Visual Arts

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Rococo

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also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century artistic movement and style, which affected several aspects of the arts including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, decoration, literature, music and theatre. Paintings are whimsical and have recognizable (and overt) erotic themes. Use of pastel colors and flowing brushstrokes was also popular.

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Bathers

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designed to appeal to tastes of 18th century French court; shows sensibility; erotic tone to its environment

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The Duchess of Polignac

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exquisite fashion- Baroque sensibility (from Remembrant; dramatic lighting to Reuben's sensual curves); shows Bernini's sense of the theatrical movement given the musical score in the Duchess's hand

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Neoclassicism

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is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome. featured a clean and linear style, a subdued palette, sculpted forms, shallow depth of background and fine draftsmanship.

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The Death of Marat

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celebrates a fallen hero of the Revolution. Marat is posed by David as Christ is traditionally posed in the Deposition (his arm draping over the edge of the tub). A dramatic Caravaggesque light falls over the revolutionary hero, his virtue embodied in the Neoclassical simplicity of David's design.

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Monticello

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Theme: democratic ideals, sense of order and harmony, moral perfection deriving from measure and proportion.
He utilized these themes in the facade of his own home at Monticello.

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Grande Odalisque

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long, gently curving limbs shows Mannerist painting; odalisque is a harem slave- seems more decadent than not, deeply involved in a world of satins, peacock feathers, and hashish.

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Romanticism

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artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Mainly they cared
about the individual, intuition, and imagination.

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Saturn Devouring One of His Sons

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Saturn is allegorically a figure of Time, which consumes us all. It is the incestuous cannibalism of the scene, the terrible monstrosity of the vision itself, shows Goya's own despair. Conclusion is that the world has a place full of terror, violence, and horror.

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The Raft of the Medusa

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Two contradictory pyramidal points of tension; on the left- the mast suggests crucifix and the raft is sailing away from its rescuers while on the right- the survivors climb desperately in their attempt to be seen. It fueled the Romantic movement with the passion of its feelings.

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The Death of Sardanapalus

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The work is quick, imprecise, and fluid. A flurry of curves and swirls, organized in a diagonal recession from the lower right to the upper left, dominates the study. Has dynamic quality- a sense of movement and agitation. Seems almost chaotic in its accumulation of detail, and its diagonal orientation seems almost dizzily stable. The line is as compositionally disorientating as his subject is emotionally disturbing.

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Odalisque

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Represented a dangerous and barbaric Neo-Baroque sensibility.

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The Heart of the Andes

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The dramatic appeal of the piece was heightened by brightly lighting the picture and leaving the remainder of the room dark. Beautiful and pastoral in feeling, and in the careful rendering of plant life, it is almost scientific in its fidelity to nature.

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Realism

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general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality. Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.

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Liberty Leading the People

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represents Liberty as an idealized allegorical figure, but the battle (took place during the July Revolution of 1830) is depicted in a highly realistic manner, with figures lying dead on the barricades beneath Liberty's feet and Notre Dame Cathedral at the distant right shrouded in smoke.

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Burial at Ornans

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Panorama of distraction, of common people performing their everyday duties, in a landscape whose horizontality reads like an unwavering line of monotony.

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Olympia

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depiction of a common prostitute posed in a manner of the traditional odalisque. Body is virtually flat, Manet painted with large strokes of thick paint.

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The Glass of Absinthe

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In the dazed, absent look of this young woman, Degas reveals the consequences of absinthe consumption with a shockingly direct realism worthy of Courbet.

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Impressionism

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is 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists. Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), common, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.

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La Moulin de la Galette

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The figures are Renoir's friends. Shows Partisan life, done with rigorous attitude.

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Reading

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The proper subject matter of the Realist is a farmer's cart heading down the road. Leisure is Morisot's subject. The woman in the painting has no interest in what passes behind her.

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Impression-Sunrise

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A singularly lively and striking sensation of the observed scene. His canvases communicate impressions. The paintings have the feel of sketches, as if they were executed spontaneously, even instantaneously, in the manner of photographic snapshots.

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Post-Impressionism

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describe the development of French art since Manet. they continued using vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brush strokes, and real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour.

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The Starry Night

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shows emotion, sincerity of one's feeling for nature. Endless movement.

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The Day of the Gods

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captures the mystery and magic of the primitive culture, a world of unity, peace, and naked innocence far removed from the turmoil of civilized life. The perfect balance of the painting's composition and the brilliant color of the scene are structural realizations of paradise on earth.

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The Bathers

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Architectural. Subtly critiques the image of Impressionist leisure. These are not well to do middle class Parisians, but workers (their clothes show it) swimming in the Seine.

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The Large Bathers

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The pyramidal structure of the composition draws attention to the geometry that dominates even the individual faceting of the wide brushstrokes, which he laid down as horizontals, verticals and diagonals.

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Cubism

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is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement hat revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

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Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, giving them a savage aura.

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The Table

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designed to raise questions about what's real and what's fake by bringing elements from the real word into the space of the painting. The wood is false while the wallpaper is real. The problematic interchange between art and reality that painting embodies is fully highlighted.

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Houses at l'Estaque

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It's impossible to tell what is foreground and what is not since the leaves appear identical to the greenery that is growing between the houses behind it. It is a design of triangles and cubes.

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Violin and Palette

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The curves of the violin are flattened and cubed. The instrument seems as flat as the sheets of music above it.

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Fauvism

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A style of short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.

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The Green Stripe

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The painting is a play between zones of complementary colors and its emphasis on blue-violet, red-orange, and green. It relies on the primary colors of light, not pigment.

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Expressionism

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was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.

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Sketch I for Composition VII

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Alive in non-figurative movement and color. Each color and each line carried explicit expressive meaning.

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The Large Blue Horses

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Blue means masculinity, strength and purity.

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Prophet

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The portrait is emerging out of the very gouges Nolde's knife made in the block.

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Futurism

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was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city.

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Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

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Gives sense of a figure striding forward, clothing flapping in the wind. Boccioni probably means to represent a nude, its musculature stretched and swollen to reveal its movement through space and time. Loses solidity-fracture.

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Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

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Captures the Futurist fascination with movement. It demonstrates its debt to new technological media. Conservative- photograph.

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Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

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downtown Manhattan, shows movement of human body

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Dada

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Dada began in Zurich and became an international movement. Or non-movement, as it were. Dada had only one rule: Never follow any known rules. Abstraction and Expressionism were the main influences on Dada.

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Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q.)

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WWI. The letters in the title is a pun, meaning "she's hot in the pants".

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Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany

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Chaotic display of photo-montages, Dada periodicals, drawings, and assemblages, described as looking like the aftermath of an accident between a trolley car and a newspaper kiosk.

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Surrealism

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is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920's, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Emphasis on the mysterious, marvelous, mythological and irrational in an effort to make art ambiguous and strange.

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The Persistence of Memory

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Things that might resemble things we might have in our dreams. Soft textures of clocks, insects, bleak landscape. The limbless figure lying on the ground like a giant slug is actually a self-portrait of the artist, who seems to have moved into a landscape removed from time and mind.

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Painting

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Biomorphic, amoeba-like forms float in a space that suggests a darkened landscape. Everything in this composition appears fluid, susceptible to continuing and ongoing mutation, back and forth between representation and abstraction.

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Abstract Expressionism

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was an American post–World War II art movement. Dripping, smearing, slathering, and flinging lots of paint on to the canvas.

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No. 29, 1950

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Open field of free gestures, equal intensity. Contains pebbles, shells, sand, sections of wire mesh, marbles, and pieces of colored plastic.

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Woman and Bicycle

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Seen as an attack upon women. Hashed-out, scribbled-over, loosely gestural painting is equally a celebration of his own freedom from the conventions of figural representation. Abstract, 1960's, equal characteristics of women.

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Four Darks in Red

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Produces meditative, not active, space. Non-symbolic character transcend sublime beyond tradition.

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Flood

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Intensely atmospheric. Seemly spontaneous.