UNIT 5 ART HISTORY/MOVEMENT PDF

UNIT 5 ART HISTORY/MOVEMENT Lesson 1: Pre-Historic, Egyptian and Classical Art Pre-Historic Art Artworks created before the beginning of recorded history have long since perished. Only a few of these artworks survived, and thes...

UNIT 5 ART HISTORY/MOVEMENT Lesson 1: Pre-Historic, Egyptian and Classical Art Pre-Historic Art Artworks created before the beginning of recorded history have long since perished. Only a few of these artworks survived, and these give significant clues to the artistic spirits of our ancestors. Deep inside certain caves in the mountainous region that is now southern France and northern Spain can be found the oldest paintings known to exist. The wall paintings in a cave at Lascaux, France have been dated to about 13,000 B.C, during the Upper Paleolithic Period. Based on the conclusions of archaeologists, the paintings were done by mixing pigments of red and yellow ocher, a natural earth substance, with animal fat and painted onto the walls using reed brush. In powdered form, these ochers were probably mouth-blown to a higher surface through hollow reeds. Experts were also intrigued as to why these paintings were made far inside of the caves and not very accessible to people. Most of them believe that these paintings had a magical function. Even older than the Lascaux cave paintings is a little female statuette. This statuette, which is called Venus of Willendorf, is made of stone and was formed about 23.000, and was found near a town in present-day Austria. This statuette is believed to be a fertility image, meant to be carried around as an amulet. Less than five inches tall, the statuette stressed the features associated with childbearing. Much pre-historic art seems to have been created to make sense out of the universe and to exert some control over the forces of nature. Another pre-historic art is the Stonehenge. Located on a plain in the south of England, the Stonehenge, a structure of megaliths, stood for more than three thousand years, around 2,000 B.C. People are fascinated as to how and why this structure was built. According to the experts, these huge stones, weighting 50 tons or more, were quarried many miles away and dragged to the site by whatever primitive means may have been available. As to why it was created, a study conducted by the astronomer Gerald Hawkins in 1964 revealed that this structure apparently functioned as a giant calendar, codifying the changes of seasons and stars.  Egyptian Art The Egyptians built their society around the Nile River, which enabled them to develop agriculture, and establish a permanent settlements. This condition creates a social climate which allows art to flourish. Hieroglyphics is the first art forms of the Egyptians. The principal message of their art is continuity, characterized by stability, order, and endurance. These can be seen in their artworks such as the Sphinx, their pyramids and mastabas, temples and colossal sculptures. Painting is an expression or definition of concepts of accepted social values rather than a mere decoration. Stone was The major medium of art. For painting and sculpture, ancient Egyptians followed the “law of frontality” wherein the head faces forward with the arms set close to the body and the legs perfectly balanced. The faces were drawn in profile with a frontal view of the eyes which are often expressionless. They used ocher and fresco-secco as their medium. Their style is described as realistic and naturalistic (Amarna Style). Sculptures are in relief and free-standing, colossal or life-size of kings, queens, armies and servants. These sculptures are idealized representations, immobile of features and always frontal in pose. Strong geometric emphasis was given to the body, with the shoulders and chest plane resembling an inverted triangle during the old and middle kingdom while greater naturalism was attained during the new kingdom. Egypt is known for its pyramids and mastabas as well as temples and palaces built on posts known as ‘flower and bud capitals.’ Classical Art Classical art refers to the art of Greece and Rome developed around 5 th and 4th centuries B.C. The center of classical art was Athens, one of Greece’s city states. During these periods, naturalism was attained, figures were well proportioned and shown in movement, although faces remained immobile. Gods and athletes were favorite subjects of sculpture. Paintings were mostly done on vases. Subjects were usually portrait, landscapes, geometric designs, genre scenes and mythological characters and scenes. It is characterized by simplicity, formality, symmetry and restraint. Classicism in architecture is characterized by the used of columns Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan and Composite designed by the Greek and the Romans.  Classicism in theater or drama is best represented by the works of Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Classical art is characterized by simplicity, formality, symmetry and restraint. Lesson 2: Medieval Art Watch the video on Middle Ages Art and take down notes on Early Christian Art, Romanesque Art, Byzantine Art, and Gothic Art. Lesson 3: Modernism and Contemporary Art (19th and 20th Centuries) Modern and Contemporary Arts Modernism in the 19th Century ❖ Impressionism Impressionism is perhaps the most important movement in the whole of modern painting. At some point in the 1860s, a group of young artists decided to paint, very simply, what they saw, thought, and felt. They weren’t interested in painting history, mythology, or the lives of great men, and they didn’t seek perfection in visual appearances. Instead, as their name suggests, the Impressionists tried to get down on canvas an “impression” of how a landscape, thing, or person appeared to them at a certain moment in time. This often meant using much lighter and looser brushwork than painters had up until that point, and painting out of doors, en plein air. The Impressionists also rejected official exhibitions and painting competitions set up by the French government instead organizing their own group exhibitions, which the public were initially very hostile. All of these moves predicted the emergence of modern art, and the whole associated philosophy of the avant-garde. ❖ Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, which was from the last Impressionist exhibition up to the birth of Fauvism. The movement emerged as a reaction against Impressionism and its concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and color.  Post-Impressionists both extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations: the artists continued using vivid colors, a thick application of paint and real-life subject matter, but were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, distort forms for an expressive effect and use unnatural and seemingly random colors. ❖ Pointillism Pointillism can be described relatively simply – it’s an art movement named after a technique in which small dots of color are applied to canvas in order to form an image. Today, the term dotted art is also in colloquial use, and it describes the application of small dots of different color painted on canvas. As a historical art movement, Pointillism has a very particular implication, but nowadays it’s usually described as a special technique that has been used by a number of different artists, all of them creating in various contexts when it comes to art movements. The birth of Pointillism dates back to the Belle Epoque in Paris and the time of the Impressionist art. It is generally related to the French painter Georges Seurat, whose masterpiece Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte is widely praised as the most famous of the Pointillism paintings. New Media / New Art Forms ❖ Fauvism and Expressionism Fauvism took hold of the art scene from 1905 to 1910, give or take, and is characterized by intense color and bold brushwork. In some cases, artists from this period applied paint straight from the bottle. They chose simple subjects and because of this, the paintings looked almost abstract. Fauvism artists were also deeply interested in scientific color theory from the 19th century. Specifically, with the use of complementary colors, fauvists understood how to make colors seem brighter and bolder by incorporating these theories. Expressionism is an umbrella term for any artwork that distorts reality to match the inner feelings, views, or ideas of the artist. In short, it is art that expresses inner realities onto the outer world. As for the subject matter, expressionist art tends to be emotional and sometimes even mythical, begging the assumption that expressionism is an extension of romanticism. Since expressionism is such a broad term, it’s easy to start attributing it to art from any era. So, for the most part, expressionism is generally applied to art from the 20th century. It is said to have started with the work of Vincent van Gogh and extends into modern art as we know it today. ❖ Cubism Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.  Cubism was one of the most influential styles of the twentieth century. It is generally agreed to have begun around 1907 with Picasso’s celebrated painting Demoiselles D’Avignon which included elements of cubist style. The name ‘cubism’ seems to have derived from a comment made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles who, on seeing some of Georges Braque’s paintings exhibited in Paris in 1908, described them as reducing everything to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’. ❖ Dada Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature. The founder of dada was a writer, Hugo Ball. In 1916 he started a satirical night- club in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine which, wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ”Dada”. Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.’ This was the first of many dada publications. Dada became an international movement and eventually formed the basis of surrealism in Paris after the war. ❖ Surrealism A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary. Surrealism aimed to revolutionize human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favour of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s poets and artists found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional. Many surrealist artists used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and images from their unconscious minds, and others sought to depict dream worlds or hidden psychological tensions. Most influential artists include Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Max Ernst and Rene Magritte. ❖ Abstract Expressionism Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark- making, and the impression of spontaneity. The abstract expressionists were mostly based in New York City, and also became known as the New York school. The name evokes their aim to make art that while abstract was also expressive or emotional in its effect. They were inspired by the surrealist idea that art should come from the unconscious mind, and by the automatism of artist Joan Miró. ❖ Optical / Op Art Op art was a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects. The effects created by op art ranged from the subtle, to the disturbing and disorienting.  Op painting used a framework of purely geometric forms as the basis for its effects and also drew on color theory and the physiology and psychology of perception. Leading figures were Bridget Riley, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Victor Vasarely. Vasarely was one of the originators of op art. Soto’s work often involves mobile elements and points up the close connection between kinetic and op art. ❖ Pop Art Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. Different cultures and countries contributed to the movement during the 1960s and 70s. Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, pop art reached its peak in the 1960s. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be. Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books for their imagery. ❖ Photo Realism Photorealism is a painting style that emerged in Europe and the USA in the late 1960s, characterized by its painstaking detail and precision. Photorealism rejected the painterly qualities by which individual artists could be recognized, and instead strove to create pictures that looked photographic. Visual complexity, heightened clarity and a desire to be emotionally neutral led to banal subject matter that likened the movement to pop art. The early 1990s saw a renewed interest in photorealism, thanks to new technology in the form of cameras and digital equipment which offered more precision. ❖ Minimalism Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle. Minimalism or minimalist art can be seen as extending the abstract idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing. We usually think of art as representing an aspect of the real world (a landscape, a person, or even a tin of soup!); or reflecting an experience such as an emotion or feeling. With minimalism, no attempt is made to represent an outside reality, the artist wants the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them. The medium, (or material) from which it is made, and the form of the work is the reality. Minimalist painter Frank Stella famously said about his paintings ‘What you see is what you see’.