AP Art History

Test 5

Term 3

Fallingwater• 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright• Horizontal massing (prairie school)• Cantilever• Cast concrete• Ribbon fenestration• Site specific• Organicism• Hearth• Influences: Japanese, Arts and

Crafts, modern technology• Commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann,

a department store owner, to replace a summer cottage

• Declares war on the modern industrial city

Bauhaus Building• 1925-26, Walter Gropius, Dessau,

Germany• “workhouse” = modern engineering,

curtain walls (no load bearing features)

• Functionality, craftsmanship• Counterpart to the total and rational

planning envisioned by the de Stijl group

• He admired the spirit of medieval building guilds

• Sought to revive and commit that spirit to the reconciliation of modern art and industry

• Frankly acknowledges the reinforced concrete, steel, and glass of which it is built

• Used asymmetrical balancing to convey dynamic quality of life

German Pavilion• 1929, Mies Van der Rohe• International Exposition, Spain• He was director of the Bauhaus• “Less is more.”• Great passion = subtle perfection of

structure, proportion, and detail• Relied on domino construction

system developed by Le Corbusier• Very simple• No references to the past

Villa Savoye• 1930, Le Corbusier, France• Big in purism, emphasizing purity of geometric form• Hated the crowded, noisy, chaotic cities• Envisioned a city of uniform style, laid out on a grid• Building strictly functional• Nature wouldn’t be neglected• Icon of international style• Culminated the domino construction system• Curtain walls on the exterior to provide freedom of design• Ribbon windows• Designed as a weekend retreat• “machine for living”• Brutalism: raw process by which it was made is shown

Schroeder House• 1925, Gerrit Rietveld, Utrecht, The

Netherlands• Two kinds of beauty: a sensual or

subjective one and a higher rational, objective kind

• Example of International style• Applied Mondrian’s principle of a

dynamic equilibrium • Radically asymmetrical exterior

composed of interlocking gray an white planes

• Commissioned by wealthy widow• House = ascetic experience • Walls slide

Man, Controller of the Universe• 1934, Diego Rivera• Commissioned by Rockefeller Family• In the lobby of the RCA Building • He was a communist and included Lenin’s face• The Rockefellers canceled his commission and had the mural destroyed• Recreated in Mexico city• Man controls the universe through manipulation of technology• Lenin on the right, capitalists on the left• Capitalist world cursed by militarism and labor unrest

Guernica• 1937, Picasso, Paris Universal Exposition• = synthetic cubism• Surrealism: horror• Victims of war throughout time• Timeless look at war• Made during the Spanish Civil War• Painted in Paris• = a stark, hallucinatory nightmare that became a powerful symbol of the brutality of war• Focused on the victims• Screaming horse = Spanish Republic• Bull = Franco or Spain

Vanna Venturi House• 1961-64, Robert Venturi, Chestnut

Hill, PA• Designed for his mother• Plays with complexity and confusion• Refers to past: Wright and classical• Beginnings in Mannerism• Ambiguity, paradox• Rejected the abstract purity of

International Style• Incorporated elements drawn fro

vernacular sources• “Less is a bore.”• Complexity and Contradiction in

Architecture• Building = simple and complex• Circles, triangles, rectangles

Guggenheim Museum• 1993-97, Frank Gehry, Bilbao, Spain• Used vernacular forms and cheap

materials• Developed a organic, sculptural style• Resembles a living organism• Pays homage to Wright’s famous

one in New York and attempts to outdo it in size and effect

Portrait of a German Officer• 1914, Marsden Hartley• Exhibited at the Armory Show• Pioneer of American modernism• Merged cubism from Paris with

expressionism of Kandinsky in Berlin• Tightly arranged composition of

boldly colored shapes and patterns, interspersed with numbers, letters, military imagery

• Speaks symbolically of Karl von Freyburg

• Black creates a funeral undertone

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA• 1936, Dorothea Lange• She was a leading RA/FSA

photographer• Pictures Florence Thompson• Captures fears of an entire

population of disenfranchised people• Image of a generation• Using photography as a moral,

reform sense to raise awareness

Aspects of Negro Life• 1934, Aaron Douglas• Developed an abstracted style influenced by African art as well as Art Deco• Used schematic figures, silhouetted in profile with eyes rendered frontally like Egyptian art• Limited palette• Concentric bands suggesting musical rhythms or spiritual emanations• Painted for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public library under the sponsorship of

the Public Works of Art Project• Intended to awaken in African Americans, a sense of their place in history• At the right, blacks celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation

Migration of the Negro• 1940-41, Jacob Lawrence• Influenced by Locke and Douglass• Devoted early work to depiction of

black history• Recounted through narrative painting

in dozens of small panels, each with a text

• Made of 60 panels• Chronicled the great 20th century

exodus of blacks from the rural south the urban North

• Boldly abstracted style suggests influence of both cubism and black folk art

Autumn Rhythm• 1950, Jackson Pollock• Interested in vast American west and

Indian art• Taught by Benton• American search for self• Pulsing foreground, middle ground,

and background• Giving vent to primal, natural forces• Took pleasure in the sense of being

fully absorbed in action, eliminating the sense of self-consciousness

• Shows harmony with oneself and the world

Mountains and Sea• 1952, Helen Frankenthaler• Among the second generation of

Abstract Expressionism• Used thin oil paints and applied them

in washes• Pollock saw her work as avant-garde

Canyon• 1959, Robert Rauschenberg• Combine painting• Featured in the “Art of Assemblage”

exhibition• Desired to work in the gap between

art and life• Chaotically mixes conventional

artistic materials with a wide variety of ingredients from the urban environment

• Challenges viewer to make sense of it

Just What Is It That Makes Today So Different, So Appealing?

• 1955, Hamilton, collage• Prominent member of the

Independent Group• He resisted the Institute of

Contemporary Art’s commitment to modernist art, design, and architect

Marilyn Diptych• 1962, Andy Warhol• Was a successful commercial

illustrator• Turned from conventional painting to

the assembly-line technique of silk-screening photo-images

• Borrowed the diptych format from the icons of Christian saints

• Symbolically treated her as a saint• He was fascinated with fame• Fame confers, as holiness, a kind of

immortality

Lipstick on Caterpillar Tracks• 1969, Claes Oldenburg• Proposed city monuments• Criticizes war• Cynical attack on Vietnam• Created at the invitation of a group of

graduate students in Yale’s school of Architecture

• Requested a monument to the “Second American Revolution” of the late 60’s (student demonstrations against Vietnam)

• Erotic overtones “make love, not war”

• Addressed issue of “potency” both sexual and military

Earthworks

Smithson, Spiral Jetty

• 1969-1970• Sought to illustrate the “ongoing dialectic” in nature

between constructive forces and destructive forces• 1,500 ft spiraling stone and earth platform extending into

the Great Salt Lake in Utah• Lake recalls both the origins of life in the salty waters of

the primordial ocean and also the end of life• Abandoned oil rigs that dot the shoreline suggested

prehistoric dinosaurs and some vanished civilization• Spiral- most fundamental shape in nature, dialectical

(shape that opens and closes, curls and uncurls endlessly)

• Smithson ordered no maintenance be done on the work

Christo, Running Fence

• 1976• 24 ½ miles long, 18 feet high nylon fence that crossed two

counties in northern California and extended into the Pacific Ocean (location chosen for aesthetic reasons as well as to link urban, suburban, and rural spaces)

• Jeanne-Claude and Christo like to reveal the beauty in various spaces

• Fence broke down social barriers among supporters such as students, ranchers, lawyers, and artists

• The work remained in place for 2 weeks and then was taken down

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial

• 1982• The Mall, Washington DC• Abstract and intimate conjoined with basic ideas of

minimal grandeur of long, black granite walls and row upon row of engraved names

• Statement of loss, sorrow, and the futility of war• Timeless monument to suffering humanity, faceless in

sacrifice• Subject of controversy due to Minimalist style• Competition for commission• Not only reflects faces of visitors but also reflects

Washington Monument (reminds viewer of sacrifices made in defense of liberty throughout history of US)

Photo Realism

Feminist Art

Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima

• 1972, Mixed media• Her assemblages show political militancy rare in postwar American art• Appropriates the derogatory stereotype of the cheerfully servile

“mammy” and transforms it into an icon of militant black feminist power• Background papered with smiling advertising image of Aunt Jemima• Notepad holder in the form of Aunt Jemima• Broom whose handle is pencil for the notepad• Rifle• In place of the notepad is a picture of another jolly mammy holding a

crying child identified by the artist as a mulatto (both black and white ancestry)

• Clenched fist in front of her stands for Black Power• Armed Jemima liberates herself not only from racial oppression but also

from traditional gender roles that had long relegated black women to such subservient positions as domestic servant or mammy

Faith Ringgold

• African American artist (born 1930) who drew on traditional American craft of quilt making and combined it with rich heritage of African textiles to create memorable statements about American race relations

• Put paint on soft fabrics rather than stretched canvases• Framed images with decorative quilted borders• Quilts narrated by women and usually address themes

related to women’s lives• Messages are reminders to the viewer of the real social

and economic limitations that African Americans have faced through American history

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party

• 1974-1979• Painted porcelain, needlework• Composed of a large, triangular table (each side stretching 48 feet) which rests on a triangular

platform covered with 2,300 triangular porcelain tiles• Triangle- symbol of equalized world sought by feminism, one of the earliest symbols of women• Porcelain “Heritage Floor” bears the names of 999 notable women from myth, legend, and history• Thirteen place settings along the side of each triangle each represent a famous woman• Each place setting features a 14-inch-wide painted porcelain plate, ceramic flatware, ceramic

chalice with gold interior, embroidered napkin all on a runner• Most plates feature abstract designs of female genitalia because, Chicago said, “that is all [the

women at the table] had in common…They were from different periods, classes, ethnicities, geographies, experiences, but what kept them within the same combined historical space” was the fact of their biological sex

• Women had been “swallowed up and obscured by history instead of being recognized and honored” (represented by plates)

• Wanted to raise awareness of the many contributions women have made to history, thereby fostering women’s empowerment in the present

Cindy Sherman

• Made a series of works beginning in the late 1970’s in which she posed herself in made-up self settings that quote well-known plots of old movies

• All her works examine the rolls that our popular culture assigns to women, and Sherman shows that she understands them all very well and she plays them willingly

• Her personality is the sum of all the movies that she has seen, and she does not know where the real Cindy Sherman starts and the one derived from movies stops

Barbara Kruger

• Born 1945• More militant point than Cindy Sherman with slightly

different media• Work quotes magazine advertising layouts (catchy

photograph and slogan inscribed)• Slogan talks back to the viewer with a confrontational

sentence that sounds feminist• Not an “original” piece of graphic design that can be

reproduced• Worked in other public media, including billboards and bus

shelter posters, implanting her subversive messages directly into the flow of media and advertising

Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, The Red Mean: Self Portrait

• 1992• Acrylic, newspaper collage, and mixed media on canvas,

92”x60”• Native American• “Made in the USA” above an identification number• Central figure quotes Vitruvian Man, but message is

autobiographical• Silhouette placed inside the red X that signified nuclear radiation• Alludes both to the uranium mines found on some Indian

reservations and also to the fact that many have become temporary repositories for nuclear waste

• Background- collage of Native American tribal newspapers• Includes her ethic identity and life on the reservation as well as

the history of Western art

1990’s-2000’s

Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial

• 2000• Steel and concrete, Vienna, Austria• Urges us to take a fresh look at everyday

things by making casts of them• Turns negative spaces into concrete

blocks• ONLY INFORMATION GIVEN IN BOOK;

PIECE NOT DISCUSSED

El Anatsui, After Kings

• 2005• Aluminum (liquor bottle caps) and copper wire• 88” x 70”• Gathered several thousand aluminum tops, flattened them, and

stitched them together with copper wire to form large wall pieces• Tops were chosen not only because they were plentiful but also

for symbolic meaning (“To me, the bottle tops encapsulate the essence of the alcoholic drinks which were brought to Africa by Europeans as trade items at the time of the earliest contrast between these two people….”)

• Changes garbage into a form that resembles a traditional kente cloth from the Ahsanti culture of Ghana (originally for nobility only explains the title of the work)

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental US

• 1995• Closed-circuit installation with 313 monitors, neon, steel structure, color and sound• “as collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray [television] tube will replace

the canvas”• Strongly influenced by John Cage• Worked with live, recorded, and computer-generated images displayed on video

monitors of varying sizes, which he often combined into sculptural ensembles• Site specific• Featured a map of continental US outlined in neon and backed by video monitors

perpetually flashing with color and movement and accompanied by sound• Monitors display images reflecting the states culture and history• Exception: state of New York, whose monitors displayed live, closed-circuit images of

the gallery visitors, placing them in the artwork and transforming them from passive spectators into active participants