Edexcel GCE Art and Design

Unit 4: A2 Externally Set Assignment

Combinations and Alliances

Michelangelo and Pope Clement VII

In 1534 Michelangelo's

childhood friend, Pope Clement VII,

was dying. Desperate to make

one last grand gesture, he summoned

Michelangelo to complete his work

in the Sistine Chapel. This was

the perfect opportunity to

express years of fear and

resentment. Across the altar of the

Sistine Chapel, he composed a

vicious tableau of terror and pain:

“The Last Judgement”.

http://www.wga.hu/tours/sistina/index_d.html

Caravaggio and Cardinal Francesco Maria del MonteCaravaggio, by name of Michelangelo Merisi, Italian painter whose revolutionary technique of tenebrism, or dramatic, selective illumination of form out of deep shadow, became a hallmark of Baroque painting. Scorning the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects, he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. His three paintings of St Matthew (c. 1597-1602) caused a sensation and were followed by such masterpieces as The Supper at Emmaus (1601-02) and Death of the Virgin (1605-06).

… In 1595, his luck changed. An eminent Cardinal, Francesco del Monte, recognized the young painter's talent and took Caravaggio into his household. Through the cardinal's circle of acquaintance, Caravaggio received his first public commissions which were so compelling and so innovative that he became a celebrity almost overnight…

Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin

http://www.vangoghgauguin.com/ http://www.vangoghgallery.com/influences/

http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/vangogh/slide_intro.html

Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin's meeting in Paris marked the beginning of one of the most talked about artistic friendships in the history of art. It was a relationship in which hope and disappointment, camaraderie and rivalry, admiration and jealousy constantly alternated, and which captivate both artists emotionally and artistically until their death.

Auguste Rodin and Rose BeuretRose Beuret went as a country girl to Paris to start work as a seamstress in one of the many workshops. It was there where she met Rodin and, in his own words, "clasped to him like an animal". Two years later she gave birth to a son, who was never acknowledged by the father. She remained his partner for over 50 years and only married him in 1917, a few days before she died. Rose was a lifelong stable factor in the background for Rodin. She was not part of his social life though and had to put up with a lot. She regularly modeled for Rodin which becomes even more fascinating when you keep in mind the later role she played in Rodin's life.

In 1889, the Paris Salon invited Rodin to be a judge on its artistic jury. Though Rodin's career was on the rise, Claudel and Beuret were becoming increasingly impatient with Rodin's "double life". Claudel and Rodin shared an atelier at a small old castle, but Rodin refused to relinquish his ties to Beuret, his loyal companion during the lean years, and mother of his son. During one absence, Rodin wrote to Beuret, "I think of how much you must have loved me to put up with my caprices…I remain, in all tenderness, your Rodin.” Claudel and Rodin parted

in 1898.

In 1883, Rodin met the 18-year-old Camille Claudel. The two formed a passionate but stormy relationship and influenced each other artistically. Claudel inspired Rodin as a model for many of his figures, and she was a talented sculptor, assisting him on commissions.

Gilbert and GeorgeGeorge was born in Devon in 1942. Gilbert was born in Italy in 1943, in a small village in the Dolomites. They met as students on the sculpture course at St Martins School of Art, London, where they exhibited together and soon began to create art together. They adopted the identity of ‘living sculptures’ in both their art and their daily lives, becoming not only creators, but also the art itself.

Gilbert & George place themselves, their thoughts and their feelings at the centre of their art, and almost all of the images they use are gathered within walking distance of their home in London’s East End. Yet their pictures capture a broad human experience, encompassing an astonishing range of emotions and themes, from rural idylls to gritty images of a decaying London; from fantastical brightly-coloured panoramas to raw examinations of humanity stripped bare; from sex advertisements to religious fundamentalism.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1163&page=1

Anthony Green and Mary Cozens-Walker

http://www.anthonygreen.org.uk/ http://marycozenswalker.co.uk/index.html

Green and Cozens-Walker are a British husband and wife artist team. They are both painters, at the simplest description, but then their work goes far beyond any categorization. Green makes three dimensional paintings. Cozens-Walker does multimedia creations that employ stitching, textiles, painting and lots more.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

The marriage of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo is one of the most famous alliances between artists. It is a well-known fact that they had a passionate and stormy relationship, filled with great love and also betrayals. They both had incredible talents and vision, but Diego's work would be more public and monumental, whereas Frida's was more personal and intimate in scale.

During her own lifetime Frida owed much of her renown as a painter to the fact that she was married to Diego Rivera. After years in his shadow, she is now even more famous than her husband. By the early 1980s his social realist murals began to look outdated, and Kahlo was being rediscovered. Her portrayal of her own physical and emotional pain spoke to a new generation of feminists and to those more concerned with personal feeling than grand ideologies.

Charles Saatchi and the Young British Artists

YBA is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988. The scene began around a series of artist-led exhibitions held in warehouses and factories. They are noted for "shock tactics", use of throwaway materials, wild-living, and an attitude "both oppositional and entrepreneurial." They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s. Many of the artists were initially supported and collected by Charles Saatchi. Leading artists of the group include Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

This work was funded by Saatchi, who in 1991 had offered to pay for whatever artwork Hirst wanted to create. The shark itself cost Hirst £6,000 and the total cost of the work was £50,000. The shark was caught by a fisherman commissioned to do so, in Australia. Hirst wanted something "big enough to eat you".

My Bed was bought by Saatchi for £150,000 and displayed as part of the first exhibition when the Saatchi Gallery opened its new premises at County Hall, London (which it has now vacated). Saatchi also installed the bed in a dedicated room in his own home.

Dutch Still-lifes in the 17th Century

Vanitas is the Latin for vanity, in the sense of emptiness or a worthless action. 'Vanity of Vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity' means all human action is transient in contrast to the everlasting nature of faith.

A vanitas is a particular type of still life painting in which objects symbolically refer to such a theme. For example, in Steenwyck's 'Allegory' in the Collection, objects which suggest human achievements, like the book and instruments, are related to reminders of mortality: the lamp which has been snuffed out and the skull.

Patrick Blanc

http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/

Patrick Blanc is a botanist, working at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he specializes in plants from tropical forests. He has invented the green wall.

Edouard Francois

http://edouardfrancois.com/

Edouard François has become one of the protagonists of green architecture on an

international scene. His work focuses on matter, context, use, economy and ecology, following

the preoccupations of sustainable development. Francois’ European team of architects and

urbanists are working also on landscape design and graphic design projects.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

“To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He helped develop the "street photography" or "real life reportage" style that has influenced generations of

photographers who followed.

Urban plants and wildlife

Urban wildlife is wildlife that can live or thrive in urban environments. Some urban wildlife, such as house mice, are synanthropic, ecologically associated with humans. Different types of urban area support different kinds of wildlife. One general feature of birds species that adapt well to urban environments is they tend to be the species with bigger brains, perhaps allowing them to be more adaptable to the changeable urban environment.

Characterized by an abundance of pavement, reflected heat, polluted air and contaminated soil, our cities and towns may seem harsh and unwelcoming to vegetation. However, there are a number of plants that manage to grow spontaneously in sidewalk cracks and roadside meridians, flourish along chain-link fences and railroad tracks, line the banks of streams and rivers, and emerge in the midst of landscape plantings and trampled lawns. On their own and free of charge, these plants provide ecological services including temperature reduction, oxygen production, carbon storage, food and habitat for wildlife, pollution mitigation, and erosion control on slopes. Around the world, wild plants help to make urban environments more habitablefor people.

Peter Howson

http://www.peterhowson.net/http://www.flowersgalleries.com/artists/118-artists/3792-peter-howson/

Maggi Hambling

http://www.maggihambling.com/

Howard Brodie

“I remember the young soldier well, he screamed, he was just out of control, and he screamed, and

there was another soldier next to him who consoled him, and embraced him. That was a moving

moment for me, to see that compassion in combat. And these are the things a person feels when he's in proximity to death-- his buddy, that next human

being, that person in the foxhole is the most important person in your life.”

http://www.pbs.org/theydrewfire/artists/brodie.html

“My most searing memory of any war was during the battle of the bulge, when Germans posing as GI's

infiltrated our lines. I heard we were going to execute three of them…A defenseless human is

entireley different than a man in action. To see these three young men calculatingly reduced to quivering corpses before my eyes really burned into my being.

That's the only drawing I've ever had that's been censored. All coverage of the execution was

censored.”

Vasily Vereshchagin

John Singer Sargent

Graham Sutherland

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2014&page=1

Theodore GericaultLe Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818–1819, Oil on canvas

At 491 cm × 716 cm it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Medusa, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on July 5, 1816. At least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness.

In choosing the tragedy as subject matter for his first major work—an uncommissioned depiction of an event from recent history—Géricault consciously selected a well-known incident that would generate great public interest and help launch his career.

The event fascinated the young artist, and before he began work on the final painting, he undertook extensive research and produced many preparatory sketches. He interviewed two of the survivors, and constructed a detailed scale model of the raft. His efforts took him to morgues and hospitals where he could view, first-hand, the colour and texture of the flesh of the dying and dead. As the artist had anticipated, the painting proved highly controversial at its first appearance in the 1819 Paris Salon, attracting passionate praise and condemnation in equal measure. However, it established his international reputation, and today is widely seen as seminal in the early history of the Romantic movement in French painting.

Caspar David FriedrichSea of Ice, 1823-1824, Oil on canvas

With dawn and dusk constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich's own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism. His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentality. The Wreck of the Hope - also known as The Polar Sea or The Sea of Ice - perhaps best summarizes Friedrich's ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received. Completed in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean; "the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference."

‘This scene has been descried as ‘a stunning composition of near and distant forms in an Arctic image’.

Tom McGrathWreck 2, 2005, oil and alkyd on canvas

Diego VelázquezThe Family of Felipe IV, or Las Meninas, ca. 1656, Oil on canvas, 318 cm x 276 cm

A portrait of the infant Margarita, daughter of Felipe IV (1605-1665), surrounded by her servants or “family” in a hall of Madrid’s Alcázar Palace.

This, the most famous of Velasquez’s works, offers a complex composition built with admirable skill in the use of perspective, the depiction of light, and the representation of atmosphere.

There have been innumerable interpretations of this subject and later references to it. The most numerous emphasize a defense of the nobility of painting versus craft. Velasquez portrays himself, painting the painting itself, on the left of the canvas, thus affirming the supremacy of the art of painting. The infant Margarita (1651-1673), wears white and appears in the center of the composition, surrounded by her ladies in waiting, the “meninas” María Agustina de Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco, along with two court buffoons, María Bárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, and a mastiff. Behind her, the duenna Marcela de Ulloa converses with the quartermaster, José Nieto, who is in the doorway.

The King and Queen, Felipe IV and Maria de Austria (1634-1696) are reflected in the mirror at the back of the room, leading to series of extraordinarily complex spatial relations.

Ken Howard

http://www.kenhoward.co.uk/

The Crucible ExhibitionGloucester Cathedral

http://www.gloucestercathedral.org.uk/index.php?page=crucible

‘Crucible’ at Gloucester Cathedral ran for nine and a half weeks from 1 September to 7 November 2010. The exhibition displayed 76 works of art by 48 sculptors,

many of whom are internationally famous artists.

http://www.crucible2010.co.uk/

Antony Gromley, Close V Damien Hirst, St. Bartholomew Exquisite Pain

David Nash, Encased Cross

Kenneth Armitage, Reach for the Stars Ralph Brown, Clochard

Bridget Riley

http://www.op-art.co.uk/

“No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.”

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-op-art.htm

“The music of colour, that’s what I want”

Victor Vasarely“The pebbles, the sea shells on the beach, the whirlpools, the hovering mist, the sunshine, the sky… in the rocks, in

the pieces of broken bottles, polished by the rhythmic coming and going of the waves, I am certain to recognize

the internal geometry of nature.”

Frank Stella

"What you see is what you see."

John Hoyland

Shortly after painting 'Saracen', Hoyland stated: 'Paintings are not to be understood, they are to be

recognised. They are an equivalent to nature, not an illustration of it'. Since executing his first abstract

works in 1958, Hoyland's paintings have proclaimed their self-

sufficiency as visual facts or events. In the 1960s Hoyland was mainly

involved with formal issues of scale, colour, and the relation of shapes. In the 1970s he began to invest these elements with a greater

emotive significance. Consequently, as 'Saracen' demonstrates, his

handling of the forms in his paintings became looser and more

gestural. He explained: 'The structure of form is meant to be a container for colour, a container of

feeling'.

Joan Miró

Howard Hodgkin

http://www.howard-hodgkin.com/

“My subject matter is simple and straightforward. It ranges from views through windows, landscapes, even occasionally a still-life, to memories of holidays, encounters with interiors and art collections, other people, other bodies, love affairs, sexual encounters and emotional situations of all kinds, even including eating...”

Binding together all his work is his consistent exploration of the representation of personal encounters, emotional experience and memories of specific events.

Whether trips to India, Egypt or Morocco, social occasions such as dinner with friends, particular moments are simultaneously reconstructed and obscured through

a layering of the picture surface with distinct marks and intense colours, often achieved only over a period of several years.

“I go for a walk. Maybe I go to the British Museum and look at something. I try to forget about as much as possible until I start thinking about what scale the

picture will be…and then I think, ‘Is this going to be a little picture or a big picture?...I think more and more

about the painting, then I make a mark and anther, and then the trouble starts.”

“I start out with the subject and naturally I have to remember first of all what it looked like, but it would also

perhaps contain a great deal of feeling and sentiment. All of that has got to be somehow transmuted,

transformed or made into a physical object, and when that happens, when that’s finally been done, when the last physical marks have been put on and the subject comes back – which, after all, is usually the moment when the painting is at long last a coherent physical

object – well, then the picture’s finished and there is no question of doing anything more to it. My pictures really

finish themselves.”