Painting Specifically: Beginning Painting and Drawing Week 1

A massive derecho swept through Yellow Springs, Ohio first week of class.

Reading: “Chuang-tzu’s Essay on Seeing Things as Equal,” A. C. Graham, 1969
***How, if at all, does this essay relate to painting? Come to next class prepared to discuss this question, and others you may have.

A Very Concise Survey of Modern Painting

Modern Art roughly 1860-1962 or 1980

Shirking tradition

Spirit of experimentation:

J. M. W. Turner

new ways of seeing
new ways of using materials
new functions for art
tendency away from narrative, toward abstraction

19th century

Romanticism:

Francisco de Goya- (proto-symbolist)

J. M. W. Turner- (painter of light, “Turneresque” proto-impressionist)

Realism: anti-Idealism, artistic freedom, and abandoning traditional tropes

Jean-Francois Millet

Jean-Francois Millet- (Naturalism) exultation of peasants and their labors

Edouard Manet- affronting propriety

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Impressionism: depiction of outer appearances (light, ephemera, modernity, immediacy, movement, democratization of subject matter, en plein air, overall visual effects versus detail, broken brushstrokes)

Claude Monet

Claude Monet- painter of light, like Turner

Mary Cassat- American expatriate

Post-Impressionism: Reject Impressionism's creative and expressive limitations and shallowness of subject matter, and restore a sense of order to Impressionism

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec- contour, movement, influenced by classical Japanese woodcuts (proto-Art Nouveau)

Georges Seurat

Neo-Impressionism (subgroup of Post-Impressionism): Science of optics, color theory, desire to refine the principles of Impressionism

Georges Seurat- Pointillism

Paul Cezanne- give order and structure to Impressionism, (the way he broke surface up into geometric shapes would inspire Cubism)

Vincent van Gogh- swirled and curled his brushwork to convey feelings and states of mind

Symbolism: rejected realism and sought to create images that stood for big ideas

Edvard Munch- deeply psychological

James Ensor- Proto-Surrealist

Paul Cezanne

Primitivism:

Henri Rousseau- (Le Douanier), naïve style, primitive subjects

Paul Gauguin- sophisticated treatment of primitive subjects, proto-fauvist

20th century before WWI

Fauvism:colorful like Impressionism, but not based upon observation, and often dark outlines

Henri Matisse- innovative colorist and draftsman

James Ensor

Andre Derain- foresaw the interest in African art

Art Nouveau: Graphic, natural motifs, a reaction against academic art of the 19th century being decidedly decorative and blending with nature and life

Alphonse Mucha- (founder)
Aubrey Beardsley- Black ink drawings, erotic, grotesque, flowing

Henri Matisse

Paul Gauguin

Cubism: Artists selected fragments of the world and its objects, and then rearranged them with artistic freedom. Marcel Duchamp saw the next logical step as to consider all real fragments of the world as art in their own right, and hence the birth of the readymade.

Georges Braque

Pablo Picasso- co-founder

Georges Braque- co-founder

Expressionism/German Espressionism:

Oskar Kokoschka- intensely psychological and emotional

Paula Modersohn-Becker- important ground-breaking early expressionist

Futurism: Italy (the future, technology, speed,movement, violence, fascism, anti-liberalism)

Carlo Carra

Gino Severini

Paula Modersohn-Becker

20th century between WWI & WWII

Art Deco:

Tamara de Lempika- Classic Deco style

Diego Rivera- Mexican Social Realist but in the Deco style

Synthetic Cubism: use of collage. intermix real fragments from reality with rendered ones.

Juan Gris

Pablo Picasso

Precisionism: (first indigenous U.S. modern-art movement) very clean line. flat interlocking planes reinterpret the american landscape of buildings, roads, and factories, and signs.

Gino Severini

Georgia O’Keefe- (her early work)

Charles Demuth- master of Precisionism

Suprematism: (the supremacy of pure artistic feeling)

Kazimir Malevich- simple black square to leave the viewer to ponder what is present in a painting that represents nothing else.

Olga Rozanova

Surrealism:

Giorgio de Chirico- His Metaphysical paintings inspired Surrealism.

Kazimir Malevich

Rene Magritte- Challenged viewers preconceived perception of reality.

Bauhaus: Sought to combine all the arts.

Paul Klee- playful humor, expressive, surreal, cubistic

Josef Albers- color theorist

De Stijl (neoplasticism): A utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order achieved through pure abstraction.

Piet Mondrian- Searched for spiritual knowledge not through empirical means.

Theo van Doesburg- Primary theoretician of De Stijl.

Giorgio de Chirico

20th century after WWII

Abstract Expressionism:

Jackson Pollock- Husband of Lee Krasner, drip painting, pure paint action, free of brushstrokes.

Lee Krasner- Wife of Jackson Pollock, Influential Ab-Ex painter

Color Field Painting:

Barnett Newman- or Post-painterly Abstraction "Zips"

Helen Frankenthaler- very thin paint on unprimed canvas

Proto-Pop:

Jasper Johns- popular iconography and letters and numbers repeated

Robert Rauschenberg- (combines) newspaper clippings and found objects attached to paintings (proto-bricolage (Postmodern))

Hard-Edge Painting:

Frank Stella- Shaped canvases, taped lines

Agnes Martin- reductive, grids

Minimalism:

Jackson Pollock

Donald Judd- Sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy.

Anne Truitt

Lyrical Abstraction: Moving away from the current trends, they reintroduced painterliness and expressive form to abstraction.

Ellsworth Kelly- expressive form

Nancy Graves- Her aerial views of the moon works were influential for future artists that also drew inspiration from aerial views.

Bay Area Figurative School: Abandoned Ab-Ex for a return to figural work.

Richard Diebenkorn

Joan Brown

Helen Frankenthaler

Robert Rauschenberg

Agnes Martin

Anne Truitt

Nancy Graves

Richard Diebenkorn

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Andy Warhol

1962-1990: Post-Modernism: Bricolage (materials close-at-hand), broken barrier between high and low art, recycling of past styles into a modern context, appropriation, collage. Rejects the grand narrative of Modernism.

Pop Art:

Andy Warhol-

Niki de Saint Phalle-

Op Art:

Bridget Reily-

Victor Vasarely-

Niki de Saint Phalle

Postminimalism:

Eva Hesse-

Richard Serra-

Photorealism:

Audrey Flack-

Richard Estes-

Neo-Expressionism- 1980-90’s renewed interest in painting after the 1960-70’s witnessed a crisis in painting with the emergence of Land Art, Performance Art, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, New Media Art. Hotly debated- revival of traditional themes of self-expression in Europe after decades of American Dominance on one hand, blatantly marketable return to painting, celebrity, backlash against feminism and feminist themes, anti-intellectualism, return to mythic subjects and individualist methods deemed outmoded- lacking interactivity, anti-minimalist.