Humanism

During the Middle Ages (a period of European history from the third through 13th centuries), art and learning were centered on the church and religion. But at the start of the 14th century, people became less interested in thinking about God, heaven and the saints, and more interested in thinking about themselves, their surroundings and their everyday lives. Part of this change was influenced by the study of ancient Greek and Roman writings on scientific matters, government, philosophy, and art. When scholars during the Renaissance began to study these writings, their interests turned away from traditional areas of study such as religion, medicine and the law. The people of the Renaissance became interested in other areas of science, the natural world, biology and astronomy. People now studied mathematics, engineering, and architecture. Artists, writers, musicians and composers began creating work outside of the church. Artists signed their work and authors wrote autobiographies and memoirs — stories about themselves.

Jacopa di Cione Madonna and Child in Glory 1360/65 Tempera and gold on panel Enlarge The central figures of the Madonna and child in this painting from the late Middle Ages are much larger than the four saints who stand below the Madonna or the angels gathered around the upper edges of the painting. The artists made the Madonna and child larger to help viewers understand that they are the most important figures in the painting.

The values and ideals popular during the European Renaissance can be described by the term secular humanism: secular, meaning not religious and humanism, meaning placing the study and progress of human nature at the center of interests.

The rise of Humanism can be seen in paintings created by Renaissance artists. During the Middle Ages, saints in paintings wore halos (a ring or circle of light) around their heads. Artists also used hieratic scale in paintings during the Middle Ages, making saints or members of the family of God larger in scale than ordinary or less important figures. As Humanism became more popular during the Renaissance, ordinary people grew to be the same size as saints in paintings and saints began to look more like ordinary people. For example, halos became fainter and eventually disappeared during the Renaissance.

Saints occupied the same landscape as ordinary people in Renaissance paintings and the landscape was earth instead of heaven. In the Middle Ages it was common for artists to represent figures of heaven against a gold background, a symbol for the beauty and value of the atmosphere of heaven. As Renaissance artists experimented with new Humanist ideas, the natural landscape began to appear as a background in paintings. Saints left their golden atmosphere to occupy the same gardens, forests and buildings that everyday people lived in.

Giovanni Agostino da Lodi Adoration of the Shepherds 1510 Oil on panel Enlarge The holy family of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are joined here by shepherds and an angel in the center playing a lute. The landscape around them is earthly rather than heavenly.

During the Renaissance, the use mathematical perspective to represent space in paintings was invented. Earlier attempts at representing space often resulted in furniture or buildings that look just a little "off." Using mathematical formulas, instead of just the human eye, gave artists new tools to represent three-dimensional space in a convincing way. Renaissance paintings began to give the impression that the frame around the painting was a window frame, and looking at the painting was like looking through a window.

Artists began to use oil paints for the first time during the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, egg tempera was used most widely. Mixing egg yolks with pigments made egg tempera and artists made their own paints. Egg tempera dried quickly and created a flat, rough surface. Oil paint was invented in the early 15th century and created great excitement among Renaissance artists. Oil paint dried slowly, and was translucent, meaning light could shine through the paint. The characteristics of oil paint allowed artists to build layers of color and create paintings with the appearance of greater depth.

What is a Mandala?

The word "mandala" is from the classical Indian language of Sanskrit. Loosely translated to mean "circle," a mandala is far more than a simple shape. It represents wholeness, and can be seen as a model for the organizational structure of life itself--a cosmic diagram that reminds us of our relation to the infinite, the world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds.

Describing both material and non-material realities, the mandala appears in all aspects of life: the celestial circles we call earth, sun, and moon, as well as conceptual circles of friends, family, and community.

A mandala is...
An integrated structure
organized around a
unifying center

 "The integrated view of the world represented by the mandala, while long embraced by some Eastern religions, has now begun to emerge in Western religious and secular cultures. Awareness of the mandala may have the potential of changing how we see ourselves, our planet, and perhaps even our own life purpose."
(From Mandala: Journey to the Center, by Bailey Cunningham)


creating unity
Creating a group mandala is a unifying experience in which people can express themselves individually within a unified structure. 


cross-cultural patterns
The mandala pattern is used in many religious traditions. Hildegard von Bingen, a Christian nun in the 12th century, created many beautiful mandalas to express her visions and beliefs.
In the Americas, Indians have created medicine wheels and sand mandalas. The circular Aztec calendar was both a timekeeping device and a religious expression of ancient Aztecs.
In Asia, the Taoist "yin-yang" symbol represents opposition as well as interdependence. Tibetan mandalas are often highly intricate illustrations of religious significance that are used for meditation.

different cultures, similar expressions
Both Navajo Indians and Tibetan monks create sand mandalas to demonstrate the impermanence of life.
In ancient Tibet, as part of a spiritual practice, monks created intricate mandalas with colored sand made of crushed semiprecious stones. The tradition continues to this day as the monks travel to different cultures around the world to create sand mandalas and educate people about the culture of Tibet.

The creation of a sand mandala requires many hours and days to complete. Each mandala contains many symbols that must be perfectly reproduced each time the mandala is created. When finished, the monks gather in a colorful ceremony, chanting in deep tones as they sweep their mandala into a jar and empty it into a nearby body of water as a blessing. This action also symbolizes symbolizes the cycle of life.

A world away, the American Navajo people also create impermanent sand paintings which are used in spiritual rituals–in much the same way as as they are used by Tibetans. A Navajo sandpainting ritual may last from five to nine days and range in size from three to fifteen feet or more.

mandalas in architecture
From Buddhist stupas to Muslim mosques and Christian cathedrals, the principle of a structure built around a center is a common theme in architecture.

Native American teepees are conical shapes built around a pole that represents the "axis mundi" or world axis. 

Buckminster Fuller expanded on the dome design with his famous geodesic dome structures. The dome structure has the highest ratio of enclosed area to external surface area, and all structural members contribute equally to the whole--a great structural representation of a mandala!

micro to macro
Representing the universe itself, a mandala is both the microcosm and the macrocosm, and we are all part of its intricate design. The mandala is more than an image seen with our eyes; it is an actual moment in time. It can be can be used as a vehicle to explore art, science, religion and life itself. The mandala contains an encyclopedia of the finite and a road map to infinity.

Carl Jung said that a mandala symbolizes "a safe refuge of inner reconciliation and wholeness." It is "a synthesis of distinctive elements in a unified scheme representing the basic nature of existence." Jung used the mandala for his own personal growth and wrote about his experiences.

It is said by Tibetan Buddhists that a mandala consists of five "excellencies":
The teacher • The message • The audience • The site • The time
An audience or "viewer" is necessary to create a mandala. Where there is no you, there is no mandala. (from: You Are the Eyes of the World, by Longchenpa, translated by Lipman and Peterson).

See Links for more information on the mandala

Tibetan sand mandala (click to enlarge)

Navajo sand painting

Labyrinths are a type of mandala found in many cultures and are used as a tool for centering

Prominent Architects

 An interesting read that will give you a modern perspective on how art connects with architecture and how it shapes our world:

Architects Who Changed the World

Architectural History

An easy to comprehend timeline of Architectural History:


Timeline

Another Timeline:

Politics and Conflicts of War

The experiences of politics, conflict and war have been represented in works of art for thousands of years. They become documents, signifiers and symbols for power, remembrance, culture and national pride.

An ancient symbol of this power is the sculpture of Lammasu (below), a protective spirit carved into a massive bas-relief into the main gate of the Assyrian court nearly two thousand years ago. The figure has the head of a man, the body of a bull and the wings of an eagle.
 
Lammasu, the Human Headed Winged Bull, Assyrian. Carved stone. 721-705 BCE.
Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago.

In another subtler example but with no less visual effect, a ceramic Standing Male Warrior from theMayan culture of Central America (in the photo below) looks out at the viewer in a stance of informal attention. The figure is only eleven inches high but gives us a trove of information about how Mayan soldiers dressed for battle. A thick vest with detailed patterning covers his torso. A necklace with heavy cupped objects (possibly sea or turtle shells) protects his upper body. The thick belt and loincloth at his waist and the strong bracelets on each wrist add to his protection. The round earrings are typical Mayan accessories. The fingers of his right hand are slightly curled as if he held a club or spear at one time. 

For all the restrained beauty in the sculpture, the warrior’s shield and helmet dominate the composition. The shield, held at ease just above the figure’s foot, is embellished with a centralized mask and radiating scallops around the outer edge. The whole shield looks battered and bent from use. The helmet is in the form of an eagle or hawk’s head, surrounded by a heavy necklace of rectangular bars. Vestiges of paint still cling to parts of the sculpture, and it’s easy to imagine how colorful it would have first appeared.

Compare the Standing Male Warrior to the Terra Cotta Army from China (also pictured below). Discovered in 1974 and dating to the second century BCE, the Chinese figures, all life size, stand in neat rows to guard the nearby tomb of Emperor Qin. In this instance the idea of power and preservation of order is carried into the afterlife. Each soldier’s face is modeled as an individual and their armored robes show lots of detail and patterning. Similar to the Mayan figure, their right hands are curled to hold a club, spear or other kind of weapon.
 Maya Standing Male Warrior, Island of Jaina, Campeche, Mexico, Late Classic Period, c. 550-950 AD,
Ceramic and paint, Height 11 1/4 inches.


 
Emperor Qin’s Terra Cotta Army. Life size. China, 210 BCE

Nations identify themselves with specific images. A flag is an example that best represents a particular nation. There is symbolic meaning in a flag’s colors, the depicted objects and any text that may be included in them. For example, each white star on the American flag represents one of the fifty states that comprise the nation. In comparison, the flag of Mongolia uses a sky blue central bar, the country’s national color, and incorporates Buddhist religious symbols in yellow on the left.
“Uncle Sam” (below) is a figurative representation that symbolizes the United States (“Uncle Sam” stands for “U.S”). He is dressed in America’s symbolic colors red, white and blue. This stern-faced visage was used in state advertising to recruit young men to the Army during World War I and is now an icon of American political history.
 
James M. Flagg, Uncle Sam Recruiting Poster, 1916. Collection: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

 Until now we have looked at examples that infer war and conflict. Let’s take a look at one that shows the battle as it happens.The Japanese war epic The Tale of Heiji contains a series of texts and scroll paintings describing the Heiji Rebellion from the tenth century. The scroll section below shows rebels burning the Imperial Sanjo Palace in Kyoto. While flames and smoke rise from the palace the chaos of battle goes on around it. Here war itself becomes the subject matter of the artwork, giving an historical account of the action but also a graphic aesthetic description of the event.

The Burning of the Sanjo Palace, Detail from the Heiji monogatori scrolls. Ink and colors on paper, 13^th century.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

One of the most famous testaments to the horrors of war is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica from 1937. We saw this work in module 2 in the context of how the artist prepared and organized the final painting through sketches, studies and changes in the actual work. Picasso painted Guernica in response to the bombing of the Spanish Basque town by the German air force at the request of Spain’s General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso shows us a nightmarish scene of death and destruction within an orchestrated chaos of black, white and gray. The bull on the left is interpreted as Franco himself, watching passively over the carnage in front of him. The gored horse near the middle represents the Spanish people – wounded and flailing as they try to resist. A figure thrusts a candle through the open window at the upper right, a reference to the rest of the world as they watch the atrocities taking place. The only direct evidence of battle lies in the dead soldier on the floor, still clutching his broken sword (refer back to the right hands of the Mayan Standing Male Warrior and the figures in the Terra Cotta Army to see visual comparisons to Picasso’s soldier).

During the 1970’s and 1980’s artist Leon Golub created a series of paintings documenting the abuses that can arise in unstable political climates. Golub’s Mercenaries shows soldiers for hire as they call out and taunt each other in an atmosphere of disorder. They lack the discipline of a trained army, and Golub capitalizes on this idea by arranging the figures in a disjointed, asymmetrical composition. His use of a large-scale format (the painting is nearly 8 feet high) and the compliments red and green increases the menace and power of the figures.  

In the artist’s words:
 “The mercenary is not a common subject of art, but is a near-universal means of establishing or maintaining control under volatile or up-for-grabs political circumstances”*.
*Leon Golub The Mercenaries, Interview with Matthew Baigell (1981)

3D Methods

1. Carving uses the subtractive process to cut away areas from a larger mass, and is the oldest method used for three-dimensional work. Traditionally stone and wood were the most common materials because they were readily available and extremely durable. Contemporary materials include foam, plastics and glass. Using chisels and other sharp tools, artists carve away material until the ultimate form of the work is achieved.

A beautiful example of the carving process is seen in the Water and Moon Bodhisattva from 10^th century China. The Bodhisattva, a Buddhist figure who has attained Enlightenment but decides to stay on earth to teach others, is exquisitely carved and painted. The figure is almost eight feet high, seated in an elegant pose on a lotus bloom, relaxed, staring straight ahead with a calm, benevolent look. The extended right arm and raised knee create a stable triangular composition. The sculptor carves the left arm to simulate muscle tension inherent when it supports the weight of the body.
In another example, you can see the high degree of relief carved from an original cedar wood block in the Earthquake Mask from the Pacific Northwest Coast Kwakwaka’ wakw culture. It’s extraordinary for masks to personify a natural event. This and other mythic figure masks are used in ritual and ceremony dances. The broad areas of paint give a heightened sense of character to this mask.
 
Earthquake Mask, 9” x 7”, early 20^th century. Kwakwaka’ wakw culture, North American Pacific Coast. Burke Museum, University of Washington, Seattle.

Wood sculptures by contemporary artist Ursula von Rydingsvard are carved, glued and even burned. Many are massive, rough vessel forms that carry the visual evidence of their creation.

Michelangelo’s masterpiece Statue of David from 1501 is carved and sanded to an idealized form that the artist releases from the massive block, a testament to human aesthetic brilliance.
 
Michelangelo, David, 1501, marble, 17’ high.
Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

2. Casting: The additive method of casting has been in use for over five thousand years. It’s a manufacturing process by which a liquid material is usually poured into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify. One traditional method of bronze casting frequently used today is the lost wax processCasting materials are usually metals but can be various cold setting materials that cure after mixing two or more components together; examples are epoxy, concrete, plaster and clay. Casting is most often used for making complex shapes that would be otherwise difficult or uneconomical to make by other methods. It’s a labor-intensive process that allows for the creation of multiples from an original object (similar to the medium of printmaking), each of which is extremely durable and exactly like its predecessor. A mold is usually destroyed after the desired number of castings has been made. Traditionally, bronze statues were placed atop pedestals to signify the importance of the figure depicted. A statue of William Seward (below), the U. S. Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and who negotiated the purchase of the Alaska territories, is set nearly eight feet high so viewers must look up at him. Standing next to the globe, he holds a roll of plans in his left hand.

 
Richard Brooks, William Seward, bronze on stone pedestal, c. 1909.
Image by Christopher Gildow.

More contemporary bronze cast sculptures reflect their subjects through different cultural perspectives. The statue of rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix is set on the ground, his figure cast as if performing on stage. He’s on both of his knees, head thrown back, eyes shut and mouth open in mid wail. His bell-bottom pants, frilly shirt unbuttoned halfway, necklace and headband give us a snapshot of 1960’s rock culture but also engage us with the subject at our level.

Daryl Smith, Jimi Hendrix, 1996, bronze. Broadway and Pine, Seattle.
Image by Christopher Gildow.

Doris Chase, who had a video work we examined in the Camera Arts module, was also a strong sculptor. Her large scale abstract work Changing Form from 1971 is cast in bronze and dominates the area around it. The title refers to the visual experience you get walking around the work, seeing the positive and negative shapes dissolve and recombine with each other.

Doris Chase, Changing Form, 1971. Bronze.
Image by Christopher Gildow.

3. Modeling is a method that can be both additive and subtractive. The artist uses modeling to build up form with clay, plaster or other soft material that can be pushed, pulled, pinched or poured into place. The material then hardens into the finished work. Larger sculptures created with this method make use of an armature, an underlying structure of wire that sets the physical shape of the work. Although modeling is primarily an additive process, artists do remove material in the process. Modeling a form is often a preliminary step in the casting method. In 2010, Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man (c. 1955), a bronze sculpture first modeled in clay, set a record for the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.

4. Construction, or Assemblage, uses found, manufactured or altered objects to build form. Artists weld, glue, bolt and wire individual pieces together. Sculptor Debra Butterfield transforms throw away objects into abstract sculptures of horses with scrap metal, wood and other found objects. She often casts these constructions in bronze. Louise Nevelson used cut and shaped pieces of wood, gluing and nailing them together to form fantastic, complex compositions. Painted a single tone, (usually black or white), her sculptures are graphic, textural facades of shapes, patterns and shadow. 
Traditional African masks often combine different materials. The elaborate Kanaga Mask from Mali uses wood, fibers, animal hide and pigment to construct an other worldly visage that changes from human to animal and back again. Some modern and contemporary sculptures incorporate movement, light and sound.

Kinetic sculptures use ambient air currents or motors allowing them to move, changing in form as the viewer stands in place. The artist Alexander Calder is famous for his mobiles, whimsical, abstract works that are intricately balanced to move at the slightest wisp of air, while the sculptures of Jean Tinguely are contraption-like and, similar to Nevelson’s and Butterfield’s works, constructed of scraps often found in garbage dumps. His motorized works exhibit a mechanical aesthetic as they whir, rock and generate noises. Tinguely’s most famous work,  Homage to New York, ran in the sculpture garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1960 as part of a performance by the artist. After several minutes, the work exploded and caught fire. 

The idea of generating sound as part of three-dimensional works has been utilized for hundreds of years, traditionally in musical instruments that carry aspiritual reference. Contemporary artists use sound to heighten the effect of sculpture or to direct recorded narratives. The cast bronze fountain by George Tsutakawa (below) uses water flow to produce a soft rushing sound. In this instance the sculpture also attracts the viewer by the motion of the water: a clear, fluid addition to an otherwise hard abstract surface.


George Tsutakawa, Fountain. Bronze, running water.
City of Seattle

Doug Hollis’s A Sound Garden from 1982 creates sounds from hollow metal tubes atop grid like structures rising above the ground. In weather vane fashion, the tubes swing into the wind and resonate to specific pitch. The sound extends the aesthetic value of the work to include the sense of hearing and, together with the metal construction, creates a mechanical and psychological basis for the work.

Sculpture and 3D Art: From the Beginning to Modern Forms

Sculpture is any artwork made by the manipulation of materials resulting in a three-dimensional object. The sculpted figure of the Venus of Berekhat Ram, discovered in the Middle East in 1981, dates to 230,000 years BCE. It is the oldest example of artwork known. The crudely carved stone figure will fit in the palm of your hand. Its name derives from the similarity in form with so-called female fertility figures found throughout Europe, some of which date to 25,000 years ago.

For example, The form of the Venus of Willendorf below shows remarkable skill in its carving, including arms draped over exaggerated breasts, an extended abdomen and elaborate patterning on the head, indicating either a braided hairstyle or type of woven cap. Just as remarkable, the figure has no facial detail to indicate identity. The meaning behind these figures is difficult to put into context because of the lack of any written record about them or other supporting materials.


Venus of Willendorf, c.25,000 BCE.
Natural History Museum, Vienna.

These earliest images are indicative of most of the cultural record in sculpture for thousands of years; singular figurative objects made within an iconographic context of myth, ritual or ceremony. It’s not until the Old Kingdom period of Egyptian sculpture, between 3100 and 2180 BCE, that we start to see sculpture that reflects a resemblance of specific figures.

Sculpture can be freestanding, or self-supported, where the viewer can walk completely around the work to see it from all sides, or created in relief,where the primary form’s surface is raised above the surrounding material, such as the image on a coin.

Bas-relief refers to a shallow extension of the image from its surroundings, high relief is where the most prominent elements of the composition are undercut and rendered at more than half in the round against the background. Rich, animated bas-relief sculpture exists at the Banteay Srei temple near Angor Wat, Cambodia. Here humans and mythic figures combine in depictions from ancient Hindu stories.


Bas-relief sculpture at the temple Banteay Srei, Angor, Cambodia. 10^th century. Sandstone.

The Shaw Memorial combines freestanding, bas and high relief elements in one masterful sculpture. The work memorializes Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty fourth regiment, the first African-American infantry unit to fight for the north in the civil war.

Dan Flavin is one of the first artists to explore the possibilities of light as a sculptural medium. Since the 1960’s his work has incorporated fluorescent bulbs of different colors and in various arrangements. Moreover, he takes advantage of the wall space the light is projected onto, literally blurring the line between traditional sculpture and the more complex medium of installation.

Installation art utilizes multiple objects, often from various mediums, and takes up entire spaces. It can be generic or site specific. Because of their relative complexity, installations can address aesthetic and narrative ideas on a larger scale than traditional sculpture. Its genesis can be traced to the Dada movement, ascendant after World War I and which predicated a new aesthetic by its unconventional nature and ridicule of established tastes and styles. Sculpture came off the pedestal and began to transform entire rooms into works or art. Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, begun in 1923, transforms his apartment into an abstract, claustrophobic space that is at once part sculpture and architecture. With installation art the viewer is surrounded by and can become part ofthe work itself.

British artist Rachel Whiteread’s installation Embankment from 2005 fills an entire exhibition hall with casts made from various sized boxes. At first appearance a snowy mountain landscape navigated by the viewer is actually a gigantic nod to the idea of boxes as receptacles of memory towering above and stacked around them, squeezing them towards the center of the room.

Rachel Whiteread, Embankment, 2005.
Source: Wikipedia and licensed through Creative Commons
Ilya Kabakov mixes together a narrative of political propaganda, humor and mundane existence in his installation The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment from 1984. What we see is the remains of a small apartment plastered with Soviet era posters, a small bed and the makeshift slingshot a man uses to escape the drudgery of his life within the system. A gaping hole in the roof and his shoes on the floor are evidence enough that he made it into space.
Performance art goes a step further, involving the artist as part of the work itself. Some performance artworks are interactive, involving the viewer too. The nature of the medium is in its ability to use live performance in the same context as static works of art: to enhance our understanding of artistic experience. Similar to installation works, performance art had its first manifestations during the Dada art movement, when live performances included poetry, visual art and music, often going on at the same time.
The German artist Joseph Beuys was instrumental in introducing performance art as a legitimate medium in the post World War Two artistic milieu. I Like America and America Likes Me from 1974 finds Beuys co-existing with a coyote for a week in the Rene Block Gallery in New York City. The artist is protected from the animal by a felt blanket and a shepherd’s staff. Performance art, like installation, challenges the viewer to reexamine the artistic experience from a new level.
In the 1960’s Allen Kaprow’s Happenings invited viewers to be the participants. These events, sometimes rehearsed and other times improvised begin to erase the line between the artist and the audience. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece from 1965 specifically invites members of the audience to interact with her on stage.

This same idea – using the artist’s body as subject, is evident in the performance art of Marina Abramovic. In The Artist is Present she sits quietly as individual visitors sit across the table from her, exchanging silent glances and stares.
Today we see a new form of performance art happen unexpectedly around us in the form of  
 Flash Mobs: groups of people who gather in public spaces to collaborate in short, seemingly spontaneous events that entertain and surprise passersby. Many flash mobs are arranged in advance through the use of social media. An example of flash mob performance is
Do Re Mi in the Central Station in Antwerp, Belgium in March of 2009.
Craft requires the specific skilled use of tools in creating works or art. These tools can take many forms: words, construction tools, a camera, a paintbrush or even a voice. Traditional studio crafts include ceramics, metal and woodworking, weaving and the glass arts.

 Crafts are distinguished by a high degree of workmanship and finish. Traditional crafts have their roots in utilitarian purposes: furniture, utensils and other everyday accoutrements that are designed for specific uses, and reflect the adage that “form follows function”. But human creativity goes beyond simple function to include the aesthetic realm, entered through the doors of embellishment, decoration and an intuitive sense of design.

In the two examples below, a homeowner’s yard gate shows off his metal smith skills, becoming a study in ornate symmetry. In another example, a staircase crafted in the Shaker style takes on an elegant form that mirrors the organic spiral shape representing the ‘golden ratio’


Yard gate; metal, concrete and glass.








Shaker style staircase, Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Photo by Jack Boucher, National Parks Service.
Image is in the public domain. Utility is not the sole purpose of craft. The Persian carpet below has its use as a utilitarian object, but the craftsmanship shown in its pattern and design gives it a separate aesthetic value. The decorative element is visually stimulating, as if the artisan uses the carpet as simply a vehicle for his or her own creative imagination.


 
Antique Tabriz Persian carpet.

As we’ve seen in an earlier module, quilts made in the rural community of Gee's Bend Alabama show a diverse range of individual patterns within a larger design structure of colorful stripes and blocks, and have a basis in graphic textile designs from Africa. Even a small tobacco bag from the Native American Sioux culture (below) becomes a work of art with its intricate beaded patterns and floral designs.


 
Tobacco pouch, Sioux

The craftsmanship in glass making is one of the most demanding. Working with an extremely fragile medium presents unique challenges. Challenges aside, the delicate nature of glass gives it exceptional visual presence. A blown glass urn dated to first century Rome is an example. The fact that it has survived the ages intact is testament to its ultimate strength and beauty.


 
Cinerary Urn, Roman. C. 1^st century CE. Blown glass.

Louis Comfort Tiffany introduced many styles of decorative glass between the late 19^th and first part of the 20^th centuries. His stained glass window The Holy City in Baltimore Maryland has intricate details in illustrations influenced by the Art Nouveau style popular at the turn of the 19^th century.

 
Louis Comfort Tiffany, The Holy City, stained glass window, Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, Maryland. 1905.
 
The artist Dale Chihuly has redefined the traditional craft of glass making over the last forty years, moving it towards the mainstream of fine art with single objects and large scale installations involving hundreds of individual pieces.

Product Design: The dictum “form follows function” represents an organic approach to three-dimensional design. The products and devices we use everyday continue to serve the same functions but change in styles. This constant realignment in basic form reflects modern aesthetic considerations and, on a larger scale, become artifacts of the popular culture of a given time period.
The two examples below illustrate this idea. Like Tiffany glass, the chair designed by Henry van de Velde in 1895 reflects the Art Nouveau style in its wood construction with organic, stylized lines and curvilinear form. In comparison, the Ant Chair from 1952 retains the basic functional form with more modern design using a triangular leg configuration of tubular steel and a single piece of laminated wood veneer, the cut out shape suggesting the form of a black ant.


Henry van de Velde, Chair, 1895. Wood, woven fiber.



Arne Jacobsen, Ant Chair, 1952. Steel and wood.

Three-dimensional media includes many forms including sculpture, craft and product design. They are the oldest and most durable of all the creative arts. You can see how the different creative processes and methods generate a diverse range of visual forms and characteristics. Craft in particular has its origins in utility but is no longer exclusive to this realm, and innovations about the nature of three-dimensional media have led to the contemporary forms of installation and performance art, with the inclusion at times of both the artist and the viewer into the work itself. You’ll experience and learn more about three-dimensional media in the journal activities that accompany this module.

Subject and Context

There are specific categories of ideas that have been represented in art over time. Many of them are present in some cultures, but never present in others. This disparity gives us another place to look for meaning when we approach differences in representation.  But generally these categories of ideas (sometimes called subjects) can also be called a genre of art; that is, a fairly loose category of images that share the same content.  Here is a brief list of the type of genre that you may see in a work:

• Landscape
• still life
• portrait
• self-portrait
• allegory: representing a mythological scene or story
• historical: actual representation of a historic event
• religious: two forms: religious representation or religious action
• daily life: sometimes also called genre painting
• nude: male nude and female nude are separate categories
• political: two forms: propaganda and criticism
• social: work created to support a specific social cause
• power: work created to connect to specific spiritual strength
• fantasy: work created to invent new visual worlds
• decoration: work created to embellish surroundings
• abstraction: work whose elements and principles are manipulated to alter the  subject in some way.

What you will discover when you think about some of these subjects is that you may already have a vision of how this subject should appear.  For example: visualize a portrait or self-portrait.  You can see the head, probably from the shoulders up, with little background, painted fairly accurately.  Look at these portraits and see that this is moderately true, though some works may surprise you. Artists often reinvent how a subject is portrayed (remember the portraits made from images of DNA we saw in a previous module). Some works of art can be part of a certain genre by using metaphor: one image that stands for another. A good example is thisquilt by Missouri Pettway from Gees Bend, Alabama. Made of strips of old work clothes, corduroy and cotton sacking material, it becomes a portrait of the artist’s husband. Missouri's daughter Arlonzia describes the quilt: "It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen, eighteen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, 'I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.'

Contemporary artists sometimes reinterpret artworks from the past.

This can change the context of the work (the historical or cultural background in which the original work was created), but the content remains the same. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley from 1936 (below) uses the subject matter of a mother and her children to symbolize the hardships faced during the Great Depression. The woman’s face speaks of worry and desperation about how to provide for her children and herself.

Comparatively, San Francisco photographer Jim Thirtyacre’s image Working Mother from 2009 reflects this same sentiment but through the context of the first major economic crisis of the twenty first century.


Dorthea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936. Photograph.
Farm Security Administration collection, U.S. Library of Congress.

Jim Thirtyacre, Working Mother, 2009. Color digital image.

It is important to note that many cultures do not use particular genres – portraiture, for example, in their art. For some cultures the representation of an actual human face is dangerous and can call up spirits who will want to live in the image: so their masks, while still face-like, are extremely stylized.  Traditional Islamic images are forbidden to depict figures and other material objects. In their place artists use the genre of decoration.

Modern Art TImeline (Part 2)

Artists, Movements and Styles in Modern Art (1916-1975)

Dada
(c.1916-1922)

RAOUL HAUSMANN (1886-1971)
'Tatlin at Home', 1920 (collage)

 

Dada was not a style of art like Fauvism or Cubism. It was a form of artistic anarchy born out of disgust for the social, political and cultural establishment of the time which it held responsible for Europe's descent into World War.

Dadaism was an ‘anti art’ stance as it was intent on destroying the artistic values of the past. The aim of Dada was to create a climate in which art was alive to the moment and not paralysed by the corrupted traditions of the established order. Dada’s weapons in the war against the art establishment were confrontation and provocation. They confronted the artistic establishment with the irrationality of their collages and assemblages and provoked conservative complacency with outrageous actions at their exhibitions and meetings.

The Dada movement started in Zurich and spread as far as New York. Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters were among the best of the Dada artists.

Surrealism
(c.1924-1939)

RENÉ MAGRITTE (1898-1967)
'Time Transfixed', 1938 (oil on canvas)

 

Surrealism was the positive response to Dada's negativity. Its aim, as outlined in the First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, was to liberate the artist's imagination by tapping into the unconscious mind to discover a 'superior' reality - a 'sur-reality'. To achieve this the Surrealists drew upon the images of dreams, the effects of combining disassociated images, and the technique of 'pure psychic automatism', a spontaneous form of drawing without the conscious control of the mind.

The look of Surrealist art was inspired by the irrational juxtaposition of images in Dada collages, the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, and both 'primitive' and 'outsider' art.

The most influential of the Surrealist artists were Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali and René Magritte. The movement broke up at the outbreak of war in 1939 when several of the Surrealists left Europe for New York where they had a formative influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism.

Dada and Surrealism Slideshow

Abstract Expressionism
(1946-1956)

JACKSON POLLOCK (1912-1956)
'Full Fathom Five', 1947
(oil with nails, coins, buttons, cigarette etc. on canvas)

 

Abstract Expressionism was the first American art style to exert an influence on a global scale. It drew upon the ‘spiritual’ approach of Kandinsky, the 'automatism' of the Surrealists, and a range of dramatic painting techniques.

Abstract Expressionism was also known as ‘Action Painting’, a title which implied that the physical act of painting was as important as the result itself.

The Abstract Expressionist movement embraced paintings from a wide range of artists whose work was not always purely abstract or truly expressionistic. The ‘all-over’ drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, which entangle the viewer in a skein of light, color and texture, were the biggest challenge to the interpretation of pictorial space since Cubism. The paintings of Mark Rothko bathe the spectator in a mystical world of diffuse color while the art of Robert Motherwell sets up an abstract dialogue between his 'automatic' calligraphy and the conscious control of shapes and colors. Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnet Newman and Clifford Still were other major figures associated with the movement.

Abstract Expressionism Slideshow

 Pop Art
(1954-1970)

ANDY WARHOL (1928-1987 )
'Campbell's Soup 1 (Tomato)', 1968
(silkscreen on canvas)

 

Pop Art was the art movement that characterized a sense of optimism during the post war consumer boom of the 1950's and 60's. It coincided with the globalization of pop music and youth culture, personified by Elvis and The Beatles.

Pop Art was brash, colorful, young, fun and hostile to the artistic establishment. It included different styles of painting and sculpture from various countries, but what they all had in common was an interest in popular culture.

The stark look of Pop Art emerged from a fusion of Dada collages and 'readymades' with the imagery of the consumer culture. It was seen as an antidote to the introspection of Abstract Expressionism. The expressive techniques of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg provided the stylistic link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop but the images of celebrity and consumerism by Andy Warhol and the comic book iconography of Roy Lichtenstein represent the style as we know it today.

Pop Art Slideshow

Op Art
(c.1964-1970)

VICTOR VASARELY (1906-1997)
'Gestalt 4', 1970 (serigraph )

Op Art is short for 'optical art'. It was an abstract style that emerged in the 1960's based on the illusionistic effects of line, shape, pattern and color.

Op Artists such as Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz play with the perception of the viewer by subverting the picture plane with ambiguous shapes, shifting tones and dynamic color relationships. Although Op Art images are static they generate the illusion of movement with perceptual tricks that create an unstable picture surface. The effects of this can be so strong that you have to look away for fear of losing your balance or hurting your eyes. Needless to say that the fairground fun aspect of Op Art was very popular with the public and was quickly commercialized by the design and fashion industries.

Op Art Slideshow

Minimalism
(1960-1975)

FRANK STELLA (b.1936)
'Jarmolince III', 1973 (relief assemblage)

 

Minimalism was not only a reaction against the emotionally charged techniques of Abstract Expressionism but also a further refinement of pure abstraction. It was an attempt to discover the essence of art by reducing the elements of a work to the basic considerations of shape, surface and materials.

Minimalist art used hard-edged forms and geometric grid structures. Color was simply used to define space or surface. Ad Reinhardt, whose late paintings anticipate Minimalism, put it simply, ‘The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.’
Frank Stella, Don Judd, Robert Morris, John McCracken and Sol LeWitt were important contributors to Minimalism.

Principles of Design