Final Exam

Front 1

Les Demoiselles d' Avignon

Back 1

Pablo Picasso- 1907. Influenced by emotive power of African sculpture. Revolutionary break with traditional Western Art. Picture is no longer a window to the visible world but as a painting with a complex of invented forms, nearly flat. First exorcism painting. Eliminated allegorical figures from brothel scene and with them any symbolical, iconographical, or anecdotal significance. Ravening eroticism- more primitive, aggressive, and savage. Abandons single viewpoint and normal proportions- geometrical lozenges and triangles. Unexpressed emotions and states of mind- no comfortable, contrived coherence of representation (stylistic unity, unfinished?). Rough handling and jagged forms.

Front 2

Improvisation No. 30

Back 2

Vassily Kandinsky-1913. "largely unconscious, spontaneous expressions of inner character, non-material in nature." Two recognizable cannons, not content but what the spectator feels under the effect of the form and color combinations. Subconscious, strong inner tension. Automatic creative processes? Inner necessity of spiritual art. Color creates physical and spiritual effects.

Front 3

Study for Composition VII

Back 3

Vassily Kandinsky-1913. Landmark in the history of painting- the forms and colored shapes have absolutely no equivalents in the world of appearances. No perspective and no normal spatial relationships. Shapes float in spaces maybe only known to dreams.

Front 4

Cubism

Back 4

Figures broken up into flat surfaces meeting at sharp angles. Light used arbitrarily and anti-perspectivally. Space almost completely eliminated. Whole picture conceived as an independent construction.

Front 5

Female Nude

Back 5

Picasso- 1910. Paintings became less sculptural. Analytical Cubism. Forms increasingly fragmented, led towards abstraction and a more intellectual kind of painting where objects were to disintegrate to a point only just short of total unrecognizability. Massless, eliding planes, tilting creates spiral of ambiguities. Uncertain and unimportant subject matter.

Front 6

Guitar

Back 6

Picasso 1913- Relation to sculpture even more radical than painting. Whole nature of sculpture- had been carved in stone or wood or modeled in clay. Picasso used wood, tin, cardboard, paper, string and other materials ready-made character. Same process of assemblage. Debt to African sculpture. Liberated from classic materials and techniques, represent objects and give them a new autonomy. Guitar retains ambiguities.

Front 7

Harlequin

Back 7

Picasso- 1915. "The best thing I have done." His style- daring simplicity, dazzling decorative color, unconcealed disunities. Synthetic Cubism- worked from abstraction back to representation. Pictorial surface no relationship to the shape of the portrayed object. Subject clearly recognizable.

Front 8

Tableau No. 2: Composition VII

Back 8

Piet Mondrian- 1913. Dutch De Stijl (The Style) most cerebral and idealistic of the abstract movements. Cubism not developing abstraction towards its final goal. Sought a solitary path toward a more spiritual form of art. So abstract, hard to detect subject. Dynamic, close-textured and vibrant. Plastic pure reality- form and natural color create subjective states of mind obscuring it. Reduce natural forms to constant elements and colors likewise, abolishing in an act of larger unity. Ethical overtones of perfectly balanced organism.

Front 9

Nude Descending a Staircase

Back 9

Marcel Duchamp- 1912. Futurist version of cubism. Intellectual anarchist.

Front 10

Fountain

Back 10

Duchamp- 1917. Ready-made. Everyday objects presented for contemplation. Most iconoclastic gesture- taste, skill, and craftsmanship. Visual indifference. Utilitarian aspect disappeared under new title and point of view, new thought.

Front 11

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even

Back 11

Duchamp- 1915- 1923. Abandoned unfinished, when glass cracked in complementary directions then finished. Intended enigma- illusion of an illusion. Real world caught on other side and sometimes the viewer. Bride in upper half undresses and both attracts and repulses suitors- orgasmic frustrations. No solution, no problem. Most fully comitted opposition to visual conception of art. Art a sign, literary and intellectual.

Front 12

The Two Fridas

Back 12

Frida Kahlo- 1939. Mexican. Problematic relationship of women with surrealism- object of sexual fantasy. Problem of women, anxiety-ridden. Painted her own visions and recognized misogyny. Consciousness of body, duality of cultural and sexual identity. Divorce to Rivera- one that he loved and one he no longer does, traditional Mexican persona and new woman. Join hands but artery ruptured.

Front 13

Migrant Mother

Back 13

Dorethea Lange- 1936. "What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much? Rural poverty during the depression. Clear, hideous, and beautiful detail- open insanity and pitiful grandeur. Doesn't tamper with photographs, misery of displaced in all times.

Front 14

Fox Trot A: Lozenge with Three Lines

Back 14

Mondrian- 1929-1930. Greatest painter of inter-war years, asceticism and single-mindedness. Pure means for ultimate reality behind appearances could be clear. Limited to lines and rectangles and black and white. Art of pure relations, dynamic life-giving. Lyrically intense simplicity. Depth of overlapping lines. Framing-strip set back twice to emphasize surface and graphic power of exposed edges. Ambiguity, formation go on forever? Could be read as a limited plane surface. No fading away at edges like traditional, even Cubist, pictures. Edges just as important. No focus, nothing is inert. Everything irregular. Austere liberation.

Front 15

Guernica

Back 15

Picasso- 1937. Spanish Civil War. Village destroyed by Nazi bombers in support of Spanish Fascists. Largest and most ambitious work. Ideological service of modern art- indignation for slaughter defenseless refugees and citizens. Privately expressed qualities now understandable symbols. Dying horse tragic protagonist with universal significance, implacable bull irrational forces of man and nature. Heads of mothers and wounded limbs, subconsciousness of this premonitory event

Front 16

Autumn Rhythm

Back 16

Jackson Pollock- 1950. Abstract Expressionism. Raw, violent, neuroses and frustrations. Surrealist automatism and Jungian analysis. Not a naturally gifted painter, wrestled with his talents. Painting is a result of the encounter. Abandoned easel and palette and brushes. No representational significance, only engagement with the medium. Emotions while he struggled with the paint. Indian sand paintings. Endlessly rhythmical palimpsest of repetitive patterns, interpenetrating and partaking of each other. Microscopic and telescopic, atomic explosion. Natural growth out of a need. No accident and no beginning or end.