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Contemporary art
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Contemporary art is the art of today, produced by artists who are living in the twenty-first century. Contemporary art provides an opportunity to reflect on contemporary society and the relevant to ourselves. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that challenge traditional boundaries and defy easy definition. In vernacular English, modern and contemporary are synonyms, resulting in some conflation of the modern art. Some define contemporary art as art produced within our lifetime, recognizing that lifetimes, however, there is a recognition that this generic definition is subject to specialized limitations. The classification of art as a special type of art, rather than a general adjectival phrase. In London, the Contemporary Art Society was founded in 1910 by the critic Roger Fry and others, as a private society for buying works of art to place in public museums. A number of other institutions using the term were founded in the 1930s, such as in 1938 the Contemporary Art Society of Adelaide, Australia, particular points that have been seen as marking a change in art styles include the end of World War II and the 1960s. There has perhaps been a lack of natural break points since the 1960s, and definitions of what contemporary art in the 2010s vary. Art from the past 20 years is likely to be included, and definitions often include art going back to about 1970, the art of the late 20th and early 21st century. Many use the formulation Modern and Contemporary Art, which avoids this problem, smaller commercial galleries, magazines and other sources may use stricter definitions, perhaps restricting the contemporary to work from 2000 onwards. One of the many people have in approaching contemporary artwork is its diversity - diversity of material, form, subject matter. It is distinguished by the lack of a uniform organizing principle, ideology, or -ism that we so often see in other. Broadly speaking, we see Modernism as looking at modernist principals - the focus of the work is self-referential, likewise, Impressionism looks at our perception of a moment through light and color as opposed to attempts at stark realism. Contemporary art, on the hand, does not have one. Its view, instead, is refracted, prismatic, and multi-faceted, reflecting the diversity of the world today, in all of its complexities, contemporary art reflects life as we know it. It can be, therefore, contradictory, confusing, and open-ended, there are, however, a number of common themes that have appeared in contemporary works. Post-modern, post-structuralist, feminist, and Marxist theory have played important roles in the development of theories of art
2.
Streamline Moderne
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Streamline Moderne, or Art Moderne, is a late type of the Art Deco architecture and design that emerged in the 1930s. Its architectural style emphasized curving forms, long lines. The first streamline buildings evolved from the work of New Objectivity artists, a movement connected to the German Werkbund, as the Great Depression of the 1930s progressed, Americans saw a new aspect of Art Deco—i. e. Cylindrical forms and long horizontal windowing also may be influenced by constructivism, as a result, an array of designers quickly ultra-modernized and streamlined the designs of everyday objects. Manufacturers of clocks, radios, telephones, cars, furniture, the style was the first to incorporate electric light into architectural structure. In the first-class dining room of the SS Normandie, fitted out 1933–35, twelve pillars of Lalique glass. The Streamline Moderne was both a reaction to Art Deco and a reflection of austere economic times, Sharp angles were replaced with simple, exotic woods and stone were replaced with cement and glass. Art Deco and Streamline Moderne were not necessarily opposites, the Sterling Streamliner Diners were diners designed like streamlined trains. Although Streamline Moderne houses are less common than streamline commercial buildings, the Lydecker House in Los Angeles, built by Howard Lydecker, is an example of Streamline Moderne design in residential architecture. In tract development, elements of the style were used as a variation in postwar row housing in San Franciscos Sunset District. The style was applied to such as electric clocks, sewing machines, small radio receivers. Their manufacturing processes exploited developments in science including aluminium and bakelite. Compared to Europe, the United States in the 1930s had a focus on design as a means to increase sales of consumer products. Streamlining was associated with prosperity and an exciting future and this hope resonated with the American middle class, the major market for consumer products. A wide range of goods from refrigerators to pencil sharpeners was produced in streamlined designs, streamlining became a widespread design practice for automobiles, railroad cars, buses, and other vehicles in the 1930s. Streamline style can be contrasted with functionalism, which was a design style in Europe at the same time. One reason for the designs in functionalism was to lower the production costs of the items. Streamlining and functionalism represent two different schools in modernistic industrial design, but both reflecting the intended consumer
3.
Vincent van Gogh
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Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings and his suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty. Born into a family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling and he turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881 and his younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter. His early works, mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers, in 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were reacting against the Impressionist sensibility. As his work developed he created a new approach to still lifes and his paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in the south of France in 1888. During this period he broadened his subject matter to include trees, cypresses, wheat fields. Van Gogh suffered from episodes and delusions and though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor and he spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris and his depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died from his injuries two days later, Van Gogh was unsuccessful during his lifetime, and was considered a madman and a failure. He became famous after his suicide, and exists in the imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius. His reputation began to grow in the early 20th century as elements of his style came to be incorporated by the Fauves. The most comprehensive source on Van Gogh is the correspondence between him and his younger brother, Theo. Their lifelong friendship, and most of what is known of Vincents thoughts, Theo van Gogh was an art dealer and provided his brother with financial and emotional support, and access to influential people on the contemporary art scene. Theo kept all of Vincents letters to him, Vincent kept few of the letters he received, after both had died, Theos widow Johanna arranged for the publication of some of their letters. A few appeared in 1906 and 1913, the majority were published in 1914, Vincents letters are eloquent and expressive and have been described as having a diary-like intimacy, and read in parts like autobiography
4.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
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Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. In a 2005 auction at Christies auction house, La Blanchisseuse, his painting of a young laundress, sold for US$22.4 million. The last part of his name means he was a member of an aristocratic family and his younger brother was born in 1867, but died the following year. After the death of his brother, Henris parents separated and a nanny ended up taking care of him, at the age of eight, Henri went to live with his mother in Paris where he drew sketches and caricatures in his exercise workbooks. The family quickly realised that Henris talents lay in drawing and painting, a friend of his father, René Princeteau, visited sometimes to give informal lessons. Some of Henris early paintings are of horses, a speciality of Princeteau, in 1875, Toulouse-Lautrec returned to Albi because his mother had concerns about his health. He took thermal baths at Amélie-les-Bains and his mother consulted doctors in the hope of finding a way to improve her sons growth, Toulouse-Lautrecs parents, the Comte and Comtesse, were first cousins, and he suffered from congenital health conditions sometimes attributed to a family history of inbreeding. At age 13, Toulouse-Lautrec fractured his right femur, at age 14, he fractured his left. The breaks did not heal properly, modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, possibly pycnodysostosis, or a variant disorder along the lines of osteopetrosis, achondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta. Rickets aggravated by praecox virilism has also been suggested, afterwards, his legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was extremely short. He developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs, additionally, he is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals. Physically unable to participate in many activities enjoyed by males his age and he became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer, and, through his works, recorded many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s, after initially failing college entrance exams, he passed his second attempt and completed his studies. Toulouse-Lautrecs mother had high ambitions and, with the aim of her son becoming a fashionable and respected painter and he was drawn to Montmartre, the area of Paris famous for its bohemian lifestyle and the haunt of artists, writers, and philosophers. Studying with Bonnat placed Toulouse-Lautrec in the heart of Montmartre, an area he rarely left over the next 20 years. After Bonnat took a new job, Toulouse-Lautrec moved to the studio of Fernand Cormon in 1882 and studied for a five years. At this time he met Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh, Cormon, whose instruction was more relaxed than Bonnats, allowed his pupils to roam Paris, looking for subjects to paint. During this period, Toulouse-Lautrec had his first encounter with a prostitute, which led him to paint his first painting of a prostitute in Montmartre, a woman rumoured to be Marie-Charlet
5.
Paul Gauguin
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Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French post-Impressionist artist. Underappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his use of color. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many artists, such as Pablo Picasso. Many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin and he was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. He was also a proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. Gauguin was born in Paris, France to Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal on June 7,1848 and his birth coincided with revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe that year. His father, a 34-year-old liberal journalist, came from a family of petit-bourgeoisie entrepreneurs residing in Orléans and he was compelled to flee France when the newspaper for which he wrote was suppressed by French authorities. Gauguins mother, the 22-year-old Aline Marie Chazal, was the daughter of Andre Chazal, an engraver, and Flora Tristan and their union ended when Andre assaulted his wife Flora and was sentenced to prison for attempted murder. Paul Gauguins maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the daughter of Thérèse Laisnay. Details of Thérèses family background are not known, her father, Don Mariano, was a Spanish nobleman, members of the wealthy Tristan Moscoso family held powerful positions in Peru. Nonetheless, Don Marianos unexpected death plunged his mistress and daughter Flora into poverty, when Floras marriage with Andre failed, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her fathers Peruvian relatives. She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune and this never materialized, but she successfully published a popular travelogue of her experiences in Peru which launched her literary career in 1838. An active supporter of early socialist societies, Gauguins maternal grandmother helped to lay the foundations for the 1848 revolutionary movements, placed under surveillance by French police and suffering from overwork, she died in 1844. Her grandson Paul idolized his grandmother, and kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life. In 1850, Clovis Gauguin departed for Peru with his wife Alina and he died of a heart attack en route, and Alina arrived in Peru a widow with the 18-month-old Paul and his 2 ½ year-old sister, Marie. Gauguins mother was welcomed by her granduncle, whose son-in-law would shortly assume the presidency of Peru. To the age of six, Paul enjoyed an upbringing, attended by nursemaids. He retained a vivid memory of period of his childhood which instilled indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life
6.
Spirit of the Dead Watching
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Spirit of the Dead Watching is an 1892 oil on burlap canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, depicting a naked Tahitian girl lying on her stomach. An old woman is seated behind her, Gauguin said the title may refer to either the girl imagining the ghost, or the ghost imagining her. The subject of the painting is Gauguins young native wife Tehaamana, motionless, naked, belly down on the bed, she stared up at me, her eyes wide with fear. Perhaps she took me, with my face, for one of those legendary demons or specters. Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews says the painting is a descendent of a previous series of frightened Eves that Gauguin painted from 1889. His 1889 Breton Eve, shown at the Volpini exhibition of 1889, represented Eve as in fear of the snake, in his letter of 8 December 1892 to his wife Mette, he says I painted a nude of a young girl. In this position she is on the verge of being indecent, but I want it that way, the lines and movement are interesting to me. And so, I give her, in depicting the head and he then needed to find a pretext for the girls emotions. At first Gauguin made the old woman the subject of her fright, rather, she suggests the girls fear was a response to Gauguins aggressive behavior, consistent with his known battering of his wife Mette, the submissive fear in her eyes his erotic reward. Stephen F. Eisenman, professor of Art History at Northwestern University, suggests the painting and its narrative is an encyclopaedia of colonial racism. Eisenmans book Gauguins Skirt challenges conventional notions of the political and gender content of Gauguins paintings, in Spirit he sees parallels not only with Manets Olympia, but also with the Louvre Hermaphrodite in the boyishness of the features and the a tergo posture. The androgynous depiction is in keeping with Polynesian cosmology and its stress on the nature of things. Other historians such as Naomi E. Maurer have viewed the narrative as a device to make the indecency of the more acceptable to a European audience. The painting appears in the background of another Gauguin painting, his Self-portrait with Hat, Gauguin was an admirer of Édouard Manets 1863 Olympia. The copy is not an especially faithful one and it is thought he completed it from a photograph, edgar Dégas later purchased it for 230 francs at Gauguins 1895 auction of his paintings to raise funds for his return to Tahiti. It is known that Gauguin took a photograph of Manets Olympia with him on his first visit to Tahiti, when Gauguin exhibited Spirit of the Dead Watching at his largely unsuccessful 1893 Durand-Ruel exhibition, several critics noted the compositional similarities with Olympia. Thadée Natanson, a founder of La Revue Blanche, called it the Olympia of Tahiti, while Alfred Jarry, more pointedly, Pollock notes a structural correspondence between the two paintings. Thus, by reference to Manets Olympia, Gaughin has reintroduced himself, taking his place in the avant-garde as artist, as owner
7.
Georges Seurat
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Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, altered the direction of art by initiating Neo-impressionism. Seurat was born 2 December 1859 in Paris, at 60 rue de Bondy, the Seurat family moved to 136 boulevard de Magenta in 1862 or 1863. His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally from Champagne, was a legal official who had become wealthy from speculating in property. Georges had a brother, Émile Augustin, and a sister, Marie-Berthe and his father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife and children once a week at boulevard de Magenta. Georges Seurat first studied art at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his familys home in the boulevard Magenta, Seurats studies resulted in a well-considered and fertile theory of contrasts, a theory to which all his work was thereafter subjected. His formal artistic education came to an end in November 1879, after a year at the Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris where he shared a studio with his friend Aman-Jean, while also renting a small apartment at 16 rue de Chabrol. For the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of monochrome drawing and his first exhibited work, shown at the Salon, of 1883, was a Conté crayon drawing of Aman-Jean. He also studied the works of Eugène Delacroix carefully, making notes on his use of color and he spent 1883 working on his first major painting—a large canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, a monumental work showing young men relaxing by the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris. Seurat also departed from the Impressionist ideal by preparing for the work with a number of drawings, Bathers at Asnières was rejected by the Paris Salon, and instead he showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. Seurats new ideas on pointillism were to have a strong influence on Signac. In the summer of 1884, Seurat began work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the painting shows members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow the eye to blend colors optically. It took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide painting, much of which he spent in the park sketching in preparation for the work and it is now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting was the inspiration for James Lapine and Stephen Sondheims musical, Seurat concealed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch, an artists model whom he portrayed in his painting Jeune femme se poudrant. In 1889 she moved in with Seurat in his studio on the 7th floor of 128bis Boulevard de Clichy, when Madeleine became pregnant, the couple moved to a studio at 39 passage de lÉlysée-des-Beaux-Arts. There she gave birth to their son, who was named Pierre-Georges,16 February 1890, Seurat died in Paris in his parents home on 29 March 1891 at the age of 31
8.
Barnes Foundation
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The Barnes Foundation is an American educational art and horticultural institution with locations in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and Logan Square, Philadelphia. It was founded in 1922 by Albert C, today, the foundation owns more than 4,000 objects, including over 900 paintings, estimated to be worth about $25 billion. In the 1990s, the declining finances led its leaders to various controversial moves, including sending artworks on world tours. A2009 documentary, The Art of the Steal, argued that the foundation had been taken over by other non-profit institutions, after numerous court challenges, the new Barnes building opened on Benjamin Franklin Parkway on May 19,2012. The foundations current president and executive director, Thomas “Thom” Collins, was appointed on January 7,2015, from 1912, Barnes, who derived his fortune from his development of the antiseptic drug Argyrol and a business to sell it, began to study and collect art. He was assisted at first by the painter William Glackens, a schoolmate, in 1912 in Paris, Barnes visited the home of Gertrude and Leo Stein, where he became familiar with the work of such Modernist artists as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Commissioned by Barnes, Glackens selected the first 20 works he purchased from modern painters in Paris, in the 1920s, Barnes became acquainted with the work of Amedeo Modigliani and Giorgio de Chirico, thanks to the dealer Paul Guillaume. In 1922, Barnes began to transform his collection into a cultural institution and he chartered the Barnes Foundation as an educational institution in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He selected the location on land in Merion that he bought from the American Civil War veteran and horticulturist Captain Joseph Lapsley Wilson and he commissioned architect Paul Cret to design a complex of buildings. Soon afterward, a dispute was filed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The main building features several unusual cubist bas-reliefs, commissioned by Barnes from the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Barnes built his home next to the gallery, and it now serves as the administration building of the foundation. His wife, Laura, developed the Arboretum of the Barnes Foundation, Barness conception of his foundation as a school rather than a typical museum was shaped through his collaboration with the philosopher John Dewey, who helped draw up its mandate. To help with the educational programs, Barnes hired Thomas Munro, one of Deweys students at Columbia University, and Lawrence Buermeyer. Buermeyer and Munro each served as Associate Director of Education for several years and she accompanied him on buying trips from the 1920s through the 1940s. She continued to express his philosophy after his death, Barnes created detailed terms of operation in an indenture of trust to be honored in perpetuity after his death. Matisse is said to have hailed the school as the only place in America to view art. Artist Harriet Zeitlin is among those who studied at the Foundation, in 1941 and 1942, Bertrand Russell gave a series of lectures on the history of philosophy at the gallery, these would later become his landmark A History of Western Philosophy. After a decade of legal challenges, the public was allowed access to the collection in 1961
9.
The Scream
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The Scream is the popular name given to each of four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, by Norwegian Expressionist artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1910. The German title Munch gave these works is Der Schrei der Natur, the works show a figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a tumultuous orange sky. Arthur Lubow has described The Scream as an icon of modern art, Edvard Munch created the four versions in various media. The National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, holds one of two painted versions, the Munch Museum holds the other painted version and a pastel version from 1893. These three versions have not traveled for years, the fourth version was sold for $119,922,600 at Sothebys Impressionist and Modern Art auction on 2 May 2012 to financier Leon Black, the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction. The painting was on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York from October 2012 to April 2013, also in 1895, Munch created a lithograph stone of the image. Of the lithograph prints produced by Munch, several examples survive, only approximately four dozen prints were made before the original stone was resurfaced by the printer in Munchs absence. The Scream has been the target of several high-profile art thefts, in 1994, the version in the National Gallery was stolen. It was recovered months later. In 2004, both The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum, and were recovered two years later. The original German title given by Munch to his work was Der Schrei der Natur, the Norwegian word skrik usually is translated as scream, but is cognate with the English shriek. Occasionally, the painting also has been called The Cry and he later described his inspiration for the image, One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I stopped and looked out over the sun was setting. I sensed a scream passing through nature, it seemed to me that I heard the scream, I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. This explanation has been disputed by scholars, who note that Munch was a painter and was not primarily interested in literal renderings of what he had seen. Alternatively, it has suggested that the proximity of both a slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum to the site depicted in the painting may have offered some inspiration. The scene was identified as being the view from a road overlooking Oslo, at the time of painting the work, Munchs manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was a patient at the asylum at the foot of Ekeberg. In 2004, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florences Museum of Natural History, nonetheless, later studies have confirmed Rosenblums suggestion, disproving the Italian theory, for Munch had not been to Florence until after painting The Scream
10.
Edvard Munch
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One of his best known works is The Scream of 1893. Edvard Munch was born in a farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, to Laura Catherine Bjølstad and Christian Munch, Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had a sister, Johanne Sophie, and three younger siblings, Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine, and Inger Marie. Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their mother, Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch and historian Peter Andreas Munch. The family moved to Christiania in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress, Edvards mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munchs favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After their mothers death, the Munch siblings were raised by their father, often ill for much of the winters and kept out of school, Edvard would draw to keep himself occupied. He was tutored by his mates and his aunt. Christian Munch also instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained the children with vivid ghost-stories, as Edvard remembered it, Christians positive behavior toward his children was overshadowed by his morbid pietism. Munch wrote, My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis, from him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born, Christian reprimanded his children by telling them that their mother was looking down from heaven and grieving over their misbehavior. The oppressive religious milieu, plus Edvards poor health and the vivid ghost stories, helped inspire his macabre visions and nightmares, one of Munchs younger sisters, Laura, was diagnosed with mental illness at an early age. Of the five siblings, only Andreas married, but he died a few months after the wedding, Munch would later write, I inherited two of mankinds most frightful enemies—the heritage of consumption and insanity. Christian Munchs military pay was low, and his attempts to develop a private side practice failed, keeping his family in genteel. They moved frequently from one flat to another. Munchs early drawings and watercolors depicted these interiors, and the objects, such as medicine bottles and drawing implements. By his teens, art dominated Munchs interests, at thirteen, Munch had his first exposure to other artists at the newly formed Art Association, where he admired the work of the Norwegian landscape school. He returned to copy the paintings, and soon he began to paint in oils, in 1879, Munch enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry and math. He learned scaled and perspective drawing, but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies, the following year, much to his fathers disappointment, Munch left the college determined to become a painter
11.
Pablo Picasso
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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, Picassos work is often categorized into periods. Much of Picassos work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style and his later work often combines elements of his earlier styles. Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa, though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist. Picassos family was of middle-class background and his father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts, Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were piz, piz, a shortening of lápiz, from the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was an academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork, the family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his sketch of a pigeon. In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his sister, Conchita. After her death, the moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home, Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, the student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day. Picassos father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrids Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, at age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment
12.
Family of Saltimbanques
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Family of Saltimbanques is a 1905 painting by Pablo Picasso. The work depicts six saltimbanques, a kind of itinerant circus performer and it is considered the masterpiece of Picassos Rose Period, sometimes called his circus period. It was painted during a period from late 1904 to early 1906 when Picasso explored themes using the saltimbanque, Picasso frequently attended the Cirque Médrano in Montmartre. The composition groups the saltimbanques together but they seem disconnected and do not look at one another, critics have suggested Family of Saltimbanques is a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle, symbolized as poor, independent and isolated. The painting was removed from the Spanish salon at the IX Biennale of Venice in 1910, bohemian–Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke was inspired by this painting as he wrote the fifth of ten elegies in his Duino Elegies. Rilke used the figures in Picassos painting as a symbol of human activity, always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented. before their pure too-little, had passed into empty too-much. A related work in gouache and pastel is Family of Acrobats, Family of Saltimbanques via National Gallery of Art
13.
National Gallery of Art
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The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D. C. located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated an art collection and funds for construction. The Gallery often presents temporary special exhibitions spanning the world and the history of art and it is one of the largest museums in North America. In 1930 Mellon formed the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, when quizzed by Abbot, he explained that the project was in the hands of the Trust and that its decisions were partly dependent on the attitude of the Government towards the gift. Designed by architect John Russell Pope, the new structure was completed and accepted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the American people on March 17,1941. Neither Mellon nor Pope lived to see the completed, both died in late August 1937, only two months after excavation had begun. At the time of its inception it was the largest marble structure in the world, as anticipated by Mellon, the creation of the National Gallery encouraged the donation of other substantial art collections by a number of private donors. The Gallerys East Building was constructed in the 1970s on much of the land left over from the original congressional joint resolution. It was funded by Mellons children Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, designed by famed architect I. M. Pei, the contemporary structure was completed in 1978 and was opened on June 1 of that year by President Jimmy Carter. The new building was built to house the Museums collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures. The design received a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1981, the final addition to the complex is the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Completed and opened to the public on May 23,1999, the National Gallery of Art is supported through a private-public partnership. The United States federal government provides funds, through annual appropriations, to support the museums operations, all artwork, as well as special programs, are provided through private donations and funds. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian Institution, noted directors of the National Gallery have included David E. Finley, Jr. John Walker, and J. Carter Brown. Rusty Powell III is the current director, entry to both buildings of the National Gallery of Art is free of charge. From Monday through Saturday, the museum is open from 10 a. m. –5 p. m. it is open from 11 –6 p. m. on Sundays and it is closed on December 25 and January 1. The museum comprises two buildings, the West Building and the East Building linked by an underground passage
14.
Washington, D.C.
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Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D. C. is the capital of the United States. The signing of the Residence Act on July 16,1790, Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Congress and the District is therefore not a part of any state. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, named in honor of President George Washington, the City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia, in 1871. Washington had an population of 681,170 as of July 2016. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the population to more than one million during the workweek. The Washington metropolitan area, of which the District is a part, has a population of over 6 million, the centers of all three branches of the federal government of the United States are in the District, including the Congress, President, and Supreme Court. Washington is home to national monuments and museums, which are primarily situated on or around the National Mall. The city hosts 176 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of international organizations, trade unions, non-profit organizations, lobbying groups. A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973, However, the Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, the District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century, One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. 43, published January 23,1788, James Madison argued that the new government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance. Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia, known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital, on July 9,1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River. The exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory, the port of Georgetown, Maryland, founded in 1751, many of the stones are still standing
15.
Jean Metzinger
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Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote a theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the Neo-impressionism of Georges Seurat, between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works. From 1908 Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form, a style that would become known as Cubism. His early involvement in Cubism saw him both as an influential artist and an important theorist of the movement. The idea of moving around an object in order to see it from different view-points is treated, for the first time, in Metzingers Note sur la Peinture, before the emergence of Cubism, painters worked from the limiting factor of a single view-point. Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first major treatise on Cubism in 1912, Metzinger was a founding member of the Section dOr group of artists. During the First World War Metzinger furthered his role as a leading Cubist with his co-founding of the phase of the movement. He recognized the importance of mathematics in art, through a radical geometrization of form as an underlying basis for his wartime compositions. As post-war reconstruction began, a series of exhibitions at Léonce Rosenbergs Galerie de LEffort Moderne were to highlight order, the collective phenomenon of Cubism—now in its advanced revisionist form—became part of a widely discussed development in French culture, with Metzinger at its helm. In terms of the separation of culture and life, this period emerges as the most important in the history of Modernism, for Metzinger, the classical vision had been an incomplete representation of real things, based on an incomplete set of laws, postulates and theorems. He believed the world was dynamic and changing in time, that it appeared different depending on the point of view of the observer, each of these viewpoints were equally valid according to underlying symmetries inherent in nature. Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family and his great-grandfather, Nicolas Metzinger, Captain in the 1st Horse Artillery Regiment, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte. A street in the Sixième arrondissement of Nantes was named after Jeans grandfather, Jeans younger brother Maurice would become a musician, excelling as a cellist. By 1900 Jean was a student at Académie Cours Cambronne in Nantes, working under Hippolyte Touront, Metzinger, however, was interested in the current trends in painting. Metzinger sent three paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in 1903, and subsequently moved to Paris with the proceeds from their sale, from the age of 20, Metzinger supported himself as a professional painter. He would show four times at Weills gallery,17 January-1 February 1913, March 1913, June 1914. It is at Berthe Weills that he would meet Max Jacob for the first time, Berthe Weill was also the first Parisian art dealer to sell works of Picasso. Along with Picasso and Metzinger, she helped discover Matisse, Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, in 1904 Metzinger exhibited six paintings in the Divisionist style at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne
16.
Egon Schiele
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Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, the twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schieles paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism. Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln, Lower Austria, as a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains, and would spend many hours drawing them, to the point where his father felt obliged to destroy his sketchbooks. When he was 11 years old, Schiele moved to the city of Krems to attend secondary school. To those around him, Schiele was regarded as a strange child, shy and reserved, he did poorly at school except in athletics and drawing, and was usually in classes made up of younger pupils. When he was sixteen he took the twelve-year-old Gerti by train to Trieste without permission, when Schiele was 15 years old, his father died from syphilis, and he became a ward of his maternal uncle, Leopold Czihaczek, also a railway official. In 1906 Schiele applied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had once studied, within his first year there, Schiele was sent, at the insistence of several faculty members, to the more traditional Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1906. In 1907, Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, who generously mentored younger artists, Klimt took a particular interest in the young Schiele, buying his drawings, offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Secession, in 1908 Schiele had his first exhibition, in Klosterneuburg. Schiele left the Academy in 1909, after completing his third year, Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit some of his work at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh among others. Once free of the constraints of the Academys conventions, Schiele began to not only the human form. At the time, many found the explicitness of his works disturbing, in 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schieles first solo show. A solo exhibition of his took place in Paris in 1914. Schieles self-portraits helped re-establish the energy of both genres with their level of emotional and sexual honesty and use of figural distortion in place of conventional ideals of beauty. Egon Schiele’s Kneeling Nude with Raised Hands is considered among the most significant nude art pieces made during the 20th century, Schiele’s radical and developed approach towards the naked human form challenged both scholars and progressives alike. This unconventional piece and style went against strict academia and elevated a sexual uproar with its contorted lines, Schiele mastered the craft of contouring sexually charged beings to express emotional revolutions. In 1911, Schiele met the seventeen-year-old Walburga Neuzil, who lived with him in Vienna, very little is known of her, except that she had previously modelled for Gustav Klimt and might have been one of his mistresses
17.
I and the Village
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I and the Village is a 1911 painting by the Russian-French artist Marc Chagall. It is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the work is Cubist in construction and contains many soft, dreamlike images overlapping one another in a continuous space. In the foreground, a cap-wearing green-faced man stares at a goat or sheep with the image of a smaller goat being milked on its cheek, in the foreground is a glowing tree held in the mans dark hand. The background features a collection of houses next to an Orthodox church, note that the green-faced man wears a necklace with St. Andrews cross, indicating that the man is a Christian. As the title suggests, I and the Village is influenced by memories of the place of birth. The significance of the lies in its seamless integration of various elements of Eastern European folktales and culture. Its clearly defined semiotic elements and daringly whimsical style were at the time considered groundbreaking, charlotte Douglas, Jeannene M. Przyblyski, I and the village, early works, Jewish Community Museum,1987 Rosenblum, Robert. New York, Harry N. Abrams,1966
18.
Marc Chagall
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Marc Zakharovich Chagall was a Russian-French artist. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century, according to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists. For decades, he had also respected as the worlds preeminent Jewish artist. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and he also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin, during this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis, as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernisms golden age in Paris, where he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism. Yet throughout these phases of his style he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, when Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is. Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Liozna, at the time of his birth, Vitebsks population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called Russian Toledo, as the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II. Chagall was the eldest of nine children, the family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family. His father, Khatskl Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant and his father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month. Chagall would later include fish motifs out of respect for his father, writes Chagall biographer, Chagall wrote of these early years, Day after day, winter and summer, at six oclock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea, hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. No word will ever ease my fathers lot, There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like a symbol, was never out of my childish hands. One of the sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia
19.
Black Square (painting)
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The Black Square, Black Square or Malevichs Black Square is an iconic painting by Kazimir Malevich. The first version was done in 1915, Malevich made four variants of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s. The Black Square was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 in 1915, the work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as the “zero point of painting, referring to the paintings historical significance and paraphrasing Malevich. Malevich painted his first Black Square in 1915 and he made four variants of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s, despite the authors 1913 inscription on the reverse. The painting is known as Black Square, The Black Square or as Malevichs Black Square. It was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 in 1915, forensic detail reveals of how Black Square was painted over a more complex and colorful composition. A plurality of art historians, curators, and critics refer to Black Square as one of the works of modern art. Malevich declared the square a work of Suprematism, a movement which he proclaimed but which is associated almost exclusively with the work Malevich, Suprematism may be understood as a transitional phase in the evolution of Russian art, bridging the evolutionary gap between futurism and constructivism. Malevich had made remarks about his painting. “It is from zero, in zero, that the movement of being begins. ”I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to creation. The experience of pure non-objectivity in the emptiness of a liberated nothing. Peter Schjeldahl wrote, The brushwork is juicy and brusque, filling in the shapes, but the forms are weightless, more like thoughts than like images. You don’t look at the picture so much as launch yourself into its trackless empyrean, beyond its obvious design flair, the work looks easy because it is. Malevich is monumental not for what he put into space but for what he took out, bodily experience. His appeal to Americans isn’t surprising, apart from a peculiarly Russian mystical tradition, which he exploited—evoking the compact spell of the icon, as a conduit of the divine—his work amounts to a cosmic “Song of the Open Road. ”It conveys sheer, surging, untrammelled possibility. This quality seemed in synch with the Revolution of 1917 and it wasn’t—which Malevich was painfully made aware of, first by his rivals in the Russian avant-garde and then, conclusively, by the regime of Joseph Stalin. Negligence and contempt on the part of the Soviet government in whose keeping the original Black Square remained for decades has resulted in the painting degrading considerably. Peter Schjeldahl writes, The painting looks terrible, crackled, scuffed, in fact, it passed most of that time deep in the Soviet archives, classed among the lowliest of the states treasures
20.
Kazimir Malevich
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Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician. He was a pioneer of abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement. He was a devout Christian mystic who believed the central task of an artist was that of rendering spiritual feeling, Kazimir Malevich was born Kazimierz Malewicz to a Polish family, who settled near Kiev in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire during the partitions of Poland. His parents, Ludwika and Seweryn Malewicz, were Roman Catholic like most ethnic Poles and they both had fled from the former eastern territories of the Commonwealth to Kiev in the aftermath of the failed Polish January Uprising of 1863 against the tsarist army. His native language was Polish though he spoke Ukrainian in public, subsequently, Malevich even wrote a series of articles about art in Ukrainian. Kazimirs father managed a sugar factory, Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood. His family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of Ukraine, amidst sugar-beet plantations, until age twelve he knew nothing of professional artists, although art had surrounded him in childhood. He delighted in peasant embroidery, and in decorated walls and stoves and he was able to paint in the peasant style. He studied drawing in Kiev from 1895 to 1896, from 1896 to 1904 Kazimir Malevich lived in Kursk. In 1904, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow and he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1904 to 1910 and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow. In the same year he participated in an exhibition by the collective, by that time his works were influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian avant-garde painters, who were particularly interested in Russian folk art called lubok. Malevich described himself as painting in a Cubo-Futuristic style in 1912, in March 1913 a major exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulovs paintings opened in Moscow. Already in the year the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, with Malevichs stage-set. In 1914 Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, Malevich also co-illustrated, with Pavel Filonov, Selected Poems with Postscript, 1907–1914 by Velimir Khlebnikov and another work by Khlebnikov in 1914 titled Roar. In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, in 1915–1916 he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916–1917 he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk, Aleksandra Ekster, famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square and White On White. Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, a black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenery designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The second Black Square was painted around 1923, some believe that the third Black Square was painted in 1929 for Malevichs solo exhibition, because of the poor condition of the 1915 square
21.
Marcel Duchamp
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Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his artists as retinal art. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind, Marcel Duchamp was born at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, France, and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle, his grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint. Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamps seven children, one died as an infant, Marcel Duchamp was the brother of, Jacques Villon, painter, printmaker Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sculptor Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, painter. At 8 years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, two other students in his class also became well-known artists and lasting friends, Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont. For the next 8 years, he was locked into a regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not a student, his best subject was mathematics. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize and he learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to protect his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamps true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid, at 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities. That summer he painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils. Duchamps early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles and he experimented with classical techniques and subjects. He studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, during this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use verbal puns, visual puns, or both, such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life. In 1905, he began his military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment. There he learned typography and printing processes—skills he would use in his later work, due to his eldest brother Jacques membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamps work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon dAutomne. The following year his work was featured in the Salon des Indépendants, of Duchamps pieces in the show, critic Guillaume Apollinaire—who was to become a friend—criticized what he called Duchamps very ugly nudes. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, or the Section dOr, uninterested in the Cubists seriousness or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory, and gained a reputation of being shy
22.
Fountain (Duchamp)
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Fountain is a 1917 work produced by Marcel Duchamp. The piece was a urinal, which was signed R. Mutt. Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitzs studio, and the published in The Blind Man. The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger,17 replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s now exist. Marcel Duchamp arrived in the United States less than two prior to the creation of Fountain and had become involved with Dada, an anti-rational, anti-art cultural movement. The artist brought the urinal to his studio at 33 West 67th Street, reoriented it to a position 90 degrees from its position of use. According to another version, Duchamp did not create Fountain, at the time Duchamp was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists. After much debate by the members about whether the piece was or was not art. Duchamp resigned from the Board in protest and he took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object. In defense of the work being art, Wood also wrote, The only works of art America has given are her plumbing, Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation. Menno Hubregtse argues that Duchamp may have chosen Fountain as a readymade because it parodied Robert J. Coadys exaltation of industrial machines as pure forms of American art. Coady, who championed his call for American art in his publication The Soil, Hubregtse notes that Duchamps urinal may have been a clever response to Coadys comparison of Crottis sculpture with the absolute expression of a—plumber. Shortly after its exhibition, Fountain was lost. According to Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins, the best guess is that it was out as rubbish by Stieglitz. The edition of eight was manufactured from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain, the artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—at best it is puzzling, but over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear, Art is something you piss on, since the photograph taken by Stieglitz is the only image of the original sculpture, there are some interpretations of Fountain by looking not only at reproductions but this particular photograph. The use of the word Dada for the art movement, the meaning and it is not clear whether Duchamp or Freytag-Lorinhoven had in mind the German Armut, or possibly Urmutter
23.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the part of the 20th century. He was married to painter Georgia OKeeffe, Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the first son of German-Jewish immigrants Edward Stieglitz and Hedwig Ann Werner. His father was a lieutenant in the Union Army and he had five siblings, Flora, twins Julius and Leopold, Agnes and Selma. Alfred Stieglitz, seeing the relationship of the twins, wished he had a soul mate of his own during his childhood. Stieglitz attended Charlier Institute, a Christian school and the best private school in New York, the following year, his family began spending the summers at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, a tradition that continued into Stieglitzs adulthood. So that he would qualify for admission to the City College of New York, Stieglitz was enrolled in a school for his senior year of high school. In 1881, Edward Stieglitz sold his company for US$400,000, Alfred Stieglitz enrolled in the Realgymnasium in Karlsruhe. The next year, Stieglitz studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and he enrolled in a chemistry class taught by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, a scientist and researcher, who worked on the chemical processes for developing photographs. In Vogel, Stieglitz found both the challenge he needed and an outlet for his growing artistic and cultural interests. He received an allowance of $1,200 a month, German artists Adolf von Menzel and Wilhelm Hasemann were his friends. He bought his first camera and traveled through the European countryside, taking photographs of landscapes and peasants in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In 1884, his parents returned to America, but 20-year-old Stieglitz remained in Germany and collected books on photography and photographers in Europe, through his self-study, he saw photography as an art form. In 1887, he wrote his very first article, A Word or Two about Amateur Photography in Germany and he then wrote articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany. He won first place for his photography, The Last Joke, Bellagio, the next year he won both first and second prizes in the same competition, and his reputation began to spread as several German and British photographic magazines published his work. In 1890, his sister Flora died while giving birth, Stieglitz considered himself an artist, but he refused to sell his photographs. His father purchased a small business for him so that he could earn a living in his chosen profession. Because he demanded high quality images and paid his employee high wages and he regularly wrote for The American Amateur Photographer magazine
24.
Wassily Kandinsky
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Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting one of the first recognised purely abstract works, born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics, successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat—Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbes private school and he returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the theories on art in Communist Moscow. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and he died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Kandinskys creation of work followed a long period of development. He called this devotion to beauty, fervor of spirit. Kandinsky was born in Moscow, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources while in Moscow. He studied many fields while in school, including law and economics, later in life, he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew, in 1889, he was part of an ethnographic research group which travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past, he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that upon entering them and this experience, and his study of the regions folk art, was reflected in much of his early work. The artist is the hand plays, touching one key or another. Kandinsky was also the uncle of Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, in 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy where his teachers would eventually include Franz von Stuck. He was not immediately granted admission, and began learning art on his own and that same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet. He was particularly taken with the style of Haystacks, this. Later, he would write about this experience, That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me and this non-recognition was painful to me
25.
Philosophy
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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument and systematic presentation, classic philosophical questions include, Is it possible to know anything and to prove it. However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as, is it better to be just or unjust. Historically, philosophy encompassed any body of knowledge, from the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, natural philosophy encompassed astronomy, medicine and physics. For example, Newtons 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics, in the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. In the modern era, some investigations that were part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology. Other investigations closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy, for example, is beauty objective or subjective. Are there many scientific methods or just one, is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy. Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, since the 20th century, professional philosophers contribute to society primarily as professors, researchers and writers. Traditionally, the term referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, mathematics, natural science, education. This division is not obsolete but has changed, Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences, especially astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. Moral philosophy has birthed the social sciences, but still includes value theory, metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic, mathematics and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology, cosmology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today, colin McGinn and others claim that no philosophical progress has occurred during that interval. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, in one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as how are we to live, a broad and impartial conception of philosophy then, finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality, morality and life in all world civilizations. Socrates was an influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom
26.
Abstraction
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An abstraction is the product of this process — a concept that acts as a super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category. Conceptual abstractions may be formed by filtering the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, in a type–token distinction, a type is more abstract than its tokens. Abstraction in its use is a material process, discussed in the themes below. Its development is likely to have been connected with the development of human language. Abstraction involves induction of ideas or the synthesis of particular facts into one theory about something. It is the opposite of specification, which is the analysis or breaking-down of an idea or abstraction into concrete facts. Thales believed that everything in the universe comes from one main substance and he deduced or specified from a general idea, everything is water, to the specific forms of water such as ice, snow, fog, and rivers. Modern scientists can use the opposite approach of abstraction, or going from particular facts collected into one general idea. This conceptual scheme emphasizes the inherent equality of both constituent and abstract data, thus avoiding problems arising from the distinction between abstract and concrete, in this sense the process of abstraction entails the identification of similarities between objects, and the process of associating these objects with an abstraction. For example, picture 1 below illustrates the concrete relationship Cat sits on Mat, for example, graph 1 below expresses the abstraction agent sits on location. This conceptual scheme entails no specific hierarchical taxonomy, only a progressive exclusion of detail, things that do not exist at any particular place and time are often considered abstract. By contrast, instances, or members, of such a thing might exist in many different places and times. Those abstract things are said to be multiply instantiated, in the sense of picture 1, picture 2. It is not sufficient, however, to abstract ideas as those that can be instantiated. Although the concepts cat and telephone are abstractions, they are not abstract in the sense of the objects in graph 1 below, perhaps confusingly, some philosophies refer to tropes as abstract particulars — e. g. the particular redness of a particular apple is an abstract particular. This is similar to qualia and sumbebekos, karl Marxs writing on the commodity abstraction recognizes a parallel process. The state as both concept and material practice exemplifies the two sides of this process of abstraction, conceptually, the current concept of the state is an abstraction from the much more concrete early-modern use as the standing or status of the prince, his visible estates. At the same time, materially, the practice of statehood is now constitutively and materially more abstract than at the time when princes ruled as the embodiment of extended power and that difference accounts for the ontological usefulness of the word abstract
27.
Postmodern art
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Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, the predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Arthur Danto argues contemporary is the term, and postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement. Some postmodern artists have more distinctive breaks from the ideas of modern art and there is no consensus as to what is late-modern. Ideas rejected by the modern aesthetic have been re-established, traditional techniques and subject matter have returned in art. Some critics argue much of the current postmodern art, the latest avant-gardism, as well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art, postmodern has also been used to denote a phase of modern art. Defenders of modernism, such as Clement Greenberg, as well as opponents of modernism, such as Félix Guattari. The neo-conservative Hilton Kramer describes postmodernism as a creation of modernism at the end of its tether, in the context of aesthetics and art, Jean-François Lyotard is a major philosopher of postmodernism. Many critics hold postmodern art emerges from modern art, suggested dates for the shift from modern to postmodern include 1914 in Europe, and 1962 or 1968 in America. He makes the point these debates go on all the time with respect to art movements and periods, American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson argues the condition of life and production will be reflected in all activity, including the making of art. Jean Baudrillard has had a significant influence on postmodern-inspired art and emphasised the possibilities of new forms of creativity, the artist Peter Halley describes his day-glo colours as hyperrealization of real color, and acknowledges Baudrillard as an influence. As with all uses of the term there are critics of its application. Kirk Varnedoe, for instance, stated there is no such thing as postmodernism. Postmodernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against or reject, trends in modernism, however, paradox is probably the most important modernist idea against which postmodernism reacts. Paradox was central to the modernist enterprise, which Manet introduced, manets various violations of representational art brought to prominence the supposed mutual exclusiveness of reality and representation, design and representation, abstraction and reality, and so on. The incorporation of paradox was highly stimulating from Manet to the conceptualists, Postmodernism rejects the notion of advancement or progress in art per se, and thus aims to overturn the myth of the avant-garde. Rosalind Krauss was one of the important enunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, griselda Pollock studied and confronted the avant-garde and modern art in a series of groundbreaking books, reviewing modern art at the same time as redefining postmodern art. One characteristic of postmodern art is its conflation of high and low culture through the use of industrial materials and pop culture imagery
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Henri Matisse
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Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is primarily as a painter. Although he was labelled a Fauve, by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in northern France and he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as an administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered a kind of paradise as he described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, initially he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired, as an art student he made copies of four of Chardins paintings in the Louvre, in 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the Australian painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van Gogh and he later said Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me. In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, with the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre, the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean and Pierre, Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, in Cézannes sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. Many of Matisses paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signacs essay and his paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910
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Proto-Cubism
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Proto-Cubism is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century this period can be characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become more extreme. Proto-Cubist artworks typically depict objects in geometric schemas of cubic or conic shapes, the illusion of classical perspective is progressively stripped away from objective representation to reveal the constructive essence of the physical world. Proto-Cubist works embrace many styles, and would affect diverse individuals, groups and movements. The building blocks that lead to the construction of proto-Cubist works are diverse in nature, neither homogeneous nor isotropic, the progression of each individual artist was unique. In anticipation of Proto-Cubism the idea of form inherent in art since the Renaissance had been questioned, the romanticist Eugène Delacroix, the realist Gustave Courbet, and practically all the Impressionists had abandoned a significant portion of Classicism in favor of immediate sensation. The dynamic expression favored by these artists presented a challenge in contrast to the means of expression promoted by the Academia. The representation of fixed objects occupying a space, was replaced by dynamic colors, yet other means would be necessary to jettison completely the long-standing foundation that surrounded them. Cézanne ambiguously writes, Interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, in addition to his preoccupation for the simplification of geometric structure, Cézanne was concerned with the means of rendering the effect of volume and space. His rather classical color-modulating system consisted of changing colors from warm to cool as the object away from the source of light. Cézannes departure from classicism, however, would be best summarized in the treatment and of application of the paint itself, the complexity of surface variations with overlapped shifting planes, seemingly arbitrary contours, contrasts and values combined to produce a strong patchwork effect. Increasingly in his works, as Cézanne achieves a greater freedom. As the color planes acquire greater formal independence, defined objects, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles acknowledged the importance of Cézanne to the Cubists in his article titled From Cézanne to Cubism. For Vauxcelles the influence had a character, both architectural and intellectual. He stressed the statement made by Émile Bernard that Cézannes optics were not in the eye, with both his courage and experience to draw from, Cézanne created a hybrid art-form. He combined on the one hand the imitative and the immobile, a left over from the Renaissance. His own generation would see in his contradictory codes nothing more than impotence, however, the next generation would see in Cézanne greatness, precisely because of this duality
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Georges Braque
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Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame, georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil, Val-dOise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter, however, he also studied artistic painting during evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902, the next year, he attended the Académie Humbert, also in Paris, and painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia, Braques earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the Fauves in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared Braques hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to LEstaque, to Antwerp, in May 1907, he successfully exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon dAutomne greatly affected the artists of Paris. Braques paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective and he showed this in the painting Houses at lEstaque. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African masks, Picasso celebrates animation, while Braque celebrates contemplation. Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris and these artists were the styles main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique, French art critic Louis Vauxcelles used the terms bizarre cubiques in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as full of little cubes, the term Cubism, first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, quickly gained wide use but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described Cubism as the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction. The Cubist style spread quickly throughout Paris and then Europe, the two artists productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army
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Raoul Dufy
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Raoul Dufy was a French Fauvist painter, brother of Jean Dufy. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics and textiles and he is noted for scenes of open-air social events. He was also a draftsman, printmaker, book illustrator, scenic designer, a designer of furniture, Raoul Dufy was born into a large family at Le Havre, in Normandy. He left school at the age of fourteen to work in a coffee-importing company, in 1895, when he was 18, he started taking evening classes in art at Le Havres École des Beaux-Arts. The classes were taught by Charles Lhuillier, who had been, forty years earlier, there, Dufy met Raimond Lecourt and Othon Friesz with whom he later shared a studio in Montmartre and to whom he remained a lifelong friend. During this period, Dufy painted mostly Norman landscapes in watercolors, in 1900, after a year of military service, Dufy won a scholarship to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where again he crossed paths with Othon Friesz. He concentrated on improving his drawing skills, the impressionist landscape painters, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, influenced Dufy profoundly. His first exhibition took place in 1901, introduced to Berthe Weill in 1902, Dufy showed his work in her gallery. Then he exhibited again in 1903 at the Salon des Indépendants, a boost to his confidence, the painter, Maurice Denis, bought one of his paintings. Dufy continued to paint, often in the vicinity of Le Havre, in 1904, with his friend, Albert Marquet, he worked in Fecamp on the English Channel. Henri Matisses Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which Dufy saw at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, was a revelation to the young artist, les Fauves emphasized bright color and bold contours in their work. Dufys painting reflected this aesthetic until about 1909, when contact with the work of Paul Cézanne led him to adopt a somewhat subtler technique. It was not until 1920, however, after he had flirted briefly with yet another style, cubism and it involved skeletal structures, arranged with foreshortened perspective, and the use of thin washes of color applied quickly, in a manner that came to be known as stenographic. Dufys cheerful oils and watercolors depict events of the period, including yachting scenes, sparkling views of the French Riviera, chic parties. Dufy completed one of the largest paintings ever contemplated, a huge and immensely popular ode to electricity, Dufy also acquired a reputation as an illustrator and as a commercial artist. He painted murals for buildings, he also produced a huge number of tapestries. His plates appear in books by Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, in 1909, Raoul Dufy was commissioned by Paul Poiret to design stationery for the house, and after 1912 designed textile patterns for Bianchini-Ferier used in Poirets and Charvets garments. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dufy exhibited at the annual Salon des Tuileries in Paris, by 1950, his hands were struck with rheumatoid arthritis and his ability to paint diminished, as he has to fasten the brush to his hand
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Maurice de Vlaminck
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Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon dAutomne exhibition of 1905, Maurice de Vlaminck was born on Rue Pierre Lescot in Paris. His father Edmond Julien was Flemish and taught violin and his mother Joséphine Caroline Grillet came from Lorraine and his father taught him to play the violin. He began painting in his late teens, in 1893, he studied with a painter named Henri Rigalon on the Île de Chatou. In 1894 he married Suzanne Berly, the turning point in his life was a chance meeting on the train to Paris towards the end of his stint in the army. Vlaminck, then 23, met an aspiring artist, André Derain, when Vlaminck completed his army service in 1900, the two rented a studio together, the Maison Levanneur which now houses the Cneai, for a year before Derain left to do his own military service. In 1902 and 1903 he wrote several mildly pornographic novels illustrated by Derain and he painted during the day and earned his livelihood by giving violin lessons and performing with musical bands at night. Vlaminck participated in the controversial 1905 Salon dAutomne exhibition, in 1911, Vlaminck traveled to London and painted by the Thames. In 1913, he painted again with Derain in Marseille and Martigues, in World War I he was stationed in Paris, and began writing poetry. Eventually he settled in Rueil-la-Gadelière, a small village south-west of Paris and he married his second wife, Berthe Combes, with whom he had two daughters. From 1925 he traveled throughout France, but continued to paint primarily along the Seine, resentful that Fauvism had been overtaken by Cubism as an art movement Vlaminck blamed Picasso for dragging French painting into a wretched dead end and state of confusion. During the Second World War Vlaminck visited Germany and on his return published a tirade against Picasso, a gifted story teller, Vlaminck wrote many autobiographies, which were somewhat marred either by vagueness or lack of absolute truthfulness. Vlaminck died in Rueil-la-Gadelière on 11 October 1958, two of Vlamincks groundbreaking paintings, Sur le zinc and Lhomme a la pipe were painted in 1900. For the next few years Vlaminck lived in or near Chatou, painting and exhibiting alongside Derain, Matisse, at this time his exuberant paint application and vibrant use of colour displayed the influence of Vincent van Gogh. According to art critic Souren Melikian, it is the cartoon of a type. In his landscape paintings, his approach was similar and he ignored the details, with the landscape becoming a mere excuse to express mood through violent colour and brushwork. An example is Sous bois, painted in 1904, the following year, he began to experiment with deconstruction, turning the physical world into dabs and streaks of colour that convey a sense of motion. His paintings Le Pont de Chatou, Les Ramasseurs de pommes de terre, La Seine a Chatou, Vlamincks compositions show familiarity with the Impressionists, several of whom had painted in the same area in the 1870s and 1880s
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Fauvism
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While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain, the paintings of the Fauves were characterized by seemingly wild brush work and strident colors, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as a development of Van Goghs Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated color—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derains work at Collioure in 1905, in 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier, How do you see these trees. So, put in yellow, this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine, Fauvism can also be seen as a mode of Expressionism. Moreaus broad-mindedness, originality and affirmation of the potency of pure color was inspirational for his students. Matisse said of him, He did not set us on the right roads and this source of empathy was taken away with Moreaus death in 1898, but the artists discovered other catalysts for their development. In 1896, Matisse, then an art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. The next year he returned as Russells student and abandoned his earth-colored palette for bright Impressionist colors, later stating, Russell was my teacher, Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing. In parallel with the discovery of contemporary avant-garde art came an appreciation of pre-Renaissance French art. Another aesthetic influence was African sculpture, of which Vlaminck, Derain, many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in Matisses painting, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which he painted in the summer of 1904, whilst in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon dAutomne, Henri Rousseau was not a Fauve, but his large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was exhibited near Matisses work and may have had an influence on the pejorative used. Vauxcelles comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, the pictures gained considerable condemnation—A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public, wrote the critic Camille Mauclair —but also some favorable attention. Matisses Neo-Impressionist landscape, Luxe, Calme et Volupté, had already exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1905. Art history History of painting Neo-Fauvism Visual arts Western painting Gerdts, the Color of Modernism, The American Fauves. Spivey, Virginia, Fauvism, Smarthistory at Khan Academy Whitfield, Fauve Painting from the Permanent Collection at the National Gallery of Art Fauvism, The Wild Beasts of Early Twentieth Century Art Rewald, Sabine. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves,1910
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Dance (Matisse)
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Dance refers to either of two related paintings made by Henri Matisse between 1909 and 1910. The first, preliminary version is Matisses study for the second version, the composition or arrangement of dancing figures is reminiscent of Blakes watercolour Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies dancing from 1786. In March 1909, Matisse painted a version of this work. It was a study and uses paler colors and less detail. The painting was regarded by the artist who once called it the overpowering climax of luminosity. It was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Dance, is a large decorative panel, painted with a companion piece, Music, specifically for the Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, with whom Matisse had a long association. Until the October Revolution of 1917, this painting hung together with Music on the staircase of Shchukins Moscow mansion, the painting shows five dancing figures, painted in a strong red, set against a very simplified green landscape and deep blue sky. The painting is associated with the Dance of the Young Girls from Igor Stravinskys famous musical work The Rite of Spring. Dance is commonly recognized as a key point of career and in the development of modern painting and it generally resides in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, but was loaned to Hermitage Amsterdam for a period of six weeks from April 1 to May 9,2010
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Tribal art
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Tribal art is the visual arts and material culture of indigenous peoples. The term primitive is criticized as being Eurocentric and pejorative, Tribal art is often ceremonial or religious in nature. Typically originating in rural areas, tribal art refers to the subject, in the 19th century, non-western art was not seen by mainstream Western art professional as being as art at all. The art world perception of tribal arts is becoming less paternalistic, major exhibitions of tribal arts in the late 19th through mid-20th centuries exposed the Western art world to non-Western art. Major exhibitions included the Museum of Modern Arts 1935 Africa Negro Art and 1941 Indian Art of the United States, exposure to tribal arts provide inspiration to many modern artists, notably Expressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists, notably Surrealist Max Ernst. The Anthropology of Art, A Reader, edmund Snow Carpenter, The Tribal Terror of Self-Awareness. In Paul Hockings, Principles of Visual Anthropology,1975, pages 451–461, denis Dutton, Tribal Art and Artefact. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,51, 13–21, Winter 1993, denis Dutton, Mythologies of Tribal Art. Herbert E. Roese, African Wood Carvings - the sculptural art of West Africa,2011, Cardiff ISBN 978-0-9560294-2-3 Ralph T. Coe, the responsive eye, Ralph T. Coe and the collecting of American Indian art. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tribal Art Magazine Paleobree — Tribal Art Information Service Art Tribal Newsletter Tribal art forgeries Oceanic Art Society
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Hedonism
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Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure and happiness are the primary or most important intrinsic goods and the proper aim of human life. A hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure, but when finally gained of that pleasure, either through intrinsic or extrinsic goods, ethical hedonism is the idea that all people have the right to do everything in their power to achieve the greatest amount of pleasure possible to them. It is also the idea that every persons pleasure should far surpass their amount of pain, ethical hedonism is said to have been started by Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates. He held the idea that pleasure is the highest good, Hedonism is a sub philosophy of utilitarianism, which says to act in a way that maximizes utility. Hedonists equate pleasure with utility and believe that pleasure is the master of all humankind, the name derives from the Greek word for delight. An extremely strong aversion to hedonism is hedonophobia, in the original Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written soon after the invention of writing, Siduri gave the following advice Fill your belly. Dance and make music day and night These things alone are the concern of men, the following is a song attributed to the reign of one of the Pharoahs around the time of the 12th dynasty, and the text was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. The school was so called after Cyrene, the birthplace of Aristippus and it was one of the earliest Socratic schools. The Cyrenaics taught that the only good is pleasure, which meant not just the absence of pain. Of these, momentary pleasures, especially physical ones, are stronger than those of anticipation or memory and they did, however, recognize the value of social obligation, and that pleasure could be gained from altruism. Theodorus the Atheist was an exponent of hedonism who was a disciple of younger Aristippus. The school died out within a century, and was replaced by Epicureanism, the Cyrenaics were known for their skeptical theory of knowledge. They reduced logic to a doctrine concerning the criterion of truth. They thought that we can know with certainty our immediate sense-experiences and they also denied that we can have knowledge of what the experiences of other people are like. These sensations are motions which are subjective, and are painful, indifferent or pleasant, according as they are violent. Further they are individual, and can in no way be described as constituting absolute objective knowledge. Feeling, therefore, is the only criterion of knowledge. Our ways of being affected are alone knowable, thus the sole aim for everyone should be pleasure
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Cubism
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Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century, the term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s. The movement was pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Andre Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. The impact of Cubism was far-reaching and wide-ranging, Cubism spread rapidly across the globe and in doing so evolved to a greater or lesser extent. In essence, Cubism was the origin of a process that produced diversity. In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, Abstract art, in other countries Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Other common threads between these movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization. Cubism began between 1907 and 1911, Pablo Picassos 1907 painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braques 1908 Houses at L’Estaque prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques, Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as the first Cubist paintings. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, english art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch. Douglas Coopers restrictive use of terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed, wider views of Cubism include artists who were later associated with the Salle 41 artists, e. g. John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram. The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram, The diagram being a symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as not as imitations or recreations. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian, artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. Picassos paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as seen in Les Demoiselles dAvignon
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Cube
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In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube is the only regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids and it has 6 faces,12 edges, and 8 vertices. The cube is also a square parallelepiped, an equilateral cuboid and it is a regular square prism in three orientations, and a trigonal trapezohedron in four orientations. The cube is dual to the octahedron and it has cubical or octahedral symmetry. The cube has four special orthogonal projections, centered, on a vertex, edges, face, the first and third correspond to the A2 and B2 Coxeter planes. The cube can also be represented as a tiling. This projection is conformal, preserving angles but not areas or lengths, straight lines on the sphere are projected as circular arcs on the plane. In analytic geometry, a surface with center and edge length of 2a is the locus of all points such that max = a. For a cube of length a, As the volume of a cube is the third power of its sides a × a × a, third powers are called cubes, by analogy with squares. A cube has the largest volume among cuboids with a surface area. Also, a cube has the largest volume among cuboids with the same linear size. They were unable to solve this problem, and in 1837 Pierre Wantzel proved it to be impossible because the root of 2 is not a constructible number. The cube has three uniform colorings, named by the colors of the faces around each vertex,111,112,123. The cube has three classes of symmetry, which can be represented by coloring the faces. The highest octahedral symmetry Oh has all the faces the same color, the dihedral symmetry D4h comes from the cube being a prism, with all four sides being the same color. The lowest symmetry D2h is also a symmetry, with sides alternating colors. Each symmetry form has a different Wythoff symbol, a cube has eleven nets, that is, there are eleven ways to flatten a hollow cube by cutting seven edges. To color the cube so that no two adjacent faces have the color, one would need at least three colors
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Sphere
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A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space that is the surface of a completely round ball. This distance r is the radius of the ball, and the point is the center of the mathematical ball. The longest straight line through the ball, connecting two points of the sphere, passes through the center and its length is twice the radius. While outside mathematics the terms sphere and ball are used interchangeably. The ball and the share the same radius, diameter. The surface area of a sphere is, A =4 π r 2, at any given radius r, the incremental volume equals the product of the surface area at radius r and the thickness of a shell, δ V ≈ A ⋅ δ r. The total volume is the summation of all volumes, V ≈ ∑ A ⋅ δ r. In the limit as δr approaches zero this equation becomes, V = ∫0 r A d r ′, substitute V,43 π r 3 = ∫0 r A d r ′. Differentiating both sides of equation with respect to r yields A as a function of r,4 π r 2 = A. Which is generally abbreviated as, A =4 π r 2, alternatively, the area element on the sphere is given in spherical coordinates by dA = r2 sin θ dθ dφ. In Cartesian coordinates, the element is d S = r r 2 − ∑ i ≠ k x i 2 ∏ i ≠ k d x i, ∀ k. For more generality, see area element, the total area can thus be obtained by integration, A = ∫02 π ∫0 π r 2 sin θ d θ d φ =4 π r 2. In three dimensions, the volume inside a sphere is derived to be V =43 π r 3 where r is the radius of the sphere, archimedes first derived this formula, which shows that the volume inside a sphere is 2/3 that of a circumscribed cylinder. In modern mathematics, this formula can be derived using integral calculus, at any given x, the incremental volume equals the product of the cross-sectional area of the disk at x and its thickness, δ V ≈ π y 2 ⋅ δ x. The total volume is the summation of all volumes, V ≈ ∑ π y 2 ⋅ δ x. In the limit as δx approaches zero this equation becomes, V = ∫ − r r π y 2 d x. At any given x, a right-angled triangle connects x, y and r to the origin, hence, applying the Pythagorean theorem yields, thus, substituting y with a function of x gives, V = ∫ − r r π d x. Which can now be evaluated as follows, V = π − r r = π − π =43 π r 3
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Cone
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A cone is a three-dimensional geometric shape that tapers smoothly from a flat base to a point called the apex or vertex. A cone is formed by a set of segments, half-lines, or lines connecting a common point. If the enclosed points are included in the base, the cone is a solid object, otherwise it is a two-dimensional object in three-dimensional space. In the case of an object, the boundary formed by these lines or partial lines is called the lateral surface, if the lateral surface is unbounded. In the case of line segments, the cone does not extend beyond the base, while in the case of half-lines, in the case of lines, the cone extends infinitely far in both directions from the apex, in which case it is sometimes called a double cone. Either half of a cone on one side of the apex is called a nappe. The axis of a cone is the line, passing through the apex. If the base is right circular the intersection of a plane with this surface is a conic section, in general, however, the base may be any shape and the apex may lie anywhere. Contrasted with right cones are oblique cones, in which the axis passes through the centre of the base non-perpendicularly, a cone with a polygonal base is called a pyramid. Depending on the context, cone may also mean specifically a convex cone or a projective cone, cones can also be generalized to higher dimensions. The perimeter of the base of a cone is called the directrix, the base radius of a circular cone is the radius of its base, often this is simply called the radius of the cone. The aperture of a circular cone is the maximum angle between two generatrix lines, if the generatrix makes an angle θ to the axis, the aperture is 2θ. A cone with a region including its apex cut off by a plane is called a cone, if the truncation plane is parallel to the cones base. An elliptical cone is a cone with an elliptical base, a generalized cone is the surface created by the set of lines passing through a vertex and every point on a boundary. The slant height of a circular cone is the distance from any point on the circle to the apex of the cone. It is given by r 2 + h 2, where r is the radius of the cirf the cone and this application is primarily useful in determining the slant height of a cone when given other information regarding the radius or height. The volume V of any conic solid is one third of the product of the area of the base A B and the height h V =13 A B h. In modern mathematics, this formula can easily be computed using calculus – it is, up to scaling, the integral ∫ x 2 d x =13 x 3
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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
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Les Demoiselles dAvignon is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer dAvinyó in Barcelona, each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picassos native Spain, the racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force. In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane and this proto-Cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both Cubism and Modern art. Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to anger and disagreement, even amongst the painters closest associates. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke, yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle, Braque too initially disliked the painting, yet perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great detail. And effectively, his subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the Cubist revolution and its resemblance to Cézannes Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Gauguins statue Oviri and El Grecos Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics. A photograph of the Les Demoiselles was first published in an article by Gelett Burgess entitled The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves, The Architectural Record, at the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. The work, painted in the studio of Picasso at Le Bateau-Lavoir, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d’Antin in July 1916, an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon. Picasso, who had referred to it as mon bordel, or Le Bordel dAvignon, never liked Salmons title. Picasso came into his own as an important artist during the first decade of the 20th century and he arrived in Paris from Spain around the turn of the century as a young, ambitious painter out to make a name for himself. Although he eventually left most of his friends, relatives and contacts in Spain, he continued to live, for several years he alternated between living and working in Barcelona, Madrid and the Spanish countryside, and made frequent trips to Paris. By 1904, he was settled in Paris and had established several studios. Between 1901 and 1904, Picasso began to achieve recognition for his Blue period paintings, in the main these were studies of poverty and desperation based on scenes he had seen in Spain and Paris at the turn of the century. Subjects included gaunt families, blind figures, and personal encounters, other paintings depicted his friends and he followed his success by developing into his Rose period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work. Picasso became a favorite of the American art collectors Gertrude Stein, the Steins older brother Michael and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein, Gertrude Stein began acquiring Picassos drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris
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