Unit35 45

Impressionism France, c. 1875

The Influence of Japanese Art • In 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States Navy lead a fleet of heavily armed steam-powered frigates to Edo, Japan, where he threatened to open fire upon the town if Japan did not agree to a trade agreement with the U.S. (it was a “closed country” that did not trade with Europe/the U.S.).

• Once trade begun, compilations of wood block prints by Japanese artists, such as Hokusai, made their way into the United States and Europe, where they were eagerly collected by artists.

• The French coined the term Japonisme to describe the Japanese aesthetic, which was popular due to its exoticism and beauty.

• Describe the style of the Japanese prints. How are they different from European artwork?

• Ways in which European art was influenced by the newly available Japanese wood block prints: - asymmetry of compositions (off balance, off center placement of subjects) - dramatic cropping of image/picture plane - use of flat areas of color/pattern, less traditional modeling - stacking up object in picture plane to create space/depth - leaving large areas “empty” in a composition

Concept of Modernism • The Impressionists sought to paint everyday life (like the Realists), but they also tried to show its elusive impermanence.

• Later 1800s in France saw continued increase in urbanization, industrialization, secularism (from Darwin), Marxism.

• Modernism: The combination of rapid technological changes and exposure to a variety of cultures led to an acute sense in Western cultures of the world’s impermanence. Modernist artists seek to capture the images and sensibilities of their age, but modernism is more than just an attempt to capture the real world (like with the Realists) – Modernists also critically examine the premises of art itself.

• “The essence of Modernism lies in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence… Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art.” – Clement Greenburg (art critic) • Modernist artists (of which Impressionists are a subgroup) called attention to the surface of the painting, and to the painting as an object itself.

Modernization of Paris • In 1852, the French emperor Napoleon III ordered Paris rebuilt with new water and sewer systems, street lighting, and residences to accommodate Paris’ growing population, and widened streets (known as boulevards), to enable the mobilization of the military in the event of any future uprisings.

• To oversee his new modernization project, Napoleon III appointed a city superintendent, Baron Georges Haussman.

• The “Haussmannization” of Paris turned it from a cramped, medieval city into the scenic and open city of today.

• Some Parisian Impressionists chose to depict their impressions of contemporary urban life.

• The focus of Pissarro’s painting is not on the buildings, but rather the bustling people that made up the street life.

• Instead of depicting the fugitive passing of light, Pissarro sought to capture a spontaneous “snapshot” of a moment, influenced by the aesthetic of photography.

La Place du Theatre Francais Camille Pissarro, 1898.

Aesthetics of Impressionism 1. Rendering visual world as it appears to the eye, not as it actually exists. Capturing a quick, spontaneous “impression” of an image.

- Emphasis on optical sensations -Impressionist subject matter is the experience of looking.

-Artists recorded what they saw as well as what they felt.

2. Drawing attention to the surface of the painting – texture, brush strokes, lack of modeling, thick paint - Painters minimize the effects of modeling and perspective, forcing the viewer to look at the painted surface and to recognize it as a flat plane covered with pigment - Often short, choppy brush strokes 3. Artists worked outdoors (en plein air), looking directly at nature – trying to capture transitory light/color effects - Portable pigments in tubes using new chemical pigments make possible working outdoors using intense contrasting colors.

4. Representation of atmosphere, climate, and light effects - Artists work rapidly (or in sequence) to capture the changing light - Forms bathed in light create the illusion (“an envelope of light”) 5. Painted directly on a white canvas (not neutralized by brown or green as before)

Claude Monet in His Studio Boat Edouard Manet, 1874.

Color Theory Color wheel for paint

Color wheel for light

• Impressionist Color Theory (based on scientific and medical discoveries) - light is the source of our experience of color – white light is made up of colored light - local color (the actual color of an object) is modified by the quality of the light & reflections from other objects - shadows are not black/grey but composed of colors modified by reflections & other conditions - two complementary colors in small amounts placed next to each other blend in the eye to look like neutral tones - juxtaposition of colors on a canvas for the eye to fuse at a distance produces a more intense hue than mixing them • The first Impressionist Exhibition was held in 1874 (Paris).

• The Influence of Photography - cropping of subjects at edges of picture plane to give casual “snapshot” quality - imbalanced or asymmetrical compositions – the most important element in the painting is often not in the center.

Impression: Sunrise Claude Monet, 1872. Oil on canvas.

1’ 7” x 2’ 1”

Claude Monet • After the Realist Courbet bucked the official Salon exhibition (run by the Academy of Beaux Arts and funded by the French government) by putting on his own exhibition, separate exhibitions began to proliferate, allowing a wider range of artistic styles to gain recognition.

• The first Impressionist Exhibition was held in 1874 (Paris).

• Monet preferred to paint outdoors, giving him the opportunity to closely study the effects of changing light and atmosphere on the way things appeared.

• In this painting, Monet made no attempt to blend the edges of his brushstrokes, or refine the details.

• Which area grabs your attention? How? • What colors do you see?

• What is the mood?

• Although Monet worked primarily in France, this painting was done in England. He fled there temporarily during the Franco-Prussian War that broke out in 1870.

On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt Monet, 1868. Oil on canvas. 32” x 39”.

On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt • Although this painting initially seems to be set in the countryside, upon closer inspection we notice the dock and houses on the far bank, placing this scene in the suburbs outside of Paris (easily accessible by the new train lines).

• This earlier work of Monet shows the beginnings of his experimentation with painting in plein air, using colors directly from the paint tubes without much mixing.

• By placing bold strokes of color next to each other, Monet created a sense of shimmering sunny brilliance.

• The brightness of the color is enhanced by Monet’s lack of underpainting, as taught by the Academy of Beaux Arts.

• Monet sought to capture the play of light quickly, before it changed.

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal • In his intense drive to study the phenomena of light and color, Monet painted around forty views of the façade of the Rouen Cathedral (in Rouen, north of Paris).

• Monet observed the cathedral from nearly the same viewpoint, but at different times of the day, and under various climatic conditions (sunny, cloudy, misty, etc.).

• Monet’s loose brushstrokes create a shimmering sense of atmosphere.

• The subject of these paintings is NOT Rouen Cathedral, but rather the effects of light as it plays across the surface of the cathedral.

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal Monet, 1894.

Oil on canvas, 3’3” x 2’2”.

The Sainte-Lazare Station • Exhibited at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1877.

• One of a series of paintings depicting this Parisian train station.

• Revisited the station for many days, working on multiple canvases at a time, switching canvases as the light changed (one canvas in early morning, one for midday, etc.).

• Why do you think Monet chose to focus on this location?

• The whole series was originally intended to be all hung together for effect, so the viewer could compare the different lighting situations.

• Forms dissolve and dematerialize.

• Emphasis on color over line or form.

• Paint is layered, thick.

Gare Saint-Lazare Claude Monet. 1877 CE. Oil on canvas.

Giverny • In the latter half of his life, Monet bought a house in Giverny (rural, northern France), where he constructed a large, lush garden.

• He spent the last thirty years of his life painting around 250 images of his garden, mainly focusing on the pond, bridge, and water lilies.

• As he grew older, his eyes developed cataracts, and it became difficult for him to see.

• As a result, his brushwork became even looser, verging at times upon total abstraction.

Water Lilies Monet, 1906.

Water Lilies L’Orangerie Museum.

Monet, 1906.

Caillebotte • Caillebotte’s (pronounced “kai-bot”) Paris Street, Rainy Day also focuses on the newly modernized wide boulevards of Paris, and the fashionable citizens who used them.

• How is Caillebotte’s style different from the other Impressionists?

• What about his artwork makes it Impressionistic?

• Like Pissarro, Caillebotte was influenced by photography. What about this artwork seems reminiscent of a photographic “snapshot”?

Paris Street, Rainy Day Gustave Caillebotte, 1877.

Oil on canvas, 6’9” x 9’9”.

Villa at the Seaside Berthe Morisot, 1874.

Oil on canvas, 1’8” x 2’.

NORTON SIMON!

Morisot • Many impressionist paintings depict scenes of people picnicking, boating, and strolling around the resort areas on the seashore or along the Seine River, which were easily accessible to Parisians via new train lines.

• Berthe Morisot (Manet’s sister in law) made paintings that focused on domestic subjects (the one realm of Parisian life where society allowed an upper-class woman access) as well as outdoor scenes.

• In this painting, an elegantly (but not ostentatiously) dressed woman at a well-to-do seaside resort looks out at the peaceful sailboats with her child (whose own toy boat is a dash of red).

• Morisot used the open, loose brushwork and plein air lighting to record her quick perceptions.

• No where did Morisot linger on contours or details.

• The filmy, soft focus feeling conveys the outdoor airiness of the seaside, and her figure placement seems casual and relaxed.

Summer’s Day Morisot, 1879. Oil on canvas.

Summer’s Day • As a woman, Morisot was not free to roam the streets of Paris in search of a subject to paint. She was confined to the world of women’s lives.

• Although she began painting in the 1850s, it was not until the 1870s that her art began to take on a more fluid, impressionistic style.

• In this painting, two ladies properly escort each other, and their ferry is steered by an unseen boatmen who is at their bidding.

• The short choppy brushstrokes flatten the picture plane of the canvas, bringing our attention to the foreground.

• Although she was not able to comment on modern city life in the ways of her brother-in-law, Morisot nevertheless painted intensely modern pictures.

Mary Cassatt • Mary Cassatt was an American-born artist. She studied in Pennsylvania, then moved with her sister to France.

• She became friends with Degas, who became her mentor. She frequently exhibited her work with the Impressionists.

• As a woman, she was not able to frequent the cafes with her male artist friends, and she had the responsibility of caring for her aging parents, who had moved to Paris to join her.

• Because of these reasons, her subjects (like Morisot) are mostly domestic scenes of women with children.

• In this painting, the hands and faces of the figures are solidly modeled in a realistic manner, strongly contrasting with the loose, broad brushstrokes and unfinished quality of the background.

• This painting transforms a quiet moment between mother and child into an homage to motherhood.

Mother and Child Mary Cassatt, 1890.

Oil on canvas.

3’11” x 2’1”

The Bath Mary Cassatt, 1892.

Oil on canvas.

• This painting revisits the theme of a tender moment between 3’3” x 2’2”

Mary Cassatt

a mother and child.

• How is this painting different in style than the last one?

• In what ways was this painting influenced by Japanese wood block prints?

• Although Mary Cassatt remained an expatriate, she encouraged friends visiting from the United States to purchase Impressionist artworks, helping to make Impressionism popular in the U.S. before it was even accepted in Paris.

The Coiffure • What is a coiffure?

• April 1890 – Ecole des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris showcased an exhibition of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, featuring scenes of urban bourgeois pleasure—geishas, sumo wrestlers, actors, the mists of Mount Fuji, cherry blossoms, rain showers, and surging waves.

• This etching is based off a print Cassatt had collected from Japan, called Takashima Ohisa Using Two Mirrors to Observe her Coiffure.

• In what ways was this print influenced by Japanese wood block prints?

• The woman in Cassatt’s print does not make eye contact, giving us a sense of voyeurism. What Western works have a voyeuristic sense?

• Though voyeuristic, the image is not sexualized.

• The downward gaze is done partly in for the modesty of the female subject in the ukiyo-e prints (artists knew their works were made for a male-dominated market and designed them to be enticing) and partly as a study of shape and line, so that the viewer, realizing that he or she is not looking at a psychological portrait, could focus more intently on the compositional elements of the work.

• The print allows the artist to show concise skill, like a haiku.

The Coiffure Mary Cassatt, 1890 CE. Drypoint and aquatint.

The Coiffure • Drypoint (using burin to remove burr) & aquatint for soft shading • Instead of the heavy, bold outlines of woodblock prints, Cassatt wanted the soft, hazy, sensual look of pastels (like chalk).

• The companion piece to La Coiffure is Woman Bathing, another image of a woman, bare-chested and half-dressed, grooming before a mirror.

• In Cassatt’s prints, the time-honored boudoir scenes we see in Titian and Delacroix become de-eroticized and re-appropriated as skilled exercises in form, shading, and line.

• In the spirit of ukiyo-e and Impressionism, these prints capture fugitive, fleeting moments of the busy lives of the Parisian bourgeois and working class.

• Cassatt, though herself of a comfortably wealthy family, believed art should be accessible to people of all education levels and classes, not only to buy, but to understand. Images of the everyday are accessible.

Degas • Instead of painting outdoors, Degas painted in a studio from sketches and photographs, sometimes in oil, but also frequently in pastel, a new medium he championed.

• The son of a banker, Degas studied at the Ecole (School) de Beaux Arts, and spent 3 years studying the classics in Rome.

• He primarily focused on entertainment: the racetrack, the music hall, and the ballet/opera, although he was also well known for his series of bathing women.

• Degas did not draw/paint actual dances, instead he hired dancers to come to his studio to pose for him.

• His depictions of dancers at times include social commentary: the dancers’ poses are intended to show how the life of a dancer is tiresome, involving many hours of hard practice.

• Also, because ballet dancers often came from lower class families, they were widely assumed to be sexually “available,” and attracted the attention of wealthy men willing to support them financially for sexual favors. The two men lounging on the right of Rehearsal on Stage have presumably paid to watch the practice.

• In what ways do these drawings show the influence of Japanese prints and photography?

Rehearsal on Stage Edgar Degas, 1874.

Pastel over brush and-ink drawing on cream-colored paper, mounted on canvas.

21” x 28”.

Degas • Degas and Cassatt had a stormy friendship. Both were fiercely independent and ambitious artists, dedicated to their art.

• However, both held the other in mutual respect. They inspired each other, challenged each other to improve, and helped each other’s careers at various points.

• About Cassatt, Degas once remarked, “I am not willing to admit a woman can draw that well.”

• In this portrait of Mary Cassatt, Degas depicts her with a thoughtful expression, leaning forward to listen to the viewer while playing a game of cards. He shows her with an air of intelligence that he did not use on most of his depictions of women.

Portrait of Mary Cassatt Degas, 1884. Oil on canvas.

28” x 23”.

Boating Edouard Manet, 1874. Oil on canvas. 38” x 51”.

Manet • Later in his career, Manet was influenced by the style of Monet and the other Impressionists. He began painting with lighter colors and looser strokes, but continued his focus on gritty themes of real life.

• In this painting, a young man, who is a lower-class boatman (as signaled by his uniform of the round collared white shirt and white pants, with the flat straw hat) steers a boat, accompanied by a young woman.

• The woman seems uncomfortable in her position. The fact that she is un-chaperoned hints at a subtext of impropriety.

A Bar at the Folies Bergere Manet, 1882. Oil on canvas. 3’1” x 4’3”.

Manet • Setting: what sort of place was the Folies-Bergere? What happened there? What do you see in the background?

• Central figure: What is her mood? What class is she/how can you tell?

• What is displayed in the foreground? What is their connection to the central figure?

• Does anything not make visual sense? Why did Manet paint it that way?

• How is this painting thematically similar to Manet’s other works, such as Olympia, Boating, and Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe?

Renoir • Industrialization lead to a wealthy middle class with time and money to spend at cabarets and dance halls.

• This painting by Renoir depicts the Parisian dancehall Le Moulin de la Galette (located in the Montmarte section of Paris, near the Moulin Rouge), which had an outdoor courtyard that would open during good weather.

• Renoir was a Beaux-Arts trained figure painter, and even after he embraced Impressionism, he focused on figures.

• Renoir glamorized the working-class clientele of the dance hall by placing his artist friends and their models in their midst.

• The people are relaxed, smiling, dancing, and chatting. Their flirtations are made innocent by the children nearby.

• The dappled sun filters through the leaves of the trees above, to fall in illuminated patches on the people below, achieving the Impressionist impulse to capture fleeting light.

• Renoir believed paintings should be beautiful, powerful, inimitable, and indescribable with bare words.

Le Moulin de la Galette Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876.

Oil on canvas, 4’3” x 5’8”.

PostImpres sionis m

Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching) Gauguin.

Context • Reaction to Impressionism – Impressionist aesthetic was exhausted, optical reality was “played out” • Personal view of the artist was primary – -Stylization of subject matter/images done in an invented order -Exploring the world of the imagination • Political sub-text to work -Working class/lower classes/underworld of industrial revolution -Alienation of modern cities/societies, with disturbing undercurrents to work and society • Fascination with foreign in two respects: -The “primitive” (non-urban) -Non-Western peoples • Experimentation with primary elements of art, painting style and art techniques -Artists focus on formal and stylistic aspects of art making -Issues of artist’s personal (unique) style/technique. Artists strove to have unique style (a signature look).

At the Moulin Rouge.

Toulouse-Lautrec.

Characteristics of Post-Impressionism • Variety of style – not one style but the emergence of individual styles • Variety of painting techniques -The artist’s individual technique becomes a preoccupation and their signature -Paintings become formal exercises rather than records of visual reality • Variety of influences on artists’ styles: -Medieval art – Gauguin -Japanese art (prints) – Van Gogh -Commercial art/posters – Toulouse-Lautrec -Exotic cultures of Tahiti - Gauguin • Varied subject matter of painting: -The exotic – Gauguin -The fringes of modern cities – Van Gogh, Seurat -The fringes of night life – Toulouse-Lautrec

Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket) James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1875.

Oil on panel. 1’11” x 1’6”

Whistler • Like Cassatt, Whistler was an American expatriate. He lived in Paris for some time before finally settling in London.

• He called his paintings “nocturnes” or “arrangements” to draw a parallel to musical harmonies • Whistler here spatters gold flecks on a dark background, reminiscent of a falling firework.

• He was interested in creating a harmonious arrangement of shapes on the rectangle of his panel.

• While he shared the Impressionists’ interests in the subject of contemporary life and the sensations that color produces in the eye, he also added the influence of creating harmonies similar to musical harmonies.

• “Nature contains the elements, in color and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful – as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.” -Whistler

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 James Abbot McNeill Whistler, 1871.

Whistler • Not all of Whistler’s artwork’s were as abstract seeming as Nocturne in Black and Gold. He also was well known for doing realistic portraits.

• This portrait, called Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (but commonly incorrectly referred to as “Whistler’s Mother”) is a portrait of Whistler’s mother, who lived with him at the time, and helped him in his studio.

• What sort of person do you think she was?

• Although this image is obviously more realistic than Nocturne in Black and Gold, it still has some things in common, such as…?

Toulouse-Lautrec • Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic family in southern France, but a genetic disorder stunted his growth and left him physically disabled.

• As a result, he exiled himself from high society, finding solace instead in the tawdry night world of the cafes, theaters, dance halls, and brothels of Montmarte, Paris.

• In At the Moulin Rouge, Toulouse-Lautrec depicted the interior of the famous dance hall and cabaret.

• His depiction shows the influence of Degas, Japanese prints, and photography in the oblique and asymmetrical composition, the spatial diagonals, and the strong line patterns with added dissonant colors.

• Although the subject matter is similar to Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette, Toulouse-Lautrec’s scene is nightlife, with its artificial light, brassy music, and corrupt, cruel, mask-like faces.

• Between 1891 and 1900, Toulouse-Lautrec made roughly 30 posters for various nightspots, advertising their most popular acts. In Jane Avril, the dancer (Jane) shows off her limber ability to do the can-can.

• In the foreground, a bass-player fills the lower right.

• The linear, fluid style is characteristic of the Art Nouveau movement of the late 1800s.

Jane Avril Toulouse-Lautrec.

1893.

Lithograph.

5’2” x 4’1”

At the Moulin Rouge.

Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895.

Seurat • Approached Impressionist ideas of light/color/optics through systematic organization of color.

• Pointillism (aka Divisionism) involved carefully observing color and separating it into its component parts. The artist then applies these pure colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The figures are thus only visible from a distance, when the viewer’s eye blends the colors.

• Scientists at the time studied how the eye perceives color, as well as emotional responses to colors. They discovered: -Simultaneous contrasts of colors (meaning that juxtaposing colors affects the eyes perception of each, e.g. when dark and light green are side-by-side, the dark green seems darker, and the light green seems lighter).

-Colors could optically mix, if they were small and seen from a distance.

-Optical after-images (after staring at a red object, the eye will momentarily see a spot of green).

• The painting is very ordered and stiff. How did Seurat create a sense of repetition?

• Representation of social class – various classes mingle on their day off (Sunday)

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte Georges Seurat, 1884-86. Oil on canvas. 6’9” x 10”.

Vincent van Gogh • Van Gogh used color and distorted forms to express his emotions (subjective rather than objective).

• Son of a pastor in the Netherlands. Did missionary work in Belgium, but faced many professional failures. Turned to painting. Created first painting at 32, but continued to feel like a failure and outcast. Fatally shot himself 5 years later. Only sold one painting.

• He lived for 2 years in Paris, where he avidly collected Japanese wood block prints, before moving to Arles in rural southern France, where he and Gauguin tried to start an artist’s colony.

• After a psychotic episode where he tried to give his cut off ear to a prostitute and commit suicide, he was committed to an insane asylum, where he continued to paint (Gauguin left).

• Starry Night was painted when he was in the asylum. Instead of painting the sky as he saw it through his window, he depicted his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with whirling and exploding stars, with the earth and humanity huddling beneath it.

• The church in the foreground may be an attempt to reconcile his conflicting feelings about religion. Dutch-style steeple.

• How is van Gogh using color to express himself?

Starry Night Vincent van Gogh, 1889. oil on canvas, 2’5” x 3’.

• Van Gogh observed the intense blues, greens, and purples of night, and that stars were not all the same color. He tried to communicate this vivid colorful reality in the painting.

Paul Gauguin • Gauguin ran a successful brokerage business before turning to art (which helped fund his later travels).

• Like van Gogh, his paintings are subjective/expressive.

• He believed that color above all must be expressive, and that it was the right of the artist to choose what colors to use.

• Unlike van Gogh, his color areas appear flat and smooth.

• Gauguin departed from optical realism and composed the picture elements to focus on the message/idea.

• After visiting van Gogh in France, Gauguin moved to Tahiti (in the South Pacific), far from materialistic Europe. He was disappointed to find that it had been extensively colonized by the French. He moved to a remote part of the island to maintain his vision of an untamed paradise.

• He was especially interested in the Tahitian people and wildlife, filling his paintings with depictions of them.

• He struggled, never finding recognition/success. He attempted suicide while in Tahiti, but failed. He died a few years later in the Marquesas Islands.

Where Do We Come From?

What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Paul Gauguin, 1897.

Oil on canvas. 4’7” x 12’3”.

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Cezánne

Mont Sainte-Victoire Paul Cezánne, 1902-04.

Oil/canvas.

Large Bathers Paul Cezánne, 1906.

• From rural southern France (Aix-en-Provence) he moved for a few years to Paris, exhibited with the Impressionists.

• Though friends with Manet and novelist Emile Zola, he never fit in with the others. Eventually moved back to the countryside, but never fell out of touch with the innovations of Paris artists.

• Although his landscapes are reminiscent of Impressionism, Cezanne sought to make something more “solid and durable.”

• He worked in nature, painting the landscape near his home.

• He worked in a more analytical style, using the elements of art (line, form, & especially color) to organize nature.

• Instead of using linear perspective to create depth, he utilized color relationships, putting warmer and more saturated colors in the foreground, and cooler, duller colors in the back.

• The three main aspects of color are: -Hue – a color (such as red, turquoise, green…)

-Saturation – how bold or drab a color is -Value – how light or dark a color is • His brushstrokes, while coarse, are deliberate and controlled.

• He sought to paint “something other than reality,” not a representation of nature but “a construction after nature.”

Cezánne

Mont Sainte-Victoire Paul Cezánne, 1902-04.

Oil/canvas. Appx. 36” w.

• Cézanne returned to the motif of Mont Sainte-Victoire throughout the rest of his career, creating a series of works that shows the mountain from many different points of view and often in relationship to constantly changing surrounding elements (trees, bushes, buildings, bridges, fields and quarries).

• Cézanne divides his composition into three roughly equal horizontal sections. What are they?

• Cézanne made subtle adjustments to reality (horizon higher on right, splotches of green in the sky) for aesthetic purposes.

• Cézanne evokes a deep, panoramic, and atmospheric scene, but we also remain acutely aware of the painting as a fairly rough, if deftly, worked surface. Flatness coexists with depth and we find ourselves caught between these two poles—now more aware of one, now the other.

• Although he was not widely popular during his life, his ideas greatly influenced later painters (Picasso, Matisse)

Symbolism

Adele Bloch-Bauer Gustav Klimt

Context • Symbolist artists sought to create free interpretations of nature, expressing their individual spirit, rather than imitating nature.

• They rejected the observable world in favor of a fantasy world, of forms they conjured in their own imaginations.

• They used color, line, and shape as symbols of personal emotions, hence the term “symbolists.”

• The Symbolists goal was not to see things, but to see through them to a significance and reality far deeper than what superficial appearance revealed.

• Extremely subjective • Stood against vulgar materialism and conventional notions of industrial and middle-class society.

• Focused on the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasy • The end of the 19th century in Europe (especially Austria) is sometimes referred to as the fin-de-siècle, or end of the century.

This time was characterized by flamboyant extravagance tempered with unsettling undertones.

• While wide-spread prosperity lead the middle class to aspire to “the good life” of the upper class, the culture was unrestrained and freewheeling, but it masked an anxiety prompted by the significant political upheaval and an uncertain future.

The Apparition Moreau, 1876.

Watercolor on • Moreau was inspired by the subjects of his own dreams. paper, • Although he depicted fantastical images, he did so in a 3’5” x 2’4”.

Gustave Moreau

sumptuous, realistic, and detailed style.

• He frequently revisited the theme of the “femme fatale,” the destructive temptress of men.

• In this image, he has depicted Salome, a biblical figure who danced seductively for her step-father, King Herod, and asked in return the head of John the Baptist, whom Herod had captive.

• Salome, having completed her dance, points upward to the radiant vision of John’s head, dripping with blood, yet with eyes still wide open.

• The setting is not a Middle Eastern palace, but a classical Roman hall, resembling a triumphal arch.

• The combination of hallucinatory imagery, eroticism, precise drawing, rich color, and opulent setting is the hallmark of his style.

• His paintings influenced the Surrealists of the early 20th century.

The Cyclops Redon, 1898.

Oil on canvas, 2’1” x 1’8”

Odilon Redon • Another French Symbolist was Redon, who experienced an intense inner world even as a child, when he complained of “imaginary things” haunting him.

• This image depicts the cyclops Polyphemus as he looks lovingly at his unrequited crush, Galatea.

• How is this depiction different from Raphael’s?

• In addition to colorful paintings, Redon also produced a series of charcoal drawings, etchings, and lithographs done in black and white, which he referred to as his noirs (French for “black”).

Henri Rousseau

Sleeping Gypsy Rousseau, 1897.

Oil on canvas, 4’3” x 6’7”.

The Dream Rousseau, 1910.

• Henri Rousseau (not to be confused with the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau) was not a formally trained painter, and only began painting at age 41, after retiring from working for the French government.

• Although he annually showed his work with the Salon des Indépendants from 1886 onward, his work still garnered criticism from both traditional and more liberal painters due to his lack of formal training (evident in his doll-like figures, stage-like settings, and unconvincing perspective).

• Although his work focuses on “exotic” locales, he had never actually travelled outside of France. His depictions are based on his imagination, and what he had seen in books.

• In Sleeping Gypsy, a lion sniffs the dreaming gypsy in a desert landscape. A critical encounter impends – an encounter of the type that recalls the uneasiness of a person’s vulnerable subconscious self during sleep.

James Ensor • Ensor was a Belgian painter, who in 1883 cofounded Les Vingts (The Twenty), a group of Belgian artists who staged unjuried exhibitions in Brussels modeled on the independent salons of Paris.

• A fervent nationalist, he left the group when it began to exhibit the work of foreign artists.

• Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 is probably a reaction to Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte being displayed at a Vingt exhibition.

• While Seurat’s painting celebrates the leisure activities of Parisians, Ensor’s painting is a socialist commentary on the decadence and alienation of urban life at the end of the 19th century.

• The image shows the artist’s pessimistic vision of how Christ would be greeted in the Belgian capital.

• Christ is a small figure on a donkey, ignored by the crowd of people wearing grotesque carnival masks.

• The banners read “Long Live Jesus, King of Brussels” and “Long Live Socialism.”

• The clashing use of reds, greens, and blues, and the coarsely applied paint, underscore the corrupt values of modern society.

Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889.

Ensor, 1888. Oil on canvas, 8’3” x 14’1”

The Scream (originally titled • Munch (“Moonk”) felt deeply the pain of modern life.

Despair) Munch, 1893.

• He also believed humans helpless in the face of the forces of Tempera and death and love. He focused on themes of jealousy, loneliness, pastels on dread, desire, and despair. cardboard, • His goal was to describe the conditions of “modern psychic life,” as he 3’ x 2’5”

Edvard Munch

put it. Worked from memory/imagination, not observation.

• Which elements/principles did Munch use here?

• What is disturbing looking about the man?

• The screaming figure only takes up a small amount of space in the composition. How does the rest of the work continue and enhance the “feel” of the man’s primal scream?

• What creates a sense of alienation/loneliness?

• This image was made for a semi-autobiographical series called “The Frieze of Life”. Munch made 4 versions of this same image, each in different media (oil paint, tempera paint, pastel, lithograph) • “I stopped and leaned against the railing, almost dead with fatigue.

Above the blue-black fjord hung the clouds, red as blood and tongues of fire. My friends had left me, and alone, trembling with anguish, I became aware of the vast, infinite scream of nature.” –Munch’s diary • Munch attempted to convey a sound (scream) and emotion (fear) visually (synesthesia – union of senses, ex. tasting musical notes).

Gustav Klimt • Gustav Klimt was from Vienna, Austria, and epitomized the style of fin-de-siécle through flamboyant decoration tempered with unsettling undertones.

• This painting depicts a couple locked in an embrace. The setting is ambiguous, with little sense of depth beyond the couple.

• We see very little of the couple, only heads and arms. The rest is flattened into areas of bold pattern.

• Notice that the man is covered in rectangular patterns, whereas the woman is covered in circular patterns. Why? • Klimt’s work was at times controversial because of it’s overtly erotic imagery.

• During this period of Klimt’s career, known as the Gold Period, he utilized gold leaf on the surface of his artwork. He may have been influenced by: - Trips to Venice and Ravenna, where he would have seen golden Byzantine mosaics - His father and brother, who were both gold engravers • The gold speckling surrounding the figures make their setting ambiguous, eternal… one with the cosmos.

The Kiss Klimt, 1908.

Oil on canvas, 5’11” square.

UNIT SHEET #38 – MODERNISM What is Modernism?

1. Redefining “reality” – a growing interest in ​psychological reality​ and imagined reality. Interest in other realities apart from the visual, external world of objects, space, and light.

2. Art that calls attention to the ​process of its making​, or calls attention to itself as art.

3. Focus on the ​individual​ in the form of self-analysis and self-expression.

4. Desire for ​freedom from the academic art institutions​ and traditional processes of art-making.

5. Interest in the ​exotic​ and in new sources of imagery which are often non-Western.

6. Elements of art – line shape form, value, color, texture – used as a primary structuring device within a work.

7. Experimentation and use of modern materials and technology for art-making.

8. Challenging conventional ideas of what is “beautiful.”

9. ​Fracturing​ of image and the process of various ways of abstraction.

10. The objectification of the art work – the painting as an object itself. Moving away from illusionary space.

11. The “shock of the new” – ​innovation​ becomes one of the defining elements of art.

12. The ​avante-garde​, or “front lines” of artists, pushing boundaries and challenging tradition.

Context – Historical Framework - Non-European influences​ to European art and culture due to imperialism and colonialism.

- Pessimism and a sense of hopelessness due to war​ and conflict. Rising nationalism results in military build-up in central Europe, creates rivalry between major powers.

- New building technologies​ due to rapid industrialization (reinforced concrete, steel, the skyscraper) - New awareness of space and time due to scientific discoveries/inventions – ​Wright​ ​brothers​ (flight), Einstein​ (theory of relativity), and ​Ford​ (automobile).

- Mass communication increases – ideas spread – ​Edison​ (motion picture camera), ​Marconi​ (radio) - New interest in the inner world of fantasy, dreams, sexuality, neurosis due to studies and writings of human psyche by ​Freud​ (psychoanalysis), Jung (collective unconscious).

Two Approaches to Analyzing Early 20​th​ Century Art Movements: Formalism Expressionism Intellectual/reason Emotional/passionate Formal elements of art serve to structure artwork The artistic process – the act of creation shapes artwork Objective/analytical Subjective/expressive Looking at the world from without Looking at the world within one’s self Contrived or applied order/structure to visual image Intuitive or random ordering of images, chance Organization of time/space/form Organization of experience/feeling Two ways of looking at non-representational art work in the 20​th​ century: Abstraction Non-objective Changing reality to some degree – the art work is still Artwork which is not referenced to an exterior reality of connected to the real world of objects or “visual reality” objects or visible things but is generated by an “idea” but has an applied structure (elimination, stylization, (i.e. an internal “Reality”), an emotion or “feeling,” or addition, geometry, etc.) to reality. spiritual experience.

European and American Art: 1920-1945

Europe

Neue Sachlichkeit • Because WWI was fought on European land, it affected European artists more deeply than American artists.

• In Germany, WWI gave rise to an artistic movement called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), comprised totally of artists who had at one point served in the German military.

• Their military experiences deeply influenced their worldviews and informed their art.

• Their aim was to present a clear-eyed, direct, and honest image of the war and its effects.

• Associated artists: Grosz, Beckmann, and Dix.

Eclipse of the Sun George Grosz, 1926.

Oil on canvas, 6’9” x 6’.

Grosz • George Grosz, a former Dadaist, felt anger and horror at WWI. • Instead of depicting the war itself, here he has depicted what he felt were the two causes of the war: militarism and capitalism.

• The German president Paul von Hindenburg is shown in his army uniform with war medals, his bloody sword laid on the table. On his head is the laurel wreath of victory.

• Von Hindenburg presides over a meeting with four headless ministers – men who act on his orders without question.

• Von Hindenburg is revealed to be a puppet leader, as a wealthy industrialist whispers instructions in his ear.

• The gullible public is represented by the donkey wearing blinders, which eats news papers (metaphorically “swallows” the propaganda promoted by the government and business-friendly press).

• In the upper left, a coin “eclipses” the sun, casting all into darkness.

• In the lower right, a skeleton represents the casualties caused by capitalist greed.

Night Max Beckmann, 1918.

Oil on canvas, 4’4” x 5’.

Beckmann • Although initially a supporter of the war who enlisted in the army, Beckmann became disillusioned by the death and destruction that surrounded him.

• His work emphasized the horrors of war and of a society that he saw descending into madness.

• In this image, three intruders have forcefully invaded a cramped room. A bound woman in the foreground (apparently raped) is splayed across the foreground. Her husband appears on the left, being hanged by one of the intruders, while another dislocates his arm. On the right, another intruder prepares to flee with a kidnapped child.

• Beckmann based the husband, wife, and child off of his own family.

• The sharp, brusque style with harsh outlines emphasizes the brutality of the scene. Objects seem dislocated and contorted, and the space appears buckled and illogical.

• Although the scene does not specifically focus on a war scene, the wrenching brutality and violence pervading the home are horrifying comments on society’s condition.

Der Krieg (The War) Otto Dix, 1929-32.

Oil/tempera on wood, 6’8” x 13’4”.

Dix • Dix also grew disillusioned with the war and humanity during his time fighting.

• In the left panel, soldiers march off to fight.

• The center and right panels show the bloody carnage of battle set in an apocalyptic hellscape, where corpses are strewn on the ground, riddled with bullet holes.

• Dix depicted himself as the ghostly soldier dragging a fellow soldier to safety.

• Below, in a coffin-like bunker, soldiers sleep, or are perhaps dead.

• Dix intentionally designed this work to resemble an altarpiece, such as the Isenheim Altarpiece.

• However, Dix’s altarpiece lacks the sense of hope promised by the resurrection of Christ.

The Degenerate Art exhibition, July 16, 1937.

Degenerate Art • Hitler, who was an aspiring artist himself, believed that realistic genre painting represented the height of Aryan art development.

Anything that did not conform to that standard, he considered degenerate (immoral).

• In 1937, he ordered his minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, to confiscate over 16,000 “degenerate” artwork from artists and museums, and organize a show.

• The Degenerate Art (“Entartete Kunst”) exhibition displayed 650 artworks by such artists as Beckmann, Dix, Ernst, Grosz, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Marc, and Nolde (even though Nolde was a member of the Nazi party).

• The purpose of the show was to publically ridicule the artists. The show was visited by over a million viewers.

• Hitler also ordered the organization of another exhibition, the Great German Art Exhibition, which ran concurrently and presented an array of Nazi-approved conservative art.

• The persecution of the Nazi party had a drastically negative effect on German artists. Some, like Max Beckmann, fled the country, never to return. Kirchner responded by destroying all his woodblocks and burning many of his works, then committing suicide.

Surrealism • In 1924, with the publication in France of the First Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton founded the Surrealist movement, which was joined by many Dadaists.

• The Surrealists attempted to express, through art, the world of dreams, the psyche the unconscious (Freud/Jung).

• Surrealists believed dreams occurred at the level connecting all human consciousness, and could be the place where people could move beyond their environment’s constricting forces to re-engage with their inner self, which society had repressed.

• Developed techniques such as automatic writing (spontaneous writing using free association) to tap into the unconscious.

• Naturalistic Surrealism: artist presented recognizable scenes that seem to have metamorphosed into a dream or nightmare image. Examples: Dali, Magritte.

• Biomorphic Surrealism: Artist used automatism (creation of art without conscious control) to create abstract compositions in which the imagery sometimes suggested natural forms.

Example: Miró

De Chirico • An early precursor of Surrealism was Giorgio de Chirico, whose ambiguous paintings of cityscapes are examples of a movement called Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting).

• Although he studied in Munich, de Chirico was an Italian painter, who spent the majority of his career in Italy.

• De Chirico found hidden reality revealed through strange juxtapositions, such as those seen on late autumn afternoons, when the long shadows of the setting sun transformed vast open squares and silent public monuments into what the painter called “metaphysical towns.”

• Metaphysics – philosophical branch concerned with questions of existence, reality, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility.

• In Song of Love, de Chirico depicts the dreamlike piazza of an Italian town, deserted. A huge marble head (based on the Apollo Belvedere) hangs above a large green sphere, next to a red rubber glove. In the background, a locomotive puffs smoke • An eerie sense of foreboding permeates the scene, although none of the objects are dangerous or threatening in and of themselves.

• De Chirico’s works were popular, and reproduced in periodicals, thereby influencing many Dadaists and Surrealists.

The Song of Love Giorgio de Chirico, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 2’5” x 1’11.

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale Max Ernst, 1924.

Oil on wood with wood construction.

2’3” x 1’10.

Ernst • Max Ernst was a German Dada artist, who later joined the Surrealists. He also wrote poetry and unusual biographical notes (such as describing his birth as the day he emerged from an egg, lain by his mother in an eagle’s nest).

• His art frequently incorporated found objects, as well as fragments of images from old books, magazines, and prints.

• In this, work, Ernst challenged the Renaissance idea that the picture frame was like a “window” looking into a real scene.

• He rendered some aspects realistically using linear perspective (such as the wall, bird, and distant city).

• However, the sketch-like figures are depicted more loosely, and seem out of place in the realistic setting.

• Furthermore, some aspects of the artwork are really three dimensional (gate, building in the foreground, knob), projecting into the viewer’s space. Even the painted area extends onto the frame at the edges.

• Ernst painted the title (pulled from one of his own poems) onto the frame, forcing the viewer to think about the ambiguous connection between the words and the imagery.

Dalí

Persistence of Memory Salvador Dalí, 1931.

Oil on canvas, 9” x 1’1”.

• The Spanish artist Salvador Dalí was primarily known for his paintings, but he also made sculptures, jewelry, and films.

• He used what he called the “paranoiac critical method” to assist his creative process.

• As he described it, in his painting he aimed to “materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialistic fury of precision… in order that the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident… as that of the exterior would of phenomenal reality.”

• In other words, he aimed to depict the imagery of fantasy and the psyche as realistically as possible.

• In Persistence of Memory, Dalí created a haunting allegory of empty space where time has ended.

• What is the feeling given by this landscape?

• What unusual things do you notice?

• Is this an example of Naturalistic or Biomorphic Surrealism?

The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images Rene Magritte, 1929.

Oil on canvas, 2’ x 3’1”.

Magritte • Like Dalí, Magritte painted strange, dreamlike images using a precise, realistic style.

• Originally from Belgium, he moved to Paris between 1926 and 1930 to be a part of Breton’s Surrealist group.

• In 1929, Magritte published an essay in the Surrealist journal La Revolution Surrealiste in which he discussed the disjunction between objects, pictures of objects, and names of objects.

• In The Treachery of Images, Magritte demonstrated what he attempted to explain in his article. He painted a highly realistic pipe, then beneath it wrote (in French) “this is not a pipe.”

• What did he mean?

Oppenheim • Meret Oppenheim was a Swiss-born artist who moved to Paris.

She associated with the Surrealists, as well as other artists such as Picasso and Man Ray. • One day, during a conversation over tea with Picasso, she showed him a brass bracelet covered in fur that she had designed.

He commented that “anything might be covered in fur.” When her tea cooled, she jokingly asked the waiter for “more fur.”

• Inspired, she created Object (also called Luncheon in Fur), a gazelle fur-covered teacup, spoon, and saucer (assemblage).

• Object takes on an anthropomorphic quality, animated by the quirky combination of fur with a functional object. Forces viewer to imagine the sensation of drinking from it.

• The sculpture captures the Surrealist flair for mystical transformation, humor, and undertones of eroticism or sensuality.

Object (Le Dejeuner en fourrure) Meret Oppenheim, 1936.

Fur-covered cup, saucer, & spoon.

Miró • Joan Miró resisted being grouped with any art movement, but he is considered to be an example of Biomorphic Surrealism.

• Miró used a special process to access the subconscious part of his mind.

• He began his paintings by making a scattered collage of fragments cut from a catalog for machinery. The shapes of the collage became motifs the artist freely reshaped on the canvas to create silhouettes (solid or in outline).

• “Rather than setting out to paint something, I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or bird as I work… The first stage is free, unconscious… The second stage is carefully calculated.” - Miró • The finished product suggests a host of amoebic organisms, or constellations in outer space.

• He finished by adding accents of bright white or color.

Painting Joan Miró, 1933.

Oil on canvas, 5’8” x 6’5”

Klee • Swiss-German artist Paul Klee sought clues to humanity’s deeper nature in primitive shapes and symbols, believing them to be evidence of Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious (he cited the use of symbols in “primitive” cultures).

• “Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things.” - Klee • Klee’s process started typically by studying nature, especially in analyzing the processes of growth and change. He made diagrammatic sketches in notebooks of his studies.

• Upon starting an image, he would allow the pencil or brush to lead him until an image emerged, to which he would then respond to complete the idea.

• Twittering Machine shows bird-like symbols drawn in a child-like manner, perched upon a crank-driven mechanism, giving it an air of whimsy.

• The small size of Klee’s work forces the viewer to draw close to examine it, creating a sense of intimacy between the viewer and the artwork.

Twittering Machine Paul Klee, 1922.

Watercolor and pen and ink on oil transfer drawing, on paper, mounted on cardboard.

2’1” x 1’7”

Stepanova • After WWI, Russian & German artists began to experiment with photomontage – a composite image made up of two or more photographs to give the illusion of a single image (can also include text, newspaper clippings, and other images).

• Constructivism – art/architectural movement orig. in Russia, rejected traditional styles, used modern materials in new, dramatic ways, often used art in service of social issues.

Influenced by Cubism & Futurism.

• In 1917 (in the middle of WWI), Russia had the October Revolution. At it’s end in 1922, the Communist USSR emerged.

• What form of government did Communism replace?

• Who is the man depicted in the upper right?

• What was a “Five Year Plan”? Who started it in Russia?

• What formal elements indicate that this is Russian?

• Was Stepanova, and the photomontage she created, supportive of the Communists or critical of them?

Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan Varvara Stepanova, 1932 CE. Photomontage. Moscow.

Stepanova • Stepanova was supportive of the Communist regime. She dedicated herself to serving the ideals of the Communist party through the magazine USSR in Construction, a propagandistic magazine showing the achievements of the new USSR. • USSR in Construction was intended to be read by competing foreign powers, not Russian citizens. It also encouraged small groups of Communists within those foreign countries.

• Though Lenin was the first leader of Russia, he died shortly thereafter and was replaced by Joseph Stalin, who instated the first Five Year Plan.

• Stalin’s Five Year Plan (1928-32) was designed to industrialize Russia, create collective farming, and establish a military (unfortunately at the expense of rural farmers forced to give up their land).

Illustration from The Results of the First Five-Year Plan Varvara Stepanova, 1932 CE. Photomontage. Moscow.

• Though the plan was successful in industrializing the country, thousands of people were impoverished & died as a result. What started as positive propaganda became, little by little, a means to • Discuss the composition layout and elements used. How is Stepanova creating a sense of excitement and triumph? hide a disastrous economic policy from the rest of the world.

• This image ignores the negative aspects, focusing on the • Why did she use Lenin’s image instead of Stalin’s? triumphant looking Lenin, celebratory crowds, modernized electrical lines, and triumphal trumpets blaring above flags with CCCD (Russian initials for USSR) on them.

De Stijl

Furniture by Rietveld

• A group of designers and artists in the Netherlands, lead by Theo van Doesburg, formed a new movement in 1917 called De Stijl (the Style), named after the magazine they published.

• In the wake of WWI, they felt art needed to be simplified to its fundamentals, to create a sense of order and spiritual unity.

• “We demand the construction of our environment in accordance with creative laws based upon a fixed principle.

These laws, following those of economics, mathematics, technique, sanitation, etc., are leading to a new, plastic unity.”

• Attempted to create sense of order and spiritual unity by: - simplifying colors down to only primary colors (red, blue, yellow), black, and white.

- Painting emphasized non-objective design using only basic shapes, such as the rectangle.

- Clean, precise, straight lines.

Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow.

Piet Mondrian, 1930.

Oil on canvas, 1’6” square.

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Mondrian • Piet Mondrian (Dutch) was one of the founding members of De Stijl. His referred to his theories about art Neoplasticism – the new pure plastic (flexible, malleable) art.

• “The natural surface of things is beautiful, but the imitation of it is without life… to approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual…” - Mondrian • He believed that all great art had two goals: 1.the attempt to create “universal beauty” 2.the desire for “aesthetic expression of oneself.” The first goal is objective, the second is subjective, existing in the artist’s own heart/mind.

• To achieve this, the artist must balance the individual with the universal.

• Mondrian based his compositions, using the primary colors, plus white and black, on a grid. The color planes were locked into place with strong vertical and horizontal lines.

• He strove to maintain a dynamic tension in his paintings using size, position, and color, rather than making everything perfectly symmetrical and balanced.

• Inspired by Picasso’s Cubism, tried to push it further into abstraction.

Schröder House Gerrit T. Rietveld, 1924.

Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Rietveld • Rietveld was an architect and furniture designer who incorporated the ideas of the De Stijl movement.

• He believed in breaking up the basic cube structure of living spaces into flexible, varying parts.

• To do this, he designed the second floor of the Schroder house (which included the common living spaces; bedrooms were downstairs) with moveable panels, so that inhabitants could close the panels to make separate rooms, or open them to make one large open room.

• Similarly, the exterior of the building has a shifting quality, where railings, free-floating walls, and long rectangular windows give the effect of cubic units breaking up into parts.

• As with Mondrian, Rietveld limited his colors to primaries and neutrals.

Mexican and American Art, 1930-45 • The stock market crash of 1929 plunged the U.S. into the Great Depression. Many were out of work, including artists. The limited art market disappeared, and museums cut their exhibition schedules and purchases.

• The strain was relieved somewhat by the Treasury Relief Art Project (founded in 1934 to commission art for federal buildings) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), founded in 1935 to relieve widespread unemployment.

• Despite the poor economy, the U.S. became a haven for European artists seeking to escape from Hitler and the Nazis, including Leger, Beckmann, Grosz, Ernst, and Dali.

• In the late 1930s, museums began exhibiting the work of the persecuted artists driven from their homelands, as a showing of support for freedom and democracy.

• Although many of the German artists returned home after the war, their influence on American modernism was significant.

Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange, 1935.

Gelatin silver print, 1’1” x 9”.

Hopper • Trained as a commercial artist.

• Paintings depict buildings, streets, and landscapes that are muted and full of empty spaces, evoking the feelings of overwhelming loneliness and isolation of the Depression-era.

• Although his paintings are thematically similar to the Realist paintings of the 19th century, his simplified architectural shapes reflect the more modern move towards abstraction.

• In Nighthawks, four figures sit inside a late night diner, visible through large plate-glass windows, which give the paradoxical sense of creating both a safe refuge and a vulnerable visibility from the outside.

Nighthawks Edward Hopper, 1942.

Oil on canvas, 2’6” x 4’8”.

American Gothic Grant Wood, 1930.

Oil on beaverboard, 2’6” x 2’1”.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover

Wood • Iowan artist Grant Wood lead a new movement developing in the Midwest, known as Regionalism (or American Scene Painting), which focused on rural American subjects depicted in an accessibly readable, Realist style (which appealed to those who were uneasy with abstraction).

• In American Gothic, a farmer and his spinster daughter wearing simple, austere clothing and dour expressions, stand in front of their small but tidy house (featuring a Gothic lancet window).

• Critics stated that it embodied strength, dignity, fortitude, resoluteness, integrity, and the true spirit of America. It showed the simple, hardworking people of the Midwest to be the backbone of a country struggling through the Depression.

• However, some Iowans considered the depiction of life in their state insulting.

• Another criticism against Wood’s style was that it had political undertones of staunch nationalism. Given the problematic attitude of nationalism in Germany at the time, many observers found Wood’s nationalistic attitude disturbing.

• Wood’s paintings, though often sentimentally nostalgic, were accepted as a symbol of reassurance to a country struggling to cope.

Lange • In the 1930s, the U.S. government initiated the Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

• The RA oversaw emergency aid programs for farm families struggling to survive the Great Depression. The RA hired Dorothea Lange to document the deplorable living conditions of the rural poor in 1936.

• At the end of an assignment photographing pea pickers in California, Lange stopped at a camp in Nipomo where the migrant workers were starving because the crops had frozen.

• It was at the camp in Nipomo that Lange captured an image of strength mixed with worry in the weathered face of a mother.

• Lange described the encounter: “I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction… There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and she seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.”

• Within days after Lange’s photograph appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, people rushed food to Nipomo to feed the hungry workers.

Migrant Mother Dorothea Lange, 1935.

Gelatin silver print, 1’1” x 9”.

Epic of American Civilization: Hispano-America (panel 16) Jose Clemente Orozco, 1932-34.

Fresco in Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

Orozco • Between the two world wars, three Mexican painters (Orozco, Rivera, Kahlo) created a body of works (in both Mexico and the U.S.) that focused on the indigenous history and culture existing in Mexico before the arrival of Europeans.

• The movement these artists formed was part of the idealistic rethinking of society that occurred in conjunction with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).

• Orozco was commissioned by Dartmouth College to create a large mural cycle, of which he could choose the subject.

• He designed 14 large panels and ten smaller ones which together form a panoramic and symbolic history of ancient and modern Mexico, beginning with the early Aztec mythology of Quetzalcoatl to modern times.

• In this section, a heroic Mexican peasant is armed to participate in the Mexican Revolution. Around him are symbols of his oppressors – bankers, government soldiers, officials, gangsters, and the rich.

• Money grubbers empty huge bags of coins at the incorruptible peasant’s feet, while a general raises a dagger to stab him.

Rivera • Diego Rivera was another Mexican artist revered for his murals.

• He was a socialist who believed that the role of the artist was to create art for revolution, putting the interest of the worker first.

• 1910-20: Mexican civil war to oust dictator Porfirio Diaz.

Revolutionaries believed land should be controlled by the working class. After the revolution, the government commissioned large, public murals celebrating Mexican heroes (didactic to the illiterate) • Rivera’s murals feature large, clearly defined figures and bold colors that make the story easily legible, although the compositions are complex.

• As he became more famous, he won commissions to paint murals in Depression-era USA. • Commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to paint a mural in Rockefeller Center, NYC. Although Rivera was paid in full, the mural was destroyed rather than unveiled because Rivera included a depiction of the communist Vladimir Lenin.

Rivera Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park Diego Rivera. 1947-48 CE. Fresco.

Approximately 50’ wide.

Original location: lobby of Hotel del Prado, Mexico City. Moved to Alameda Park after an earthquake destabilized the hotel.

Benito Juárez, who restored the republic after French occupation and attempted to modernize the country as president.

• Depicts figures from 400 years of Mexican history.

• Does anything belie the idea that this is a pleasant dream?

• Rivera wasn’t a Surrealist, so why depict a dream? What advantage did it give him?

Refined ladies and gentlemen promenade in their Sunday best, under the watchful eye of Porfirio Díaz in his plumed military garb.

Rivera • The image includes many famous figures, including: -Hernán Cortés (the Spanish conqueror who initiated the fall of the Aztec Empire) -Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (a seventeenth-century nun and one of Mexico’s most notable writers) -Porfirio Díaz (whose dictatorship at the turn of the twentieth century inspired the Mexican Revolution).

-Frida Kahlo, behind the artist himself as a young boy, holding a yin-yang symbol (opposite but equal forces) • The skeletal figure is known as La Catrina, a nickname for upper-class Mexican women who dressed in European clothing.

• The printmaker Jose Posada (shown to the right of La Catrina) first depicted La Catrina as a skeleton, to critique the Mexican elite. The feather boa around her neck alludes to the Mesoamerican serpent god Quetzacoatl.

• La Catrina links Posada with Rivera (hand-holding).

• Chronology: the left side of the composition highlights the conquest and colonization of Mexico, the fight for independence and the revolution occupy the majority of the central space, and modern achievements fill the right.

• Gives attention to “underdogs” usually forgotten by history

Kahlo • Kahlo rejected any formal association with the Surrealists.

• Suffered polio as a child, leading to a disfigured leg.

• As a teenager, she was extremely injured in a bus accident (including broken spinal column, pelvis, ribs, crushed foot, 11 leg fractures, and an iron handrail piercing her abdomen, requiring 32 surgeries).

• She began painting while bedridden/recovering. Although she recovered, she continued to have extreme relapses of pain that left her bedridden.

• She is known for her many self-portraits. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and it is the subject I know best.”

• An avowed Communist, her works are political & personal.

• In addition to addressing her own personal pain/suffering, she also often addressed the limited roles available for women at the time (most were expected to be housewives).

• Was married to Diego Rivera, but after multiple instances of his infidelity, their marriage fell apart and they divorced.

Two Fridas Frida Kahlo, 1939.

Oil on canvas, 5’7” sq.

Kahlo • In Two Fridas, she depicted herself twice, once in European garb (left) and once in traditional Zapotec dress.

• The figures are connected by a thin vein between the hearts (a common motif in Aztec art).

• This represents both her own heritage (Mexican mother, German father). Rivera encouraged her to wear Mexican dress.

• One end of the umbilical cord-like vein ends in surgical clamps, the other in a childhood picture of Diego Rivera, whom she was in process of divorcing (Rivera as son and husband).

• The 2 Fridas are united (by blood & holding hands). Where one is weakened by an exposed heart, the other is strong; where one still pines for her lost love (as underscored by the vein feeding Rivera’s miniature portrait), the other clamps down on that figurative and literal tie with a surgical clamp.

Two Fridas Frida Kahlo, 1939.

Oil on canvas, 5’7” sq.

Lawrence • Born in New Jersey, but moved to Harlem, NYC at age 13.

Mother enrolled him and his siblings in arts/crafts classes.

• Created the Migration of the Negro series (60 images) at the young age of 23.

• The series focuses on the mass migration of African Americans from the southern United States to the north after the Civil War. • African Americans moved north to fill vacancies in factory jobs.

• However, they still faced poor living conditions and racial discrimination.

• The largest northern racial conflicts arose when newly relocated African Americans were used as strike-breakers.

• Lawrence was influenced by the flat, spare style of Cubism, and the colors and shapes of Harlem. Reduced forms to bare basics while still communicating a narrative.

• Each of the 60 images is accompanied by a caption describing what is pictured. Panel number 49’s caption reads: “They also found discrimination in the North although it was much different from that which they had known in the South.”

The Migration of the Negro, Panel No. 49 Jacob Lawrence, 1940-41 CE. Casein tempera on hardboard.

The Jungle Alfredo Lam, 1943 CE. 8’ square.

Gouache on paper mounted on canvas.

The Jungle • Wifredo Lam was from Cuba, but lived in Madrid and Paris before WWII, where he was influenced by Surrealist art. He returned to Cuba during the war.

• His return home lead him to introduce Afro-Caribbean elements into his art. What typically African elements are included?

• The image features a cluster of strange faces, limbs, and sugarcane, crowding the surface of the painting.

• Like funhouse mirror reflections, the figures vary between elongated/thin and wide/bulky.

• What is he using to create balance and unity?

• Despite the title, sugar cane does not grow in jungles, but rather in cleared fields. It was a cash crop in Cuba, relying on the toil of thousands of poor laborers.

• In the days before the Cuban Revolution (mid 1950s), Americans and Europeans saw Cuba as a vacation playground, and ignored the harsh realities of Cubans’ daily lives.

• In fact, most sugar plantations were owned/run by American companies.

• The mystical figures are influenced by Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion mixing African religious practices with Catholicism.

The Jungle Alfredo Lam, 1943 CE. 8’ square.

Gouache on paper mounted on canvas.

The Jungle • Wifredo Lam sought to create an image that reflected the reality of the Afro-Cuban experience, not glossed over by corny tourist advertising. He stated: I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit [...] In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others. But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.

Calder • Alexander Calder was the son and grandson of sculptors, who initially studied mechanical engineering.

• Fascinated by motion, he made an early sculpture that was a miniature circus, where each wire-based miniature performer moved to mimic a real circus.

• After visiting Mondrian’s studio in the 1930s, Calder began creating mobiles (named by Duchamp, who was intrigued by Calder's early motorized and hand-cranked examples of moving abstract pieces), comprised of nonobjective shapes of colorful aluminum suspended in motion from carefully balanced wires.

• This new kind of sculpture succeeded in expressing the innate dynamism of the natural world.

• In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in NYC commissioned Lobster Trap and Fish Tail to hang in the stairwell.

• Calder carefully planned each non-mechanized mobile so any air current would set the parts moving to create a constantly shifting dance in space.

Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, Alexander Calder, 1939.

Painted sheet aluminum and steel wire, 8’6” x 9’6”.

Modernism and and Modernism Postmodernism in in Postmodernism Europe and and America, America, Europe 1945-present 1945-present

Postwar Expressionism in Europe • The end of WWII in 1945 left devastated cities, broken economies, and governments in chaos throughout Europe.

• The world had seen massive loss of life in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Holocaust in which six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

• The writings of Kierkegaard and Sartre popularized the ideas of Existentialist philosophy, which asserted the freedom of the individual to determine their own development through acts of the will, the absurdity of human existence and the impossibility of achieving certainty regarding the existence of God or the purpose of humanity.

• The result was a sense of despair, disillusionment, and skepticism that manifested itself artistically in a brutality and roughness seen in artworks by Giacometti and Bacon.

• Many artists relocated during the war to the United States, and introduced their ideas to American artists.

Result was a surge in American avant-garde art making after the war.

Painting Francis Bacon, 1946.

Oil and pastel on linen, 6’6” x 4’4”

Man Pointing No. 5 Alberto Giacometti 1947.

Bronze, 5’10” high.

Giacometti • Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss-born artist. His family were descendants of Italian refugees escaping the Italian Inquisition.

• Although he did not intentionally pursue existentialist ideas in his art, Giacometti’s works capture the feelings of alienation and solitude associated with the philosophy.

• Giacometti’s sculptures are typically tall, thin, and featureless, with a rough, agitated surface.

• Rather than conveying the solidity and mass of conventional bronze sculpture, these severely attenuated figures seem swallowed up by the space surrounding them, imparting a sense of isolation and fragility.

Bacon

Pope Innocent X (based on Velazquez)

Self-Portrait

• Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1910, but was the son of an Englishman. He lived in London.

• He experienced first-hand the destruction of lives and property the Nazi bombing wrought on London during WWII. • Painting serves as a criticism of humanity and a reflection of war’s butchery, which he said was “an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.”

• His painting depicts a stocky man with a gaping mouth and hidden eyes sits surrounded by bloody carcasses, a tell-tale red stain on his upper lip.

• Bacon may have based his depiction of this figure on news photographs of similarly dressed European and American officials, particularly Neville Chamberlain, the wartime British prime minister who frequently appeared in photographs with an umbrella.

• The flayed figure behind the main character resembles a crucifix.

• Bacon also produced a series of “screaming popes,” based on Diego Velazquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X. The motif of a gaping or screaming mouth recurred throughout Bacon’s career.

• Although he preferred to paint portraits of friends, Bacon was forced to paint more self-portraits in his later years, as many of his friends died young.

Abstract Expressionism • Also known as the New York School (first American art movement to gain international acclaim).

• Championed by the art critic Clement Greenberg, who encouraged artistic “purity,” the renunciation of explicit subject matter, and the acceptance of the limitations of each given medium (for instance, 2D paintings should appear flat).

• Abstract Expressionist artists were seen as intellectuals and individualists, and were glamorized as such in print publications.

• The U.S. government also promoted the “rugged individualist” persona of Abstract Expressionists (such as Jackson Pollock) as a counter to Russian Communist painting.

• Goal of abstract expressionism was to express the universal truths of the human condition through primal images.

• Gestural abstraction (de Kooning, Pollock, “action” painters) • Chromatic abstraction (Newman, Rothko)

• “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.”

– Art critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 article “The American Action Painters” • Sartre’s position that an individual’s actions might give life meaning suggested the importance of the artist’s creative process. Through the artist’s physical struggle with his materials, a painting itself might ultimately come to serve as a lasting mark of one’s existence.

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) Jackson Pollock, 1950.

Oil, enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas, 7’3” x 9’10”

Pollock • American painter Jackson Pollock divorced art from any depiction of reality by unrolling large-scale (unstretched) canvases on the floor of his studio, then dripping, flinging, and pouring paint (as well as enamel, and sometimes other elements such as sand) onto it, creating a lacy, spider-web like design.

• Pollock preferred to work on the floor because he could approach the painting from all angles, and be “in” it.

• Responding to the image as it developed, he created art that was spontaneous yet choreographed, highlighting the emphasis on the process of creation, rather than end product.

• The automatic, improvisational nature of Pollock’s work relies on the subconscious to create the composition.

• A large article on Pollock in Time Magazine catapulted him to celebrity status, but the pressures of fame were too much. After struggling with depression and alcoholism, he died in a car crash at age 44.

De Kooning • Dutch-born Willem de Kooning moved to New York City, where he created vigorously painted works of art (sometimes even poking holes in his canvases).

• Although his artworks are still rooted in figuration, they display the sweeping gestural brushstrokes and energetic application of paint typical of gestural abstraction.

• Process was important to de Kooning. He worked on Woman I for almost two years, daily painting an image, then scraping it off the next day to start again, over 100 times before finally settling on the finished image.

• Out of the jumbled array of slashing lines and agitated patches of color appears a ferocious-looking woman, with blankly staring eyes and a toothy smile, inspired by an ad for Camel cigarettes, which seems to devolve into a grimace.

• Female models on advertising billboards partly inspired Woman I, one of a series of images of women, but de Kooning’s female forms also suggest fertility figures (Willendorf) and a satirical reversal of the traditional image of Venus.

• So, is this image misogynistic, or is it an ironic comment on the insipid and artificial world of film and advertising?

• One of a series of 6 paintings of women.

Woman, I Willem de Kooning 1950-52.

Oil on canvas, 6’4” x 4’10”

Newman • In contrast to the aggressively energetic gestural brushstrokes of the action painters, the chromatic abstractionists exudes a quieter aesthetic, focused on use of color.

• Newman’s early work focused on organic abstractions inspired by biological studies, but he soon simplified his style.

• He is most known for his large-scale canvases of slightly modulated color, accented by thin vertical lines called “zips” that run from the top to the bottom of the canvas.

• The zips were not meant to represent specific entities, but rather accents energizing the field and giving it scale.

• By simplifying his compositions, Newman increased color’s capacity to communicate and to express his feelings about the tragic condition of modern life and the human struggle to survive.

• Vir Heroicus Sublimis translates as Sublime Heroic Man.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis Barnett Newman, 1950.

Oil on canvas, 7’11” x 17’9”

No. 14 Mark Rothko, 1960.

Oil on canvas, 9’ 6” x 8’ 9”

Rothko • Russian-born Mark Rothko moved with his family to the U.S. at 10.

• His early paintings were figural, but he soon came to believe that references to anything specific in the physical world conflicted with the sublime idea of the universal, supernatural “spirit of myth,” which he saw as the purpose of art.

• His paintings were large and compositionally simple, relying on color to convey meaning.

• He typically made compositions of two or three large rectangles with hazy edges, which seem to hover in front of the background, and shimmer with intense luminosity.

• He saw color as a doorway to another reality, and insisted color could express “basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom…

The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

Post-Painterly Abstraction • Another post-war American art movement.

• Evolved out of abstract expressionism.

• Name coined by critic Clement Greenberg because of the lack of visible “hand” of the artist (no brushstrokes).

• Instead of passionate, gestural art (abstract expressionism), Post-Painterly Abstraction conveys a cool, detached rationality emphasizing tighter pictorial control.

• Praised by Greenberg because it embodied his idea of purity in art.

Red Blue Green Ellsworth Kelly, 1963.

6’11” x 11’4”.

Kelly • New York-born Ellsworth Kelly distilled painting down to its essential elements, producing spare, elemental images, known as hard-edge painting.

• In Red Blue Green, three flat shapes of bright colors break up a rectangular canvas.

• The edges of the shapes are painted with exact precision, so that it almost seems machine-made.

• His works usually feature at least one bright color.

• Some of his works are on irregularly shaped canvases (pictured below).

• The paintings are completely nonobjective, simple, and contain no suggestions of the illusion of depth.

Mas o Menos Frank Stella, 1964.

Metallic powder in acrylic emulsion on canvas, 9’10” x 13’8”

Stella • Another hard-edge painter of the 1960s was Massachusetts born Frank Stella.

• Stella lived in New York but did not favor the rough expressive brushwork of the abstract expressionists.

• Stella eliminated many of the variables associated with painting. His simplified images of thin, evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds have no central focus, no painterly or expressive elements, and no tactile quality.

• He focused on pure, systematic painting. “What you see is what you see.”

• Forces the viewer to acknowledge the painting is simply pigment on a flat surface.

Model for a glass skyscraper Mies van der Rohe, 1922.

Barcelona Chair

Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, 1954-58. New York City. Steel frame with glass curtain wall and frame.

Seagram Building

• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over the Bauhaus in 1928, after Gropius, and moved it to Berlin.

• Believed “less is more,” which he put to use in his skin and bones architecture. Similar to Minimalist painting.

• The illusion of movement was created by the reflections and changes of light on the glass surface.

• Later in his career, Mies van der Rohe continued his “less is more” sleek glass aesthetic with the Seagram Building.

• The lobby is set back into the building, giving the appearance that the building lifts off the ground on stilts.

• The structural framework is hidden, leaving only the outer walls of glass (and the bronze strips which hold the glass in place).

• The building is thin, with part of its property left as an open public plaza (allowing space to look up at the building).

• Amber glass and dark bronze (which must be oiled annually) convey sense of elegance, sophistication of company.

• The use of bronze on the exterior, travertine around the elevators, and the subtle vertical striations on the pillars (which allude to column fluting) reference Classical Greco-Roman art/architecture.

• Used I-beams (usually a structural element) decoratively on the façade to create sense of texture & verticality.

Frankenthaler & Louis • Color-field painting, another variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction, but instead of emphasizing harsh, geometric edges, they focused on soft, hazy colors made by pouring thinned paint onto unprimed canvas, letting the paint soak in and bleed.

• Helen Frankenthaler began paintings by selecting several colors, and began pouring them onto the canvas. Her focus was not on emotional expression (as Rothko’s was), but rather on seeing how the colors interacted with each other.

• Instead of oil paint, Frankenthaler used the new acrylic (plastic based) paint, which was soluble in water (unlike oil paint).

Frankenthaler watered down her acrylic paint until it was runny.

• She poured the paint onto unprimed canvas, so that it would soak in and stain the fibers of the canvas (“soak-stain” technique).

• After pouring the paint onto the horizontal canvas, she would tip and tilt the canvas to control where the paint would run as it began to soak in.

• Although influenced by Pollock, she wanted to avoid gestural brushstrokes.

• No specific content or intended emotion – viewer can just appreciate the colors and their inter-relationships, the same as they might enjoy the colors of a sunset or a stained glass window.

The Bay Helen Frankenthaler, 1963 CE. Acrylic on canvas.

Judd • Sculptors were also influenced by Greenberg’s formalist ideas.

As painters were emphasizing the flatness of the canvas, sculptors focused on the three-dimensionality of their work.

• Missouri-born Donald Judd embraced a spare, straightforward aesthetic.

• He believed that the three-dimensionality of sculpture was inherently more powerful than flat painting.

• He experimented with new industrial materials, believing that each material had its own qualities that affected the finished product, and to use the same traditional materials without thought to form was pointless.

• His sculptures are not meant to be metaphorical or symbolic.

They are straightforward declarations of sculpture’s objecthood.

• Judd used Plexiglas because its translucency enables the viewer access to the interior, thereby rendering the sculpture both open and enclosed.

• Judd’s work is often considered Minimalist, but he criticized Minimalist art as being too idea-oriented.

Untitled Donald Judd, 1969.

Brass & colored fluorescent Plexiglas on steel brackets.

10 units, 6” x 2’ x 2’3” each with 6’ intervals.

Cumul I Louise Bourgeois, 1969.

Marble, 1’10” x 4’2” x 4’.

Bourgeois • In contrast to Judd’s crisp box structures, French-American Louise Bourgeois created abstractions with organic qualities.

• Like Judd, Bourgeois experimented with a variety of materials, including wood, plaster, latex, plastics, marble, alabaster, and bronze. She utilized each material’s qualities to suit the expressiveness of the piece.

• In Cumul I, she carved a grouping of round-topped figures huddling under a shared garment. Although the forms remain abstract, they strongly refer to human figures, each with a different personality.

• She accentuated the difference between the figures and the cloth by polishing the figures to a shine, and leaving the cloth with a matte finish.

• “My figures are anthropomorphic and they are landscape also, since our body could be considered from a topographical point of view, as a land with mounds and valleys and caves and holes.”

• In the 1990s, she created several spider sculptures titled Maman, which referenced the cleverness and protection of her mother, a weaver.

Fission Bridget Riley, 1963. Tempera on composition board, 2’11” x 2’10”

Homage to the Square Josef Albers

Riley • In the 1960s, a major artistic movement was Op Art (short for Optical Art), in which painters sought to produce optical illusions of motion and depth using only geometric forms on two-dimensional surfaces.

• Influenced by the work of Josef Albers, whose series of paintings titled Homage to the Square explored the optical effects of placing different colors next to each other.

• Bridget Riley’s Fission was featured in the December 1964 issue of Life magazine, which unleashed a craze for Op Art designs in clothing.

• In Fission, Riley filled the canvas with black dots o varied sizes and shapes, creating the illusion of a pulsating surface that caves in the center.

• Op Art paintings are disorienting and sometimes disturbing and can even induce motion sickness.

• Op Art, while modernist in its nonobjective depictions of shapes, nonetheless embraced the Renaissance notion that the painter can create the illusion of depth.

Post-Modernism • Re-action against Modern art, the emphasis on originality, and the idea of a lionized artist-genius.

• Belief that there are no totally new ideas. Instead, artists re-appropriate old ideas and put them in new contexts to create new meanings.

• Influence of mass-media and mass production techniques.

• Used art to question social issues, such as gender and racial discrimination and identities.

• In some cases, involves the de-materialization of art, where art may be an ephemeral performance or idea which cannot be bought/sold or displayed in a museum.

• “Postmodern” is a broad, catch-all term encompassing many different movements, such as Pop Art, Environmental Art, and Performance Art.

House in New Castle County Delaware, USA. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown (architects). 1978-1983 CE. Wood frame and stucco.

Rear view

Front view

House in New Castle County • Considered an example of Postmodern Architecture.

• Fond of Mannerist and Baroque architecture of Rome.

• Felt that austere Modern architecture had run it’s course, and urged for architecture with a “messy vitality over obvious unity” in his book Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture.

• Look of a building was more important than the theories or techniques used to build them.

• Setting for this house is in nature, but not on top of a hill – rather, surrounded by hills and a forest.

• Seems conventional from afar, but strange features can be noticed up close.

• Front façade has a floating, flat archway that, like a billboard, rises awkwardly from the lower edge of the gable. Venturi considered this to be a “sign” to viewers that this was a residence (may also have helped birdwatcher owners look at birds unseen).

• Rear façade also has an arched screen, but this one is framed by the edges of the roof, and supported by flat, cut-out like Doric columns.

• Classical in derivation yet slightly cartoonish, this somewhat awkward assemblage gives the house a simultaneously grand and whimsical appearance.

House in New Castle County Delaware, USA. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown (architects). 1978-1983 CE. Wood frame and stucco.

House in New Castle County • Interiors are also playfully but simply decorated, with a focus on flat cut-outs and geometric designs.

• The painted arches in the vaulted music room, the quirky chandeliers, and the perforated wall patterns seem cut by hand with a jig-saw.

• Borrows from the Carpenter Gothic and Queen Anne styles of the 19th century.

• Not afraid of ornamentation – “less is a bore.”

• The pluralistic view of architecture helped propel 20th century architecture in a new direction.

Carpenter Gothic

Queen Anne Style

Pop-Art • In the years following WWII, art was primarily abstract or nonobjective, but in the late 50s and early 60s, artists (first in England, then America) began appropriating popular/consumer culture in their art.

• Pop artists used products of consumer culture (such as advertisements, comic books, and gossip magazines) to critique the very culture that made those items.

• Although Pop art began in England, it blossomed to its greatest prominence in the United States, where economic prosperity fueled widespread advertising on televisions (now in most people’s houses), radios, print media, and billboards, that encouraged endless consumption.

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Richard Hamilton, 1956.

Collage, 10” x 9”.

Hamilton • The earliest Pop artists were a group of British artists, architects, and writers, who formed the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in the early 1950s.

• They took a fresh approach to art by incorporating imagery from popular culture, such as advertising, comic books, and movies.

• The Independent Group member Richard Hamilton was trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter, and had studied the way advertising shapes public attitudes.

• Hamilton was influenced by Duchamp’s ideas of combining mass-produced objects in a new way to create new meaning.

• He created the small collage Just What Is It That Make’s Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? out of clippings from newspapers, magazines, and comic books.

• It features a bodybuilder (Charles Atlas), a Hoover vacuum cleaner advertisement, a girl cut from a “girlie magazine,” as well as various products, and arranges them to make a fantasy home.

• The work raises questions about consumer culture, the advertising that creates it, and the way people are defined by their possessions.

Johns

Three Flags Jasper Johns, 1958.

Encaustic on canvas, 2’7” x 3’9”.

Target with Plaster Casts

• Jasper Johns was a pivotal artist in the transition from abstraction to Pop art in America.

• He painted ordinary, common objects - what he called things “seen but not looked at,” such as flags, targets, and maps.

• In Three Flags (painted at the height of the Cold War), Johns painted a trio of overlapping American flags of decreasing size.

• Johns bent traditional perspective rules by making the closest flag the smallest.

• The flags are painted on three canvases using encaustic mixed with newsprint, which has a thick, impasto-like quality.

• By using the textural encaustic and repeating the image of the flag like a pattern, Johns called attention to the fact that they were actually paintings, not real cloth flags.

• When the then-unknown Johns moved to New York City from South Carolina, he met and fell in love with the artist Robert Rauschenberg. The two had a closeted eight-year relationship during the deeply homophobic 1950s. The balance between rejecting the macho abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock while resisting giving away personal feelings lead to Johns’ focus on familiar images that seem to have an obscured deeper truth.

Rauschenberg • Robert Rauschenberg made works that had specific meaning to himself, but were open to interpretation by the viewer.

• He made what he called combines, which were assemblages of various objects (like a collage of a wide variety of objects).

• He often incorporated three-dimensional objects, clippings from newspapers/magazines, and roughly painted sections.

• In the 1960s, he adopted the use of silk screen painting, enabling him to reproduce appropriated news images and photographs onto his canvases.

• In Canyon, tilted pieces of printed paper and photographs cover parts of the canvas, painted over in parts with paint. A stuffed eagle spreads its wings as if lifting off into flight. A billow dangles from a string attached to a wooden stick below.

• Although the viewer may recognize aspects, the overall meaning may seem ambiguous.

• Canyon was a reference to a Rembrandt painting that depicted Jupiter, in the form of an eagle, carrying the boy Ganymede into the sky. What does the pillow represent?

Canyon Robert Rauschenberg, 1959. Oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube, and mirror on canvas, with oil on bald eagle, string, and pillow.

6’9” x 5’10” x 2’.

Monogram

Lichtenstein • Roy Lichtenstein was famous for appropriating images from romance comics, a form of entertainment meant to be read and discarded, and immortalizing/glorifying them on large canvases.

• His works are typically melodramatic, and often include “thought bubble” words.

• He utilized the print production techniques of comics, including black outlines, flat areas of color, and benday dots (named after their inventor, Benjamin Day), which, as in Pointillism, created modulations of color by varying the color and size of dots and their background color.

• The underlying meaning of his work is the industrialization of America (and the world). He created emotionally charged artworks using the cool, detached style of comics.

• Lichtenstein felt that, although Pop art was considered American, it was really just industrial art, and that as the world became more industrialized, Pop art would become an international style of art.

Hopeless Roy Lichtenstein, 1963.

Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 3’8” x 3’8”.

Green Coca-Cola Bottles

Marilyn Diptych.

Andy Warhol, 1962 CE. Oil, acrylic, and silkscreen enamel on canvas. 6’ x 9’.

Warhol • Started as a commercial artist illustrating shoes for catalogues • Warhol used his experience in the advertising industry to create artworks that commented on celebrity, mass production, and consumer culture.

• He utilized screen printing to “mass produce” images, repeating the same image again and again.

• His “Crash” series focused on repeating images of horrific car accidents, exploring the desensitization that results from being exposed to images of horrible events.

• As he became a successful Pop artist, he named his art studio The Factory. Although he created the ideas for artworks, his workers did the physical act of screen printing.

• Blurred the line between art and advertising/commerce.

• Marilyn Diptych is so called because it is split into two halves, like a medieval Christian altarpiece. This implies that we should worship Marilyn like a religious icon.

• Uses the monumental size and unfocused, “allover composition” of the abstract expressionists, but removes the personal expressive qualities through mass production techniques.

Marilyn Diptych. Andy Warhol, 1962 CE. Oil, acrylic, and silkscreen enamel on canvas. 6’ x 9’.

Marilyn Diptych • Why did Warhol repeat the image so many times? What does the repetition communicate?

• Warhol had an entire workshop of assistants (called “The Factory”) who helped him physically make his artworks. Why is this still considered “his” art? How does it relate to the meaning of his artwork?

• The images are arranged into a grid, similar to a photographer’s contact sheet, or a film strip.

• What happened to Marilyn Monroe shortly before this artwork was made?

• Why did Warhol paint one side of the diptych in color, and the other side in black and white?

• Does this painting de-sensitize the viewer, or does it help to evoke sympathy?

• This painting is more than a mere celebration of Monroe’s iconic status. It is an invitation to consider the consequences of the increasing role of mass media images in our everyday lives.

Oldenburg

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks.

Claes Oldenburg, 1969. 21’ high. Cor-Ten steel, steel, aluminum, and cast resin; painted with polyurethane enamel.

• Claes (“Kloss”) Oldenburg is known for Pop sculptures.

• Oldenburg’s sculptures feature large-scale everyday objects, and often have a sense of humor to them.

• He is well known for his “soft sculptures”, in which he depicted everyday objects recreated (in large scale) out of soft fabrics, such as slices of cake, electric fans, and toilets.

• Many of his sculptures are intended for outdoor public spaces, such as parks or city centers.

• While some are more serious (like Lipstick Ascending) others are designed to deflate the self-seriousness of the world.

• Oldenburg stated in 1961: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum […] I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary […].”

Oldenburg

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks.

Claes Oldenburg, 1969. 21’ high. Cor-Ten steel, steel, aluminum, and cast resin; painted with polyurethane enamel.

• His first major outdoor work was Lipstick on Caterpillar Tracks, a work made in secret and installed (uninvited) on the campus of Yale University (his alma mater).

• The work was intended to be a platform for anti-war protesters giving speeches, and was positioned next to a WWI monument and the Yale president’s office.

• The original work featured plywood treads and a vinyl balloon for the red part of the lipstick, which had to be inflated by the speaker (underscoring the ironic sexual innuendo).

• Due to vandalism and deterioration, the sculpture was reconstructed using metal and fiberglass. Yale formally accepted the controversial gift in 1974.

• He combined the highly “feminine” product with the “masculine” machinery of war to critique both the hawkish, hyper-masculine military and the blatant consumerism of the United States.

• In addition to its feminine associations, the large lipstick tube is phallic and bullet-like, making the benign beauty product seem masculine or even violent. The juxtaposition implied that the U.S. obsession with beauty and consumption both fueled and distracted from the ongoing violence in Vietnam.

Superrealism • Sometimes also known as Photorealism • Like Pop artists, the Superrealists sought a form of artistic communication more accessible to the public than the remote, unfamiliar visual language of the Abstract Expressionists, Post-Painterly Abstractionists, and Minimalists.

• Worked primarily in the 1960s-70s • Used scrupulous faithfulness to optical fact.

Marilyn Audrey Flack, 1977.

Oil over acrylic airbrushed on canvas, 8’ sq.

Close • Seattle-born Chuck Close is a Superrealist artist who focuses on creating large-scale portraits of himself and friends (non-famous) • Working from photographs, Close aimed to translate photographic information into paintings.

• By enlarging a work, yet maintaining the varying levels of focus achieved by photography, Close brought the viewers attention to areas they might not otherwise notice. “In my work, the blurred areas don’t come into focus, but they are too large to be ignored.”

• He utilized various techniques to achieve his desired look, including airbrush, razor blades, and drills. His process to enlarge images involved making matching grids.

• At age 48, he suffered a seizure due to the collapse of a spinal nerve, which left him mostly paralyzed from the neck down. He is still able to make some minor movements with his arms, and walk for a few steps at a time.

• Because of his new physical impairment, Close was forced to modify his style. Although he still used his grid system, he now used larger squares, filled with round circles of color. Although from up close, his work appears to be random ovals of color, from a distance the colors blend to create a pixelated photograph like image.

Big Self-Portrait Chuck Close, 1968.

Acrylic on canvas, 9’ x 7’.

Hanson • Duane Hanson was a Superrealist sculptor.

• He perfected a technique of creating life-like human sculptures.

• First, he created plaster molds from real people. He then assembled the molds, and filled them with polyester resin. After removing the molds to expose the resin, he painted the resin with airbrush, and added clothing and accessories.

• His sculptures are easily mistaken for real people at first.

• His sculptures depict stereotypical average Americans, striking chords with the public because of their familiarity.

• “The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lowerand middle-class American types of today. To me, the resignation, emptiness and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people… I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our time.”

Supermarket Shopper Duane Hanson, 1970.

Polyester resin and fiberglass polychromed in oil, with clothing, steel cart, and groceries, life-size.

Feminist Art • In the 1960s and 70s, with the rising Feminist and Civil Rights movements, art began to embrace the persuasive power to communicate with a wide audience. • In the 70s, many artists began to investigate the social dynamics of power and privilege, especially in relation to gender (although racial and sexual orientation issues have also figured prominently in the art of recent decades). • Feminist artists sought equal rights for women in contemporary society, and focused attention on the subservient place of women in societies throughout history.

The Dinner Party Judy Chicago, 1979. Multimedia (ceramics and stitchery), 48’ per side.

Judy Chicago • A major goal of Judy Cohen, who took the name Judy Chicago, was to educate the public about women’s role in history and the fine arts, and to establish a respect for women and their art.

• Inspired by O’Keeffe, in the early 1970s, Chicago began planning a large scale work, the Dinner Party, using craft techniques (like china painting and needlework), traditionally “women’s work” (the “dinner party” theme also references a woman’s traditional role as homemaker).

• The original idea was to have a new version of the Last Supper, where the 13 honored guests were all female (13 also corresponding to the number in a coven, as Chicago originally intended her work to reference worship of the Mother Goddess) • In her research, she discovered many worth women, and tripled her original amount to 39, making a triangle (female and Goddess symbol) with 13 women per side. An additional 999 women’s names are written on the white tile floor.

• The guests included Emily Dickinson, Hatshepsut, O’Keeffe, Sacagawea, Susan B. Anthony (suffragist), and Virginia Woolfe.

• Each woman had a unique table runner and plate, designed (using variations on butterfly, symbol of liberation, and vulvar, symbol of female sexuality, motifs) to represent their specific contributions.

Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) Barbara Kruger, 1981.

Photograph, red painted frame, 4’7” x 3’5”.

Kruger • Barbara Kruger began her career as a commercial graphic designer, and rose to be the art director of Mademoiselle magazine in the late 1960s.

• Fascinated by the strategies and techniques of contemporary mass media, she incorporated the layout techniques magazines and billboards used to sell consumer goods.

• However, Kruger’s goal was to subvert the typical use of advertising imagery. She aimed to expose the deceptiveness of the media messages the viewer absorbs.

• Kruger wanted to undermine the myths – particularly those about women – the media constantly reinforces. Her large work-and-photograph collages challenge the cultural attitudes embedded in commercial advertising.

• In Untitled (Your Gaze…), Kruger overlaid the words on a classically beautiful sculpted female face.

• The words are spread apart, creating a jolted, staccato feeling which delays comprehension of the message while increasing its dramatic intensity.

Guerrilla Girls • A group of anonymous feminist artists banded together in 1985 to form the Guerrilla Girls, a guerrilla art group that wore gorilla masks in public (to force critics to focus on their messages rather than their personal lives/personalities).

• The Guerrilla Girls used a graphic design-based style (with a heavy emphasis on text), combining humor with statistics regarding sexism in the art world.

• Their messages have taken many avenues, including posters, billboards, and paid advertising in major art publications like ArtForum.

• Although members have changed over the years, the Guerrilla Girls group is still actively making work.

The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist Guerrilla Girls, 1988. Offset lithograph, 17” x 22”.

Ringgold & Saar • Faith Ringgold is an African American woman from Harlem, New York. Her artworks address both gender and race.

• Born in 1930, she studied painting at the City College of NY and taught art in NY public schools.

• In the 70s, she began creating works that incorporated fabric, such as the story quilt Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, as it referenced traditional women’s crafts and her mother’s work as a fashion designer. After her mother’s death, Ringgold began work on Who’s Afraid…?

• Incorporates painted characters, traditional triangular quilting, and sections of text retelling the story of Aunt Jemima, a traditional “mammy” character used to sell baking products by reminding white buyers of an idealized version of the pre-Civil War era, redefined by Ringgold as a successful business woman.

• “Jemima could do anything she set her mind to. When Ma Tillie and Pa Blakey, Jemima’s Ma and Pa, forbid her to marry Big Rufus Cook on account a they wanted her to marry a preacher, Jemima up and marry Big Rufus anyway, and they run off to Tampa, Florida to work for Ole Man and Ole Lady Prophet cookin, cleanin and takin care a they chirun, somethin Jemima never had to do livin in her Ma and Pa’s comfortable home in New Orleans.”

• Betye Saar also explored theme in her assemblage in a window box called the Liberation of Aunt Jemima.

Liberation of Aunt Jemima Betye Saar, 1972.

Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?

Faith Ringgold, 1983. 7’6” x 6’8”.

Acrylic on canvas with fabric borers, quilted.

Earth Art • Also sometimes called earthworks, land art, or environmental art.

• Most are site-specific (intended for a specific location).

• Became popular in the 1960s & 70s during a time of increasing awareness of environmental/ecological issues, such as pollution and the depletion of natural resources.

• Environmental artists used their art to call attention to the landscape, often using organic or natural materials.

• The challenge of earthworks is the removal of the art from the sphere of museums and galleries.

• Although most environmental artists encourage spectator interaction with their works, the remote locations of many earthworks ironically have limited public access.

Spiral Jetty Robert Smithson, 1970.

Great Salt Lake, Utah.

Smithson • Spiral Jetty is considered the primary work of Robert Smithson, an artist who was inspired to create the work when he stumbled upon abandoned oil drilling machinery on the side of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. He saw it as a sign of nature’s inconquerability.

• He made a jetty 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide of mud, basalt rocks, and earth. He was inspired to create the shape based on the roundness of the environment and the spiral shape of salt crystals contained in the lake. Site-specific.

• As the water level of the lake rises and falls, the jetty at times is dry and at other time is submerged. Although the basalt rocks were originally black against the red, algae-filled water, they are now white against pink due to the salt.

• Smithson died in a plane crash at 35, and a debate has Lightning Field continued since whether to let weather and time take its natural Walter de Maria, effects on the piece, or to preserve it (Smithson was interested 1977. in entropy, and expressed his desire to let it erode).

Western New • Another earthwork is Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field, a grid Mexico.

400 polished of steel poles designed to attract lightning during New Mexico’s stainless steel summer monsoons. poles (~20.5’ tall) • Visitors can stay in a remote log cabin overnight during the arranged in a 1 mile x 1km grid. summer months. Only six may stay at a time, encouraging visitors to experience the work in solitude.

Performance Art • Emerged in the 1960s-70s.

• Artists questioned “what is art?” by replacing the traditional art object (painting, sculpture, etc.) with movements, gestures, and sounds performed before an audience, whose members sometimes participate in the performance.

• Pushed art outside of the mainstream museum/gallery.

• Incorporated the integral element of time.

• Antidote to the pretentiousness of most traditional art objects.

• Challenged (at least initially) art’s function as a commodity (since performances could not be bought and sold by a museum). However, museums eventually began commissioning performances.

Yayoi Kusama. Original installation and performance 1966. Mirror balls.

Happening – a performance, initially planned, but involving some spontaneity & audience participation.

Narcissus Garden • Japanese artist, born 1929. Discouraged from doing art during childhood (not proper role for women). Moved to NYC in her 20s.

• Creates installation art – three-dimensional works that often are site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space.

• Originally, the mirrored orbs were displayed on a lawn during the 1966 Venice Biennale (most prestigious international art exhibition, held every 2 years). The close proximity of the orbs created an infinite sea of reflections and distortions.

• When a person looks into a mirrored ball, all they see is their own reflection, symbolic of their own ego/narcissisum.

• Performative aspect: Kusama began selling the balls to passers-by for $2, with a sign YOUR NARCISSISM FOR SALE. During this happening she accentuated her “otherness” by wearing a gold kimono.

• Her performance was both self-promoting and also critical of the commercial aspect of the art world.

• Reproductions have been commissioned/installed in NYC Central Park & in the garden of a wealthy Brazilian industrial tycoon.

• Now very expensive, they are a trophy of self-importance. Once intended as the media for an interactive performance between artist and viewer, they are now a valuable commodity for display, and encourage viewers to indulge in their own narcissism by taking a selfie of their reflection in the famous sculpture.

Dots Obsession

Fireflies on the Water Infinity Mirror Room at the Broad right now, closes in September!

Infinity Mirror Room

Cage • John Cage was a composer who felt that the closed structures marking traditional music separated it from the unpredictable and multilayered qualities of daily existence.

• He brought to music composition some of the ideas of Duchamp and of Eastern philosophy, using methods such as chance.

• He developed the concept of “indeterminacy,” wherein the composer leaves much of the interpretation of a musical composition up to the performer.

• Cage also experimented with using varied sounds made by non-traditional instruments (considered all sounds to be of equal value), and is considered one of the early precursors to electronic music.

• His most famous piece is 4’33” (pronounced “four minutes, thirty three seconds”), a piece containing only rests (silence) for the instrumentalist. The musician sits still with their instrument for four minutes and thirty three seconds, bowing to signal the end of the piece. The “music” is the unplanned sounds and noises (such as coughs and whispers) emanating from the audience during the performance.

4’33” John Cage, 1952.

Beuys • Joseph Beuys (sounds like “boys”) was a German artist who was influenced by the ideas of American performance art.

• During WWII, he was a German fighter pilot. Shot down over the Crimea (near the Black Sea) by Russians, he maintained that he was rescued by nomadic Tartars, who wrapped him in felt and animal fat to insulate him from the cold (materials he used in his later art).

• He believed the role of the artist was to be like shaman, an individual with special spiritual powers.

• In “How to…” he coated his face with honey and gold leaf (representing nature and thought). His shoe was tied to a magnet, attracted to the iron slab on the floor (earthly strength).

• “…everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or question. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as I said, even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. “ • “…my technique has been to try and seek out the energy points in the human power field, rather than demanding specific knowledge or reactions on then part of the public. I try to bring to light the complexity of creative areas.”

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

Performance at Schmela Gallery, Dusseldorf.

Burden • Chris Burden’s early works from the 1970s involve endurance, physical pain, and danger. They questioned the violence and brutality of the Vietnam War. • In 1971, he had an assistant shoot him through the arm from about five meters away in the performance Shoot.

• In his 1974 performance Trans-Fixed, he was nailed through the palms (like a crucifix) to a Volkswagen beetle, while the car revved to mimic a howl of pain.

• Through the Night Softly (1973) – wriggled on his stomach over twenty feet of broken glass, shirtless, with hands tied behind his back.

• 220 (1971) – Burden and three friends filled a gallery at midnight with 1 foot of water. In the gallery were four wooden ladders. Each person climbed a ladder, then Burden dropped a 220 volt electrical cord into the water, trapping everyone on their ladder. Although his goal was to create a “life-raft like situation,” the participants eventually were able to sleep on their ladders. The experiment ended at 6am when Burden’s wife switched off the electricity.

• Burden’s more recent work focuses on installations, such as Urban Light (a collection of antique Los Angeles street lamps lamps installed in front of LACMA) and Metropolis II.

Shoot Chris Burden

Contemporary Art • The term “contemporary art” can be applied to any recently made art; it is not defined by any particular style or belief.

• Post-modern art, by contrast, is art which rejects some or all of the tenets of modernism. While all post-modern art is contemporary, some contemporary art is not post-modern.

• There is no one particular style of post-modern art. It is a plurality of various styles and themes.

• Most commonly, post-modern art deals with social issues (such as race, gender, and sexual orientation) as well as political issues.

Grand Louvre Pyramide Ieoh Ming Pei, 1988.

Louvre Museum, Paris.

I. M. Pei • Ieoh Ming Pei designed the Grand Pyramids in the Louvre Museum’s central courtyard (which was originally a palace) in 1988. Initially criticized the design as jarring next to the centuries-old buildings around it, but eventually became iconic of the museum, which spans the history of art from ancient to post-modern.

• Includes four pyramids (one large central plus three smaller) and triangular fountains, echoing the glass of the pyramids.

• Serves as the entrance to the museum as well as a skylight for the lobby, ticket booths, and gift shops below.

• Materials evoke sense of modernity, but shape (pyramid) evokes ancient Egypt (the museum houses an extensive ancient Egyptian collection).

• Clear glass material allows view of the buildings behind to remain unobstructed to viewers on the ground.

Keith Haring • Keith Haring began his art career making chalk drawings in the NYC subway system, where he drew energetic linear figures on the black advertising spaces that didn’t presently have ads.

• Although he was initially arrested whenever police saw him, his style gained popularity, and he began selling to collectors.

• Eventually, he opened a gallery where he sold a variety of products (such as hats, shirts, buttons, and bags) displaying his figures, especially his crawling baby and barking dog figures.

• In the 1980s New York City, AIDS was a quickly spreading epidemic, which hit the homosexual population especially hard.

Haring, who was gay, lent his drawings to ACT UP (an organization dedicated to AIDS awareness and research) and Planned Parenthood (an organization that offers low-cost STD testing). He died of the virus in 1990.

• Tuttomondo (“everyone”) was Haring’s last commission before his death. He painted the side of a building in Pisa, Italy, with his brightly-colored characteristic energetic characters. It is a hymn to the joy of life.

Tuttomondo Keith Haring, 1989.

Sant’Antonio, Pisa, Italy.

Self-Portrait 1980

Robert Mapplethorpe

Self-Portrait 1988 Self-Portrait 1980

• Born in Queens, NY, and studied drawing and painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he eventually turned to photography.

• Mapplethorpe’s black and white photographs have a silvery surface rich in a wide range of values and minute details.

• His photographs depicted people, many nude, some homoerotic and/or sadomasochistic in nature.

• His traveling exhibition, The Perfect Moment, became the focus of protests. It was cancelled in some cities, and when it was displayed in Cincinnati, the museum and curator were indicted by the state government on charges of obscenity (of which they were acquitted by a jury six months later).

• As an artist who received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), the controversial nature of Mapplethorpe’s photographs lead to a national debate over what type of art should be publicly funded.

• Discuss the three self-portraits in the upper left.

Banksy

Shepard Fairey

Murakami

Early Modernists Europe: 1900-1920 Fauvism, German Expressionism, Primitivism/Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Suprematism/Constructivism

Context: Europe 1900-1920 - Non-European influences to European art and culture due to imperialism and colonialism.

- Pessimism and a sense of hopelessness due to war and conflict.

Rising nationalism results in military build-up in central Europe, creates rivalry between major powers.

- New building technologies due to rapid industrialization (reinforced concrete, steel, the skyscraper) - New awareness of space and time due to scientific discoveries/inventions – Wright brothers (flight), Einstein (theory of relativity), and Ford (automobile).

- Mass communication increases – ideas spread – Edison (motion picture camera), Marconi (radio) - New interest in the inner world of fantasy, dreams, sexuality, neurosis due to studies and writings of human psyche by Freud (psychoanalysis), Jung (collective unconscious).

- Rise of new political ideologies between 1900 and 1940, such as Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.

What is Modernism?

1. Interest in psychological reality and imagined reality.

2. Art that calls attention to the process of its making, or calls attention to itself as art.

3. Focus on the individual in the form of self-analysis and self-expression.

4. Desire for freedom from the academic art institutions and traditional processes of art-making.

5. Interest in the exotic and in new sources of imagery which are often non-Western.

6. Elements of art – line shape form, value, color, texture – used to create structure in an artwork.

7. Experimentation and use of modern materials and technology for art-making.

8. Challenging conventional ideas of what is “beautiful.”

9. Fracturing of image and the process of various ways of abstraction.

10. The objectification of the art work – the painting as an object itself. Moving away from illusionary space.

11. The “shock of the new” – emphasis on innovation 12. The avante-garde, or “front lines” of artists, pushing boundaries and challenging tradition.

Picasso • “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them.” - Picasso • Picasso was a prodigious young Spanish artist who had already mastered Realism by the time he enrolled in an art academy.

• His early career saw a brief period of Impressionism as well as a Blue Period (1901-1904), in which he expressed his inner melancholy by depicting sad figures using mostly blue tones.

• Not satisfied, he continued searching for new and innovative ways to depict things (a search that continued through his long career, leading him to constantly evolve in style).

• Inspired by the geometry of African masks he had collected, as well as ancient Iberian (the peninsula on which Spain and Portugal are located) statues, he began working on Les Demoiselle’s d’Avignon (the Young Women of Avignon).

• Although originally from Spain, Picasso spent most of his life living in Paris.

The Tragedy

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother

Man with Guitar

Picasso • Inspired by the geometry of African masks he had collected, as well as ancient Iberian (the peninsula on which Spain and Portugal are located) statues, he began working on Les Demoiselle’s d’Avignon (the Young Women of Avignon).

• A retrospective of Cezanne’s work displayed his famous Bathers painting (bottom left). This motivated Henri Matisse to do a painting in the same theme called Bonheur de Vivre (bottom right).

Competitive Picasso sought to outdo Matisse’s version with his own.

• What is similar between Picasso’s and Cezanne’s paintings? What is different between Picasso’s and Matisse’s?

• Originally intended to be called Philosophical Bordello, it initially had two men mingling with the women in the reception room of a brothel on Avignon Street in Barcelona. One man was a sailor, the other was a medical student. There was a bowl of fruit (sexuality).

• How do the sailor and the medical student symbolize Picasso?

• Picasso removed the men, and simplified the room to draperies.

How does the removal of the men change the painting?

• Though it seems “quick” and sketch-like, Picasso did over 100 planning drawings before beginning this painting.

• Are the women in front of or behind the curtains?

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Pablo Picasso, 1907.

Oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’8”

Picasso • The three figures on the left are rendered with the calm, ideal features of the Iberian sculptures he had seen.

• The two figures on the right have energetic, violently striated features based on African masks. Picasso was drawn to the aggressive qualities of the masks.

• The intimidating/aggressive mask-like features allude to Picasso’s fear of the prostitutes, and his fear that they might give him syphilis.

• To match the powerful new two heads of his right figures, Picasso also revised their bodies by breaking them into more ambiguous planes, suggesting a combination of views.

• The woman on the far left is based on ancient Iberian sculptures (to give a crude directness). The woman in the center is a reference to Matisse’s painting (a figure shown in the same pose).

• The last figure, 2nd from left, is the prostitute “chosen” by Picasso (as indicated by the point of the fruit-topped table at the bottom).

• She raises one arm, and pulls a sheet up with the other, in a pose that looks as if she is already laying down in a bed. Picasso here renders two moments in time: we first look across at the row of women, and then we look down on to the prostitute of our/Picasso’s choice.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Pablo Picasso, 1907.

Oil on canvas, 8’ x 7’8”

Primitivism & Cubism • Cubism – -Developed by Picasso and Braque in 1906.

-Dissected three dimensional objects into their various parts, then reassembled them on the picture plane in a new order.

-Influenced by the radical new understanding of the physical world introduced by Einstein, which disrupted the Newtonian idea of the universe as an orderly machine.

-Two main branches: analytical and synthetic. Analytical cubism involved the analysis and dissection of the form, which was then painted by the artist (such as the example to the right). In Synthetic cubism (1912), artists assembled paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials.

• Primitivism -The incorporation of stylistic elements from Africa, Oceania, and the native peoples of the Americas into the art of European artists was called Primitivism. Artists like Picasso collected non-Western art, admiring it for its different stylistic preferences and standards.

-The availability of non-Western art was a result of imperialism. Museums displaying the “curiosities,” such as statues of tribal gods, reinforced the perceived need for the “barbaric” people to be civilized, and thus justified colonialism.

Girl with Mandolin Pablo Picasso

Still Life with Chair Caning Picasso, 1912.

Oil, oilcloth, and rope • Picasso was constantly challenging himself to try new styles, on canvas. 10” x 1’2”.

Other Picasso Work

Girl Before a Mirror (1932)

Three Musicians (1921)

Girl with Mandolin (1910)

materials, and approaches to art making. As a result, his long career shows a variety of styles.

• His early work, including Girl with Mandolin and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are classified as Analytic Cubism, characterized by the artist’s careful analysis of the 3 dimensional form of their subject, which they fragmented and reassembled from different viewpoints.

• In 1912, with the creation of Still Life with Chair Caning, Cubism entered its Synthetic Cubism phase, during which artists assembled, or “synthesized” their Cubist vision (still from multiple viewpoints) of their subject.

• Still Life with Chair Caning is assembled using oil paint, rope, and a lithographic reproduction of a photo of chair “caning” (the woven seat of a chair). Because the image of the caning is an illusion, the non-representational painted forms seem more honest/real.

• The letters JOU reference the masthead of newspapers (journeaux), and also is a play on “jouer” (play) and “jouir” (enjoy).

The illusion of the letters is broken by the U falling out of the shape around it, and falling under the thin cylinder above.

• The diamond pattern in Three Musicians and Girl Before a Mirror references Harlequin, a clown character in popular plays to whom Picasso likened himself.

Guernica

Guernica Picasso, 1937. Oil on canvas. 11’5” x 25’5”.

• • • • • • • • •

Guernica Picasso, 1937. Oil on canvas. 11’5” x 25’5”.

Guernica • Although he moved to Paris, Picasso kept an eye on the political events in his home country of Spain.

• In the 1930s, a civil war broke out in Spain. Although he believed that art should be used as “an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy,” when an exiled Spanish official in Paris asked Picasso to produce a major work for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, he hesitated.

• Shortly thereafter, the city of Guernica, the capital of the Basque region of Spain, was brutally bombed by Nazi air forces allied with the rebel Spanish general Francisco Franco. They bombed the city at the busiest hour of a market day, killing or wounding many of Guernica’s 7000 inhabitants.

• News of the bombing jolted Picasso into action, and he completed the large-scale painting in only two months.

• The painting shows the aftermath of a bombing (no bombs shown, no German planes). It could be the aftermath of any war atrocity.

• Discuss what each figure is doing.

• The bull represents brutality and darkness.

• The fragmentation and dislocation of the figures echoes the actual horror and pain of the event.

• To accent the starkness, he limited his palette to greyscale.

Georges Braque • Braque and Picasso pioneered both Analytic and Synthetic Cubism together, both making important works in each sub-genre.

• This painting is an example of the earlier Analytic Cubist era.

• The subject of the painting is a musician that the artist recalled seeing years earlier in a bar in Marseilles.

• How is this work (as well as Girl with Mandolin) different from the work o the Fauves and German Expressionists?

• Braque’s dissection of the man and his instrument is so thorough that the viewer must look closely to discover clues to the subject.

• Braque left some lighter areas transparent, so that the viewer could look through the plane of the lighter color to a different image below.

• He added stenciled letters and numbers to add to the painting’s complexity. The letters are flat shapes, and they lie flat on the painted canvas surface, yet the shading and shapes of other forms seem to flow behind and underneath them, pushing the letters and numbers forward.

Sometimes they seem attached to the surface of some object within the painting.

• The letters seem to anchor the painting in the world of representation, thereby increasing the tension between representation and abstraction, and creating a sense of doubt and ambiguity for the viewer.

The Portuguese Georges Braque, 1911.

Oil on canvas, 3’10” x 2’8”

Red Room (Harmony in Red) Matisse

Fauvism • In 1905, at the third Autumn Salon in Paris, a group of young painters exhibited canvases so simplified in design and bright in color that a critic described the artists as fauves, or wild beasts.

• Fauvists were influenced by Gauguin and van Gogh, but went even further in using color experimentally, to create emotions.

• They worked with spontaneity, creating textured surfaces, linear patterns, and bright, expressive colors.

• The movement only stayed together about five years before the artists went on to pursue separate, individual styles.

Goldfish.

Matisse.

1912 CE. Oil on canvas.

Matisse • Henri Matisse, a French painter, was the most successful of the Fauve artists. Goldfish were one of his favorite motifs.

• He strove to use color to convey meaning.

• Matisse thought of colors in a painting to be similar to notes in a musical composition. Influenced by Cezanne.

• The goldfish immediately attract our attention due to their color.

The bright orange strongly contrasts with the more subtle pinks and greens that surround the fish bowl and the blue-green background.

• Blue and orange, as well as green and red, are complementary colors and, when placed next to one another, appear even brighter.

• Inspired by a trip to Morocco, where the locals entertained themselves by gazing for hours at goldfish.

• Matisse wanted this painting to be a relaxing experience for the viewer, like sitting in a comfy chair after a long day. The goldfish represent the “lost paradise” of a peaceful mind.

• Also metaphorical for Matisse’s own studio (his own plants, fish, and furniture are featured), as he painted this painting inside his own atrium, which surrounded him with glass (just like the fish).

• Despite the calming subject matter, the incongruous angles and illogical flattening of forms creates a sense of tension and ambiguity.

Reflects Matisse’s interest in depicting things from multiple views.

Street, Dresden Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1908.

Oil on canvas, 4’11” x 6’7”.

German Expressionism • German Expressionists also used color to express their ideas, but even more so they used distortions of form, ragged outlines, and agitated brushstrokes.

• Protested the decadence of the upper class, and the alienation of urbanized society.

• There were two major factions of German Expressionists, as well as some artists who did not associate with any faction.

-Die Brücke (The Bridge) – Gathered in Dresden in 1905 under the leadership of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. So named because they felt they “bridged” the gap between old and new. Based on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra the bridge represented a personal journey of self discovery. Modeled themselves on medieval craft guilds whose members lived together and practiced all the arts equally.

-Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) – Formed in Munich in 1911 by Kandinsky and Marc. Named whimsically after Kandinsky and Marc’s mutual interest in the color blue and horses.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1916. Oil on canvas.

Self-Portrait as a Soldier • In the early 1900s, the Die Brucke artists were confident and believed the lived in an era of great change & modernity.

• Influences: so-called “primitive” art from ancient and non-western cultures, as well as European rural folk art. This they perceived to be more “honest” and “direct”. Figures were more simplified and abstracted, but jarringly set in urban settings.

• Kirchner volunteered to be a military driver (avoiding a more dangerous role) but was declared unfit due to ill health. He never saw battle in person.

• Why is he depicted in a soldier’s uniform, then?

• Other artists at the time depicted war amputees to shame politicians.

Kirchner shows his own hand cut off, but he never really lost his hand.

What does it represent?

• During the war, Kirchner suffered from alcohol & drug abuse, and experienced paralysis in his feet/hands. His fears about the war seemed self-fulfilling.

• Eventually, he recovered from his addictions, and became productive again, to much acclaim.

• After Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, he persecuted artists who painted outside the traditional style, and set up an art exhibition to shame avant-garde artists (Degenerate Art exhibition 1937). Thirty Kirchner works were exhibited. In his shame, he killed himself in 1938.

Improvisation 28 Vassily Kandinsky, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 3’8” x 5’4”

Kandinsky • Kandinsky was one of the founding members of the Der Blaue Reiter movement. He moved from his homeland of Russia (Moscow) to Germany in 1896.

• Kandinsky was a well-read intellectual, who gave up a promising career teaching economics to begin painting. He also taught his artistic theories at the Bauhaus for several years.

• Reading new scientific theories about atomic structure by scientists like Einstein and Planck convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance, thereby shattering his faith in a world of tangible things.

• Instead, he focused on creating a spiritual experience through art.

In addition to being pleasing to the eye, certain colors (or combinations of colors) could resonate with a person’s soul.

• Furthermore, different colors had different meanings (for instance, white is clarity, hope, and silence, whereas black is obscurity, hopelessness, and death).

• He took the relationship between music and art to a new level, associating certain sounds to different colors (for instance, yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet).

• He elaborated on his many theories in two treatises, Point and Line on Plane, and Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Franz Marc • Marc grew increasingly pessimistic about the state of humanity, especially as World War I loomed on the horizon.

• He depicted animals because he believed they were more pure than flawed humanity, and thus more appropriate vehicles to express an inner truth.

• He ascribed certain attributes to different colors. He wrote in a letter that “blue is the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, happy, and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy.”

• Fate of the Animals was painted at the brink of World War I, which started the next year. He was killed in the Battle of Verdun.

• The animals in the painting appear trapped in a forest amid falling trees, some apocalyptic event destroying both the forest and the animals.

• Marc distorted and fragmented the scene like shattered glass.

• The darker colors of severity and brutality dominate.

• On the back of the canvas, Marc wrote: “All being is flaming suffering.”

Fate of the Animals Franz Marc (German), 1913.

Oil on canvas, 6’4” x 8’9”.

Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing Egon Schiele, 1910.

Gouache, watercolor, • Schiele had a prolific career, making over 3000 artworks and pencil on paper. (including 100 self-portraits), despite dying of Spanish flu at 1’10” x 1’2”.

Egon Schiele

28.

• He was not formally associated with any Expressionist group, and lived in Austria.

• He worked predominately with gouache (a type of opaque watercolor) and watercolor.

• As a teenager, Schiele watched the slow, painful deterioration of his father, who contracted syphilis and died when Egon was 15. Schiele afterward associated sex with physical and emotional pain and death.

• Protégé of Klimt, and was influenced by van Gogh and Munch.

• Depictions primarily depicted emaciated bodies and tormented psyches.

• In what ways did Schiele emphasize the repulsiveness of the figure?

Brancusi • Romanian. Peasant parents. Showed early talent for carving tools. A wealthy merchant noticed his skills and sent him to art school.

• After Romanian schooling, moved to Paris. Brought with him fold art traditions of Romania. He was also interested in folk art of Africa and pre-Classical Mediterranean art.

• Brancusi sought to move beyond surface appearances to capture the essence or spirit of the object depicted.

• Created “honest” art by having the design reflect the natural properties of the materials (The Kiss is blocky stone, while Bird in Space is aerodynamic metal).

• Like Picasso and Gauguin, Brancusi was interested in the “honesty” of abstracted “primitive” art of Africa (and Brancusi’s home Romania).

• Although a talented carver who could do realism, Brancusi strove to show abstract concepts. For instance, Bird in Space depicts the concept of “flight”. What abstract idea does The Kiss depict?

• Brancusi made multiple versions of each of his ideas, each time becoming more abstracted and simplified.

• A plaster cast of The Kiss was displayed at the Armory Show in NY. • The eyes of the 2 figures in The Kiss seem to unite as one cyclopian eye. What does this mean?

• Often designed his own, more natural or unusual pedestals

The Kiss Constantin Brancusi, 1907-08 CE. Limestone. 11” tall.

Bird in Space

Sleeping Muse

Cubist Sculpture • The Russian artist Archipenko was influenced by Analytic Cubism.

• He explored the Cubist idea of spatial ambiguity and the relationship between sold forms and space.

• In this sculpture, instead of sculpting a head, he left a negative space (void) where here head should be. Although negative spaces have been common in art throughout history, this was one of the first in which it was an integral part of the design/composition.

• The negative space is of equal importance to the form.

• Julio Gonzalez was a Spanish artist and friend of Picasso, who was from a family of metalworkers. He helped Picasso with several sculptures that Picasso designed.

• While helping Picasso with the technical aspects of welding, Gonzalez in turn learned about abstract sculpture.

• In his version of Woman Combing her Hair, he used prefabricated materials (such as iron rods and sheets), which he welded together to make the sculpture.

• The overall effect is rougher and rawer than Archipenko’s smooth bronze cast.

• Furthermore, Gonzalez’s take is less realistic than Archipenko’s.

While Achipenko’s is easily identifiable as a female figure, Gonzalez’s is not.

Woman Combing Her Hair Aleksander Archipenko, 1915.

Bronze, 1’2” tall.

Woman Combing Her Hair Julio Gonzalez, 1936.

Welded Iron, 4’4” tall.

The City Fernand Léger, 1919.

Oil on canvas, 7’7” x 9’9”.

Purism & Fernand Léger • Purism, an art movement founded by the architect and painter Le Corbusier, believed that Cubism was merely decorative, and out of touch with the “machine age.”

• Purists maintained machinery’s clean functional lines and the pure forms of its parts should direct artists’ experiments in design.

• Fernand Léger, a former French Cubist, was inspired by the “machine aesthetic,” and brought together the meticulous Cubist analysis of form with Purism’s broad simplification and machinelike finish of the design components.

• Léger’s works have the sharp precision of a machine, whose beauty and quality he appreciated.

• He incorporated into his works the massive effects of modern posters and billboard advertisements, the harsh flashing of electric lights, and the noise of traffic.

• He depicted the mechanical commotion of urban life, including the robotic movements of mechanized people.

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

Oil on canvas, 2’11” x 3’7”.

Futurism • Futurism was a movement located in Italy that shared many of the same interests as the French Cubists and German Expressionists.

• Had a strong socio-political agenda. Futurists were indignant over the political and cultural decline of Italy, and published fiery manifestoes advocating revolution and the destruction of museums (which they called “mausoleums”).

• They advocated war, seeing it as a cleansing agent.

• Aesthetically, they were interested in the speed and dynamism of modern technology.

• Futurist art often focused on motion in time and space, incorporating the Cubist discoveries derived from formal analysis.

• “We declare… that all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified… that all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of ssteel, of pride, of fever and of speed… that movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.” – from Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto.

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Umberto Boccioni, 1913 (cast 1931).

Bronze, 3’8” tall.

Boccioni • Boccioni was one of the co-signers of the manifesto.

• His sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, is the definitive example of Futurist sculpture because it highlights the formal and spatial effects of motion rather than their source, the human figure.

• The figure is so expanded, interrupted, and broken in plane and contour that it almost disappears behind the blur of its movement.

• It bears some resemblance to Nike of Samothrace (Winged Victory), but the ancient sculpture only used the billowing of fabric and posture to convey motion.

• In its power and sense of vital activity, this sculpture creates an image symbolic of the dynamic quality of modern life.

Severini • Severini’s painting depicts an armored train, mounted with a booming cannon, below which riflemen aim at an unseen target.

• The train is “high tech,” with glossy, aerodynamic sides and shiny rivets.

• Severini depicted all of the components of the painting (train, soldiers, cannon, smoke, etc.) broken into facets and planes, suggesting action and movement.

• The painting depicts the Futurists’ passion for speed, modern technology and aesthetics, and their faith in the cleansing action of war.

• In contrast to the Cubists and German Expressionists, the colors are light, and death and destruction (the tragic consequences of war) are absent.

• Once World War I broke out, the group dissipated, because many of the war-supporting members of the group joined the army. Some of them, such as Boccioni, died in the war.

Armored Train Gino Severini, 1915.

Oil on canvas, 3’10” x 2’10”.

Kollwitz • Käthe Kollwitz (KAY-tuh CALL-vitz), German artist who focused on

printmaking for its reproducibility (good for polit. statements).

• Married a doctor, was inspired by his proletariat-class patients.

Focused her work on the plight of the working class as well as the atrocities of war (was a pacifist, lived through both WWI and II).

• Earlier career – engravings, later career – woodcuts.

• Between WWI and WWII, Germany was ruled by the Weimar (VY-mar) Republic (a representative democracy). This was divided into different political factions, including the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the German Communist Party (KPD).

• 1919: The KPD staged a Berlin uprising, which was then suppressed by the SPD, who captured/killed 2 leaders of the KPD, one of whom was Karl Liebknecht. This image was done as a memorial for his family.

• What traditional Christian scene is this similar to?

• Kollwitz’s image focuses not on the man himself, but on the workers who had put their faith in him. The focus is on those broadly affected, rather than those in the spotlight.

• Discuss the aesthetics and composition of the print.

• Why did Kollwitz switch from her typical etching style to woodblock prints for this post-WWI period?

Memorial Sheet for Karl Liebknecht Käthe Kollwitz, 1919-1920 CE. Woodcut.

Dada • “Cubism was a school of painting. Futurism was a political movement.

DADA is a state of mind.” – Andre Breton • Although Futurists hoped the war would revolutionize the world, the reality of war was different. New weapon technologies, such as machine guns, poison gas shells, armored vehicles, and high explosives, resulted in a huge death toll.

• Furthermore, there was no clear, “justifiable” reason for the war in the first place. It was primarily fought due to rivalries between Serbia/Russia and Austria/Hungary, which in turn dragged in the other powers of Europe.

• The Dada movement emerged in reaction to what many artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide. Dadaists believed that Enlightenment reasoning had produced global devastation, and consequently, they turned away from logic in favor of the irrational.

Absurdity became their goal.

• Although initially a cynical, pessimistic, even nihilistic movement, it evolved to have a whimsical, irreverent, and yet also thought-provoking sense of humor.

• Influenced by the writings of Freud (exploration of the unconscious and inner drives) and Jung (who elaborated on Freud’s theories by dividing the unconscious into the personal unconscious and collective unconscious).

• The collective unconscious is comprised of memories, associations shared by all humans. People are not born with a clean slate.

L. H. O. O. Q. Marcel Duchamp, 1919.

Arp • Arp incorporated the element of chance into his work.

• Tired of his Cubist-inspired collages, he tore some squares out of colored paper, and dropped them onto a larger paper on the floor.

With some minor adjusting, he then glued the papers into place.

• The similarity of the shapes guaranteed a somewhat regular design, enhanced by his adjustments, but chance had introduced an imbalance that seemed to Arp to restore to his work a special mysterious vitality he wanted to preserve.

• Arp’s renunciation of artistic control and reliance on chance when creating his compositions reinforced the anarchy and subversion inherent in Dada.

• “For us chance was the ‘unconscious mind’ that Freud had discovered in 1900… Adoption of chance had another purpose, a secret one. This was to restore to the work of art its primeval magic power and to find a way back to the immediacy it had lost through contact with classicism.” – Hans Richter

Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance Jean Arp, 1916-1917.

Torn and pasted paper. 1’7” x 1’2”.

Fountain Marcel Duchamp, 1917.

Glazed sanitary china with black paint, 1’ high.

Duchamp

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

Rrose Selavy Photo by Man Ray.

• Duchamp was French, and spent the early part of his art career in Paris, and the later part in New York City.

• First introduced his “readymade” sculptures in 1913, which were mass-produced common objects, or “found objects” that the artist selected and sometimes modified (“assisted readymade”).

• His most outrageous (and hence famous) readymade was Fountain, a urinal that he turned onto its back, and signed “R. Mutt” (which was a pun on the Mott plumbing manufacturer and the character Mutt from the comic strip “Mutt and Jeff”).

• The art of this artwork lay in the artist’s choice of object, which had the effect of conferring the status of art on it and forcing viewers to see the object in a new light.

• “Whether ‘R.Mutt’ with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

• Fountain was exhibited at the Society of Independent Artist’s show (in America), which typically exhibited all works entered. However, the show coordinators were outraged, and rejected Fountain.

• After The Large Glass, Duchamp turned away from art to pursue his interest in chess.

Monument to the Third International Vladimir Tatlin, 1919-1920.

Suprematism/Constructivism • Russian movements which embraced the idea that art was integral to helping improve society (as opposed to the pessimistic Dadaist view).

• Suprematism – a movement developed by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, who believed that the supreme reality in the world was “pure feeling,” which attaches to no object.

• Malevich called for new, nonobjective forms in art – shapes not related to objects in the visible world.

• Constructivism – a Russian art movement began in 1919 that was inspired by the Russian Revolution (1917) . Focus on space and time.

Believed art could harness the power of industrialization to benefit all people.

Malevich • “Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling…” - Malevich • The basic form of his art was the rectangle.

• In this artwork, the brightly colored shapes float against and within a white space, and the artist placed them in dynamic relationship to one another. What makes them dynamic?

• Malevich believed that everyone could understand his art, as he used the pure language of shape and color, to which everyone could respond intuitively.

• In 1917, militarily weakened by WWI, the Russian revolution broke out due to dissatisfaction with Tsar Nicholas II, who subsequently abdicated the throne in March. By the end of the year, the Bolsheviks, a faction of Russian Social Democrats (who later called themselves Communists), lead by Lenin, had wrested control from the provisional government (as well as several satellite countries).

• Although Malevich viewed the revolution as an opportunity to wipe out past traditions and begin a new art culture, the political leaders of the Soviet Union decided their new communist society needed a more practical, realistic art, which could be used to teach the public about their new government.

Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying Kazimir Malevich, 1915.

Oil on canvas, 1’11” x 1’7”.

Gabo • Like Malevich, Gabo believed that art should come from sources separate from the everyday world. For Gabo, the new reality was the space-time world described by early -20th-century scientists.

• Gabo called himself a Constructivist because he built up his sculptures piece by piece, instead of carving or modeling them in traditional ways.

• Although some of his works involve real motion, most of his works relied on the relationship of mass and space to suggest the nature of space-time.

• To indicate volumes of mass and space more clearly in his sculpture, Gabo used some new clear synthetic plastic materials (such as celluloid, nylon, and Lucite) to create constructions whose space seems to flow through as well as around the transparent materials.

• In Column, Gabo opened up the column’s circular mass so viewers could experience the volume of space it occupies. Instead of making a circular column, Gabo implies the circularity of the column by having a circular base topped with two intersecting vertical planes.

• The opaque colored planes at the base and elsewhere set up counter-rhythms to the crossed upright planes. They establish the sense of dynamic kinetic movement Gabo always sought to express as an essential part of reality.

Column Naum Gabo, c. 1923.

Perspex, wood, metal, glass. 3’5” tall.

American Art 1900-1935

Sixth Avenue and 30th Street, New York City, John Sloan, 1907.

• Increasingly common transatlantic travel resulted in greater exchange of artistic ideas among European and American artists.

• Some artists, like Whistler and Cassatt, moved from the US to Europe. On the other hand, many European artists (especially before and after WWI) moved to the US. • The early years of American art, still unexposed to the revolutionary work of their European counterparts, continued in Realism, depicting an unvarnished look at American life.

• The most prominent group of American Realist artists were known as The Eight, lead by their teacher Robert Henri.

• Because their images depicting the rapidly changing urban landscape of New York City often captured the bleak and seedy aspects of city life, The Eight eventually became known as the Ash Can School.

• The relative isolation of American artists from developments across the Atlantic came to an abrupt end in March 1913 when the Armory Show opened in New York City.

Armory Show Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Marcel Duchamp, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 4’10” x 2’11”

• Today, the Armory Show is considered a seminal event in the beginning of American modernism, but at the time it was hated by critics. The show, held in the 69th Regiment Armory in NYC, exhibited over 1,600 artworks by American and European artists.

• The show was organized by Walt Kuhn and Arthur Davies, whose goal in exhibiting American and European art side-by-side was to help the American artists consider whether the had “fallen behind.”

• European artists exhibited included Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Kirchner, and Brancusi.

• Perhaps the most reviled artwork of the show was Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which (unlike his usual Dadaist work) is stylistically similar to Futurists and Cubists.

• Critics used the following words to describe the show: pathological, menace, lunatic, depraved, alien, perilous.

• The show also travelled to Boston and Chicago.

Ingres’ Violin Man Ray, 1924.

Gelatin silver print, 11.5” x 9”.

Man Ray • Man Ray (original name Emmanuel Radnitzky) was an American artist, but as a close friend of Duchamp’s, his art reflected a strong Dadaist sensibility.

• Although primarily known for his photography, he also created ready-mades of found objects, such as his Gift.

• Ray was interested in mass-produced objects and technology, as well as a dedication to exploring the psychological realm of human perception.

• Man Ray was trained as an architectural draftsman and engineer, and earned a living as a graphic designer and portrait photographer.

• His interest in portraiture is evident in his many portraits of his contemporaries, including Duchamp (as Rrose Selavy) and Meret Oppenheim, a Surrealist artist.

• In his famous image, Ingres’ Violin, Man Ray referenced Ingre’s depictions of the nude female, such as in Odalisque and the Bather of Valpincon. He painted the f holes onto the photograph, then took a second photograph of the original.

What does the image suggest?

Gift Meret Oppenheim

Rrose Selavy

Self-Portrait With Camera Tears

Georgia O’Keeffe • In her early career, Wisconsin-born O’Keeffe was a Precisionist (an American movement that celebrated the beauty of mechanical precision). In 1918, she moved to NYC, where she focused on the awe-inspiring complexity of the city, as in New York, Night.

• While in NYC, she met Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer who also owned an art gallery called 291 that regularly exhibited the latest European and American art.

• Stieglitz was impressed with O’Keeffe’s talent, and drew her into his artistic circles. Eventually, the pair married.

• In 1929, looking for new inspiration, and to get away from summers in rural New York with Stieglitz’s family, O’Keeffe, went with a friend to New Mexico. Inspired by the quiet beauty of the landscape, she returned annually to paint, and moved there permanently in 1949 (after the death of Stieglitz).

• In addition to the New Mexico landscapes, O’Keeffe is known for painting close-ups of flowers. Her flower paintings stripped the flowers to their purest forms and colors to heighten their expressive power.

• Exhibiting the natural flow of curved planes and contour, O’Keeffe simplified the form almost to the point of complete abstraction. Her painting is like quiet, graceful poetry, reflecting the slow, controlled motion of growing life.

Jack in the Pulpit, No. IV Georgia O’Keeffe, 1930.

Oil on canvas, 40” x 30”.

The Steerage Alfred Stieglitz, 1907.

Photogravure (on tissue), 1’ x 10”

Alfred Stieglitz • Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s husband, was an accomplished photographer in addition to gallery owner.

• He worked to promote photography as a form of “fine art” like painting (thus focused on utilizing elements/principles0, rather than a hobby or tool of necessity.

• Most well known for his images of urbanity.

• During a voyage to Europe in 1907, he grew tired of his wealthy companions in first class. He wandered forward on the ship to the end of the first class level, and looked out upon the steerage passengers – people the US government sent back to Europe after refusing them entrance into the country.

• In addition to the depiction of “simple people,” Stieglitz was primarily interested in the formal elements of his composition. Part of what struck him when he took The Steerage was the various intersecting diagonal lines and shapes, which created strong triangles throughout the work.

• Stieglitz wanted his photographs to be as honest as possible, and developed his photos using the basic photographic techniques (no “tricks” such as double exposures or otherwise adding things to the image).

• Written by Stieglitz 35 years later: “A round straw hat, the funnel leading out, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railings made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape. I stood spellbound for a while, looking and looking. Could I photograph what I felt, looking and looking and still looking? I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life. […]

Spontaneously I raced to the main stairway of the steamer, chased down to my cabin, got my Graflex, raced back again all out of breath, wondering whether the man with the straw hat had moved or not. If he had, the picture I had seen would no longer be. The relationship of shapes as I wanted them would have been disturbed and the picture lost.

But there was the man with the straw hat. He hadn’t moved. The man with the crossed white suspenders showing his back, he too, talking to a man, hadn’t moved. And the woman with a child on her lap, sitting on the floor, hadn’t moved. Seemingly, no one had changed position. […] [It] would be a picture based on related shapes and on the deepest human feeling, a step in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery."

Lounge Chair Charles & Ray Eames

Barcelona Chair Mies van der Rohe

Wassily Chair Breuer

Bauhaus • The Weimar School of Arts and Crafts in Germany was founded in 1906. In 1919, Walter Gropius became the director, and renamed the school Das Staatlich Bauhaus (State School of Building).

• Gropius’s goal was to train artists, architects, and designers to accept and anticipate 20th-century needs, based on four principles put forth in the Bauhaus Manifesto.

1.Positive attitude to the living environment of vehicles and machines 2.The organic shaping of things in accordance with their own current laws, avoiding romantic embellishment/whimsy 3.Restriction of basic forms and colors to what is typical and universally intelligible 4.Simplicity in complexity, economy in the use of space, materials, time, and money.

• He believed there was no distinction between artist and craftsman.

As such, classes in “crafts” such as weaving, pottery, bookbinding, advertising, carpentry, and furniture design were offered, in addition to the “fine arts” like painting & sculpture.

• Gropius emphasized thorough knowledge of machine-age technologies and materials, industry, and mass-production.

• Marriage of art and industry.

Villa Savoye • The Bauhaus was closed immediately when Hitler came to power, and its students/teachers scattered throughout Europe and to America, spreading the ideas of the school.

• The simple, geometric aesthetic became known as International Style, because of its international popularity.

• Le Corbusier was a Swiss architect who believed “the house should be a machine for living in,” and that they should be based on the basic physical and psychological needs of every human: sun, space, and vegetation, combined with controlled temperature, good ventilation, and insulation against undesired noise.

• At Villa Savoye (VEE-lah SAH-vuah), a private residence, the garages, utility rooms, and bedrooms are enclosed downstairs (painted green to help it blend into landscape).

• The roomier upstairs is “the salon,” a formal living space (with strip windows to provide a view of the surroundings), supported by columns (a “floating box”) wrapped around an open central court.

• A ramp leads up to a wind-sheltered rooftop garden (the solarium).

• The large property allowed Le Corbusier creative freedom.

• The estate, just outside of Paris, was a pleasant get-away for it’s wealthy patrons (the Savoyes).

Villa Savoye Le Corbusier, 1929.

Villa Savoye • Le Corbusier wrote a treatise on architecture called “Toward an Architecture” that detailed his philosophy: -Celebrated science/technology/reason, beauty of precision -Also valued beauty of Classical Greek architecture, esp. Parthenon -Saw Parthenon as the perfected refinement of Archaic structures • Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture (1926) system: -pilotis (slender columns) to raise the building off the ground and allow air to circulate beneath -roof terraces, to bring nature into an urban setting -a free plan that allowed interior space to be distributed at will -a free façade whose smooth plane could be used for formal experimentation -Strip (a.k.a. ribbon) windows, which let in light but also reinforced the planarity of the wall.

• Made of molded reinforced concrete. Exterior planar (flat, rectangular plan), interior curved, esp. the ramp between levels.

• Rooftop garden blends interior with exterior/nature. Madame Savoye believed in the health benefits of fresh air and sunshine.

Outdoor leisure time was a mark of a modern lifestyle.

• The house was, in a sense, a machine designed to maximize leisure in the machine age.

Villa Savoye Le Corbusier, 1929.

Le Corbusier • His later chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut is a sculptural contrast to the rectilinear Villa Savoye.

• Made of steel and mesh sprayed with concrete and painted white (except the roof, which he wanted to let darken naturally over time).

• Lighting comes in through deeply recessed stained glass windows.

• Roof seems to “miraculously float” above the worshippers (it is supported by a series of blocks), creating a sense of mystery.

• Built upon the site of a pilgrimage church destroyed in WWII. • Although it seems monumental, it is in fact an intimately sized chapel (seating only 200 worshippers).

• The shape of the roof was designed to evoke: 1.The shape of praying hands 2.The wings of a dove (representing both peace and the Holy Spirit) 3.The prow of a ship (the word “nave” is Latin for “ship”) • Le Corbusier hoped that in the mystical interior he created, and in the rolling hills around the church, men and women would reflect on the sacred and the natural.

Notre-Dame-du-Haut Le Corbusier, 1950-55.

Ronchamp, France.

Fallingwater (Kaufmann House) F. L. Wright Bear Run, Penn.

1936-39.

Frank Lloyd Wright • Wisconsin-born architect Frank Lloyd Wright moved to Chicago and joined the modern architecture firm headed by Sullivan.

• He believed in natural, organic, nonsymmetrical buildings that fit into their environments. He aimed to develop an organic unity of planning, structure, materials, and site, through continuity.

• Fallingwater was designed as a weekend home for the department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann Sr. • Built OVER a waterfall (instead of facing it). Emphasis on integrating the architecture into the surroundings. The water seems to flow THROUGH the building.

• Building designed using cantilevered terraces that extend out over the water below. Variety of textures (stone, glass, painted metal, and concrete) enliven the surface of the building.

• Focus on defining space, not mass.

• Designed this at 67 years of age (during a low point in his career).

Private home commissions were seldom during the Depression.

• According to legend, Wright procrastinated drawing the design for 9 months, until Kaufmann was literally on his way over to see them. The plans were drawn up in 2 hours.

Fallingwater (Kaufmann House) F. L. Wright • Wright had a Transcendentalist philosophy, and believed humans Bear Run, Penn. were part of nature.

1936-39.

Frank Lloyd Wright

• He even incorporated a natural rocky outcropping into the hearth • Wright: “Can you say, when your building is complete, that the landscape is more beautiful than it was before?”

• Wright further emphasized the connection with nature by liberal use of glass. The house has no walls facing the falls, only elongated views leading the eye out to the horizon and the woods.

• Over time, Wright’s cantilevers have begun to sag and crack, requiring frequent repairs. In 2002, a system of support cables was added to stabilize the cantilevers.

• The success of his design was personal for Wright – although he had influenced International Style and the Bauhaus architects like Corbusier, he was largely forgotten and shunned by the 1930s. The critical approval of Fallingwater cemented Wright’s place as a major influence in modern architecture.

Chrysler Building William van Alen, Art Deco spire.

New York, NY, 1928-1930.

Chrysler Building • Art Deco was a movement in the 1920s-30s which sought to upgrade industrial design to “fine art” while using new materials and decorative patterns that reflected the simplifying trends in modernist architecture.

• A descendant of Art Nouveau, Art Deco had a streamlined, elongated symmetrical aspects, characterized by flat shapes filled with hard-edged patterns.

• The focus on stream-lined, aerodynamic design began with trains, cars, and boats, and the popular appeal of these objects lead to the streamlined aesthetic to be applied to all sorts of objects (furniture, jewelry, utensils, illustrations, etc.).

• The masterpiece of Art Deco architecture is the Chrysler Building in New York City, designed by William van Alen.

• In the Roaring Twenties, American millionaires and corporations competed with one another to raise the tallest skyscrapers in the biggest cities.

• Built up of polished stainless steel diminishing fan shapes, the spire glitters triumphantly in the sky, a resplendent crown honoring the business achievements of the great auto-maker.

• A temple of commerce, the Chrysler Building celebrated the principles and success of American business before the Great Depression of the 1930s.

African Art & Architecture

Africa: Context  The largest and 2nd most populous continent (you could fit the USA into Africa 3x and still have extra room).  Africa has a diverse topography and climate, ranging from deserts in the north and south, savannahs (grasslands) in the east, and dense, mountainous jungles in the center and west.

2nd

 Traditionally, sculpture has been the predominant art form of Africa (over architecture or drawing/painting), especially wood carving, metalworking, ceramics, and woven textiles.  With some exceptions, art forms are divided by gender – men were builders and carvers and were permitted to wear masks in ceremonies, while women painted walls and created ceramics. African art is often intended to be used (not just looked at), either for ritual or storytelling (oral tradition) purposes.  Up until the 1500s, politics within Africa were unaffected by Europeans and Asians because of geographical barriers.  Between 1500-1800, some European colonization occurred, but mostly in coastal areas which provided best access to African goods for trade.

Africa: Context  In the late 1800s, Europe raced to colonize most of Africa, but by the mid 1900s, most African nations won their independence.

Still, the European incursion had permanently complicated African politics.  The period of African colonization by Europe lead to many African art objects being collected and shown in Europe, at first as curiosities.  Accomplished African artists went through extensive apprenticeships, joined guilds, built fame, and were even sought after by princes.  However, due to the African tradition of oral history, artists did not sign their works. European collectors did not bother to find out the dates or artists of the works they collected, and that information is now unknown.  Although only thought of as “primitive” curiosities as first, by the early 1900s, artists (like Pablo Picasso) became interested in the stylization of African art, and were influenced to experiment with abstraction in their own artwork.

Kalahari Desert Congo jungle

Savannah

Conical Tower and Circular Wall of Great Zimbabwe  Most traditional African architecture is not made of stone (but rather wood or mudbrick), and thus has not survived the passage of time. Great Zimbabwe is a notable exception, featuring ashlar masonry (Europeans explorers/archaeologists even refused to believe it was made by Africans). Zimbabwe is in the southern region of Africa. The word “Zimbabwe” means the “house of stone” after this historical monument.  The Shona people, who built the site, had migrated south from the Sahara desert in northern Africa.  The site was originally built as a royal residence for a king, whose palace was located on top of a hill.  A city of 18,000 was built in the valley below, which flourished as a trading center, selling locally mined gold.  The round structure (the “Great Enclosure”) pictured is thought to have been either the queen’s residence, or a temple.  The masonry is impressive because it is all built in curves, no straight lines or right angles.  Inside is a cone-like structure modeled after a grain silo. Control over food symbolized the king’s power, prosperity, and generosity.  The complex also included ritual and burial sites.

Southeastern Zimbabwe.

Shona peoples. C. 10001400 CE. Coursed granite blocks.

Conical Tower and Circular Wall of Great Zimbabwe  The circular wall is 800’ long, 32’ tall, and 17’ thick at the base, but were more symbolic (keeping royals away from commoners) than defensive.  The walls slope inward, becoming thinner at the top. By making each layer a little farther back than the one below, the wall was stabilized without needing to use mortar.  The pathways in the complex are narrow and long, forcing people to walk in single file, similar to experiences walking in the tall grass African bush.  In addition to the stone walls, the complex would have also contained mud and thatch huts.  The chevron pattern at the top of the wall may symbolize lightning or an eagle in flight, symbols for the king’s power.  Soapstone bird statues were also found at the complex, which may also have symbolized the king.  Next to the tower is a platform resembling a chikuva, the stand on which a wife displays her pottery, and also the focus for prayers and ancestral intercession.  Thus, the tower and chikuva together may represent male and female roles: the state and the family.

Southeastern Zimbabwe. Shona peoples.

C. 1000-1400 CE. Coursed granite blocks.

Great Mosque, Djenne

Great Mosque, Djenne, Mali Originally built c. 1200, rebuilt 1907.

Adobe mud brick, palm scaffolding, mud paste.

• Around 1200 CE, King Koi Konboro converted to Islam, and tore down his palace to construct a mosque.

• The region is mostly flat, dusty savannah, with sparse trees and rocks. As such, the mosque was constructed using local materials and techniques, namely baked mud brick with visible palm wood scaffolding, coated over with a mud paste to protect from the annual rains.

• The then dilapidated mosque was rebuilt the first time in 1836. After a roof fire in the early 1900s, the mosque was rebuilt a second time in 1907.  The earthen roof is supported by monumental pillars and an internal framework of wood. The wooden beams are allowed to protrude (called torons) to provide a “ladder” for workers to climb during re-plastering.  Engaged pilasters on the exterior create a sense of rhythm.  The façade of the mosque features three towers that are also minarets. The center tower contains the mihrab.

Great Mosque, Djenne

Djenne marketplace by the Great Mosque

 The top of each minaret tower is decorated with an ostrich egg, a symbol of purity and fertility.  Although the walls have few windows, fresh air is let in through vent holes in the roof.

• The mud paste deteriorates quickly, so the town of Djenne has an annual festival, which includes food and celebration, to restore it.

• Everyone participates: the mud is mixed in large holes ahead of time. Women carry water to add to the mud, while young boys play in the mud to mix it. Elderly people, who have participated before, give advice and watch the proceedings from a place of honor.

• A race is held to determine who will have the honor of bringing the first batch of mud to the mosque. The men climb the palm scaffolding and re-paste the walls by hand.

• Musicians entertain the workers as they apply plaster.

• Foreign Muslim investors have offered to rebuild the mosque in concrete, and put tile on its current sand floor, but Djenne’s community refused, preferring to maintain their cultural traditions.

Edo peoples, Benin (Nigeria).

C. 1500 CE. Cast brass. Appx 18”.

Wall Plaque from Oba’s Palace  In the 1500-1600s CE, the Kingdom of Benin was a major trade center, controlling trade between Africa and Europe (Portugal).  In exchange for copper, brass and guns, the people of Benin traded pepper, cloth, ivory, and slaves captured from neighboring peoples during wars.  The king (Oba) who was believed to be a direct descendant of Oranmiyan, the legendary founder of the dynasty. The Oba was the spiritual, secular and ritual head of the kingdom, considered a deity and held in the highest veneration.  The stronghold on trade made the Oba wealthy, and he built a lavish palace decorated with over 900 bronze plaques depicting court life in the 1500s.  The plaques show many images of the king and his servants, as well as Portuguese traders, and symbolic animals (such as mudfish, which can live on land or water and thus represent the king’s dominion over both).  The images do NOT show the everyday life of villagers or farmers, and there are no depictions of women or children. Instead, they focus only on glorifying their patron, the Oba.  What is happening in the plaque pictured at left? How do we know who’s who?

Edo peoples, Benin (Nigeria).

C. 1500 CE. Cast brass. High relief.

Wall Plaque from Oba’s Palace  In the center is the Oba. We can recognize him by his size, and by the coral regalia he wears (a legend tells of an ancient Oba who wrestled the sea-god, and took from him the coral used in the Oba’s regalia to this day).  His attendants hold shields over his head, either to protect him from attack or the hot, midday sun (only done for the Oba).  In the original setting (hanging on pillars inside the palace), the plaques were arranged in order to tell the history of the royal lineage of Benin’s Obas, but since the plaques are no longer in situ, the order of the sequence is lost.  This Oba is depicted sitting on a horse, which may indicate that he is Oba Esigie, the first Oba to ride a horse.  Below the Oba’s feet is a small figure, probably a defeated rival.  Made using brass manillas from the Portuguese (bracelet-shaped ingot of metal). Also features coral jewelry (coral also from Portuguese). Shows influence of Portuguese trade.  Do you see any cross-like shapes?  Emphasis on heads; relatively small bodies.  Made using the lost wax process.

Wall Plaque from Oba’s Palace Trade began to decline with Portugal as the Portuguese empire waned in the 18th century. By the 19th century, Britain wanted Benin as a new trading partner, but this partnership was much less mutually beneficial and was marked with frequent tension.  After increased aggression from both nations, the British launched the Punitive Expedition of 1897, seizing the Oba’s palace, burning down the city around it, killing many, and looting the royal court’s vast stores of art and treasure.  This plaque was one of the artworks looted in the siege.  This act of looting perpetrated by the British was later condemned as a criminal and violent act of British imperialism and colonialism.  As such, there are many who believe that objects such as this plaque should be returned to the people of Benin, who remain deeply connected to their history and cultural traditions.  However, there are others who feel that these remarkable objects are part of the world’s heritage, and thus should remain in museum collections around the world as testament to this artistically rich culture.

Sika Dwa Kofi (Golden Stool)  In Ashanti culture, a person is gifted a stool upon their coming of age.

The stool one sits in daily begins to contain one’s sunsum, or aura/esseneThus, people do not share stools.  The Golden Stool is made of wood covered in gold, and is believed to be a gift from heaven to the Ashanti people. (It miraculously fell out of the sky into the lap of the first king to unite the Ashanti peoples in the 1700s).  No one is allowed to sit on the Golden Stool; in fact, it sits in it’s own chair. It is never allowed to touch the ground, and only the king may touch it directly. It has bells to warn the king of danger.  The Golden Stool contains the sunsum of the Ashanti people, and is thus a very sacred object, more important than the king (or Ashantehene).  The Ashantehene is considered a descendent of a god, and is thus always sheltered by an umbrella while wearing sandals (to show he is below heaven but above the earth).  Gold symbolizes royalty in the Ashanti culture.  In the late 1800s, the British tried to gain control over the Ashanti and their gold resources. When the Ashanti resisted, the British destroyed the Ashanti capital, banished the Ashantehene, and looted many objects, but could not find the Golden Stool  When a British governor demanded the Golden Stool be provided for him to sit on, the outrage sparked a rebellion.

Ashanti peoples (south central Ghana). C. 1700 CE. Gold over wood and cast-gold attachments.

Kuba peoples, Democratic Republic of Congo. C. 1760 CE. Wood. 19” tall.

Ndop of King Mishe Mishyaang Mambul  In the early 1700s, the Kuba King Mishe miShyaang maMbul was celebrated throughout his kingdom for his generosity and for the great number of his loyal subjects.  He commissioned an idealized portrait-statue (ndop) to record his reign and accomplishments in history along with his predecessors  The ndop sculptural record helps freeze a moment in time that would otherwise be transformed during its transmission from generation to generation (important to have a physical object of record in a primarily oral-history based society).  How might you know this figure is a king (nyim)? He has an idealized physique – not a true portrait of his likeness, but a representation of his spirit. The specific nyim is identified by the geometric motif on the base and the emblem in front (ibol), chosen by the nyim. Mishe’s ibol is a drum with a severed hand.  He holds a sword hilt-forward (non-aggressive pose).  This ndop is the earliest in existence. Ndops typically are seated on a base in a cross-legged pose. 1:3 proportion head to body to show intelligence.  Typical aloof expression – above worldly matters.

Kuba Nyim Kot a Mbweeky III in state dress with royal drum in Mushenge, Congo

Ndop of King Mishe Mishyaang Mambul  The Kuba are a varied but related group of peoples united under a single ruler (nyim).  The photo, from 1971, shows the nyim at the time participating in a royal event, dressed in the traditional royal regalia.  The regalia included: headdress, leopard teeth necklace, sword, lance, drums, basket.  The costuming was elaborate, weighing up to 185 pounds.

Intended to represent the splendor of the nyim’s court, the nyim’s greatness, responsibilities, wealth, status, and power.  The nyim was often buried with his regalia, and the next nyim would begin accumulating his own objects.

Nkisi N’Kondi (Power Figure)  A power figure is a magical charm seemingly carved in the likeness of human being, embedded with a spirit.  A nkisi nkondi can act as an oath taking image which is used to resolve disputes, protect from harm, give harm to others, bless, or even give or take away life (fetish object – has magical powers).  They are carved under the divine authority and in consultation with an spiritual specialist (nganga) who activates these figures though chants, prayers.  Sharp objects (nails, blades, pegs, etc.) are inserted (or removed) to prod the spirit into action. A peg may refer to a matter being ‘settled’ whereas a deeply inserted nail may signify a more serious offense such as murder. Prior to insertion, opposing parties or clients, often lick the blades or nails, to seal the function or purpose of the nkisi through their saliva. Breaking the oath activates the nkisi’s power.  Medicinal compounds called bilongo are placed in the belly of the figure which is shielded by a piece of glass or mirror. The glass represents the “other world” of spirits/the dead who can peer through and see potential enemies.  Seeds may be added to the bilongo to tell the spirit to replicate itself, claws may cause the spirits to grasp something, stones may instruct the spirits to pelt something.

Kongo peoples (Dem. Rep. Congo). C. 1880 CE. Wood & metal.

Chokwe peoples (Dem. Rep. Congo).

C. 1900. Wood, fiber, pigment, metal.

Female Pwo Mask  Worn by male dancers to honor female members of community and female ancestors.  High value on fertility – respect for women who have given birth  Matrilineal society – family traced through women  Accompanied by a bodysuit made of raffia, a loincloth, and wooden breasts. Dance movements slow and graceful.  Facial expression shows the inner wisdom of a woman who has gone through childbirth.  White kaolin clay (around eyes) associated with spirit realm, showing her wisdom/spiritual insight after having given birth.  In what ways is this object stylized? What type of shape is used?  Pounded dots = tattoo patterns commonly worn. Individual patterns had symbolic meanings.  Fiber hairstyle shows the fashionable hairstyle from the time.  The Pwo would perform along with a male counterpart (Chihongo) to bring fertility and prosperity to the community.

Mblo (Portrait Mask)  This type of mask was presented to a special honoree. Before presentation, the Mblo performance involved a series of increasingly complex and entertaining dances.  At the end of the dances, the mask is presented to the honoree. The mask is their artistic double or namesake.  During the performance, the mask is worn by the dancer who also wears the clothes of the honoree. The honoree also joins in the dance.  The mask would be commissioned by a group of admirers.  Honorees were typically older. The Mblo performance typically honored beauty, age, and wisdom.  Although the mask represents the person being honored, it is not a true portrait, but an idealized & stylized version of them. Intended to capture the character of the woman.  This particular mask was made for a female honoree.  The downcast eyes, serious and serene expression, long column-like nose are typical of Baule masks.  Baule masks usually have subtle asymmetry to give the mask interest, mystery, and engagement. What is asymmetrical?  The ornamentation has no iconographic significance (decorative).

Baule peoples (Cote d’Ivoire). Early 1900s.

Wood & pigment.

Sande Society, Mende peoples, West African forests of Sierra Leone and Liberia.

C. 1900. Wood, cloth, and fiber.

Bundu Mask

 Carved by men, but performed/worn by women in a coming-ofage initiation ceremony (secret “Sande Society” of women).  “Helmet mask” - Worn on top of head, with raffia covering face.  Girls taken to secluded forest area to receive instruction on how to be a good adult woman and wife, including information on ritual dances, cooking, raising children, and spiritual knowledge.  The sequestration can last anywhere between a month and a year, with the girls father or prospective husband paying the Sande society for her education.  Girls learn deference to authority & importance of secrecy  Girls bond and learn to work closely with other girls/women  Face: serene, demure. Closed eyes = reserved, closed mouth = no gossip, small ears = don’t listen to gossip. High forehead: wisdom.

Scarification around eyes for beauty.  Rolls under chin = has enough body fat to bear children  Elaborate hairstyle symbolizes wealth/status  Mask depicts Sowei spirit, a water spirit. The lines under chin could also be ripples in water as spirit breaks the surface.  Activated with spirit during dance/performance, but not when it is in disuse.  Coated with palm oil for lustrous shine

Ikenga (Shrine Figure)  Carved wooden figures with a human face & animal attributes Ikenga (translates as “strong right arm”) is the personal god of achievement/success. Believed that the power to accomplish something lays in one’s right hand. Actions of the right hand include holding tools/weapons, making sacrifices, conducts rituals, etc.  Almost all Ikenga hold sword in right hand (unless the Ikenga is more abstract and carved without arms) to show strength and ability to get to things in life.  Left hand shows more individualized symbols, depending upon the patron’s career or interests. Not all Ikenga are carved for warriors; could be for any highly accomplished man (or occasionally woman).  Carved of hardwoods (symbolize strength, endurance)  Large horns dominate, indicating power/strength. Aggressive, head-first fight.  Decorative scarification on temple indicates the patron holds a title or high position in society.  Not a portrait, but a symbol of the power and accomplishments of the patron (almost like a “sacred diploma”). Shows high status achieved through hard work.  Kept in the patron’s home in a shrine, & destroyed upon his death.  Activated with blessings before patron’s kinsman before use  Combines one’s personal god with one’s ancestors and “right hand” power

Igbo peoples (Nigeria). C. 1900 CE. Wood.

Mbudye Society, Luba peoples (Dem. Rep. of Congo). C. 1900 CE. Wood, beads, metal.

Lukasa (Memory Board)  The elite Mbudye Society (whose members are considered “men of memory," and who have extensive religious training) use the lukasa to recount history in the context of spiritual rituals.  Diviners (who have the power to predict the future) can also read the lukasa. The history is also used to interpret and judge contemporary situations. Each lukasa is different but small enough to hold in the left hand. The board is "read" by touching its surface with the right forefinger.  The lukasa is typically arranged with large beads surrounded by smaller beads or a line of beads, the configuration of which dictates certain kinds of information (ex. large beads surrounded by smaller beads = king in his court; a line of beads = journey or path).  Each board is unique & is the divine revelation of a spirit This information can be interpreted in a variety of ways and the expert might change his manner of delivery and his reading based upon his audience and assignment.  The most important function of the lukasa was to serve as a memory aid that describes the myths surrounding the origins of the Luba empire, including recitation of the names of royal Luba line.  The recounting of the past is performative, includes dance and song.  The back & sides are carved with decorative geometric patterns.

Aka Elephant Mask  Worn by “Elephant Society” aka Kuosi members only.  Kuosi were originally a secret society of warriors sworn to protect the fon (king). Over time, it has come to be filled mostly with wealthy, titled men and court officials, as well as elite warriors.  Decorated with beads arranged in geometric patterns (typical of Cameroon grassland art). Beads show wealth of the kingdom, as they were once very expensive (imported from Venice).  Worn during dances to drums/gongs to honor the king  Worn in conjunction with a red feather headdress and a leopard skin cape, embroidered tunic, rattles/bells, and a horse-tail whisk  Leopard and elephant = symbols of the fon’s power. Why?  Fon = divine king who could transform into elephant. Leopard believed to be able to transform into a human.  Why does the mask also have a human face? (composite)  Having the elite members of society dance wearing symbols of the fon’s power reinforced the political stability of the society, and reinforced the rigid social hierarchy.  Color: Black = relationship between living and dead.

White = ancestors and potent medicines.

Red = life, women, and institution of kingship.

Bamileke (Cameroon, western grassfields region). C. 1900 CE. Wood, woven raffia, cloth, and beads.

Fang peoples (southern Cameroon).

C. 1900 CE. Wood.

Reliquary Figure (Byeri)  For veneration of familial ancestors to obtain ancestor’s goodwill  Fang people’s nomadic, so art is portable  Attached to/guarded a basket containing skulls of notable ancestors which hold the powers/abilities of those ancestors, which could then be used or called upon by the living in times of need.  What types of things might the living seek assistance with from their ancestors’ spirits?  Physique similar to infant to help with fertility  Herniated (“outie”) belly button = the byeri is like an umbilical cord, connecting the human world with the spiritual world.  Prominent belly-button & genitals emphasize life/vitality, while somber, prayerful expression shows death.  Abstracted body suggests contradiction: peaceful, eyes closed expression = respectful, spiritual, but muscular arms , bent limbs, and clasped fingers = strength ready to spring out at any people or spirits wishing to do the relics harm.  Also used as puppets to teach young men about their ancestors  Abstraction preferred over naturalism to better communicate the concept/idea which the byeri symbolizes.  Byeri could be depicted as male or female.

Olowe of Ise (Yoruba peoples).

Palace of Ikere, Nigeria.

C. 1910-1914 CE. Wood and pigment.

Veranda Post of Enthroned King & Senior Wife (Opo Ogoga)

 Artist = Olowe of Ise, known for exaggerated proportions and sculptures of group figures. Originally painted.  One of four sculptural posts which appeared to hold up the palace veranda (porch) roof (not truly load-bearing)  Sculpture in the round – intended to be seen from all sides  Top of post is rectilinear to match architecture, but opens up to more organic shapes & negative spaces towards the middle/bottom.  Why is the senior wife depicted as larger than the king?  How does the king still show importance, even though he’s smaller?  Senior wife was in charge of placing the crown on the new king  Smaller figures below: a junior wife, the flute-playing Esu (trickster god), and a now-missing fan-bearer.  What is the message of the arrangement of figures? How does it relate to their practical function of holding up the palace roof?  Smaller surface details create interest without detracting from overall message, and entice the viewer to look at all sides.  King’s headdress: head protrusions = divine presence, creates link to past rulers in spirit realm. Bird symbolizes watchfulness/protection, and also powerful female ancestors & deities who support the king.

Art of South and West Asia

Early History • Between approximately 2600 and 1500 BCE, civilization arose and thrived in the Indus Valley (“Indus” is the root for the words “India” and “Hindu”).

• This civilization was highly sophisticated compared to other civilizations at the time, boasting urban sewage irrigation systems, public baths, and architecture made of kiln-baked bricks.

• Around 1500 BCE, the first of four Vedas was recorded by a nomadic group of herding people in northwestern India.

• The Vedas were compilations of religious learning (Veda means knowledge), which included hymns intended for priests (called Brahmins) to chant or sing.

• The polytheistic religion recorded in the Vedas emphasized elaborate ritual sacrifice to bring favor from the gods.

• Between 800-500 BCE, in the Ganges River valley, religious thinkers composed a variety of texts called the Upanishads, which introduced the ideas of samsara (reincarnation), karma (good/bad deeds in one life affect the events of the next), and nirvana (reaching an infinite state of oneness with everything) and moksha (the ultimate end of/freedom from the cycle of rebirth).

• The notions of samsara, karma, and nirvana were the basis of Hinduism and Buddhism, religions that arose shortly thereafter.

India, c. 250 BCE

Buddhism

 Buddhism - Siddhartha Gautama (born c. 560 BCE), a king's son. At 29, he witnessed ppl suffering, & renounced his rich life to find the answer to suffering as an ascetic. After six years of wandering and meditation, he reached complete enlightenment (Buddhahood) after sitting for seven weeks under a Bodhi tree. He preached his first sermon in Sarnath (Deer Park), where he set in motion the Wheel (chakra) of the Law (Dharma). His teachings were:  Four Noble Truths (achieved through meditation, these are the four main tenets of Buddhism) 1. life is suffering 2. the cause of suffering is desire 3. one can overcome and extinguish desire 4. the way to conquer desire and end suffering is to follow the Buddha's Eightfold Path of right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.  The Buddha's path leads to nirvana, the cessation of the endless cycle of painful life, death, and rebirth.  3 Main Branches: - Theravada (or Hinayana)– oldest, Buddha is human, only monks attain nirvana - Mahayana – all people could attain nirvana w/ help of bodhisattvas (beings who are capable of enlightenment but who forego it in order to help other living beings towards it). Buddha seen as transcendent figure anyone could aspire to become.

- Tantric (or Esoteric) – work with guru to perform enlightening rituals, achieve spiritual breakthroughs faster.

Images of the Buddha • Depictions of the Buddha typically featured the following: -An idealized physique (triangular torso, smooth body). Not a “true” portrait of his features (all made long after his death).

-A monk’s robe -The urna (or curl of hair or dot between the eyebrows, shows spiritual awareness), and the ushnisha (a bump on top of his head symbolizing wisdom/enlightenment).

-Symbolic hand gestures, called mudras (image on the left shows the blessing mudra, image on the right shows the teaching or Wheel of Law mudra). Fingers close to equal in length.

-Lotus position (crossed legs) = overcoming obstacles -Hands and feet inscribed with a Wheel of Law symbol -Sun disk behind head -Elongated earlobes (from wearing heavy jewelry as a youth).

• Images of the Buddha are used: - As an aid to visualize one’s own enlightenment.

- To give access to the Buddha (once it is ritually empowered as an embodiment of the Buddha). It may then receive offerings, confessions, and prayers of practitioners.

- To serve as a focal point for meditation and ritual.

Buddha Seated on Lion Throne Mathura, India 2nd Century CE Red sandstone, 2’ 3”

Seated Buddha Preaching First Sermon Sarnath, India c. 450 CE. Tan sandstone, 5’ 3”

Stupas • Stupas are large circular mounds designed similarly to earlier South Asian burial mounds (can also be small containers).

• However, the stupa was not a tomb, but a monument housing relics of the Buddha (although not all stupas contain the ashes of the Buddha, they still symbolically are reliquaries).  The earliest stupas contained portions of the Buddha’s ashes, and as a result, the stupa was associated with the body of the Buddha, as if sitting upright in meditation (base = crossed legs, top pole = his head). Adding the Buddha’s ashes to the mound of dirt activated it with the energy of the Buddha himself.

• Buddhists venerated the Buddha’s remains by circumambulation, walking around the stupa in a clockwise direction. The circular movement, echoing the movement of the earth and sun, brought the devotee into harmony with the cosmos. Building & worshipping at stupas has karmic benefits & helps the worshipper understand the Buddha’s teachings.

• The stupa also represents Mount Sumeru (the center of the world that connects heaven and earth), with the cardinal points (N, S, E, W) marked by highly decorated gateways.

• In the center, a pole corresponds to the axis of the universe. The pole rises from the mountain-dome and passes through the roof, thus uniting this world with the heavenly paradise.

The Great Stupa at Sanchi • This is the oldest existing Buddhist sanctuary. Though Buddha never visited this site in his lifetime, it holds several important relics (incl. the remains of one of his closest disciples).

• Originally founded by Emperor Ashoka, the first king to convert to Buddhism and actively spread it. He erected 100s of pillars proclaiming the virtues of Buddhism, including the one at Sanchi. Lion (symbol of Siddhartha’s family) perched atop a lotus flower.

• Ashoka felt remorse for a village he’d destroyed, so he built many pillars and stupas to help spread Buddhism and improve his karma.

• The complex includes many structures, including 3 stupas.

The oldest and largest is Stupa 1 (pictured), made of sandstone. Four carved gates (at the cardinal points) provide entry for circumambulation around the portico.

Great Stupa at Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, India. Buddhist.

Maurya, late Sunga Dynasty. C. 300-100 BCE. Stone masonry, sandstone on dome.

The Great Stupa at Sanchi • The gate carvings include both relief and in the round.

• Many images show past lives of the Buddha.

• Some images are local traditions from before Buddhism, such as the yakshis (tree nymphs who awoke trees to blossom in spring by kicking the trunk while breaking a branch).

• In the 300s CE, the statues of the Buddha seated in the canopies facing the four entrances of the Great Stupa were added.

• The complex was active and continually added onto until the 1100s CE, when it was deserted.

• By the 1300s, the complex was forgotten and covered with vegetation. It was rediscovered and restored in the 1800s.

Bamiyan Buddhas • One of a pair of Buddhas. Largest Buddhas in the world.

• Located in Afghanistan, along a Silk Road route between the Indian subcontinent and Asia/Europe/the Middle East.

• Fertile valley amid harsh terrain = good trade route stop • Original artist & patron unknown.

• May depict later Buddhas (not Siddhartha Gautama) • Mostly high relief, but feet are carved in the round to enable circumambulation around the feet. Inside of niche frescoed.

• Flowing robes & curled hair show Greco-Roman influence.

• Surface covered in stucco/plaster and painted with pigments to appear metallic. Face may have had a wooden mask attached.

• Bamiyan became a large Buddhist monastery • The area converted to Islam in the 900s.

• In 1221 CE, Genghis Khan sent his favorite grandson to seize the valley, but when the grandson was shot & killed, Ghengis Khan vowed revenge: he killed every human and animal of Bamiyan. The city was never rebuilt.

Buddha Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

Gandharan.

C. 400-800 CE. Cut sandstone with plaster and polychrome paint.

175’ tall.

Bamiyan Buddhas Sadly, the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban (an extremist/fundamentalist Islamic group in Afghanistan) in 2001.

Only outlines of the figures and a few details remain.

The direction to destroy the Buddha images was motivated, in part, by the Taliban’s extreme iconoclastic campaign as well as their disdain for western interest and funding that had gone to protecting the images while there was an intense and growing need for humanitarian aid in the region.

The Taliban’s claim that destroying the Buddha sculptures was an Islamic act is belied by the fact that Bamiyan had become predominantly Muslim by the 10th century and that the sculptures had up until 2001 remained a largely intact.

Hinduism • Hinduism: the belief that meditation and reason, along with the selfless fulfillment of everyday duties, can lead to ultimate absorption in the godhead. There are many variations of practices and beliefs within the religion, varying by era and region. ď‚&#x; Unlike many other religions, Hinduism has no historical founder. Its authority rests instead upon a large body of sacred texts that provide Hindus with rules governing rituals, worship, pilgrimage, and daily activities, among many other things. • Common to virtually all Hindus are certain beliefs, including, but not limited to, the following: - a belief in many gods, which are seen as manifestations of a single unity. These deities are linked to universal and natural processes.

- a preference for one deity while not excluding or disbelieving others - a belief in the universal law of cause and effect (karma) and reincarnation (samsara) - a belief in the possibility of liberation and release (moksha) by which the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara) can be resolved (tied to social caste system) Mandala

Primary Hindu Texts  The four Vedas – India’s earliest surviving texts (c. 2000 CE) made up of hymns and descriptions of rituals, as well as philosophical sections. Foundation for deepest beliefs.

• Mahabharata - 100,000 verse long epic poem about the conflict between the Pandava brothers and their rival cousins the Kauravas, which leads to a battle.  Bhagavad Gita – Contained within the Mahabharata. Before the battle, Krishna consoles one of the Pandavas. It has become a standard reference in addressing the duty of the individual, the importance of dharma, and humankind’s relationship to God and society.  Ramayana – Epic poem about Rama and Sita, the ideal royal couple, and their helper, the monkey leader, Hanuman. Rama is an incarnation of the God Vishnu. The story tells of Rama and Sita’s withdrawal to the forest after being exiled from the kingdom of Ayodhya. Sita is abducted in the forest by Ravana, the evil king of Lanka. Rama eventually defeats Ravana, with the help of his brother and an army of monkeys and bears. The couple returns to Ayodhya and are crowned.  Puranas – Primary source of stories about the Hindu deities (assembled between 300-1000 CE). Emphasis on main gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.  Tantras - texts concerning ritual practices surrounding various deities , religious observances, yoga, behavior, and the proper selection and design of temple sites. Some aspects of the Tantras concern the harnessing of physical energies as a means to achieve spiritual breakthrough.

Hindu Deities • Shiva - most complex of Hindu gods, believed by his devotees to be the root and support of the universe, and the creative/destructive flow of life that rushes through it • Vishnu - a kind and dependable god believed to work continually for the world's welfare • The Goddess - takes many forms and has many names. She has both benign and horrific forms. Shakti = female creator force, Kali = destructive force, Parvati = consort of Shiva, & Durga = demon slayer • avatars – various forms or incarnations taken by the gods • In the rock wall relief carving to the right, Shiva is depicted with many arms, doing the cosmic dance. Some of the hands hold objects, and others form prescribed mudras. At the lower right, the elephant-headed god Ganesha (associated with intelligence and obstacles) mimics Shiva. Artists often represented Hindu deities as part human and part animal, or figures with multiple body parts. Such composite and multilimbed forms indicate the subjects are not human but suprahuman (above human) gods with supernatural powers.  According to some interpretations, all divinities are in fact a manifestation of a single godhead, divine force, or abstraction.

Dancing Shiva Rock-cut relief, cave 1, Badami, India.

Late sixth century

Hindu Worship Practices Puja – general term for Hindu worship  Worship takes place in the home (at the family shrine) or at a temple.  Painted/sculpted images of gods are believed to genuinely embody the divine (the sculpture IS the god). Images are highly respected.  Worship is individual, not congregational, BUT large groups of people celebrate together during various religious festivals.  Hindu temples are thought of as homes for the deity for whom the temple is dedicated, and are not designed for large crowds of people.  Worship practices vary by region, but usually include: giving thanks, asking for assistance, giving penance, & contemplating the divine. Hindu priests (at the temple) assist worshippers by performing ritual acts and blessing offerings, usually accompanied by ringing of bells, passing of a flame, dancing, and/or chanting.  Worship usually begins by circumambulating the temple.  Inside, devotees make direct eye contact with the deity statue (an act called darshan), where they see the deity, but the deity also sees into them. By having darshan, the devotee receives energy and blessings from the deity.

Diwali (Festival of Lights)

Holi (Festival of Colors)

Hindu Temples • Usually built on an elevated base/podium, topped with a tall tower representing the cosmic mountain.

• The inner sanctuary, called a garbha griha (womb chamber), contained a statue of the deity.

• This chamber is a metaphorical chamber within the "world mountain" and holds an image of the temple's deity. Stepping over threshold is considered a purifying act.

• Only priests (Brahmin) could enter the womb chamber to give offerings to the deity statue. Non-Brahmin could view and worship the deity statue from the threshold.

• The statue of the god was considered a manifestation of the god, and was thus treated as such (fed, bathed, clothed, etc.)

• There are two main temple styles (northern and southern).

• The roofs of the northern style temples have a rounder, more beehive-like tower, capped by an amalaka (cushion-shaped form).

• The southern style temples have stepped-pyramid roofs with flat tops, and pillared hall.

• The temples themselves are sculptural, but they are also decorated with smaller, elaborate sculptures and reliefs.

Vishvanatha Temple (northern style)

Rajarajeshvara Temple (southern style)

Lakshmana Temple • The Chandella Dynasty built a large complex of 85 temples at their capitol Khajuraho (only 22 remain today).

• The Lakshmana Temple follows the basic from of most Hindu Temples, with a long entrance passage leading to a dark inner chamber containing the deity image, which is located under the tallest point in the roof.

• A visitor's journey within the temple is one from light to dark, from spacious to small and intimate, and from worldly to spiritual.

• Lakshmana Temple is dedicted to Vishnu.

• The temple is covered with sculptural decorations, inside and out. These sculptural works fill up every inch of the temple's surface and help to blur the distinction between angular architectural forms and organic, flowing natural forms.

• The temple complex at Khajuraho also consists of three large tanks, or human-made lakes that provide water for the village and serve as ceremonial bathing areas. This illustrates the importance of water in Hindu religious practice where water is one of the most sacred elements, and the necessity of a water source for the town's residents.

Khajuraho, India.

Hindu, Chandella Dynasty. C. 950 CE. Sandstone.

Lakshmana Temple • The sculptural decorations influenced by Tantric thought, which deals openly with all aspects of life, including sex (but erotic images could only cover certain parts of the temple).

• Sex is important because Tantric cosmos is divided into the male and female principle. Male principle has the form and potential, while female has the energy. One cannot achieve anything without the other.

• Bodies may appear nude, but are in fact adorned with jewelry and gauzy veils.

• The voluptuous idealism of the bodies underscores their symbolism of fertility, abundance, and prosperity.

• Sculptures at Lakshmana also include cult images, family, heaven nymphs, animals/plants, and miscellaneous other themes like teachers, dancers, etc. Only 1/10th are erotic.

• The main idol, located inside, is the tri-headed and four-armed Vaikuntha Vishnu, whose central head is human, flanked by a lion and a boar’s head (other avatars of Vishnu).

Khajuraho, India. Hindu, Chandella Dynasty. C. 950 CE. Sandstone.

Hindu; India (Tamil Nadu), Chola Dynasty.

C. 1000 CE. Cast bronze.

27” tall.

Shiva as Lord of Dance (Nataraja) • Nata = dance, raja = king • Original location unknown, but most likely in a place of private or public worship. Designed to be portable, carried in parades.

• During processional parades, worshippers would carry these statues, followed by priests chanting prayers and blessings.

• Statue would be wrapped in white and red cloth, adorned with flowers, and surrounded by candles during the parade.

• When the worshipper comes before the statue and prays, faith activates the divine energy inherent in the statue, and at that moment, Shiva is present.

• During the Chola Dynasty, their empire grew towards Sri Lanka, giving them access to copper, which lead to a proliferation of bronze working.

• Although energetic-looking, depictions of deities in this era followed a prescribed canon of ideal measurements and forms (arms long like bamboo, faces round like the moon, eyes shaped like lotus leaves, gods taller than humans, etc.)

• What main act is Shiva responsible for?

Shiva as Lord of Dance (Nataraja) • Here, Shiva performs his dance within the cosmic circle of fire that is the simultaneous and continuous creation and destruction of the universe.

• The ring of fire that surrounds him is the encapsulated cosmos of mass, time, and space, whose endless cycle of annihilation and regeneration moves in tune to the beat of Shiva’s drum & steps.

• His upper right hand holds the damaru drum • His lower right hand is in the abhaya mudra gesture, which reassures followers to not be afraid for they have his blessing.

• Shiva’s lower left hand, palm down across his torso, signifies spiritual grace through meditation and mastery over temptation.

• His upper left hand holds the agni, the flame of destruction that destroys all that the damaru has drummed into existence.

• Shiva stands upon the demon Apasmara, the embodiment of ignorance • Shiva’s long hair streams out across the universe.

• What does his facial expression convey?

Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings

• Jahangir was a king during the Mughal Dynasty, whose birth was prophesized by the Sufi (Islamic mystic) Shaikh Salim.

• Jahangir is shown sitting atop a disc-shaped platform (to echo the halo behind his head, which shows a crescent moon around a sun, symbolizing his emperorship and divine truth).

• He is higher and larger than the others.

• Jahangir gives a book to the Sufi Shaikh, showing his favor.

Compare the depiction of the Sufi vs. Jahangir.

• Below the Sufi Shaikh is an unidentified Ottoman Sultan (giving a gesture of respect) and King James I of England.

• James never actually visited India. The image of James was based on a painting of him given to Jahangir by an English diplomat. The artist changed the pose of his hand to be off of the hilt of his sword (unthreatening).

• By ignoring the Sultan and King James I in favor of the Sufi, Jahangir shows his Muslim leanings and superiority over other rulers.

• What aspects of the image are probably influenced by European artistic styles?

Bichtir (artist).

India. C. 1620 CE. Watercolor, gold, and ink on paper.

10” tall.

Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings • In the bottom left is a portrait of the artist, Bichtir, whose yellow robe tied to the left shows that he is a Hindu in service of the Mughal court, reminding that not all Islamic art was made by Muslims.

• Bichtir holds a miniature painting, which also shows him in his yellow robe, bowing towards Jahangir (along with 2 horses and an elephant, probably imperial gifts).

• On the hourglass below Jahangir, angels write “O Shah, May the Span of Your Life be a Thousand Years” • The putti (like cherubs, but not specifically Christian) above cover their eyes, perhaps afraid of time running out for Jahangir.

• This miniature folio was once a part of a muraqqa', or album, which would typically have had alternating folios containing calligraphic text and painting.

Bichtir (artist).

India. C. 1620 CE. Watercolor, gold, and ink on paper.

10” tall.

Taj Mahal, India

Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. Ustad Ahmad Lahori (architect). 1650 CE. Stone masonry and marble with inlay of precious and semiprecious stones; gardens.

• Built by the fifth Mughal ruler (also a Muslim).

• Around 1650, Shah Jahan (a Shah is a word for king used in Iran and India) constructed a large, ornate mausoleum for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. He was later entombed there.

• The glistening white marble is radiant and seems almost weightless. Built on the banks of the Yamuna River, it is surrounded by lush reflecting pools and gardens, and decorated with arabesques and Qur’an inscriptions.

• The pointed arches and domes create a sense of upward lift. Well balanced proportions create a sense of peace (the height of the central building is the same as its width, and the large dome (the taj or “crown”) is the same height as the base below it).

• The building was probably conceived as the throne of God, perched above the gardens of Paradise on judgment day, with the non-functional/decorative minarets holding up the canopy above the throne.

• Qu’ran verses and floral motifs (also alluding to gardens of Paradise) decorate the walls.

Taj Mahal

Entry gate, aerial view, and interior chamber.

• Visitors enter the complex through a large, ornate red sandstone gateway (also with reflecting pool and gardens).

• Then, they pass through large gardens before approaching the Taj, which is flanked on both sides by two more red sandstone buildings. One of these buildings is a mosque. The other’s purpose is unknown, except that it gives a sense of balance.

• This white-and-red color scheme of the built complex may correspond with principles laid down in ancient Hindu texts—in which white stood for purity and the priestly class, and red represented the color of the warrior class.

• The interior features eight halls and side rooms connected to the main space in a cross-axial plan, a reference to the eight levels of Paradise.

• The center of the main chamber holds Mumtaz Mahal’s intricately decorated marble cenotaph (an "empty tomb" or a monument erected in honor of a person whose remains are elsewhere), with Shah Jahan’s laid beside hers after he died 30 years later.

• The coffins bearing their remains lie in the spaces directly beneath the cenotaphs.

The Pacific Islands: Context • Very wide geographical and culturally diverse area (first inhabitants were the Lapita).

• United by sea and an oceanic lifestyle; master shipbuilders and navigators.

• Divided into 3 major areas: •Micronesia: Includes Mariana, Caroline, Marshall, and Kiribati islands.

•Melanesia: Most diverse region, with 1293 different languages. Includes Vanuatu, New Caledonia, New Guinea island, and the Solomon islands. Settled earliest (35,000-45,000 years ago).

•Polynesia: Includes New Zealand, Hawaii, Fiji, Tonga, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island), as well as countless small islands in between. Settled by people with a common cultural heritage. Settled more recently (between 3000-1000 years ago).

The Pacific Islands: Context • Ferdinand Magellan – circumnavigated the globe, brought European explorers into contact with the cultures of the Pacific.

• European explorers of the 1700s were followed

by European occupiers in the 1800s, who imposed European customs, values, religion, and technology.

• In the 1900s, many areas of the Pacific achieved independence.

• Gender: men and women had defined roles in society, even in art production (men carved wood, women made pottery and sewed).

• Men’s arts were usually associated with the sacred realm of rites and ritual.

• Art typically features locally available materials, such as bone, shell, wood, coral, fiber, and stone.

• Art often deals with family or clan history, or complex religious belief systems.

• Ritual performances, for various purposes, often include costumes, dance, song, and cosmetics.

Nan Madol

Pohnpei Island, Micronesia. Saudeleur Dynasty. C. 700-1600 CE. Basalt boulders and prismatic columns.

• Nan Madol was a city that was capital of the Saudeleur Dynasty of Micronesia. City population of around 1000.

• Built on a series of 92 man-made islands situated in a lagoon (similar to which European city?)

• Tides wash the canals clean daily, while 35’ thick and 15’ high sea walls break any incoming waves.

• Curved walls designed to look similar to a boat from the outside.

• Oriented towards the SW to take better advantage of the trade winds, make it easier for sailors to go in and out.

• City divided by class – king designed city with the upper class close to him (so he could better keep an eye on them… who does that remind you of?)

Savannah

Nan Madol • Although the site was active by 700 CE, the stone structures were not built until around 1200 CE. Not much else is known about who built the stone structures, or how.

• According to legend, the site was founded and built by a pair of twin sorcerers, who used magic and dragons to levitate the stones into place.

• Some of the artificial islands had special functions, such as a food prep island, a coconut oil producing island, and canoe constructing island.

• Tomb islands are surrounded by high walls, and the royal mortuary islet has 25’ walls surrounding a tomb enclosure within a courtyard.

• Stone structures were built of uncarved basalt, which (under the right conditions of rapidly cooling lava flows) can naturally form into polygonal columns (similar formations can also be seen at Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, and Devil’s Postpile in California).

Pohnpei, Savannah Micronesia.

Saudeleur Dynasty. C. 700-1600 CE. Basalt boulders and prismatic columns.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island). C. 1100-1600 CE. Volcanic tuff figures on basalt base.

Moai on Platform (Ahu) • Moai (“statue”) were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors between 1000 CE and 1650 CE. • At least 887 of these monumental sculptures exist.

• The size and complexity of the moai increased over time, the largest of which are 100,000 pounds (50 tons).

• 14 of the moai are made of harder basalt; the rest are made of the softer volcanic tuff (tufa). Mostly male.

• The remaining standing moai were toppled in the 1860s after the adoption of Christianity.

• Erected on large stone platforms called ahu (also considered sacred) mixed with ashes from cremations.

• Eyes inlaid with red stone and coral to “open” them; also sometimes painted with red & white designs.

• Pectorals and navels delineated. Small arms fall straight down sides and join/clasp hands under the navel.

• What is the expressions of the moai?

• Some moai also have designs carved into their backs, believed to have been added later.

• In the 1600s, an ecological collapse occurred (possibly due to the introduction of rats). With failing crops, the people turned away from the protection of the moai to a new birdman religion.

Hawaiian. Late eighteenth century CE. Feathers and fiber.

‘Ahu ‘ula (Feather Cape) • ‘Ahu ‘ula means “red garment” and refers to feather capes worn by elite Hawaiian males in ceremonies and battle.

• Color red associated with gods and royalty.

• Made up of 500,000 feathers (some birds only have 7 useable feathers, so that would require 71,000 birds).

• Yellow feathers also highly valued for their scarcity.

• Made of olona fiber netting made in straight rows, with pieces joined and cut to form the desired shape.

• Tiny bundles of feathers were attached to the netting in overlapping rows starting at the lower edge.

• The shape of the cape and the narrow neckline was designed to closely fit the wearer.

• Cloaks such as these were also given to early European sea captains and crews, as a sign of respect.

• The artist (considered priest class) who made the cloak chanted to the wearer’s ancestors to imbue protective power onto the cloak, to protect the wearer from harm.

• Pattern shows lineage: Artists recited the genealogy of the wearer during the construction of the cape, weaving the story of the family and the individual into the patterns of the garment. High status = could trace genealogy back to gods

Savannah

Rarotonga, Cook Islands, central Polynesia.

C. 1800 CE. Wood, tapa, fiber, and feathers.

Staff God • Cook Islands – first settled around 1000 CE, colonized by the British in the 1800s, annexed in 1901.

• Pre-colonization, the most sacred image was the Staff God, a carved wooden deity, wrapped in many layers of tapa (cloth made of softened and woven bark), and erected in the village common.

• Top of staff was a carved head, with smaller heads below. The staff represents an elongated torso. At the base of the shaft was a naturalistic phallus (often broken off later by Europeans).

• The spirit of the god is represented by polished pearl shells and red feathers placed inside the tapa, near the shaft.

• Which god is represented by these is no longer known.

• Wrapping: sculptures representing forces in the supernatural world were wrapped to be protected. One’s mana or vital force needed to be protected (mana could be individual or communal).

The act of protecting the mana through wrapping is called tapu.

• Combines male & female elements: •Male: carved wood (male job), male deity, phallus •Female: woven (female job) tapa, protective force, smaller figures may depict women in childbirth.

• Most destroyed during conversion to Christianity.

More on Mana • Polynesian cultures held firm to the belief in mana, a supernatural power associated with high-rank, divinity, maintenance of social order and social reproduction, as well as an abundance of water and fertility of the land.

• Mana was held to be so powerful that rules or taboos were necessary to regulate it in ritual and society. For example, an uninitiated person of low rank would never enter in a sacred enclosure without risking death.

• Mana was believed to be concentrated in certain parts of the body and could accumulate in objects, such as hair, bones, rocks, whale’s teeth, and textiles.

Savannah

Female Deity from Nukuoro • Nukuoro atoll inhabited since c. 700 CE by settlers from Samoa.

• Located within Micronesia, but is culturally Polynesian • Began bartering with Europeans in early 1800s. Christianized in the early 1900s.

Most of the pre-Christian dances, songs, and stories were lost.

• Figurines carved with a blade, then polished with pumice.

• Highly abstracted, geometric figures, reduced to basic shapes, with minimal linear incisions for details. Erect pose.

• Some females have identifiable breasts, but others are ambiguous.

• Often kept in communal religious buildings, the figures represent individual deities. Sometimes dressed in garments or decorated with flowers.

• Local deities in Nukuoro resided in animals or were represented in stones, pieces of wood or wooden figurines.

• Each figure bore the name of a specific male or female deity associated with a particular extended family group, priest, and specific temple.

• Used & venerated during an annual harvest festival.

• During the weeks-long festivities, the harvested fruits and food offerings were brought to the wooden sculptures, male and female dances were performed and women were tattooed. Any weathered and rotten statues were also replaced during the ceremony. For the period of these rituals, the sculptures were considered the resting place of a god or a deified ancestor’s spirit.

• Influenced European sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore.

Nukuoro, Micronesia. C. 1800 CE. Wood. 13” tall.

Hiapo (tapa)

Examples of tapas

Hiapo (tapa) • Bark for tapa harvested from the inner bark of a mulberry tree, pounded flat with a wooden beater on a wooden anvil. Pieces pasted together.

• Designs were sometimes stained, rubbed on, or stamped, or stenciled.

• Designs were geometric motifs in ordered, abstract patterns.

• Tapas usually used for clothing (before introduction of cotton), bedding, wall hangings, and room dividers. Displayed ceremonially on special occasions like birthdays, weddings, and burials.

• Textiles considered women’s wealth – can be used in reciprocal cultural exchanges, or can be presented in exchange for work, food, or to mark special occasions.

• Hiapo is the word for bark cloth on the small island of Niue, south of Samoa. Bark cloth wasn’t introduced there until Samoan missionaries introduced it in 1830.

• By the 1880s, a distinctive style of hiapo decorations emerged that incorporated fine lines and complicated, detailed geometric designs.

• Innovation Patterns composed of spirals, concentric circles, and diminishing motifs. Niueans created the first depictions of human figures in bark cloth. Some include writing (usually names) along the edge.

• Each set of designs is meant to be interpreted symbolically. Many of the symbolic images have a rich history.

Niue. C. 1850-1900 CE. Tapa or bark cloth, freehand painting.

Gottfried Lindauer. 1890 CE. Oil on canvas.

When painting chiefs for Partridge, Lindauer depicted the Maori in traditional ceremonial dress.

When painting portraits commissioned by non-famous Maori families, Lindauer depicted them in European garb.

Tamati Waka Nene • The Māori (“MAOW-ree”) are the indigenous people of New Zealand, known for their facial tattooing (moko).

• This portrait, painted by a Czech artist, depicts Tamati Waka Nene, a Maori chief and important war leader (MANA).

• He lived during a time of change for the Maori – when British missionaries and settlers were just arriving.

• Nene himself converted to Christianity and renamed himself after Thomas Walker, an English merchant.

• In Maori culture, a portrait not only records likeness, it embodies the spirit of the person depicted, bringing their ancestral presence back into the world of the living.

• Kiwi-feather cloak, earring of greenstone, tewhatewha blade = prestigious taonga (treasures) to show great mana.

• Henry Partridge – patron, commissioned Lindauer to paint Maori people to capture their disappearing way of life. Donated 62 such portraits to Auckland Art Gallery.

• Lindauer based the portrait off of a b&w photograph of Nene taken by John Crombie (Nene died before Lindauer came to NZ).

• Lindauer (trained in Renaissance style portraiture) used a projector to enlarge the image onto the canvas to paint it.

New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. C. 1900 CE. Wood, pigment, fiber, and shell.

Malagan Display and Mask • Malangan is a cycle of rituals for the people of New Ireland (off the coast of Papua New Guinea) expressing complex religious and philosophical ideas.

• Malangan rituals mainly deal with honoring and dismissing the dead, but they also act as affirmation of the identity of clan groups, and negotiate the transmission of rights to land. ​ • Malangan sculptures were intended to be used on a single ritual and then destroyed.

• Malangan sculptures can be symbolic of kinship, identity, gender, death, and the spirit world.

• They often include representations of fish and birds of identifiable species, alluding both to specific myths and the animal's natural characteristics.

• The group of sculptures in the lower image were displayed together in a canoe during a single Malangan ceremony.

• Because of the great costs of the sculptures, masks, and feasts associated with funerals, they sometimes happened months after a person died, or honored multiple people at once.

• People of the region did not worship gods, but instead recognized their co-existence with surrounding spirits in the landscape as well as ancestors.

New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. C. 1900 CE. Wood, pigment, fiber, and shell.

Malagan Display and Mask • Instead of a hierarchical society, the society of New Ireland is composed of small, tight-knit families and complex networks of trade and exchange.

• The Malangan masks were used mostly for funerals, which bid farewell to the dead (helped them on their way to the afterworld) and celebrated the vibrancy of the living.

• Funerary rites freed the living from serving the dead.

• The masks represent: dead ancestors, ges (the spirit-double of a living individual), or the various bush spirits.

• When a mask is bought, the seller surrenders all rights to the style/form in which it was made, and even the accompanying rites, encouraging artists to constantly search for new and innovative designs.

• Colors (black, yellow, red) denote magic/war/violence • Mask indicates the particular relationship of a deceased person to their clan and family.

• Large hair “comb” reflects a hairstyle of the time, but masks are not physical portraits, only portraits of the soul.

• Rituals performed in a temporary structure which is destroyed or abandoned after the rituals are over.

Torres Strait. C. 1870 CE. Turtle shell, wood, fiber, feathers, and shell.

Buk (mask) • Narrow waterway between island of New Guinea and Australia is the Torres Straight.

• People of the region uniquely made masks of turtle shell.

• Worn during dances/rituals about death, fertility, or male initiation.

• Would have a sense of movement when performed (feathers, raffia-hair).

• Some masks combine humans and animals – this mask features a frigate bird on top.

• Ceremonies also involved fire, drumming, and chanting.

• Designed to recreate mythical ancestral beings and their impact on people in everyday life.

• Christian missionaries later asked the people to destroy their masks, so only a few still exist.

• Why the frigate bird?

• Person might represent an ancestor (age indicated by beard), or a mythical hero who performed impressive/magical deeds.

• Exact creation date unknown – may have been not meant for performance at all, but for tourists/export.

Navigation Chart • Marshall Islands – 34 coral atolls with over 1000 islets spread out over 100 miles, all with low height/visibility from sea.

• Marshall Islanders built strong, quick, maneuverable canoes to trade between the islands, but needed a sort of map.

• Devised charts of wooden sticks that indicated locations of the islands as well as swell & wave patterns of the sea.

• Horizontal & vertical sticks are merely the support – the diagonal sticks represent wave swells (direction of wave flow), and cowries shells represent the islands.

• Voyagers would memorize the chart before taking to sea, and would not bring the chart along. So, why make them?

• The top example shown is known as a rebbelib, which covers a large section or all of the Marshall Islands (this one shows both chains which form the Marshall Islands). Other types of charts show only a smaller area.

Marshall Islands, Micronesia. C. 1900 CE. Wood and fiber.

Fiji, Polynesia. 1953 CE. Multimedia performance (costume; cosmetics, including scent; chant; movement; and pandanus fiber/hibiscus fiber mats), photographic documentation.

Presentation of Fijian Mats and Tapa Cloths to Queen Elizabeth II • December, 1953, the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II of England took a royal tour of the British commonwealth, stopping at the island of Fiji (then a colony) for 3 days.

• She visited hospitals and schools, and met with Fijian politicians. She was presented with Fijian art objects, dances, and songs, and participated in a kava ceremony (wherein everyone drinks from a cup of kava root tea, in order from most important to least).

• Bark cloth is called masi in Fiji, and the practice of making it continues to this day, and is often presented as gifts during special occasions such as weddings and funerals.

• In Fiji, artists paint the red, white, and black designs.

• Notice in the photo that only the women presenting the rolls of woven mats are dressed in masi (bark cloth) clothing.

• Fijian mats serve as a type of ritual exchange and tribute.

• Mats made by women, who strip, boil, dye, and tightly weave the leaves of the Pandanus plant.

• Surprisingly, mats with simpler/plainer designs are reserved for more important occasions.

Fiji, Polynesia. 1953 CE. Multimedia performance (costume; cosmetics, including scent; chant; movement; and pandanus fiber/hibiscus fiber mats), photographic documentation.

Presentation of Fijian Mats and Tapa Cloths to Queen Elizabeth II • Fijian artists also made elaborate carvings made of wood or ivory, as well as small woven god houses called bure kalou (left), which provided a pathway for the god to descend to the priest. • The masi for Elizabeth featured royal crowns, geometric patterns, and a floral motif.

Art of the Indigenous Americas

“Middle America� is also commonly called Mesoamerica (includes Mexico, Guatamala, Honduras, & Belize)

Context • People first migrated from Asia to the Americas during the last glacial period, about 15,000-30,000 years ago.

• As people spread southward throughout the Americas, a vast range of cultural diversity flourished. Groups of indigenous Americans are as varied as the ecosystems they inhabit.

• Most pre-Columbian Americans practiced various forms of shamanism, using shamanistic rituals and objects.

• Most artworks are made of locally available materials, especially feathers, jade, turquoise, hides, bone, wood, weaving, basketry, and ceramics.

• Architecture (for non-nomadic peoples) could include large stone complexes or pyramids.

• European countries began serious efforts at colonization in the Americas in the 1500s, significantly impacting indigenous lifestyles and art.

• North American indigenous peoples have undergone widespread persecution and cultural reshaping since the arrival of the Europeans.

• The artworks in this slideshow are organized chronologically, but could also be considered regionally (grouped as North American, Mesoamerican, and South American).

Chavín de Huántar

N. Highlands, Peru. Chavin. 900-200 BCE. Stone architecture, Granite sculpture, hammered gold alloy jewelry.

• Located in present-day coastal, Andean-mountain Peru.

• Religious capital/pilgrimage site.

• Located at a high (10K feet) mountain pass connecting the desert coast (west) and Amazon jungle (east), as well as at the confluence point between two rivers (spiritual site).

• Temple complex faces a river which flows in front of it.

• The temple complex that stands today is comprised of two building phases: the U-shaped Old Temple, built around 900 B.C.E., and the New Temple (built approximately 500 B.C.E.), which expanded the Old Temple and added a rectangular sunken court.

•The interior of the temple was riddled with a multitude of tunnels, called galleries, which are dark, windowless, maze-like passageways.

• New explorations are examining the acoustics of these structures, and how they may have projected sounds from inside the temple to pilgrims in the plazas outside. It is possible that the whole building spoke with the voice of its god.

• Sunken court in front of temple for ceremonial purposes.

Chavín de Huántar • The patron deity is depicted in the Lanzón (right), an anthropomorphic, wedge-shaped stone over 15’ tall.

• Located deep within the galleries below the Old Temple, the Lanzon was probably only seen by priests.

• Ritual items also found (mortars, pestles, conch trumpets) • Lanzon means “spear” in Spanish, but the stone is intended to represent instead the digging stick used in traditional agriculture, indicating that the deity’s power ensured a good harvest.

• The Lanzón depicts a jaguar-faced figure with serpent-eyebrows. Its mouth is also large, with bared teeth and protruding fangs. The figure’s left hand rests pointing down, while the right is raised upward, encompassing the heavens and the earth.

• Combination of human, jaguar, serpent, and caiman.

• Contour rivalry – a technique where two images share outlines, so it can appear as one thing or the other.

Deliberately creates visual confusion, to create a barrier between believers who can see its true form and those outside the cult who cannot.

N. Highlands, Peru. Chavin. 900-200 BCE. Stone architecture, Granite sculpture.

Chavin de Huantar • Leopards were shown in relief carvings throughout the complex, as evidenced by the sculpted panel from a stairwell (bottom).

• The serpent motif is also continued in jewelry found in elite burial sites at Chavin, such as the nose-ornaments pictured.

• This type of ornament either was designed to pinch onto, or pass through, the septum.

• As with the Lanzon, the eyes of the snakes look upward.

• An ornament like this would have been worn by an elite man or woman to show not only their wealth/power, but also their allegiance to the Chavin religion.

• Wearing the nose-ornament transformed the wearer into a supernatural being during ceremonies.

• Metal-working techniques developed in South America, then moved north. This is one of the oldest existing examples of metalworking in the Americas.

• Visual dualism is typical of Andean art. Pairs, doubles, and visual oppositions (such as living/dead, black/white, male/female, left/right, peak/valley, night/day, and sun/moon) are common motifs, and related to Chavin religious beliefs.

N. Highlands, Peru. Chavin. 900-200 BCE. Hammered gold alloy jewelry.

Montezuma County, Colorado, USA. Ancestral Puebloan (formerly Anasazi). 450-1300 CE. Sandstone.

Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings

Why “formerly Anasazi”?

Why was it changed to “Ancestral Puebloan”?

Why did they live here?

Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings • The Ancestral Puebloan peoples lived in the Four Corners region, and built dwellings into the sides of cliffs (most major structures built between 1000-1100 CE).

• Farmers – cultivated beans, squash, & corn. Lived near water source (streams), walked to farmlands.

• Reason 1. Defense – ladders could be retracted.

• Reason 2. Shelter – protected homes from wind, sun, and rain (cooler in summer, warmer in winter).

• Cliff structures mostly residential, but also some ritual and storage structures.

• Made with cut sandstone, mud mortar, wood beams adapted to clefts in the cliff face, and plaster. Buildings prior to 1000 CE made primarily of adobe (mud & straw bricks, less durable).

• Cliff Palace – the largest compound of cliff dwellings at the Mesa Verde site (there are other smaller ones in the area). Housed about 125 people, had 150 rooms, 20 of which were circular kivas.

• Buildings could be 1 to 4 stories (up to cliff ceiling). Cliff palace has a circular tower of unknown function.

• Why was Cliff Palace abandoned only 100 years after it was built?

Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings

Taos Pueblo (modern)

• At sites like Cliff Palace, families lived in units organized around kivas, circular, subterranean rooms used for communal and ritual purposes. Connected rooms fanned out to create housing units.

• A kiva typically had a wood-beamed roof held up by six engaged support columns above a shelf-like banquette.

On the floor was a fire pit, protected by a deflector wall from the ventilation shaft.

• In the center of the floor was the sipapu, a ceremonial hole through which spirits could emerge from the spirit world, and from which the first ancestors first emerged from the primordial underworld.

• Kivas evolved from earlier pit-houses (c. 750 CE), partially underground structures that served as “living rooms” for large families. Smaller kivas were probably also mostly used as living rooms, but larger kivas were certainly religious ceremonial spaces.

• Kivas continue to be used for ceremonies today by Puebloan peoples (such as the Taos, Hopi, and Zuni), though not the ones located at Mesa Verde, as it is now a National Park.

Mesa Verde Murals & Ceramics • Murals found within Mesa Verde include geometric designs, animals, and plants.

• Mural 30 (pictured) is painted red against a white wall, and features geometric shapes thought to portray the landscape.

• The red band at the bottom is thought to symbolize the earth while the lighter portion symbolizes the sky.

• The triangular elements may be peaks, while the rectangular element in the sky might relate to clouds, rain, sun, or moon.

• Paintings could be made with ground up local materials, such as red ochre, charcoal, or blue azurite.

• Ancestral Puebloans produced black-on-white ceramics and turquoise and shell jewelry, which showed evidence of trade with far away people.

Mayan Culture •Mayans occupied southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, but were not unified – comprised of 60 different independent city-states.

• Maya cities often included palaces, stepped pyramids, temples, plazas, and ball courts. Ruled by privileged elites and kings.

• Maya developed a sophisticated writing system and an elaborate calendar system known as the Long Count.

• Maya writing found on sculptures, buildings, murals, pottery, and codices (a special type of screen-fold book).

• In the 1950s it was discovered that the script combined signs representing whole words with signs representing syllables. Certain glyphs were recognized as naming specific people and cities. 85% of the glyphs can now be read.

• Maya civilization declined around 800, maybe due to war or crop failure. Populations reduced but not destroyed. 6 million alive today.

Yaxchilán

Chiapas, Mexico. Maya. 725 CE. Limestone.

• Important Mayan center during the Classic period (300-900 CE).

• Located on bank of Usumacinta River in Chiapas, Mexico.

•Much of the exterior of the buildings were decorated with reliefs.

• Carved stone lintels above doorways were commissioned by rulers to record royal dynasties in text and image.

• The complex is entered through a long, dark passageway called the Labyrinth that leads one to the main plaza, framed by buildings.

Structure 40 • Yaxchilan is made of 3 main complexes: Central Acropolis, South Acropolis, and West Acropolis. Site is built over a high terrace.

• Structure 33 was probably made by the major ruler Bird Jaguar IV (or Structure 33 dedicated to him by his son). The temple (1 large room with 3 doors) is decorated with stucco motifs and overlooks the main plaza and river.

Probably used for ritual gatherings.

• The roof of Structure 33 is composed of a high crest or roof comb with a frieze and niches with remains of a human figure.

• Structure 40 is also topped with a roof comb, and once was decorated with murals, and stone stelae depicting King Bird Jaguar IV and his father. Probably functioned as a dwelling & tomb.

• Both structures reached by climbing high stairs (shows importance)

Yaxchilán Lintel Reliefs • Royals depicted youthful, handsome, athletic. Shown wearing authoritative regalia including jade jewelry and a huge headdress.

• King and queens (who also held much power as queens and mothers of kings) performed many rituals, including blood-letting and human sacrifices (sacrificial victims captured from enemies during warfare).

• In this lintel relief, Lady Xok, principal queen of King Shield Jaguar II, lets blood by passing a spiny rope through her tongue, letting the blood drip onto the codex below. The king illuminates the scene with a lit torch.

• The pain and loss of this blood sacrifice were a necessary prelude to conjuring up royal ancestors.

• This sacrifice mirrored the Maya story of creation, when the gods let their blood to create the human race.

• By choosing to take part in the ritual, the queen demonstrated her moral and physical strength to her people, and her suitability as a royal.

• Royals frequently engaged in bloodletting ceremonies using lancets made of stingray spine, bone, and stone, many of which have been found in royal burials.

• The king wears a helmet made of a human head, possibly a trophy.

• Originally polychromed.

Structure 23, lintel 24. Chiapas, Mexico. Maya.

725 CE. Limestone.

Yaxchilán Lintel Reliefs • To the right of the blood-letting lintel relief we see the aftermath of a different blood-letting ritual performed by Lady Xok, this one occurring in 681 CE, the year her husband took the throne.

• Out of her blood, we see emerging a huge, writing serpent.

• Out of the serpent’s mouth emerges an armed ancestor – the founder of the dynasty.

• Through her blood-letting, Lady Xok has conjured up the founding ancestor, as if in the moment when her husband becomes king, she goes back and consults with the founder.

• The shedding of royal blood was an act of supreme sacrifice to gain the gods’ favor and thus perpetuate the cycle of human life.

• In a third, unpictured lintel (#26), Lady Xok is shown handing a jaguar helmet to her husband, securing his place in the dynasty of kings.

• All three lintel reliefs were commissioned by Lady Xok. • As is typical with Maya lintel reliefs, the date of the event and names of the featured figures are noted in the glyphs at the top.

Structure 23, lintel 25. Chiapas, Mexico. Maya.

725 CE. Limestone.

Adams County, Ohio, USA. Mississippian (Eastern Woodlands).

C. 1070 CE. Earthwork/effigy mound.

Great Serpent Mound • Largest serpent effigy in the world. 1,300’ in length, 1-3’ tall.

• Mounds were often made by the ancient American cultures along the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers, but have been destroyed as farms spread across the US. • The ancient peoples who created it were farmers who grew maize, beans, and squash. No written records.

• Located on a high plateau above a creek, which flows through an ancient meteor crater.

• Contains no artifacts or remains, making it hard to date exactly, or tell who made it. May have been made by one group of people (likely Mississippians or Fort Ancient culture), or maybe it was constructed and maintained over time by several different groups.

• What’s pictured? A snake or lizard (reptiles considered to have supernatural powers) with 7 curves, its jaw open, perhaps swallowing an egg, a frog, or the sun (to create an eclipse)… or the round shape is the serpent’s eye.

• Function uncertain. Possibilities: navigational compass (parts of snake align with certain stars), calendar (head points to summer solstice sunset, tail points to winter solstice sunrise), record of celestial event (Halley’s Comet appeared in 1066, also a visible supernova that year), base of a larger structure which no longer exists, or some combination of these.

The Mexica (or Aztec) • The Aztecs (or Mexica, as they called themselves) were a nomadic people who migrated south from the desert into central Mexico.

They eventually settled on the edge of a lake, establishing their city of Tenotchtitlán in 1345 CE. In 150 years, it was one of the largest cities in the world.

• Tenochtitlan is built on an island surrounded by marshes. The Aztecs built causeways to connect islands, an created farmland in the marshes by filling fenced in boxes with extra soil.

• Developed aqueducts to dispose of waste and roads meant for foot travel (no large draft animals like horses or oxen).

• City ruled by a single leader supported by nobles, priests, warriors, and merchant classes.

• Emphasis on warfare – conquered peoples paid tribute and provided a source of slaves (used for working and human sacrifice).

• Extensive trade networks. Exported ceramics & lake salt. Imported most valuable raw materials (skins, gold, jade, turquoise, feathers, etc.), which skilled urban craftspeople crafted into luxury items, which could then be re-exported.

• The dead were usually cremated and buried with their possessions, especially tools used in life.

• What ended the Mexica empire?

Templo Mayor (Main Temple) • Located in the center of Tenochtitlan (modern day Mex. City), positioned as the center of the Mexica empire. The capital was also divided into four main quadrants, with the Templo Mayor at the center, akin to the Mexica cosmos, which was believed to be composed of four parts structured around the navel of the universe, or the axis mundi.

• Made of stone covered in stucco.

• Pair of staircases lead to twin temples, dedicated to the gods Tlaloc (god of water/rain/agri. Fertility) and Huitzilopochtli (god of war, fire, & sun, and patron deity of the Mexica).

• This pair of gods symbolized the Mexica concept of “burnt water” which promoted warfare as the primary way to acquire wealth/power.

• In front of Huitzilopochtli’s temple was a large sacrificial stone.

• At the base of the temple were sculpted snakes and snake heads.

• At the base of the stairs below Huitzilopochtli’s temple is an 11’ wide disc-shaped monolith, the Coyolxauhqui Stone.

• Only priests & sacrificial victims climbed the stairs.

• Cult statues of 2 deities inside shrines, made of seeds, honey, & human blood with a gold mask. Broken apart and eaten by the populace annually.

Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City). Mexica (Aztec). 1375-1520 CE. Stone temple.

Coyolxauhqui Stone • One day, the earth goddess Coatllicue (“Snakes-her-Skirt”) was sweeping atop Snake Mountain (Coatepec) when a feather fell into her apron causing her to immaculately conceive.

• Her daughter, Coyolxauhqui (“Bells-her-Cheeks”) became enraged when she heard her mother was pregnant, so she summoned 400 of her brothers to go kill their mother.

• 1 brother warned Coatlicue, who was afraid, but she was comforted by her unborn baby Huitzilopochtli.

• When Coyolxauhqui approached, Huitzilopochtli was born, fully grown and armed, and killed Coyolxauhqui.

• He sliced off his sisters head and threw her off the mountain, breaking her body apart as it fell.

• Coyolxahqui’s sagging stomach indicates she was a mother. Her nakedness indicates defeat. The monster faces at her broken joints associate her with gods of chaos and trouble.

• During the annual banner raising ceremony at Templo Mayor, the Mexica celebrated Huitzilopochtli’s triumph by dancing, eating tamales, and sacrificing war captives (painted blue) on the sacrificial stone, then throwing their bodies down the stairs to land on the Coyolxauhqui Stone, as a re-enactment of her death/defeat.

• Sends intimidating message to enemies.

Mexica (Aztec). 1375-1520 CE. Volcanic stone (orig. polychromed).

Tlaloc Temple • The sculptural decorations on the Tlaloc side of Templo Mayor relates to him as the patron deity of rain, water, and agricultural fertility.

• A reclining male figure painted blue and red, known as a chacmool, holds a bowl up to receive offerings. Associated with rain god.

• At the base of the temple, directly below the chacmool, is the Altar of the Frogs. Croaking frogs were thought to herald the coming of the rainy season.

• While Huitzilopochtli’s temple symbolized Coatepec (Snake Mountain) and victory in war, Tlaloc’s temple was intended to symbolize the Mountain of Sustenance (Tonacatepetl). This fertile mountain produced high amounts of rain, thereby allowing crops to grow.

• Over 100 ritual deposits were found at Templo Mayor. Some related to water (coral, shells, crocodile skeletons), and some related to war and sacrifice (skull masks, sacrificial knives).

• One buried item was an Olmec jade mask. The Olmec were a much earlier civilization (from about 100 BCE-700 CE, about 1000 years earlier).

• The fact that it was buried in a ritual cache suggests that the Mexica found it important, and held respect for the past.

• During the Spanish conquest of 1521, Templo Mayor was destroyed, its remains buried until discovered by construction workers in the 1900s.

Chacmool

Olmec mask

Templo Mayor (Main Temple) • Depiction of the origin of the universe.

• Mexica believed they lived in the fifth Sun, or historical era.

• The name of the fifth sun is “Four Movement” and is indicated by the 4 squares around the center figure. The symbols inside each square show the names of the previous four Suns (4 Jaguar, 4 Wind, 4 Rain, and 4 Water).

• The name of each sun indicates what caused the death of that era, thus “Four Movement” indicates our current era will end in earthquakes (very volcanic era with serious earthquakes).

• The Sun is brought into creation by the self-sacrifice of two gods (one to create the Sun, and one to put it into motion).

• Thus, humans needed to feed the sacrificed gods with sacrificial animal, blood, or human offerings to continue the Sun. • Arrows to 4 cardinal points. Belief that the world was divided into 4 quadrants with Tenochtitlan at the center (Tenochtitlan itself is divided into 4 quadrants, with Templo Mayor at the center to reflect this cosmic diagram).

• Fire serpents with faces coming out of their mouths meet at the bottom – associated with movement of the sun and passage of time.

• Date known by inclusion of royal insignia of Moctezuma II (1520 CE)

Tenochtitlán (present-day Mexico City). Mexica (Aztec). 1375-1520 CE, basalt calendar stone.

Mexica (Aztec). 1428-1520 CE. Feathers (Quetzal and cotinga), fiber, and gold.

Ruler’s Feather Headdress • Probably belonged to Moctezuma II, and given to Cortez as a gift for Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire.

• Not the main crown of the Aztec emperor (which was a turquoise encrusted diadem).

• 400 long green feathers are from sacred male quetzal bird, which only produces 2 long tail feathers.

• The number 400 symbolized eternity.

• The quetzal feathers (as well as feathers from several other species of birds) are mounted on a net of vegetal fibers and sticks.

• Originally, a golden beak was attached to the front.

• Quetzals only found in central America/Costa Rica; evidence of long distance trade/tribute being sent to Aztec capitol.

• Elaborate costumes were an important part of status.

• Feathers shimmer/move in wind when worn, animated.

• Feather-workers were highly regarded craftspeople, who continued working with feathers even after Spanish conquest (shift in subject matter to Christian iconography).

• In the last 200 years, it has been misidentified by historians as an apron and a standard.

The Inca (Inka) • Capital: Cuzco, located at 11,200’ elevation in the central Andes Mountains (Peru). Considered center of the world (axis mundi).

• Inca period: 1400 CE-1531. Inca-colonial: 1531-1800.

• Empire stretched 2,400 miles along the Andes from Chile to Colombia.

• Their name for their empire translates to “Land of Four Quarters” • Ruled by a single emperor considered a living god, ruling by divine right (descended from the sun god, Inti).

• Economy based on taxed labor – surplus goods (clothing, pottery, food) was stored for use by the army and state laborers.

• Inca colonists were settled in newly conquered territories as a way of managing subject peoples and spreading Inca language/customs.

• Local lords were enlisted into the system of Inca government to maintain order in their provinces. Rebels were resettled in the Inca heartland.

• Inca empire connected with a network of roads and bridges, administrative centers, storehouses, and military bases.

• No system of writing. Our knowledge of them is based on artifacts.

• Stones are fit together without mortar. Although not uniform in shape, the puzzle piece-like shapes hold together during earthquakes.

• Buildings usually slope inward toward the top, in a trapezoid shape.

12-sided stone in Cusco

City of Cusco • In addition to being divided into upper hanan and lower hurin halves (mimicking upper and lower class), Cusco is divided into 4 quadrants, to reflect the way the empire is divided into 4. People from a certain quadrant of the empire live in the respective quadrant of the city.

• The similarity between the layout of the city and the layout of the empire symbolized the power of the emperor to rule over and control his empire.

• May also have been shaped like a puma (head fortress, heart central square).

• Leaders from all sections of the empire lived in Cusco, to help control their people. Young men were educated in Cusco to teach them Inca culture, which they brought back home with them.

• In addition to Inka gods and ancestor mummies kept in Cusco, there were also the captured gods of subject peoples, brought there as a means of controlling their followers.

• At the heart of hurin (lower) Cusco was the Qorikancha or “Golden House.” This was the most sacred shrine of the Inca, dedicated to the worship from the sun.

• The Inca claimed descent from the sun god (Inti), and held the sun’s worship above all others.

Cusco: Qorikancha with Santo Domingo Convent •The Qorikancha was the center point of the empire, and from it radiated imaginary lines like spokes, called ceques, which connected it to over 300 shrines throughout the Cusco valley.

• The shrines at the end of the ceques aligned with the sun in a form of astronomical calendar. The shrines were thus a marker of time, with different noble families tending to and holding rituals at the shrines around the ceque system throughout the year.

• Qorikancha was also an observatory for priests to chart the skies.

• Because of the importance of the Qorikancha, the stones are not irregular, but smoothly polished rectangular courses which were originally covered in gold (to symbolize Inti, the sun).

• The doorways were also double-jammed. These time-consuming embellishments were saved for only the most important buildings.

• Inside, a reproduction of the world in miniature took the shape of a garden made from gold, silver and jewels, with people, animals, and plants.

• The riches of the Qorikancha would be taken in the looting of the city following the Spanish conquest in 1532, and melted down for their precious materials.

• The Spanish turned the Qorikancha into a Christian convent and church, built directly on top of the shrine, incorporating some elements.

Central highlands, Peru. Inka. C. 1440 CE. Convent added 1550 CE. Adesite.

Inka, c. 1440-1533 CE. Sheet metal/repousse, metal alloys

Maize Cobs • This object was one of the objects from inside the Qorikancha’s golden enclosure – a gold-silver alloy sculpture of a life-size ear of maize, still on the stalk.

• These delicate, hollow cobs were hammered into shape (repousse).

• The naturalism of the items in the “garden” contrasts with the more common geometric patterns and abstractions of Andean art.

• Maize was an important staple food source for the Inca, and was also the main ingredient for maize beer (chicha) which was imbibed at important political feasts.

• The diverse plants and animals represented in the garden are from throughout the Inca empire’s various elevations and ecosystems, and cannot really co-exist in the same garden in real life.

• The Qorikancha’s garden asserted the natural world as a possession of the Inka at the same time it reinforced their divine right to rule across the Andes.

•Small metal offerings acted as symbols of the supernatural origin of the Inkas in the Sun, and their control over the natural world as descendants from the most powerful deity.

• In 1534, Spanish conquistadors raided Cusco and Qorikancha’s garden, sending the gold and silver objects back to King Charles V.

City of Cusco: Walls at Saqsa Waman • Above Cusco to the northwest (“head” of the puma).

• Features huge, zig-zag stone walls.

• Unclear function, possibly a fortress.

• Seems to have been left unfinished (or maybe it was in the midst of being built during the Spanish conquest).

• Built of MUCH larger stones than the city of Cusco.

• 70 ton stones quarried and hauled into place using man-power (labor tax).

Central highlands, Peru. Inka. C. 1440 CE. Adesite.

City of Machu Picchu • It was built as a part-time royal estate for the first Inka emperor, Pachacuti Inka Yupanqui, in the mid 1400s. Located 3 days walk from Cusco, at a lower, more pleasant altitude (about 7,000 ft).

• It was intended as a place where the Inka emperor and his family could host feasts, perform religious ceremonies, and administer the affairs of empire, while also establishing a claim to land that would be owned by his lineage after his death.

• The site was chosen and situated for its relationship to the Andean landscape, including sight lines to other mountain peaks which were considered ancestral deities throughout the Andes.

• The site contains housing for elites, retainers, and maintenance staff, religious shrines, fountains, and terraces, as well as carved rock outcrops, a signature element of Inka art.

• Terracing increased the arable land surface and reduced erosion by creating walled steps down the sides of steep mountains. Each step could then be planted with crops. More crops grown in valley.

• Excess water drained off using stone channels that directed water into fountains (some used for ritual bathing of the emperor).

• Irregular ashlar masonry buildings with wood/thatch roofs.

• Trapezoidal doors, windows, & niches.

Central Highlands, Peru. Inka. C. 1450-1540 CE. Granite.

Machu Picchu Observatory • The buildings of Machu Picchu clearly show social divisions, with the high-status residential buildings in a cluster to the northeast.

• The emperor himself lived in a separate compound at the southwest of the site, indicating his unique status as the ruler.

• The Observatory was adjacent to the royal residence, emphasizing the relationship between the elites, religious ritual, and astronomical observation, and the emperor’s divine ancestry (from sun god Inti).

• One of the obligations of the royal family was performing many rituals that sustained relationships with the supernatural forces that drove existence.

• The Observatory (a.k.a. Temple of the Sun) was composed of the upper curved stone enclosure and a lower cave beneath. Both sections contained niches.

• The upper section’s windows were used to calculate the June solstice and the movement of constellations (such as Pleiades).

• The lower cave referred to the underworld in Inka myth, connecting the cosmos above with the earth below.

• The stone Intihuatana (“hitching post of the sun”) is a carved boulder in the ritual area. Similar carved boulders found throughout empire, symbolized belief in landscape with supernatural forces.

• Used to track the movement of the sun throughout the year.

Central Highlands, Peru. Inka. C. 1450-1540 CE. Granite.

Inka, Peru. C. 1450-1540 CE. Camelid fiber and cotton.

All’t’oqapu Tunic • The exchange of high status goods (often given to local leaders) helped secure the reciprocal but unequal economic relationship between the Inca and their subjects.

• Giving status objects to local leaders cemented the relationship, and gave the Inca the right to claim portions of local produce and labor.

• Finely woven fabrics, often using llama or alpaca wool and cotton, are an Andean tradition predating the Incan empire.

• Collecting, spinning, and dying the fibers was time and labor intensive, before the weaving even began. Some dyes, like indigo and cochineal red (made from shells of tiny red insects) were also expensive, and reserved for high status objects.

• Red- and blue-dyed textiles thus represented the social and political power that commanded those resources.

• Weaving done “chosen women” (acllas) from across the empire, who were cloistered together to weave fine cloth. The acllas also performed religious rituals and made/served chicha (corn beer).

• The high quality textiles they produced were given as royal gifts, worn by royals, or burned as sacrifices to Inti.

• Finely woven (about 300 threads per inch) for a light, strong weave.

All’t’oqapu Tunic

Backstrap loom

• It was believed that a spirit essence grew with the piece as it formed on the loom, and to cut the fabric would destroy the spirit. As such, it was traditional to weave garments as a single piece.

• The word t’oqapu refers to the square geometric motifs. These designs were reserved for high ranking individuals only.

• Most tunics only had the t’oqapu designs in a single band around the neck or wrists. The designs were probably related to specific peoples, places, or social roles.

• Since this tunic is covered in t’oqapu, it was probably a royal tunic.

• Demonstrates the power of the Inca ruler (“Sapa Inca”) by: •Expensive materials (fine thread, bright dyes, technically difficult weave) shows ability to command taxation and access luxury goods • Inclusion of a black & white checkerboard pattern, worn by the Inca army, showing the Sapa Inca’s military might •Variety of t’oqapu shows that the Sapa Inca (translates as “unique Inca”) was a special individual who held claim to all t’oqapu, and therefore all people of the empire.

• It is a statement of absolute dominion over the land, its people, and its resources, manifested in an item that is typically Andean in its material and manufacture.

Bandolier Bag • A bandolier bag is a bag, intended to be worn across the chest, based on bags carried by European soldiers to store ammunition.

• Large size bag. Decorated with billowing silk ribbons & thousands of tiny “seed” beads that sparkled in the light.

• Bandolier bags were made by many Eastern Woodland groups, with some regional variations. This one is probably Lenape (upstate NY).

• Even after the Lenape and other similar tribes were forcibly resettled in Oklahoma, they continued to make this style of bag.

• Typically made by women & worn by men. Intended to complement men’s ceremonial outfits. Status symbol.

• This particular bag is made of both cotton cloth (a European introduction) and animal hide (a traditional material).

• This bag was made with tiny European glass beads, valued for their bright colors. Before European colonization, artists would have used dyed porcupine quills.

• Silk ribbons (also European) provided a wide range of color choices.

Before introduction of ribbons, artists painted the surface of hides.

• A red wool fringe on the pocket adds to the textural variety.

• Describe the aesthetic qualities. Is it symmetrical?

Lenape (Delaware Tribe, Eastern Woodlands). C. 1850 CE. Beadwork on leather.

Prairie Style • After the forced relocation to Oklahoma, the Lenape came into contact with other relocated Eastern Woodlands tribes, sharing styles and motifs.

• The resulting “Prairie Style” borrows from a mixing of older Delaware traditions/motifs, usually featuring glass beads to create abstracted floral patterns.

• Prairie Style is more abstract, not closely resembling natural flowers.

• Prairie Style is the result of peoples coming into contact with one another, in the wake of removal from their ancestral homelands, helping to express group identities and social status.

• Bandolier bags using abstracted floral patterns, ribbons, and glass beads demonstrate an ability to adapt to a new way of life and creativity with new materials, while also showing a resilience of traditional motifs and ways of life.

Transformation Mask

Kwakwaka’wakw, Northwest Coast of Canada. C. 1880 CE. Wood, paint, and string.

• The Kwakwaka’wakw (kwock-wocka-wock) nations are located along the Pacific coast of Canada, near Vancouver (a little north of Seattle).

• Important arts include intricate weaving and wood-carving using mostly cedar (especially totem poles and masks).

• Mask worn with cedar-bark costume by men during night-time, fire-lit ceremonies inside communal longhouses.

• Kwakwaka'wakw oral history says their ancestors came in the forms of animals by way of land, sea, or underground. When one of these ancestral animals arrived at a given spot, it discarded its animal appearance and became human.

• During ceremonies, dancers wear transformation masks which open at the pull of a string, revealing a second face inside.

• These masks enable the dancers to “transform” from one animal into another, or from an animal to a mythic being or ancestor.

• One ceremony that used transformation masks was the potlatch ceremony. Wealth was measured not by how much a person had, but how much they had to give away. At potlatches, people (especially the host) gave away or exchanged gifts to demonstrate their own wealth.

• Only men of high status were allowed to wear the transformation masks, which thus symbolized their high social status.

•Masks could be inherited or gifted between family members.

Transformation Mask • Four bands of Kwakwaka’wakw (Orca, Eagle, Raven, Wolf). Within each band are numayn – people of ranked status within the band.

• Numayns were responsible for safe-guarding family crest symbols (which were often painted inside masks).

• Numayns (depending upon rank) were given privileges (like rights to natural resources, like salmon fishing areas, or the right to wear a transformation mask, or the right to sacred names or dances that related to the numayn’s ancestor).

• Ancestral entities and supernatural forces temporarily embody dancers wearing these masks and other ceremonial regalia.

• Many myths of transformation involve trickster supernaturals – a god(dess), spirit, man/woman, or animal who exhibits intelligence or secrets and uses it to play tricks. Often the Raven (who changes into other animals or helps provide humans with the sun, moon, or fire) or the Thunderbird (who creates thunder and lightening with his wings).

• Pacific NW art (including Kwakwaka’wakw) uses the formline style, using blue/green/red/black colors, undulating thick/thin lines, ovoid shapes, and bilateral symmetry.

• Potlatches were banned in the 20th century (because no one worked during them, and the gvmt. was afraid they involved cannibalism), and many transformation masks were collected and destroyed.

Attributed to Cotsiogo (Cadzi Cody), Eastern Shoshone, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, USA. C. 1890-1900 CE. Painted elk hide.

Wind River Indian Reservation, WY

Painted Elk Hide • Great Plains tradition of painting on hides dates back 1000 years.

• Painting & oral tradition used to record history.

• This is done by Cotsiogo (“co SEE ko”) a.k.a. Cadzi Cody, a member of the Eastern Shoshone nation.

• This item probably functioned as a warrior’s robe or wall hanging, but painting was also done on tipis, clothing, & shields.

• Paintings done on hides (elk, deer, or buffalo) using natural pigments like red ochre and chalk. (Later, European paint & dye) • Earlier paintings focused on geometric motifs or figures, but in the late 1800s, artists focused on subjects that “affirmed native identity” and appealed to tourists (romanticized).

• Done using a combo of free-hand painting & stencils.

• Prior to the establishment of the Wind River Reservation in the 1860s, the Shoshone were nomadic, following natural resources (namely buffalo). During Cotsiogo’s life, the buffalo herds dwindled from over-hunting by white Americans and the Shoshone were forced to settle permanently on the reservation.

• Forced to find a new means of livelihood, Shoshone artists began making art to be bought by tourists.

Painted Elk Hide • In the Shoshone camp (represented by the 2 tipis), a group of men perform a dance (a composite of 3 different dances is shown – the sacred Sun Dance, the non-religious Wolf Dance, and the Grass Dance).

• They perform the Sun Dance of raising a buffalo head up between two poles, honoring the Creator Deity for the buffalo and ensuring the bounty continued.

• The US government outlawed the Sun Dance (to force N.A.s to abandon their traditions), so Cotsiogo modified the dance by combining it with the Wolf & Grass dances, to avoid problems.

• Scenes from daily life surround: women sit in the village, hunters shoot buffalo with arrows, and warriors display their bravery in battle through their eagle-feathered war bonnets, which only accomplished warriors could wear (each feather symbolized a great deed of bravery performed in battle).

• Considering this was made c. 1900, in what ways did the reality of Shoshone life not match this romanticized vision?

What is anachronistic?

• Why has Cotsiogo chosen to depict this romanticized version of Shoshone life?

Black on Black Ceramic Vessel • Maria Martinez lived her whole 93 years at San Ildefonso Pueblo, in New Mexico (just north of Santa Fe).

• She learned to hand-build (no potters wheel) thin-walled ceramic vessels from her aunt by layering coils of clay.

• She & her husband, Julian, worked for awhile at an archeological dig at Bandelier, a nearby ruin. She helped around the camp while Julian helped the archeologist and made notes of the patterns found on the pottery shards they found at the site.

• Although the dirt in the region is red, the shards they found were shiny & black. The archaeologist, Prof. Hewett, asked Maria to experiment with firing techniques to recreate the black pottery.

• After much trial & error, she discovered that by smothering the firing with powdered manure, the trapped smoke and reduction of oxygen turned the clay black. The name for this finished look is blackware.

• Instead of using kilns, the ceramics were buried during the firing.

• Although shiny, the pots are NOT glazed. Instead, they are burnished – a process of coating the unfired pot with a layer of slip, then polishing it with a glossy stone.

• Maria began producing ceramics to bring money to her pueblo.

Maria and Julian Martinez, Etwa, Puebloan, San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, USA. C. 1950. Blackware ceramic.

Black on Black Ceramic Vessel • She built the pots, and her husband Julian decorated them. After the pots were burnished, he painted the matte designs using a mixture of either pulverized iron ore or a reduction of wild plants called guaco.

• After Julian’s death, she also made pots with her adult children.

• Making ceramics was a very communal process, not done by only Maria. Members of the pueblo helped dig the clay out of secret local spots, mix it with water and volcanic ash, and store it.

• The designs Julian used were geometric and abstract, based on the ancient shards they found, usually featuring natural things like rain clouds, feathers, rivers, or rows of corn.

• The designs appealed to fans of the Art Deco movement of the early 20th century (which focused on bold, geometric shapes), and admirers began to ask Maria to sign her pottery.

• At first she resisted (because of the team effort that really went into the pottery), but eventually she began to sign them to bring more money in for her pueblo. She even signed other’s pueblo artists’ pots, so they would fetch a higher price.

• Humble and dedicated to her pueblo, Maria Martinez became an unlikely celebrity in the art world, and an ambassador between traditional techniques and modern world.

Context • Spain ruled its colonies in the New World (the Viceroyalty of New Spain in N. America and the Viceroyalty of Peru in S. America) between approximately 1520-1820 CE. • With them they brought their Catholic religion, with a special focus on Marian devotion (focus on Virgin Mary).

• Unlike English colonists further north, Spanish colonists enlisted native artists, resulting in art that combines native skills and traditions with Spanish Catholic imagery and themes.

• In addition to trading goods between Europe and the Americas, the Spanish also set up a trade route between the Americas and Asia (specifically Manila in the Spanish Philippines), known as the Manila Galleon route (after the huge galleon cargo ship).

• The Manila Galleon introduced Asian materials, such as silk, ivory, and porcelain, into the artistic production of New Spain.

• As a result, the art produced in New Spain could combine influences from Asia, Europe, and the Indigenous Americas.

• The first major center of artistic production in the Spanish colonies was at Cuzco in Peru.

Frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza • In 1541, the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, commissioned a codex (an old form of book) to record information about the Aztec empire.

• The Codex Mendoza contained information about the lords of Tenochtitlan, the tribute paid to the Aztecs, and a description of Aztec daily life.

• Viceroy Mendoza sent the codex to the Spanish King Charles V, but it was intercepted by French pirates, and wound up in France where it was acquired by André Thevet, who added his own name on some pages.

• Artwork done by indigenous artists, but annotated by a Spanish priest who spoke Nahuatl (Aztec language).

• How might you know that this was done by indigenous, instead of Spanish, artists?

• The image on the frontispiece (the title page of a book) illustrates the layout of Tenotchtitlan, with the city divided into four parts by intersecting blue-green undulating diagonals representing canals.

• What else did this quadripartite division represent?

• The eagle on the nopal cactus represents the sign that Huitzilopotchtli told the ancestral Aztecs to look for when choosing where to build.

Viceroyalty of New Spain. C. 1541 CE. Ink and color on paper.

Frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza •Also depicted around the eagle: a temple, a skull rack, a war shield, and maize.

• In the 4 quadrants are men in white, who lead the ancestral Aztecs to the lake. Their names are represented by the symbols depicted next to them (pre-conquest name-glyphs).

• The gray-skinned man to the left of the eagle is a priest, shown by his bloody ear (blood-letting ritual) and scroll coming from his mouth.

• Surrounding the entire page are year glyphs, beginning on the upper left with the date 2-House (1325 C.E.) and finishing (counter clock-wise) with the date 13-Reed for a total of 52 years.

• Aztecs believed a complete cycle of years was 52 years, after which a new fire was drilled into a sacrificial victim, then distributed among people to light their homes. This ensured the sun would rise again.

• The first year of the new cycle was 2-Reed, noted by the symbol with a fire drill above it.

• Below the city diagram are two scenes of military conquest, where Aztec soldiers (shown larger with obsidian blades) defeat 2 enemies.

• How else might you know the 2 larger men are Aztecs?

• The enemies’ cities are identified with glyphs as Colhuacan and Tenayuca, two early Aztec victories in their rise to power.

Master of Calamarca (La Paz School). c. 17th century CE. Oil on canvas.

Angel with Arquebus, Asiel Timor Dei • Inscription means “Asiel, Fear of God” (Asiel = name of the angel) • An arquebus is an early form of muzzle-loaded long rifle.

• Depictions of androgynous, stunningly attired, arquebus-carrying angels were produced from the late-1600s through the 1800s in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru.

• They were celestial, aristocratic, and military beings all at once.

• The Master of Calamarca (Bolivian) or his workshop created a series of paintings of angels with arquebuses. Though found by itself, this one was probably part of a larger group of angels doing other activities, like drumming or holding lances.

• Made during the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic church portrayed itself as an army with angels as its soldiers. The armed angel protects faithful Christians.

• The Council of Trent outlawed depictions of angels other than Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, but this was largely ignored by the Spanish and their colonies.

• Prints depicting archangels circulated throughout the Andes, and since angels explained the spiritual function of the cosmos, they could stand in for/replace sacred indigenous beings.

• As such, Catholic missionaries in the Viceroyalty of Peru used images of angels to help convert the indigenous populations.

Master of Calamarca (La Paz School). c. 17th century CE. Oil on canvas.

Angel with Arquebus, Asiel Timor Dei • Androgynous Catholic angels were also equated with Inca tradition through the myth of the creator god Viracocha and his invisible servants, the beautiful warriors known as huamincas.

• Having never seen firearms before, indigenous populations initially saw firearms as supernatural manifestations, and thus the gun also represents the power of the Spaniards over the indigenous.

• However, the angel hardly looks like a war-hardened soldier. What about his depiction belie the idea that he is about to shoot?

• What is going on with his outfit? What elements are European vs. what elements are derived from native traditions?

• Dem sleeves, doe…

• At the time this was made, gold/silver embroidery was prohibited, except for the military.

• Francisco de Ávila, a priest in Peru who studied native customs, described the second coming of Christ as an event during which an army of well-attired angels with feathered hats would descend from the heavens.

Screen with the Siege of Belgrade and Hunting Scene • Biombo – Spansh for folding screen (from Japanese byōbu) • Done in the style of Japanese lacquer-ware (black wood, floral motifs, glossy finish) • Commissioned by the Viceroy (Jose Sarmiento de Valledares) • This is one of a pair (so this only shows ½ the battle scene) • Depicts a battle between the Ottoman Turks and Austria, which was ruled by the Hapsburgs (who also ruled Spain) as part of the Holy Roman Empire.

• In addition to oil painting, there are areas inlaid with mother-of-pearl shell (enconchados) • The Siege side of the biombo was intended to be seen by visitors of the Viceroy, to demonstrate his ruling power.

• The other side (Hunting Scene) is more peaceful, and intended to be displayed for the Viceroy’s wife and her friends.

• Both sides are based on European art (the Hunting Scene was based on a Medici tapestry which was converted into a print, and the Siege side was also based on a print).

• However, both sides also show Asian influences. How so?

Siege of Belgrade Circle of the González Family.

C. 1697-1701 CE. Tempera and resin on wood, shell inlay

Hunting Scene.

Circle of the Gonzรกlez Family.

C. 1697-1701 CE. Tempera and resin on wood, shell inlay.

Miguel González.

C. 1698 CE. Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City.

1500s CE. Oil on canvas on wood, inlaid with mother of pearl.

Based on original image of Virgin of Guadalupe from Juan Diego’s tilma.

Virgin of Guadalupe • Enconchado (mother of pearl inlay) catches the light • Depicts a vision in which Mary appeared to an indigenous person, Juan Diego, on a hill called Tepeyac, a location sacred to a pre-Colombian goddess.

• Mary ordered Juan Diego (in 1531) to tell the local archbishop to build a sanctuary at the site.

• Archbishop did not believe at first, so Mary made the hilltop flower. Mary told Diego to gather the roses in his tilma cloak and show them to the archbishop, and when he did so, the image of the Virgin was miraculously imprinted upon his cloak.

• Since then, Virgin de Guadalupe is highly revered symbol in Mexico – symbolizes the correctness of the conversion to Christianity (see eagle on cactus symbol).

• Virgin of Guadalupe became the co-patroness of Mexico after it was believed she intervened in an epidemic.

• In Guadalupe images Mary always stands on a crescent moon, surrounded by sunrays, with a crown of stars (or in this case, 12 rays of light) as the “Woman of the Apocalypse” is described in the Book of Revelations.

• Ashen skin = “dark virgin” – relatable to indigenous peoples • “True copies” – based on the original, believed to carry some of the power of the original image.

Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo • Made in Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) • Pinturas de castas – “caste paintings” depicted marriages between people of different races (but not realistically) • Casta paintings usually show mother, father, and 1-2 children, based on images of the Holy Family • Casta paintings usually produced in a series of 16 paintings of different racial pairings (but all 16 could be on one canvas) • The first position of the casta series is always a Spanish man and an elite Indigenous woman, accompanied by their offspring: a mestizo.

• The various pairings are hierarchically ranked, and the name for the offspring produced by that pairing is noted (many with pejorative terms).

• Casta paintings convey the perception that the more European you are, the closer to the top of the social and racial hierarchy you belong. Pure-blooded Spaniards always occupy the preeminent position in casta paintings and are often the best dressed and most “civilized.”

• This high-status family appears well-dressed and loving, but lower status pairings were shown in rags and discord.

• Who probably commissioned casta paintings?

Attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez.

C. 1715 CE. Oil on canvas.

Miguel Cabrera. C. 1750 CE. Oil on canvas.

Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

St. Jerome

• Sor Juana was a child prodigy born of creole parents (of Spanish descent) who amazed scholars with her knowledge of philosophy, physics, and math at 15.

• She became a nun so that she could avoid marriage and instead focus on her intellectual pursuits (first Carmelite, then switched to Jeronymite, an order dedicated to St. Jerome, which let her host intellectual gatherings).

• This portrait was based off earlier images of her (Cabrera never met her) and was styled similarly to images of scholars at their desks (see image of Jerome at left). Made for her admirers.

• She corresponded with scientists, theologians, and other literary intellectuals in Mexico and abroad. She wrote poetry and plays that became internationally famous, and engaged in theological debates. She provided education for girls.

• What about this image conveys her intellectualism?

• What about this image conveys her role as a nun?

• Her escudo de monja (“nun’s shield”) depicts the Annunciation.

The book she touches is a work by St. Jerome.

• Red curtain conveys high status. The writing implements imply that she writes in addition to being well read. Eye-contact.

• She was forced by the church to give up her intellectual pursuits, library, and instruments. She died caring for the sick.