art history

Black-on-black ceramic vessel. Maria Martínez and Julian Martínez, Tewa, Puebloan, San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico. c. mid-20th century C.E. blackware ceramic To make the pottery stronger it had to be mixed with a temper made from sherds of broken pots that had been pounded into a powder or volcanic ash. When mixed with water, the elasticity of the clay and the strength of the temper could be formed into different shapes, including a rounded pot. Only the artist’s hands as the potting wheel was not used. Community job; many people worked on one sculpture; pioneered a style of applying a matte-black design over polished-black. rain clouds, bird feathers, rows of planted corn, and the flow of rivers. These designs are exaggerated due to the low rounded shapes of the pot, which are bulbous around the shoulder then narrow at the top.  The shape, color, and designs fit the contemporary Art Deco movement, which was popular between the two World Wars and emphasized...

Painted elk hide. Attributed to Cotsiogo (Cadzi Cody), Eastern Shoshone, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming. c. 1890–1900 C.E. Painted elk hide. Painting on animal hides is a longstanding tradition of the Great Basin and Great Plains people of the United States Painted on elk, deer, or buffalo hides using natural pigments like red ochre and chalk, and eventually paints and dyes obtained through trade.  Usually, artists decorated the hides with geometric or figural motifs. By the later nineteenth century certain hide artists began depicting subject matter that “affirmed native identity” and appealed to tourists. Many of these scenes celebrated battles and other biographical details. Hides represent his experiences during a period of immense change for the Shoshone people.  Many Shoshone traversed the geographic regions we now call the Great Plains and Plateau regions. With newly established trade markets and the influx of new materials, artists like Cotsiogo somet...

Bandolier bag. Lenape (Delaware tribe, Eastern Woodlands). c. 1850 C.E. Beadwork on leather. This is an object that invites close looking to fully appreciate the process by which colorful beads animate the bag, making a dazzling object and showcasing remarkable technical skill. Bandolier Bags are based on bags carried by European soldiers armed with rifles, who used the bags to store ammunition cartridges. While Bandolier Bags were made by different tribes and First Nations across the Great Lakes and Prairie regions, they differ in appearance. The stylistic differences are the result of personal preference as much contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans, goods acquired in trade, and travel. Bandolier Bags (like this one) are often large in size and decorated with a wide array of colorful beads and ribbons. They are worn as a cross-body bag, with a thick strap crossing a person’s chest to allow it to rest on the hip. These bags were especially popular in the late nineteent...

  Great Serpent Mound . Adams County, southern Ohio. Mississippian (Eastern Woodlands). c. 1070 C.E. Earthwork/effigy mound. The Great Serpent Mound in rural, southwestern Ohio is the largest serpent effigy in the world. Numerous mounds were made by the ancient Native American cultures that flourished along the fertile valleys of the Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers a thousand years ago, though many were destroyed as farms spread across this region during the modern era. The Great Serpent Mound measures approximately 1,300 feet in length and ranges from one to three feet in height. Was erected by settled peoples who cultivated maize, beans and squash and who maintained a stratified society with an organized labor force, but left no written records.  Many native cultures in both North and Central America attributed supernatural powers to snakes or reptiles and included them in their spiritual practices. The head of the serpent aligns with the summ...

Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. Montezuma County, Colorado. Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi). 450–1300 C.E. Sandstone Beginning after 1000-1100 CE, they built more than 600 structures into the cliff faces of the Four Corners region of the United States: the southwestern corner of Colorado, northwestern corner of New Mexico, northeastern corner of Arizona, and southeastern corner of Utah. These structures were mostly residential but some were used for storage and ritual. The most famous residential sites date to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the Ancestral Puebloans accessed these dwellings with retractable ladders.  We often see traces of the people who constructed these buildings, such as handprints or fingerprints in many of the mortar and plaster walls.  The cliff dwellings are certainly among the best preserved buildings from this time. To build these structures, people used stone and mud mortar, along with wooden beams adapted to the natural clefts in the ...

DeStijl (1916-1925) Dutch Completely abstract Black lines shape rectangular spaces Only the primary colors are used Diagonal lines forbidden  Harlem Renaissance (1930s) African Americans migrated in great numbers to Harlem, New York City Movement began after World War I Themes include racial pride, civil rights, and the influence of slavery on modern culture Mexican Muralists (1917-1930s) Training in Fresco painting Large murals  Promoted political/social messages Promote to labor and struggle of working classes Socialist agenda 

Time Period: 1900-1980 World War I and II, Great Depression  Intensely creative period, one of the most in history  Patronage of museums  One of the results of WWII is the abandonment of Paris as the art capital of the world; it was now New York because of the abundance of European settlers; unafraid of experimentation  Color was not only used to describe, but also evoke a feeling and challenge the viewer; perspective was discarded; dynamic compositions  Europeans stimulated by African art; inspired by geometric and abstract pieces Modern sculpture turned anything into a work of art Art Movements:  Fauvism (c. 1905) Expressionism (1905-1930) Cubism (1911) Constructivism (1907-1930s)  Dada (1914-1920s) DeStijl (1916-1925) Mexican Muralists (1917-1930s) International Style (1920s-1930s) Surrealism (1924-1930s)  Harlem Renaissance (1930s) Abstract Expressionism (Late 1940s-1950s) Pop Art (1955-1960s) Color Field Painting ...

Fauvism (c. 1905) Expressionism (1905-1930s) Cubism (1907-1930s) Futurism (1909-1914) Suprematism (1913-1920s) Constructivism (1914-1920s) Dada (1916-1925) DeStijl (1917-1930s) Bauhaus (1919-1933) Precisionism (1920s) Surrealism (1924-1930s) Art Deco (1920-1930s) Organic Art (1920s-1930s) Depression Era (1930s) Abstract Expressionism (40s-50s) Pop Art (55-60s) Color Field Painting (60s) Conceptual Art (60s) Performance Art (60s) Op Art (60s) Minimalism (60s) Site/Environmental Art (70s-90s) Feminist Art (70s- present) Postmodernism (75- present) Video/Computer/Digital Art (contemporary)

House in New Castle County. Delaware, U.S. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown (architects). 1978–1983 C.E. Wood frame and stucco. Robert Venturi's New Castle County House offers a modest but instructive example of the Post-Modern style set in rural north Delaware; orthodox.  Modern architecture and city planning had run its course. Rather than copy a specific style, he borrowed freely, juxtaposing, collaging, and reinterpreting forms from distinct periods and places.  Classical in derivation yet slightly cartoonish, this somewhat awkward assemblage gives the house a simultaneously grand and whimsical appearance.  The painted arches in the vaulted music room, the quirky chandeliers, and perforated wall patterns exhibit a straight-forward craftsman-like quality; his buildings and critical writings helped propel late 20th-century architecture in a new direction.  This private residence remains a playfully challenging work expressing a refr...

Spiral Jetty. Great Salt Lake, Utah, U.S. Robert Smithson. 1970 C.E. Earthwork: mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, and water coil. Edge; intersection between land and water; dense with minerals; created opportunities for the land/water to meet each other; meant to be a piece that changed based on natural principles; Nazca lines; in nature; environmental issues, man and industry; art becomes part of the process of nature; meant to be regularly documented; sense of order to chaos; opens our eyes to the brevity of our lifetime.  Located in remote and inaccessible area; presence of bacteria creates red color; made with a tractor 

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks . Claes Oldenburg. 1969– 1974 C.E. Cor‐Ten steel, steel, aluminum, and cast resin; painted with polyurethane enamel. A monumental tube of lipstick sprouting from a military vehicle; visible space for the anti-war movement while also poking fun at the solemnity of the plaza.  The sculpture served as a stage and backdrop for several subsequent student protests. Oldenburg and the architeciture students never intended for the original Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks sculpture to be permanent.  In the Yale sculpture, the artist combined the highly “feminine” product with the “masculine” machinery of war. In doing so, he playfully critiqued both the hawkish, hyper-masculine rhetoric of the military and the blatant consumerism of the United States. In addition to its feminine associations, the large lipstick tube is phallic and bullet-like, making the benign beauty product seem masculine or even violent.  The jux...

Narcissus Garden. Yayoi Kusama. Original installation and performance. 1966. Mirror balls. Kusama is a self-taught artist who now chooses to live in a private Tokyo mental health facility, while prolifically producing art in various media in her studio nearby.  Her highly constructed persona and self-proclaimed life-long history of insanity have been the subject of scrutiny and critiques for decades. The tightly arranged 1,500 shimmering balls constructed an infinite reflective field in which the images of the artist, the visitors, the architecture, and the landscape were repeated, distorted, and projected by the convex mirror surfaces that produced virtual images appearing closer and smaller than reality.  When gazing into it, the viewer only saw his/her own reflection staring back, forcing a confrontation with one's own vanity and ego. Originally intended as the media for an interactive performance between the artist and the viewer, the objects are now regarded ...

Marilyn Diptych. Andy Warhol. 1962 C.E. Oil, acrylic, and silkscreen enamel on canvas. Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych is made of two silver canvases on which the artist silkscreened a photograph of Marilyn Monroe fifty times.  At first glance, the work—which explicitly references a form of Christian painting in its title—invites us to worship the legendary icon, whose image Warhol plucked from popular culture and immortalized as art.  This image is a carefully crafted critique of both modern art and contemporary life. True to form, the actress looks at us seductively from under heavy-lidded eyes and with parted lips; Warhol’s use of the silkscreen technique further “flattens” the star’s face.  By screening broad planes of unmodulated color, the artist removes the gradual shading that creates a sense of three-dimensional volume, and suspends the actress in an abstract void. In this way, the painting suggests that “Marilyn Monroe,” is merely a one-dimensional ...

Seagram Building . New York City, U.S. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson (architects). 1954-1958 C.E. Steel frame with glass curtain wall and bronze. One of the most important buildings in the history of architecture in the United States; buildings like these designed since the 20s; never had designed an office building before; end of war, the depression; largest liquor company at the time; bronze; based off Greek architecture; symmetrical, disciplined aesthetic; looking to balance old and new; play of light and shadow; textured; Mies constantly referenced antiquity; new architectural experience for the people of New York; is it alienating or welcoming?  Reflection of Minimalist movement in painting; simplicity, geometry, elegance; reflective surface; interplay of vertical and horizontal accents; steel and glass skyscraper, common after WWII

The Migration of the Negro , Panel no. 49. Jacob Lawrence. 1940– 1941 C.E. Casein tempera on Hardboard. They also found discrimination in the North although it was much different from that which they had known in the South. Series of small paintings. 60 in total.  Documents migration of African Americans; young artist, age 24.  Agricultural south to industrial north at the end of 19th/beginning of 20th centuries.  Labor in the north, racism in south influenced this move; 6 million people moved; Lawrence’s family was one of them.  New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh; industrial centers.  Geometric shapes; flat colors; education, domesticity, labor, travel; series is about movement and change; train stations; trains packed continuously with migrants; new life in urban centers; unable to make a living in south, flooding; poverty, food had doubled in price; south lost labors, crops died; frequently arrested; child labor, lack of education in s...

Fallingwater . Pennsylvania, U.S. Frank Lloyd Wright (architect). 1936–1939 C.E. Reinforced concrete, sandstone, steel, and glass. Perched above a mountain cataract on a rocky hillside deep in the rugged forest of Southwestern Pennsylvania, some 90 minutes from Pittsburgh, is America’s most famous house.  After this late-career triumph, the sixty-seven year old would go on to create a series of highly original designs that would validate his claim as “The world’s greatest architect.” The mid-1930s were among the darkest years for architecture and architects in American history; the country’s financial system had collapsed with the failure of hundreds of banks.  Almost no private homes were built. Many of the architectural projects started during the boom of the late 1920s were halted for lack of funds.  Wright further emphasizes the connection with nature by liberal use of glass; the house has no walls facing the falls, only a central stone core for the f...

The Steerage . Alfred Stieglitz. 1907 C.E. Photogravure. Elevate photography to the status of fine art by engaging the same dialogues around abstraction that preoccupied European avant-garde painters. The Steerage suggests that photographs have more than just a “documentary” voice that speaks to the truth-to-appearance of subjects in a field of space within narrowly defined slice of time.  The Steerage calls for a more complex, layered view of photography’s essence that can accommodate and convey abstraction.  The Steerage is not only about the “significant form” of shapes, forms and textures, but it also conveys a message about its subjects, immigrants who were rejected at Ellis Island.  Stieglitz’s father exemplified the “American dream” that was just beyond the grasp of many of the subjects of The Steerage. He himself was an immigrant.  While he was sympathetic to the plight of aspiring new arrivals, Stieglitz was opposed to admitting the uneducated ...

Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building . Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Louis Sullivan (architect). 1899–1903 C.E. Iron, steel, glass, and terra cotta. Chicago’s downtown neighborhoods Building with large glass windows and a rounded corner entryway covered with lavish decoration stands out.  In contrast to its relatively plain neighbors, the pedestrian’s eye is immediately attracted to the structure’s bronze-colored ground floor and broad white façade stretching twelve stories above it. A department store.  Sullivan’s building is an important example of early Chicago skyscraper architecture; relationship between architecture and commerce.  Uniquely American blend of Art Nouveau decoration with a simplified monumentality.  For Sullivan, the characteristic feature of a skyscraper was that it was tall, and so the building’s design should serve that goal by emphasizing its upward momentum.  Instead of emphasizing identical windows meant to reflec...

The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm). Thomas Cole. 1836 C.E. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hudson River School Painting. Founder of American Landscape painting; landscape ranked very low by the academies in Europe.  Painting not respected in American society; didn’t aim for anything extravagant, no grand, mythological scenes; Americans wanted portraits, or landscapes, or views.  Five or six feet wide: point Cole wanted to make. Landscape painting was considered lowly; made it in a campus comparable to highly renowned paintings.  He tries to use landscapes to say something big, convey a greater meaning; this is seen in his other works. Ambitious; Represents transformation, metamorphosis. It’s about America and what it’ll become. On the right, we see a storm-ravaged landscape; broken trees, rain the background, lightning bolts; birds are frantic.  Lush landscapes represents Eden: America as...

GEORGE WASHINGTON, JEAN ANTOINE HOUDON; 1788-1792 C.E. MARBLE After the successful conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, many state governments turned to public art to commemorate this momentous occasion.  Little talent in America. Artist trained at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1761 when only twenty years of age.  Houdon was, by the middle of the 1780s, the most famous and accomplished neoclassical sculptor at work in France. Given Houdon’s skill and ambition, the sculptor likely hoped to cast a larger than life-sized bronze statue of General Washington on horseback, a format appropriate for a victorious field commander.  In time, however, Houdon would be disappointed if his aspiration was to forge an equestrian bronze, the final product, delivered more than a decade later, was comparatively simple standing marble. They took detailed measurements of Washington’s body and sculpted a...