Thursday, September 16, 2010

Reading Summary/The Annotated Mona Lisa

Birth of Photography
- Early 19th century scientific discoveries in optics and chemistry help produces new art form called photography.
- French chemist Joseph Niepce (1765- 1833) made first surviving photo. (view of courtyard)
- Exposed a polished pewter for 8 hours to get photo.
- Louis Daguerre (1789-1851) invented more practical uses for photography in 1837.
- First picture "Still Life" was a detailed view of his corner studio. Exposed for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Took earliest photograph of human being. (Parisian boulevard)
- Englishmen , William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 - 1877) improved photography with his invention of calotypes, or the negative, in 1839.
- 1851 wetplate reduces exposure time to seconds.
- Tintype was invented, with an image on a thin metal plate instead of glass.
- Dryplate liberated the photographer from dashing in to the darkroom.
- 1858, instant photography replaced the daguerreotype and in the 1880's portable hand held cameras and roll film took over.
- Heavy equipment and fragile plates made traveling with photography different difficult.
- Matthew Brady took pictures of the civil war.

Impressionism:
- Impressionism born in France in the early 1860's and lasted to 1886.
- Emphasized color and light. Main goal to present impression or initial sensory perceptions.
- Choppy brush stokes and pure colors side by side look unintelligible.

Post - Impressionism
- French phenomenon that included French artist Seurat, Gouguin, Cezanne, Toulosue - Lautrec and Dutchman Van Gogh.
- 2oth century art, with its extremes of individual styles from cubism to surrealism grew out of those trends.

The Twentieth Century: Modern Art
- Art aggressively convulsive, with style quickly replacing each other.
- Art concerned its self less with exterior visual reality and more with interior vision.
- Modern artist defied convention.
- Art moved from rendering nature toward pure abstraction.

Fauvism: Exploding Color
- Lasted from 1904 to 1908 (First major avant-garde of the 20th century)
- Fauve artist like Matisse, Vlaminick, Derain, Dufy, Braque, and Rouault experimented eith different colors.
- The public called them wild beast.
- Derain pioneered strong solor as an expressive end in its self
- Vlaminick was a physically a bigman who was extremely sure of himself.

Twentieth-Century Sculpture: A New Look
- Greatest modernist sculptor was Rumanian artist constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), shaved away detail almost to vanishing point.

Twin Titans Of The Twentieth Century: Matisse and Picasso
- Each inspired a different form of revolt against realism, one of shape, the other of color.
- Henri Matisse delt more with color.
- Belived painting should bring pleasure to viewer.
- Picasso produced an estimated 50,000 works and inventing cubism.
- Blue period 1901-1904; Rose period 1905-1906; Negro period in 1907.

Cubism
- Lasted from 1908 to 1914
- Got name form Matisse's dismissal of a cubist landscape by George Braque as nothing but cubes.
- Analytic Cubism analyzed the form of objects by shattering them into fragments spread out on canvas.
- Synthetic Cubism is a second form of cubism.

Modernism Outside Of France
- Three movements - futurism in Italy, Constructivism in Russia, and Precisionism in the U.S adopted the form of cubism to redefine the nature of art.

Expressionism The Fine Art Of Feeling
- From 1905-1930 Expresionism dominated German art.
- Die Brucke and Der Blane Reither, two groups in Germany, brought expressionism to maturity.
- The used of distorted, exaggerated forms and colors for emotional impact.

Mondrain: History Of Opposites
- Dutch group of artist tried, from 1917 to 1931, to eliminate emotion from art. Lead by Piet Mondrain.
- Called De Stij; which means "The Style"
- Advocated a Severe art of pure geometry.
- Vertical lines represented vitality and horizontal lines tranquility.

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