¨To become a truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.¨
Giorgio de Chirico
Imagine you are in a tomb, an Egyptian tomb, and you're looking the pictures painted and carved on the walls. You see warriors with bows hunting, servants plowing in the fields, falcon and jackal-headed gods, kings and queens sitting in their palace, musicians playing music. Egyptians loved to make art. The Egyptians made statues, reliefs, paintings, pottery, jewelery, sculptures and coffins. They made art for gods, kings and queens, and for the dead in their tombs. Their beliefs and religion were often drawn on paintings like their predictions of what the afterlife was like, or pictures of gods doing certain things. Egyptian art was very delicate and beautiful. Influence
The Egyptians were influenced by many things. Their religion and beliefs were shown in most of their paintings. Paintings had pictures of gods and goddesses doing different activities. Colored portraits made predictions of the afterlife they believed in. Nature and everyday activities were main subjects too.
Hieroglyphics
Egyptian language in writing was called hieroglyphics. Because of its importance to the culture, this written and painted language was also an art form for the Egyptians. Hieroglyphics was a system with 24 alphabetic characters. Vowels wouldn’t be written down. Instead they had phonograms and ideograms. Hieroglyphics were carved or painted. But for everyday purposes, they used a simple cursive form of hieroglyphics called hieratic. The picture writing, hieroglyphics was used for religious writings and for inscriptions on monuments. There were about 750 different hieroglyphs. It took as much as twelve years to learn to write in the Egyptians script. Many artists and scribes started learning at the age of four! They wrote on papyrus scrolls using colored inks and pens made from the softened ends of reeds.
Art Forms Egyptians had several kinds of art forms. Mummy cases, or sarcophaguses, were built for the bodies of kings or important people. They believed that the body went to an afterlife and the sarcophagus was to be a beautiful and valuable place for the body to rest. The body was wrapped in white bandages then it was put in its own case with a unique design. But the more significant people were given more than one case, which were piled inside each other. Another interesting art form was relief art. In relief art, the picture was carved into layers to give a raised look. In the Old and Middle Kingdom, reliefs were made in soft limestone. During the New Kingdom sandstone was used. Reliefs showed every kind of activity, from feasting to working, from learning to dancing. Statues were another common art form Egyptians liked making. Most were of gods, goddesses, pharaohs, and queens. The statues could be made small or large. Statues were not suppose to copy nature, but they were meant to be symbols of the people's beliefs. Statues always had to be youthful figures. The paintings and drawings of Egyptian people look flat and strange, because they were painted in a particular way. I mportant people were painted larger than others. Heads were shown from front view. Eyes and the top half of the body were shown from the front, but arms and legs were shown from the side, so that they were easier to see.
Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions.[1] This method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:
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In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Tony Godfrey, author of "Conceptual Art" (1998), asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art[3], a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, "Art after Philosophy" (1969). The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of (the influential art critic) Clement Greenberg's vision of Modern art during the 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and the English Art & Language group began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible (see below). One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects.[4][5][6] Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, in popular usage, particularly in the UK, "conceptual art" came to denote all contemporary art that does not practise the traditional skills of painting and sculpture.[7] It could be said that one of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself. As the artist Mel Bochner suggested as early as 1970, in explaining why he does not like the epithet "conceptual", it is not always entirely clear what "concept" refers to, and it runs the risk of being confused with "intention." Thus, in describing or defining a work of art as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as "conceptual" with an artist's "intention."
The work of the Austrian painter and illustrator Gustav Klimt, b. July 14, 1862, d. Feb. 6, 1918, founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Sezession, embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological, and aesthetic preoccupations of turn-of-the-century Vienna's dazzling intellectual world.
He has been called the preeminent exponent of ART NOUVEAU. Klimt began (1883) as an artist-decorator in association with his brother and Franz Matsoh. In 1886-92, Klimt executed mural decorations for staircases at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; these confirmed Klimt's eclecticism and broadened his range of historical references. Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of modernist architects and artists who organized their own exhibition society and gave rise to the SECESSION MOVEMENT, or the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. He was also a frequent contributor to Ver Sacrum, the group's journal.
Adele Bloch-Bauer I
1907 (140 Kb); Oil and gold on canvas, 138 x 138; Austrian Gallery, Vienna
Adele Bloch-Bauer clasping her hands (she had a deformed finger). Dressed in gold, surrounded by gold. A very gold picture.
The Tree of Life
1909
by Gustav Klimt
The Tree of Life is an important symbol in nearly every culture. With its branches reaching into the sky, and roots deep in the earth, it dwells in three worlds- a link between heaven, the earth, and the underworld, uniting above and below. It is both a feminine symbol, bearing sustenance, and a masculine, visibly phallic symbol- another union.
Among the important decorative projects undertaken by Klimt were his celebrated Beethoven frieze (1902; Osterreichische Galerie), a cycle of mosaic decorations for Josef Hofmann's Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905-09), and numerous book illustrations.
1907-08 (100 Kb); 180 x 180 cm (71 x 71 in); Österreichisches Galerie Wien, Vienna
Man leaning over and kissing kneeling woman. All shrouded in symbolically patterned gold. A bed of flowers below them.The Kiss is a fascinating icon of the loss of self that lovers experience. Only the faces and hands of this couple are visible; all the rest is great swirl of gold, studded with colored rectangles as if to express visually the emotional and physical explosion of erotic love.
Danae
1907 (90 Kb); Private collection, Graz
Danae, seemingly underwater, thighs drawn up. Gold and silver seminal flow rising between her legs. Very erotic.
The legend concerns her mating with Zeus in the form of a gold shower, to conceive Perseus, which is depicted here. The eroticism is highly intentional: the red hair, etc. The small black rectangle is Klimt's reduction of maleness to an abstract symbol.
The primal forces of sexuality, regeneration, love, and death form the dominant themes of Klimt's work. His paintings of femmes fatales, such as Judith I (1901; Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna), personify the dark side of sexual attraction. The Kiss (1907-08; Osterreichische Galerie) celebrates the attraction of the sexes; and Hope I (1903; National Gallery, Ottawa) juxtaposes the promise of new life with the destroying force of death. The sensualism and originality of Klimt's art led to a hostile reaction to his three ceiling murals--Philosophy (1900), Medicine (1901), and Jurisprudence (1902)--for the University of Vienna.
Judith I
1901 (80 Kb); Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna
Love
1895 (90 Kb); Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna
Detail of a well-dressed woman closing her eyes and abondonning herself to her first kiss. A gypsy-like man looks down on her about to kiss her.
Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L'Estaque in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works "cubes." Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso's ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.
Still life with a bottle of rum
Pablo Picasso
The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.
Violin and Playing cards
Juan Gris
In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or "analyzed" into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During "high" Analytic Cubism (1910–12), also called "hermetic," Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters (1999.363.63; 1999.363.11). Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards (1997.149.12), and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare.
Table by a Window, November 1917 Jean Metzinger (French, 1883–1956) Oil on canvas
During the winter of 1912–13, Picasso executed a great number of papiers collés (1999.363.64). With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their "high" Analytic work. Whereas, in Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or "analyzed" object are reassembled to evoke that same object, in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism—initiated by the papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association.
While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger (1999.363.35), Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris (1996.403.14), Roger de La Fresnaye (1991.397), Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger (59.86), and even Diego Rivera (49.70.51). Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.
The liberating formal concepts initiated by Cubism also had far-reaching consequences for Dada and Surrealism, as well as for all artists pursuing abstraction in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America, and Russia.
Weeping woman (series)
Pablo Picasso
Weeping Woman (series)
Pablo Picasso
Weeping woman (series)
Pablo Picasso
Francois, Claude and Paloma
Pablo Picasso
Francois Gilot
Pablo Picasso
Picture of Francois Gilot
The woman who left Picasso.
Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L'Estaque in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works "cubes." Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso's ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.
Still life with a bottle of rum
Pablo Picasso
The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.
Violin and Playing cards
Juan Gris
In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or "analyzed" into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During "high" Analytic Cubism (1910–12), also called "hermetic," Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters (1999.363.63; 1999.363.11). Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards (1997.149.12), and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare.
Table by a Window, November 1917 Jean Metzinger (French, 1883–1956) Oil on canvas
During the winter of 1912–13, Picasso executed a great number of papiers collés (1999.363.64). With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their "high" Analytic work. Whereas, in Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or "analyzed" object are reassembled to evoke that same object, in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism—initiated by the papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association.
While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger (1999.363.35), Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris (1996.403.14), Roger de La Fresnaye (1991.397), Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger (59.86), and even Diego Rivera (49.70.51). Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.
The liberating formal concepts initiated by Cubism also had far-reaching consequences for Dada and Surrealism, as well as for all artists pursuing abstraction in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America, and Russia.
Stonehenge is a megalithic monument on the Salisbury Plain in Southern England, composed mainly of thirty upright stones (sarsens, each over ten feet tall and weighing 26 tons), aligned in a circle, with thirty lintels (6 tons each) perched horizontally atop the sarsens in a continuous circle. There is also an inner circle composed of similar stones, also constructed in post-and-lintel fashion.
Stonehenge Megaliths
Constructed without the use of draft animals and shaped by stone tools,
Stonehenge was erected many miles from the quarry from which the stones came.
It is an amazing feat of engineering, and many stories, both old ones and retellings, frequently name Merlin as this engineer.
The archaeological evidence at Stonehenge simply does not support an Arthurian date of construction. The archaeology points to a construction date between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago (more than likely, several construction dates over this time). Stonehenge is angled such that on the equinoxes and the solstices, the sun rising over the horizon appears to be perfectly placed between gaps in the megaliths. This is doubtless not an accident, and probably contributed to the stories of its mysterious origins.
One of the great enigmas of planet Earth revolves around a collection of approximately 15,000 pre-Columbian artifacts - the ancient carved gliptolithic rock-library known as the Ica Stones.
They are carved stones supposedly found in a cave in the coastal desert city of Ica, Peru. Ica is a relatively small area, some 300 kilometers from Lima. In the 1960's a farmer claimed to have found piles and piles of rocks deep in various gorges and caves not far from the Nazca Lines. Some were also buried slightly under the ground. The native farmer produced only bags of stones at first, but later, he produced literally thousands of the artifacts. For some time he made a good living selling the stones to tourists.
The farmer became something of a celebrity. Word traveled in the archealogical world, and experts descended on Ica.
The Peruvian government took an interst in the stones. They did not Peru to become another Egypt, overrun with diggers and robbers. They had enough of them already. No one knows what was said to the farmer but after arrest and confinement, he suddenly admitted in writing that the stones were hoaxed and that he had carved the stones himself. He was going to bilk the tourists and never realized it would get out of hand.
In 1966, Dr. Javier Cabrera, the town's physician, received a small, carved rock for his birthday from a native. The carving on the rock looked ancient to Dr. Cabrera, but intrigued him because it seemed to depict a primitive fish.
Dr. Cabrera became the prime customer for the stones, and the farmer apparently had an endless supply. Dr. Cabrera questioned the farmer about carving the stones. The farmer was evasive and maintained his story about created them himself for fear of being arrested again and put in jail for the rest of his life.
When Dr. Cabrera had bought a few thousand he wanted to know how many there were in total. The farmer seemed to produce more every week. Cabrera was beginning to believe that he had fallen prey to this farmer, and the man had created them himself. The farmer refused to discuss how he made the stones. Logically Dr. Cabrerafigured that the farmer would have had to carve one stone every day for over 40 years to produce the total library! This could not be possible. Dr. Cabrera set out to find answers about his Ica Stones based on the designs on the stones.
The stones come in all sizes. There are small ones that can fit in the palm of you hand. There are rocks as large as a dog. All of the stones have images that have been carved with continuous lines etched into the rock surface. The etching reveals a lighter color than the original dark varnish of age, yet the etched grooves also bear traces of this varnish, indicating that the carving was done in ancient times. They are a form of andesite, a gray to black volcanic rock, and a very hard mineral that would make etching quite difficult with primitive tools, a local river rock, covered with a patina of natural oxidation. Laboratories in Germany have authenticated the incisions that make up the carvings as extremely ancient. Nearby fossil finds indicate the area to be replete in bone fragments millions of years old.
Unlike clay figurines that have organic material (i.e. straw) in their composition, there are no organic materials in plain old rock that will tell anything of its age. Traditional radiocarbon dating techniques rely upon organic material (that was once alive) to determine age. The surface of these rocks, however, has a varnish that is the result of bacteria and minute organisms which have adhered to them. A good black varnish or patina will take thousands of years to discolor and coat each stone. Etching these rocks would have removed the existing varnish, revealing the bare rock. Since these rocks have developed additional varnish in the grooves, it seems likely that they have were carved a long time ago.
Dr. Cabrera's library is organized by subject matter including the races of man, ancient animals, lost continents, and the knowledge of a global catastrophe.
There are scenes of natives adorned with robes and high crowns, similar to the Incas, performing medical procedures on patients. Several depict heart and brain transplants.
The stones are clearly carved depicting people
riding dinasours and flying reptiles.
There are stones with genetic codes, and the prolongation of life. Blood vessels are shown being reconnected via re-absorption tubes utilizing the natural regeneration of cells.
There are carvings of a cesearean section with acupuncture as a form of anesthesia.
There are telescopes and
ancient maps and star maps.
There is a series of four stones show the hemispheres of Earth pointing to the existence of unknown continent's that today remains a part of our collective myth.
Dr. Cabrera concluded that there was no way the farmer had time, skills, nor knowledge of how to create the stones. After pruchsing 11,000 stones, Dr. Cabrera became a trusted friend of the farmer. He learned that the man was released from prison once he signed the confession that he was cheating the tourists. He agreed not to pretend the stones came from the hills but that he had indeed carved them himself. It was either that or go to prison for the remainder of his life for selling government possessions (the international antiquity laws).
Dr. Cabrera continued his research with geologists to interpret the maps on several stones showing a weird configuration of the world. Some angles and land masses looked vaguely familiar, but the majority were badly skewered into strange shapes. Geologists have confirmed that based on current computer projections, the shapes indicated on the rocks are indeed accurate for the planet Earth, as it was, about 13,000,000 (million) years ago - pre-stone age.
The Ica Stones will remain an unsolved mystery. Who actually created the Ica Stones? Evidence seems to show it was extraterrestrial visitors - but it will remain an unsolved mystery.
Art Nouveau is an international movement and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that peaked in popularity at the turn of the 20th century (18901905). The name 'Art nouveau' is French for 'new art'. It is also known as Jugendstil, German for 'youth style', named after the magazine Jugend, which promoted it, and in Italy, Stile Liberty from the department store in London, Liberty & Co., which popularized the style. A reaction to academic art of the 19th century, it is characterized by organic, especially floral and other plant-inspired motifs, as well as highly-stylized, flowing curvilinear forms. Art Nouveau is an approach to design according to which artists should work on everything from architecture to furniture, making art part of everyday life.
Art Nouveau buildings often have asymmetrical shapes, arches and decorative surfaces with curved, plant-like designs.
The son of a coppersmith, Antoni Gaudi was born in Reus, Spain in 1852. He studied at the Escola Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona and designed his first major commission for the Casa Vincens in Barcelona using a Gothic Revival style that set a precedent for his future work.
Over the course of his career, Gaudi developed a sensuous, curving, almost surreal design style which established him as the innovative leader of the Spanish Art Nouveau movement. With little regard for formal order, he juxtaposed unrelated systems and altered established visual order. Gaudi's characteristically warped form of Gothic architecture drew admiration from other avant-garde artists.
Although categorized with the Art Nouveau, Gaudi created an entirely original style. He died in Barcelona in 1926.
A fragment (going on a loop) of the film of Jackson Pollock painting - shot by Hans Namuth (1950) and released as "Jackson Pollock 51" (1951). Sound is not synchronous. Available (with another short clip and a text transcript of Pollock's comments) at http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/pr...
Pollocks paintings are not about something in the way that da vinci's paintings are. He is trying to illustrate the intangible. The man had the guts to put himself on a canvas and display it. He's finding himself through painting, putting everything, his whole life on a canvas, You have to appreciate that if for no other reason, because you would be too frightened to do it yourself.
In the December 1952 issue of ARTnews, Harold Rosenberg coined the term, “action painting.” The term characterizes artists who first and foremost see the canvas as a space for action. Jackson Pollock is the artist who best illustrates the techniques of action painting.
The bold colors, movement and individuality of Jackson Pollock paintings are recognizable worldwide. His technique of “dripping” paint onto a canvas created a number of famous works that earned him considerable acclaim. Pollock’s paintbrush would dance above the canvas and express his emotions and feelings without having to touch the canvas.
Action painting refers to a style that resembles performance art, whereby the artist freely lets go and unleashes emotion. It is in the performance of action painting that a plot is created by the artist. However, there is no central motif. Action painting tells a story without the use of a central image, merely through action. The painting Lavender Mist, unveiled by Pollock in 1950, is one of the most famous Jackson Pollock paintings. The canvas which is 10 feet wide displays paint that has been dripped and splattered over every inch. Lines of color move in every direction, and the imprint of Pollock’s hands which have been dipped in paint appear at the top right corner of the canvas. The eye frantically attempts to take in the sheer magnitude of the painting and is unable to rest. Because his paintings were created through action, the process of viewing them must also involve an active process.
It is debatable whether action painting is an accurate way to describe the technique that Pollock famously used. The Jackson Pollock paintings do illustrate a technique that was not bound by restrictions of space or convention. Certainly, Pollock’s abstract expressionist style of painting broke many conventions and was heavily influenced by cubism and surrealism. Pollock himself was uninterested in labels or definitions; he simply wanted to authentically and freely express his emotions. When asked about technique he replied, “It doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.”
This is a very interesting example of sound sculpture.
The Singing Ringing Tree is a wind powered sound sculpture resembling a tree set in the landscape of the Pennine mountain range overlooking Burnley, in Lancashire. The collection of tubes makes the strangest sounds when the wind blows, which is often round the location at Crown Point, on the moorland overlooking Burnley. Seen in the background is Pendle Hill, famous for the PENDLE WITCHES. Maybe in the sculpture, the myth lives on.
Barton Rubenstein creates indoor and outdoor modern sculpture with and without water for public and private spaces. These include corporate, commercial and academic institutions as well as private residences. He typically works with bronze, stainless steel, stone and glass.
Fascinated with various elements of nature, Rubenstein focuses on water, kinetics, light, and suspension to create sculpture that surprise and challenge the viewer. "The goal of my artwork is first to create a level of intrigue, and then to allow for the gradual discovery of its secrets and complexities."
Pop Art is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop art developed in the late1950's as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and flourished in the sixties and early seventies. Pop Art favored figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as Campbell Soup cans, comic strips and advertisements. The movement eliminated distinctions between "good" and "bad" taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques.
Famous for his original works of art due to his amazing wood-carving talent, Constantin Brancusi (1876 -1957) left an important and unique heritage behind, a free spirit of a genius confident in his own uniqueness, who considered that "Nothing can grow under big trees." See more about his life and art. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/the-story-of-a-genius-constantin-brancusi.html
Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created more than 20,000 works. Picasso's genius manifested itself early: at the age of 10 he made his first paintings, and at 15 he performed brilliantly on the entrance examinations to Barcelona's School of Fine Arts.
Duchamp was a French-American artist often associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements of the 1920s. His paintings and sculptures served to break down prevailing notions about "fine art" and deliver poignant political and social critiques of mainstream and "highbrow" culture. He developed the term "readymade" to refer to found objects chosen by the artist as art.
Modern sculptures have evolved since ages and changed their forms since decades. Today, modern sculptures are available in many types making them highly appreciable and exciting. Here are some striking characteristics of modern sculptures.
wall art sculpture
•One striking feature of modern sculptures is that these can be practiced outdoors. They can be accomplished in full view of all spectators providing them a quick look of the creativity involved in the making. Modern sculptures are of many forms in which the most accepted form is the wall art sculptures, usually used as beautiful decorative items.
Fish - ice sculpture
•Ice sculptures are an important aspect of modern sculptures. These are very rare types of formation where the main raw material used in making is ice. Ice Sculptures are accepted in a lot of countries such as China, Canada, Russia and also Sweden. Snow sculptures are a new variety of the snow sculptures designed specially by carving out a piece from a single block of solid snow. Snow, which is used in the making of modern sculptures, is used in a densely packaged form.
Kinetic Sculpture
•Kinetic Sculptures is another form of modern sculptures which are designed for moving freely. You will find such sculptures in different entertainment zones and theatres.
•Sound sculptures are sound systems and are designed to produce some great kind of sound depending on the environment on which they are used. These sound sculptures are usually site specific and are designed keeping in mind the requirement of the place. They are best placed in hotels, restaurants, shopping malls and in theaters.
art toys
•Art toys are one of the most striking characteristics of every contemporary art form. The idea of having sculptures with toy motifs have become a common feature now. The use of such a format by artists started becoming prominent since 1990s today, Art toys are one of the best representations of modern art.
The principles of art help artists plan their art and think about how other people will react to the artwork. The principles are balance, contrast, proportion, pattern, rhythm, emphasis, unity, and variety.
Understanding the elements and principles of art helps people talk and think about art.
To see examples of the principles of art click on the following link:
Modern architecture is characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. The first variants were conceived early in the 20th century. Modern architecture was adopted by many influential architects and architectural educators, gained popularity after the Second World War, and continues as a dominant architectural style for institutional and corporate buildings in the 21st century.
Some historians see the evolution of Modern architecture as a social matter, closely tied to the project of Modernity and thus the Enlightenment. The Modern style developed, in their opinion, as a result of social and political revolutions.
Others see Modern architecture as primarily driven by technological and engineering developments, and it is true that the availability of new building materials such as iron, steel, and glass drove the invention of new building techniques as part of the Industrial Revolution.
By the 1920s the most important figures in Modern architecture had established their reputations. The big three are commonly recognized as Le Corbusier in France, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany.
Modern architecture is usually characterized by:
Bailey House, Case Study # 21
an adoption of the principle that the materials and functional requirements determine the result
an adoption of the machine aesthetic
an emphasis of horizontal and vertical lines
a creation of ornament using the structure and theme of the building, or a rejection of ornamentation.
a simplification of form and elimination of "unnecessary detail"
Melnikov House in Abbat Street in Moscow, by Konstantine Melnikov.
an adoption of expressed structure
Form follows function
The Seagram Building, New York City, 1958. One of the finest examples of the functionalist aesthetic and a masterpiece of corporate modernism.
The term Neo-Impressionism refers to a pictorial technique where color pigments are no longer mixed either on the palette or directly on canvas, but instead placed as small dots side by side. Mixing of colors takes place from a suitable distance, in the observor's eye, as an "optical mixture".
In the early 1880s, French painter Georges Seurat studied writings on color theory by French chemists Eugène Chevreul (1786-1889), Charles Henry, and American physicist Ogden Rood, and invented a new painting technique that he named "separation of color" or "Divisionism", the main advantage of which is to give a greater vibrancy of color.
Seurat's first large painting (206x305cm) "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" - 1884-1886 may be considered as the founding masterpiece of Divisionism.
Op Art relies on optical illusions and is sometimes called optical art or retinal art. Op painters and sculptors used geometric designs in order to create feelings of movement or vibration, sometimes in vibrant colors and other times in simply black and white. The movement had its origins in the work of Victor Vasarely, who created tessellations and work with shocking perspectives. It also developed from the Abstract Expressionist movement that discredited the importance of subject matter. The term was coined in 1964 by Time magazine. A major Op Art exhibit in 1965, titled “The Responsive Eye,” caught the public interest. As a result, the style began appearing in print, television, advertising, album art, fashion, and interior decorating. Despite Op Art’s popularity, it never became a full-fledged mass movement of modern art like Pop Art.
Op Art’s primary goal was to fool the eye. Works were composed to create the illusion of movement, although all Op Art pieces were flat and two-dimensional. Based on geometry, Op Art is almost completely non-representational. The color, line, and shapes were chosen for the purposes of illusion and not to evoke any emotion or mood. Colors and perspective and chosen carefully to achieve the desired effect, and both positive and negative spaces are of equal importance in the composition.
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