Art in ancient egypt

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

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:

“	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.	”
—Sol LeWitt[2]

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."

Gustav Klimt

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.



Judith II



Secrets from Ancient Egypt

All You Need to Know about Conceptual Art