This course is an introduction to art history as a
field of cultural production. The readings and conference discussions will be
directed towards exploring not only the paradigmatic works of art and
architecture from antiquity to post-modernity but also the interpretive texts
produced about them. Emphasis will be placed on the shift of practices of
artifact production with skilled crafting in pre-industrial societies towards
modern definitions of art and visual culture with their distinctive
socio-cultural status in the contemporary world. Case studies are thus drawn
from ancient Near Eastern and classical antiquity as well as the Western
post-industrial art. While the development of the discipline form 18th century
onwards will be problematized, core discursive issues in art history such as
representation, iconography, narrative, technology, style, museum studies will
be addressed.
Realism depicts the
world, its events, and people as they really are. There is no personification
of people as mythological beings, no one is glorified, romanticizing anyone or
anything is out. Realism is a social commentary on the world in which we live.
Artists took the common and ordinary, and elevated them to a higher status.
The focus of
Realism is on the common man. For too long the workers, peasants, and laborers
of life were never the subject of art. For one thing, common people never had
the money to commission works of art. No farmer could trade crops for a
portrait of himself farming, for instance. Nor did common people have the money
to go to museums, Salons, or Academies of Art. And this despite making up the
vast majority of people on Earth.
Artists like Gustave
Courbet felt the need to depict
ordinary people and show the rest of society what their lives were like. It was
social commentary, pure and simple
IMPRESIONISM
Impressionism is a
19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists.
Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and
1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in
France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work,
Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which provoked the critic
Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian
newspaper Le Charivari.
Impressionist
painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush
strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its
changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time),
ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human
perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The development of
Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other
media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature.
Surrealism is a
cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its
visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously
contradictory conditions of dream and reality." Artists painted unnerving,
illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from
everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious
to express itself and/or an idea/concept.
Surrealist works
feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur;
however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression
of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an
artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism
was, above all, a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism
developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important
center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread
around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and
music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and
practice,
philosophy, and social theory.
Dada was, officially, not a movement, its artists not artists and its art not art. That sounds easy enough, doesn't it? Of course, there is a bit more to the story of Dadaism than this simplistic explanation.
Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe at a time when the horror of World War I was being played out in what amounted to citizens' front yards. Due to the war, a number of artists, writers and intellectuals -- notably of French and German nationality -- found themselves congregating in the refuge that Zurich (in neutral Switzerland) offered. Far from merely feeling relief at their respective escapes, this bunch was pretty ticked off that modern European society would allow the war to have happened. They were so angry, in fact, that they undertook the time-honored artistic tradition of protesting.
Pop art is an art that has regained popularity. The history of pop art emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the 1960s in the United States. Now in the 2000s, pop art has regained popularity.
Pop art is about techniques of commercial art it imitated the techniques of commercial art (as the soup cans of Andy Warhol) and the styles of popular culture and the mass media.
The Mass media would include: painting, sculpture, and graphics that use the imagery of popular or mass culture such as newspapers, comics, advertising, and consumer goods. A witty and ironic art.
Pop art is lots of things that high-art isn't - it's mass-produced, it is expendable, it is low-cost, glamorous, witty and encourages big bucks, bright lights and big celebrities - there's no sign of the impoverished artist slaving away in a tiny studio in this movement. Some critics like Harold Rosenberg described Pop art as being "Like a joke without humor, told over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat... Advertising art which advertises itself as art that hates advertising.
Contemporary art is
art produced at the present period in time. Contemporary art includes, and
develops from, Postmodern art, which is itself a successor to Modern art. In
vernacular English, "modern" and "contemporary" are
synonyms, resulting in some conflation of the terms "modern art" and
"contemporary art" by non-specialists.
CUBISM ART
Cubism began as an idea and then it became a style. Based on Paul Cézanne's three main ingredients - geometricity, simultaneity (multiple views) and passage - Cubism tried to describe, in visual terms, the concept of the Fourth Dimension.
Cubism is a kind of Realism. It is a conceptual approach to realism in art, which aims to depict the world as it is and not as it seems. This was the "idea." For example, pick up any ordinary cup. Chances are the mouth of the cup is round. Close your eyes and imagine the cup. The mouth is round. It is always round - whether you are looking at the cup or remembering the cup. To depict the mouth as an oval is a falsehood, a mere device to create an optical illusion. The mouth of a glass is not an oval; it is a circle. This circular form is its truth, its reality. The representation of a cup as a circle attached to the outline of its profile view communicates its concrete reality. In this respect, Cubism can be considered realism, in a conceptual, rather than perceptional way
PHOTOREALISM ART
Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic mediums, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used to broadly describe artworks in many different mediums, it is also used to refer specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the United States art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
CUMMUNISM ART
Communism is a socialist social system in
which the means of production are commonly owned, and which has no state, money, or social classes. It is also a political way of thinking and an idea of how to get to such
a society. Communism says that the people of any and every place in
the world should all own the factories and farms that are used to make goods
and food. This social process is known as common ownership. The main
differences between socialism and communism are that, in a Communist society,
the state and money do not exist. Work is not something a person must do to
stay alive but is rather something people can choose whether or not to do.
MODERNISM ART
The history of modern
art started with Impressionism. It all began in Paris as a reaction to a
very formal and rigid style of painting - done inside studios and set by
traditional institutions like the Academie
des Beaux-Artsin Paris.
The exhibition of
Edouard Manet's famous painting,Dejeuner sur l'herbe, in 1863 in the Salon des Refuses(organized by
those painter who were rejected by the Academie des Beaux-Arts), caused a
scandal. It can be considered as the beginning of Impressionism.
The Impressionist
painters preferred to paint outside and studied the effect of light on objects.
Their preferred subjects were landscapes and scenes from daily life. The best
known names in Impressionist painting are Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro
and Pierre
Auguste Renoir in France and Alfred
Sisley in England.
MEDIEVRAL ART
Art
during the Middle Ages saw many changes up to the emergence of the early
Renaissance period. Early art subjects were initially restricted to the
production of Pietistic painting (religious art or Christian art) in the form
of illuminated manuscripts, mosaics and fresco paintings in churches. There
were no portrait paintings in the art of the Middle Ages. The colors were
generally somewhat muted. The subject of Medieval architecture is also covered
in this section. The following links provide facts and interesting information
about Medieval Art and Architecture and the famous artists of the Middle ages:
MANNERISM
ART
Mannerism is a style of art that was created in
the Late Renaissance period, from about 1520 until about 1600. The Mannerist
style of painting or sculpture often shows figures that are
"elongated" (made longer) and "distorted" (made into
strange shapes"). The aim of the Mannerist artist was usually to make art
that looked "elegant
BAROQUE
ART
In fine art, the term Baroque (derived from the Portuguese
'barocco' meaning, 'irregular pearl or stone') describes a fairly complex
idiom, originating in Rome, which flowered during the period c.1590-1720, and
which embraced painting, and sculpture as well as architecture. After the idealism of the Renaissance
(c.1400-1530), and the slightly 'forced' nature of Mannerism (c.1530-1600),
Baroque art above all reflected the religious tensions of the age -
notably the desire of the Catholic Church in Rome (as annunciated at the
Council of Trent, 1545-63) to reassert itself in the wake of the Protestant
Reformation. Thus it is almost synonymous with Catholic Counter-Reformation Art of
the period
NEOCLASSICISM ART
Neoclassicism
was a widespread and influential movement in painting and the other visual arts
that began in the 1760s, reached its height in the 1780s and '90s, and lasted
until the 1840s and '50s. In painting it generally took the form of an emphasis
on austere linear design in the depiction of classical themes and subject
matter, using archaeologically correct settings and costumes.
ROMANTICISM ART
Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic
in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in
France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and
flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion,
Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment
values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789.
Though often posited in opposition toNeoclassicism,
early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis
David's studio,
including Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, and
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best
expressed in Ingres' Apotheosis of
Homer and Eugène
Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which
polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres' work
seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of the David in contrast to the
disorder and tumult of the Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian
tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of
the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.
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