The YBA movement

In  1988, a new movement arose comprised of a new style of art. The group was known as the Young British Artists, with Damien Hirst as an unspoken leader. The big talk about these artists was their work’s shock factor. Whether they were revealing extremely personal details of their lives, showing off something grotesque, putting something simple that seemingly required no effort on display, or just generally pushing comfort boundaries, these artist were always stirring up the waters.

In the case of the infamous Damien Hirst he was most well known for his works with formaldehyde and dead animals. In one piece entitled Mother and Child (Divided) he put two cows, one older female and her child, cut in half, into big cases of formaldehyde. The controversy surrounding this was for two major reasons. One being the need for Hirst to display such a disturbingly Gorey piece and if that was necessary to get his point across, the other being whether he deserves the credit if his team did all the actual work of putting the piece together for him. What it actually seeks to represent is two forever separated and fatally severed and the impossibleness to maintain unity.

Similarly controversial are the works of Ron Mueck who used practices of hyperreality to shock viewers. The uncomfortable feeling his method of sculpting has is iconic. An example being his piece Big Baby II, which features a newborn baby, still marked and bloody from birth, in the nude. However this baby is excessively large and extremely detailed. It is used to represent the vulnerability and fragility of human life and the naturalness of a baby.

Conceptual Art: Manzoni

 

Conceptual art, which are commonly installations, are nowhere near similar to traditional art pieces of the 18th and 19th centuries. Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit is a can that may or may not contain literal human waste.

Pop Art: Warhol and Lichtenstein

Pop art is a movement that began in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s. It was a movement of rebellion, revolting against traditional art. Critics did not welcome the movement, saying that the subject matter was too simple and the pieces weren’t treated well. Pop art often focused on cultural objects and media stars. It blurred the lined between was what previously considered high art and low, everyday culture.

   

Andy Warhol began his career as a magazine illustrator and graphic designer. He is also one of the most famous artists from the 20th century. In the 1960s, he began experimenting with turning products of mass production into art. This can be seen in his Campbell’s Soup Cans collection, pictured above on the left (1962). Each of the thirty-two cans are on a separate canvases, one for each kind of soup sold by Campbell’s at the time. The combination canvas is mounted on the wall and a shelf is mounted underneath it, like in a grocery store. Warhol’s portrait of Michael Jackson (above right) was created in 1984. It is based on Thriller-era Michael Jackson, seen in his red jacket from the music video. The image of Jackson is screen printed. Warhol then painted with red, orange, and yellow paint over the image to highlight his hair and facial features.

 

Roy Lichtenstein is another famous pop artists from the the mid-20th century. He satirically developed fame for himself through the use of mass-reproduced visuals. Lichtenstein is most famous for his comic-book style and cartoon pieces. His most famous work is Whaam! (above right), painted in 1963. It features a military plane attacking another plane. Lichtenstein used a comic book panel from a 1962 comic book, pictured above on the left, as his inspiration for this piece. He once said there is humor behind the piece since there are two separate panels and one is shooting the other. Lichtenstein expanded his comic book style art in his crying girl pieces (below). Just as in comic books, the images are made up of tiny dots and seem cartoony.

  

Many pieces from the Pop Art movement, including those of Warhol and Lichtenstein, have been replicated and reprinted thousands of times since they were first created. They have become icons of 20th century culture, as well as part of American culture.

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer during the 1970’s all the way into the beginning of the 2000’s. He made many pieces making statements about society, especially in reference to Nazi propaganda (such as scattered swastikas) for a large portion of his career due to the guilt put on his country for the actions of some of their people and ancestors during World War II.

One of his works, Potato House, inspired conversation due to its simple structure, a latticework house with potatoes nailed to it. It was used to show how he could transform mundane materials into something bigger or totally different. On other occasions he made things like palm trees or used materials like measuring sticks, always trying to be innovative and out of the ordinary with his structures, almost poking fun of himself for the many times he claimed he wasn’t a sculptor.

Another set of his works focused on watchtowers to emphasize the surveillance of Nazi Concentration camps but left this ambiguous enough for them to resemble just the average watchtower found on the sides of German roads for hunting. Anyone who knows Polke’s work however, knows that they are making reference to the Nazi era. He made stencils of the watchtower and plastered it all over works between 1984 to 1988 and entire collections have be comprised of these pieces.

Abstraction and Minimalism

The cubist artists of the early 20th century opened doors into the next big form of art to shake up the world: Abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter during this time, was one of those who embraced this new form in his 1925 work Swinging. This piece demonstrates a common theme in abstract art, that notion of a lot going on but also nothing specifically happening. You can all the different aspects of the painting but the meaning has never been quite so unclear in the years of painting before this. What Kandinsky was trying to do was show the spiritual aspect of painting. The colors in this work bleed and flow from one to another such as in the orange, blues and purples in the bottom right hand corner or the blues and yellows in the upper left. The shapes are all very statically geometric and where they cross one another they create new shapes. This geometric aspect is prominent within abstraction as a whole.

Another example is No. 98 2478 Red/135 Green, created in 1936 by the Belgian sculptor and painter Georges Vantongerloo. Once again there are geometric shapes, this time far more basic with just squares and rectangular lines. The colors are simple with just white, red, green, black, and a light, which is used as a visual break for the eye. The structure of this piece is a lot more simple than the Kandinsky and is a lot more limited and structured with its shapes and primary color use. The entire piece is based on a mathematical formula that gives it its exact dimensions.

After abstraction came minimalism, which was a reaction to industrialism in the early 20th century, Hans Haacke created the Condensation Cube and managed to create a natural world inside of the cube apart from the industrial world. The cube is a product of its environment and it depends on the world it lives in, in comparison to how the natural world is now a product of the people after the industrial revolution.

Anslem Kiefer

 

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist, born at the time of Germany’s surrender and then end of World War II. Much of his art reflects his idea of German identity and how it was impacted by the Third Reich. His work references post-World War II Germany, it’s landscapes, and culture. Kiefer also frequently references mythology in his pieces. He does this through Contemporary paintings and sculptures.

 

Winter Landscape, 1970 (above) is Kiefer’s interpretation of his homeland after the war. The watercolor portrays a bleak landscape with a wounded head in the sky. The blood from the figure’s neck trail down and stains the white snow. He uses only blues, grays, and whites, with the exception of the red blood. These colour choices create a very eerie ambiance. It is cold. Perspective is created by the trees and mountain in the background. The trees are a reference to his last name, which translate to ‘pine tree’, which is a common reference in Kiefer’s works. The trees are also a reference to ‘Yggdrasil’, a mythological tree that remains standing despite destruction around it. The trees in his watercolor remain standing despite the blood stained snow clearly suggestion devastation. Kiefer is referring to Germany; despite the destruction that encapsulated the entire country after World War II, it will stand strong in the end.

Sulamith, 1983 (right), is the final addition to a series Kiefer created based on Nazi architecture. The massive painting, which stands at 541 x 368.3, depicts a funeral home for the Great German Soldiers. The classical architecture features tall, curved ceilings. But this painting is more than just a funeral home. The dark ceilings and smokey film suggests that it is a crematoria from a Nazi death camp. Because of the dark colours and large size, the painting is completely encapsulating. Kiefer forces the viewer to get lost in the painting and confront the truth behind these ovens. The title, Sulamith, is a reference to a character that appears in the Old Testament  of the Bible and has come to symbolize the Jewish people. This painting can be seen as a tribute to the Jewish population that was targeted in World War II by the Nazis.

Kiefer’s sculptures often contain irony. The sculpture pictured on the left, Book with Wings (1945), is made of steal and cannot fly. Still, the book looks like it’s about to take flight. Kiefer created two sculptures featuring winged books, “one triumphant and the other drooping and in repose.” This is the triumphant one, its wings held up high. Kiefer uses books in many of his pieces. Books are powerful and represent world knowledge.

Cezanne and Cubism

Paul Cezanne is a French painter working at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. He is widely regarded for bridging the gap between cubism and its precursor of post impressionism. one of his most famous works of art is Bathers, first exhibited in 1906. The painting depicts 11 nude women bathing outside among the trees. Cezanne sought to display the harmony of figures with their landscape, as can be scene in how leisurely the entire atmosphere of the painting is. There is quite a bit of diagonals in this photo, pointing towards a couple of directions.There are trees and a few figures pointing upwards towards the rightmost corner, and some more characters vice versa. This painting provided inspiration for artists the likes of Picasso and Matisse to move forward into the nascent cubist movement.

Cubism

  

Pablo Picasso, previously named as a fan of Cezanne’s, went on to take a page from Cezanne’s book and take it one step further in his own work. Picasso was a Spanish artist of mixed media including painting, sculpture, ceramicist, playwright, and more. His most successful work was created early on in the 20th century, and to this day he is known as one of the greatest artists of all time, coined as a co-founder of the cubist movement.

Two of his artworks we studied were the painting Bust of a Woman(left) and the sculpture Head of a Woman(right). While the bust is just a painting, it is said to have sculpture like qualities due to its squared off and jagged figure, reminiscent of many statues. He uses darker shadows to emphasize the depth of the woman’s facial features, following inspiration from African and Polynesian sculpture. Both pieces show a face that is both human and alien all at once and emphasize the ridges and rougher part of the face. The sculpture piece, based on a companion of his, features many planes and segments to the face.

Georges Braque is another cubist artist of the early 20th century whose focus relied heavily on the geometry of the piece and using a viewer’s sense of perspective to locate the subject matter within the piece. Two of these pieces are Bottle and Fishes and Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece, which both have common subject matter with their bottles of rum and what could be seen as stacks of paper. In the first piece, the bottle is to the left of the center and the fish is to the right. In the second piece, the bottle is standing upright closer to the top of the piece, with some of the bottle’s writing visible and the mantelpiece that it is sitting on can be seen if you find the corner of it near the bottom right. Cubism is all about using this style of intercutting line work and and almost collage like appearance.

Lastly there is another similar cubist work, this time made in a synthetic style, rather than analytic, by Juan Gris. The title of the piece is Bottle of Rum and Newspaper. The piece is extremely similar to the works of Braque due to its same piercing lines intersecting different parts of the artwork as well as his presentation of a rum bottle. As well as having a newspaper clipping that can be seen towards the bottom left corner when part of a letter seems to be sticking up. One major difference however is the use of color. Analytic cubist do not often use much color but Synthetic do, as can be seen by the yellow, red, blue, and green.

Dada and Surrealism: Man Ray, Ernst, Dali

Dada

Dada was a product of the First World War in Switzerland as a reaction to the war. They aimed to destroy traditional art values and create something completely new, reflecting the transformation of the world at the time.

 Man Ray was involved in both the Dada and Surrealist movements. His piece entitled New York, 1920 (left) is a cleaned out olive jar filled with silver marbles, corked at the top, with a piece of masking tape reading “New York”. At first glance, this piece reflects a skyscraper that can be seen in New York. He’s taking completely unrelated objects, uniting them together, and using them to display a third party. His combination of heavy iron balls encapsulated by a fragile tube of glass is ironic and surprising. It is an ode to New York, which is where Dada began branching out and developing as an artist. Across the Hudson River in New Jersey is where he had is first ever solo show. He was very fond of New York and it’s chaotic atmosphere. He once said that Dada was not intense enough New York. Still, before the Dada movement, a piece like this could most likely not be found.

 

Surrealism

Surrealism began in Paris in 1924 as was based heavily on Sigmund Freud. Freud founded psychoanalysis and promoted allowing one’s subconscious to take control and thoughts to flow freely. Within surrealism, there are two main types. Automatic surrealism combines traditional paintings with automatic techniques, such as using images clipped from magazines, books, newspapers, etc. Max Ernst invented automatic surrealism, as well as frotagge, which involves rubbing a textured surface with a pencil or other drawing utensil. He then adapted frotagge to create grattage, which was the same concept but with oil paintings. Surrealists embraced grattage because it put the painting in the hands of fate. This technique can be seen in his piece entitled The Entire City, dated 1934 (below). His use of grattage created a base for the painting and determined the shapes that make up the city. The piece showcases a crumpling, broken down “city” that is lit by a ring-shaped moon. The piece is most likely a reflection of Ernst’s negative feelings towards Nazism spreading throughout his native Germany.

Oneiric surrealism is the other type of surrealistic art. It deeply channeled Freud’s idea of a dream-like world. Salvador Dali is perhaps the most famous surrealist artists. It is common among his works for the surface of the piece to seem normal, but features items that are unrelated. Mountain Lake, 1938 (below), is an example of Dali doubling the meaning of an image. The lake can also be seen as a fish. There is also a phone in the forefront of the painting. These unrelated images challenge the viewer’s rationality. The painting is a reflection of both Dali’s personal life and public relations of the time. After his brother named Salvador passed away, Dali was born and became his namesake. His parents visited this lake after his death. The telephone, which is disconnected, is a reference to Chamberlain and Hitler conversation regarding the German annexation of the Sudetenland in September 1938.

Malevich

Kazimir Malevich is known as one of the pioneers of the avant-garde and abstract movement, or Suprematism,  of the 20th century. He was born in Ukraine to two Polish parents searching for work. As one of fourteen children, they lived their lives as peasants. When Malevich was twelve, he began drawing without any influence from his family. He was determined to pursue art as a career and began attending numerous art schools before settling in at the Kiev School of Art in 1895.

During the early years of Malevich’s life as an artist, he spent a lot of time looking at works by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Monet and Cézanne. Their works, as well as works by van Gogh, inspired him to explore the world of colour. His attempts can be seen in his early work Self Portrait, 1910 (below). After a few tries, though, Malevich decided art should not be based heavily on imitation.

 

After exploring the styles of cubo-futurism and even theater, Malevich began to develop his own style. He focused on geometric shapes and the use of space. Examples of this can be seen below in Black Square and Red Square, 1915 (left) and Suprematist Painting, 1916 (right). Malevich depends of these geometric shapes and uses them to compliment each other. For instance, in Suprematist Painting, he paints almost all of the rectangles on a right-facing angle. This forces your eye to follow the painting in that direction and gives it a sense of fluidity. Malevich’s colour choices also make the subjects stand out. The red stands out against the black in Black Square and Red Square. He uses blue and yellow in Suprematist Painting, both primary colours, and has a green rectangle next to them, which is the outcome of combining blue and yellow.

       

Malevich’s most famous work is Black Square. It is not only what he is most known for, but it was the pivotal piece that started the Suprematism movement. The painting is oil on canvas and is fairly large, standing at 106.2 x 106.5 cm. It is exactly what the title says it is, a black square and nothing else. Malevich believes this painting held an uncompromisable amount of power. According to the Tate Modern, “the apparent simplicity of the composition is matched by its enigmatic complexity as an artistic gesture: embodying affirmation and negation, absence and presence in equal measure it brings to an end centuries of representation and marks a zero hour in modern art.”

Much of Malevich’s work was influenced by his life spent under the Soviet Union’s rule. Russian avant-garde artists of the time viewed the revolution happening in their home country as a parallel to the revolution happening in the art world. When Stalin took office, Malevich’s style of art became illegal because it was seen as radical. Some of his work was destroyed. In fact, Black Square was not featured in an exhibit again until the 1980s. In his last 3 years of life, Malevich was arrested and diagnosed with cancer, before passing away in 1935.

During the late 1920s-early 1930s, conditions grew increasingly worse for the people of Russia. Because of communism sweeping the nation, grain requisitions, and collectivization, farmers and peasants experienced extreme famine and starvation. Malevich viewed this as their identities being taken away. He painted various pieces of anonymous peasants to represent their lack of identity under communist Russia. Both Girls in the Fields (left) and Peasants (right) are dated 1928-32 and feature faceless figures. The settings are field landscapes, implying that they are field workers. There are no large landmarks to separate the fields from other generic fields. This creates a sense of dislocation for both the fields and the figures featured. They are faceless under Russia.

 

Post-Impressionism: Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh

    

1. Georges Seurat – Seurat is a french painter from Paris, France who has gone down in history as one of the most well known and major post-impressionists. He received his training at art schools in France where he was classically trained. After his studies, Seurat spent some time serving the military, before returning to work under the guidance of such influences as Delacroix, in order to develop his style of color use.

One of his most well known pieces is entitled Bathers at Asnières (left). This work was painted in 1883 depicting common folk laying out and bathing by a river in a Paris suburb. The people are meant to be a representation of the working class relaxing after a day of labor. One of the major important factors of Seurat’s work is his use of color.

He generally uses dots of different colors instead of fully blending them so that from afar your eye blends the colors for you and absorbs the picture they present. For example, the the grass of this painting there is dots of yellow speckled among the different shades of dark and light green that emphasize the tone of the grass as a whole. There seems to be a glow of white around the characters standing in the water and the one with his feet dipped in. This separates their colors from those around them. The colors, while being varied, are not overwhelmingly bright but rather a more calming and soft tone. The figures are very pale and the source of light is indistinct. Their serene setting directly contrasts the factories billowing smoke in the background, seemingly making a statement about the modern day workforce laying just on the horizon of any downtime.

Another famous work of Seurat’s is his piece entitled A River Bank (The Seine at Asnières) (right) which was earlier in his career, dated 1883. It displays a shockingly huge difference in his style and showcases just how far his work developed from the more classic impressionist style of this piece. Here it can be seen how the colors blend into one another such as the green yellow color blending between the sky and trees. There is also far less subject matter to look at. Unlike the people in the first piece, this just shows a general landscape with a red and white pole as the only noticeably different aspect to be drawn to.

2. Paul Gauguin– Paul Gauguin, full name Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, was born and raised in Paris France as well as Peru and was also a major painter of the post impressionist movement. He began pursuing painting as a hobby increased after his broken family life and marriage. He began working with Van Gogh and his work went unappreciated until after his death.

One significant work to touch upon (shown above) is entitled Harvest: Le Pouldu, painted in 1890. It depicts the village landscape surrounding a boarding house he stayed in. It is a prime example of his synthetist style. One of the most interesting aspects of this piece is how Gauguin painted the hills in the background. The and sectioned by thick lines separating the different shades of browns and greens. Gauguin uses color to create form in his pieces in this way. All of the figured in the painting lack detail and are made to have fluid movement rather than being structured. This can be contrasted to the works of the pre-raphaelites that used intensive detail in all of their pieces. The painting overall suggests the simplicity of real life, particularly within this rural village.

       

3. Vincent van Gogh– van Gogh was born in The Netherlands but later worked in England and France. He came from a family heavily rooted in the arts and religion so it is no surprise that van Gogh himself took up one of them as a career later in his life. He is considered the icon of post-impressionist work and to this day is one of the most world renown painters of all time. His entire life history, including his dissent into madness has been docmented and studied many numbers of times throughout the years.

One of his most famous works is Van Gogh’s Chair (left) painted in 1888. It depicts a chair from van Gogh’s home that he shared with Paul Gauguin at the time. He also painted a similar work that showed Gauguin’s chair, often said to show the contrast in living aspects between the two artists. The piece shows a frequently recurring subject of van Gogh’s works that is everyday objects from life. It also demonstrates the imperfect perspective of his works. Judging by the size and positioning of the legs of the chair and the warped appearance of the floor tiles, it is hard to grasp exactly how this chair is sitting. Van Gogh also loved outlining objects in different colors. In this piece, where the chair meets the blue walls, the outline is brown, and where the chair meets the brown flooring, the outline is blue.

Another significant piece of van Gogh’s is entitled Sunflowers, also painted in 1888. It applies a classic impasto style by the thicker areas of paint in the darker parts of the sunflowers. It follows a simple color scheme of shades of yellows and some greens, but still incorporates van Gogh’s classic blue outline. And again it shows van Gogh’s passion for painting everyday objects.