Art History Final

• Courbet
• "Stone Breakers"
• 1849
• Realism,impressionism
• Courbet painted these ordinary people in an attempt to portray the French people as a political entity. In this way Courbet's republicanism showed through in his work. Courbet truthfully portrayed ordinary people and places, leaving out the glamour that most French painters at that time added to their works. Because of this, Courbet became known as the leader of the Realist movement.

The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, depicts two ordinary peasant workers. Courbet painted without any apparent sentiment; instead, he let the image of the two men, one too young for hard labor and the other too old, express the feelings of hardship and exhaustion that he was trying to portray. Courbet shows sympathy for the workers and disgust for the upper class by painting these men with a dignity all their own.

• Courbet
• "Burial at Ornans"
• 1849
• Realism

Courbet has intentionally painted his black-clad folk in a manner that does not idealize their suffering. The Salon audience is accustomed to paintings that poeticize and uplift, and they read Courbet's grieving figures as vulgar and ugly. One critic writes, "He paints pictures as you black your boots

• Manet
• "Olympia"
• 1863
• Realism

It is possible also to find a strong reminiscence of the classicism of Ingres in the beautiful precision with which the figure is drawn, though if he taught to placate public and critical opinion by these references to tradition, the storm of anger the work provoked at the Salon of 1865 was sufficient disillusionment. There is a subtlety of modelling in the figure and a delicacy of distinction between the light flesh tones and the white draperies of the couch that his assailants were incapable of seeing. The sharpness of contrast also between model and foreground items and dark background, which added a modern vivacity to the Venetian-type subject, was regarded with obtuse suspicion as an intended parody.

Olympia was the gift of a group of art lovers and painters to the Luxembourg in 1890 and was transferred to the Louvre in 1908.

• Manet
• "Luncehon on the Grass"
• 1863
• Realism

The Paris Salon rejected it for exhibition in 1863 but he exhibited it at the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) later in the year. Emperor Napoleon III had initiated The Salon des Refusés after the Paris Salon rejected more than 4,000 paintings in 1863

The painting's juxtaposition of fully-dressed men and a nude woman was controversial, as was its abbreviated, sketch-like handling, an innovation that distinguished Manet from Courbet. At the same time, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of theJudgement of Paris (c. 1515) based on a drawing by Raphael

• Winslow Homer
• "The veteran in a new Field"
• 1865
• Realism-american

The painting seems to blend several related narratives. Most soldiers had been farmers before the Civil War. This man, who has returned to his field, holds an old-fashioned scythe that evokes the Grim Reaper, recalls the war's harvest of death, and expresses grief upon Lincoln's murder. The redemptive feature is the bountiful wheat—a Northern crop—which could connote the Union's victory. With its dual references to death and life, Homer's iconic composition offers a powerful meditation on America's sacrifices and its potential for recovery.Source:Winslow Homer: The Veteran in a New Field (67.187.131) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Thomas Eakins
• "The Gross Clinic"
• 1875
• Realism-American

Admired for its uncompromising realism, The Gross Clinichas an important place documenting the history of medicine—both because it honors the emergence ofsurgery as a healing profession (previously, surgery was associated primarily with amputation), and because it shows us what the surgical theater looked like in the nineteenth century.

It is assumed that the patient was a teenage boy, although the exposed body is not entirely discernible as male or female; the painting is shocking for both the odd presentation of this figure and the matter-of-fact goriness of the procedure.[1] Adding to the drama is the lone woman in the painting seen in the middle ground, possibly the patient's mother, cringing in distress

• Henry Ossawa Tanner
• The Thankful poor
• 1894
• Realism-american

• Timothy O'Sullivan
• A Harvest of Death
• July 1863
• Photagraphy

The image eloquently captures the war's toll of death and destruction, especially apparent after the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place from July 1 to July 3, 1863. Although Gardner's caption identifies the men in the photograph as "rebels represented...without shoes," they are probably Union dead. During the Civil War, shoes were routinely removed from corpses because supplies were scarce and surviving troops needed them.

• Claude Monet
• Rouen Cathedral: The portal in the sun
• 1894
• Impressionism

When Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral series, he had long since been impressed with the way light imparts to a subject a distinctly different character at different times of the day and the year, and as atmospheric conditions change. For Monet, the effects of light on a subject became as important as the subject itself. His Series Paintings, in which he painted many views of the same subject under different lighting conditions, are an attempt to illustrate the importance of light in our perception of a subject at a given time and place

Monet found that the thing he had set out to paint–light–was, because of its ever-changing nature and its extreme subtlety, an almost impossible thing to capture. He was assisted, however, by his ability to capture the essence of a scene quickly, then finish it later using a sketch combined with his memory of the scene. For these paintings, he used thick layers of richly textured paint, expressive of the intricate nature of the subject.

• Pierre Renoir
• Le Moulin de la Galette
• 1876
• Impressionism

Every Sunday afternoon young people from the north of Paris contributed in the dance-hall and in the courtyard behind it in fine weather. Most of the figures in Renoir's work, rather than being habitués of the Moulin were in fact portraits of his friends, with the occasional professional model posing for thin. The scene which Renoir has painted in this work is not an authentic representation of the clientele of the Moulin, but rather a scrupulously organized series of portrait.

• Degas
• The Tub
• 1886
• Impressionism

The Tub still models the body through chiaroscuro, but the sharp outline, the ‘arranged’ pose, the steep downward angle of view past the dressing table, and the sharp contrast with a background form - here the bathtub itself - are entirely keeping with Japanese precedent

However, although the painting certainly does contain many Japanese similarities, it does not keep entirely with Japanese precedent. Instead of having an “arranged” pose, the woman portrayed in The Tub is in a very natural position. She is crouching down in the tub washing herself. Nothing about her body position is pretentious or “posed.” Degas in fact prided himself on his figures being completely the opposite - candid and unrestrained. As he said, “my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations… it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.” (Degas) The pose is very similar to some of the poses portrayed in the Japanese prints. However, Degas’ woman is much more natural, as opposed to the slightly more rigid and unrealistic feel that many of the Japanese prints had.

• Mary Cassatt
• The bath
• 1892
• Impressionism

Mary Cassatt adapted elements of the Japanese aesthetic -- including asymmetrical composition, flattened space, areas of pattern, and steep perspective -- to a Western image of maternal care.

• Seurat
• Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte
• 1884-1886
• Post-impressionism

Motivated by study in optical and colour theory, he contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer's eye. For example, he painted many green and red dots in a certain way that when you see the painting, the colour would be seen as the combination of both colours, in this case yellow. He believed that this form of painting, now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes

Shows mix of classes of society

• Gauguin
• The vision after the sermon
• 1888
• Post impressionism

These intense colors give power and radiance to the supernatural world, separating it from the duller, lifeless black-and-white actuality

Finally, Gauguin’s growth reached a climax in “Vision After the Sermon,” (1888) in which he at last found the colors and the “idiom” he had been searching for in Brittany and created a work that, according to Fred Kliener, “decisively rejects Realism and Impressionism” and is considered his first true Symbolist painting. (Kliener, 918) This decisive rejection, like the progression leading up to it, was greatly dependent on Gauguin’s development of color, however this dependence is often overlooked because of the obvious Christian imagery in “Vision After the Sermon.” As in “Yellow Christ,” the Symbolic power of “Vision” has been widely attributed to its religious subject matter alone.

• Van Gogh
• The night Cafe
• 1888
• Post impressionism

In wildly contrasting, vivid colours, the ceiling is green, the upper walls red, the glowing, gas ceiling lamps and floor largely yellow. The paint is applied thickly, with many of the lines of the room leading toward the door in the back. The perspective looks somewhat downward toward the floo

It is color not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist, but color to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperamen

• Van gogh
• A starry night
• 1889
• Dutch post impressionism

The center part shows the village of Saint-Rémy under a swirling sky, in a view from the asylum towards north. The Alpilles far to the right fit to this view, but there is little rapport of the actual scene with the intermediary hills which seem to be derived from a different part of the surroundings, south of the asylum. Thecypress tree to the left was added into the composition.[7] Of note is the fact van Gogh had already, during his time in Arles, repositioned Ursa Major from the north to the south in his painting Starry Night Over the Rhone.

• Gaugiun
• Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going
• 1897
• Post Impressionism

Gauguin—after vowing that he would commit suicide following this painting's completion, something he had previously attempted—indicated that the painting should be read from right to left, with the three major figure groups illustrating the questions posed in the title. The three women with a child represent the beginning of life; the middle group symbolizes the daily existence of young adulthood; and in the final group, according to the artist, "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts"; at her feet, "a strange white bird...represents the futility of words." The blue idol in the background apparently represents what Gauguin described as "the Beyond." Of its entirety he said, "I believe that this canvas not only surpasses all my preceding ones, but that I shall never do anything better—or even like it."The painting is an accentuation of Gauguin's trailblazing post-impressionistic style; his art stressed the vivid use of colors and thick brushstrokes, tenets of the impressionists, while it aimed to convey an emotional or expressionistic strength. It emerged in conjunction with other avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, including cubism and fauvism.

• Louis Daugerre
• Artists Studio
• 1837
• Photography, still life

• Julia margaret Cameron
• Ophelia, Study 2
• 1868
• Photography

• Muybridge
• Horse galloping
• 1878
• Photography

Contending that all four of a horse's feet are off the ground simultaneously at some point while galloping, Stanford hired Muybridge to prove it photographically. Muybridge's first photographs of the horse were poorly exposed and thus inconclusive. After constructing a more efficient shutter and improving the speed of his film, he resumed his experiments with motion studies in 1877, but he was still producing only single images. Undaunted, he developed a system of first twelve and eventually twenty-four cameras, whose electro-magnetic shutter blades were opened by the stride of the animal tripping wires strung across the track. This series of twenty-four consecutive frames, which took less than one second to expose, was made after Muybridge had perfected his technique. Ultimately, Muybridge did prove that all four feet of a galloping horse were off the ground simultaneously.

• Cezanne
• The Basket of Apples
• 1895
• Post impressionism

The piece is often noted for its disjointed perspective. It has been described as a balanced composition due to its unbalanced parts[1]: the tilted bottle, the incline of the basket, and the foreshortened lines of the cookies meshing with the lines of the tablecloth.[1] Additionally, the right side of the tabletop is not in the same plane as the left side, as if the image simultaneously reflects two viewpoints.[2]Paintings such as this helped form a bridge betweenImpressionism and Cubism.[2]

• Picasso
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
• 1907
• Cubism

Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionallyfeminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, giving them a savage aura. In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both Cubism and modern art. Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends.

• Braque
• The portuguese
• 1911
• Cubism

• Picasso
• Still life with chair-caning
• 1912
• Cubism

• Duschamp
• Nude Descending a staircase
• 1912
• cubism

• Boccioni
• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
• 1913
• Futurism

• Charles Garnier
• Opera, Paris
• 1861-1874
• Modern Architecture

The style is monumental and considered typically Beaux-Arts, with use of axial symmetry in plan, and its exterior ornamentation.

The Palais is decorated opulently with elaborate multicolored marble friezes, columns, and lavish statuary, many of which portray deities of Greek mythology. Between the columns of the theatre's front façade, there are bronze busts of many of the great composers, Mozart, Rossini, Daniel Auber,Beethoven, Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy,Spontini, and Philippe Quinault.

• Barry and Pugin
• Houses of Parliament, London
• 1835
• Modern Architecture

The architect conceived the great square tower as the keep of a legislative "castle" (echoing his selection of the portcullis as his identifying mark in the planning competition), and used it as the royal entrance to the Palace and as a fireproof repository for the archives of Parliament

Striking the hour to within a second of the time, the Great Clock achieved standards of accuracy considered impossible by 19th-century clockmakers, and it has remained consistently reliable since it entered service in 1859

• Joseph Paxton
• Crystal Palace,London
• 1851
• Modern Architecture

was a cast-iron and glassbuilding originally erected in Hyde Park, London,England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square feet (92,000 m²) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in theIndustrial Revolution

• Louis Sullivan(and Dankmar Adler)
• Guaranty Building
• Buffalo, New York
• 1894-1896

In the 1890s the skyscraper was a new and uniquely American building type. Most early skyscrapers, including the Guaranty Building’s neighbor, the Ellicott Square Building, borrowed heavily from classical European design and used strong horizontal lines to de-emphasize their verticality. Familiar styles were used for what were new, and often overwhelmingly large, structures.

The Guaranty Building stunningly illustrates Sullivan’s famous statement that “form follows function.” The building’s intricate terra cotta ornamentation, for example, accentuates its structure.

• L. Mies van der Rohe and P Johnson
• Seagrams Building
• New York City
• 1956-1958
• Modern Architecture

It was a style that argued that the functional utility of the building’s structural elements when made visible, could supplant a formal decorative articulation; and more honestly converse with the public than any system of applied ornamentation. A building's structural elements should be visible, Mies thought. The Seagram Building, like virtually all large buildings of the time, was built of a steel frame, from whichnon-structural glass walls were hung

• Le Corbusier
• Villa Savoye, Poissy(near Paris)
• 1929
• Modern Architecture

A manifesto of Le Corbusier's "five points" of new architecture, the villa is representative of the bases of modern architecture, and is one of the most easily recognizable and renowned examples of theInternational style.

• The plan was set out using the principle ratios of the Golden section: in this case a square divided into sixteen equal parts, extended on two sides to incorporate the projecting façades and then further divided to give the position of the ramp and the entrance.
  2. Support of ground-level pilotis, elevating the building from the earth and allowed an extended continuity of the garden beneath.
  4. Functional roof, serving as a garden and terrace, reclaiming for nature the land occupied by the building.
  6. Free floor plan, relieved of load-bearing walls, allowing walls to be placed freely and only where aesthetically needed.
  8. Long horizontal windows, providing illumination and ventilation.
  10. Freely-designed facades, serving as only as a skin of the wall and windows and unconstrained by load-bearing considerations.

• Frank loyd Wright
• Robie House, Chicago
• 1907-1909
• Modern Architecture

Designed in Wright's Oak Park studio in 1908 and completed in 1910, the building is both a masterpiece of the Prairie style and renowned as a forerunner of modernism in architecture. Tours of the site offer both a first-hand experience of its amazingly contemporary spaces and the current restoration work that is returning the house to its original appearance.

• Walter Gropius
• The bauhaus
• Dessau, Germany
• 1925-1926
• Modern architecture

Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the Fagus Factory than the stripped down Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the VölkischSommerfeld House.^[16] The Dessau years saw a remarkable change in direction for the school. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius had approached the Dutch architect Mart Stam to run the newly-founded architecture program, and when Stam declined the position, Gropius turned to Stam's friend and colleague in the ABC group,Hannes Meyer.

• Michael Graves
• Portland Building
• 1980
• Modern architecture

The distinctive look of Michael Graves' Portland Building, with its use of a variety of surface materials and colors, small windows, and inclusion of prominent decorative flourishes, was in stark contrast to the architectural style most commonly used for large office buildings at the time,^[5] and made the building an icon of postmodern architecture. It is the first major postmodern building, opening before Philip Johnson's AT&T Building, and its design has been described as a rejection of the Modernist principles established in the early 20th century.

Beyond questions of style, many structural flaws came to light shortly after the building's completion.^[6] The building's failings are the subject of much humor and contempt by the civil servants who work there, who describe it as cheaply built and difficult to work in.^[7]

• Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,
• House in Delaware
• 1978-1983
• MOdern architecture

• Marcel Duschamp
• Fountain
• 1917
• Dada

"The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges."^[7] Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation.

• Hannah Hoch
• Cut with a Kitchen Knife
• 1919-1920
• Dada

• Man Ray
• Gift
• 1921
• Dada

Man Ray’s first solo exhibition in Paris included paintings, aerographs, and collages, mostly brought from New York in his steamer trunk. Not listed in the catalogue was an object Man Ray constructed on the very afternoon his show opened: he glued a row of fourteen tacks to the bottom of an iron and added it to the works on display as a gift for the gallery owner, the poet Philippe Soupault. With its menacing blend of domesticity and sadomasochism, the object apparently attracted unusual attention—by the end of the day, Gift had vanished.

• Meret Oppenheim
• Object, Lucheon in fur
• 1936
• Surrealism

This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim's fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, "Even this cup and saucer." Soon after, when asked by André Breton, Surrealism's leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. In so doing, she transformed genteel items traditionally associated with feminine decorum into sensuous, sexually punning tableware.

• Dali
• The Persistence of Memory
• 1931
• Surrealism
• The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order".^[1]This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. When asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was in fact the case, Dali replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of aCamembert cheese melting in the sun.

It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" that Dalí used in several period pieces to represent himself – the abstract form becoming something of a self portrait, reappearing frequently in his work

• Joan Miro
• Painting
• 1933
• Surrealism

• Frida Kahlo
• The two fridas
• 1939
• mexican surrealism

• Style: representational and fantastic, symbolic and iconic. Kahlo referenes the traditional sacred altar format of a Mexican retablo painting. The doubling or split self and the contradictory pairing of an inner and outer reality being played out in the body suggests a Surreal vision. As she herself wrote, "I adore surprise and the unexpected. I like to go beyond realism." But she also reminds us, "I paint my own reality."
• Subject: a double self-portrait painted shortly after Diego Rivera asked her for a divorce. Frida was undergoing an emotional crisis. She shows herself split in two: one Frida wearing native Indian costume, the other wearing European dress. They are connected by a bloodline that runs from heart to heart. The Frida in white snips the bloodline so it drips blood directly over her lap (her womb). A graphic image of heartbreak in which Frida's inner suffering is turned inside-out. A turbulent sky fills the background. Focus is on inner identity and the desiring body

• Jackson Pollock
• No. 1 (lavender mist)
• 1950
• Abstract expressionism

There is a tremendous speed in black and white lines laid over areas of paint; and there is the airiness of space in the bare canvas. Yet there is also strictness and economy in this work. One restriction Pollock imposed on himself was his use of colors that are restrained, even dignified-such as black, white, tan, and aluminum gray-and he shows by the way these dignified colors are poured and dripped that they can be wild. And all this he does within the borders of a large rectangular canvas 5'8" by 8'8". I think what Jackson Pollock did with paint is great.

• Mark Rothko
• No. 14
• 1960
• Abstract Realism

• Richard Hamilton
• just what is that makes todays homes so different
• 1959
• Pop art-collage

he collage consists of images taken mainly from American magazines. The principal template was an image of a modern sitting-room in an advertisement in Ladies Home Journal for Armstrong Floors, which describes the "modern fashion in floors"

• warhol
• green coca cola bottles
• 1962
• pop art

• warhol
• marilyn diptych
• 1962
• pop art
• The work was completed during the weeks afterMarilyn Monroe's death in August 1962. It contains fifty images of the actress, which are all based on a single publicity photograph from the film Niagara.

The juxtaposition of the color images with those in black and white is sometimes thought to symbolize Monroe's life and mortality.^[1] The black and white pictures can also be said to represent her career in film^[2] or the photographs of her in magazines

• ellsworth kelly
• red blue green
• 1963
• Post painterly abstraction/art since 1960

• Hard-edged, flat, and without a trace of the artist's hand, Kelly's signature imagery is nonetheless based on architectural and natural forms. In Kelly's hands, abstraction becomes a conceptual method by which he reconfigures and recontextualizes the forms and structures of the real world. His paintings and sculptures represent a subjective interpretation of reality, rather than a descriptive copy of it. In "Blue Green Red," he has juxtaposed three bold colors in a highly skillful and effective manner to create a complex picture in which color and shape are one. The edges of one shape—the rectangle—are identified with the edges of the canvas, while the blue ellipse expands beyond the canvas, forcing us to finish it in our minds. Despite the clean, precise rendering of the ellipse, its form is irregular and seems to float and swell, activating the entire composition.
• Kelly's arrangement of the complementary colors, which work to intensify one another at their intersections, is also an essential component of the work. The opposite colors of red and green both add to the boldness of the work and divide the overall rectangle into distinct units

• Frank Stella
• Mas o Menos
• 1964
• Post painterly abstraction/art since 1960

• tony smith
• die
• 1962
• Minimalist sculpture/art since 1960

• Donald Judd
• Untitled
• 1969
• Minimalist sculpture/art since 1960

Sculpture must always face gravity, and the stack—one thing on top of another— is one of its basic ways of coping. The principle traditionally enforces a certain hierarchy, an upper object being not only usually different from a lower one but conceptually nobler, as when a statue stands on a pedestal. Yet in Judd's stack of galvanized–iron boxes, all of the units are identical; they are set on the wall and separated, so that none is subordinated to another's weight (and also so that the space around them plays a role in the work equivalent to theirs); and their regular climb—each of the twelve boxes is nine inches high, and they rest nine inches apart—suggests an infinitely extensible series, denying the possibility of a crowning summit. Judd's form of Minimalism

• Judy Chicago
• the dinner party
• 1974-79
• Art since 1960/contemporary art

• Judy Chicago, the instigator and co-ordinator of the project, stated that its purpose was to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."
• The Dinner Partycelebrates traditional female accomplishments such as textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, which have been framed ascraft or domestic art, as opposed to the more culturally valued, male-dominated fine arts. The white floor of triangular porcelain tiles is inscribed with the names of a further 999 notable women

• faith ringgold
• whos afraid of aunt jemima
• 1983
• contemporary art

• joseph beuys
• how to explain pictures to a dead hare
• 1965
• Contemp art, perfomance piece

• jean tinguely
• Homage to new york
• 1960
• contemp art

• carol schneeman
• meat joy
• 1964
• contemp art

• robert smithson
• The spiral jetty
• great salt lake
• 1970
• contemp art-earthwork

• At the time of its construction, the water level of the lake was unusually low because of a drought. Within a few years, the water level returned to normal and submerged the jetty for the next three decades. Due to a drought, the jetty re-emerged in 2004 and was completely exposed for almost a year. The lake level rose again during the spring of 2005 due to a near record-setting snowpack in the mountains and partially submerged the Jetty again. Lake levels receded and, as of spring 2010, the Jetty is again walkable and visibl

• christo and jeanne claude
• surrounded islands
• 1980-1983
• Contemp art

• Maya ling lin
• vietnam veterans memorial
• washington dc
• 1981-83
• contemp art

The period of urbanization and industrialization from 1850-1960.

A movement in Western art that developed in the second half of the 19th century and sought to capture the images and sensibilities of the age. Modernist art goes beyond simply dealing with the present and involves the artist’s critical examination of the premises of art itself.

the middle class or the capitalist class who own most of society's wealth and means of production.

workers or working-class people, regarded collectively

scientific interest in how things in nature really look, if only for a moment

a group of paintings of the same object which demonstrate interest not in the subject itself, but how objects serve as screens for the changing atmospherecropping

when the artist applies color in tiny dots and the images then become comprehensive from a distance when the viewer’s eyes optically blend the pigment dots

French for “in open air.” An approach to painting much popular among the Impressionists, in which an artist sketches outdoors to achieve a quick impression of light, air and color.

a layer of thickly applied paint with visible brushstrokes

French fascination with everything Japanese in the second half of the nineteenth century

Latin, “dark room.” An ancestor of the modern camera in which a tiny pinhole, acting as a lens, projects an image on a screen, the wall of a room, or the ground-glass wall of a box; used by artists in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries as an aid in drawing from nature

single, unique image made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal which appears crisp, precise, and silvery. Devceloped by Louis Daguerre.

A photographic process in which a positive image is made by shining light through a negative image onto a sheet of sensitized paper and are somewhat hazy in quality

a group of artists who were against Realism and liked to paint biblical or mythological subjects

French “advance guard” Late 19th and 20th century artists who emphasized innovation and challenged established convention in their work

a dismissal of illusionistic space that had dominated art since the Renaissance.

(Cubism and African art): artists in the early 20th century often collected art from non-Western cultures and studied it to get back to the “truth” of art; this “barbaric” art of non-Western cultures justified the perceived “need” for a colonial presence in these countries

a composition made by combining on a flat surface various materials, such as newspaper, wallpaper, printed text and illustrations, photographs, and cloth

A public declaration by the leader of the Futurist movement, Filippo Marinetti, which aggressively advocated for revolution in society and art

when a series of photographs are taken in a chronological order to document movement

Associating different historical styles with different meanings

A type of steel construction, usually for buildings of considerable height, in which the loads and stresses are transmitted to the building foundation by a framework of steel beams

when the structural supports of a building a set back and the outer walls of the building are non-structural

piers that are supports that lift a building above ground. They can be elements such as columns, pillars, or stilts.

a style with no ornament that emphasizes structure and does not particularly fit in any particular environment. Associated with Le Corbusier, whose elegance of design came to influence the look of modern office buildings and skyscrapers.

a type of architecture characterized by low, horizontal lines that were meant to blend with the flat, prairie landscape around the architecture

architecture whose designs are inspired by forms and objects found in nature

Building House”; A school of architecture in Germany for improving craft production and emphasized the unity of art, architecture, and design.

An exhibition of Modern art in 1913 that took place in New York City. This was the first time Modern art got a large audience and it was highly criticized.

a found object that selects already made materials rather than creating them

where Dadaism began. In 1916 Hugo Ball read a poem here that was nonsensical and attacked conventions of society and art

a composition made by pasting together pictures or parts of pictures, especially photographs

three-dimensional, tangible works that embody Surrealist ideas to explore the realms of fantasy and the subconscious

a type of surrealism that suggests that the forms and images were generated by the subconscious without the artist's control.

recognizable images or scenes transformed into a dream or nightmare image

a type of surrealism that suggests a relationship to biological or organic forms found in nature but they do not look like a realistic or naturalistic imitation of anything we might see in the real world

a word that serves as a generic title for a whole series of collages of the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters. The word derived nonsensically from the German word Kommerzbank (commerce bank) and appeared as a word fragment in one of his compositions.

a group of American Realist artists who gravitated into the circle of the influential and evangelical artist and teacher Robert Henri who urged the artists produce images depicting the rapidly changing urban landscape of New York City (often these images captured the bleak and seedy aspects of the city leading to their nickname “Ash Can School”)

An American art movement of the 1920s and 1930s. They concentrated on portraying man-made environments in a clear and concise manner to express the beauty of perfect and precise machine forms

the capital of the Basque region, an area in southern France and northern Spain, which was almost totally destroyed by Nazi air bombers killing thousands. This event inspired Picasso to complete his work, Guernica.

German, “new objectivity.” An art movement that grew directly out of WWI experiences of a group of German artists who sought to show the horrors of war and its effects

an exhibition mounted in 1937 by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in which they displayed art that degraded art that did not meet the zenith of Aryan art development, particularly the avant-garde.

A type of art formulated to convey belief that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling, which attaches to no object and thus calls for new, nonobjective forms in art- shapes not related to objects in the visible world

An early 20th century Russian art movement in which art sculptures were built up piece by piece in space instead of carving or modeling them.

Dutch, “the style.” An early 29th century art movement that promoted utopian ideals and developed a simplified geometric style

A 20th century American art movement that portrayed American rural life in a clearly readable, realist style

a philosophy asserting the absurdity of human existence and the impossibility of achieving certitude

An architectural style using deconstruction as an analytical strategy. Attempts to disorient the observer by disrupting the conventional categories of architecture. The haphazard presentation of columns, masses, planes, lighting, and so forth challenges the viewer’s assumptions about form as it relates to function

A reaction against modernist formalism. Far more encompassing and accepting than the more rigid confines of modernist practice, postmodernism offers some styles, subjects, and formats, from traditional easel painting to installation and from abstraction to illusionistic scenes. Often postmodern art includes irony or reveals a self conscious awareness on the part of the artist of art-making processes or the workings of the art world

During the past half century, the embrace of new technologies, particularly video recording and computer graphics, in an attempt to find fresh avenues of artistic expression.

Particularly important with performance art- it is the material evidence, in the medium of photography, that still exists from these ephemeral performances.

the kind of Abstract Expressionism practiced by Jackson Pollock, in which the emphasis was on the creation process, the artist’s gesture in making art.

A variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction in which artists sought to reduce painting to its physical essence by pouring diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and letting these pigments soak into the fabric