death stands ready in the door to fling his last arrow
and take the man to his fate while his soul is wrestled over. God is
represented by the apparition of the crucifixion in the window. The light
that shines through the window is represented similarly to the soul of
Jesus being delivered to Mary in the Merode Altarpiece c. 1425. Above

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the bed, on a canopy, a demon shines a fake sparking lamp to misguide

him.
At the misers back is an angel. Again the angel is similar to

representations of Gabriel in annunciation scenes but the miser pays no
attention and seems torn, even on his deathbed, between the glory of god
and the vain gloria of his avarice represented by the evil frog like demon
tempting him with the money bag.
Overall the composition is a vertical one and this plays into the
iconography. God is represented at the top of the image and as we
descend through the image we can also see that the iconography descends
into the common world of man.
Beneath the deathbed is a rather red nosed and almost drunken looking
man who has a key and a rosary hanging from his robes. According to the
the National Gallery's website, "At the foot of the bed a younger man,
possibly the miser at an earlier age, hypocritically throws coins into a
chest with one hand as he fingers a rosary with the other."
I think they may have it wrong though, to me it looks like he is placing

money into an alm's bowl held by a demon while another demon passes up
what looks to be a letter or a papal indulgence. Could this be St. Peter
and the chest represent the holdings of the Catholic Church? Perhaps then,
the letter is an indulgence that is an attempt to pay his way into heaven.
Beneath the chest and at the very bottom of the picture plane lies a suit of
discarded armor. Perhaps a representation of the miser's discarded faith.
Notice that the sword is rusted. He is no longer the good Christian soldier
depicted in Durer's print.
Here's another point of view but I'm not sure if it's correct:

Bosch's depiction of a dying miser lying in his high narrow

bedchamber features a number of details pointing out the
consequences of a life devoted to avarice. The figure of death
stands in the doorway indicating that the miser's end is rapidly
approaching. And while the miser's guardian angel vainly tries
to draw his attention to the crucifix in the window at the upper
left, the demonic influence is overpowering.
Many commentators have noted that Bosch's work here seems

to be of a type which may have been influenced by the Fifteen
Century devotional work Ars Moriendi (Craft of Dying) which
describes how a dying man is exposed to a series of
temptations by demons surrounding his deathbed. At each
temptation an angel comforts him and strengthens him and in
the end the angel is successful, the soul is carried to heaven
and the devil's howl in despair. Here, however, the outcome is
much less certain.
The fact that the miser's path was established long before his
death is apparent with the inclusion of an image of his younger
self placing a coin into a bag held by a demon. Underneath the
chest other demons await. in the forefront a winged demon
BOSCH, Hieronymus. handles the red robes which indicate the miser's earthly rank.
Death and the Miser c. 1490 While at bedside another creature offers a bag of gold which
Oil on wood, 93 x 31 cm provides a final distraction to the dying man. The message
National Gallery of Art, Washington appears to be that despite God's willingness to provide
salvation most people will persist in their sins until the point of
death.
http://www.artdamage.com/bosch/miser.htm
Here's the National Gallery of Art, Washington point of view:

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Of all fifteenth-century artists, Hieronymus Bosch is the most mysterious. His puzzling, sometimes bizarre imagery has prompted a
number of false assertions that he was, for example, the member of a heretical sect, a sexual libertine, or a forerunner of the surrealists.
What can be said is that he was a moralist, profoundly pessimistic about man's inevitable descent into sin and damnation.
In this slender panel, probably a wing from a larger altarpiece, a dying man seems torn between salvation and his own avarice. At the
foot of the bed a younger man, possibly the miser at an earlier age, hypocritically throws coins into a chest with one hand as he fingers a
rosary with the other. In his last hour, with death literally at the door, the miser still hesitates; will he reach for the demon's bag of gold
or will he follow the angel's gesture and direct his final thoughts to the crucifix in the window?
Avarice was one of the seven deadly sins and among the final temptations described in the Ars moriendi (Art of Dying), a religious
treatise probably written about 1400 and later popularized in printed books. Bosch's painting is similar to illustrations in these books, but
his introduction of ambiguity and suspense is unique.
This panel is thinly painted. In several areas it is possible to see in the underdrawing where Bosch changed his mind about the
composition. His thin paint and unblended brushstrokes differ markedly from the enamellike polish of other works in this gallery.
also see
http://www.thebeckoning.com/art/bosch/bosch-miser.html
Paradise BOSCH, Hieronymus, Haywain 1500-02 Hell

Oil on panel, Monasterio de San Lorenzo, El Escorial Oil on panel, 147 x 66 cm

Context: The subject of sin and its punishments was central to all of Bosch's art. A famous triptych, The Haywain,
contains a progression of sin, from Eden to hell, across its panels. In the central panel sin is represented through the
metaphor of a large wagonload of hay for which a greedy world grasps. All the while, the wagon is being pulled by

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demons towards the right panel - which shows one of Bosch's earliest depictions of hell.
Form: Interestingly enough, Bosch again is collaging together elements from images by Giotto in his Last Judgement
and Masaccio's Expulsion as well as various elements and compositional devices one might find in the Tympanum of
Gothic and Rmanesque Churches such as those found at Autun.
In the sky we see an image of God almost as if he is in a Last Judgement scene. The composition is very similar to
Giotto's Last Judgment. The arrangement and scale of the angels or possibly even some demons is in a semi- circular
form as in Giotto's.
Beneath, in the garden, we the arrangement of the figures in this continuous narrative scene is based on various
standard compositions for each story. For example, the creation of Eve uses the same poses as Michelangelo does
about ten years later in his Sistine Chapel panel.
Iconography: The arraangement of this panel is hierarchical. The scene at the top, may represent creation but the
weird bug like demons grouped at the bottom coupled with the angels who are higher up in the picture plane, may
indicate that this is the fall of the angels which is echoed by Adam's expulsion at the very bottom. An interesting,
Catholic icon is represented by God the father as he pulls Eve from Adam's rib. God is wearing the papal crown.
Paradise
Form: The composition of the center

scene is fairly symmetrical. The hay
wagon that sits in the center of the
image creates the bottom of pyramidal
shape that is completed by the figure
who sit atop the wagon and God in
heaven who looks over the scene.
Iconography: The overall scene is one

that represents our unavoidable journey
to damnation. It is a bit pessimistic.
Atop the Hay wagon, angels pray for us

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and demons also vie for our attention.

A vessel, possibly representing the holy
vessel is atop a pike, while opposite this
is an owl, representing knowledge and
death, sits atop another branch
surrounded by blackbirds (death?).
Below the wagon are scenes of chaos,

murder, lust and avarice. Basically all
the seven deadly sins are represented in
one guise or another and even the clergy
are not immune to gluttony in the lower
right hand corner.
BOSCH, Hieronymus, Haywain 1500-02

Oil on panel, Monasterio de San Lorenzo, El Escorial
The outer panels of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights betray little of the

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wonders which lie within. Here we see the earth as Bosch envisioned it to be on
the third day of creation. Light has been separated from the darkness, the waters
have been divided above and below the firmament and trees are beginning to
grow across the face of the earth. Overlooking this pale and watery earth
composed primarily of subtle grays and green-grays is the Creator who is
pictured as sitting passively on his throne holding a book which represents the
creative Word. And lest we miss the allusion to the effortlessness of the Creator's
act, Bosch has added an inscription from Ps. 33.9, "For he spake and it was
done; he commanded and it stood forth."
http://www.artdamage.com/bosch/gardenex.htm
BOSCH, Hieronymus.
Garden of Earthly Delights (closed triptych) c. 1500
"Creation of the World"?
Oil on panel, (86 5/8 X 76 1/4) 220 x 195 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
The "Garden of Earthly Delights," representative of Bosch at his mature best,
shows the earthly paradise with the creation of woman, the first temptation, and
the fall. The painting's beautiful and unsettling images of sensuality and of the
dreams that afflict the people who live in a pleasure-seeking world express
Bosch's iconographic originality with tremendous force. The chief characteristic
of this work is perhaps its dreamlike quality; multitudes of nude human figures,
giant birds, and horses cavort and frolic in a delightfully implausible,
otherworldly landscape, and all the elements come together to produce a perfect,
harmonious whole.
"Bosch, Hiëronymus." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM.

Various attempts have been made to relate these fantasies to the realities of his
own day. For instance, some of the sexually related visions have been related to
the creed of the Adamites, a hereticel sect of the day advocating, at least in
theory, sexual freedom like that in Eden. But the most promising line has been
to recognize many of them as illustrations of proverbs: for instance, the pair of
lovers in the glass bubble would recall the proverb 'Pleasure is as fragile as
glass'. This approach also provides a link between these fantasies and Bosch's
other work, such as the Cure of Folly or Haywain, and between Bosch's later
work and Bruegel's in the middle of the sixteenth century: though without
Bosch's satanic profusion, Bruegel also made illustrations of proverbs in this
way.
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/b/bosch/painting/triptyc1/delightc.html
At the time of his death, Bosch was internationally celebrated as an eccentric

painter of religious visions who dealt in particular with the torments of hell.
During his lifetime Bosch's works were in the inventories of noble families of
the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and they were imitated in a number of
BOSCH, Hieronymus. paintings and prints throughout the 16th century, especially in the works of
Garden of Earthly Delights Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
(central panel of the triptych) c. 1500 Bosch's most famous and unconventional picture is The Garden of Earthly
Oil on panel, 220 x 195 cm Delights which, like most of his other ambitious works, is a large, 3-part
Museo del Prado, Madrid altarpiece, called a triptych. This painting was probably made for the private
enjoyment of a noble family. It is named for the luscious garden in the central
panel, which is filled with cavorting nudes and giant birds and fruit. The triptych

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depicts the history of the world and the progression of sin. Beginning on the
outside shutters with the creation of the world, the story progresses from Adam
and Eve and original sin on the left panel to the torments of hell, a dark, icy, yet
fiery nightmarish vision, on the right. The Garden of Delights in the center
illustrates a world deeply engaged in sinful pleasures.
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/b/bosch/painting/triptyc1/delightr.html
The subdued gray earth of The Garden of Earthly Delight's exterior panels gives way to an
explosion of vibrant color within. With the felt panel we move to the final three days of creation when
life burst forth on the earth with all of its abundance. Swarms of living creatures inhabit the fertile
garden with many gathering near a tall, slender Fountain of Life which occupies a small island in the
lake at the center of the panel. To the right of the fountain a group of animals are climbing a bank
which transforms itself into a face.
In the foreground, near the Tree of Knowledge we see God presenting Eve to an astounded Adam
who seems amazed at this creature who has been brought forth from his rib. It is notable that here God
is much more youthful that we have seen in previous representations in that Bosch sets aside his earlier
convention and presents the Deity in the Person of Christ. This follows a frequent convention in
Fifteenth Century Dutch literature where the marriage of Adam and Eve is performed by a Youthful
Deity.
As is usually the case with Bosch, however, no paradise exists entirely free from at least a
foreshadowing of evil and this foreshadowing appears as a pit in the extreme foreground, out of which
a variety of creatures are emerging.
http://www.artdamage.com/bosch/gardenl.htm
Left Detail Heaven/Paradise

with Adam and Eve
The dreamlike paradise of the center panel gives way to the nightmare of Hell in which the
excitement of passion is transformed into a frenzy of suffering. Here the lushest paradise Bosch will
ever produce leads to the most violent of his always violent hells. As is generally the case in Bosch's
vision of Hell a burning city serves as a backdrop to the various activities carried out by Hell's
citizens, but here the buildings don't merely burn, rather they explode with firey plumes blasting into
the darkness as what appears to be a wave of refugees flee across a bridge toward an illuminated gate
house.
As is always the case in Bosch's Hells the general theme is a chaos in which normal relationships
are turned upside down and everyday objects are turned into objects of torture. And, given Bosch's use
of musical instruments as symbolic of lust it is not surprising that in the Hell musical instruments as
objects of torment are prominently featured. From the left we see a nude figure which has been
attached by devils to the neck of a lute, while another has been entangled in the strings of a harp and a
third has been stuffed down the neck of a great horn.
http://www.artdamage.com/bosch/gardenr.htm


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Right Detail
The picture shows a detail of The Hell. Several huge musical instruments
figure prominently in Bosch's conception of hell. They are shaped similarly to
the ones used at that time, but their positioning is unrealistic (for example, a
harp grows out of a lute). Their relationship to each other bears strongly
fanciful elements, and they have been adapted in form. What is more, the use
of these instruments is wholly fantastic. There is a human figure stretched
across the strings of a harp; another writhes around the neck of a flute,
intertwined with a snake; a third peers out of a drum equipped with bird-like
feet, the next one plays triangle while reaching out from a hurdy-gurdy, and
even the smoking trumpet displays an outstretched human arm. It is difficult
to conceive that the group of damned souls would sing a hymn from the
musical score fixed to the reverse of the reclining figure in front of them -
although this has been proposed by some scholars. The ensemble, lead by an
infernal monster, could more likely be a parody.
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/b/bosch/painting/triptyc1/delights.html

According to Dr. Bruce Lamott, a music historian, the depiction of the individual
crucified on the harp, the image of the trumpet shoved up the rear end of one of the
figures, and the ears sliced by the knives could be a reference to the ideas that were
being debated by the Council of Trent. Many individuals felt that music was too
sensuous and the work of the devil and that the new traditions of playing music in
Church was a mistake.
There are also some very Giottoesque elements in this painting. In the lower right hand
of hell is an image of a pig dressed in a nun's habit which obviously is a jab at the
greedy nature of the Catholic Church. It is very similar to Giotto's inclusion of the
Bishop who is taking money for indulgences and pardoning people in hell.
BRUEGEL, or Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Form: This is a realistic yet cartoonish rendering. In general the

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rules of perspective are adhered to and there is some chiaroscuro.

Each object and individual are clearly rendered using the glazing
techniques that Van Eyck perfected nearly a century before,
however, the carefully glazed rendering of the surfaces and objects
are secondary to the message.
Iconography and Context: The iconography relates to the Northern

habit of creating and using parables. A parable is a kind of adage
which Webster's dictionary describes as a "saying often in
metaphorical form that embodies a common observation."
This painting contains nearly more than twenty proverbs and each
is designed to provide some sort of moral direction in visual form.
This painting probably served two purposes. The visual depiction
of proverbs as symbols was probably created both as a form of
instruction but also as a clever conversation piece.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder Below is a diagram that identifies some of the proverbs in the
Netherlandish Proverbs painting.
1559 Oil on oak panel, 117 x 163
cm Staatliche Museen, Berlin
1. Daar zijn de daken met vladen gedekt.

There the roofs are tiled with tarts!
The image is one connoting a plentitude or a state of wealth.
2. Daar steekt de bezem uit.

There the broom sticks out.
This signifies that the head of the household is not at home which in turn indicates that a
party is in progress or soon will be.
3. Onder het mes zitten.

Sitting under the knife.
A severe testing under great pressure.
4. 't is naar het vallen van de kaart.

It depends on the fall of the cards.
So much of life is a matter of luck.
5. Een pilaarbijter.
A pillar biter.
A religious hypocrite.
6. Zij draagt water in de eene, en vuur in de andere hand.

She carries water in one hand and fire in the other.
Someone who is two-faced.
7. Men kan met het hoofd niet door den muur loopen.
One cannot walk headfirst through a wall.
A man foolishly trying to ignore the hard realities of the natural world.
8. De een scheert de schapen, de ander de varkens.

The one shears the sheep, the other the pigs.
In life some individuals have opportunities for material success while others do not.

Renaissance Art
Printmaking and the Reformation

Context: One of the major innovations of the Renaissance, much like our own information revolution
concerning the internet, was the invention of the movable type printing press. Two majors forms had
been around for several hundred years already. Engraving and woodblock printing but this innovation
was something new.
The movable type printing press, perfected most likely by Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468), created an
information revolution. What made the movable type printing press so significant was the fact that it
used reusable interchangable parts to create pages of texts. In the large illustration on the left is a man
putting precarved blocks (made out of medal or wood) in to small compartments in a larger tray. Above
the tray is the original manuscript which he is "typesetting." The page once it had been set would be run
through a printing press for a series of images and then once enough copies had been made, the block
would be dumped out, sorted and then reused in another page.
Engraving Depicting a Renaissance The major benefit to this process is speed and economy. Since the individual pages didn't need to be
Printmaking Shop carved from scratch, half the time was needed to print off a series of pages. It was also cheaper because
less labor and materials were needed.
In the past, books and especially the Bible, were often hand made. Monks or scribes would hand copy
and decorate each page individually and the major producer or publisher of such manuscripts was the
Catholic Church. With this new technology, wealthy individuals could now afford to print off multiple
sets of books and flyers with their ideas. The text of the Bible, whose cost was prohibitively expensive
and also outlawed to anyone but the Cathloic clergy, could now be printed up at much less cost. The
equivalenyt of these events would be our ability to send off a mass e-mail, print out multiple copies of a
flyer at a copy shop and or post documents to the web. This is called "self-publishing."
New books were now being published and copies of Gutenberg's famous Bible were being mass
produced and this lead to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the North of Europe and the
writings of Martin Luther who used this movable type press to circulate his ideas. This lead to the
"Reformation"
Martin Luther was the leader of the religious movement known as the Reformation. After reading a
passage in the Book of Romans, he had a greater understanding about the judgment of God—basically
that anyone could go straight to God and ask for forgiveness for their sins. This, of course, went against
what Catholicism taught which was that people could only speak to God through an intermediary
(usually a priest) and that the only way to get a speedy ticket out of Purgatory was to buy one’s way
out. This led Luther to write the "95 Theses."
There was a great outcry against Luther by the Pope about the "95 Theses." This led Luther to write
three manifestos – the first of which was an open letter to the Christian Nobility. This letter appealed to
the noblemen of Germany to hear his beliefs and try to persuade the people who still followed the
“Romanists” (Catholics).
In this manifesto, Luther uses a metaphor of three walls to describe what is seemingly a catch-22
situation. The Pope was all-powerful and was the only one who could translate the Bible. If a person
wished to challenge this, they would have to call a council – and the only person who could call council
was the Pope! Luther dispels this belief with his teachings.
According to the Britannica Encyclopedia:
The role of Luther Luther said that what differentiated him from previous reformers was that they attacked the life, he the doctrine of the
church. Whereas they denounced the sins of churchmen, he was disillusioned by the whole scholastic scheme of redemption. The
assumption was that man could erase his sins one by one through confession and absolution in the sacrament of penance. Luther
discovered that he could not remember or even recognize all of his sins, and the attempt to dispose of them one by one was like trying to
cure smallpox by picking off the scabs. Indeed, he believed that the whole man was sick. The church, however, held that the individual
was not too sick to make up for bad deeds by some good deeds. God gave to all a measure of grace. If human beings lay hold of it and
did the best they could, God would reward them with a further gift of grace with which they could perform deeds of genuine merit,
which would give them credit before God. Human beings might even die with more than enough credits for salvation. These extra credits
constituted a treasury of the merits of the saints, from which the pope could make transfers to those whose accounts were in arrears. The
transfer was called an indulgence and for this, in Luther's day, the grateful recipient made a contribution to the church.
"The continental Reformation- Germany, Switzerland, and France."
Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM.
The text of the "An Open Letter to The Christian Nobility" is a good summary of the main ideas published in Martin Luther's "Ninety-five

Renaissance Art
Theses." However, here are his "Ninety-five Theses" for those of you who would like to read the whole thing.
Please readMencher, Liaisons 125-136 Martin Luther (1483-1546) "An Open Letter to The Christian Nobility" 1520.
A lot of the primary texts concerning the Reformation can be found here.

Form: These are two prints presented in the form of a diptych (two images side by side).
The two images by Lucas Cranach demonstrate a large amount of fine detail even though
this is hard to do with woodcut printmaking.
The images also demonstrate that by this time linear perspective and anatomical accuracy
were common place expectations for almost all art.
Iconography: The image on the left depicts Jesus in the manner to which the audiences of
the Renaissance would have come to expect him and his disciples to look like. He is a
young bearded man in a robe; however, the people he thrashes are all wearing clothing
contemporary to Germany in the 1500's. The temples architecture is also familiar and
typical for a church from the 16th century. This is designed to draw the audience in and
make them identify with the sinners in the image. This device is referred to as a genre
Lucas Cranach the Elder. element. Art historians use the term genre to describe images that depict people and events
"Passional Christi und Antichristi." from everyday life.
Woodcut. 1521. The right hand image shows a scene similarly useing genre elements in which the Pope
Northern Renaissance, Germany (who wears the Papal tiara or crown) is seated on a comfortable cushion while he is

surrounded by his bishops (note the hats).
Matthew Chapter 21
In this picture from a Lutheran devotional (and propagandist) booklet, Christ (on the left) is
12 Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all
driving the moneychangers out of the temple, in contrast to the Pope, who is shown as a
those
hawker of indulgences. The picture originated as a woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder the
engaged in selling and buying there. He overturned
court painter for the Elector of Saxony and a close friend of Luther's.
the tables
Context: The image at left is a representation of this Bible passage from the book of
of the money changers and the seats of those who
Matthew. Cranach and Luther got together on this one to illustrate the text from the Bible
were selling doves.
but also to update it. This image would have been distributed as a piece of propaganda
13 And he said to them, "It is written: 'My house shall
against the Catholic Church and used to illustrate Luther's new and radical ideas.
be a house of
prayer,' but you are making it a den of thieves."
This following lifted directly from this page

http://www.thelutheran.org/9610/page26.html
It seems amazingly relevant!

Had television existed in the 16th century, the daily dose of political attack ads might have shown spots of Martin Luther as saint and the
pope as sinner!
People who use the phrase "politics as usual" when they are disgusted by the mudslinging and outrageous claims of political commercials
probably don't realize just how "usual" that really is. The modern mass media campaign of charge and countercharge originated not in
the smoke-filled rooms of political parties but in the Protestant-Roman Catholic struggle of the Reformation.
The printing press was barely 70 year s old when Martin Luther and his supporters turned it into an awesome tool--and weapon--for the
spread of the Lutheran understanding of the gospel. They used every trick in today's campaign adviser's book to advance their cause, and
their Catholic opponents responded in kind.

A commercial this summer framed an upbeat President Clinton against a bright blue sky, while Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich were
shown in black-and-white with frowns on their faces. In similar fashion, 16th century folk were treated to woodcuts of Luther, Bible in
hand, surrounded by a halo of sanctity and overshadowed by the hovering dove of the Spirit. His "opponent," the pope, was cast as a
servant of the devil, enthroned in hell.
One of the most famous attack ad woodcuts commissioned by Luther pairs the scene of Christ driving the money-changers from the
temple with a view of the pope receiving indulgence money. Sound familiar? It's not unlike a recent commercial depicting Clinton
wanting more and more tax money, while Dole drives the wicked "taxers and spenders" away.
In his contributions to this media melee, Luther didn't hesitate to depict his opponents in the worst possible light or to put a highly
favorable "spin" on the efforts and beliefs of his side.
Yet, in even his angriest publications, Luther always offered profound teachings about the gospel. He could never just attack. He had to
preach and teach as well.
Would that the modern media campaigns imitate less Luther's trashing of opponents and more his presentation of issues that really

Renaissance Art
matter.
Iconography: Stokstad describes the iconography of this image as a "moral lesson on

the power of evil" but more than that, Stokstad discusses the use of images of witches
in his images as an expression of evil. It is interesting that this is one of the roles that
older, perhaps unattractive woman were accused of during the Renaissance and well into
the 1800's. In some ways, the depiction of witches in the art of the Renaissance
represents the anti-ideal for a woman. In this way, woman are still provided with a role
model of what not to become.

Form and Context:
Woodcut is the technique of printing designs from planks of wood. . . It is

one of the oldest methods of making prints from a relief surface, having been
used in China to decorate textiles since the 5th century AD. In Europe,
printing from wood blocks on textiles was known from the early 14th
century, but it had little development until paper began to be manufactured
in France and Germany at the end of the 14th century. . . In Bavaria, Austria,
and Bohemia, religious images and playing cards were first made from wood
blocks in the early 15th century, and the development of printing from
movable type led to widespread use of woodcut illustrations in the
Netherlands and in Italy. With the 16th century, black-line woodcut reached
its greatest perfection with Albrecht Dürer and his followers Lucas Cranach
and Hans Holbein. In the Netherlands Lucas van Leyden and in Italy Jacopo
de' Barbari and Domenico Campagnola, who were, like Dürer, engravers on
copper, also made woodcuts.
As wood is a natural material, its structure varies enormously and this

exercises a strong influence on the cutting. Wood blocks are cut plankwise.
The woods most often used are pear, rose, pine, apple, and beech. The old
masters preferred fine-grained hardwoods because they allow finer detail
work than softwoods, but modern printmakers value the coarse grain of
softwoods and often incorporate it into the design.
Albrecht DÜRER, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

1498 Woodcut, 39 x 28 cm
(Revelation 6:1-8:) Conquest, War, Plague and Famine,
Death
The printing of woodcuts is a relatively simple process because it does not

require great pressure. Although presses are used, even hand rubbing with a
wooden spoon can produce a good print. The ink used to print woodcuts
must be fairly solid and sticky, so that it lies on the surface without flowing
into the hollows. The printing ink can be deposited on the relief either with
dabbers or with rollers. Thinner papers are particularly suitable for woodcuts
because they make rich prints without heavy pressure.
Form: In this variation of the theme, the two figures are nude and the total environment is much
more worked out. This image indicates a fairly good use of anatomy and perspective and shows
more of a development of the mark making discussed in Grien's drawing. The development of
the vocabulary of marks would have been important for Grien to be able to make a high quality
engraving.

Engraving

Baroque Art
Baroque Art 1600-c1730

Annibale Carracci
Farnese Gallery
Form: The gallery of the palace is sixty-six feet long and twenty-one feet
wide. The vaulted ceilings reach thirty-two feet in height. Its dual function
was to hold receptions and display statues which were part of the Farnese
collection. (now held in Naples)
Iconography: Overtly the ceiling deals with humanistic and neoclassical

scenes. Since the Cardinal Farnese commissioned the ceiling to celebrate
the wedding of his brother, the pagan theme, love of the gods at first seems
appropriate, however, the scenes are often profane, hedonistic, and erotic
and therefore almost a rather odd choice of subject material for a cardinal.
All scenes are taken from classical mythology and strongly illustrate the
power of love. None of the scenes are linked to form a continuous narrative
though they all echo and respond to each other in their form and idea.
Context: Annibale, his brother Agostino, and their cousin Lodovico were
Bolognese artists who designated their studio in a teaching academy. Their
aim was to combine the best elements of all the previous masters and start a
classical revival. Annibale was the major artist among the three--his fame
resting on the decorations of the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome.
In a way, the Carracci family was making the equivalent of today's interior
Annibale Carracci The Farnese ceiling- 1597-1601 design companies or even a film production company. One of the things
depicting the Loves of the Gods, ceiling frescoes in the Gallery, they were attempting to do was to find and create a bigger market for their
Palazzo Farnese, Rome. work and so, you will see that over all the Carracci worked with a variety of
Venus and Anchises (detail) styles, palettes and themes.

Venus and Anchises

Form: The color is strong and clear. Surrounding the couple are
illusionistic stone statues resembling classical Atlas figures. These trompe
l’oeil figures and busts surrounding the painting are known as “terms.”
They are both classical architectural ornaments.
Iconography: Whenever you see someone's leg thrown over another's, there
is an implication of sexuality. In his book, The Sexuality of Christ, Leo
Steinberg refers to this as the “slung leg theory.” The union of Venus and
Anchises resulted in the birth of Aeneas, the founder of Rome. This is
indicated on the footstool containing a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid.
Part of the iconography of these images is a reference to both the tradition

of studying classic or "antique" works as a guide to making better art and
the ceiling overall is a "tongue in cheek" reference to Michelangelo's
Sistine Chapel. However, in this case, the subject matter of the ceiling and
scenes are not biblical and since they are so "sexy" in nature, they are also
less than classic or platonic.
Context: Virgil modeled his book, the Aeneid on Homer’s Odyssey and
Iliad. The Aenied’s protagonist is Aeneas. Like Homer’s Achilles, Aeneas
was born of a mortal man (Anchises) and goddess (Venus). Their union is
featured in this fresco. It is believed that Aeneas was the founder of Rome
and that Julius Caesar and Augustus are his descendants.
written by Annette Abbott edited by Kenney Mencher

Form: This self portrait incorporates a low key or earth toned palette combined with a very
close point of view. Annibale demonstrates a good mastery of the human face as well as the
depiction of light and shadow across it which is called chiaroscuro (the play of light and
shadow or shading) to create realism in this work. According to the Brittanica, chiaroscuro
(from Italian chiaro, "light"; scuro, "dark"), which is technique employed in the visual arts to
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/1300_1700/Baroque_Art.htm[7/31/2013 11:40:25 AM]

Baroque Art
represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects.
Carracci also uses an intense spotlight on his face while the rest of the picture plane is murky
surrounding him. This is called tenebrism and it is a way of creating a focus on a particular
element in a work and also gives the work a sense of heightened drama.
The painting also feels like an immediate kind of "snapshot" of Carracci. Carracci seems to
be looking directly at you but what he is really doing is looking directly into a mirror and
painting directly from observation. Since this is the case, Carracci was probably painting
without using any previous studies or drawings. This is called ala prima-(in the first) which
means painting directly from observation onto canvas.
Iconography and Context: One of the skills that most painters needed to develop during the
Renaissance period was the ability to paint portraits and accurate likenesses. Often this skill
was developed by painting with a the only model that one might have available which is
one's self. Obviously, since there are others in this image, Carracci could have had one of
his assistants model for him so why then did he paint a self portrait?
The answer probably lies in the basic premise of the Renaissance man. The humanistic and
platonic idea of perfectibility gave rise to self reflection and observation. A portrait then is
not just about the immediate appearance but also it is a symbol of the person. In this image
Annibale Carracci, Self Portrait 1597 we see that Carracci is studying himself and also demonstrating his ability to create a strong
psychological likeness as well a physical likeness.

Form: In contrast to the vivid colours of the frescoes of the
Farnese Gallery, Carracci uses a low-key palette in his Flight
into Egypt. The earth tones of the landscape are employed to
guide the viewer to gaze at the main characters at the front of
the picture plane. Carracci thought that Nature was an
important element in painting and this is reflected most
through his landscapes. Many of the landscape scenes which
he painted in Rome consisted of this classical landscape
formula: a vista of recessing diagonal lines containing castles,
trees, winding rivers and hilltop towns.
Iconography: This is a genre scene and a pastoral or

arcadian setting of sorts. Carracci incorporates elements of the
classic arcadian scene with the genre elements that are meant
to get the viewer to feel as if they might be able to identify
with the principle characters in the scene. We only know that
this is not a simple landscape scene after noticing the halos on
the figures and reading the title.
Carracci Annibale Flight to Egypt 1604 Oil on canvas Galleria Doria Pamphili,
Rome After this then, we are expected to look for some sort of
submerged symbolism. The shepherd with his sheep in the
middle of the picture plane represents Jesus, the Shepherd of
humankind. The gray clouds in the sky may indicate the
“storm” taking place at that time. The peaceful boat, which
delivered them to safety to the other side of the river, is
symbolic of life. White birds (doves?) are also indicative of
either the Holy Spirit or of peace.
Context: This painting refers to the biblical story from

Matthew 2: 1-21. After hearing that another “king” had been
born in Bethlehem, Herod orders all male children under the
age of two to be killed in order to ensure his continual reign.
An angel appears to Joseph in a dream and instructs him to
leave Bethlehem immediately with Mary and Jesus and go to
Robert Campin (the Master of Flemalle) Merode Altarpiece c. 1425
Egypt where they all will be safe.

Baroque Art
The Merode Altarpiece shares many of the same qualities with Carracci's Flight
written by Annette Abbott
to Egypt.
How might Campin's work be a schema for it?
ar.ca.di.an adj, often cap (1589) 1: idyllically pastoral; esp: idyllically innocent, simple, or untroubled 2 a: of or relating to Arcadia or
the Arcadians b: of or relating to Arcadian Ar.ca.di.an n (1590) 1 often not cap: a person who lives a simple quiet life 2: a native or
inhabitant of Arcadia 3: the dialect of ancient Greek used in Arcadia
Modern Greek ARKADHÍA, mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient Greece. The pastoral character of Arcadian
life together with its isolation partially explains why it was represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic poetry and in the
literature of the Renaissance. The region is not exactly coextensive with the present-day nomós (department) of Arkadhía, which
extends on the east to the Gulf of Argolis. The capital of the nomos is Trípolis.
chiar.oscu.ro n, pl -ros [It, fr. chiaro clear, light + oscuro

obscure, dark] (1686) 1: pictorial representation in terms of light
and shade without regard to color 2 a: the arrangement or
treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art b: the
interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or
character) 3: a 16th century woodcut technique involving the use
of several blocks to print different tones of the same color; also: a
print made by this technique 4: the interplay of light and shadow
on or as if on a surface 5: the quality of being veiled or partly in
shadow

Chiaroscuro (from Italian chiaro, "light"; scuro,

"dark"),
technique employed in the visual arts to represent light
and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects.
Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman

artists used chiaroscuro effects, but in European
painting the technique was first brought to its full
potential by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century
in such paintings as his "Adoration of the Magi" (1481;
Uffizi, Florence). Thereafter, chiaroscuro became a
chiaroscuro primary technique for many painters, and by the late
17th century the term was routinely used to describe
any painting, drawing, or print that depends for its
effect on an extensive gradation of light and darkness.
"chiaroscuro." and Britannica 2001 Standard Edition

CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com
Inc. November 19, 2002.

genre n [F, fr. MF, kind, gender--more at gender] (1770) 1: a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a
particular style, form, or content 2: kind, sort 3: painting that depicts scenes or events from everyday life usu. realistically
he.do.nism n [Gk hedone pleasure; akin to Gk hedys sweet--more at sweet] (1856) 1: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the
sole or chief good in life 2: a way of life based on or suggesting the principles of hedonism -- he.do.nist n -- he.do.nis.tic adj --
he.do.nis.ti.cal.ly adv
neo.clas.sic or neo.clas.si.cal adj (1877): of, relating to, or constituting a revival or adaptation of the classical esp. in literature, music,
art, or architecture -- neo.clas.si.cism n -- neo.clas.si.cist n or adj

pas.to.ral adj [ME, fr. L pastoralis, fr. pastor herdsman] (15c) 1 a (1): of, relating to, or composed of shepherds or herdsmen (2):

Baroque Art
devoted to or based on livestock raising b: of or relating to the countryside: not urban c: portraying or expressive of the life of
shepherds or country people esp. in an idealized and conventionalized manner <~ poetry> d: pleasingly peaceful and innocent: idyllic
2 a: of or relating to spiritual care or guidance esp. of a congregation b: of or relating to the pastor of a church -- pas.to.ral.ly adv --
pas.to.ral.ness n ²pastoral n (1584) 1 a: a literary work (as a poem or play) dealing with shepherds or rural life in a usu. artificial
manner and typically drawing a contrast between the innocence and serenity of the simple life and the misery and corruption of city
and esp. court life b: pastoral poetry or drama c: a rural picture or scene d: pastorale 1b 2: crosier 1 3: a letter of a pastor to his charge:
as a: a letter addressed by a bishop to his diocese b: a letter of the house of bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church to be read in
each parish

ten.e.brism n, often cap [L tenebrae darkness] (1954): a style of painting esp. associated with the Italian painter Caravaggio and his
followers in which most of the figures are engulfed in shadow but some are dramatically illuminated by a concentrated beam of light
usu. from an identifiable source -- ten.e.brist n or adj, often cap
trompe l’oeil - (French: "deceive the eye"), in painting, the representation of an object with such verisimilitude as to deceive the
viewer concerning the material reality of the object. This idea appealed to the ancient Greeks who were newly emancipated from the
conventional stylizations of earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly painted such realistic grapes that birds tried to eat them. The
technique was also popular with Roman muralists. Although trompe l’oeil never achieved the status of a major artistic aim, from the
early Renaissance on, European painters occasionally fostered illusionism by painting false frames out of which the contents of a still
life or portrait appeared to spill, or by creating window-like images suggesting actual openings in the wall or ceiling. (Brittanica)

Caravaggio (1569-1609)
Form: This allegorical portrait incorporates a low key or earth toned palette combined
with a very close point of view. Caravaggio demonstrates a good mastery of the human
face as well as chiaroscuro . According to the Brittanica, chiaroscuro (from Italian
chiaro, "light"; scuro, "dark"), which is technique employed in the visual arts to
represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects.
Caravaggio also uses an intense spotlight on his face while the rest of the picture plane
is murky surrounding him. This is called tenebrism and it is a way of creating a focus
on a particular element in a work and also gives the work a sense of heightened drama.
The painting also feels like an immediate kind of "snapshot" of a young boy dressed in
neoclassic clothing caught at the instance when a lizard bites his fingers. The
immediacy of the painting is complimented by the direct gaze and the facial expression
of the figure. This painting appears to be painted directly from life without using any
previous studies or drawings. This is called ala prima- (in the first) which means
painting directly from observation onto canvas.
This painting also demonstrates Caravaggio's skill beyond his ability to paint the human
form. The clear vessel of water is what is referred to as an artist's conceit or concetto
(italian for conceit) because painting a transparent vessel is one of the harder things to
paint. Caravaggio also has a fine command of painting drapery.
Even though the figure in this painting is placed in the visual center of the picture plane
the light which rakes in from the upper left hand corner creates a strong diagonal across
the picture plane. The use of a diagonal in the composition of the picture plane is a very
Michelangelo Meresi Caravaggio Baroque device.
Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard c1600
oil on canvas Iconography: Caravaggio was a rather outrageous and controversial man. Many of his
Italian Baroque paintings demonstrate a rebellious and often ribald sense of humor. This is an
allegorical portrait of lust. The young boy is probably the type of young man that
Tenebrism means using light as a spotlighting effect in Caravaggio held as the object of his desire. Young male prostitutes were fairly common
a murky or dark scene. in cities during this time (as they are now) and it has been suggested by some sources
ala prima-directly onto canvas; paints directly form life that Caravaggio was a homosexual and a pederast. The lizard hanging from the boy's
finger may represent the cost of the lust and the cherries may be a reference to the
concepts concerning "forbidden fruit" or possibly even virginity.
Context: Caravaggio was an,
Italian baroque painter, who was the most revolutionary artist of

his time and the best exemplar of naturalistic painting in the early
17th century. Originally named Michelangelo Merisi, Caravaggio
was born September 28, 1573, in the Lombardy hill town of

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Caravaggio, from which his professional name is derived.

Orphaned at age 11, he was apprenticed to the painter Simone
Peterzano of Milan for four years. At some time between 1588 and
1592, Caravaggio went to Rome and worked as an assistant to
Giuseppe Cesari, also known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino, for whom
he executed fruit and flower pieces (now lost). Caravaggio's
personal life was turbulent. He was often arrested and imprisoned.
He fled Rome for Naples in 1606 when charged with murder.
chiaroscuro Later that year he traveled to Malta, was made a knight, or
cavaliere, of the Maltese order. In October of 1608, Caravaggio
was again arrested and, escaping from a Maltese jail, went to
Syracuse in Sicily. He died on the beach at Port'Ercole in
Tuscany on July 18, 1610, of a fever contracted after a mistaken
arrest.
source of quote
http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Caravaggio.html

Form: This is a still life painting which is painted from an extraordinary

point of view. The basket and its contents are depicted from eye level. The
virtuosity of how realistically the surfaces and details of the basket, its
contents, the moisture on the fruit and even the hints of decay are
expressions of Caravaggio's skills. It's interesting to note that this is often
referred to as the completely dedicated still life painting of its kind since
Pompeii (79 CE).
Iconography: Paintings like this one depicting fruit is symbolic of the

pleasures of every day life and perhaps of the delicacies one might desire.
Fruit was not available all year and it is one of the fleeting pleasures. The
depictions of fruit and other delicacies, such as Herakleitos' Unswept Floor
(fig 6-58) are references to the wealth of the patron and the skill of the
artist.
The depictions of the decay caused by the worms in the apple and on the
leaves may be a memento mori. That although these are delicacies and
treasured parts of enjoying life, sometimes such things are transitory and
Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit c. 1597
fleeting.
Oil on canvas, 46 x 64 cm
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan
Italian Baroque

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In this image, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c1593, Caravaggio combines the
formal qualities and iconographic elements of Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard
and Basket of Fruit.
Why do you think he does this and what message is being communicated?
Caravaggio. Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c1593

oil on canvas, 27.5x26"
Galleria Borghese, Rome
Italian Baroque

Form: This painting is typical of Caravaggio's style and exhibits all the hallmarks of it.
Here we see heightened tenebrism and chiaroscuro as well as an ambiguous use of space.
Caravaggio almost always pushes al his figures up against the front of the picture plane and
creates an ambiguous and unrecognizable environment. For Caravaggio the background and
environment are often unimportant and some critics have charged that he didn't bother with
the background or had trouble unifying his composition and so just create a well of darkness
to unify it.
In this image Saul of Tarsus, the saint-to-be, is represented flat on his back, his arms thrown
up, while an old servant appears to maneuver the horse away from its fallen master. The
horse fills the picture as if it were the hero, and its explicitness and the angle from which it
is viewed might betray some irreverence on the part of the artist for this subject. One critic
who objected to the intertangling of the limbs of the horse and figures called the painting an
"accident in a blacksmith's shop."
Caravaggio used real people for his models and so the clothing and faces incorporate a
strong genre element.
Iconography: Light in Caravaggio's paintings is an icon of God's power and of

enlightenment. Caravaggio seems to literally be translating the imagery from the Bible.
According to Acts Chapter 27, Paul describes,
Conversion of St. Paul- 1601 by Caravaggio

Italian Baroque
6
"On that journey as I drew near to Damascus, about noon a great light from the sky suddenly shone around me.

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7
I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?'
8
I replied, 'Who are you, sir?' And he said to me, 'I am Jesus the Nazorean whom you are persecuting.'
9
My companions saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who spoke to me.
10 I asked, 'What shall I do, sir?' The Lord answered me, 'Get up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told about everything
appointed for you to do.'
11 Since I could see nothing because of the brightness of that light, I was led by hand by my companions and entered Damascus.
12 "A certain Ananias, a devout observer of the law, and highly spoken of by all the Jews who lived there,
13 came to me and stood there and said, 'Saul, my brother, regain your sight.' And at that very moment I regained my sight and saw
him.
14 Then he said, 'The God of our ancestors designated you to know his will, to see the Righteous One, and to hear the sound of his
voice;
15 for you will be his witness 2 before all to what you have seen and heard.
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/acts/acts22.htm#v3
Also see Acts Chapter 9

For full text of the passage go here: http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/acts/acts9.htm
Context: Caravaggio's Conversion of Paul, was considered scandalous because in it he devotes so much of the canvas to the horse's rear.
Visually he is literally "mooning" the audience. Observers also found Paul's prone position and the intermingling of his limbs with the horses
somewhat objectionable.
Form: Even though the figures in this painting are arranged in a band across the front of
the picture plane, the light which rakes in from the upper right hand corner creates a
strong diagonal across the picture plane. The use of a diagonal in the composition of the
picture plane is a very Baroque device.
From "Caravaggio", by Alfred Moir:
"The subject traditionally was represented either indoors or out; sometimes Saint
Matthew is shown inside a building, with Christ outside (following the Biblical text)
summoning him through a window. Both before and after Caravaggio the subject was
often used as a pretext for anecdotal genre paintings. Caravaggio may well have been
familiar with earlier Netherlandish paintings of money lenders or of gamblers seated
around a table like Saint Matthew and his associates.
"Caravaggio represented the event as a nearly silent, dramatic narrative. The sequence of
actions before and after this moment can be easily and convincingly re-created. The tax-
gatherer Levi (Saint Matthew's name before he became the apostle) was seated at a table
with his four assistants, counting the day's proceeds, the group lighted from a source at
the upper right of the painting. Christ, His eyes veiled, with His halo the only hint of
divinity, enters with Saint Peter. A gesture of His right hand, all the more powerful and
Caravaggio (1569-1609) compelling because of its languor, summons Levi. Surprised by the intrusion and perhaps
Calling of St. Matthew- 1597-1601, dazzled by the sudden light from the just-opened door, Levi draws back and gestures
Oil on canvas, located in the Contarelli Chapel, San toward himself with his left hand as if to say, "Who, me?", his right hand remaining on
Luigi dei Francesi. the coin he had been counting before Christ's entrance.
Italian Baroque
"The two figures on the left, derived from a 1545 Hans Holbein print representing
gamblers unaware of the appearance of Death, are so concerned with counting the money
that they do not even notice Christ's arrival; symbolically their inattention to Christ
deprives them of the opportunity He offers for eternal life, and condemns them to death.
The two boys in the center do respond, the younger one drawing back against Levi as if
seeking his protection, the swaggering older one, who is armed, leaning forward a little
menacingly. Saint Peter gestures firmly with his hand to calm his potential resistance.
The dramatic point of the picture is that for this moment, no one does anything. Christ's
appearance is so unexpected and His gesture so commanding as to suspend action for a
shocked instant, before reaction can take place. In another second, Levi will rise up and
follow Christ - in fact, Christ's feet are already turned as if to leave the room. The
particular power of the picture is in this cessation of action. It utilizes the fundamentally
static medium of painting to convey characteristic human indecision after a challenge or
command and before reaction.
"The picture is divided into two parts. The standing figures on the right form a vertical
St. Matthew Cycle (Contarelli Chapel) c1602
rectangle; those gathered around the table on the left a horizontal block. The costumes

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Rome,St.Luigi dei Francesi

reinforce the contrast. Levi and his subordinates, who are involved in affairs of this
The paintings in situ.
world, are dressed in a contemporary mode, while the barefoot Christ and Saint Peter,
Italian Baroque
who summon Levi to another life and world, appear in timeless cloaks. The two groups
are also separated by a void, bridged literally and symbolically by Christ's hand. This
hand, like Adam's in Michelangelo's Creation, unifies the two parts formally and
psychologically. Underlying the shallow stage-like space of the picture is a grid pattern of
verticals and horizontals, which knit it together structurally.
"The light has been no less carefully manipulated: the visible window covered with
oilskin, very likely to provide diffused light in the painter's studio; the upper light, to
illuminate Saint Matthew's face and the seated group; and the light behind Christ and
Saint Peter, introduced only with them. It may be that this third source of light is
intended as miraculous. Otherwise, why does Saint Peter cast no shadow on the defensive
youth facing him?"
Matthew
Chapter 9
1
1 He entered a boat, made the crossing, and came into his own town.
2
And there people brought to him a paralytic lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Courage,
child, your sins are forgiven."
3
At that, some of the scribes 2 said to themselves, "This man is blaspheming."
4
Jesus knew what they were thinking, and said, "Why do you harbor evil thoughts?
5
Which is easier, to say, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Rise and walk'?
6
3But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" --he then said to the paralytic, "Rise, pick
up your stretcher, and go home."
7
He rose and went home.
8
4 When the crowds saw this they were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to human beings.
9
56
As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, "Follow me." And
he got up and followed him.
10 While he was at table in his house, 7 many tax collectors and sinners came and sat with Jesus and his disciples.
11 The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher 8 eat with tax collectors and sinners?"
12 He heard this and said, "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. 9
13 Go and learn the meaning of the words, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' 10 I did not come to call the righteous but sinners."
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/matthew/matthew9.htm
Almost the the same account is given in Luke 5:27 http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/luke/luke5.htm
Form: Although only a black and white reproduction survives the

image entitled St. Matthew and the Angel, we know that originally
would have looked very similar in color and value structure to the
Inspiration of St. Matthew.
Some major differences do exist however. The point of view is

quite different in both as is the costuming and the interaction of
the two figures. In the image on the left, Matthew is bare legged,
entwined with the angel in a transparent gauze like gown and his
facial expression is rather dumb. Although the viewer is placed in
a vantage point from above, the viewer is still confronted with the
bare feet of the saint as they project out into the foreground. The
image on the right is just the opposite in almost every way.
Iconography: The iconography of this scene concerns itself with

an image in which Matthew composes his gospel long after the

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death and ascension of Jesus. Matthew is described as having

received divine inspiration and guidance for his account from an
angel. Nevertheless, the angel in the left hand image is guiding
Matthew's hand in a rather provocative manner. This manner,
Caravaggio St. Matthew and the Angel Caravaggio, coupled with the bare legs and befuddled almost senile expression
destroyed during WW II Inspiration of St. Matthew on the saints face is what ultimately led to this image being
Italian Baroque Italian Baroque rejected by the patrons. Caravaggio then painted its replacement
the Inspiration of St. Matthew.
Context: It is precisely this kind of irreverence and rebellious

"thumbing his nose" at the patron that both earned Caravaggio his
notoriety as well as his infamous reputation.
Caravaggisti- a follower of Caravaggio
Form: As in the last comparison only a black and

white reproduction survives the image entitled St.
Matthew and the Angel, we know that originally would
have looked very similar in color and value structure to
the the painting by Rembrandt.
Rembrandt painted his image more than 50 years after

Caravaggio painted his but Rembrandt's portrait of the
saint follows many of the same schema as Caravaggio.
Both use tenebrism as a way of creating a focus on St.
Matthew and to heighten the drama. In this way and
for this reason, Rembrandt, and other artists who copy
Caravaggio's style are often referred to as caravaggisti
which literally means a follower of Caravaggio.
Iconography: Rembrandt depicts Matthew in a similar

manner to Caravaggio however, in his depiction
Matthew is not as aware of the angel as in either one
by Caravaggio.
Rembrandt St. Matthew and the Angel 1661 Rembrandt also incorporates and element of the genre
Caravaggio St. Matthew and the Angel imagery in his work. Matthew looks like one of the
destroyed during WW II Dutch Baroque Jews that he might have known in Amsterdam and
Italian Baroque Rembrandt also attempts to authenticate the Persian or
middle eastern quality of the image by providing
Matthew with a turbine.
Context: Many artists, including Rembrandt,

Velázquez, Gentileschi and others took their cue form
the works of Caravaggio and we refer to them all as
Caravaggistis.

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This is another one of those paintings that Caravaggio got in trouble for. This is an
apochryphal story concerning the death of Mary. In Caravaggio's depiction of the dead saint
he depicts her in a very real way. Her feet are dirty, her body and hair are disheveled and her
skin is past an white. Her appearance is so "life like" or really "death like" because
Caravaggio used the corpse of a prostitute that the authorities had pulled from the Tiber river
in Rome as his model.
Caravaggio Death of the Virgin 1605-1606

Italian Baroque
al.le.go.ry n, pl -ries [ME allegorie, fr. L allegoria, fr. Gk allegoria, fr. allegorein to speak figuratively, fr. allos
other + -egorein to speak publicly, fr. agora assembly--more at else, agora] (14c) 1: the expression by means of
symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also: an instance (as in
a story or painting) of such expression 2: a symbolic representation: emblem 2
apoc.ry.pha n pl but sing or pl in constr [ML, fr. LL, neut. pl. of apocryphus secret, not canonical, fr. Gk
apokryphos obscure, fr. apokryptein to hide away, fr. apo- + kryptein to hide--more at crypt] (14c) 1: writings or
statements of dubious authenticity 2 cap a: books included in the Septuagint and Vulgate but excluded from the
Jewish and Protestant canons of the Old Testament b: early Christian writings not included in the New
Testament
apoc.ry.phal adj (1590) 1: of doubtful authenticity: spurious 2 often cap: of or resembling the Apocrypha syn
see fictitious -- apoc.ry.phal.ly adv -- apoc.ry.phal.ness n
ar.ca.di.an adj, often cap (1589) 1: idyllically pastoral; esp: idyllically innocent, simple, or untroubled 2 a: of or
relating to Arcadia or the Arcadians b: of or relating to Arcadian Ar.ca.di.an n (1590) 1 often not cap: a person
who lives a simple quiet life 2: a native or inhabitant of Arcadia 3: the dialect of ancient Greek used in Arcadia
Modern Greek ARKADHÍA, mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient Greece. The pastoral
character of Arcadian life together with its isolation partially explains why it was represented as a paradise in
Greek and Roman bucolic poetry and in the literature of the Renaissance. The region is not exactly coextensive
with the present-day nomós (department) of Arkadhía, which extends on the east to the Gulf of Argolis. The
capital of the nomos is Trípolis.

chiar.oscu.ro n, pl -ros [It, fr. chiaro clear, light + oscuro
obscure, dark] (1686) 1: pictorial representation in terms of light

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and shade without regard to color 2 a: the arrangement or

treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art b: the
interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or
character) 3: a 16th century woodcut technique involving the use
of several blocks to print different tones of the same color; also: a
print made by this technique 4: the interplay of light and shadow
on or as if on a surface 5: the quality of being veiled or partly in
shadow

technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and
shadow as they define three-dimensional objects.
Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists used
chiaroscuro effects, but in European painting the technique was
first brought to its full potential by Leonardo da Vinci in the late
15th century in such paintings as his "Adoration of the Magi"
(1481; Uffizi, Florence). Thereafter, chiaroscuro became a primary
technique for many painters, and by the late 17th century the term
chiaroscuro was routinely used to describe any painting, drawing, or print that
depends for its effect on an extensive gradation of light and
darkness.
"chiaroscuro." and Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-

ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. November
19, 2002.

genre n [F, fr. MF, kind, gender--more at gender] (1770) 1: a category of artistic, musical, or literary
composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content 2: kind, sort 3: painting that depicts scenes or
events from everyday life usu. realistically
he.do.nism n [Gk hedone pleasure; akin to Gk hedys sweet--more at sweet] (1856) 1: the doctrine that pleasure
or happiness is the sole or chief good in life 2: a way of life based on or suggesting the principles of hedonism --
he.do.nist n -- he.do.nis.tic adj -- he.do.nis.ti.cal.ly adv
neo.clas.sic or neo.clas.si.cal adj (1877): of, relating to, or constituting a revival or adaptation of the classical
esp. in literature, music, art, or architecture -- neo.clas.si.cism n -- neo.clas.si.cist n or adj

pas.to.ral adj [ME, fr. L pastoralis, fr. pastor herdsman] (15c) 1 a (1): of, relating to, or composed of shepherds
or herdsmen (2): devoted to or based on livestock raising b: of or relating to the countryside: not urban c:
portraying or expressive of the life of shepherds or country people esp. in an idealized and conventionalized
manner <~ poetry> d: pleasingly peaceful and innocent: idyllic 2 a: of or relating to spiritual care or guidance
esp. of a congregation b: of or relating to the pastor of a church -- pas.to.ral.ly adv -- pas.to.ral.ness n ²pastoral n
(1584) 1 a: a literary work (as a poem or play) dealing with shepherds or rural life in a usu. artificial manner and
typically drawing a contrast between the innocence and serenity of the simple life and the misery and corruption
of city and esp. court life b: pastoral poetry or drama c: a rural picture or scene d: pastorale 1b 2: crosier 1 3: a
letter of a pastor to his charge: as a: a letter addressed by a bishop to his diocese b: a letter of the house of
bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church to be read in each parish
ped.er.ast n [Gk paiderastes, lit., lover of boys, fr. paid- ped- + erastes lover, fr. erasthai to love--more at eros]
(ca. 1736): one that practices anal intercourse esp. with a boy -- ped.er.as.tic adj -- ped.er.as.ty n
rib.ald n [ME, fr. MF ribaut, ribauld wanton, rascal, fr. riber to be wanton, of Gmc origin; akin to OHG riban to
be wanton, lit., to rub] (13c): a ribald person ²ribald adj (1508) 1: crude, offensive <~ language> 2: characterized
by or using coarse indecent humor syn see coarse
ten.e.brism n, often cap [L tenebrae darkness] (1954): a style of painting esp. associated with the Italian painter
Caravaggio and his followers in which most of the figures are engulfed in shadow but some are dramatically
illuminated by a concentrated beam of light usu. from an identifiable source -- ten.e.brist n or adj, often cap
according to the Brittanica,

"in the history of Western painting, the use of extreme contrasts of light and dark in figurative compositions to

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heighten their dramatic effect. (The term is derived from the Latin tenebrae, "darkness.") In tenebrist paintings
the figures are often portrayed against a background of intense darkness, but the figures themselves are
illuminated by a bright, searching light that sets off their three-dimensional forms by a harsh but exquisitely
controlled chiaroscuro . The technique was introduced by the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571?-1610) and was
taken up in the early 17th century by painters influenced by him, including the French painter Georges de La
Tour, the Dutch painters Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrik Terbrugghen, and the Spanish painter Francisco de
Zurbarán."
trompe l’oeil - (French: "deceive the eye"), in painting, the representation of an object with such verisimilitude
as to deceive the viewer concerning the material reality of the object. This idea appealed to the ancient Greeks
who were newly emancipated from the conventional stylizations of earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly
painted such realistic grapes that birds tried to eat them. The technique was also popular with Roman muralists.
Although trompe l’oeil never achieved the status of a major artistic aim, from the early Renaissance on,
European painters occasionally fostered illusionism by painting false frames out of which the contents of a still
life or portrait appeared to spill, or by creating window-like images suggesting actual openings in the wall or
ceiling. (Brittanica)

Make sure you read

Mencher, Liaisons 197-214 Read Judith and Holofernes and Susanna and the Elders

from Caravaggio
Influence.
The many painters who imitated Caravaggio's style soon became

known as Caravaggisti. Caravaggio's influence in Rome itself
was remarkable but short-lived, lasting only until the 1620s. His
foremost followers elsewhere in Italy were Orazio Gentileschi,
Artemisia Gentileschi, and the Spaniard José de Ribera. Outside
Italy, the Dutch painters Hendrick Terbrugghen, Gerrit van
Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen made the city of Utrecht the
foremost northern centre of Caravaggism. The single most
important painter in the tradition was the Frenchman Georges de
La Tour, though echoes of Caravaggio's style can also be found
in the works of such giants as Rembrandt van Rijn and Diego
Orazio Gentileschi Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1628, canvas, Velázquez.
Italian Baroque
According to the Brittanica, Orazio Gentileschi (1562-1639) whose,
original name ORAZIO LOMI Italian Baroque painter, one of the more important painters who came under the
influence of Caravaggio and who was one of the more successful interpreters of his style.
Gentileschi first studied with his half brother Aurelio Lomi. At some time in the late 1570s or early 1580s he
went to Rome, where, with the landscape painter Agostino Tassi, he painted frescoes in churches of Santa Maria
Maggiore, San Giovanni Laterano, and Santa Nicola in Carcere from about 1590 to 1600, executing figures for
Tassi's landscapes.
In the first years of the 17th century Gentileschi came under the influence of Caravaggio, also in Rome at the
time. His paintings of this period (e.g., "David and Goliath," 1610?, and "St. Cecilia and the Angel," 1610?)
employ Caravaggio's use of dramatic, unconventional gesture and monumental composition, his uncompromising
realism and contemporary representation of figure types, and to some extent his strong chiaroscuro, or light-and-
dark contrast. Shortly afterward Gentileschi developed a Tuscan lyricism foreign to Caravaggio's almost brutal
vitality, a lighter palette, and a more precise treatment reminiscent of his Mannerist beginnings. From 1621 to
1623 Gentileschi was in Genoa, where he painted his masterpiece, "The Annunciation" (1623), a work of
consummate grace that shows a weakening of Caravaggio's influence. The composition still depends on dramatic
gestures, here of the Virgin and the angel, and there is still a strong immediacy to the incident and an absence of
idealization. The mood, however, is more restrained and lyrical than in his earlier works, the colours are light,
and the earlier chiaroscuro is absent.

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After a stay in France, Gentileschi traveled to England in 1626 at the invitation of King Charles I; he remained
there as court painter for the rest of his life, his work becoming increasingly conventional and decorative. His
last major work is an ambitious series of ceiling paintings for the Queen's House, Greenwich, painted probably
after 1635, and now in Marlborough House, London.

Orazio had a daughter named Artemisia (1593-1652/53) who was also a painter. According to the Brittanica,
Italian painter, daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, who was a major follower of the revolutionary Baroque painter
Caravaggio. She was an important second-generation proponent of Caravaggio's dramatic realism.
A pupil of her father and of his friend, the landscape painter Agostino Tassi, she painted at first in a style
indistinguishable from her father's somewhat lyrical interpretation of Caravaggio's example. Her first known
work is "Susanna and the Elders" (1610), an accomplished work long attributed to her father. She was raped by
Tassi, and, when he did not fulfill his promise to marry her, Orazio Gentileschi in 1612 brought him to trial.
During that event she herself was forced to give evidence under torture. She married a Florentine shortly after
the trial and joined the Academy of Design in Florence in 1616. While in Florence she began to develop her own
distinct style. Her colours are more brilliant than her father's, and she continued to employ the tenebrism made
popular by Caravaggio long after her father had abandoned that style. Although her compositions were graceful,
she was perhaps the most violent of all the Caravaggisti; she illustrated such subjects as the story from the
Apocrypha of Judith, the Jewish heroine, beheading Holofernes, an invading general.
Artemisia Gentileschi was in Rome for a time and also in Venice. About 1630 she moved to Naples and in 1638-
39 visited her father in London. There she painted many portraits and quickly surpassed her father's fame. Later,
probably in 1640 or 1641, she settled in Naples, but little is known of the final years of her life.
Form: This self portrait demonstrates her skill as a painter. The angle from which she chose to paint
herself is an awkward one and she almost certainly had to set up several mirrors in order to bounce her
reflection around until she was able to see herself. She uses many of the standard formal schemas of
Caravaggio's work, tenebrism, a low key earth toned pallete and heightened chiaroscuro. Like
Caravaggio she also has a fine command of painting drapery.
Iconography: According to the Webgalleries website,
An example of Gentileschi's mature work, this painting depicts the artist not only in a self
portrait but also as Pittura, the originator of the art of painting. Artemisia has given us her
Artemisia Gentileschi. Self Portrait as image, painted in profile, and the attributes of the personification of painting in accordance
Allegory with Ripa's Iconologia. Around her neck, she wears the golden chain and the mask of
of Painting or "La Pittura" 1630 imitation. Her disheveled hair depicts the divine frenzy of artistic temperament, and the
Oil on Canvas handling of color on her dress shows Artemisia's skill as an artist. Although other artists
Kensington Palace have depicted Pittura, Artemisia's portrait is unique because only a female artist would be
Italian Baroque able to depict herself as the allegory of painting. Until this time, the male artists who
worked this theme had to add a female figurehead to represent Ripa's Pittura.
http://www.webgalleries.com/pm/colors/gentile.html
Artemisia also updates her depiction almost with the same use of genre as Caravaggio. In this image
she dresses her allegorical Pittura as a 17th century woman.
Context: Artemisia self portrait is interesting because her depiction of herself is quite different than
one might expect a female painter to create. Comparing her self portrait against Sofonisba
Anguissola's may give you some insight as to how her past has influenced her life.
Sofonisba Anguissola,
Self Portrait of the Artist

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with Sisters and Governess. 1555

(The Chess Game)
oil on canvas, 27"x37"
Nardowe Museum, Poznan, Poland
Italian Renaissance/Mannerist

It has been argued that this painting expresses

Artemisia's psychological revenge on Tassi. It is, in
fact, one of several canvas' which Artemisia based
the Judith theme, but the subject matter was a
popular one and was treated by many artists
throughout the centuries. What makes this painting
unique, however, is Artemisia's rendering of Judith
as a strong and capable heroine. While many
depictions of Judith show her after the slaying of
Holofernes, Gentileschi gives us Judith in the act of
killing the man. The subject matter is taken from
the Book of Judith whereby Judith liberates her
people by slaying the evil tyrant. She has entered
the enemy camp under the guise of seducing
Artimisia Gentileschi, Holofernes and when he falls asleep she hacks off
Judith Slaying Holofernes c1620 Artimisia Gentileschi his head with his sword. Carrying back his head in
Judith Beheading Holofernes Judith with the head of Holofernes a bag, she presents it to her people, who then go on
Oil on Canvas c1625 to defeat the Assyrians. The dark background and
Uffizi Gallery, Florence Detroit, Institute of Art single source of light add psychological tension and
Italian Baroque Italian Baroque drama to the scene and cause it to play out beyond
the boarders of the canvas. We, as spectators, have
Gentileschi's images feel "real." The become witness to a murder.
postures and movement in Gentileschi's http://www.webgalleries.com/pm/colors/gentile.html
images are fluid and naturalistic. One
feels the struggle the two women face in
trying to escape. Unlike Caravaggio's
painting, Judith and Holofernes,
Gentileschi's image shows powerful
women. In Caravaggio's the servant is
an old woman as opposed to the young
beautiful and powerful maid
accompanying Judith in Gentileshi's
images.
Caravaggio, Judith Slaying Holofernes
c1600
Italian Baroque
.


Baroque Art
Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders c1640

Italian Baroque
The Story of Susanna and the Elders
The second addition to Daniel, (Daniel 17) the story of Susanna, and the third one,
Bel and the Dragon, are preserved in two Greek versions. In both stories
the hero is the wise Daniel. Susanna was the pious and beautiful wife of
Joakim, a wealthy Jew in Babylon. Two aged judges became inflamed
with love for her. They tried to force her to yield to their lust, and, when
she refused, they accused her of committing adultery with a young man,
who escaped. She was condemned to death, but when Daniel
cross-examined the two elders separately, the first stated that Susanna
had been surprised under a mastic tree, the other under a holm tree.
Susanna was thus saved and the two false witnesses executed.
This page is a direct quote from: Copyright © 1994-1997 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
To cite this page:
"Biblical Literature and Its Critical Interpretation: Intertestamental literature:
APOCRYPHAL WRITINGS: Additions to Daniel and Esther.." Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=macro/5000/71/65.html>
[Accessed 25 September 1997].
The Story of Susanna and the Elders

(directly quoted from this site gopher://ccat.sas.upenn.edu:3333/00/Religious/Biblical/KJVBible/Apocrypha/Sus_KJV.txt)
Set apart from the beginning of Daniel, because it is not in the Hebrew, as neither the Narration of Bel and the Dragon.
Sus 1:1
There dwelt a man in Babylon, called Joacim:
Sus 1:2
And he took a wife, whose name was Susanna, the daughter of
Chelcias, a very fair woman, and one that feared the Lord.
Sus 1:3
Her parents also were righteous, and taught their daughter
according to the law of Moses.

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Sus 1:4
Now Joacim was a great rich man, and had a fair garden
joining unto his house: and to him resorted the Jews; because he
was more honourable than all others.
Sus 1:5
The same year were appointed two of the ancients of the
people to be judges, such as the Lord spake of, that wickedness
came from Babylon from ancient judges, who seemed to govern the
people.
Sus 1:6
These kept much at Joacim's house: and all that had any suits
in law came unto them.
Sus 1:7
Now when the people departed away at noon, Susanna went into
her husband's garden to walk.
Sus 1:8
And the two elders saw her going in every day, and walking;
so that their lust was inflamed toward her.
Sus 1:9
And they perverted their own mind, and turned away their
eyes, that they might not look unto heaven, nor remember just
judgments.
Sus 1:10
And albeit they both were wounded with her love, yet durst
not one shew another his grief.
Sus 1:11
For they were ashamed to declare their lust, that they
desired to have to do with her.
Sus 1:12
Yet they watched diligently from day to day to see her.
Sus 1:13
And the one said to the other, Let us now go home: for it is
dinner time.
Sus 1:14
So when they were gone out, they parted the one from the
other, and turning back again they came to the same place; and
after that they had asked one another the cause, they
acknowledged their lust: then appointed they a time both
together, when they might find her alone.
Sus 1:15
And it fell out, as they watched a fit time, she went in as
before with two maids only, and she was desirous to wash herself
in the garden: for it was hot.
Sus 1:16
And there was no body there save the two elders, that had hid
themselves, and watched her.
Sus 1:17
Then she said to her maids, Bring me oil and washing balls,
and shut the garden doors, that I may wash me.
Sus 1:18
And they did as she bade them, and shut the garden doors, and
went out themselves at privy doors to fetch the things that she

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had commanded them: but they saw not the elders, because they
were hid.
Sus 1:19
Now when the maids were gone forth, the two elders rose up,
and ran unto her, saying,
Sus 1:20
Behold, the garden doors are shut, that no man can see us,
and we are in love with thee; therefore consent unto us, and lie
with us.
Sus 1:21
If thou wilt not, we will bear witness against thee, that a
young man was with thee: and therefore thou didst send away thy
maids from thee.
Sus 1:22
Then Susanna sighed, and said, I am straitened on every side:
for if I do this thing, it is death unto me: and if I do it not
I cannot escape your hands.
Sus 1:23
It is better for me to fall into your hands, and not do it,
than to sin in the sight of the Lord.
Sus 1:24
With that Susanna cried with a loud voice: and the two elders
cried out against her.
Sus 1:25
Then ran the one, and opened the garden door.
Sus 1:26
So when the servants of the house heard the cry in the
garden, they rushed in at the privy door, to see what was done
unto her.
Sus 1:27
But when the elders had declared their matter, the servants
were greatly ashamed: for there was never such a report made of
Susanna.
Sus 1:28
And it came to pass the next day, when the people were
assembled to her husband Joacim, the two elders came also full
of mischievous imagination against Susanna to put her to death;
Sus 1:29
And said before the people, Send for Susanna, the daughter of
Chelcias, Joacim's wife. And so they sent.
Sus 1:30
So she came with her father and mother, her children, and all
her kindred.
Sus 1:31
Now Susanna was a very delicate woman, and beauteous to
behold.
Sus 1:32
And these wicked men commanded to uncover her face, (for she
was covered) that they might be filled with her beauty.
Sus 1:33
Therefore her friends and all that saw her wept.

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Sus 1:34
Then the two elders stood up in the midst of the people, and
laid their hands upon her head.
Sus 1:35
And she weeping looked up toward heaven: for her heart
trusted in the Lord.
Sus 1:36
And the elders said, As we walked in the garden alone, this
woman came in with two maids, and shut the garden doors, and
sent the maids away.
Sus 1:37
Then a young man, who there was hid, came unto her, and lay
with her.
Sus 1:38
Then we that stood in a corner of the garden, seeing this
wickedness, ran unto them.
Sus 1:39
And when we saw them together, the man we could not hold: for
he was stronger than we, and opened the door, and leaped out.
Sus 1:40
But having taken this woman, we asked who the young man was,
but she would not tell us: these things do we testify.
Sus 1:41
Then the assembly believed them as those that were the elders
and judges of the people: so they condemned her to death.
Sus 1:42
Then Susanna cried out with a loud voice, and said, O
everlasting God, that knowest the secrets, and knowest all
things before they be:
Sus 1:43
Thou knowest that they have borne false witness against me,
and, behold, I must die; whereas I never did such things as
these men have maliciously invented against me.
Sus 1:44
And the Lord heard her voice.
Sus 1:45
Therefore when she was led to be put to death, the Lord
raised up the holy spirit of a young youth whose name was
Daniel:
Sus 1:46
Who cried with a loud voice, I am clear from the blood of
this woman.
Sus 1:47
Then all the people turned them toward him, and said, What
mean these words that thou hast spoken?
Sus 1:48
So he standing in the midst of them said, Are ye such fools,
ye sons of Israel, that without examination or knowledge of the
truth ye have condemned a daughter of Israel?
Sus 1:49
Return again to the place of judgment: for they have borne
false witness against her.

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Sus 1:50
Wherefore all the people turned again in haste, and the
elders said unto him, Come, sit down among us, and shew it us,
seeing God hath given thee the honour of an elder.
Sus 1:51
Then said Daniel unto them, Put these two aside one far from
another, and I will examine them.
Sus 1:52
So when they were put asunder one from another, he called one
of them, and said unto him, O thou that art waxen old in
wickedness, now thy sins which thou hast committed aforetime are
come to light.
Sus 1:53
For thou hast pronounced false judgment and hast condemned
the innocent and hast let the guilty go free; albeit the Lord
saith, The innocent and righteous shalt thou not slay.
Sus 1:54
Now then, if thou hast seen her, tell me, Under what tree
sawest thou them companying together? Who answered, Under a
mastick tree.
Sus 1:55
And Daniel said, Very well; thou hast lied against thine own
head; for even now the angel of God hath received the sentence
of God to cut thee in two.
Sus 1:56
So he put him aside, and commanded to bring the other, and
said unto him, O thou seed of Chanaan, and not of Juda, beauty
hath deceived thee, and lust hath perverted thine heart.
Sus 1:57
Thus have ye dealt with the daughters of Israel, and they for
fear companied with you: but the daughter of Juda would not
abide your wickedness.
Sus 1:58
Now therefore tell me, Under what tree didst thou take them
companying together? Who answered, Under an holm tree.
Sus 1:59
Then said Daniel unto him, Well; thou hast also lied against
thine own head: for the angel of God waiteth with the sword to
cut thee in two, that he may destroy you.
Sus 1:60
With that all the assembly cried out with a loud voice, and
praised God, who saveth them that trust in him.
Sus 1:61
And they arose against the two elders, for Daniel had
convicted them of false witness by their own mouth:
Sus 1:62
And according to the law of Moses they did unto them in such
sort as they maliciously intended to do to their neighbour: and
they put them to death. Thus the innocent blood was saved the
same day.
Sus 1:63
Therefore Chelcias and his wife praised God for their
daughter Susanna, with Joacim her husband, and all the kindred,

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because there was no dishonesty found in her.
Sus 1:64
From that day forth was Daniel had in great reputation in the
sight of the people.
al.le.go.ry n, pl -ries [ME allegorie, fr. L allegoria, fr. Gk allegoria, fr. allegorein to speak figuratively, fr. allos other + -
egorein to speak publicly, fr. agora assembly--more at else, agora] (14c) 1: the expression by means of symbolic fictional
figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also: an instance (as in a story or painting) of such
expression 2: a symbolic representation: emblem 2
apoc.ry.pha n pl but sing or pl in constr [ML, fr. LL, neut. pl. of apocryphus secret, not canonical, fr. Gk apokryphos
obscure, fr. apokryptein to hide away, fr. apo- + kryptein to hide--more at crypt] (14c) 1: writings or statements of dubious
authenticity 2 cap a: books included in the Septuagint and Vulgate but excluded from the Jewish and Protestant canons of
the Old Testament b: early Christian writings not included in the New Testament
apoc.ry.phal adj (1590) 1: of doubtful authenticity: spurious 2 often cap: of or resembling the Apocrypha syn see fictitious
-- apoc.ry.phal.ly adv -- apoc.ry.phal.ness n
ar.ca.di.an adj, often cap (1589) 1: idyllically pastoral; esp: idyllically innocent, simple, or untroubled 2 a: of or relating to
Arcadia or the Arcadians b: of or relating to Arcadian Ar.ca.di.an n (1590) 1 often not cap: a person who lives a simple
quiet life 2: a native or inhabitant of Arcadia 3: the dialect of ancient Greek used in Arcadia
Modern Greek ARKADHÍA, mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient Greece. The pastoral character of
Arcadian life together with its isolation partially explains why it was represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic
poetry and in the literature of the Renaissance. The region is not exactly coextensive with the present-day nomós
(department) of Arkadhía, which extends on the east to the Gulf of Argolis. The capital of the nomos is Trípolis.
chiar.oscu.ro n, pl -ros [It, fr. chiaro clear, light + oscuro obscure, dark] (1686) 1: pictorial representation in terms of light
and shade without regard to color 2 a: the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art b: the
interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or character) 3: a 16th century woodcut technique involving the use
of several blocks to print different tones of the same color; also: a print made by this technique 4: the interplay of light and
shadow on or as if on a surface 5: the quality of being veiled or partly in shadow

technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects.
Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists used chiaroscuro effects, but in European painting the
technique was first brought to its full potential by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century in such paintings as his
"Adoration of the Magi" (1481; Uffizi, Florence). Thereafter, chiaroscuro became a primary technique for many painters,
and by the late 17th century the term was routinely used to describe any painting, drawing, or print that depends for its
effect on an extensive gradation of light and darkness.
"chiaroscuro." and Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc.

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November 19, 2002.
genre n [F, fr. MF, kind, gender--more at gender] (1770) 1: a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition
characterized by a particular style, form, or content 2: kind, sort 3: painting that depicts scenes or events from everyday
life usu. realistically
he.do.nism n [Gk hedone pleasure; akin to Gk hedys sweet--more at sweet] (1856) 1: the doctrine that pleasure or
happiness is the sole or chief good in life 2: a way of life based on or suggesting the principles of hedonism -- he.do.nist n -
- he.do.nis.tic adj -- he.do.nis.ti.cal.ly adv
neo.clas.sic or neo.clas.si.cal adj (1877): of, relating to, or constituting a revival or adaptation of the classical esp. in
literature, music, art, or architecture -- neo.clas.si.cism n -- neo.clas.si.cist n or adj

pas.to.ral adj [ME, fr. L pastoralis, fr. pastor herdsman] (15c) 1 a (1): of, relating to, or composed of shepherds or
herdsmen (2): devoted to or based on livestock raising b: of or relating to the countryside: not urban c: portraying or
expressive of the life of shepherds or country people esp. in an idealized and conventionalized manner <~ poetry> d:
pleasingly peaceful and innocent: idyllic 2 a: of or relating to spiritual care or guidance esp. of a congregation b: of or
relating to the pastor of a church -- pas.to.ral.ly adv -- pas.to.ral.ness n ²pastoral n (1584) 1 a: a literary work (as a poem or
play) dealing with shepherds or rural life in a usu. artificial manner and typically drawing a contrast between the innocence
and serenity of the simple life and the misery and corruption of city and esp. court life b: pastoral poetry or drama c: a rural
picture or scene d: pastorale 1b 2: crosier 1 3: a letter of a pastor to his charge: as a: a letter addressed by a bishop to his
diocese b: a letter of the house of bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church to be read in each parish
ped.er.ast n [Gk paiderastes, lit., lover of boys, fr. paid- ped- + erastes lover, fr. erasthai to love--more at eros] (ca. 1736):
one that practices anal intercourse esp. with a boy -- ped.er.as.tic adj -- ped.er.as.ty n
rib.ald n [ME, fr. MF ribaut, ribauld wanton, rascal, fr. riber to be wanton, of Gmc origin; akin to OHG riban to be
wanton, lit., to rub] (13c): a ribald person ²ribald adj (1508) 1: crude, offensive <~ language> 2: characterized by or using
coarse indecent humor syn see coarse
ten.e.brism n, often cap [L tenebrae darkness] (1954): a style of painting esp. associated with the Italian painter Caravaggio
and his followers in which most of the figures are engulfed in shadow but some are dramatically illuminated by a
concentrated beam of light usu. from an identifiable source -- ten.e.brist n or adj, often cap
according to the Brittanica,

"in the history of Western painting, the use of extreme contrasts of light and dark in figurative compositions to heighten
their dramatic effect. (The term is derived from the Latin tenebrae, "darkness.") In tenebrist paintings the figures are often
portrayed against a background of intense darkness, but the figures themselves are illuminated by a bright, searching light
that sets off their three-dimensional forms by a harsh but exquisitely controlled chiaroscuro . The technique was introduced
by the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571?-1610) and was taken up in the early 17th century by painters influenced by him,
including the French painter Georges de La Tour, the Dutch painters Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrik Terbrugghen, and
the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán."
trompe l’oeil - (French: "deceive the eye"), in painting, the representation of an object with such verisimilitude as to
deceive the viewer concerning the material reality of the object. This idea appealed to the ancient Greeks who were newly
emancipated from the conventional stylizations of earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly painted such realistic grapes
that birds tried to eat them. The technique was also popular with Roman muralists. Although trompe l’oeil never achieved
the status of a major artistic aim, from the early Renaissance on, European painters occasionally fostered illusionism by
painting false frames out of which the contents of a still life or portrait appeared to spill, or by creating window-like images
suggesting actual openings in the wall or ceiling. (Brittanica)

Rubens and Rembrandt

Peter Paul Rubens
Peter Paul Rubens' work is original and powerful synthesis. He was

always in search of new ideas. In 1598 he became a master. He was
wealthy and spoke three to five different languages. He had two studios.
He would first sketch a painting and then corrected it. He is known to be
top in industry.
Elevation of the Cross, 1610 oil on canvas, 15' 2" x 11' 2", Cathedral,

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Antwerp. This is a Triptych painting that shows foreshortened anatomy.

The Christ cuts diagonally across the picture creating space and
prospective. This is portrait of giants trying to lift Christ. It shows a man
dressed in a medieval armor suite. Christ's complexion is pinkish
European and also portrays light and shadow.

Shows foreshortened anatomy and the contortions of violent action

triptych - 3 pictures
Christ's complexion - Dutch or French (red hair, pink flesh)
blending of genre painting and classicism - a lot of emotion in
painting, soldier wearing medieval suit of armor, men have perfect
Greek God bodies
Follower of Caravaggio
Rubens The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus 1617 7'x10' Alte,

Pinakothek, Munich.
It portrays the demi-gods Castor and Pollux taking the two mortal women.
This is a sensual theme to escape reality. The women show little
resistance to the man. This is an erotic scene to be view by male gaze.
Sfumato is showed in the background. Cupid is showed to be holding to a
horse.

Castor and Pollux abducting women

Constructed for male gaze
Covering the eroticism with a mythological story
It is really an erotic picture, male sexual fantasy
Girls are the ideal northern beauties (Phoebe and Hillarea)
Castor and Pollux were brothers

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Around 1625 Rubens did a series of paintings to commemorate the marriage and
political alliance of Henry IV, king of France with Marie d' Medici a princess from
Italy. The union was to cement relations between the Catholic Church in Italy with
the government of France.
The paintings are an odd blending of classicism, genre, and religious imagery.
Rubens Arrival of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles

1622-26
The Destiny of Marie d' Medici
Oil on canvas 155 x 115 1/4 in (394 x 293 cm)
Musee du Louvre, Paris

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Rubens Arrival of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles

Rubens Arrival of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles 1622-26 1622-26
(oil study) Oil on canvas 155 x 115 1/4 in
The Destiny of Marie d' Medici
Juno Presents the Portrait of Marie d' Medici to Henry IV Marriage By Proxy
The Destiny of Marie d' Medici The Destiny of Marie d' Medici

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Diego Velasquez Los Borrachos 1628 Oil on canvas 5'6''x7'6'' Located in Museo del Prado, Madrid
Diego Velasquez
Diego Velasquez is a realist painter from Spain. He is known for his great skill in merging color, light, space, rhythm of line and mass in equal
value. He has influenced the likes of Francisco de Goya, Camille Corot and Edouard Manet.
Los Borrachos "The Drinkers" dated c 1628. Oil on canvas, approx 5'6" x 7' 6". Museo del Prado, Madrid. The painting illustrates low life liberal
men drinking wine . Dionysus, god of wine is crowning some one. The figure in the foreground whose back is to the viewer is similar to the
same type of figure in Giotto's Lamentation . This painting is refered to Velasquez's education in terms of classicism and mythology. It is a
mythological scene painted in the genre style.
Diego Velasquez Los Borrachos 1628 Oil on canvas 5'6''x7'6'' Located in Museo del Prado, Madrid
Also contains tenebrism

Takes up mythological theme
Dionysus - God of wine
Uses genre, typical street people
Velasquez was King Philip's close personal friend and advisor
He was the King's court painter and understood the rules, makes reference to his education and that he can paint whatever he wants to

Baroque Still Life

Excerpted from,
Food for thought. by Robert Hughes. Time, 5/22/95, Vol. 145 Issue 21,
following p70, 2p, 3c
IN 17TH AND 18TH CENTURY SPANISH STILL LIFES,

EVERYDAY OBJECTS ARE SET AGAINST A PERSPECTIVE OF
FLEETING TIME AND DEATH
"Tell me what you eat," said the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-
Savarin, "and I will tell you who you are." This is strikingly true of the way
still life-the depiction of inanimate things, mainly food, drink and the
vessels used to serve them-developed in Spain from the 16th century on.
You might almost say that independent still life, painting that had no other
purpose than to confront us with objects for their own sake, was a Hispanic
reinvention. It was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans but then lost,
and it did not come back in force until the end of the 16th century in
northern Italy, Holland and Spain, all of which were under the sway of the
Spanish Bourbon dynasty.
Still life is to eating what the nude is to sex, not a simple image but a
complicated knot of cultural ideas about materialism and transcendence,
Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit c. 1597 illusion and reality, pleasure and denial, life and death. . .
Oil on canvas, 46 x 64 cm Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan
It begins with one extraordinary icon-an odd word for a painting of a
cabbage, a quince, a cut melon and a cucumber, but no other will quite do.
It is by Juan Sanchez Cotan (1560-1627), a painter from Toledo who is
known by only a few works, all of which are remarkable for their careful,
precise, yet unpedantic construction. This is one of the finest. No still life
was ever so still. The black space behind the framing window looks
infinitely deep; two of the objects (the slice of melon and the yellow tip of

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the cucumber) stick out a little into our space. Everything is painted with
self-abnegating care, warts and all, becoming a tiny sample of the world as
a marvel: not through weirdness or preciousness (as in the curio cabinets of
the great) but through its ordinary, even blemished, but always singular
character.
Cotan's work oscillates between desire and denial. Its fruit and fish and
vegetables are more sacramental than gastronomic, emblems of the variety
of God's creation (one of Cotan's still lifes contains a chayote from Mexico,
an exotic rarity in 16th century Spain). Your eye can't wallow in such
spareness, as it can in the abundance of Flemish still life. It sees the
vegetable as Idea, a reading promoted by the fact that Cotan deliberately
arranged the objects on strings and shelf to form a hyperbolic curve. The
melon opens its delicious interior to you, but its geometric frame cancels
Juan Cotan, Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber, c. 1602 the idea of eating it. It's food for thought. . .
trompe l'oeil Seventeenth century Spain was notorious for the parsimony of its common
diet: bread, beans, onions, a scrap of lamb or fish sometimes, and garlic,
garlic, garlic. It was to French or Italian cooking what the crabby-looking
servant girl grinding aioli in Diego Velazquez's Kitchen Scene with Christ
in the House of Martha and Mary was to the sumptuous nudes of Titian or
Veronese. A modern palate would recoil at the eggs slowly frying, or rather
poaching, in oil on top of a clay stove in Velazquez's An Old Woman
Cooking Eggs. But what an amazing act of skill the picture itself is, done in
1618 by a 19-year-old boy who wanted to display his total control over
surface texture, form and light, from the transparency of the oil in which the
eggs swim to the knife's curved shadow on a bowl to the marvelous fugue
of circles and ellipses, melon and cooking vessels, that fills the lower third
of the canvas.
The binding metaphor of 17th century still life was the vanitas, a term
deriving from the text in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Such images were meant to show the fleeting nature of the world's goods,
honors and sensual pleasures, setting them against the terrible perspective of
death, time and judgment. They exemplified the desengauo del mundo,
"disillusionment of the world," that was one of the chief tropes of Spanish
Baroque art and literature. They could be small and simple-three moldy
skulls and a pocket watch-or fulsome in their cascade of lessons.
Jan Vermeer
Context and Iconography:
"Provenance: The provenance of this painting cannot be traced back very far. All
earlier documents or sales catalogs cited by Blankert are pure guesswork. Vermeer
seems to have painted a number of "heads," and various cited 'tronie', as they were
called, cannot be further identified. We only know for certain that the work was
purchased at the beginning of 1882 for the collection A. A. des Tombe of The Hague
for fl. 2.30 in the sale Braam of the same city. The des Tombe collection was a
public collection and bequeathed the picture in 1903 to the Mauritshuis.
The girl is seen against a neutral, dark background, very nearly black, which
establishes a powerful three-dimensionality of effect. Seen from the side, the girl is
turning to gaze at us, and her lips are slightly parted, as if she were about to speak to
us. It is an illusionist approach often adopted in Dutch art. She is inclining her head
slightly to one side as if lost in thought, yet her gaze is keen.
The girl is dressed in an unadorned, brownish-yellow jacket, and the shining white
collar contrasts clearly against it. The blue turban represents a further contrast, while

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a lemon-yellow, veil-like cloth falls from its peak to her shoulders. Vermeer used
plain, pure colours in this painting, limiting the range of tones. As a result, the
number of sections of colour are small, and these are given depth and shadow by the
use of varnish of the same colour."

Jan Vermeer,
Girl with a Pearl Earring c. 1665
Oil on canvas, 46,5 x 40 cm Mauritshuis, The Hague
Dutch, Baroque
" The girl's headdress has an exotic effect. Turbans were a popular fashionable accessory in Europe as early as
the 15th century, as is shown by Jan van Eyck's probable self portrait, now in the National Gallery in London.
During the wars against the Turks, the remote way of life and foreign dress of the "enemy of Christendom"
proved to be very fascinating. A particularly noticeable feature of Vermeer's painting is the large, tear-shaped
pearl hanging from the girl's ear; part of it has a golden sheen, and it stands out from the part of the neck which
is in shadow.
In his Introduction to the Devout Life (1608), which was published in a Dutch translation in 1616, the mystic St
Francis De Sales (1567-1622) wrote, "Both now and in the past it has been customary for women to hang pearls
from their ears; as Pliny observed, they gain pleasure from the sensation of the swinging pearls touching them.
But I know that God's friend, Isaac, sent earrings to chaste Rebecca as a first token of his love. This leads me to
think that this jewel has a spiritual meaning, namely that the first part of the body that a man wants, and which a
woman must loyally protect, is the ear; no word or sound should enter it other than the sweet sound of chaste
words, which are the oriental pearls of the gospel."
From this it is clear that the pearl in Vermeer's painting is a symbol of chastity. The oriental aspect, which is
mentioned in the above extract, is further emphasized by the turban. The reference to Isaac and Rebecca
suggests that this picture could have been painted on the occasion of this young woman's marriage. So to that
extent it is a portrait.
There is surely a similar explanation for the Head of a Girl dressed in a smart, grey dress (Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York). One must admire the artist's technique, which features application of the pigments in
juxtaposition and melting, avoiding precise lines, and therefore blurring the contours of different colours so as to
obtain effects that foreshadow those of the impressionists. The dark backgrounds that Vermeer chose in these
two portraits enhance the plasticity of the models. "
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/highlight.cgi?file=html/v/vermeer/03b/22pearl.html&find=pearl
Form: Jan Vermeer is at first glance

very much a caravaggisti. His portrait
demonstrates a good mastery of the
human face as well as chiaroscuro and

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tenebrism. Essentially there handling

of value structure is the same.
However, where Caravaggio might

choose dull earth toned hues (colors), on
closer inspection, you can see that
Vermeer uses more intense and
saturated tones.
In Caravaggio's painting he paints the

flesh tones of the young man completely
in browns and pinks. Vermeer's flesh
tones are much more colorful.

Jan Vermeer, Michelangelo Meresi Caravaggio
Girl with a Pearl Earring c. 1665 Boy Being Bitten by a Lizard c1600
Oil on canvas, 46,5 x 40 cm Mauritshuis, The Hague
Dutch, Baroque
If you look closely at the core shadow of the girl's cheekbone and under her chin, you will
see that Vermeer used some blue and grays in the shadows and that he also shows a bit of
yellowish green on her jaw line which is the color of the light reflecting from her garment.
The use of colors that you wouldn't expect to find in things like flesh tones are referred to
as non-local color.
Vermeer looked very carefully at flesh tones, the colors of drapery, and the colors of walls
and shadows and recorded in paint how color changes in response to the light that moves
across it.

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figure 1
This strip (fig 1) is of the blue cloth across the top of her head. In figure 2, I reduced the
colors to blocks of tones to allow you to see the value shift as well as the change in the
hues. In figure 2, if you are sensitive to color you may notice that the first two of blocks
look kind of greenish. The third block looks almost like it's pure blue and that the blocks
on the far right are brownish blue. This is because color changes as it moves across an
object.
Usually as things are closer to a light source they are yellower of "warmer" in tone and as
they move away they become cooler.
figure 2
figure 3
In figure 3 all the other colors have been dropped out of the band. It only consists of blue
with no grays or any yellow are red. Figure 3 demonstrates a lack of cool to warm
relationships. A similar relationship of warm green to cool blue green also occurs on her
blouse.

Form: The composition of Girl Reading, 1652, at first seems simple and symmetrical but
Vermeer creates a great range of space and a visual flow through the image in which the
eye moves in almost a zig zag pattern from foreground to background. By arranging a
curtain in the foreground that partially blocks the view the viewer is forced to pause.
This creates a momentary stage like trompe l’oeil effect. In the middle ground he
provides another visual pause with the table containing the fruits and the Persian carpet.
The curtain is then echoed in the curtain hanging above the window and then the diagonal
of the perspectives of the window frame moves the eye back to the image of the woman.
The value structure initially is very Caravaggesque but on closer examination the range of
value and the subtlety of the tonal transitions is a bit more complicate. The same is true
of the color in this image. The wall behind the woman is almost a rainbow of non-local
colors that move from warm to cool and light to dark.
Virtuosic conceits such as the reflection in the glass and the lace on the drapery serve to
heighten the immediacy and realism of the image. This painting and Vermeer's style
returns to some of the ideas that we explored in the Arnolfini portrait and in other
Northern painters.
Iconography: The subject matter of woman writing and reading letters became a popular
one in the 17th century and is taken up in later British novels by Jane Austen and the
Bronte sisters and in a racier way, in the French novel Dangerous Liaisons, and in
various Rococo paintings. Some historians have postulated that in Vermeer's paintings,
depictions of women reading and writing letters is an illustration of there world. Woman
were primarily confined to the internal domestic world and they were able to reach
Vermeer Girl Reading 1652 beyond it through letters. Whereas depictions of men by Vermeer, show them with the
trappings (such as globes and maps) and therefore in roles of the adventurer whose world
is outside the home. (see the Geographer)
These paintings are a kind of still life and portrait mix. The use of the still life, such as
the fresh fruit which were delicacies and the Persian carpet which was considered a
luxury items which are considered vanitas which is a kind of memento mori. According

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to the Brittanica a vanitas was,
(Latin: "vanity"), in art, an important type of still-life painting that flourished

in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, consisting of collections of
objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of
earthly achievements and pleasures; a vanitas painting exhorts the viewer to
consider mortality and to repent. The vanitas evolved from simple pictures of
skulls and other symbols of death and transience frequently painted on the
reverse sides of portraits during the late Renaissance. It had acquired an
independent status by about 1550, and by 1620 had become a very popular
genre. Its development until its decline in about 1650 was centred in Leiden,
in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, an important seat of Calvinist
learning, with its emphasis on man's sinfulness and its rigid moral code.
Context: Many historians believe that

Vermeer himself lead a very insulated and
domestic life and that many of his
paintings reuse the same props and the
Vermeer Geographer 1669 same room. This would account for his
consistent use of the window on the left in
many pictures and the reoccurrence of the
same garments, chairs, carpets and still
life objects and this is why we have so
many other kind of paintings, such as the
landscape below.
Jan Vermeer, Lady with Her Maidservant

Holding a Letter c. 1667
Oil on canvas, 89,5 x 78,1 cm
Frick Collection, New York
"Topographic views of cities had become a tradition by the time Vermeer
painted his famous canvas. Hendrik Vroom was the author of two such
works depicting Delft, but they are more archaic because they followed the
traditional panoramic approach that we remember from the two cityscapes
by Hercules Seghers at the Berlin museum. The latter artist was one of the
first to make use of the inverted Galilean telescope to transcribe the
preliminary prints and their proportions (more than twice as high as wide)
into the more conventional format of his paintings.
Vermeer executed his View of Delft on the spot, but the optical instrument
pointed toward the city and providing the artist with the aspect translated
onto canvas, which we admire for its conciseness and special structure, was
not the camera obscura but the inverted telescope. It is only the latter that

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condenses the panoramic view of a given sector, diminishes the figures of

the foreground to a smaller than normal magnification, emphasizes the
foreground as we see it in the picture, and by the same token makes the
remainder of the composition recede into space. The image thus obtained
provides us with optical effects that, without being unique in Dutch
seventeenth-century painting, as often claimed, convey a cityscape that is
united in the composition and enveloped atmospherically into glowing light.
We admire the town, but it is not a profile view of a township, but a
painting, an idealized representation of Delft, with its main characteristics
simplified and then cast into the framework of a harbour mirroring selected
reflections in the water, and a rich, full sky with magnificent cloud
Jan Vermeer, View of Delft 1659-60 formations looming over it. This is chronologically the last painting by
Oil on canvas, 98,5 x 117,5 cm Mauritshuis, The Hague Vermeer that was executed in rich, full pigmentation, with colour accents
More views of this image put in with a fully loaded brush. The artist outdid himself in a rendition of
his hometown, which stands as a truly great interpretation of nature."
Quoted from
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/v/vermeer/02c/13view.html

Camera Obscura It was believed that Vermeer used the device of the camera obscura. There are
several theories concerning his use of the device. The first is that he used the
device as means to just look at a flattened two dimensional image. According to
the Brittanica, the camera obscura,
is the ancestor of the photographic camera. The Latin name means

"dark chamber," and the earliest versions, dating to antiquity,
consisted of small darkened rooms with light admitted through a
single tiny hole. The result was that an inverted image of the outside
scene was cast on the opposite wall, which was usually whitened. For
centuries the technique was used for viewing eclipses of the Sun
without endangering the eyes and, by the 16th century, as an aid to
drawing; the subject was posed outside and the image reflected on a
piece of drawing paper for the artist to trace. Portable versions were
built, followed by smaller and even pocket models; the interior of the
box was painted black and the image reflected by an angled mirror so
that it could be viewed right side up. The introduction of a light-
sensitive plate by J.-N. Niepce created photography.
And according to the Cape Argus "CAMERA OBSCURA MARRIES MAGIC

AND SCIENCE" February 15, 2001

Knowledge of the phenomenon has been around for well over 2 000
years.
In essence, a camera obscura uses the property of light by which, if a

room or container is darkened and a small hole is made in one wall or
side, an image from the outside will be projected on to the opposite
inside surface, but upside down and inverted.
This ability of a small hole, or pinhole, to form an image was

apparently known to Chinese scholars as early as the 4th century BC.
The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle also knew about the

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phenomenon and used it to observe solar eclipses.
Famous Renaissance artist and scholar Leonardo da Vinci wrote about

it and produced a detailed account of the formation of images by the
use of a small hole.
Later, this concept was modified by the use of lenses, so that a 360BA
view could be obtained - by using a lens mounted above the camera
and able to swivel in a complete circle - and into portable forms
which eventually became pinhole cameras.
These instruments were often used by artists to aid perspective

drawing, as the images are easily traced.
Modern photography was born when the small reflex box obscura was
combined with Daguerre's invention in 1839.
Daguerre perfected the discovery of the effect of sunlight on silver

nitrate to form photographic film and paper.
Copyright 2001 The Chronicle Publishing Co.

The San Francisco Chronicle
JULY 8, 2001, SUNDAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: SUNDAY REVIEW; Pg. 65

LENGTH: 386 words
HEADLINE: How Vermeer may have used a camera obscura
BYLINE: Reviewed by Kenneth Baker
BODY:Vermeer's Camera,Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces
By Philip Steadman
OXFORD; 207 PAGES; $25
--------------------------------------------------
Did the rise of photography prepare the way for Johannes Vermeer's rediscovery after two centuries of neglect?
More than that, Philip Steadman argues in his new book, "Vermeer's Camera," Vermeer (1632-1675) may have paved the
way for photography itself by his use of a camera obscura.
Most art historians now believe that Vermeer used this optical convenience, but no one has taken more trouble to prove it
than Steadman, a professor of urban studies at University College London. The principle of the camera obscura -- Latin
for "dark chamber" -- had been known to European scholars since the early Renaissance. As to how Vermeer might have
learned of it, Steadman must speculate.
Open a small hole in the wall of a dark room and an inverted image of the scene outside, given enough light, will appear on
the opposite interior wall. Lenses and mirrors can right and focus a projected image. The same principles work in a portable
"box camera," as in the cameras that launched photography.
Steadman's argument rests on the assumption that Vermeer made a number of his most famous paintings in the same room.
Working backward from the pictures' internal perspective, Steadman infers the dimensions of the room itself, including the
position of a back wall that we, the painting's viewers, necessarily never see.
On that back wall, Steadman believes, Vermeer projected his camera obscura images of the room. He imagines Vermeer's
camera as a curtained cubicle in which the painter could sit alone.
When Steadman calculated the sizes of those hypothetical projections, based on his reckoning of the paintings' viewpoints --
that is, the position of the camera obscura's lens -- they approximate those of Vermeer's canvases to a startling degree.
Steadman's account of his research can be hard to follow at points, but his argument seems decisive.
The camera obscura hypothesis, Steadman concludes, suits not only the look of Vermeer's mature paintings but also his
situation as a man seeking peace in a financially pressed household of 11 children.

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E-mail Chronicle Art Critic Kenneth Baker at [email protected].

Jan Vermeer. The Lacemaker 1669-70
Oil on canvas transferred to panel, 2
3.9 x 20.5 cm
Dutch, Baroque
Form: This portrait is a very straightforward and naturalistic representation. The composition
is simple and there is no great range of space. The value structure initially is very
Caravaggesque but on closer examination the range of value and the subtlety of the tonal
transitions is a bit more complicate. The same is true of the color in this image. Vermeer does
use some intense or saturated hues as well as a few non-local colors in the face and hands.
This image is one of those images that tends to support Vermeer's use of the camera obscura. If
you look closely at the detail below of the red lace you will find that Vermeer's lace becomes
blobs of color rather than the red lines we would anticipate a painter rendering for individual
strands. If you look closely at the details of any photograph you will find that details become
blurry in this same fashion.
Another facet of this detail also supports this conclusion. If you look closely at the details of
the strands you will also see that there are little disks or rings of color that seem to have no
purpose for being there. These disks are actually what one would see if you looked through a
cheap or poorly made lens on a camera. They are caused by some imperfections in the lens
condensing or refracting light in an odd fashion.
Iconography: Almost all of Vermeer's paintings are allegorical in some way. As this the young
woman makes lace her hands are propped up on a prayer book. This juxtaposition of prayer
book to her embroidery seems to pay homage to the cliché that "idle hands are the work of the
devil." This may be the case because there are many accounts of Dutch housewives obsessive
creation of lace ornamentation, however, this was not just to keep their hands busy.
Lacemaking was also a good source of extra income for many housewives. If you look at
almost any image from Rembrandt to Vermeer you will see that the clothing usually included an
ornate lace collar and sometimes sleeves and other ornaments. So lace is also a sign of wealth
when it was worn.

Color Temperature
The terms "warm" and "cool" are used to express those hues that connote these respective qualities. In
general, reds, oranges, and yellows "feel" warm, while blues, greens, and purples "feel" cool.
Distinctions between warm and cool colors can be very appear either warmer or cooler depending
upon the slight influence of red or blue. The same applies to gray and black (fig.12).
fig.12
color wheel

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The wheel of color are helpful tool that show the basic organization and interrelationships of colors. It
is also used as a tool for color selection. This color wheel provides basic color terminology that
anyone working with type and color should be completely familiar with. Many color wheel models
exist, and some are quite complex. Below are color wheel that contains 12 basic colors (fig.6). It is
conceivable for a wheel to consist of an infinite number of variations, too subtle for the human eye to
discern. Contained within the circle of color is a circle of black, which is obtained by mixing together
all of the surrounding colors. Though this color wheel consist of only 12 colors, it is the root of all
colors, a pure statement of chromatic harmony, and a fountain of imagination and emotion are
important.
fig.6
Hue
Hue is simply another name for color. The pure hues are identified by familiar names such as red,
violet, green, purple, yellow. In the world of commercial products and pigments, hues have been
given thousands of names. Woodland Green, Sienna, Apache Red etc. may evoke romantic and exotic
thoughts, but these names, aside from their marketing value, have little to do with the composition of
the colors they represent. In reality, few legitimate names exist for hues. The basic 12 color-wheel
pictured on the opposite page features the primary hues red, yellow and blue; the secondary hues
orange, green, and violet; and the six tertiary hues red-orange, orange-yellow, yellow-green, blue-
green, blue-violet, and red-violet (fig.9). Primaries are considered absolute colors and cannot be
created by mixing other colors together. However, mixing together the primaries color into various
combinations creates an infinite number of colors.

fig.9
me.men.to mo.ri n, pl memento mori [L, remember that you must die] (1596): a reminder of
mortality; esp: death's-head
me.men.to n, pl -tos or -toes [ME, fr. L, remember, imper. of meminisse to remember; akin to L
ment-, mens mind--more at mind] (1580): something that serves to warn or remind; also: souvenir
non-local colorThe use of colors that you wouldn't expect to find in things like fleshtones are
referred to as non-local color.

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prov.e.nance n [F, fr. provenir to come forth, originate, fr. L provenire, fr. pro- forth + venire to
come--more at pro-, come] (1785) 1: origin, source 2: the history of ownership of a valued object or
work of art or literature
Saturation
It also called chroma or intensity, saturation refers to the brightness of a hue. The highest saturation
occurs in colors that are pure and unmixed. Any color mixture will diminish intensity. However,
adding white, gray, black, or a complementary color most radically compromises intensity (fig.10).
Variations of a single hue dulled in intensity by different amounts of an added complement are often
referred to as tones. When complementary colors are placed in close proximity, the intensity of each
is increased. This vibrant condition is referred to as simultaneous contrast (fig.11).

fig.10
fig.11
trompe l’oeil - (French: "deceive the eye"), in painting, the representation of an object with such
verisimilitude as to deceive the viewer concerning the material reality of the object. This idea
appealed to the ancient Greeks who were newly emancipated from the conventional stylizations of
earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly painted such realistic grapes that birds tried to eat them.
The technique was also popular with Roman muralists. Although trompe l’oeil never achieved the
status of a major artistic aim, from the early Renaissance on, European painters occasionally fostered
illusionism by painting false frames out of which the contents of a still life or portrait appeared to
spill, or by creating window-like images suggesting actual openings in the wall or ceiling. (Brittanica)
Value Structure
Is the lightness or darkness of a color or shade. Chiaroscuro and tenebrism both employ the use quick
shifts of light and dark.
Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a color. It is a variable that can substantially alter a color's
appearance, and as we will see later, it is also an important factor in achieving legibility with type
and color. A hue changes in value when either white or black are added to it. A color with added
white is called a tint (fig.7) ; a color with added black is called a shade (fig.8). Generally speaking,
pure hues that are normally light in value (yellow, orange, green) make the best tints, white pure hues
that are normally dark in value (red, blue, violet) make the most desirable shades. The palettes colors
below shoes a spectrum of tints and shades based on the hues from the colors clearly shows that
changes in value greatly expand color possibilities.
fig.7 fig.8
vanitas (Latin: "vanity"), in art, an important type of still-life painting that flourished in the
Netherlands in the early 17th century, consisting of collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability
of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; a vanitas painting
exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent. The vanitas evolved from simple pictures of
skulls and other symbols of death and transience frequently painted on the reverse sides of portraits
during the late Renaissance. It had acquired an independent status by about 1550, and by 1620 had
become a very popular genre. Its development until its decline in about 1650 was centred in Leiden,

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in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, an important seat of Calvinist learning, with its emphasis
on man's sinfulness and its rigid moral code. (Brittanica Encyclopedia)


Rococo in France
Baroque French Classicism and the Rococo 17th to 18th Centuries

These two
paintings are both
Baroque
renderings of
aristocrats from
the 1600 to
1700's. One of
them represents
the older more
autocratic
traditions of
Europe but both
are the results of
the
"Enlightenment."
The way in
which they are
portrayed are
important clues
as to how each of
these rulers ruled
there people and
how they saw the
world. You will
be given an
assignment in
which you will
be asked to
compare and
contrast these two
paintings and
come up with
some conclusions
as to how each
ruler is portrayed
formally and
iconographically.
You will be
asked what this
might mean
about each ruler
and the manner
in which they
governed.
Antoine Watteau. L' Indifferent 1716 Hyacinthe Rigaud Louis XIV 1701
Oil on canvas 10''x7'' Located in Louvre, Paris Oil on canvas 9'2''x7'' Located in Louvre,
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/18th_century/rococo_in_france.htm[7/31/2013 11:57:16 AM]

Rococo in France
French Rococo Paris

French Baroque

Context: This painting was executed
just before Louis XIV came into his
prime. It represent both formally and
iconographically a point of view that
is in some ways similar but still
different than the Rococo period. In
some ways classical images from the
Baroque were a bit more "platonic" in
nature than during the Rococo.
Form: This painting is Baroque and in

some ways it is the model for the
paintings of the Rococo period. This
painting incorporates intense or
saturated colors and a full use of
chiaroscuro, linear perspective and
atmospheric perspective and the
pastoral or arcadian landscape. The
composition of this image recalls
friezes from ancient Roman and Greek
buildings and Poussin's figures are
also dressed and modeled after
classical figures.
Iconography: The iconography of this

painting is also somewhat the model
for the Rococo paintings that follow.
It is the kind of image that Poussin
might have seen in Italy either on a
classical frieze or a pot. Even though
the image is "classical" it seems to me
to be an almost sarcastic or moralizing
way in which to depict it. This
Nicolas Poussin, Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan 1631-33 painting seems almost to be a warning
Oil on canvas, 100 x 142,5 cm. National Gallery, London. against hedonism.
French Baroque
The theme this story that this painting
portrays is a bacchanal.
According to Webster's,
bac.cha.na.lia n, pl
bacchanalia [L, fr.
Bacchus] (1591) 1 pl, cap:
a Roman festival of
Bacchus celebrated with
dancing, song, and revelry

Rococo in France
2: orgy 2, 3 --
bac.cha.na.lian adj or n
The Rococo style is a substyle of the French Baroque and really only exists from about 1716 to the
1770's at which time it fell out of style. Webster's defines rococo as,
ro.co.co n (1840): rococo work or style ²rococo adj [F, irreg. fr. rocaille rocaille] (1841) 1
a: of or relating to an artistic style esp. of the 18th century characterized by fanciful curved
asymmetrical forms and elaborate ornamentation b: of or relating to an 18th century
musical style marked by light gay ornamentation and departure from thorough-bass and
polyphony 2: excessively ornate or intricate
In terms of its form, the Rococo style is uses a lot of pastel colors which are various pale or light
colors, such as powder blue, peaches and pinks. The brushwork in many Rococo style paintings tends
to be feathery and or rough. Usually the paintings look a bit more like oil sketches and have a rough
or unfinished look to them. The compositions also tend to be a bit looser and not very symmetrical.
In terms of iconography and subject matter, Rococo paintings do deal with classical themes but the
stories emphasize less dignified themes such as love and romantic indiscretion, in short, the
"Dangerous Liaison." Stokstad points out that one of the main subjects of the Rococo style was the
fête galante.

¹fete n [ME fete, fr. MF, fr. OF feste--more at feast] (15c) 1: festival 2 a: a lavish often
outdoor entertainment b: a large elaborate party ²fete vt fet.ed ; fet.ing (1819) 1: to honor or
commemorate with a fete 2: to pay high honor to
fete cham.pe.tre n, pl fetes champetres [F, lit., rural festival] (1774): an outdoor
entertainment
Many of the images in Rococo art are borrowed from opera and Commedia dell'arte. According to the
Brittanica,
Around the mid-16th century, there emerged in Italy a lively tradition

of popular theatre that fused many disparate elements into a vigorous
style, which profoundly influenced the development of European
theatre. This was the legendary commedia dell'arte ("theatre of the
professionals"), a nonliterary tradition that centred on the actor, as
distinguished from the commedia erudita, where the writer was
preeminent. Although the precise origins of the commedia dell'arte
are difficult to establish, its many similarities with the skills of the
medieval jongleurs, who were themselves descendants of the Roman
mimes, suggest that it may have been a reawakening of the fabula
Atellana, stimulated and coloured by social conditions in Italy during
the Renaissance.
In spite of its outwardly anarchic spirit, the commedia dell'arte was a

highly disciplined art requiring both virtuosity and a strong sense of
ensemble playing. Its special quality came from improvisation.
Working from a scenario that outlined the plot, the actors would
improvise their own dialogue, striving for a balance of words and

Rococo in France
actions. Acrobatics and singing were also used, as well as the lazzi
(special rehearsed routines that could be inserted into the plays at
convenient points to heighten the comedy). Because the actors stayed
together in permanent companies and specialized in playing the same
role for most of their professional lives, they achieved a degree of
mastery that had been hitherto unknown on the Italian stage and that
must have made the rest of the theatre seem all the more artificial.
Another reason for the impact of the commedia dell'arte was that it
heralded the first appearance in Italy of professional actresses (the
best known being Isabella Andreini), though the female characters
were never as sharply developed as their male counterparts. Most of
the characters were defined by the leather half-masks they wore
(another link with the theatre of antiquity), which made them instantly
recognizable. They also spoke in the dialect of their different
provinces. Characters such as Pantalone, the miserly Venetian
merchant; Dottore Gratiano, the pedant from Bologna; or Arlecchino,
the mischievous servant from Bergamo, began as satires on Italian
"types" and became the archetypes of many of the favourite characters
of 17th- and 18th-century European theatre.
From humble beginnings, setting up their stages in city squares, the

better troupes--notably Gelosi, Confidenti, and Fedeli--performed in
palaces and became internationally famous once they traveled abroad.
The commedia dell'arte swept through Europe. It was particularly
popular in France, where resident Italian troupes were established
before the end of the 16th century. Local variations on the characters
appeared in the 17th century. The cheeky servant Pedrolino became
the melancholy Pierrot in France, while Pulcinella became Punch in
England. By the 18th century the commedia dell'arte was a lost art,
though its spirit lived on through the work of the dramatists it
inspired, among whom were Molière (stage name of Jean-Baptiste
Poquelin), Carlo Goldoni, and William Shakespeare.
Contextually the Rococo style occurred mainly at a time when the aristocracy was fairly indifferent to
ruling and more interested in having fun and enjoying the pleasures of life. These excesses of the
aristocracy ultimately lead to the downfall of the aristocratic class in France and the overthrow of the
French monarchy in 1789.
Form: Watteau's palette consists mainly of

pastel colors which are various pale or light
colors, such as powder blue, peaches and
pinks. The brushwork is feathery and or rough
and the composition is asymmetrical.
The main line of figures that moves across the

foreground are arranged almost musically in
uneven undulating intervals that weaves in and
out of the Baroque diagonal created by the

Rococo in France
landscape they inhabit.
Iconography and Context according to the

Brittanica,

Jean Antoine Watteau. Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera. Watteau's Cythera.

1717 oil/canvas 4'3"x6'4" Louvres, Paris In 1712 Watteau tried once more to
French Rococo go to Italy. He did not succeed, but
he was accepted by the Académie
as a painter of fêtes galantes--
outdoor entertainments in which the
courtiers often dressed in rural
costumes--for his presentation of a
scene depicting actors in a garden.
Between 1710 and 1712 he had
painted the first of his three
versions of the "L'Embarquement
pour l'île de Cythère." The myth of
the island of Cythera, or of love,
has distant roots in French and
Italian culture, in which the journey
is depicted as a difficult quest.
Watteau's Cythera, by comparison,
is a paradise wavering in the
ephemeral and in artifice; it
represents an invitation to delights
Nicolas Poussin Echo and Narcissus 1630 amid the enchantment of nature. It
French Baroque is an island toward which the
pilgrims embark but never arrive,
Compare Watteau's painting of a pastoral and classical image to preserving it preserves its light
Poussin's only if it remains far on the
treatment of the same kind of image. Think about how the form horizon.
and the subject
matter are at once different and the same. Why do you think Watteau's first version of the
these differences subject is anecdotal: it illustrates a
exist? comedy motif in a vaguely
Venetian ambience. The second--
Read the two poems below and see if you can find any parallels which is the most beautiful--has the
between the aspect of a profane ritual in an
two poems and the two paintings. How are they alike and how unreal, immense, and almost

Rococo in France
are frighteningly empty landscape. In

they different? the third, in which cherubim flutter
around a golden gondola, the
subject has become vulgarized.
Common to all three versions is a
theatrical, almost scenographic,
composition, a chromatic
transposition of all that is suggested
in the theatrical universe. The
wonderlands of opera, romance,
and epic are all evoked by
Watteau's Cythera, which
represents the country of the
impossible dream, the revenge of
madness on reason, and of freedom
on rules and morality. According to
one hypothesis, the theme was
suggested to Watteau by a prose
play, Les Trois Cousines (1700), by
Florent Dancourt, in the finale of
which a group of country youths,
disguised as pilgrims of love,
prepare to embark on the voyage to
the island of Cythera. Since this
story of rustic millers is parodistic
in intent and quite different from
the refined scene that Watteau set
in an unreal Venice, it is more
probable that Watteau was inspired
by an opéra ballet of Houdar de la
Motte, La Vénitienne (1705), in
which the invitation to the island of
love includes not only the pilgrims
of Cythera but also the stock
characters of the commedia
dell'arte--that is, both of the great
themes that Watteau pursued all his
life.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
Christopher Marlowe c 1600 Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
Come live with me and be my love, If all the world and love were young,
And we will all the pleasures prove And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, These pretty pleasures might me move
Woods, or steepy mountain yields. To live with the and be thy love.
And we will sit upon the rocks, Time drives the flocks from field to fold
Seeing the shepherds feeds their flocks, When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
By shallow rivers to whose falls And Philomel becometh dumb;

Rococo in France
Melodious birds sing madrigals. The rest complains of cares to come.
And I will make thee beds of roses The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
And a thousand fragrant posies, To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A cap of flowers, and a kittle A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle; Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
A gown made of the finest wool Thy gowns, the shoes, thy beds of roses,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Thy cap, the kirtle, and thy posies
Fair lined slippers for the cold, Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten--
With buckles of the purest gold' In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
A belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs: Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
And if these pleasures may thee move, All these in me no means can move
Come live with me, and be my love. To come to thee and be thy love.
The shepherd' swains shall dance and sing But could youth last and love still breed,
For thy delight each May morning: Had joys no date nor age no need,
If these delights thy mind may move, Then these delights my mind might move
Then live with me and be my love. To live with thee and be thy love.

Form: Fragonard's palette is almost exactly the same as
Watteau's. It too consists mainly of pastel colors which
are various pale or light colors, such as powder blue,
peaches and pinks. The brushwork is feathery and or
rough and the composition is asymmetrical.
The main line of figures that moves across the foreground

are arranged almost musically in uneven undulating
intervals that weaves in and out of the Baroque diagonal
created by the landscape they inhabit.
Iconography: Fragonard uses a combination of

contemporary 18th century eroticism and classical
themes. The scene here is almost one that you might find
in a movie or novel such as Moll Flanders, Dangerous
Liaisons, or the Affair of the Necklace.
The painting The Swing was commissioned by

the treasurer et the French clergy. The client
wanted a scene in which a lover - who can be
seen amongst the rose bushes in the left
foreground - would have an opportunity to look
under the skirts of his mistress; originally the
swing was supposed to be pushed by a bishop.
But when, owing to its piquant nature, the
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing 1766
commission was given to Fragonard, he
Oil on canvas 35''x32'' Wallace Collection, London
replaced the bishop with a gardener.
French Rococo
(quoted from
http://www.op.net/~uarts/lin/we_e_roco_1.html)

Rococo in France
The sculpture of Cupid and the two putti that hide in the
bushes are an attempt in some ways to "dress up" the
images with a classical touch. The cupid presses his
fingers to his lips as if to warn the young woman to be
less obvious as she kicks her shoe off playfully.
Fragonard also attempts to show his knowledge not just of

classicism but also of art history with his playful nod to
Michelangelo's Adam echoed in the pose of the young
man who looks up his lover's skirts.

Form: In terms of form, this image is a perfect example of the
Rococo style according to Stokstad's description of it.
Iconography: The works symbolism is almost completely clear even

if one is not familiar with the exact story expressed by the series the
Love of the Shepherds. Here is a typical "dangerous liaison" as
expressed in the two poems above by Marlowe and Raleigh. The
scene is a pastoral one, in fact the boy in red silk is the shepherd
who vaults lightly over the low wall to meet his wary girlfriend.
Above them, almost in a decaying state because it is so overgrown,
is a statue of Venus and Cupid.
The imagery is taken from a variety of literary, theatrical, and

operatic sources. In many of the novels of the period, such as in
Dangerous Liaisons, letter writing is an important plot element and
in this painting we see that the young woman holds a love letter in
her hand. The young man has just climbed a ladder is a reference to
many of Shakespeare's balcony scenes from Romeo to Cyrano as
well as scenes from operas such as Mozart's Don Giovanni and
Commedia dell'arte.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1732-1806 Context: Fragonard is the last of the great Rococo painters. His
The Meeting, from Love of the Shepherds style, which represents the last style developed by Louis XVI during
1771-73 o/c 10'x7' New York, Frick his reign (1774-93) of Louis XVI, according to the Brittanica,
Museum
was actually both a last phase of Rococo and a first phase

of Neoclassicism. The predominant style in architecture,
painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts was
Neoclassicism, a style that had come into its own during
the last years of Louis XV's life, chiefly as a reaction to
the excesses of the Rococo but partly through the
popularity of the excavations at ancient Herculaneum and
Pompeii, in Italy, and partly on the basis of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's call for "natural" virtue and honest sentiment.
One of the most dramatic episodes in the stylistic
oscillation from Rococo to Neoclassicism was played out
in 1770 at Mme du Barry's Pavillon de Louveciennes. A

Rococo in France
series of large painted canvases by the Rococo painter

Jean-Honoré Fragonard depicting the "Progress of Love"
were removed almost as soon as they were installed and
replaced with a series commissioned from Joseph-Marie
Vien, a Neoclassicist. Vien's pupil Jacques-Louis David
was the most important painter of the reign of Louis XVI;
his severe compositions recalling the style of the earlier
painter Nicolas Poussin are documents extolling
republican virtues. During the Revolution, David was a
deputy and voted for the execution of the King.

Form: These are small paintings in which
Boucher demonstrates his ability to paint the
textures of skin, fabric and porcelain.
Iconography: Titian in his The Venus of Urbino,

1538 offers the male viewer a classisizing excuse
for gazing on the female form, however, Boucher
makes no such excuse for his painting. This is
most obviously this is a semi pornographic
painting meant for a male audience. Despite the
fact that images like this have been defended as
beautiful renderings of the human form, these
images are overtly meant to be small erotic works
that would have been hung in the bedroom to
stimulate the sexual appetites of the occupants.
What is more interesting about these two images is

that they also juxtapose the eroticized female form
François Boucher, Brown Odalisk 1745 Oil on canvas with commodities or luxury items. By playing the
Musée du Louvre, Paris textures and body of the female against expensive
persian carpets, fabrics, jewels and porcelain, the
artist is also making the human female form
another commodity which can be bought and sold.
In this way, the wealth of the patron is also
eroticized. This device is played off again and
again throughout the history of art.
Context: These two images are also historical

artifacts that document two facts. The first is that
Marie-Louise O' Murphy was one of the many
mistresses of Louis XV and the brown odalisk is a
reference to the French penchant for exotic
women.
According to the O'Murphy surnames website:
The most notable woman bearing the

Murphy name was the famous courtesan

Rococo in France
François Boucher, Girl Reclining (Louise O'Murphy) 1751 Marie Louise O Murphy (1737 - 1814),
Oil on canvas, 59,5 x 73,5 cm fifth daughter of an Irish soldier who
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne had taken up shoemaking in Rouen,
France. After his death, their mother
brought the family to Paris where she
traded in old clothes while finding her
daughters work as actresses or models.
Marie Louise posed for Boucher, a
painter at court. He painted her so
attractively that she came to the notice
of Louis XV, who soon appointed her
his mistress. Their child is supposed to
have been General de Beaufranchet.
She married three times and was
divorced by her third husband, who was
thirty years her junior. For a period
during the reign of terror, she suffered
imprisonment because of her royal
connections.
This is one of the first instances that I know of that

an artist has painted an odalisk in France. An
odalisk or odalisque is a Turkish harem girl.
Images of asian or oriental nude harem girls
become the fashion in French art from this point
forward. We'll see many more of these white
European male's fantasies of eroticized asian
women from now on.
Images of the odalisque most likely symbolize the

male French view of the world and in some ways
both justify and inflame their desire to colonize
the so called "orient."
ar.ca.di.an adj, often cap (1589) 1: idyllically pastoral; esp: idyllically innocent, simple, or
untroubled 2 a: of or relating to Arcadia or the Arcadians b: of or relating to Arcadian
Ar.ca.di.an n (1590) 1 often not cap: a person who lives a simple quiet life 2: a native or
inhabitant of Arcadia 3: the dialect of ancient Greek used in Arcadia
Modern Greek ARKADHÍA, mountainous region of the central Peloponnesus of ancient

Greece. The pastoral character of Arcadian life together with its isolation partially explains
why it was represented as a paradise in Greek and Roman bucolic poetry and in the
literature of the Renaissance. The region is not exactly coextensive with the present-day
nomós (department) of Arkadhía, which extends on the east to the Gulf of Argolis. The
capital of the nomos is Trípolis.
au.to.crat.ic also au.to.crat.i.cal adj (1823) 1: of, relating to, or being an autocracy: absolute
<an ~ government> 2: characteristic of or resembling an autocrat: despotic <an ~ ruler> --

Rococo in France
au.to.crat.i.cal.ly adv
fete n [ME fete, fr. MF, fr. OF feste--more at feast] (15c) 1: festival 2 a: a lavish often
outdoor entertainment b: a large elaborate party ²fete vt fet.ed ; fet.ing (1819) 1: to honor or
commemorate with a fete 2: to pay high honor to
fete cham.pe.tre n, pl fetes champetres [F, lit., rural festival] (1774): an outdoor
entertainment
he.do.nism n [Gk hedone pleasure; akin to Gk hedys sweet--more at sweet] (1856) 1: the
doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life 2: a way of life based on
or suggesting the principles of hedonism -- he.do.nist n -- he.do.nis.tic adj --
he.do.nis.ti.cal.ly adv
neo.clas.sic or neo.clas.si.cal adj (1877): of, relating to, or constituting a revival or

adaptation of the classical esp. in literature, music, art, or architecture -- neo.clas.si.cism n -
- neo.clas.si.cist n or adj
oda.lisque n [F, fr. Turk odalik, fr. oda room] (ca. 1681) 1: a female slave 2: a concubine
in a harem
pas.to.ral adj [ME, fr. L pastoralis, fr. pastor herdsman] (15c) 1 a (1): of, relating to, or
composed of shepherds or herdsmen (2): devoted to or based on livestock raising b: of or
relating to the countryside: not urban c: portraying or expressive of the life of shepherds or
country people esp. in an idealized and conventionalized manner <~ poetry> d: pleasingly
peaceful and innocent: idyllic 2 a: of or relating to spiritual care or guidance esp. of a
congregation b: of or relating to the pastor of a church -- pas.to.ral.ly adv -- pas.to.ral.ness n
²pastoral n (1584) 1 a: a literary work (as a poem or play) dealing with shepherds or rural
life in a usu. artificial manner and typically drawing a contrast between the innocence and
serenity of the simple life and the misery and corruption of city and esp. court life b:
pastoral poetry or drama c: a rural picture or scene d: pastorale 1b 2: crosier 1 3: a letter of
a pastor to his charge: as a: a letter addressed by a bishop to his diocese b: a letter of the
house of bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church to be read in each parish
trompe l’oeil - (French: "deceive the eye"), in painting, the representation of an object with
such verisimilitude as to deceive the viewer concerning the material reality of the object.
This idea appealed to the ancient Greeks who were newly emancipated from the
conventional stylizations of earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly painted such realistic
grapes that birds tried to eat them. The technique was also popular with Roman muralists.
Although trompe l’oeil never achieved the status of a major artistic aim, from the early
Renaissance on, European painters occasionally fostered illusionism by painting false
frames out of which the contents of a still life or portrait appeared to spill, or by creating
window-like images suggesting actual openings in the wall or ceiling. (Brittanica)

Moralizing Genre Scenes 1700's
Chardin, Greuze, and Hogarth: Genre Scenes and Moralizing Art in the 1700's

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon
b. Nov. 2, 1699, Paris, Fr. d. Dec. 6, 1779, Paris
French painter of still lifes and domestic scenes remarkable for their intimate realism and tranquil atmosphere and the luminous quality of their paint. For his still lifes he chose
humble objects ("Le Buffet," 1728), and for his genre paintings modest events ("Dame cachetant une lettre" [1733; "Lady Sealing a Letter"]). He also executed some fine
portraits, especially the pastels of his last years. He was nominated to the Royal Academy of Painting in 1728.
Born in Paris, Chardin never really left his native quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Little is known about his training, although he worked for a time with the artists Pierre-
Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel. In 1724 he was admitted to the Academy of Saint Luc. His true career, however, did not begin until 1728 when, thanks to the portrait
painter Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746), he became a member of the Royal Academy of Painting, to which he offered "La Raie" ("The Skate") and "Le Buffet," both now at
the Louvre Museum.
Although not yet established, he was beginning to gain a reputation. In 1731 he married Marguerite Saintard, and two years later the first of his figure paintings appeared,
"Dame cachetant une lettre." From then on Chardin alternated between paintings of la vie silencieuse ("the silent life") or scenes of family life such as "Le Bénédicité" ("The
Grace") and half-figure paintings of young men and women concentrating on their work or play, such as "Le Jeune dessinateur" ("Young Man Drawing") and "L'Enfant au
toton" ("Child with Top," Louvre) (and Soap Bubbles, c1733). The artist repeated his subject matter, and there are often several original versions of the same composition.
Chardin's wife died in 1735, and the estate inventory drawn up after her death reveals a certain affluence, suggesting that by this time Chardin had become a successful painter.
In 1740 he was presented to Louis XV, to whom he offered "La Mère laborieuse" ("Mother Working") and "Le Bénédicité." Four years later, he married Marguerite Pouget,
Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin whom he was to immortalize 30 years later in a pastel. These were the years when Chardin was at the height of his fame. Louis XV, for example, paid 1,500 livres for "La
Self Portrait at the Easel, 1771, Serinette" ("The Bird-Organ"). Chardin continued to rise steadily on the rungs of the traditional academic career. His colleagues at the academy entrusted him, first unofficially
pastel on blue paper over canvas stretcher, (1755), then officially (1761), with the hanging of the paintings in the Salon (official exhibition of the academy), which had been held regularly every two years since 1737 and
Musée du Louvre, Paris in which Chardin had participated faithfully. It was in the exercise of his official duties that he met the encyclopaedist and philosopher Denis Diderot, who would devote some
of his finest pages of art criticism to Chardin, the "grand magicien" that he admired so much.
An anecdote illustrating Chardin's genius and his unique position in 18th-century painting is told by one of his greatest friends, the engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin, who wrote
a letter shortly after Chardin's death to Haillet de Couronne, the man who was to deliver Chardin's eulogy to the Academy of Rouen, of which Chardin had been a member.

One day, an artist was making a big show of the method he used to purify and perfect his colors. Monsieur Chardin, impatient with so much idle chatter, said to the
artist, "But who told you that one paints with colors?" "With what then?" the astonished artist asked. "One uses colors," replied Chardin, "but one paints with
feeling."
He was nearer to the feeling of meditative quiet that animates the rustic scenes of the 17th-century French master Louis Le Nain than to the spirit of light and superficial
brilliance seen in the work of many of his contemporaries. His carefully constructed still lifes do not bulge with appetizing foods but are concerned with the objects themselves
and with the treatment of light. In his genre scenes he does not seek his models among the peasantry as his predecessors did; he paints the petty bourgeoisie of Paris. But
manners have been softened, and his models seem to be far removed from Le Nain's austere peasants. The housewives of Chardin are simply but neatly dressed and the same
cleanliness is visible in the houses where they live. Everywhere a sort of intimacy and good fellowship constitute the charm of these modestly scaled pictures of domestic life
that are akin in feeling and format to the works of Jan Vermeer.
Despite the triumphs of his early and middle life, Chardin's last years were clouded, both in his private life and in his career. His only son, Pierre-Jean, who had received the
Grand Prix (prize to study art in Rome) of the academy in 1754, committed suicide in Venice in 1767. And then too, the public's taste had changed. The new director of the
academy, the all-powerful Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, in his desire to restore historical painting to the first rank, humiliated the old artist by reducing his pension and gradually
Jean- Baptiste Simeon Chardin- divesting him of his duties at the academy. Furthermore, Chardin's sight was failing. He tried his hand at drawing with pastels. It was a new medium for him and less taxing on
Grace at Table his eyes. Those pastels, most of which are in the Louvre Museum, are highly thought of in the 20th century, but that was not the case in Chardin's own time. In fact, he lived
(also called Le Bénédicité "Benediction") out the remainder of his life in almost total obscurity, his work meeting with indifference.
1740 o/c It was not until the middle of the 19th century that he was rediscovered by a handful of French critics, including the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and collectors (the
Lavalard brothers, for example, who donated their collection of Chardins to the Museum of Picardy in Amiens). Especially noteworthy is the LaCaze Collection donated to the
Louvre in 1869. Today Chardin is considered the greatest still-life painter of the 18th century, and his canvases are coveted by the world's most distinguished museums and
collections.
(P.M.R.)
"Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon." Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM. Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc. December 28, 2002.
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/18th_century/genre_scenes_and_moral_art_1700s_chardin_greuze.htm[7/31/2013 11:52:45 AM]

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin.

Soap Bubbles, c1733
oil on canvas, 36 5/8 x 29 3/8 in.
French Rococo

Form: Chardin's paintings differ from those of his Rococo contemporaries in many ways. Chardin's use of color is closer to the Renaissance painters than the Rococo. In these
paintings he uses a low key earth toned palette. His compositions, like this one, often deal with interior scenes that are dimly lit. Still life elements are painted with the same
consideration as the figures and his brushwork is more specific than the Rococo painters of his time.
Iconography: This is a genre scene in the most Renaissance and traditional sense and returns in some ways to earlier genre scenes such as in Robert Campin's Merode Altarpiece
c. 1425. The iconography is anti-Rococo because the scene deals not with a romantic encounter but with the moral instruction of two young women. The subject matter is a
middle class or bourgeoisie family in which either a mother or a governess serve a simple meal. The children, knowing their place in in the world show they are grateful to God
by saying grace before the meal. Surrounding them are the trappings of a moral bourgeois existence. The furniture, toys and clothing are simple but still of good quality.

Context: Chardin's output of quiet domestic scenes in Dutch manner, usually on a small scale but really wasn't ever in great favor with the aristocracy but at times he did enjoy
some popularity with the aristocracy because some of the ideas fell into place with Rousseau's ideas of morality and social order in texts such as his Social Contract and Émile.
Émile in particular has bearing on this painting because it is a novel about the education of a little girl named Sophie. Rousseau believed that people were born fundamentally
Jean- Baptiste Simeon Chardin- good and if allowed to pursue the natural inclinations this goodness would manifest itself.
Grace at Table (also called Benediction) Émile, was a rejection of the traditional ideal: education was not seen to be the imparting of all things to be known to the uncouth child; rather it was seen as the
1740 o/c “drawing out” of what is already there, the fostering of what is native. Rousseau's educational proposal is highly artificial, the process is carefully timed and controlled,
but with the end of allowing the free development of human potential.
http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/people/A0860819.html
Robert Campin (the Master of Flemalle)

Merode Altarpiece c. 1425
Form: This painting uses a low key earth toned palette. The composition of this image is shallow and somewhat symmetrical although not completely.
The design forces the viewer to focus on the image of the young boy who is highlighted in a tennebristic manner. Still life elements are painted with
the same consideration as the figures and his brushwork is more specific than the Rococo painters of his time.
Iconography: It is possible that this may be an overinterpretation of the iconography of this image however most historians believe that this is a type
of vanitas or memento mori: "The boy enjoys a pleasurable pursuit as time wastes away, and the soap bubble itself is a traditional symbol of the fragile,
fleeting nature of human life." http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales/
ah111/wk6hand.html
According to the National Gallery:
"A boy concentrates his full attention on a quivering bubble, which seems ready to slip from his pipe. Eighteenth-century French viewers
would have recognized the soap bubble from Dutch and Flemish painting as a symbol of life's fragility and the vanity of worldly pursuits."
http://www.nga.gov/collection/
gallery/gg53/gg53-997.0.html
Context: Interestingly enough, although most historians ascribe this new moralizing in Chardin's images to Rousseau's philosophies but similar the
ideas are also evidenced in works such as Vermeer's The Lacemaker 1669-70. Compare and contrast these two paintings and come up with some
Jan Vermeer. The Lacemaker 1669-70 conclusions as to how each image is meant to convey a similar message. Look at them both in terms of a formal, iconographic and contextual
Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Oil on canvas transferred to panel, framework. How and why are they similar and or different.
Soap Bubbles, c1733 23.9 x 20.5 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris
oil on canvas, 36 5/8 x 29 3/8 in. Dutch, Baroque
French Baroque but not really Rococo


Form: Although painted during the Rococo period this painting is not very Rococo in its form. This style of painting probably evolved somewhat from
commedia and or some other types of performances because the composition of the picture plane is very shallow and stage like. This oil painting uses a low key
earth toned palette.
Iconography: Stokstad discusses the idea that Greuze's paintings are expressions of the new moralizing philosophies expressed by French philosophers such as
Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau.
Here is a young woman who has a basket of eggs that has been broken. The egg is a symbol of life and also of a woman's womb and or virginity. In this case
the metaphor is that she has lost her virtue.
The young woman's grandmother or mother stands behind her pointing the accusing finger while her brother looks on in a state of bewilderment. The young
boy is a rather Rousseau's interpretation of a young child's reactions. Children will always try to do the right thing and here, the girl's younger brother vainly
attempts to put the eggs back together and restore her to her former state.
Context: This image relates very clearly to the plot of various novels and poems of the period such as Moll Flanders in which when a woman loses here virtue
she has started down the wrong path and it will lead to her demise. The same ideas are expressed in the prints of William Hogarth in particular his prints
entitled Before and After c1736.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1725-1805 Broken Eggs 1756
French , New York: Metropolitan Museum
French Romantic/Rococo
bour.geois adj [MF, fr. OF borjois, fr. borc] (ca. 1565) 1: of, relating to, or characteristic of the townsman or of the social middle class 2: marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity
3: dominated by commercial and industrial interests: capitalistic -- bour.geois.ifi.ca.tion n --
bour.geois.ify vb ²bourgeois n, pl bourgeois (ca. 1674) 1 a: burgher b: a middle-class person 2: a person with social behavior and political views held to be influenced by private-property interest: capitalist 3 pl: bourgeoisie
bour.geoi.sie n [F, fr. bourgeois] (1707) 1: middle class 2: a social order dominated by bourgeois
genre n [F, fr. MF, kind, gender--more at gender] (1770) 1: a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content 2: kind, sort 3: painting that depicts scenes or events from
everyday life usually realistically
petite bourgeoisie n [F, lit., small bourgeoisie] (1916): the lower middle class including esp. small shopkeepers and artisans
Hogarth Moralizing English Art in the 1700's
Form: Hogarth was more of a printmaker than a painter. He used extensively the process of intaglio and engraving processes discussed in your book. This is important because his work is rather cartoon like and seems to anticipate
what modern comic strips and political cartoons will become in the 19th through 21st centuries. Hogarth's work is realistic but it is still stylized in a cartoon like manner. His portraits of everyday people are more caricatures than
attempts to capture a realistic or photographic realism.
Context: William Hogarth is a lot like your mother, he wants you to feel guilty all the time. Hogarth started out as a painter who commented on what he perceived as the decay of English society and the realized that he could make
more money by selling his images in the form of prints. The creation of prints of Hogarth's images was a revolution for him. Instead of creating one painting that could be sold only once and had to be sold for a large sum of money, he
was actually able to make more money by creating prints and selling them for much cheaper prices. He was even able to pre-sell his images by creating subscriptions for the images. Therefore he was also able to reach a much wider
audience and this, combined with his cartoonish and satirical images, made his works wildly successful. According to the Brittanica,
The engravings were aimed at a wide public, and their tremendous success immediately established Hogarth's financial and artistic independence. He was henceforth free, unlike most of his colleagues, to follow his own
creative inclinations. To safeguard his livelihood from unscrupulously pirated editions, he fought to obtain legislation protecting artist's copyright and held back the eight-part Rake's Progress until a law of that nature, known
as the Hogarth Act, was passed in 1735.
Hogarth establishes the Copyright Law system in which it could protect an artist intellectual property. It would protect the artist's books, art, or other own ideas. He aided in the proposal to protect his prints with the Copyright Act, due
to many unauthorized copies made of his paintings. It was passed by the British Parliament in 1735.
Much of Hogarth's work is influenced by literature, popular culture, and current events. A lot of his imagery has evolved from the novels of the day, theatre, commedia as well as opera. He was actually very close friends with a famous
actor named David Garrick.
An killer site all about Hogarth with timelines, biographies and all the images you could ever want: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Gallery/3737/


In early 1730's there was an epidemic of alcoholic consumption. Gin was mass produced and started to replace beer as the
main alcoholic drink of choice. The portrait shows everybody selling their goods in order to get more gin. It shows also
that the KillMan Distiller, the undertaker, and the Pawnshop are doing very good in their business.
Early 1700's an epidemic. People had to drink distilled spirits because the water was contaminated. A watery thin or "near
beer" was the primary beverage. When gin was introduced Hogarth saw this as a corrupting drug. Gin is equivalent to
Hogarth as heroine or crack is to ours.
Beer Street and Gin Lane-(diptych) two images

William Hogarth Iconography: This diptych depicts a typical scene in which the morals of good English society are being eroded. Here is what happens when young woman who read the wrong kinds of
Before and After c1736 books.
In this image a young maiden has allowed a young suitor into her bedroom who paws at her in "Before." The night table spills over and in the bedside drawer a copy of "Moll Flanders" a
rather racy fictional biography. We know that according to Hogarth, it is her fault because she has allowed him in the bedroom and has also inflamed his desire by leaving her underwear
hanging from the curtains of her bedstead.
Symbols of her impending deflowering are in ripe abundance throughout. Highlighted by a shaft of light in the background of "Before" we see an image of a cupid about to ignite a toy
rocket. The shaft of light has moved, indicating the passage of time in "After" and we see highlighted by the shaft of light we see an image of a cupid snickering over the same spent toy
rocket.
The mirror on the nigh table in "Before," a symbol of introspection and of vanity is broken in the second scene like her chastity.
The dog barking in (Before) is trying to defend his master's virtue/honor but the same dog takes a nap in "After" indicating his master's honor cannot be defended anymore
The end results of this unattractive and rather unromantically depicted tryst is further emphasized by the disarray of his wig, the ripped curtains and idiotic look of the young disheveled man
who hastily pulls up his pants while the girls begs for a promise of marriage?
Compare this scene to Fragonard's The Meeting, from Love of the Shepherds which describes of a very similar romantic encounter.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1732-1806

The Meeting, from Love of the Shepherds
1771-73 o/c 10'x7' New York, Frick
Museum

Hogarth: Genre Scenes and Moralizing Art in the 1700's

William Hogarth
Beer Street and
Gin Lane c1730-
(diptych) two images





William
Hogarth
Before
and
After
c1736

Honore Fragonard
The Meeting,
from Love of the Shepherds
1771-73
o/c 10'x7'
New York,Frick French,
French Rococo
The Harlot's Progress 1731






Hogarth: Genre Scenes and Moralizing Art in the 1700's: 2

The Rakes Progress c1790

#1- (left) Social climber Tom Rakewell has just come into his fathers money. His father was a miser who is now dead. John was educated but
learned nothing about the way the real world works. His dad the miser would hide things. In the picture he is breaking up with his girlfriend. At
the lower left there is a bible. The leather from the bible was used to resole his father's shoe. Meanwhile the house accountant is ripping him off
but he's too busy to notice.
2 A Visit By Apprentices or Tutors
* He has gain entry into the better half of society. He has been received and is being asked to make donations. In the background there is a
painting of The Judgment of Paris.
Scene #3 The Orgy

* Tom goes off with prostitutes and has an orgy. He is drunk and high on opium. Women/Prostitutes are picking his pockets. Pictures of great
philosophers are above his head and looking down on him. A mirror is broken in this scene.
Scene #4 ?
*Tom is in trouble. He's out of reason and out of money. He has been stopped by debtors. His old girlfriend who he dumped earlier bails him out.
Scene #5 ?
*Tom marries an old crone because he ran out of money. In the slide her kids are also taking her money. Priest in this slide is not moral and is
probably being paid large sums of money for marrying them.
Scene #6
*Tom has lost all his wifes money gambling and is on the floor in despair. He has lost his dignity as well and tears the wig from his head. A fire
burns unnoticed and out of control in the background which symbolizes his state of mental, moral and financial affairs.
Scene#6 ?
* Tom is in debtor prison. In the background an alchemist attempts to create gold out of base elements which is also a metaphor for Tom's life.
Scene #7
*Tom ends up insane in a mental hospital called "Bedlam."
Hogarth: Genre Scenes and Moralizing Art in the 1700's: 3

The Harlot's Progress

Arrival in London, 1731. Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The first series shows the "Harlot" that her name is Molly Hackabout , arriving in England. She is bringing her goose with her. It also shows on the picture an old lady that
looks as if she is telling Molly to enter into the prostitution business.


The other print shows Molly with a patron who is portrayed as a Jew. This indicates that there were negative stereotypes surrounding Jews living in England. Molly is
seducing the Jew, and a monkey is shown in the pictured on the floor. The monkey is an icon that represents a passion or a lust you can't control. It also shows an African
peasant boy dressed of like someone from India which is similar in its content to the representation of the Jew.
Next portrait shows Molly that is now older and has is losing her beauty. It shows a letter that says "a Pastoral letter for my love." A guy is coming with some guards, looking
for his stolen watch.
Molly's face looks rotten from syphilitic sores and because of this she has lost her beauty and the ability to get money, she turns into be a thief. Her life as a prostitute has
already finished.
Now Molly is in the workhouse prison beating hemp fibers, and is in a lot of trouble. She is obviously exhausted and so her friend attempts to flash a little leg to get the
prison warden off her back. Benind Molly another inmate picks her pocket and winks at the guard. If she does not work she will be placed in the stocks like the woman
behind her. On the stocks it says "Better to work than to stand thus."
Next picture shows Molly dead or dying in her chair. It shows people that are there with her and are stealing her money and things.

Final scene shows Molly's funeral. It shows people that are using her coffin as a coffee table, and without care that she has died. The preacher looks like if he is a dummy, and
is there with a prostitute


History Painting
History Painting and Neoclassicism
In order to understand the political changes that lead to the styles we will be discussing. Please read the following:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778,

“Everybody is a critic.” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was no exception to the rule. Rousseau’s critical view of the world can
probably be blamed on his father. (We all like to do that.) Rousseau’s father a Swiss born patriot, who had married above
his station, abandoned Geneva, his birthplace, after breaking a law which forbid non-noble born individuals to wear
swords. Jean Jacques Rousseau was left behind with his mother’s family (his mother had perished at childbirth) to fend for
himself. By sixteen years old Rousseau had had enough of a bad situation and followed his father’s example. After a bit
of wandering, he became the beneficiary of the attentions of an older woman, the Baronne de Warens, who was colorful
person with an equally florid past. He was employed and educated by her in all respects and under her constant tutelage
became a man of letters and of experience.
By the age of thirty Rousseau made his way to Paris and made the acquaintance of similarly intellectually adventurous
individuals such as Denis Diderot the editor/inventor of the French Encyclopédie (Encyclopedia). In this fertile climate of
enlightened and radical thought Rousseau flourished. He published political tracts, wrote operas and in general gained the
social and intellectual spotlight of the French upper classes. In a moment of clarity and inspired reflection, Rousseau
concluded that modern society was indeed corrupt and the time for change had arrived. Rousseau’s epiphany led to his
evolution as an author and the creation of such politically volatile works as The Social Contract. Subsequently he fled Paris
after some of his works were ordered to be burned by the French government and a warrant for his arrest was issued.
Excerpts from
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
OR PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT
by Jean Jacques Rousseau
1762
Translated by G. D. H. Cole, public domain
Rendered into HTML and text by Jon Roland of the Constitution Society
Foederis æquas Dicamus leges.
Virgil, Æneid xi.
1. SUBJECT OF THE FIRST BOOK
MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
If I took into account only force, and the effects derived from it, I should say: "As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys,
it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as
took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away." But the social order is a
sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded
on conventions. Before coming to that, I have to prove what I have just asserted.
3. THE RIGHT OF THE STRONGEST
THE strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.
Hence the right of the strongest, which, though to all seeming meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. But are
we never to have an explanation of this phrase? Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have. To yield to
force is an act of necessity, not of will — at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?
Suppose for a moment that this so-called "right" exists. I maintain that the sole result is a mass of inexplicable nonsense. For, if force
creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible
to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act
so as to become the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no
file:///C|/Users/kmencher/Desktop/Documents/homepages/pic_old/18th_century/history_painting_classic_ideal.htm[1/21/2014 3:44:21 PM]

History Painting
need to obey because we ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word "right" adds
nothing to force: in this connection, it means absolutely nothing.
Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I can answer for its never being violated.
All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to call in the doctor? A brigand
surprises me at the edge of a wood: must I not merely surrender my purse on compulsion; but, even if I could withhold it, am I in
conscience bound to give it up? For certainly the pistol he holds is also a power.
Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers. In that case, my original
question recurs.
6. THE SOCIAL COMPACT
I SUPPOSE men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their
power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive
condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.
But, as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves
than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring into play by
means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert.
This sum of forces can arise only where several persons come together: but, as the force and liberty of each man are the chief
instruments of his self-preservation, how can he pledge them without harming his own interests, and neglecting the care he owes to
himself? This difficulty, in its bearing on my present subject, may be stated in the following terms:
"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of
each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is
the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.
The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and
ineffective; so that, although they have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly
admitted and recognised, until, on the violation of the social compact, each regains his original rights and resumes his natural liberty,
while losing the conventional liberty in favour of which he renounced it.
These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one — the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the
whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no
one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.
Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand:
for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each,
being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would
necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the
same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the
preservation of what he has.
If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms:
"Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate
capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."
At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body,
composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and
its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons formerly took the name of city,4 and now takes that of
Republic or body politic; it is called by its members State when passive. Sovereign when active, and Power when compared with
others like itself. Those who are associated in it take collectively the name of people, and severally are called citizens, as sharing in
the sovereign power, and subjects, as being under the laws of the State. But these terms are often confused and taken one for another:
it is enough to know how to distinguish them when they are being used with precision.

History Painting
7. THE SOVEREIGN
THIS formula shows us that the act of association comprises a mutual undertaking between the public and the individuals, and that
each individual, in making a contract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is
bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign. But the maxim of civil right, that no one is bound by
undertakings made to himself, does not apply in this case; for there is a great difference between incurring an obligation to yourself
and incurring one to a whole of which you form a part.
Attention must further be called to the fact that public deliberation, while competent to bind all the subjects to the Sovereign, because
of the two different capacities in which each of them may be regarded, cannot, for the opposite reason, bind the Sovereign to itself;
and that it is consequently against the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe.
Being able to regard itself in only one capacity, it is in the position of an individual who makes a contract with himself; and this
makes it clear that there neither is nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people — not even the social
contract itself. This does not mean that the body politic cannot enter into undertakings with others, provided the contract is not
infringed by them; for in relation to what is external to it, it becomes a simple being, an individual.
But the body politic or the Sovereign, drawing its being wholly from the sanctity of the contract, can never bind itself, even to an
outsider, to do anything derogatory to the original act, for instance, to alienate any part of itself, or to submit to another Sovereign.
Violation of the act by which it exists would be self-annihilation; and that which is itself nothing can create nothing.
As soon as this multitude is so united in one body, it is impossible to offend against one of the members without attacking the body,
and still more to offend against the body without the members resenting it. Duty and interest therefore equally oblige the two
contracting parties to give each other help; and the same men should seek to combine, in their double capacity, all the advantages
dependent upon that capacity.
Again, the Sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs;
and consequently the sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all
its members. We shall also see later on that it cannot hurt any in particular. The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always
what it should be.
This, however, is not the case with the relation of the subjects to the Sovereign, which, despite the common interest, would have no
security that they would fulfil their undertakings, unless it found means to assure itself of their fidelity.
In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His
particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may
make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others
than the payment of it is burdensome to himself; and, regarding the moral person which constitutes the State as a persona ficta,
because not a man, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfil the duties of a subject. The
continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic.
In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to
the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than
that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal
dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it,
would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.
1. "Learned inquiries into public right are often only the history of past abuses; and troubling to study them too deeply is a profitless
infatuation" (Essay on the Interests of France in Relation to its Neighbours, by the Marquis d'Argenson). This is exactly what Grotius
has done.
2. See a short treatise of Plutarch's entitled That Animals Reason.
3. The Romans, who understood and respected the right of war more than any other nation on earth, carried their scruples on this head
so far that a citizen was not allowed to serve as a volunteer without engaging himself expressly against the enemy, and against such
and such an enemy by name. A legion in which the younger Cato was seeing his first service under Popilius having been
reconstructed, the elder Cato wrote to Popilius that, if he wished his son to continue serving under him, he must administer to him a
new military oath, because, the first having been annulled, he was no longer able to bear arms against the enemy. The same Cato
wrote to his son telling him to take great care not to go into battle before taking this new oath. I know that the siege of Clusium and
other isolated events can be quoted against me; but I am citing laws and customs. The Romans are the people that least often
transgressed its laws; and no other people has had such good ones.

History Painting
4. The real meaning of this word has been almost wholly lost in modern times; most people mistake a town for a city, and a
townsman for a citizen. They do not know that houses make a town, but citizens a city. The same mistake long ago cost the
Carthaginians dear. I have never read of the title of citizens being given to the subjects of any prince, not even the ancient
Macedonians or the English of to-day, though they are nearer liberty than any one else. The French alone everywhere familiarly adopt
the name of citizens, because, as can be seen from their dictionaries, they have no idea of its meaning; otherwise they would be guilty
in usurping it, of the crime of lèse-majesté: among them, the name expresses a virtue, and not a right. When Bodin spoke of our
citizens and townsmen, he fell into a bad blunder in taking the one class for the other. M. d'Alembert has avoided the error, and, in
his article on Geneva, has clearly distinguished the four orders of men (or even five, counting mere foreigners) who dwell in our
town, of which two only compose the Republic. No other French writer, to my knowledge, has understood the real meaning of the
word citizen.
5. Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory: it serves only to-keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich
man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from
which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much.
Next | Contents | Liberty Library | Home | Constitution Society

Questions
"Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate
capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."
How is the above passage, quoted from Rousseau’s Social Contract, echoed in the paintings by Jacques Louis David or Angelika
Kauffman?
How does the organization of the text of the Social Contract reflect “enlightened” thinking?

Form: Although the composition is overtly symmetrical the
visual weight of the composition seems to run in a strong
diagonal from the lower left hand corner of the image up
through the flagpole and then into the smoky clouds in the
upper right hand section of the painting.
The flag and the murky gunpowder clouds create a strong

diagonal across the picture plane which moves the eyes from
the upper left hand corner towards the Native American in the
lower left. The figures including the Indian, all share in the
same combination of gestures and movements in a similar
manner to Leonardo's Last Supper.
The composition is also arranged in a similar manner to

Grueze's and Poussin's paintings. Like its Baroque French
counterparts, the image is constructed so that most of the
figures are placed in the foreground and even though there is
the creation of deep space, the background is not as important
Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe. 1770 as the figures.
Oil on canvas, 60 in. x 84 1/2 in. (152.6 cm x 214.5 cm).
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. This painting returns to a Baroque sensibility in terms of its
Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921 lighting, composition and movement. West uses tenebrism
(gift of the Second Duke of Westminster, and chiaroscuro liberally and the spotlight is on the figure
Eaton Hall, Cheshire, 1918). placed with in a Leonaroesque pyramid.
British History Painting
Iconography and Context according to art critic Robert
Hughes,
The arts in America did not bring forth anything

much new at first, except for mid- to late-18th

History Painting
century furniture--and one work by Benjamin West.

When he was 12, West (1738-1820) announced that
his talent would make him the "companion of
kings and emperors." And as a matter of fact, it
did: after he settled in England in 1763, he became
George III's favorite artist. His definitive work was
The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. It was a history
painting but recent history, recounting a British
victory over the French at the Battle of Quebec
Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1495-7 Milan, only a decade earlier. And it was in "modern,"
Santa Maria delle Grazie late-18th century dress. It changed the English
sense of decorum in heroic commemoration, the
idea of what history painting could do.
In the Battle of Quebec in 1759, the British

commander, Major General James Wolfe, was
killed at the moment of victory over the French.
West's painting depicts the hero receiving the news
just as he expires. Until West created this work,
history painting had required togas and other
accoutrements of antiquity. West's use of
contemporary 18th century dress set off a storm of
controversy, and his retort to his critics became
famous. The siege of Quebec, he pointed out, took
place "in a region of the world unknown to the
Greeks and Romans...when no such nations, nor
heroes in their costumes, any longer existed... The
same truth that guides the pen of the historian
should govern the pencil of the artist." There spoke
the Natural Man from the New World, pragmatic,
Nicolas Poussin, 'Et in Arcadia Ego' 1637-39 realistic--though, in fact, West's painting was very
Oil on canvas, 185 x 121 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris far from realist.
"I am here in Arcadia too"
Time, Spring97 Special Issue, Vol. 149 Issue 17,
French, Baroque (Learned to paint in Italy)
p76, 10p, 10c

John Singleton Copley,"Watson and the Shark" (1778), Form: Most history paintings share in many of the same
formal elements. They also share these same elements with the
Neoclassical style except for in the subject matter and clothing.
As in West's, Death of General Wolfe. 1770, this painting also

returns to a Baroque sensibility in terms of its lighting,
composition and movement. Copley uses tenebrism and
chiaroscuro liberally and the spotlight is on the figure placed
with in a Leonaroesque pyramid.
Again a strong diagonal runs through the image and the figures
all share in the same combination of gestures and movements in
a similar manner to Leonardo's Last Supper.
The composition is also arranged in a similar manner to West's,

Grueze's and Poussin's paintings. Like its counterparts, the
image is constructed so that most of the figures are placed in
the foreground and even though there is the creation of deep

History Painting
space, the background is not as important as the figures.
Iconography,
John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark was

inspired by an event that took place in Havana,
Cuba, in 1749. Fourteen-year-old Brook Watson, an
orphan serving as a crew member on a trading ship,
was attacked by a shark while swimming alone in
the harbor. His shipmates, who had been waiting on
board to escort their captain ashore, launched a
valiant rescue effort.
http://www.nga.gov/feature/watson/watsonhome.html
What is interesting and an element shared with West's painting

is the depiction of the main character or hero as a martyr very
similar to Renaissance depictions of Jesus. The non-European
are represented in a less flattering and almost subjugating light.
In West's painting we see the depiction of the Native American
and in Copley's painting the Afro-Cuban man in the back of the
boat. Historians sometimes refer to these depictions as
depicting "The Other."
These depictions of the so called "Other" might be interpreted

as a justification for colonialism and some of the racism that
justifies it. In each of these images the Other is depicted as
actionless and almost useless. The Indian, who is literally
below everyone else, gazes on Wolfe almost as if he cannot
comprehend what is happening. Likewise, the Afro-Cuban in
Copley's painting is cast in a similar inactive role and relegated
to the rear of the picture plane.

John Singleton Copley

b. July 3, 1738, Boston [Mass., U.S.]
d. Sept. 9, 1815, London, Eng.
American painter of portraits and historical subjects, generally
acclaimed as the finest artist of colonial America.
Little is known of Copley's boyhood. He developed within a

flourishing school of colonial portraiture, and it was as a portraitist
that he reached the high point of his art, and--as his Boston portraits

History Painting
later revealed--he gained an intimate knowledge of his New England

subjects and milieu and was able to convey a powerful sense of
physical entity and directness--real people seen as they are. From his
stepfather, the limner and engraver Peter Pelham, Copley gained
familiarity with graphic art as well as an early sense of vocation.
Before he was 20 he was an accomplished draughtsman. To the
Rococo portrait style derived from the English painter Joseph
Blackburn he brought his own powers of imagination and a technical
ability surpassing anyone painting in America at the time. Copley, in
his portraits, made eloquent use of a Rococo device, the portrait
d'apparat--portraying the subject with the objects associated with
him in his daily life--that gave his work a liveliness and acuity not
usually associated with 18th-century American painting.
Although he was steadily employed with commissions from the

Boston bourgeoisie, Copley wanted to test himself against the more
exacting standards of Europe. In 1766, therefore, he exhibited "Boy
with a Squirrel" at the Society of Artists in London. It was highly
praised both by Sir Joshua Reynolds and by Copley's countryman
Benjamin West. Copley married in 1769. Although he did not
venture out of Boston except for a seven-month stay in New York
City (June 1771-January 1772), he was urged by fellow artists who
were familiar with his work to study in Europe. When political and
economic conditions in Boston began to deteriorate (Copley's father-
in-law was the merchant to whom the tea that provoked the Boston
Tea Party was consigned), Copley left the country--never to return--
in June 1774. In 1775 his wife, children, and several other family
members arrived in London, and Copley established a home there in
1776.
His ambitions in Europe went beyond portraiture; he was eager to

make a success in the more highly regarded sphere of historical
painting. In his first important work, "Watson and the Shark"
(1778), Copley used what was to become one of the great themes of
19th-century Romantic art, the struggle of man against nature. He
was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. Although his English
paintings grew more academically sophisticated and self-conscious,
in general they lacked the extraordinary vitality and penetrating
realism of his Boston portraits. Toward the end of his life, his
physical and mental health grew worse. Though he continued to
paint with considerable success until the last few months of his life,
he was obsessed by the sale (at a loss) of his Boston property and by
his increasing debts.

Neoclassicism

Form: This painting is rendered in a very slick and detailed

fashion. No brushstrokes are visible in David's paintings.
Although photography hadn't been invented yet, this painting
recalls the photo realistic surfaces and textures of Jan Van
Eyck's paintings. This is quite a change from the feathery rough

History Painting
strokes of the Rococo period.
The overall design of this image reflects a Neoclassical sense of

composition and a Renaissance sense of perspective.
The picture plane is arranged in a sculptural frieze like band that

takes its cue from antique sculptural friezes such as those found
on the Ara Pacis and the Parthenon. Like its classical
counterparts, the image is constructed so that most of the figures
are placed in the foreground and even though there is the
creation of deep space, the background is not as important as the
figures.
Jacques Louis David Oath of the Horatii-1784 It is also classic in that the composition is arranged
oil on canvas, 10'x14' Louvre Museum, Paris symmetrically with the most important figure, proclaiming the
French Neoclassicism oath, in the center. The use of perspective also focusses on this
figure.
David's work also exhibits a Caravaggesque flair for chiaroscuro

and tenebrism.
Iconography: Stokstad goes into the specific story of the

Curattii and the Horatii and so this next section will be
dedicated to some other aspects of the image.
The super realistic quality of this image is meant to make it a

convincing and serious image. Likewise other formal aspects
such as lighting, texture and composition are iconic in this
image.
The use of classical imagery, such as the togas and arches, and a
story that deals specifically with self sacrifice for the state
allowed this painting to be used as a "call to arms" for the
French Revolution that followed. The classical clothing and
Ara Pacis Augustae 13-9 BCE arches referred to a tradition that was considered more dignified
than the light classical themes expressed in paintings like
Watteau's.
The lighting and the frieze like placement of the figures are
equally a part of the iconography of this image because these
formal elements directly refer to those classical traditions.
Compare Watteau's style of painting and see how the formal
qualities of each actually are part of the iconography.
The individuals being represented are also all physically

beautiful and this refers to the classical concept of kalos (Greek
for beautiful and moral.)
Another aspect of this image is the depiction of women in this

painting which seems consistent with the depiction of the
"Other" in the two history paintings we've looked at. The
woman who are betrothed to the soldiers and the children have
the most to lose and they are also the least powerful. This is
expressed through there placement, below the horizon line in the
Jean Antoine Watteau.
picture plane. Like West's Native American they are literally
Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera. 1717
beneath every one else and relegated to the margins of the scene.

History Painting
oil/canvas 4'3"x6'4" Louvres, Paris

French Rococo

Form: The composition of this painting is organized in a clear
symmetrical format in which all the attention is focused on the
center of the image on the three swords the central figure holds
aloft.
The three arches organize the composition in such a way that it is

meant to be read from left to right, almost as if it is a triptych from
Renaissance Italian painting.
The composition is also modeled on classical Greek or Roman relief

sculpture as one would find on the Ara Pacis or the friezes of the
Parthenon. The painting space is literally modeled after figures in
the composition in Greco Roman relief sculptures in that their is
very little background and the figures, which are somewhat spot lit
stand out from a very sparse background. The Roman arches are
also meant to be read sculpturally.
The style in which David painted this is very hard edged and
realistic, although painted before the invention of photography, this
Jacques-Louis David Oath of the Horatii-1784 painting seems to look almost photographic.
oil on canvas, 10'x14' Louvre Museum, Paris
French Neoclassicism
Iconography: Everything about this painting is meant to refer to the classical world. The formal elements and clothing clearly look
classic (sometimes referred to as "antique") but the actual content of the image also refers to a historical event as well.

The Horatii were a Roman legend, two sets of triplet brothers whose story was probably fashioned to explain existing legal or ritual
practices. The Horatii were Roman and the Curiatii Alban, although an alternative version reversed this order. During the war between
Rome and Alba Longa in the reign of Tullus Hostilius (traditionally 672-642 BC), it was agreed that settlement of the dispute should
depend on the outcome of combat between the two groups of brothers.
In the contest two of the Horatii were quickly killed; but the third, feigning flight, managed to slay his wounded pursuers one by one.
When the survivor entered Rome in triumph, his sister recognized among his trophies a cloak she had made for one of the Curiatii to
whom she was betrothed. She could not conceal her grief and was killed by her brother, who declared, "So perish any Roman woman
who mourns the enemy." For this act Horatius was condemned to death, but he was saved by an appeal to the people.
The tale might have been devised to provide an august origin for the legal practice that granted every condemned Roman the right to
appeal to the populace. Alternatively, perhaps it was used to explain the ritual of the tigillum sororium ("sister's beam"), the yoke
under which Horatius had to pass to be purified of his crime.
Context: David probably painted this as a "call to arms" for his fellow Frenchmen. David probably interpreted the story of the
Horatii as the ultimate tale of patriotism and sacrifice, o ne which he believed the French people needed to learn a message from. In
some ways, David was one of the leaders and propagandists for the French revolution and his paintings were seen almost as lessons or
advertisements to the French citizens to act in a self-sacrificing manner and also to suggest some sorts of reforms in French
government based on classical ideas such as those found in Republican Rome above and also those found in Athens during it's
"Golden Age".

Form: The drawing on the left is an unfinished sketch made by David
to commemorate and plan a larger painting of the same theme. There
are some unfinished paintings based on this drawing as well.
Iconography and Context: The people represented in this drawing were

some of the people who took the famous "Oath of the Tennis Court"
which according to the Brittanica, was a
(June 20, 1789), dramatic act of defiance by representatives

History Painting
of the non privileged classes of the French nation (the Third

Estate) during the meeting of the Estates-General (traditional
assembly) at the beginning of the French Revolution. The
deputies of the Third Estate, realizing that in any attempt at
reform they would be outvoted by the two privileged orders,
the clergy and the nobility, had formed, on June 17, a
National Assembly. Finding themselves locked out of their
usual meeting hall at Versailles on June 20 and thinking that
the king was forcing them to disband, they moved to a
nearby tennis court. There they took an oath never to
separate until a written constitution had been established for
France. In the face of the solidarity of the Third Estate, King
Louis XVI relented and on June 27 ordered the clergy and
Jacques-Louis David Oath Tennis Court 1791
the nobility to join with the Third Estate in the National
Assembly.
Many of the people represented in the drawing and subsequent

paintings however, were not on hand and David would add or subtract
individuals from his drawing and the subsequent paintings as some rose
and others fell out of political power.
David Oath Tennis Court 1791
Form: This is just a sketch
because David never had a
chance to complete the painting.
The overall design of this image
reflects a Neoclassical sense of
composition and a Renaissance
sense of perspective.
The picture plane is arranged

symmetrically with the most
important figure, proclaiming the
oath, in the center. The use of
perspective also focusses on this
figure.
Iconography: This painting was

meant to be a patriotic call to
arms but was never completed
because the cast of characters
kept changing and David was
probably unsure as to how to
complete it. There is an
unfinished oil version of it.

This amazingly rich sketch by Jacques Louis David is one of the most famous works from the French revolutionary era.
The thrust of the bodies together and toward the center stand for unity. The spectators, including children at the top
right, all join the spectators. Even the clergy, so villified later, join in the scene. Only one person, possibly Marat, in
the upper left–hand corner, turns his back on the celebration. And, in fact, David is commemorating a great moment of
the Revolution on 20 June 1789, in which the deputies, mainly those of the Third Estate, now proclaiming that they
represent the nation, stand together against a threatened dispersal.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/633/
The Tennis Court Oath was a result of the growing discontent of the Third Estate in France in the face of King Louis XVI's desire to
hold on to the country's history of absolute government. The deputies of the Third Estate were coming together for a meeting to

History Painting
discuss the reforms proposed by Necker, the Prime Minister. These reforms called for the meeting of all the Estates together and to
have vote by head instead of by estate. This would have given the Third Estate at least nominally a stronger voice in the Estates
General. The men of the Third Estate were ardent supporters of the reforms, and they were anxious to discuss these measures. When
the members of the Third Estate arrived at their assigned meeting hall, Menus Plaisirs, they found it locked against them. The deputies
believed that this was a blatant attempt by Louis XVI to end their demands for reform and they were further incensed at the King's
duplicity. Refusing to be held down by their King any longer, the deputies did not break up. Instead they moved their meeting to a
nearby indoor tennis court.
A debate quickly ensued about how the Third Estate was going to protect themselves from those in positions of authority who wanted
to destroy them. Some deputies believed that they should retreat to Paris where the people would be more likely to protect them from
the King's army. Mounier warned that such a step would be blatantly revolutionary and politically dangerous. Therefore, Mounier
proposed that the Third Estate adopt an oath of allegiance. The proposed oath was to read that they would remain assembled until a
constitution had been written, meeting wherever it was required and resisting pressures form the outside to disband. The proposal was
a success and the later named Tennis Court Oath was promptly written and immediately signed by 577 (only one man, Martin Dauch,
refused, saying that he could not do anything which his King had not sanctioned).
The Tennis Court Oath was an assertion that sovereignty of the people did not reside in the King, but in the people themselves and
their representatives. It was the first assertion of revolutionary authority by the Third Estate and it united virtually all its members to
common action. It's success can be seen in the fact that a scant week later Louis XVI called for a meeting together of the Estates
General for the purpose of writing a constitution.
http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/WestEurope/TennisCourt.html

Form: This painting is a depiction of a nude man who is slumped down into a cloth
draped bathtub on which a board has been placed across as an impromptu kind of
desk. He holds in hands, a letter on which the name "Charlotte Corday" is clearly
written. He has a small would just under his collar bone and a knife lies in the
forground of the image.
The anatomy of the the figure is idealized and very muscular and almost appears to
mimic the idealized muscular structure of Greco Roman sculpture.
The composition is also modeled on classical Greek or Roman relief sculpture as one
would find on the Ara Pacis or the friezes of the Parthenon. The painting space is
literally modeled after figures in the composition in Greco Roman relief sculptures in
that their is very little background and the figures, which are somewhat spot lit stand
out from a very sparse background.
In terms of value structure David is very much of a caravaggisti in this painting. He

uses tenebrism and heightened chiaroscuro.
The style in which David painted this is very hard edged and realistic, although
painted before the invention of photography, this painting seems to look almost
photographic.
On July 13, Charlotte Corday, a young Girondin supporter from

Normandy, was admitted to Jean-Paul Marat's room on the pretext that she
wished to claim his protection and stabbed him to death in his bath (he
took frequent medicinal baths to relieve a skin infection). Marat's dramatic
murder at the very moment of the Montagnards' triumph over their
opponents caused him to be considered a martyr to the people's cause. His
Jacques-Louis David.Death of Marat. 1793. name was given to 21 French towns and, later, as a gesture symbolizing
oil on canvas, 5'5"x4'2" the continuity between the French and Russian revolutions, to one of the
Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels first battleships in the Soviet Navy.
French Neoclassicism
Iconography: This image depicts Marat as a martyr for the French Revolution and has
often been referred to as the "pietà of the Revolution." This was entirely intentional
on the part of David who uses light in much the same way as Caravaggio does to
symbolize "enlightenment" or divine light. The dramatic lighting and references to

History Painting
the heroic classic past are meant to elevate and heroicize Marat as a figure who died
in the service of something greater than himself. The depiction of his body as also
heroic is a direct reference to the idea of kalos in ancient Greek art.
Form: The anatomy of the the figures are idealized
and very muscular and mimic the idealized
muscular structure of Greco Roman sculpture.
The composition is also modeled on classical

Greek or Roman relief sculpture as one would find
on the Ara Pacis or the friezes of the Parthenon.
The painting space is literally modeled after
figures in the composition in Greco Roman relief
sculptures in that their is very little background
and the figures, which are somewhat spot lit stand
out from a very sparse background.
In terms of value structure David is very much of a

caravaggisti in this painting. He uses tenebrism
and heightened chiaroscuro.
The style in which David painted this is very hard

edged and realistic, although painted before the
invention of photography, this painting seems to
David, Death of Socrates, 1787 look almost photographic.
Iconography and Context: According to: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl_dav_soc.html
At the height of his youthful popularity and enthusiasm, part of a close circle of friends (including Chernier, Lafayette and
Lavoisier) who were pushing for radical political reform, David painted this unusual historical picture in 1787.
Commissioned by the Trudaine de Montigny brothers, leaders in the call for a free market system and more public
discussion, this picture depicts the closing moments of the life of Socrates. Condemned to death or exile by the Athenian
government for his teaching methods which aroused scepticism and impiety in his students, Socrates heroicly rejected exile
and accepted death from hemlock.
For months, David and his friends debated and discussed the importance of this picture. It was to be another father figure
(like the Horatii and Brutus), unjustly condemned but who sacrifices himself for an abstract principle. By contrasting the
movements of the energetic but firmly controlled Socrates, and his swooning disciples, through the distribution of light and
dark accents, David transforms what might have been only a fashionable picture of martyrdom to a clarion call for nobility
and self-control even in the face of death.
Here the philosopher continues to speak even while reaching for the cup, demonstrating his indifference to death and his
unyielding commitment to his ideals. Most of his disciplines and slaves swirl around him in grief, betraying the weakness
of emotionalism. His wife is seen only in the distance leaving the prison. Only Plato, at the foot of the bed and Crito
grasping his master's leg, seem in control of themselves.
For contemporaries the scene could only call up memories of the recently abandoned attempt at reform, the dissolution of
the Assembly of Notables in 1787, and the large number of political prisoners in the king's jails or in exile. David certainly
intended this scene as a rebuke to cringing souls. On the eve of the Revolution, this picture served as a trumpet call to
duty, and resistance to unjust authority. Thomas Jefferson was present at its unveiling, and admired it immensly. Sir
Joshua Reynolds compared the Socrates with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Stanze, and after ten visits to
the Salon described it as ìn every sense perfect'.
Form: The overall design of this image reflects a Neoclassical

sense of composition and a Renaissance sense of perspective.
The picture plane is arranged in a sculptural frieze like band

that takes its cue from antique sculptural friezes such as those
found on the Ara Pacis and the Parthenon. Like its classical
counterparts, the image is constructed so that most of the
figures are placed in the foreground and even though there is
the creation of deep space, the background is not as important

History Painting
as the figures.
It is also classic in that the composition is arranged

symmetrically with the most important figure, proclaiming the
oath, in the center. The use of perspective also focusses on
this figure.
David's work also exhibits a Caravaggesque flair for

David Death of Socrates 1787 chiaroscuro and tenebrism.

Iconography: This image uses all of the classical iconography
we see in Oath of the Horattii but David adds to it by
depicting Socrates as bearded and aged but with a youthful and
beautiful torso much like The Young Warrior from Riace (c
460-450 BCE). The juxtaposition of the beard which
symbolizes youth against the body, which symbolizes kalos
(Greek for beautiful and moral.) Is a way of portraying
Socrates as an ideal philosopher. Davis also quotes Raphael's
School of Athens to demonstrate that Socrates is dying for a
higher ideal. Notice that even in America this same
iconography was used for this portrait of George Washington.
The story of the Socrates death is extremely relevant and

echoes many of the same qualities and aspects of David's
Oath. Socrates who lived in Athens in the fifth century was
one of the greatest philosophers to have lived. Primarily his
function was to teach the aristocratic youths of Athens how to
think and he did this by asking his students questions. The
types of questions he asked were consistently those of the
"why" variety in which he often challenged the status quo. For
THE RIACE BRONZE c460-450 this and other reasons he was accused of treason by the
BCE Horatio Greenough Athenians. The accusation leveled at him was that he was
Classical Greek George Washington (1804) corrupting the youth of Athens with his credo "question
bronze w/ bone, glass paste, American Neoclassical authority."
silver & copper inlaid,h. 200cm
Reggio Calabria: Museo According to the Brittanica,
Nazionale In 399 Socrates was indicted for "impiety." The
author of the proceedings was the influential

Anytus, one of the two chiefs of the democrats
restored by the counterrevolution of 403; but the
nominal prosecutor was the obscure and
insignificant Meletus. There were two counts in the
accusation, "corruption of the young" and "neglect
of the gods whom the city worships and the practice
of religious novelties." Socrates, who treated the
charge with contempt and made a "defense" that
amounts to avowal and justification, was convicted,
probably by 280 votes against 220. The prosecutors
had asked for the penalty of death; it now rested
with the accused to make a counterproposition.

History Painting
Though a smaller, but substantial, penalty would

have been accepted, Socrates took the high line that
he really merited the treatment of an eminent
benefactor: maintenance at the public table. He
consented only for form's sake to suggest the small
fine of one mina, raised at the entreaty of his friends
to 30.
fresco The claim to be a public benefactor incensed the
court, and death was voted by an increased majority,
a result with which Socrates declared himself well
content. As a rule at Athens, the condemned man
"drank the hemlock" within 24 hours, but, in the
case of Socrates, the fact that no execution could
take place during the absence of the sacred ship sent
yearly to Delos caused an unexpected delay of a
month, during which Socrates remained in prison,
receiving his friends daily and conversing with them
in his usual manner. An escape was planned by his
friend Crito, but Socrates refused to hear of it, on
the grounds that the verdict, though contrary to fact,
was that of a legitimate court and must therefore be
obeyed. The story of his last day, with his drinking
of the hemlock, has been perfectly told in the
Phaedo of Plato, who, though not himself an
eyewitness, was in close touch with many of those
who were present.
Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica,
Inc.
Socrates choice to drink the hemlock is portrayed by David.

Why do you think he chose to depict this scene and why?
Form: The anatomy of the the figure is idealized and very muscular and almost
appears to mimic the idealized muscular structure of Greco Roman sculpture.
Iconography: Clearly Greenough was using the iconography and symbolism

established by neoclassical artists in the 19th century. Here Washingston literally
looks like a Greek god which is meant to canonnize him.
The hand pointing up is almost certainly a reference to Rafael's depiction of Plato

from the "School of Athens."

History Painting
Horatio Greenough George Washington (1841)

(Installed in the Rotunda 1841 and moved to the
east Capitol Grounds in 1844. Transferred to
Smithsonian Institution in 1908.)
American Neoclassical
Context: According to Jean K. Rosales and Michael R. Jobe (http://www.kittytours.org/thatman2/search.asp?subject=18)
Congress made seven attempts to honor George Washington (1732-1799); this was Try Number 4. In 1832, Greenough was
commissioned to design a statue of General Washington standing, but chose to model his statue on a statue of the Greek God Zeus.
There may have been some method in his madness.
The original Mills design for the Washington Monument would have included a Greek temple on top of which there was supposed to
be a statue of George Washington driving a six-horse chariot. A close examination of the artist's rendering of this design indicates that
the Greenough statue looks amazingly like the Mills chariot driver.
One suspects he was seeking a larger commission, since acceptance of this statue would have also generated the commission for the
six horses. This theory helps to explain the very awkward position of Washington's left hand -- it was supposed to be holding the
reins of the chariot.
The statue is made of 12 tons of white marble and is so heavy it began to crack the floor of the Rotunda in the Capitol when it was
installed there in 1841. It was moved to the East Front of the Capitol in 1843 and travelled around the grounds of the Hill until it was
finally presented to the Museum of History and Technology (now the American History Museum).
2001 Jean K. Rosales and Michael R. Jobe, All Rights Reserved
-for an English patron

-Neoclassical history painting, subjects drawn from classical antiquity
(Age of Reason, contemplation)
-the story takes place in the second century BCE, during the
Republican era of Rome (Roman history)
-a woman visitor has been showing Cornelia her jewels and then
requests to see those of her hostess; Cornelia turns to her sons and says
that these are her most precious jewels
-Cornelia exemplifies the “good mother” (popular subject in late
eighteenth century)
-in the reforming spirit of the Enlightenment – depicted subjects that
would teach lessons in virtue (didactic paintings)
-the value of Cornelia’s maternal dedication is emphasized by the fact
that under her loving care the sons grew up to be political reformers
-setting = simple (like the message), but the effect of the whole is

History Painting
softened by the warm, subdued lighting and by the tranquil grace of the
leading characters
Biography:
Swiss prodigy, Maria Anna Catharina Angelica Kauffmann had an
established reputation as an artist and musician by the age of eleven.
Her father taught her and also accompanied her to Italy where she
Angelika Kauffman Cornelia's Jewels 1785 studied and continued to create her Rococo-style paintings. Kauffmann
oil on canvas 40"x50" Fine Arts Museum of Richmond moved to London in 1766 and met Sir Joshua Reynolds. She helped to
Virginia found the Royal Academy in 1769 and married fellow artist, Antonio
Swiss but worked in England, Neoclassical History Painting Zucchi. The couple moved to his home country of Italy and settled in
Rome. In addition to her many portraits, several of Kauffmann’s great
works were the decorations at St. Paul’s and the Royal Academy’s
lecture room at Somerset House.
Notice how the painting above was based on the work below.

Form: This stele is rendered in style very similar to the Nike parapet. The two female
figures are rendered in profile right against the front of the picture plane. The figures
inhabit what looks to be a post and lintel temple which gives the viewer the sense of an
environment. Each woman is idealized physically through the use of wet drapery. The
folds of each dress accent the protruding knees and fluid bodies. The anatomy of their
faces is naturalistic with some idealized features as well. An example of this is the
bridge of the noses is representing as a straight line, a minor distortion of how noses fit
in with the geography of the face: the bridge is usually slightly curved at the top. This
aquiline feature is referred to as the Greek nose.
Iconography: Scenes like this are called genre, or everyday, scenes. This is a scene of
everyday life in which a maid brings a jewelry box to her mistress and she examines her
trophies. This kind of scene, which is often referred to as the "Mistress and Maid"
motif is one that can also be found on vases as well as steles. It can best be interpreted
as a typical scene of upper class feminine pursuits. The maid, the jewels, the chair, and
the implied literacy of the visitors to the grave by the inscription on the lintel, are
emblems of economic power that compliment the seated woman's beauty and status.
(Compare this to the iconography of vases that depict two males such as in the Exekias
vase.)
Context: This stele was used as a grave marker and is probably an attempt by the artist
and the people who commissioned it to make an idealized portrait of the represented,
seated woman, buried in this grave.
Stele of Hegeso
c.410-400 BC, Marble, 5'9"
Athens. Classic

History Painting
Form: This is an unfinished painting which demonstrates

David's process of building up glazes to create finished and
polished surfaces.
The figure in the foreground is finished and she reclines in a

Roman style dress on a Roman style couch that interior
designers now call the Recamier. The background shows the
splotchy burnt siennas and umbers that David started with in
order to build up the surfaces to an almost photographic and
slick surface.
Iconography: This portrait uses the Neoclassical style to elevate

the importance of the sitter and give her a more authoritative
quality. It also refers to the sitter's taste.
Context: According to the Brittanica Madame Recamier was,
b. Dec. 4, 1777, Lyon

d. May 11, 1849, Paris
née Bernard, byname MADAME DE RÉCAMIER
Jacques Louis David, Madame Recamier 1800 French hostess of great charm and wit whose salon
attracted most of the important political and literary
figures of early 19th-century Paris.
She was the daughter of a prosperous banker and was convent educated. In 1792 she joined her father in Paris and within the year
married a wealthy banker.
Mme de Récamier began to entertain widely, and her salon soon became a fashionable gathering place for the great and near-great in
politics and the arts. Its habitués included many former Royalists and others, such as Bernadotte (later Charles XIV of Sweden and
Norway) and Gen. Jean Moreau, who were opposed to the government of Napoleon. In 1805 Napoleon's policies caused her husband
major financial losses, and in the same year Napoleon ordered her exiled from Paris. She stayed with her good friend Mme de Staël in
Geneva and then went to Rome (1813) and Naples. A literary portrait of Mme de Récamier can be found in the novel Corinne, written
by Mme de Staël during this period.
She returned to Paris following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 but again suffered financial losses. Despite her reduced
circumstances after 1819, she maintained her salon and continued to receive visitors at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, an old Paris convent in
which she took a separate suite. In her later years the French author and political figure François Chateaubriand became her constant
companion, as well as the central figure in her salon, where he read from his works. While her admirers had included many famous
and powerful men, none obtained so great an influence over her as Chateaubriand. There are two well-known portraits of Mme de
Récamier, by J.-L. David and François Gérard.

Form: Notice how all the buildings on this page reflect the basic schemas
established by the original Pantheon and incorporate some very Vitruvian
ideas into their design. Each of these structures incorporates a similar
symmetrical design, the use of columns and classical entablatures.
I some instances the strctures incorporate the sue of local materials such as in
Jefferson's Monticello or change the basic schema of the domes shape as in
Chiswick houses octaganol dome.
Iconography: All of these architects and builders used the same classical
Pantheon like schema as a means to express some sort of authority and
"class."
In France a reaction against the Rococo style began in the 1740s.

History Painting
Never very satisfactory for exterior architecture, the Rococo

nevertheless had considerable appeal as a decorative program,
reaching its height in the work of Meissonier and Oppenordt. A
dogmatic classicism in architecture had been a serious
consideration in France as early as 1671 when Louis XIV's Royal
Academy of Architecture was formed. The style, produced for
Louis XIV, adopted the richness and grandeur of the Roman
Baroque while modifying its more dramatic excesses by a rational
Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Pantheon 1755-92 application of le bon goût ("good taste"). A cornerstone of
Begun in 1757 as the Church of Sainte-Geneviève, the rationalism already had been laid in 1714 with the publication of
Pantheon is now a civic building housing the remains the French theorist the Abbé de Cordemoy's Nouveau traité de
of some of France's most famous citizens. toute l'architecture (1714; "New Treatise on All Architecture").
Reaction against the Rococo crystallized in the writings of Charles-
Nicolas Cochin and in the lectures of the Comte de Caylus at the
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1747. Along with the
return to nature and reason, the twisting curvilinear forms of the
Rococo were seen to work against nature. The same desire for truth
to nature accounted for the growing preference in France for the
informal landscape gardens of the English.
Soufflot was entrusted in 1755 with the design of Sainte-

Geneviève, which was intended to be the principal church of Paris.
His aim in this project was to combine the strict regularity and
monumentality of Roman arched ceiling vaults with the lightness
of slender supporting piers and freestanding Corinthian columns.
The plan was essentially a Greek cross, the facade an enormous
temple front. The freestanding columns proved inadequate to
support the building's dome, which eventually had to be buttressed.
Because of the predominantly classical origins of the design, it
became a simple matter, when the Revolution abolished religion,
for the church to be secularized and renamed the Panthéon.
Unfortunately, the side windows were at that time walled up and
much decoration removed. The effect of a light interior space was
destroyed, resulting in the somewhat gloomy monument that the
Panthéon is today.

Thomas Jefferson, Monticello 1770-1776
American Neoclassicism
According to the Brittanica, Monticello is,

History Painting
the home of Thomas Jefferson, located in south-central Virginia,

U.S., about 2 miles (3 km) southeast of Charlottesville.
Constructed between 1768 and 1809, it is one of the finest
examples of the early Classical Revival style in America.
Unlike most great mansions of the period, which were built in

lowlands and adjacent to rivers, Monticello is set atop an 867-
foot (264-metre) mountain; the name means "Little Mountain" in
Italian. The leveling of the mountaintop was begun in 1768, and
Jefferson began designing the house in the same year. He took
the floor plan of the house from an English pattern book, while
the facade was influenced by the designs of the 16th-century
Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Construction began in 1769 or
1770 and continued, with interruptions, for more than a decade.
The original house consisted of a central two-story portico with a wing on either side. The kitchen, laundry, servants' quarters, and
other service buildings were concealed beneath two long L-shaped terraces, extending from each side of the house along the slope of
the mountain; the terraces were connected to the basement of the main house by an underground passage. This structure was
retained through the house's subsequent alterations.
Monticello was largely finished when Jefferson left for France in 1784. During his five years there his ideas about architecture
changed dramatically, as he was influenced by the work of contemporary Neoclassical architects and by ancient Roman buildings.

Jefferson began drawing up plans for altering and enlarging Monticello in 1793, and work began in 1796. Much of the
original house was torn down. The final structure, completed in 1809, is a three-story brick and frame building with 35
rooms, 12 of them in the basement; each room is a different shape. There are two main entrances: the east portico, which
provides access to the public portions of the house; and the west portico, the private entrance, which opens on the estate's
extensive gardens. The windows on the second story start at floor level and are joined with the first-story windows in a
single frame, which gives the impression that there is only a single story. A central octagonal dome, modeled on that of
the Hôtel de Salm in Paris, dominates the structure; below it, a continuous balustrade runs around the edge of the roof.
Jefferson filled the house with ingenious devices. A dial on the ceiling of the east portico supplies a reading from a
weather vane on the roof; above the east entrance is a large clock with two faces, visible from the inside and outside. The
fireplace in the dining room conceals a dumbwaiter that communicates with the wine cellar. Jefferson's arrangements for
lighting and ventilation were equally inventive, and he designed many of the pieces of furniture himself.
Upon Jefferson's death in 1826, his daughter Martha inherited Monticello, but she was unable to maintain it. She sold the
property to U.S. Navy officer Uriah Levy in 1836, who in turn bequeathed it to the people of the United States. His
heirs, however, contested the will, and Monticello remained in possession of the Levy family until 1923, when it was
purchased by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.
The foundation restored the house and grounds and brought back many of the original furnishings. The estate of
Monticello now includes Jefferson's home and interior furnishings, orchard, vineyard, vegetable garden, and plantation. It
functions as a museum and a major tourist attraction.

Palladianism is a style of architecture based on the writings and

buildings of the humanist and theorist from Vicenza, Andrea
Palladio (1508-80), perhaps the greatest architect of the latter 16th
century and certainly the most influential. Palladio felt that
architecture should be governed by reason and by the principles
of classical antiquity as it was known in surviving buildings and
in the writings of the 1st-century-bc architect and theorist

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Vitruvius. Palladianism bespeaks rationality in its clarity, order,

and symmetry, while it also pays homage to antiquity in its use of
classical forms and decorative motifs. Few architects beyond
Palladio's immediate disciple Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616)
were interested in pursuing the most erudite aspect of Palladio's
work--his investigation of harmonic proportions--and in the hands
Chiswick House, of all too many followers of the next two centuries, Palladianism
by Lord Burlington (Richard Boyle), tended to become a sterile academic formula devoid of Palladio's
at Chiswick, England, 1729. own forcefulness and poetry.
Gardens by William Kent 1730
English Neoclassicism
It was Inigo Jones who introduced Palladian architecture into England. Upon his return from a trip to Italy
(1613-14), Jones created a Palladian style in London; this style was based upon the knowledge he had acquired
from his study of Palladio's writings and from his own first-hand examination of ancient and Renaissance
architecture. Outstanding among the preserved examples are the Queen's House at Greenwich (completed 1635),
the Banqueting House at Whitehall (1619-22), and the Queen's Chapel at St. James Palace (1623).
At the beginning of the Georgian period (1714-1830), a second and more consuming interest in Palladio
developed. Partly as a reaction to the grandiose architecture of the later Stuarts, the newly powerful Whigs
expressed a desire to return to a more rational and less complicated style. Their wish coincided with the
publication of an English translation of Palladio's treatise I quattro libri dell'architettura (1570; Four Books on
Architecture) and the first volume of Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus (1715), a folio of 100 engravings
of contemporary "classical" buildings in Britain (two more volumes followed in 1717 and 1725), the designs of
which had enormous influence in England. William Benson, a Whig member of Parliament, had already built
the first English Palladian house of the 18th century at Wilbury House, Wiltshire, in 1710. Campbell, the first
important practitioner of the new and more literal English Palladianism, built Houghton Hall in Norfolk (begun
1722) and Mereworth Castle in Kent (c. 1722). The wealthy amateur architect Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of
Burlington, and his protégé William Kent complete the triumvirate responsible for the second phase of the style.
Burlington's home, Chiswick House (begun 1725), was designed by him as a reinterpretation of Palladio's Villa
Rotonda. Holkham Hall, Norfolk (begun 1734), was built by Kent, who is also credited with having invented
the English landscape garden. The other notable English Palladian architects were Henry Flitcroft, Isaac Ware,
James Paine, Roger Morris, and John Wood the Elder.
In the 18th century a revival of Palladianism in England spread to Italy and thence throughout most of Europe
and the American colonies. Among the notable architects of this movement were Francesco Maria Preti in Italy,
Thomas Jefferson in America, and Georg Knobelsdorff in Germany. The style spread to Russia through the
work of the Scottish-born Charles Cameron and the Italian Giacomo Quarenghi, and it also reached Sweden and
Poland. By shortly after 1800 the style had succumbed everywhere to the ascendant movement of
Neoclassicism, in which classical forms and details were derived directly from antiquity instead of seen through
Palladio's Renaissance eyes.

Form: The design of this vase is overtly neoclassical because it has a classical
scene on its side and it is designed to look like an amphora. The figures on the
vase are dressed in wet drapery style and the organization of the vase looks
rather like the vase by Exekias below. The ornamentaion in the frets are also

History Painting
classical looking garland designs that can be found on vases from Ancient
Greece as well. The relief quality and color of the vase is not classical in
design and it is based on a popular type of jewelry called a cameo.
Iconography: The vessel depicts the apotheosis of Homer which is a kind of

crowning scene. Homer, often referred to as the "bard" or "poet" is holding
the harp that he would have used to accompany himself while reciting his epic
poetry of the Iliad or Odyssey. To his right is a winged victory figure called a
nike. To the right of the nike figure is probably one of the Greek gods who
Homer is about to play for once he mounts the stage.

Context: An interesting aspect of this vase is that it was produced in a factory

and demonstrates the 19th century desire for the antique coupled with a
forward looking gaze into the industrial era.
Also adapted to the Neoclassical taste was Wedgwood's jasperware,

introduced in 1775, a white, matte, unglazed stoneware resembling
biscuit porcelain and having ornamental potentialities similar to
basaltes. It could, moreover, be stained many colours, from pale
pastels (such as the famous pale blue) to stronger tints. Ornaments
in white, made separately in molds, were applied to the body of the
piece; the contrast of white on a coloured ground thus achieved was
used in imitation of antique cameos of hardstone and glass (in which
portions of the white top layer of glass are cut away, leaving the
Josiah Wedgwood and factory,
white figure in relief against the coloured underlayer). Employing
[The apotheosis of Homer], 1786.
outstanding artists of the day, such as the sculptor John Flaxman,
ceramic pottery vase. English.
Wedgwood copied innumerable antique designs, including the
Roman Portland Vase. Jasperware was imitated in other European
factories, notably at Sèvres.
Together with other Wedgwood wares, basaltes and jasperware are

still produced in both old and modern designs at the Wedgwood
factory, which moved to Barlaston, Staffordshire, in 1940.
Ajax and Achilles playing a game.

by Exekias, c540-530 B.C.E.
Attic black-figured amphora found

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in an Etruscan tomb in Vulci, Italy.

Archaic, black-figure
apo.the.o.sis n, pl -o.ses [LL, fr. Gk apotheosis, fr. apotheoun to deify, fr. apo- + theos god] (ca. 1580) 1:
elevation to divine status: deification 2: the perfect example: quintessence <this is the literary ~ of the shaggy
dog story --Thomas Sutcliffe> -- apo.the.o.size vt
cam.eo n, pl -eos [ME camew, fr. MF camau, kamaheu] (15c) 1 a: a gem carved in relief; esp: a small
piece of sculpture on a stone or shell cut in relief in one layer with another contrasting layer serving as
background b: a small medallion with a profiled head in relief 2: a carving or sculpture made in the
manner of a cameo
Women Artists: "You've Come A Long Way Baby"

Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun
b. April 16, 1755, Paris, France
d. March 30, 1842, Paris
in full MARIE-LOUISE-ÉLISABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN French painter, one of the
most successful of all women artists, particularly noted for her portraits of women.
Her father was Louis Vigée, a pastel portraitist and her first teacher. She studied
later with a number of well-known painters, among them J.-B. Greuze and Joseph
Vernet. In 1776 she married a picture dealer, J.-B.-P. Lebrun. Her great opportunity
came in 1779 when she was summoned to Versailles to paint a portrait of Queen
Marie-Antoinette. The two women became friends, and in subsequent years Vigée-
Lebrun painted at least 25 portraits of Marie-Antoinette in a great variety of poses
and costumes; a number of these may be seen in the museum at Versailles. Vigée-
Lebrun became a member of the Royal Academy in 1783.
On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, she left France and for 12 years
traveled abroad, to Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Moscow,
painting portraits and playing a leading role in society. In 1801 she returned to
Paris but, disliking Parisian social life under Napoleon, soon left for London,
where she painted portraits of the court and of Lord Byron. Later she went to
Switzerland (and painted a portrait of Mme de Staël) and then again (c. 1810) to
Paris, where she ceased painting.
Vigée-Lebrun was a woman of much wit and charm, and her memoirs, Souvenirs
de ma vie (1835-37; "Reminiscences of My Life"), provide a lively account of her
times as well as of her own work. She was one of the most technically fluent
Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun 1755- portraitists of her era, and her pictures are notable for the freshness, charm, and
1842 sensitivity of their presentation. During her career, according to her own account,
Self portrait -1790 she painted 877 pictures, including 622 portraits and about 200 landscapes.

History Painting
Artemisia Gentileschi Sofonisba Anguissola, Self Portrait of the Artist

Self Portrait as with Sisters and Governess. 1555
Allegory of Painting (The Chess Game)
or"La Pittura" 1630 oil on canvas, 27"x37" Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun 1755-1842
Italian Baroque Nardowe Museum, Poznan, Poland Self portrait -1790
Italian Renaissance French Baroque/Rococo Portraitist
Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola and Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun are self
portraits contain important clues as to how each of these artists was perceived and how they saw the
world. Compare and contrast these three paintings and come up with some conclusions as to how
each artist chose to portray themselves. What do these portrayals tell us about the role of the artist in
the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo periods?
Form: Both these portraits are done in a Rococo fashion. The brushwork is light almost
feathery and often the colors that are used tend to run towards pastel in terms of their hue.
The compositions are fairly stable and symmetrical although the tenebrism tends to create an
almost vignette type of effect.
In the self portrait the artist has chosen a neoclassical looking garment and the texture of the
background is undefined. In the portrait of Marie Antoinette, the queen is dressed in fairly
expensive clothing however the clothing is not terribly ornate or ostentatious.
Iconography: In both images, the artist has chosen to portray the female as a "good mother"
in the manner that Rousseau advocated. In Rousseau's point of view the role of individuals
was predetermined by their innate nature and that in order for an individual to fit into
society as a whole one must live in accordance with this nature. In the case of females, this
role was to have children and be good mothers. Both of these images subscribe to this point
Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun of view because these images were meant to be almost advertisements or a form of
with her daughter Julie - propaganda that would present a persona to the world.
1789 121 x 90 cm, The Louvre, Paris
Context: By 1789, accusations of impropriety and adultery had destroyed her public
reputation. This self portrait was an attempt to portray herself as a moral and upright
Frenchwoman. The same was true for Marie Antoinette. In this painting Marie Antoinette
is being depicted in modest clothing to defend against accusations of excessive spending and
she is also portrayed as the good mother who had also lost a son. On the right is her
brother, Louis, Le Dauphin gesturing toward the empty crib which indicates her loss.
The last portrait of thirty that Vigee Le Brun painted of the doomed queen. The

History Painting
picture shows Marie Therese Charlotte de France, Madame Royale, and her
brother, Louis, Le Dauphin. Louis died of natural causes early in the year that
the revolution began. The next younger child, also called Louis then became the
second Dauphin. After his father had been guillotined he became known as Louis
XVII . This Louis may have been murdered, or may have died of other causes
while imprisoned in the temple, but he may also have survuved after having been
exchanged for another sickly child. This painting still hangs at Versailles.
http://www.batguano.com/vigeemagallery.html#F
Go here for a great bio on Marie Antoinette

http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/6569/
Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

1755-1842
Marie Antoinette 1787 oil on canvas
9'x7'
Versailles
Form: This painting is Neoclassic in style because it incorporates
classical clothing and architecture and is organized in a classical
manner. The composition is also arranged in a similar manner to
Grueze's and Poussin's paintings. Like its Baroque French
are placed in the foreground and even though there is the creation
of deep space, the background is not as important as the figures.

are placed in the foreground and even though there is the creation
of deep space, the background is not as important as the figures.
Stokstad goes into the specific story of the Cornelia and the
Gracchii and so this next section will be dedicated to some other
Angelica Kauffman, aspects of the image.
Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures, 1785.
oil on canvas, 40"x50" The use of classical imagery, such as the togas and columns, and
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia a story that deals specifically with self sacrifice for the
Neoclassic, worked in England born in Switzerland generations of the future. The classical clothing and arches
referred to a tradition that was considered more dignified than the
light classical themes expressed in paintings like Watteau's.
The individuals being represented are also all physically beautiful

and this refers to the classical concept of kalos (Greek for
beautiful and moral.)

History Painting
In a twist on the classical vocabulary found in the Stele of

Hegeso, Kauffman corrects the iconography and updates it. The
prescribed role of woman is specifically expressed in this image
as that of a mother rather than a selfish woman who cares only
for jewels. This philosophy is very much in keeping with
Rousseau's ideas concerning that of the "happy mother" and in
her depiction of Cornelia she is almost changing the meaning of
the image found on the stele.
Context: According to WebGalleries,
This fine painting combines the 18th century attributes

of loving and attentive mother with Roman
Stele of Hegeso classicizing elements. Kauffmann presents us with the
c.410-400 BC, Marble, 5'9" narrative subject of "exemplum virtutis" or example of
Athens. Classic Greek virtue. Here a wealthy women sits showing off her
jewels. When she asks Cornelia to present her jewels,
Cornelia raises her hand to bring forth her sons,
Tiberus and Gaius, saying "These are my jewels". The
subjects are clothed in roman dress and set against a
roman background. An interesting comparison can be
made to Jacques Louis David's "Oath of the Horatii".
A child prodigy, Kauffmann produced her first

commissioned work before the age of 13. After the
death of her mother, she traveled through Austria and
Italy with her father, painter Joseph Johann
Kauffmann. She assisted him by painting in the
backgrounds of his works, but she also received her
own commissions and soon established a solid
reputation in her own right. She was influenced by
Correggio and the Carracci and copied their works in
the galleries as part of her artistic training. Later her
style reflected a neoclassical flavor influenced by
Ara Pacis Augustae 13-9 BCE Benjamin West, Sr. Joshua Reynolds and the
classicizing elements at Herculaneum.
In 1766 Kauffmann was invited to London. She

produced many portraits and decorative painting but
preferred history painting which was considered the
highest artistic genre and reserved only for her male
colleagues. Despite her inability to secure a formal
artistic education or study the male nude, Kauffmann
produced paintings which depicted classical
mythology, history and allegory. She received
commissions from the Royal courts in Naples, Russia
and Austria. While often dismissed by traditional art
history as a mere decorative or sentimental artist, she

History Painting
was successful enough to purchase her own home

from earned commissions and live a comfortably
stylish life. Another testament of Kauffmann's success
was that she was one of the founding members of the
British Royal Academy in 1768.
http://www.webgalleries.com/pm/colors/kauffman.html
Form: This painting is Neoclassic in style because it

incorporates classical clothing and architecture and is organized
in a classical manner. The composition is also arranged in a
similar manner to Grueze's and Poussin's paintings. Like its
Baroque French counterparts, the image is constructed so that
most of the figures are placed in the foreground and even
though there is the creation of deep space, the background is not
as important as the figures.

are placed in the foreground and even though there is the
creation of deep space, the background is not as important as the
figures.
Angelica Kauffman, Stokstad goes into the specific story of the Cornelia and the
Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures, 1785. Gracchii and so this next section will be dedicated to some other
oil on canvas, 40"x50" aspects of the image.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia
Neoclassic, worked in England born in Switzerland The use of classical imagery, such as the togas and columns, and
a story that deals specifically with self sacrifice for the
generations of the future. The classical clothing and arches
referred to a tradition that was considered more dignified than
the light classical themes expressed in paintings like Watteau's.
The individuals being represented are also all physically

beautiful and this refers to the classical concept of kalos (Greek
for beautiful and moral.)
In a twist on the classical vocabulary found in the Stele of

Hegeso Kauffman corrects the iconography and updates it. The
prescribed role of woman is specifically expressed in this image
as that of a mother rather than a selfish woman who cares only
for jewels. This philosophy is very much in keeping with
Rousseau's ideas concerning that of the "happy mother" and in
her depiction of Cornelia she is almost changing the meaning of
the image found on the stele.
Context: According to the Brittanica, Kauffman was,

Stele of Hegeso
b. Oct. 30, 1741, Chur, Switz.
c.410-400 BC, Marble, 5'9"
d. Nov. 5, 1807, Rome, Papal States [Italy]
Athens. Classic Greek
in full MARIA ANNA CATHARINA ANGELICA
KAUFFMANN painter in the early Neoclassical style

History Painting
who is best known for her decorative wall paintings

for residences designed by Robert Adam.
The daughter of Johann Joseph Kauffmann, a painter,
Angelica was a precocious child and a talented
musician and painter by her 12th year. Her early
paintings were influenced by the French Rococo
works of Henri Gravelot and François Boucher. In
1754 and 1763 she visited Italy, and while in Rome
she was influenced by the Neoclassicism of Anton
Raphael Mengs.
She was induced by Lady Wentworth, wife of the

English ambassador, to accompany her to London in
1766. She was well received and was particularly
favoured by the royal family. Sir Joshua Reynolds
became a close friend, and most of the numerous
Ara Pacis Augustae 13-9 BCE portraits and self-portraits done in her English period
were influenced by his style of portrait painting. Her
name is found among the signatories to the petition
for the establishment of the Royal Academy, and in
its first catalogue of 1769 she is listed as a member.
During the 1770s Kauffmann was one of a team of
artists who supplied the painted decorations for
Adam-designed interiors (e.g., the house at 20
Portman Square, London; now the Courtauld Institute
Galleries). Kauffmann retired to Rome in the early
1780s with her second husband, the Venetian painter
Antonio Zucchi.
Kauffmann's pastoral and mythological compositions

portray gods and goddesses in a delicate and graceful
if somewhat insipid fashion. Her paintings are
Rococo in tone and approach, though her figures are
given Neoclassical poses and draperies. Kauffmann's
portraits of female sitters are among her finest works.

Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica,

Inc.
vi.gnette n [F, fr. MF vignete, fr. dim. of vigne vine--more at vine] (1751) 2 a: a picture (as an engraving or photograph)
that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper b: the pictorial part of a postage stamp design as distinguished from the
frame and lettering 3 a: a short descriptive literary sketch b: a brief incident or scene (as in a play or movie) -- vi.gnett.ist n
²vignette vt vi.gnett.ed ; vi.gnett.ing (1853) 1: to finish (as a photograph) in the manner of a vignette 2: to describe briefly
-- vi.gnett.er n
The French Academic Tradition and the Style of Orientalism

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres-
Apotheosis of Homer, 1827
working in academic tradition.

Official art school , neoclassicism style.

History Painting
Patriotism and social responsibility.

Important figures surround them.
Neoclassicism, which was first established as the "official" or "state"

style by Jacques Louis David during the French Revolution, survived
during the first part of the 1800's but became less and less powerful or
serious: in some ways it lost quite a lot of its ideological zeal and
became a syrupy overly dramatic style.
This painting by Ingres is not a call to arms as David's Oath of the

Horatii, but more a kind of class photo of important French
mathemeticians, painters, and authors. This work might be considered
by some to be a cheap knock off (or correction) of Raphael's School of
Athens.
The smooth photographic quality taken from

neoclassicism was the standard for any pupil of
the French Academic tradition such as Ingres.
Nevertheless, later academic painting, while
preserving the formal schema, changed the
subject of both the paintings and architectural.
Now what was being represented was an
"Imaginary Orient." Please see the essay by
INGRES, Jean Auguste Dominique Odalisque with a
Linda Nochlin of the same title.
Slave
Oil on canvas mounted on panel 29 3/8 x 39 3/8 in. (146.7
x 100.3 cm)
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts
at right
John Nash: Brighton, Royal Pavillion , as remodelled,
1815-23.
INGRES, Jean Auguste Dominique Large Odalisque 1814

2'x5' Titian The Venus of Urbino (1538)
approx. 48" x 66"

History Painting
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Important terms:
reappropriation- take an "other's" property, art, or ideas and make them appropriate to another culture's tastes.
male gaze- a male view of the world in which the female form is often appropriated in order to reflect the dominant male culture.

Jean-Léon Gérome Jean-Léon Gérome

The Harem Pool c1870 Moorish Bath Legion 1880

Pygmalian Slave Auction

History Painting
Jean-Léon Gérome
Snake Charmer
Jean-Léon Gérome
Slave Market
The following article is a hard read, but, try to read it anyway, it contains some really important ideas and these ideas will
also be include as test questions.

Linda Nochlin. The Politics of Vision (New York, 1989).
What is more European, after all, than to be corrupted by the Orient? -- Richard Howard
What is the rationale behind the recent spate of revisionist or expansionist exhibitions of nineteenth-
century art--The Age of Revolution, The Second Empire, TheRealist Tradition, Northern Light,
Women Artists, various shows of academic art, etc.? Is it simply to rediscover overlooked or
forgotten works of art? Is it to reevaluate the material, to create a new and less value-laden canon?
These are the kinds of questions that were raised -- more or less unintentionally, one suspects--by the
1982 exhibition and catalogue Orientalism: The Near East in French Painting, 1800-1880.1
Above all, the Orientalist exhibition makes us wonder whether there are other questions besides the
"normal" art-historical ones that ought to be asked of this material. The organizer of the show,
Donald Rosenthal, suggests that there are indeed important issues at stake here, but he deliberately
stops short of confronting them. "The unifying characteristic of nineteenth-century Orientalism was
its attempt at documentary realism," he declares in the introduction to the catalogue, and then goes on
to maintain, quite correctly, that "the flowering of Orientalist painting . . . was closely associated
with the apogee of European colonialist expansion in the nineteenth century." Yet, having referred to
Edward Said's critical definition of Orientalism in Western literature "as a mode for defining the
presumed cultural inferiority of the Islamic Orient . . . part of the vast control mechanism of
colonialism, designed to justify and perpeturate European dominance," Rosenthal immediately rejects
this analysis in his own study. "French Orientalist painting will be discussed in terms of its aesthetic
quality and historical interest, and no attemptwill be made at a re-evaluation of its political uses."2
In other words, art-historical business as usual. Having raised the two crucial issues of policical
domination and ideology, Rosenthal drops them like hot potatoes. Yet surely most of the pictures in
the exhibition -- indeed the key notion of Orientalism itself -- cannot be confronted without a critical
analysis of the particular power structure in which these works came into being. For instance, the
degree of realism (or lack of it) in individual Orientalist images can hardly be discussed without some
attempt to clarify whose reality we are talking about.


History Painting
Jean-Léon Gérome Snake Charmer

What are we to make, for example, of
Jean-Leon Gérôme's Snake
Charmer[1], painted in the late 1860s
(now in the Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Mass.)? Surely it may
most profitably be considered as a
visual document of nineteenth-century
colonialist ideology, an iconic
distillation of the Westerner's notion
of the Oriental couched in the
language of a would-be transparent
naturalism. (No wonder Said used it
as the dust jacket for his critical study
of the phenomenon of Orientalism!)3
The title, however, doesn't really tell
the complete story; the painting should really be called The Snake Charmer and His Audience, for
we are clearly meant to look at both perofrmer and audience as parts of the same spectacle. We are
not, as we so often are in Impressionist works of this period -- works like Manet's or Degas's Cafe
Concerts, for example, which are set in Paris--invited to identify with the audience. The watchers
huddled against the ferociously detailed tiled wall in the background of Gérôme's painting are as
resolutely alienated from us as is the act they watch with such childish, trancelike concentration.
Our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque
delectation.
Clearly, these black and brown folk are mystified--but then again, so are we. Indeed, the defining
mood of the painting is mystery, and it is created by a specific pictorial device. We are permitted
only a beguiling rear view of the boy holding the snake. A full frontal view, which would reveal
unambiguously both his sex and the fullness of his dangerous performance, is denied us. And the
insistent, sexually charged mystery at the center of this painting signifies a more general one: the
mystery of the East itself, a standard topos of Orientalist ideology.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the insistent richness of the visual diet Gerome offers--the manifest
attractions of the young protagonist's rosy buttocks and muscular thighs; the wrinkles of the venerable
snake charmer to his right; the varied delights offered by the picturesque crowd and the alluringly
elaborate surfaces of the authentic Turkish tiles, carpet, and basket which serve as decor--we are
haunted by certain absensces in the painting. These absences are so conspicuous that, once we
become aware of them, they begin to function as presences, in fact, as signs of a certain kind of
conceptual deprivation.
One absence is the absence of history. Time stands still in Gerome's painting, as it does in all
imagery qualified as "picturesque," including nineteenth-century representations of peasants in France
itself. Gerome suggests that this Oriental world is a world without change, a world of timeless,
atemporal customs and rituals, untouched by the historical processes that were "afflicting" or
"improving" but, at any rate, drastically altering Western societies at the time. Yet these were in fact
years of violent and conspicuous change in the Near East as well, changes affected primarily by
Western power--technological, military, economic, cultural--and specifically by the very French
presence Gerome so scrupulously avoids.
In the very time when and place where Gerome's picture was painted, the late 1860s in
Constantinople, the government of Napoleon III was taking an active interest (as were the
governments of Russia, Austria, and Great Britain) in the efforts of the Ottoman government to
reform and modernized itself. "It was necessary to change Muslim habits, to destroy the age-old
fanaticism which was an obstacle to the fusion of races and to create a modern secular state,"
declared French historian Edouard Driault in La Question d' Orient (1898). "It was necessary to
transform . . . the education of both conquerors and subjects, and inculcate in both the unknown
spirit of tolerance--a noble task, worthy of great renown of France," he continued.
In 1863 the Ottoman Bank was founded, with the controlling interest in French hands. In 1867 the

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French government invited the sultan to visit Paris and recommended to him a system of secular
public education and the undertaking of great public works and communication systems. In 1868
under the joint direction of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Ambassador, the
Lycee of Galata-Serai was opened, a great secondary school open to Ottoman subjects of every reace
and creed, where Europeans taught more than six hundred boys the French language--"a symbol,"
Driault maintained, "of the action of France, exerting herself to instruct the peoples of the Orient in
her own language the elements of Western civilization." In the same year, a company consisting
mainly of French capitalists received a concession for railways to connect present-day Istanbul and
Salonica with the existing railways on the Middle Danube.4
The absence of a sense of history, of temporal change, in Gerome's painting is intimately related to
another striking absence in the work: that of the telltale presence of Westerners. There are never any
Europeans in "picturesque" views of the Orient like these. Indeed, it might be said that one of the
defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is
always and absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence.
Jean-Léon Gérome Snake Charmer
The white man, the Westerner, is of course always implicitly present in Orientalist paintings like
Snake Charmer; his is necessarily the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental world into
being, the gaze for which it is ultimately intended. And this leads us to still another absence. Part of
the strategy of an Orientalist painter like Gerome is to make his viewers forget that there was any
"bringing into being" at all, to convince them that works like these were simply "reflections,"
scientific in their exactitude, of a preexisting Oriental reality.
In his own time Gerome was held to be dauntingly objective and scientific and was compared in this
respect with Realist novelists. As an American critic declared in 1873:

Gerome has the reputation of being one of the most studious and
conscientiously accurate painters of our time. In a certain sense he
may even be called"learned." He believes as firmly as Charles Reade
does in the obligation on the part of the artist to be true even in
minute matters to the period and locality of a workpretending to
historical character. Balzac is said to have made a journey of several
hundreds of miles in order to verify certain apparently insignificant
factsconcerning a locality described in one of his novels. Of
Gerome, it is alleged that he never paints a picture without the most
patient and exhaustive preliminary studiesof every matter connected
with his subject. In the accesories of costume, furniture, etc. it is
invariably his aim to attain the utmost possible exactness. It is this
trait inwhich some declare an excess, that has caused him to spoken
of as a "scientific picture maker."5

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The strategies of "realist" (or perhaps "pseudo-realist," "authenticist," or "naturalist" would be better
terms) mystification go hand in hand with those of Orientalist mystification. Hence, another absence
which constitutes a significant presence in the painting: the absence--that is to say, the apparent
absence--of art. As Leo Bersani has pointed out in his article on realism and the fear of desire, " The
'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really a
question of art."6 No other artist has so inexorably eradicated all traces of the picture plane as
Gerome, denying us any clue to the art work as a literal flat surface.
Eugëne Delacroix, Street in Meknes, 1832 Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 25 1/4"

http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/sDelacroix.html
If we compare a painting like Gerome's Streets in Algier with its prototype, Delacroix's Street in
Meknes, we immediatley see that Gerome, in the interest of "artlessness," of innocent, Orientalist
transparency, goes much farther than Delacroix in supplying picturesque data to the Western
observer, and in veiling the fact that the image consists of paint on canvas. A "naturalist" or
"authenticist" artist like Gerome tries to make us forget that his art is really art, both by concealing
the evidence of his touch, and, at the same time, by insisting on a plethora of authenticating details,
especially on what might be called unnecessary ones. These include not merely the "carefully
executed Turkish tile patterns" that Richard Ettinghausen pointed out in his 1972 Gerome catalogue;
not merely the artist's renditions of Arabic inscriptions which, Ettinghausen maintains, "can be easily
read"; 7 but even the "later repair" on the tile work, which, functioning at first sight rather like the
barometer on the piano in Flaubert's description of Madame Aubain's drawing room in "Un coeur
simple," creates what Roland Barthes has called "the reality effect" (l'effet de reel).8
Such details, supposedly there to denote the real directly, are actually there simply to signify its
presence in the work as a whole. As Barthes points out, the major function of gratuitous, accurate
details like these is to announce "we are the real." They are signifiers of the category of the real,
there to give credibility to the "realness" of the work as a whole, to authenticate the total visual field
as a simple, artless reflection--in this case, of a supposed Oriental reality.
Yet if we look again, we can see that the objectively described repairs in the tiles have still another
function: a moralizing one which assumes meaning only within the apparently objectivized context of
the scene as a whole. Neglected, ill-repaired architecture functions, in nineteenth-century Orientalist
art, as a standard topos for commenting on the corruption of contemporary Islamic society. Kenneth
Bendiner has collected striking examples of this device, in both the paintings and the writings of
nineteenth-century artists. For instance, the British painter David Roberts, documenting his Holy
Land and Egypt and Nubia, wrote from Cairo in 1838 about "splendid cities, once teeming with a

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busy population and embellished with . . . edifices, the wonder of the world, now deserted and
lonely, or reduced by mismanagement and the barbarism of the Modern creed, to a state as savage as
the wild animals by which they are surrounded." At another time, explaining the existence of certain
ruins in its environs, he declared that Cairo "contains, I think, more idle people than any town its size
in the world."9
The vice of idleness was frequently commented upon by Western travelers to Islamic countries in the
nineteenth century, and in relation to it, we can observe still another striking absence in the annals of
Orientalist art: the absence of scenes of work and industry, despite the fact that some Western
observers commented on the Egyptian fellahin's long hours of back-breaking labor, and on the
ceaseless work of Egyptian women engaged in the fields and in domestic labor.10
When Gerome's painting is seen within this context of supposed Near Eastern idleness and neglect,
what might at first appear to be objectively described architectural fact turns out to be architecture
moralisee. The lesson is subtle, perhaps, but still eminently available, given a context of similar
topoi: these people--lazy, slothful, and childlike, if colorful--have let their own cultural treasures sink
into decay. There is a clear allusion here, clothed in the language of objective reportage, not merely
to the mystery of the East, but to the barbaric insouciance of Moslem peoples, who quite literally
charm snakes while Constantinople falls into ruins.
What I am trying to get at, of course, is the obvious truth that in this painting Gerome is not
reflecting a ready-made reality but, like all artists, is producing meanings. If I seem to dwell on the
issue of authenticating details, it is because not only Gerome's contemporaries, but some present-day
revisionist revivers of Gerome, and of Orientalist painting in general, insist so strongly on the
objectivity and credibility of Gerome's view of the Near East, using this sort of detail as evidence for
their claims.
The fact that Gerome and other Orientalist "realists" used photographic documentation is often
brought in to support claims to the objectivity of the works in question. Indeed, Gerome seems to
have relied on photographs for some of his architectural detail, and critics in both his own time and
in ours compare his work to photography. Photography itself is hardly immune to the blandishments
of Orientalism, and even a presumably innocent or neutral view of architecture can be ideologized.

A commercially produced tourist version of the Bab

Mansour at Meknes [2] "orientalizes" the subject,
producing the image the tourist would like to remember--
picturesque, relatively timeless, the gate itself
photographed at a dramatic angle, reemphasized by
dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, and rendered more
picturesque by the floating cloud which silhouettes it to the
left. Plastic variation, architectural values, and colorful
surface are all played up in the professional shot; at the
same time, all evidence of contemporaneity and
contradiction--that Meknes is a modern as well as a
traditional city, filled with tourists and business people
from East and West; that cars and buses are used as well as
2 donkeys and horses--is suppressed by the "official"
photograph. A photo by an amateur [3], however,
foregrounding cars and buses and the swell of empty
macadam, subordinates the picturesque and renders the
gate itself flat and incoherent. In this snapshot, Orientalism
is reduced to the presence of a few weary crenellations to
the right. But this image is simply the bad example in the
"how-to-take-good-photographs-on-your-trip" book which
teaches the novice how to approximate her experience to
the official version of visual reality.

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But of course, there is Orientalism and Orientalism. If for painters like Gerome the Near East existed
as an actual place to be mystified with effects of realness, for other artists it existes as a project of the
imagination, a fantasy space or screen onto which strong desires--erotic, sadistic, or both--could be
projected with impunity. The Near Eastern setting of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus[4] (created,
it is important to emphasize, before the artist's own trip to North Africa in 1832) does not function as
a field of ethnographic exploration. It is, rather, a stage for the playing out, from a suitable distance,
of forbidden passions--the artist's own fantasies (need it be said?) as well as those of the doomed
Near Eastern monarch.
Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827
Delacroix evidently did his Orientalist homework for the painting, probably reading descriptions in
Herodotus and Diodorus Sicilis of ancient Oriental debauchery, and dipping into passages in Quintus
Curtius on Babylonian orgies, examining an Etruscan fresco or two, perhaps even looking at some
Indian miniatures.11 But it is obvious that a thirst for accuracy was hardly a major impulse behind
the creation of this work. Nor, in this version of Orientalism--Romantic, if you will, and created forty
years before Gerome's--is it Western man's power over the Near East that is at issue, but rather, I
believe, contemporary Frenchmen's power over women, a power controlled and mediated by the
ideology of the erotic in Delacroix's time.
"In dreams begin responsibilities," a poet once said. Perhaps. Certainly, we are on surer footing
asserting that in power begin dreams--dreams of still greater power (in this case, fantasies of men's
limitless power to enjoy the bodies of women by destroying them). It would be absurd to reduce
Delacroix's complex painting to a mere pictorial projection of the artist's sadistic fantasies under the
guise of Orientalism. Yet it is not totally irrelevant to keep in mind that the vivid turbulence of
Delacroix's narrative--the story of the ancient Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus, who, upon hearing of his
incipient defeat, had all his precious possessions, including his women, destroyed, and then went up
in flames with them--is subtended by the more mundane assumption, shared by men of Delacroix's
class and time, that they were naturally "entitled" to the bodies of certain women. If the men were
artists like Delacroix, it was assumed that they had more or less unlimited access to the bodies of the
women who worked for them as models. In other words, Delacroix's private fantasy did not exist in a
vacuum, but in a particular social context which granted permission for as well as established the
boundaries of certain kinds of behavior.

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Within this context, the Orientalizing setting of Delacroix's painting both signifies an extreme state of
psychic intensity and formalizes that state through various conventions or representation. But is
allows only so much and no more. It is difficult, for example, to imagine a Death of Cleopatra, with
voluptuous nude male slaves being put to death by women servants, painted by a woman artist of this
period.12

Jean André Rixens, The Death of Cleopatra (1874)
At the same time he emphasized the sexually provocative aspects of his theme, Delacroix attempted
to defuse his overt pictorial expression of men's total domination of women in a variety of ways. He
distanced his fears and desires by letting them explode in an Orientalized setting and by filtering
them through a Byronic prototype. But at the same time, the motif of a group of naked, beautiful
women put to the sword is not taken from ancient versions of the Sardanapalus story, although the
lasciviousness of Oriental potentates was a staple of many such accounts.13 Nor was it Byron's
invention but, significantly, Delacroix's own.14
The artist participates in the carnage by placing at the blood-red heart of the picture a surrogate self--
the recumbent Sardanapalus on his bed. But Sardanapalus holds himself aloof, in the pose of the
philosopher, from the sensual tumult which surrounds him; he is an artist-destroyer who is ultimately
to be consumed in the flames of his own creation-destruction. His dandyish coolness in the face of
sensual provocation of the hightest order--what might be called his "Orientalized" remoteness and
conventialized pose--may indeed have helped Delacroix justify to himself his own erotic extremism,
the fulfillment of sadistic impulse in the painting. It did not satisfy the contemporary public. Despite
the brilliant feat of artistic semisublimation pulled off here, both public and critics were for the most
part appalled by the work when it first appeared in the Salon of 1828.15
The aloofness of the hero of the piece, its Orientalizing strategies of distancing, its references to the
outre mores of long-dead Near Eastern oligarchs fooled no one, really. Although criticism was
generally directed more against the painting's supposed formal failings, it is obvious that by depicting
this type of subject with such obvious sensual relish, such erotic panache and openness, Delacroix
had come too close to an overt statement of the most explosive, hence the most carefully repressed,
corollary of the ideology of male domination: the connection between sexual possession and murder
as an assertion of absolute enjoyment.

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The fantasy of absolute possession of women's naked bodies--a fantasy which for men of Delacroix's
time was partly based on specific practice in the institution of prostitution or, more specifically, in
the case of artists, on the availability of studio models for sexual as well as professional services--also
lies at the heart of such typical subjects of Orientalist imagery as Gerome's various Slave Markets.
These are ostensibly realistic representations of the authentic customs of picturesque Near Easterners.
Indeed, Maxime Du Camp, a fellow traveler in the picturesque byways of the Middle East, remarked
of Gerome's painting (or of one like it): "Gerome's Slave Market is a fact literally reproduced. . . .
People go [to the slave market] to purchase a slave as they do here to the market . . . to buy a
turbot."16


Slave Market Slave Auction
Obviously, the motivations behind the creation of such Orientalist erotica, and the appetite for it, had
little to do with pure ethnography. Artists like Gerome could dish up the same theme--the display of
naked, powerless women to clothed, powerful men--in a variety of guises: that of the antique slave
market, for instance, or in the subject of Phryne before the Tribunal. What lies behind the production
of such popular stimuli to simultaneous lip-licking and tongue-clicking is, of course, the satisfaction
that the delicious humiliation of lovely slave girls gives to the moralistic voyeur. They are depicted as
innocents, trapped against their will in some far-off place, their nakedness more to be pitied than
censured; they also display an ingratiating tendency to cover their eyes rather than their seductive
bodies.
Why was it that Gerome's Orientalist assertions of masculine power over feminine nakedness were
popular, and appeared frequently in the Salons of the mid-nineteenth century, whereas earlier
Delacroix's Sardanapalus had been greeted with outrage? Some of the answers have to do with the
different historical contexts in which these works originated, but some have to do with the character
of the paintings themselves. Gerome's fantasia on the theme of sexual politics (the Clark collection
Slave Market, for example) has been more successfully ideologized than Delacroix's, and this
ideologizing is achieved precisely through the work's formal stucture. Gerome's version was more
acceptable because he substituted a chilly and remote pseudoscientific naturalism--small, self-effacing
brushstrokes, and "rational" and convincing spatial effects--in other words, an apparently

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dispassionate empiricism--for Delacroix's tempestuous self-involvement, his impassioned brushwork,

subjectively outpouring perspective, and inventive, sensually self-revelatory dancelike poses.
Gerome's style justified his subject--perhaps not to us, who are cannier readers--but certainly to most
of the spectators of his time, by guaranteeing through sober "objectivity" the unassailable Otherness
of the characters in his narrative. He is saying in effect: "Don't think that I or any other right-
thinking Frenchman would ever be involved in this sort of thing. I am merely taking careful note of
the fact that less enlightened races indulge in the trade in naked women--but isn't it arousing!"
Like many other art works of his time, Gerome's Orientalist painting managed to body forth two
ideological assumptions about power: one about men's power over women; the other about white
men's superiority to, hence justifiable control over, inferior, darker races, precisely those who indulge
in this sort of regrettably lascivious commerce. Or we might say that something even more complex
is involved in Gerome's strategies vis-a-vis the homme moyen sensuel: the (male) viewer was invited
sexually to identify with, yet morally to distance himself from, his Oriental counterparts depicted
within the objectively inviting yet racially distancing space of the painting.

Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera of 1873-74

Jean-Léon Gérome
Slave Market
Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera of 1873-74 may, for the purposes of our analysis, be read as a
combative response to and subversion of the ideological assumptions controlling Gerome's Slave
Market [5]. Like Gerome's painting, Manet's work (to borrow a phrase from the German critic Meier-
Graefe, who greatly admired it) represents a Fleischbörse--a flesh market. Unlike Gerome, however,
Manet represented the marketing of attractive women not in a suitably distanced Near Eastern locale,
but behind the galleries of the opera house on the rue Le Peletier. The buyers of female flesh are not
Oriental louts but civilized and recognizable Parisians, debonair men about town, Manet's friends,
and, in some cases, fellow artists, whom he had asked to pose for him. And the flesh in question is
not represented au naturel, but sauced up in the most charming and provocative fancy-dress
costumes. Unlike Gerome's painting, which had been accepted for the Salon of 1867, Manet's was
rejected for that of 1874.
I should like to suggest that the reason for Manet's rejection was not merely the daring close-to-
homeness of his representation of the availability of feminine sexuality and male consumption of it.
Nor was it, as his friend and defender at the time Stephane Mallarme suggested, its formal daring--its
immediacy, its dash, its deliberate yet casual-looking cut-off view of the spectacle. It was rather the
way these two kinds of subversive impulse are made to intersect. Manet's rejection of the myth of

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stylistic transparency in a painting depicting erotic commerical transaction is precisely what calls into
question the underlying assumptions governing Gerome's Orientalist version of the same theme.
By interrupting the unimpeded flow of the story line with the margins of his image, Manet frankly
reveals the assumptions on which such narratives are premised. The cut-off legs and torso on the
balcony are a witty, ironic reference to the actual motivations controlling such gatherings of upper-
middle class men and charming women of the theater: pleasure for the former; profit for the latter.
The little legs and torso constitute a witty synecdoche, a substitution of part for whole, a trope par
excellence of critical realism--a trope indicating the sexual availability of delectable female bodies for
willing buyers.
By means of a similar synecdoche--the half-Polichinelle to the left, cut off by the left-hand margin of
the canvas--Manet suggests the presence of the artist-entrepreneur half inside, half outside the world
of the painting; at the same time, he further asserts the status of the image as a work of art. By means
of a brilliant, deconstructive-realist strategy, Manet has at once made us aware of the artifice of art,
as opposed to Gerome's solemn, pseudoscientific denial of it with his illusionistic naturalism. At the
same time, through the apparently accidentally amputed female legs and torso, Manet foregrounds the
nature of the actual transaction taking place in the worldy scene he has chosen to represent.17

Jean-Léon Gérome, Moorish Bath, 1880

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The Bather
of Valpinçon. 1808. Oil on canvas. Louvre,
Paris, France
Despite his insistence on accuracy as the guarantee of veracity, Gerome himself was not beyond the
blandishments of the artful. In his bath scenes like the Moorish Bath [6], the presence of a Cairene
sunken fountain with two-color marble inlay in the foreground and a beautiful silver-inlaid brass
basin with its Mamluk coat-of-arms hald by a Sudanese servant girl (as well as the inevitable Turkish
tiles) indicate a will to ethnographic exactitude. Still, Gerome makes sure we see his nude subject as
art as well as mere reportage. This he does by means of tactful reference to what might be called the
"original Oriental backview"--Ingres's Valpinçon Bather. The abstract linearism of Ingres is qualified
and softened in Gerome's painting, but is clearly meant to signify the presence of tradition: Gerome
has decked out the products of his flesh market with the signs of the artistic. His later work often

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reveals a kind of anxiety or a division--what might be called the Kitsch dilemma--between efforts to
maintain the fiction of pure transparency--a so-called photographic realism--and the need to prove
that he is more than a mere transcriber, that his work is artistic.
This anxiety is hieghtened when the subject in question is a female nude--that is to say, when an
object of desire is concerned. Gerome's anxiety about proving his "artistic-ness" at the same time that
he panders to the taste for naturalistic bodies and banal fantasy is revealed most obviously in his
various paintings of artists and models, whether the artist in question is Pygmalion or simply Gerome
himself in his studio. In the latter case, he depicts himself surrounded by testimonials to his
professional achievement and his responsiveness to the classical tradition. For Gerome, the classical
would seem to be a product that he confects matter-of-factly in his studio. The sign of the artistic--
sometimes absorbed into, sometimes in obvious conflict with the fabric of the painting as a whole--is
a hallmark of quality in the work of art, increasing its value as a product on the art market.
Manet, Edouard. Olympia 1863 Oil on canvas

51 3/8 x 74 3/4 in. (130.5 x 190 cm) Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Like the artistic back, the presence of the black servant in Gerome's Orientalist bath scenes serves
what might be called connotative as well as strictly ethnographic purposes. We are of course familiar
with the notion that the black servant somehow enhances the pearly beauty of her white mistress--a
strategy employed from the time of Ingres, in an Orientalist mood, to that of Manet's Olympia, in
which the black figure of the maid seems to be an indicator of sexual naughtiness. But in the purest
distillations of the Orientalist bath scene--like Gerome's, or Debat-Ponsan's The Massage of 1883--the
very passivity of the lovely white figure as opposed to the vigorous activity of the worn, unfeminine
ugly black one, suggests that the passive nude beauty is explicitly being prepared for service in the
sultan's bed. This sense of erotic availability is spiced with still more forbidden overtones, for the
conjunction of black and white, or dark and light females bodies, whether naked or in the guise of
mistress and maidservant, has traditionally signified lesbianism.18

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Debat-Ponsan's The Massage of 1883
Like other artists of his time, Gerome sought out instances of the picturesque in the religious
practices of the natives of the Middle East. This sort of religious ethnographic imagery attempted to
create a sleek, harmonious vision of the Islamic world as traditional, pious, and unthreatening, in
direct contradiction to the grim realities of history. On the one hand, the cultural and political
violence visited on the Islamic peoples of France's own colony, Algeria, by specific laws enacted by
the French legislature in the sixties had divided up the communally held lands of the native tribes. On
the other hand, violence was visited against native religious practices by the French Society of
Missionaries in Algeria, when, profiting from widespread famine at the end of 1867, they offered the
unfortunate orphans who fell under their power food at the price of conversion. Finally, Algerian
tribes reacted with religion-inspired violence to French oppression and colonization; in the Holy War
of 1871, 100,000 tribesmen under Bachaga Mohammed Mokrani revolted under the banner of Islamic
idealism.19
It is probably no coincidence that Gerome avoided French North Africa as the setting for his mosque
paintings, choosing Cairo instead for these religious tableaux vivants, in which the worshippers seem
as rigid, as rooted in the intricate grounding of tradition and as immobilized as the scrupulously
recorded architecture which surrounds them and echoes their forms. Indeed, taxidermy rather than
ethnography seems to be the informing discipline here: these images have something of the sense of
specimens stuffed and mounted within settings of irreproachable accuracy in the natural-history
museum, these paintings include everything within their boundaries--everything, that is, except a
sense of life, the vivifying breath of shared human experience.
What are the functions of the picturesque, of which this sort of religious ethnography is one
manifestation? Obviously, in Orientalist imagery of subject peoples' religious practices one of its
functions is to mask conflict with the appearance of tranquility. The picturesque is pursued
throughout the nineteenth century like a form of peculiarly elusive wildlife, requiring increasingly
skillful tracking as the delicate prey--an endangered species--disappears farther and farther into the
hinterlands, in France as in the Near East. The same society that was engaged in wiping out local
customs and traditional practices was also avid to preserve them in the form of records--verbal, in the
way of travel accounts or archival materials; musical, in the recording of folk songs; linguistic, in the
study of dialects or folk tales; or visual, as here.
Yet surely, the very notion of the picturesque in its nineteenth-century manifestations is premised on
the fact of destruction. Only on the brink of destruction, in the course of incipient modification and
cultural dilution, are customs, costumes, and religious rituals of the dominated finally seen as

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picturesque. Reinterpreted as the precious remnants of disappearing ways of life, worth huting down
and preserving, they are finally transformed into subjects of aesthetic delectation in an imagery in
which exotic human beings are integrated with a presumably defining and overtly limiting decor.
Another important function, then, of the picturesque--Orientalizing in this case--is to certify that the
people encapsulated by it, defined by its presence, are irredeemably different from, more backward
than, and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product. They are
irrevocably "Other."
Orientalism, then, can be viewed under the aegis of the more general category of the picturesque, a
category that can encompass a wide variety of visual objects and ideological strategies, extending
from regional genre painting down to the photographs of smiling or dancing natives in the National
Geographic. It is no accident that Gerome's North African Islamic procession and Jules Breton's or
Dagnon-Bouveret's depictions of Breton Catholic ceremonies have a family resemblance. Both
represent backward, oppressed peoples sticking to traditional practices. These works are united also
by shared stylistic strategies: the "reality effect" and the strict avoidance of any hint of conceptual
identification or shared viewpoint with their subjects, which could, for example, have been suggested
by alternative conventions of representation.

Gustave Courbet, TheBurial at Ornans, 1849 oil on canvas, 51x58"
How does a work avoid the picturesque? There are, after all, alternatives. Neither Courbet's Burial at
Ornans nor Gauguin's Day of the God falls within the category of the picturesque. Courbet, for
whom the "natives" included his own friends and family, borrowed some of the conventions of
popular imagery--conventions signifying the artist's solidarity, indeed identity, with the country
people represented. At the same time he enlarged the format and insisted upon the--decidedly non-
picturesque--insertion of contemporary costume. Gauguin, for his part, denied the picturesque by
rejecting what he conceived of as the lies of illusionism and the ideology of progress--in resorting to
flatness, decorative simplification, and references to "primitive" art--that is to say, by rejecting the
signifiers of Western rationalism, progress, and objectivity in toto.

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Gauguin, Paul. The Day of the God. 1894. Oil on canvas. 27 3/8 x 35 5/8 in. Chicago: Art Institute.
Delacroix's relation to the picturesque is central to an understanding of the nature and limits of
nineteenth-century Orientalism. He admired Morocco when he saw it on his trip accompanying the
Comte de Mornay's diplomatic mission in 1832, comparing Moroccans to classical senators and
feverishly recording every aspect of Moroccan life in his notebooks. Nevertheless, he knew where to
draw the line between Them and Us. For him, Morocco was inevitably picturesque. He clearly
distinguished between its visual beauty--including the dignified, unselfconconscious deportment of
the natives--which he treasured, and its moral quality, which he deplored. "This is a place," he wrote
to his old friend Villot from Tangiers, "completely for painters. Economists and Saint-Simonians
would have a lot to criticize here with respect to the rights of man before the law, but the beautiful
abounds here."20 And he distinguished with equal clarity between the picturesqueness of North
African people and settings in general, and the weaknesses of the Orientals' own vision of themselves
in their art. Speaking of some Persian portraits and drawings, he remarks in the pages of his Journal
that the sight of them "made me repeat what Voltaire said somewhere--that there are vast countries
where taste has never penetrated. . . . There are in these drawings neither perspective nor any feeling
for what is truly painting . . . the figures are immobile, the poses stiff, etc."21
The violence visited upon North African people by the West was rarely depicted by Orientalist
painting; it was, in fact, denied in the painting of religious ethnography. But the violence of Orientals
to each other was a favored theme. Strange and exotic punishments, hideous tortures, whether actual
or potential, the marvelously scary aftermath of barbaric executions--these are a stock-in-trade of
Orientalist art. Even a relatively benign subject like that represented in Leon Bonnat's Black Barber
of Suez can suggest potential threat through the exaggerated contrast between muscularity and
languor, the subtle overtones of Samson and Delilah.
In Henri Regnault's Execution Without Judgment Under the Caliphs of

Granada of 1870, we are expected to experience a frisson by identifying
with the victim, or rather, with his detached head, which (when the painting
is correctly hung) comes right above the spectator's eye level. We are meant
to look up at the gigantic, colorful, and dispassionate executioner as--
shudder!--the victim must have only moments earlier. It is hard to imagine
anyone painting an Execution by Guillotine Under Napoleon III for the same
Salon. Although guillotining was still a public spectacle under the Second
Empire and through the beginning of the Third Republic, it would not have
been considered an appropriate artistic subject. For guillotining was
considered rational punishment, not irrational spectacle--part of the domain
of law and reason of the progressive West.
One function of Orientalist paintings like these is, of course, to suggest that
their law is irrational violence; our violence, by contrast, is law. Yet it was
precisely the imposition of "rational" Western law by Napoleon III's
government on the customary practices of North Africa that tribesmen

History Painting
experienced most deeply as fatal violence. Nor was this violence

unintended. The important laws pertaining to landed property in Algeria,
imposed on the native population by the French from the 1850s through the mid-1870s--the
Cantonment of 1856, the Senatus Consulte of 1863 and the Warnier Law of ten years later--were
conceived as measures which would lead to the destruction of the fundamental structures of the
economy and of the traditional society--measures of legally approved violence, in other words. And
they were experienced as such by Algerian natives, who felt their speedy, devastating effects as a
savage lopping off of the head of traditional tribal existence, and execution without judgment.
A French army officer, Captain Vaissiere, in his study of the Ouled Rechaïch, published in Algiers in
1863, relates that when this group found out that the law of the Senatus Consulte was going to be
applied to their tribe, they were thrown into consternation, so clearly were they aware of the
desturctive power contained in this measure. "The French defeated us in the plain of Sbikha,"
declared one old man. "They killed our young men; they forced us to make a war contribution when
they occupied our territories. All that was nothing; wounds eventually heal. But the setting up of
private property and the authorization given each individual to sell his share of the land [which was
what Senatus Consulte provided for], this means the death sentence for the tribe, and twenty years
after these measures have been carried out, the Ouled Rechaïch will have ceased to exist."22

Horace Vernet's Capture of the Smala of Abd-el-Kader at Taguin, May 16, 1843

History Painting
It is not completely accurate to state that the violence inflicted by the West--specifically, by the
French in North Africa--was never depicted by the artists of the period--although, strictly speaking,
such representations fall under the rubric of "battle painting" rather than Orientalist genre. "At the
origin of the picturesque is war," declared Sartre at the beginning of his analysis of French colonial
violence in Situations V in 1954. A painting like Horace Vernet's Capture of the Smala of Abd-el-
Kader at Taguin, May 16, 1843, a vast panorama exhibited along with six pages of catalogue
description in the Salon of 1845, seems a literal illustration of Sartre's contention.23 This minutely
detailed pictorial commemoration of the victory of the Due d'Aumale's French troops over thirty
thousand noncombatants--old men, women, children, as well as the treasure and flocks of the native
chief, who was leading the rebellion against French military domination at the time--seems fairly
clear in its political implications, its motivations fairly transparent.

What is less clear today is the relation of two

other works, also in the Salon of 1845, to the
politics of violence in North Africa at this time.
The Salon of 1845 was the Salon immediately
following the crucial Battle of Isly--the climax
of French action against the Algerian rebel
forces led by Abd-el-Kader and his ally,
Sultan Abd-el-Rahman of Morocco. After the
destruction of his smala, or encampment, at
Taguin--the very incident depicted by Horace
Vernet--Abd-el-Kader was chased from his
country and took refuge in Morocco. There he
gained the support of Sultan Abd-el-Rahman--
the very sultan that Delacroix had sketched and
whose reception he had so minutely described
when he had visited Meknes with the Comte de
Mornay on a friendly diplomatic mission more
than ten years earlier.
Delacroix, "Moulay-Abd-el-Rabmar, Sultan of
Morocco" 1845
Delacroix had originally planned to commemorate the principal event of Mornay's mission by
including, in a prominent position, members of the French delegation at the sultan's reception.
Although it exists as a sketch, this version of the painting was never brought to completion, for the
event it was supposed to commemorate--Mornay's carefully worked out treaty with sultan--failed to
lead to the desired detente with Morocco. Delacroix's projected painting would no longer have been
appropriate or politically tactful. When the defeated Abd-el-Kader sought refuge with the sultan of
Morocco after the defeat at Isly, Moroccan affairs abruptly took a turn for the worse. The French
fleet, with English, Spanish, and American assistance, bombarded Tangiers and Mogador, and Abd-
el-Rahman was forced to eject the Algerian leader from his country. The defeated sultan of Morocco
was then forced to negotiate a new treaty, which was far more advantageous to the French. Moroccan
affairs having become current events, the journal L'Illustration asked Delacroix to contribute some
North African drawings for its account of the new peace treaty and its background, and he complied.
It is clear, then, why Delacroix took up the subject again for his monumental painting in 1845, but in
a new form with different implications, based on a new political reality. In the final version (now in
the Musee des Augustins, Toulouse), it is a vanquished opponent who is represented. He is dignified,
surrounded by his entourage, but an entourage that includes the defeated leaders of the fight against
the French and as such constitutes a reminder of French prowess. In Delacroix's Moulay-Abd-el-
Rahman, Sultan of Morocco, Leaving His Palace at Meknes, Surrounded by His Guard and His
Principal Officers[7], as it was called in the Salon catalogue of 1845, there is no longer any question
of mingling the French presence with the Moroccan one.24


History Painting
Delacroix, "Moulay-Abd-el-Rabmar, Sultan of Morocco" 1845
In the same Salon appeared a painting which is always compared to Delacroix's Sultan of Morocco:
Theodore Chasseriau's equestrian Portrait of Kalif Ali-Ben Hamet (or Ahmed) Followed by His
Escort. Indeed, in the Rochester Orientalism catalogue, Chasseriau's painting is described as
"inevitably recalling Delacroix's portrait," although more "detailed and portrait-like."25 But
Chasseriau's is actually a very different image, serving a radically different purpose. It is actually a
commissioned portrait of an Algerian chieftain friendly to the French, who, with his entourage, was
being wined and dined by the French authorities in Paris at the time.26
Ali-Ben Ahmed, in short, unlike the uncooperative and defeated Abd-el-Rahman, was a leader who
triumphed as a cat's-paw of the French. The relationships between the two works, then, is much more
concrete than some vague bond created by their compostional similarity--they are actually quite
different in their structure--or the obfuscating umbrella category of Orientalism. For it is a concrete
relationship of opposition or antagonism, political and ideological, that is at issue here. Indeed, if we
consider all the other representations of North African subjects in the Salon of 1845--and there were
quite a few--merely as examples of Orientalism, we inevitably miss their significance as political,
diplomatic, and military affairs in the inspirational territory of Orientalism, the very notion of
"Orientalism" itself in the visual arts is simply a category of obfuscation, masking important
distinctions under the rubric of the picturesque, supported by the illusion of the real.
How then should we deal with this art? Art historians are, for the most part, reluctant to proceed in
anything but the celebratory mode. If Gerome ostensibly vulgarizes and "naturalizes" a motif by
Delacroix, he must be justified in terms of his divergent stylistic motives, his greater sense of
accuracy, or his affinities with "tonal control and sense of values of a Terborch or a Pieter do
Hooch."27 In other words, he must be assimilated to the canon. Art historians who, on the other hand,
wish to maintain the canon as it is--that is, who assert that the discipline of art history should
concern itself only with major masterpieces created by great artists--simply say that Orientalists like
Gerome--that is to say, the vast majority of those producing Orientalist work in the nineteenth
century (or who even appeared in the Salons at all)--are simply not worth studying. In the view of
such art historians, artists who cannot be included in the category of great art should be ignored as
though they had never existed.
Yet it seems to me that both positions--on the one hand, that which sees the exclusion of nineteenth-
century academic art from the sacred precincts as the result of some art dealers' machinations or an
avant-garde cabal; and on the other, that which sees the wish to include them as a revisionist plot to
weaken the quality of high art as a category--are wrong. Both are based on the notion of art history

History Painting
as a positive rather than a critical discipline. Works like Gerome's, and that of other Orientalistsof his
ilk, are valuable and well worth investigating not because they share the aesthetic values of great art
on a slightly lower level, but because as visual imagery they anticipate and predict the qualities of
incipient mass culture. As such, their strategies of concealment lend themselves admirably to the
critical methodologies, the deconstructive techniques now employed by the best film historians, or by
sociologists of advertising imagery, or by analysts of visual propaganda, rather than those of
mainstream art history. As a fresh visual territory to be investigated by scholars armed with historical
and political awareness and analytic sophistication, Orientalism--or rather its deconstruction--offers a
challenge to art historians, as do many other similarly obfuscated areas of our discipline.
Notes1. Organized by Donald A. Rosenthal, the exhibition appeared at the Memorial Art Gallery,
University of Rochester (Aug. 27-Oct. 17, 1982) and at the Neuberger Museum. State University of
New York, Purchase (Nov. 14-Dec. 23, 1982). It was accompanied by a catalogue-book prepared by
Rosenthal. This article is based on a lecture presented in Purchase when the show was on view there.
2. Donald A. Rosenthal, Orientalism: The Near East in French Painting 1800-1880 (Rochester,
1982), pp. 8-9, italics added.
3. The insights offered by Said's Orientalism(New York, 1978) are central to the arguments
developed in this study. However, Said's book does not deal with the visual arts at all.
4. Driault, pp. 187 ff., cited in George E. Kirk, A Short History of the Middle East (New York,
1964), pp. 85-86.
5. J. F. B., "Gerome, the Painter," The California Art Gallery 1-4 (1873): 51-52. I am grateful to
William Gerdts for bringing this material to my attention.
6. Leo Bersani. "Le Realisme et la peur du desir," in Litterature et realite, ed. G. Genette and T.
Todorov (Paris, 1982), p. 59.
7. Richard Ettinghausen in Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904), exhibition catalogue, Dayton Art

Institute, 1972, p. 18. Edward Said has pointed out to me in conversation that most of the so-called
writing on the back wall of the Snake Charmer is in fact unreadable.
8. Roland Barthes. "L'Effet de reel," in Litterature et realite. pp. 81-90.
9. Cited by Kenneth Beninder, "The Portrayal of the Middle East in British Painting 1835-1860,"
Ph.D. Dissertation. Columbia University, 1979, pp. 110-11. Beninder cites many other instances and
has assembled visual representations of the theme as well.
10. See, for example, Bayle St. John's Village Life in Egypt, originally published in 1852, reprinted
1973, I, pp. 13, 36, and passim.
11. The best general discussion of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus is Jack Spector's Delacroix:
The Death of Sardanapalus, Art in Context Series (New York, 1974). This study deals with the
relationship of the work to Delacroix's psychosexuality, as well as embedding the painting in the
context of its literary and visual sources. The footnotes contain references to additional literature on
the painting. For other discoveries about Delacroix's use of Oriental sources, see D. Rosenthal. "A
Mughal Portrait Copied by Delacroix," Burlington Magazine CXIX (1977): 505-6, and Lee Johnson,
"Towards Delacroix's Oriental Sources," Burlington Magazine CXX (1978): 144-51.
12. Cabanel's Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Her Servants (1887) has been suggested to me by
several (male) art historians as coming close to fitting the bill. But of course the scenario is entirely
different in Cabanel's painting. First of all, the male victims are not the sex objects in the painting: it
is their female destroyer who is. And secondly, the painting is, like Delacroix's, by a man, not a
woman: again, it is a product of male fantasy, and its sexual frisson depends on the male gaze
directed upon a female object, just as it does in Delacroix's painting.
13. For a rich and suggestive analysis of this myth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see
Alain Grosrichard, Structure du Serail: La Fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l'occident classique
(Paris, 1979).

History Painting
14. This is pointed out by Spector throughout his study, but see especially p. 69.
15. For public reaction to the picture, see Spector, pp. 75-85.
16. Cited in Fanny F. Hering, Gerome, His Life and Work (New York, 1892), p. 117.
17. These issues are addressed in greater detail in "Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera"; see Chapter
5.
18. For a discussion of lesbian imagery in Orientalist painting, see Rosenthal, Orientalism, p. 98.
19. Claude Martin. Histoire de l'Algerie francaise, 1830-1962 (Paris, 1963), p. 201.
20. Letter of February 29, 1832, Correspondance generale de Eugene Delacroix, A. Joubin, ed.
(Paris, 1936), I, pp. 316-17.
21. Entry of March 11, 1850, Journal de Eugene Delacroix, ed. A. Joubin (Paris, 1950), I, p. 348.
22. Cited in Pierre Bourdieu. The Algerians, trans. A. C. M. Ross (Boston, 1962), pp. 120-21.
23. For an illustration of this work, now in the Musee de Versailles, and an analysis of it from a
different viewpoint, see Albert Boime. "New [?] Manet's Execution of Maximilian," Art Quarterly
XXXVI (Autumn 1973), fig. 1 and p. 177 and note 9, p. 177.
24. For an extremely thorough account of the genesis of this painting, the various versions of the
subject and the political circumstances in which it came into being, see Elie Lambert, Histoire d'un
tableau: "L'Abd el Rahman. Sultan de Maroc" de Delacroix, Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines,
no. 14 (Paris, 1953), pp. 249-58. Lee Johnson, in "Delacroix's Road to the Sultan of Morocco,"
Apollo CXV (March 1982): 186-89, demonstrates convincingly that the gate from which the sultan
emerges in the 1845 painting is not, as is usually thought, the Bab Mansour, the principal gate to
Meknes, but more likely is a free variation on the Bab Berdaine, which did not figure in the
ceremonial occasion.
25. Rosenthanl, Orientalism, pp. 57-58.
26. For information about Chasseriau's portrait and its subject, see Leonce Benedite. Theodore
Chasseriau, sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1932) I, pp. 234 ff., and Marc Sandoz. Theodore Chasseriau,
1819-1856 (Paris, 1974), p. 101.
27. Gerald Ackerman, cited in Rosenthal, Orientalism, p. 80. Also see Ackerman, The Life and Work
of Jean-Leon Gerome (London and New York: Sotheby's, 1986), pp. 52-53.


Paris
Paris: When it Sizzles! Impressionism and Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris.
Gustave Caillebotte 1848-94

Paris, A Rainy Day,1876-77 oil on canvas
o/c Chicago,A.I. approximately 7'x5'
Form: Semi-Impressionistic painting
done using multiple vanishing points,
atmospheric perspective, and subtle
non-local colors. This painting is a
very impressive combination of
almost all the formal qualities we
have looked at so far this semester.
In terms of Caillebotte's use of

perspective, he uses multiple points
of perspective although on first
glance it appears to be just two
points. The lamp post, which is
slightly off center is placed just in
front of one of the vanishing points.
Caillebotte uses the lamp post to
divide the picture plane but also to
divide the foreground (on the right)
from the far background (on the
left.) Caillebotte also uses
atmospheric perspective to dull the
intensity and cool the colors of the
sky and buildings as they recede into the background. He also changes the value structure and restricts in the
background.
Caillebotte also manipulates the color in an impressionistic manner. If you look closely at the color of the sky, you will
see it is not the typical blue that one may think of as being a sky color. In fact the sky almost has yellows and greens
in it. The same is true of the colors of the cobblestones. If you look closely at them you may not that the hue or color
of the cobblestones are not the browns and grays one might expect. Even in the flesh tones of the figures you may
notice that there are blues and grays in addition to the warm brown we can anticipate. (Remember Vermeer did this
too.) This is called using "non-local colors." This use of "non-local colors" is one of the main tricks of the
impressionists.
Iconography: This painting symbolizes many things. It represents the destruction of the old Paris and the
reconstruction of the newer one by Baron Haussmann. It also represents the rise in the newer bourgoisie and their
access to new found wealth. This new upper middle class had money thanks to industrialization. This new class of
people were able to spend money and enjoy the wide diagonal vistas created by the renovation of Paris. The clothing
these people wear and the accessories they carry (the top hats and umbrellas) represent the mass creation of these luxury
goods. The bottom of the buildings they walk by are shops that contain wide open picture windows that invite these
individuals to spend there newly acquired wealth.


French painter, art collector, and impresario who combined aspects of the academic and
Impressionist styles in a unique synthesis.
Born into a wealthy family, Caillebotte trained to be an engineer but became interested in
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Paris
painting and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and
Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its
successors. Caillebotte became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the
Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase works by
Monet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot.
Caillebotte was an artist of remarkable abilities, but his posthumous reputation languished
because most of his paintings remained in the hands of his family and were neither exhibited nor
reproduced until the second half of the 20th century. His early paintings feature the broad new
boulevards and modern apartment blocks created by Baron Haussmann for Paris in the 1850s and
'60s. The iron bridge depicted in "Le Pont de l'Europe" typifies this interest in the modern urban
environment, while "Floor-Scrapers" (1875) is a realistic scene of urban craftsmen busily at work.
Caillebotte's masterpiece, "Paris Street; Rainy Day" (1877; Art Institute of Chicago), uses bold
perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection on a rainy day. Caillebotte also
painted portraits and figure studies, boating scenes and rural landscapes, and decorative studies of
flowers. He tended to use brighter colours and heavier brushwork in his later works.
Caillebotte's originality lay in his attempt to combine the careful drawing and modeling and exact
tonal values advocated by the academy with the vivid colours, bold perspectives, keen sense of
natural light, and unpretentious subject matter of the Impressionists. Caillebotte's posthumous
bequest of his art collection to the French government was accepted only reluctantly by the state.
When the Caillebotte Room opened at the Luxembourg Palace in 1897, it was the first exhibition
of Impressionist paintings ever to be displayed in a French museum.


Form: Paris is now laid out in a series of broad several lane
vistas as wide as some of our 4 lane highways. The streets are
also laid out in diagonals that terminate in views of important
or beautiful buildings such as the Eiffel Tower and the Grand
Opera house or the Arche de Triomphe.
The streets are paved with cobblestones and the buildings that
spring up from these streets are fairly uniform in size, shape
and ornament because they were all constructed fairly quickly
and out of similar materials.

"Distinguished for his bold alterations in the layout

of Paris under Napoleon III, he is largely
responsible for the city's present appearance. To
create adequate traffic circulation, old streets were
PARIS. Opera Area. c.1876. widened and new ones cut, while the great railway
Demolition for Avenue de l'Opera. (Marville, Charles, stations were placed in a circle outside the old city
photographer). and provided with broad approaches. For the
enhancement of monuments, open spaces and vistas
were contrived, including the Place de l’Opéra, the
Étoile, and the Place de la Nation, which became
focusing points for radiating avenues. The Bois de
Boulogne was laid out, as well as a number of
smaller parks. The Boulevard Haussmann in Paris

Paris
commemorates his name."

http://www.bartleby.com/65/ha/Haussman.html
Iconography: The redesign incorporates many of the radiating

patterns that Versaille's gardens have and many of the
structures have the French style roof known as the Mansard
style roof that the palace at Versailles exhibits. This reference
to Versailles is either a conscious or unconscious attempt to
refer back to Paris and France's pre-Revolutionary and
romantic days.

RePlan of Paris, 1853,
Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann (1809-1891) and
Napoleon III Napoleon III and Haussmann
Even by the mid-19th century, some areas of Paris
had not been improved substantially for hundreds of
years. Access from one centre to another and to the
railway stations (which had become in effect the
gateways of Paris) was difficult; moreover,
overpopulation and rapid industrialization had
brought squalor and misery, which account in part
for the dominant role of Paris in the revolutions of
both 1830 and 1848. Napoleon III, emperor from
1852 to 1870, enjoined his prefect of the Seine,
Baron Haussmann, to remedy these problems.
Haussmann was the creator of modern Paris. A

planner on the grand scale, he advocated straight
arterial thoroughfares, symmetry, and advantageous
vistas. He slashed the boulevards through the
tangles of slums, began the modern sewer and water
systems, gutted the Île de la Cité, rebuilt the ancient
market of the Halles, and added four new Seine
bridges and rebuilt three old ones. The brilliance
and prosperity of Paris under Napoleon III were
exemplified in the exhibitions held there in 1855
and 1867.

Form: The Parisian apartment houses were redesigned to be vertical in
orientation and often rose four to five stories.
Most buildings were uniform in size and shape and were built around
airshafts or a central courtyard which allowed light and air to flow
through the entire structure and provided windows for almost all of the
inhabited rooms.

Paris
The roof was usually designed after the style of Mansard. The buildings
were made mainly from brick and concrete. Window casements and
glass were made from wood often manufactured in standard sizes and
shapes. The buildings were often surrounded by terraces with cast iron
and sometimes wrought iron ornamentation.
The buildings incorporated in door plumbing and gas lights and utilized
the extensive Parisian sewer system to sanitize them.
Almost all of the building materials were created elsewhere and then
brought to the site and built almost in a modular fashion. Ins some ways
these buildings are the ancestors to our own modularly constructed
building developments and even trailer homes.
Iconography: These redesign of Paris and the construction of such

similar apartment blocks symbolized the technological innovations and
advancements created by French civil engineers and architects. The
construction of such buildings represented the modernization and
homogenization of Parisian culture. It also demonstrated the new found
wealth of the bourgeois (middle classes.)
Context: The creation of such buildings fit in with the over all street
designs of Haussmann and were thought to cut back on diseases caused
by overcrowding and poor sanitation. These buildings also combined
commercial spaces with living spaces above and therefore made the
downtown areas more commercially viable and convenient.
The bottom floor of the structure usually contained shops or a cafe. The
large glass display windows exhibited the goods inside. The bottom and
second floors were the apartments of the wealthier individuals and
sometimes the landlords. As one moved up the structure, the stairs
created and inconvenience since at that point no elevators existed. The
further one moved from the bottom floors the less expensive the
apartments became due to the inconvenience. Hence in the attic (garret)
the artists lived as this diagram can attest.
PARIS. Apt. house, 19th c.

economic status by floor. Pinkney, pl. 3.

Paris
Form: Opera House built by Charles Garnier for Napoleon the

III. It was to be part of the great revitalization of Paris.
Iconography: "Although described by a contemporary critic as

'looking like an overloaded sideboard', it (the Paris Opera
House) is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of the
period. Here Garnier triumphed over a cramped and difficult
site, handling the carriage-ramps and approach steps, the
foyers and staircases, both in section and plan, with
confidence and skill. The style is monumental, classically
based and opulently expressed, as the times demanded, in an
elaborate language of multicoloured marbles and lavish
statuary. Throughout his life, Garnier was criticized for his
excessive use of ornament, as Napoleon and Haussmann are
still accused of being inspired by an out-of-date and
imperialist showmanship expressed in a language already
Charles Garnier's, Opera 1860-1875 debased. Such critics forget that every city needs its occasional
monuments and occasions of grandeur, and that, thanks largely
to these three men, Paris remains one of the most beautiful
cities in the world."
— John Julius Norwich, ed. Great Architecture of the World.
p214.

Context: "Charles Garnier was born of humble origins in Paris

in 1825. He studied at the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin in the
evenings until 1840 when he entered the atelier of Lebas. Later
he worked as a draughtsman for Viollet-le-Duc. In 1842
Garnier entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he eventually
won the Grand Prix de Rome. He studied for five years at the
Academy in Rome where he became interested in the
"pageantry of Roman society". He rounded out his
architectural education with a visit to Greece and Turkey in
1852. Back in Paris, Garnier received few private
commissions but accepted several municipal posts including
that of architect of the fifth and sixth arrondissemnets. In 1861
Garnier entered and won the competition for the new Paris
opera house. His design reflected the aspirations of the Second
Empire with its rich coloring and decoration."
Full text
http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Charles_Garnier.html

Paris


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Classical Greece

Ancient Greece During its "Classic" or "Golden Age"

Quick Time Line:

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Context: The Panathenaic Procession

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(Charles Rowan Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society

More on Greek theatre available on this site.

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Know these components and these orders.

Nike Temple, (Temple of Athena Nike)

Nike from Parapet

Lekythos with "Mistress

Remember Zeus gave birth to Dionysus?

Iktinos and Kallikrates The Parthenon c450 BCE Athens, Greece

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Greek, Paestum Italy Basilica 550BCE

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Apollo's Lead Horse? (Selene's Horse?) (The Elgin Marbles)

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Phidias? Detail of the Panathenaic Procession(The Elgin Marbles)

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The frieze and entablature with sculptures in situ

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the story, just go back to the “François Vase.”

Lapith Fighting a Centaur,

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Three Goddesses(?) (Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite?)

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Yet another impressive paper.....

The Athenians : “Gods Among Men” or Merely Snobs?

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Ebscohost .OhloneCollege Lib., Fremont, CA. 31 Oct 2002.

Fleischman, John. “In Classical Athens, A Market Trading in the Currency of Ideas.”

Ebscohost .OhloneCollege Lib., Fremont, CA. 6 Nov 2002

Compare the metopes to the Francois Vase.

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: a draped female figure supporting an entablature

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Sculpture During the Classic Period

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Another look at schema and correction:

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