German Expressionism (finish) + American Art before World War I

Non-objective; abstract

Der Blaue Reiter

Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)

Die Brücke

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883)

Woodblock

Primitivist style

Prairie style

Cantilever roof

Photo-secession

291 Gallery

German Expressionism

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1911

• Not seeking true to life figurative representation. Non-figural representation.
• Composition balanced even though is not distinguishable
• Thick lines to convey different shapes. Bars of sheet music
• Abstractions of military figures, rainbow, Landscape hills and sky, sunset
• Title relates to music.

Marc, Large Blue Horses, 1911

• Discovered work of Van Gogh a few years before this piece: bold use of line and colour, not mixed on palette.
• Animals mimic the curvature of the landscape.
• Weight and symbolic meaning of colour. Blue: masculine, robust, spiritual. Yellow: feminine principle. Red: Brutality.
• Horses are monumental. Fill the canvas. Almost sculptural through application of paint.
• White bone: Trees. Frames the horses. Break through composition
• Abstraction of atmospheric perspective. Painted lighter.

Die Brücke (The Bridge)

• Bridge from old to new, facilitators of new culture. Rejecting academic convention.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Invitation to the Brücke Exhibition in Dresden-Lobtau, 1908

• Primitive style: Non-Western cultures.
• Assert difference: woodblock printmaking, woodcut. Taking stylus and gauging a block of wood. Sharp edges. Almost crude.
• 3 nude women: social graces. Sharp cut lines, not curvilinear.
• Leaves.

Kirchner

Street, Dresden, 1908

 

Street, Berlin, 1915

 

• People walking through modern cities.
• Alienation between figures. Lack of communication.
• Exaggerated, non-naturalistic colours. Juxtaposing colours in jarring ways. Off key.
• African art as primitive culture. Masks: representing figures.
• Feathers in hats signify prostitute. Engaging with issues of sexuality. Anxiety worked into formal qualities: steep angles, colours. Link to Olympia.
• Each figure is thickly outlined. Colour unifies them.

Heckel

Standing Child (Fränzi), 1910

• Young children affected by excesses of sexuality and materiality of modern life.
• Crude, less refined. Angularity
• Not over-sexualising.
• Flat qualities associated with African art.
• No context as to why the figure is in the foreground. Background appears to be a landscape

Crouching Woman, 1912

• Comparison to Venus Pudica figures: Curvilinear forms. Smooth hard marble compared to carving marks on the entirety of the wooden sculpture. Traditional proportions. Arm position: more exposure, more passive.
• Stylised features.
• Crudeness in representation. Connection to nature through material.
• Comparison to Grandes Odalisque. 

American Art before World War I – Chicago + NYC

Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, 1906-9

• Prairie style. Chicago.
• How building works with landscape around it. Building centred around the hearth.
• Long and flat. Low building. Relates to ground of the prairie. Nothing is too high.
• Cantilever roof – weight is backed on the beams, echo land beneath building.
• Windows sunk into the building. Fortress. A lot of visual access to external environment.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Flatiron Building, 1903

• Bringing European art over to America
• NYC
• Photo-seccession. Photography could be fine art.
• Sharp focus photography was too utilitarian. Preferred blur or fuzzy focus. Softer.
• Was the tallest building of the time
• Tree is same shape a building in negative space. Parallel. Framing.
• Comparison with The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak: Photography and painting, landscape, US, documenting new, sublime, use of colour

SCUL 349 – Styrofoam Sculpture Part II

The finished styrofoam sculpture held together with toothpicks and masking tape for texture. Covered in a red oxide that strengthens the entire sculpture.

The sculpture is placed into the sand bucket and filled, topped off with a cone made from the same mix as the investment casting, as a funnel for the aluminium.

The piece after cooling from the pouring.

At this point I was wondering what was flaking off the sculpture when I suddenly realised it was the masking tape.

With the masking tape removed the sculpture is left with a crinkled-like texture and some amazing colouring. To keep this colouring I left the piece to cool naturally instead of cleaning the metal with cold water.

Arts & Crafts (finish) + Fauvism + German Expression

Exam Practice 1

Every image: Artist, title, date

Ability to reference readings so far

Use of terms.

Manet’s Olympia, 1863.

3 ways challenging tradition:

• Subject matter: lower class, traditionally a goddess
• Visual brushstrokes, traditionally not visual
• Direct gaze, traditionally more passive

Stonebreaker

3 ways engages with aspects of contemporary life

• Technique. Painted thickly with hands to grasp the texture of the landscape
• Lower subject not normally represented in the academy.

Cezanne,

3 ways challenges traditional methods of constructing space

• Framing of the pine tree in the foreground, choice of cropping image, consciously placed
• Shifting between 2D and 3D – Passage.

Civil war piece vs The Slave Ship

• Realism in American,  Romanticism in England
• Both focus on the power of nature, invitation to possibility, very dangerous
• Landscape paintings
• 2 different places at the same era
• Picturesque and sublime, sublime
• colder colours, warmer colours

Arts & Crafts Movement + Art Nouveau

Louis Comfort Tiffany

Table Lamp, 1904-15, bronze and Favrile glass

• Floral but stylised. Abstraction of natural form.
• Intended for wealthy buyers. Workshop only able to make one or so at a time.
• Ensured high quality and craftsmanship
• Favrile glass – lustrous, high quality, invented by him. Add colour through control but random staining happens. Easier to purify.
• Flowers, leaves, waterlilies climbing up on vine like shape at base.

Table Lamp, c 1900, bronze and Favrile

• Casade of flowers and leaf-like shapes
• Trunk detail and roots

Fauvism

-Use colour to render all pictorial elements in a scene.

 

Matisse

Woman with a Hat, 1905

• One of 10 works, maximum number, to be shown for the autumn salon. Started in 1903. Alternative venue. Contrast to Academy.
• Traditional subject matter painted in radical way. Dramatic use of colour.
• Half length portrait of his wife.
• Body facing away from viewer but facing.
• Vigorous brushstrokes and colour.
• Hat takes up 1/3 of the canvas. Fashionable image. Ribbons, bows, flowers, feathers used to decorate.
• Yellow in contrast to teals for highlights and shadows
• Thinner paint for her hair, canvas is partially visible.
• Invented movements with loaded paintbrush
• Places complementary colours next to each other. Purosefully to catch your eyes.
• Lighter colours represent an ambiguous background. Pushes the subject forward.
• President of Salon tried to persuade Matisse from showing it “excessively modern”
• Not blended or mixed like an academic painting

Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-6

• Produced several sketches for it
• loosely based vision on sketches for final work
• Balances innovative use of colour with subject matter
• Scale is not consistent
• Traditional sense of narrative is not present
• Colour and similar forms to unity figures
• conveys fore, middle, and background through: colour saturated more in foreground. Clear horizon separates background. yellows and lavenders unify.
• middle figures pulsate.
• Minimalist representation of forms
• First shown at the Salon des Independent. Greeted with uproar of cheers, angry babble and screaming laughter.

German Expressionism

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

Die Brücke (The Bridge)

• Challenges the academy in Germany
• Not interested in imitating nature, interested in inventing something that shows the immediacy of their perspective.
• Primitive. Looking to Africa, Asia, Russia for inspiration, materials.

Der Blaue Reiter

• German and Russian artists working in Germany.  1911 – 1914.

Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1911

• “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”: Psychology power of colour and music.
• Nothing depicted from everyday life. Subject matter
• Warm and cool colours. Blue – infinity, sky, purity. Yellow – acid taste of lemon, earth
• Initally sketched from natural world which is then abstracted

Post-Impressionisms (finish) + Arts and Crafts + Fauvism

St. Rémy

Impasto

John Ruskin

the Firm

Fauves (Wild Beasts)

Vauxcelles

Salon d’Automne

Collioure

Post-Impressionisms

Van Gogh, Sunflowers

1888 (London), 1888 (Amsterdam)

• Deutch but worked in France and sold paintings in Paris after his death through his brother
• Readily available flowers in the south of France
• Raw broken yellow colours
• Stained glass windows
• Portraits of individual sunflowers
• Physicality of flower, vase could fall over
• Steep flattened ground, low across the frame
• Not in glory, in different moments of decay
• Vibrant heated yellow, different shades and tones, contrast against each other
• Thickly painted
• Moving viewers’ eyes through the canvas through use of triangles.
• Colour and form to express emotional life of a flower, a mundane thing

Starry Night, 1889

• Town of the mental asylum he was placed in
• Sparkles and vibrates with the colour of the night
• Light, air, wind, and sky movement represented.
• Elevated point looking down at landscape, and places a cyprus tree in the foreground to root us. Indigenous tree.
• Rolling hills blending in with blue of sky
• Drawing on with thick application of paint
• Vibration represented with yellow on bottom, then thick white lines. Impasto.
• Sense of whirling and churning, emotional state which he is in when at the psychiatric hospital
• Hallucinatory dream-like effect. Was placed on medication but not necessarily and one-to-one connection.

Arts & Craft Movement + Art Nouveau

• Loose movement
• Spearheaded by the UK
• 1860s – 1910s
• Revivalist movement, response to industrialisation of modern society
• Ruskin identifies grates of industrialisation and criticises mass consumption and production. Removing human element. By end of 19th century cheapness was privileged over quality and beauty.
• Morris thought that the industrial machine and worker were too different from the craft. Too subservient. Championing return to handmade. Looking back to middle ages. Nostalgic for a pre-industrial time. Love of nature which was being rejected.
• Interested in artists in small workshops producing higher quality. Precedents of middle ages.
• REVIVALIST
• Specifically household objects, objects in daily lives. Goodness embodied in higher quality objects from the care put into them.
• Northern Europe and America primarily. Need industry to reject it.

William Morris

“Eveniode” pattern chintz, 1883

• Thought art should be for everyone
• 1861 founded own firm (the Firm). Stained glass, furniture, wallpaper, fabrics.
• Refined tastes were being diminished by mass produced objects
• Chintz is printed fabric, draperies
• Simplified pattern.
• The Firm designed around 50 wallpaper patterns. Hand printed, hand carved.
• “To combine clearness of form and firmness of structure”
• Interest and familiarities with nature.
• Individual petals as if picked from nature.
• Stylised into a generic form.

“Acanthus” wallpaper pattern, 1875

• Veins of leaves are stylised
• Colour palette of natural world
• Tiny design details for background
• Curved linear lines for movement of pattern
• Pulling from Greco-Roman architecture. Corinthian.

SCuUL 349 – Styrofoam Sculpture

The next sculpture will be made into aluminium but to get the original shape I am using styrofoam. For this piece I was inspired by Skyrim’s Dragon Priest mask. To begin with I created a cast of a face using plaster wrap and drew the design onto the mask to see how it would fit together if the finished piece would be worn.

After this I drew the different pieces onto the styrofoam, cut them out, and filed them down.

Finally I stuck the pieces together with toothpicks as they will burn away when the aluminium is poured. I am considered using masking tape to hold the pieces together properly as I have see the outcome of this texture on a different piece and quite like it.

TD 313 – Hat Making Process Part 2

The same process is followed as pre-felting. The wool is layered in opposite directions and then merged together with soapy warm water.

The piece is then rolled, being rotated each time you unroll it.

TD 313 – Third Project

Originally we were supposed to make a mask to complete this trilogy of felt projects, however we have now been given the freedom to make whatever we would like. After a peer of mine designed some boots to match her hat, I decided to keep going with the 1920s theme and create a dress to go along with it. Once they have both been made I will model them before handing them in to be marked.

TD 313 – Hat Making Process Part 1

I chose the red and mulberry wool I dyed to create the felt for this hat. Firstly I separated the wool and laid the colours out on the brush.

Next I merged the fibres together by gently brushing the wool.

By brushing the wool in the same direction instead of opposite directions, it folds up and comes off of the brush.

By following this formula I was able to create the correct size for my pattern.

Next I drew the pattern to scale and cut it out.

FMS 321 – Italian Neorealism

Background

• “Neorealism” first used to Visconti’s Ossessione (1943)
• Post-WWII Italy (1945-53) height of Neorealism
• Rome Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), Germany Year Zero (1948) – Rossellini
• La Terra Trema (Visconti 1948)
• Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Umberto D. (1952) – Vittorio de Sica
• “Contemporary social, historical, and political subject matter”
• Protagonists consist of poor or marginalised groups
• Low budget, low production values
• Ordinary individuals in oppressive political/ socioeconomic conditions
• Location shooting
• Emphasis on non-professional actors
• Narratives typically focus on quotidian details of life; less emphasis on plot, more emphasis on occurrences/ events

Context

• Social, political, economic
  • Reaction to prewar, Fascist influence on Italian cinema. Typically light/ indirect treatment of political issues
  • Centro Sperimentale in Rome: Attended by Rossellini, Antonioni, and other practitioners of postcard Neorealism
  • Cinecittà
  • Political gap left after Fascism filled by Christian Democrats
    • 1944-48 Centrist coalition of:
      • Italian Communist Party
      • Socialist Party
      • Liberal Party
  • Alcide de Gasperi, Christian Democrat, Prime Minister 1945-48
  • 1945-48 brief window for Neorealists
  • 1948 Christian Democrats separate from the Communist and Socialist parties.
  • Oct 5 1945: Fascist film laws repealed.
    • ENIC was dismantled
      • Loss of monopoly on distribution
      • Hollywood films return. 1949: 369 (73% of box office receipts). 95 Italian films released.
  • 1949: Undersecretary of Public Entertainment, Giulio Andreotti
    • “Andreotti laws”
      • Import limits, screen quotas
      • Pre-production censorship
      • Script approval for funds and export licences
    • Chastised and punished Neorealists
      • “Washing dirty linen in public”
      • “Slandering Italy abroad”
• Aesthetic
  • Verismo. “Objective” presentation of life; lower classes; unadorned language.
  • Postwar resurgence of relish in Italian literature with novelists such as Italo Calvino
  • André Bazin “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism”
    • “Reconstituted reportage”
      • Compares Neorealism to modern novel (Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, Dos Passos, Camus)
      • The modern novel reduces “the strictly grammatical aspect of its stylistics to a minimum”
      • Compares cinematography to Bell and Howell newsreel camera.
        • “Almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness”
      • “Air of documentary, a naturalness neared to the spoken than to the written accounts, to the sketch rather than to the painting
  • Il Bandito (Lattuada, 1946)
    • Travelling streets, discovering what is left
    • Focus on environmental, panoramic shot. 1st person.
    • American music.
  • Paisan (Rossellini, 1946)
    • Sound made on-screen, except voice over narration, very documentary
    • All on location
    • Longer takes

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Roberto Rossellini

Biography

• Born in Rome, Italy 1906
• Son of a wealthy Italian architect
• Went to Cinema Corso as a child a lot
• Worked as an apprentice in film; gained experience in sound, dubbing, set design, editing, screenwriting
• Directed his first short documentary in 1937
• Close friend of Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce

Fascist Trilogy

• Italian armed forces: The White Ship (1941), A Pilot Returns (1942), Man of the Cross (1943)
• First two funded by Fascist regime
• “Fictional Documentary”
  • Documentary footage
  • Staged action shot on location
  • Focus on contemporary narrative events

Rome, Open City (1945)

• Shot in 1945, while Italy was still at ward
• Story centred on three anti-Fascist protagonists during the Nazi occupation of Rome. Struggling to survive.
• Based in part on true events

Paisan (1946)

• Financed by international investors, distributed in the US by MGM
• Follows progress of Allied forces from southern to northern Italy
• Composed of 6 segments connected by newsreel footage

Germany, Year Zero (1947)

• Follows a 12 year old boy struggling to survive in post-war Berlin
• Financed by French production company
• Dedicated to his son
• Real settings, rough script

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Other Neorealist Filmmakers

• Visconti La Terra Trema (1948)
  • Family in Sicily mortgage home to buy a boat to catch fish and sell
  • Everything is real
  • Encourages dialect
• Zavattini, primarily a screenwriter
  • Most vocal proponent of Neorealism
  • “Some Ideas on the Cinema” – article on ethical responsibility of filmmakers
• de Sica, starts as a romantic/ comedic actor in white telephone films. Noted for work with non-prof. actors as leads. Il Signor Max (1937)
  • Locations are in tact
  • Order and structure
  • Lighthearted subject matter. Humorous

HA 261 – Impressionisms and Post-Impressionisms

Impressionist exhibitions (1874 – 1886)

Avant-garde

Louis Leroy

Le Harve

Les Invalides

Montmarte

Pointillism

Aixe-en-Provence

Passage

Architectonic

St. Rémy

Impasto

Impressionisms

Claude Monet

Impression, Sunrise, 1872

• Port town of Normandy. Le Havre.
• Flickers of paint for reflections on canvas. Individual broke strokes. Emphasising it is 2D. Free application of paint.
• Leroy – too sketchy, unfinished, not sure what object is being represented where
• Industry in background. Town critical for shipping goods. Representing the industry. Controversial subject matter.
• Interested in the transience of the moment
• Warmth of the sun catches your eyes immediately in contrast to the rest of the colours. Glanced at and captured the moment as sunset doesn’t last long.
• Silhouettes of the background. Blurred of smoke and steam.
• Picturesque – uses similar colours for nature and man.

Saint-Lazare Train Station, 1877

• Trains popular and modern. Structure is made of glass to allow light through. Blends iron, glass, sky, and steam from trains together.
• Point of view – where the train stops.
• Interest in how the steam interested with modern metals and glass. Trains veiled by the steam. Insubstantial.
• Symmetrical. But not set exactly in the centre of the frame.
• Sketchily rendered rails and humans. Figures remain anonymous

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

• Complex composition, tightly packed. Focused on light and shadow.
• Subject matter is a Sunday gathering held between the two mills in Montmarte. Upper level – working class. Contemporary social interaction. No illicit behaviours.
• Crowd packed into image but integrated. Often use neighbours as subjects. Repeated forms, hats.
• Freedom of brush work. Looser quality. Almost pastel.
• Light is dapple, shimmering, feathery touch of the brush.
• Harmonious. Idealised image of interaction.

Berthe Morisot, On the Balcony, 1872

• Limited to domestic and leisure environments due to being a women of a upper class. Improper to be seen in the city without a chaperone.
• Scene looking out to Paris from the suburbs. Sister and her daughter.
• River is compressed. Looking out over to Les Invalides. Architecture not as build as much as today.
• Women’s relationship with the city. The handle symbolises being blocked from the city. Many borders being painted.
• Woman looking at the girl, girl looking out. Not at the viewer. Girl doesn’t yet know the restrictions of her gender and class.
• Women dressed in black, representation of age and knowledge. Girl dressed in white, more innocent and naive.
• Atmospheric perspective of Paris.

Post-Impressionisms

Reacting to Impressionists

Early 1880s – 1910s

Shift from spontaneity to stable or formal order. Controlled.

George Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 – 86

• Subject matter: Sunday Afternoon, Island of La Grande Jatte. West of Paris.
• Many sketches in B&W and colour, geometrically laid out
• Final piece is a synthesis of sketches. Systematic. Figures outlined and isolated.
• Dots, dashes. Not all completely uniform. Bit more organic.
• Use of scientific theories of light at the time.
• Different classes free on a Sunday. Mixture. Male figure left foreground – lower class: lack of sleeves, posture, dozing off, informal dress. Pair in the right foreground – upper class: posture, clothing.
• One girl in the right middle ground is the only movement. Gliding.
• Department stores became popular. Mass production.

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, c. 1887

• Focused on Southern France, the architecture, the landscape, the colours. Motif painted repeatedly.
• Representing something more traditional with an inventive almost abstract technique.
• Pine tree in left foreground: trunk grows up through the left hand side but then grows around the top of the painting. Tree is cropped – more abstracted. Represents a chosen view. Multiple perspectives.
• Mountain and tree is not overlapping. Pine tree is following the outline of the mountain or vice versa.
• 2D compressed view but subject is clearly 3D
• Drags thickly loaded paint brush across the canvas.
• Uses light and dark colours in substitution of light and shadows.
• Passage: how the shapes pass over each other.
• Cool colours are pushing forward and warm colours are receding.
• Permanence of the mountain.