Fine Arts: Fine Arts 2 Application: Intro To Visual Aud. & Perf. Arts Bo 303

Fine Arts Fine Arts 2 Application: Intro to Visual Aud. & Perf. Arts BO 303

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An Introduction Overview  Art, the product of creative human activity in which materials

are shaped or selected to convey an idea, emotion, or visually interesting form.  The word art can refer to the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, decorative arts, crafts, and other visual works that combine materials or forms.  We also use the word art in a more general sense to encompass other forms of creative activity, such as dance, drama, and music, or even to describe skill in almost any activity, such as “the art of bread making” or “the art of travel.” In this article art refers to the visual arts.

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Defining Art Difficulties   Definition of art that seems correct to many Americans in

the 21st century is likely to differ greatly from definitions of art in non-Western cultures, in tribal societies, and in other historical periods.  Our rather open-ended definition may even sound strange to those in contemporary Western society who expect art to be limited to familiar categories such as painting and sculpture.  Defining art raises problems also in that since the beginning of the 20th century some artists have sought to challenge the very definition of art.  Their art objects may lack the qualities long associated with art, such as beauty, skilled craftsmanship, and clear organization.

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Difficulties

am! by American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Roy Lichtenstein was painte enstein was one of the first artists to develop a style known as pop, hich images from advertising and comic books became the subject matter of ser painting is part of the collection at the Tate Gallery, London. 4

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Difficulties The Navajo people of the Southwest were accomplished weavers. Until the late 19th century, most of their weavings were blankets intended for wearing. They then turned to weaving rugs. This 19thcentury chief's blanket Shane Ryan A. Diaz 5 incorporates the

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Difficulties In addition, during the last quarter of the 20th century,

critics and art historians considered many more types of objects as art. Today, these authorities often speak of “visual culture”—

which may include motion pictures, television, advertising, and comic books—instead of giving special attention to sculpture, painting, or architecture.

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Difficulties  Perhaps the major difficulty in defining art lies in the fact that art

implies value—monetary, social, and intellectual. Large amounts of money may be involved when an object is regarded as art.

 Items like Navajo blankets by anonymous weavers were long

classified as crafts or as cultural artifacts (objects made by humans) rather than as art because of their seemingly nonartistic materials as well as their usefulness, the anonymity and female gender of their makers, and their origins in tribal culture.

 That we are beginning to consider such objects as art is a

reflection of our changing social values.

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Difficulties

This 1959 sculpture by American artist Richard Stankiew shows his characteristic use of discarded metal and machinery. Stankiewicz’s use of these materi influenced many subsequent arti Untitled is part of the collection o National Museum of American Ar in Washington, D.C.

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Difficulties Regarding useful objects made in tribal cultures as

crafts or artifacts would not seem inappropriate if we did not think of these categories as essentially different from painting, sculpture, and other categories considered “high art.” Critics and art historians today often try to avoid this

division between high and low art, substituting for “high art” terms such as “art with a capital A,” “artas-such,” and “serious art.” But these terms still make a distinction.

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Difficulties We could speak instead of “art that is

displayed in museums,” “art that is taught in art history classes,” or “art that art critics can interpret.” These expressions would encompass tribal

objects and give them an intellectual value, no matter who made them or what their intent may have been.

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Is definition necessary? Despite the difficulty in forming a definition for

art, we go to an art museum expecting to see paintings and sculpture, not comic books, loaves of bread, or works by amateurs. Many objects we call “art” represent significant

ideas, but some do not. Someone considered a “serious artist” might even be more interested in marketing his or her products than a designer of industrial products is.

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Is definition necessary? Artists are generally more concerned with how best to

use materials to convey their ideas than with deciding what is or is not art, whereas museum curators and art historians are busier looking for examples of particular types of objects, such as Greek vases or Rembrandt drawings.  It is most important to remember that art is a category with changing boundaries, not only in its general definition but also in its subdivisions. People not only make art, but also choose which objects should be called art.

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Historical View of Art Antiquity: Skill or Technique In ancient Greece, the word techne is the closest

equivalent to art. Techne, which means work or technical skill, can be applied to the fashioning of any sort of object. But the Greeks had a special appreciation of mimesis (the imitation of reality) in painting and of especially pleasing proportions in sculpture and architecture. The ancient Romans used the word ars, but ars still referred to a technique or a method of working, not to the expressive, creative activities that we now associate with art.

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Historical View of Art Antiquity: Skill or Technique Roman

writer Pliny the Elder provides most of our knowledge about artists from the classical (ancient Greek and Roman) period. He wrote about the arts of painting and sculpture in the section on metallurgy in his Natural History. Although Pliny praises the skills of particular painters and sculptors, he does not single out painting or sculpture as being better than pottery, metalwork, or other crafts.

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The Greek temple of Poseidon at Paestum, was constructed in the mid 5th-century BC. Its massive, closely spaced columns are characteristic of the Doric order.

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The Middle Ages: Craftsmanship During the Middle Ages (about 350 to 1450), Christianity

dominated Western culture. Thus the main purpose of the visual arts was to teach people, many of whom could not read, about religion. Art taught by means of delight, drawing people’s attention and helping them understand the spiritual through fascinating forms (whether delicately refined saints or monstrous devils), ornately carved and painted decoration, precious materials (including gold, ivory, and gems), and colored light pouring forth from stained glass.

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Medieval Reliquary During the Middle Ages, the bones and other remains of saints were frequently venerated as relics. Artists would often Shane Ryan A. Diaz 17 create elaborate

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No particular form of art was considered superior

during the Middle Ages. High value was placed on small-scale luxury objects such as illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, and metal objects used in church services. The great medieval cathedrals—buildings that required the skills of hundreds of craftsmen—became the pride of entire cities. Wealthy people decorated their homes with huge tapestries that told stories from mythology.  Even clothing could be elaborately decorated and express a person’s status and moral views.

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The Lady with the Unicorn The Lady with the Unicorn is the name of a series of Franco-Flemish tapestries executed in the late 1400s that constitute an allegory of the five senses. Woven of silk and wool with silver threads, they are remarkable for their profusion of realistic detail. This panel, the sixth, is called “À mon seul désir” (“To my only desire”) after the words written at the top of the tent. The tapestries are in the Cluny Museum in Paris. 19

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The Middle Ages: Craftsmanship  Craftsmen, carefully trained

in specialized medieval workshops, made the objects we now call art.



Our word masterpiece comes from this medieval workshop tradition.

 The term refers to an object made by a craftsman at

the end of his training to show he had acquired the skills to be called a master.  During the Middle Ages a masterpiece could be a

statue, a stained glass window, or a pair of shoes.

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The Renaissance: Genius and Design The importance of skill and craftsmanship continued

well into the Renaissance, a period of artistic and literary revival that began in the 1400s. During the Renaissance, the visual arts were often associated with other trades based upon the type of material they used. For example, in the guilds (trade associations) of 15th-century Italy painters were grouped with doctors because both used chemicals, and sculptors who worked in bronze were grouped with makers of armor.

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The Gates of Paradise are bronze doors created by Italian Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425 and 145 for the east entrance to the baptistery of the Florence Cathedral in It This detail, showing Isaac and Esau, is from one of the doors' ten panels, each of which illustrates a story from the Bible.

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The Renaissance: Genius and Design However, the position of artists began to

change in the 15th century. Painters and sculptors associated informally with poets, who occupied a higher social status because poetry had long been considered a higher art. Books were written to explain the theory of art and architecture, and artists claimed that they were inspired geniuses and not merely workers.

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The Renaissance: Genius and Design  During the 16th century,

Italian theorists began to group architecture, painting, and sculpture as the arts of disegno (“design”)—that is, as creative activities that required an artist to visualize an idea and to transfer this idea to a drawing.  (The Italian word disegno means both design and drawing.) .  Narrative painting told a

story—mythological, historical, or

religious—and thus could teach morals just as literature could.

 This type of painting, called istoria in Italian or history painting in

English, was considered the highest form of painting until the late 19th century.

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The 17th to the 19th Century: The Fine Arts By the 17th century, artists

across Europe were seeking more creative freedom. They viewed the workshops of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as restrictive. Some artists gained freedom by working at the courts of monarchs and the nobility, while others made art to sell directly to individual collectors. Such freedom could mean a loss of artistic quality, however. As a result, art academies became increasingly important as a way to enter into the profession without conforming to guild regulations.

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arles I in Hunting Dress

ish artist Anthony van Dyck was serving ourt painter to King Charles I of England n he painted this portrait in 1635. Dyck’s elegant, refined style had a ng influence on English portraiture. piece is in the collection of the Louvre, ris, France.

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The 17th to the 19th Century: The Fine Arts  Academies emphasized ideas,

particularly ideas that connected the visual arts to the sciences or to literature, fields that enjoyed much higher status than the visual arts.

 At the same time, the academies wanted to separate

themselves from the workshops, where sign painting and figure painting were seen as two variations on the same craft.

 The Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts),

founded in 1648 in Paris, France, especially emphasized this distinction; it gave the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture the name beaux-arts, meaning “fine arts.”

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The 17th to the 19th Century: The Fine Arts The French Academy of Fine Arts made drawing from the

nude the cornerstone of its program, and it had enough influence to force passage of a law that prohibited figure drawing in any workshop other than the Academy.  It considered those visual arts that did not use the human figure as crafts or mechanical arts, with much lower prestige than painting or sculpture. Although the Academy held classes in other subjects, such as perspective, geometry, and anatomy, the working methods of painting and sculpture were taught in the studios of individual academy artists.

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Venus Italian neoclassical artist Antonio Canova is noted for his marble sculptures based on classical models. He created the Venus Italica (1804-1812, Pitti Palace, Florence) to replace an ancient Roman statue known as the Medici Venus, which French emperor Napoleon I had seized from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 1802. The Venus Italica was hailed immediately as Canova’s masterpiece.

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The 19th Century: SelfExpression The French Academy of Fine Arts enjoyed special favors from the

French government, and because of this connection it became part of the establishment (dominant institutions). During the 19th century artists in France fought against these institutions. In the early 19th century artists of the romantic movement (Romanticism), such as Eugène Delacroix, emphasized passionate expression. They often chose subjects that criticized the government, although their method of painting generally followed academic principles of composition and technique.

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ading the People

tic painter Eugène Delacroix was inspired to paint Liberty Leading the Pe tion of 1830, which ended France's absolute monarchy. 31

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The 19th Century: SelfExpression At mid-century Gustave Courbet and other French

artists promoted their individuality: They not only chose subjects that the government might see as offensive, but also used techniques and compositions that went against academic teaching. Starting in the 1860s Édouard Manet and the painters who became known as impressionists (see Impressionism) broke away from the Academy and established alternatives to government-sponsored exhibitions and competitions.

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The 19th Century: SelfExpression These alternatives eventually evolved into the modern

commercial gallery system in which artists provide works to dealers who exhibit and sell the works to any buyer who can afford them. The idea that artists should express their own subjective experience—what they personally feel about a theme or subject—became firmly established in the 19th century. Already in the 18th century some artists had reacted against the lack of feeling in most of the art of their time.

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Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) by Édouard Manet was painted in 1863. When it was first displayed, the rough brushwork and undefined areas of color were as distressing to the public as the nude woman who was neither a classical goddess nor a symbol in an allegory. Manet claimed that the real subject of the painting was light, and it was that philosophy that gave birth to impressionism. 34

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The 19th Century: SelfExpression The

romantic movement continued this antiestablishment trend through its emphasis on passion, imagination, and escape from reality. Around the middle of the 19th century artists of the realist tradition (see Realism) reacted against the subjective expression of romanticism and demanded a return to depicting the actual appearance of things. 35

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The 19th Century: SelfExpression This response led in the 1860s and 1870s to efforts by

the impressionists to record light and color as we see them. Their interest in light and color provided a way for artists of the next generation to express what they felt —not what they saw—through even purer (unmixed), bolder colors (see Postimpressionism). The idea that art should be a form of self-expression has remained an important part of our definition of art to this day.

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The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms In the 20th and 21st centuries

many trends have developed, including some that seek to destroy our definitions of art. Artists of the dada movement, which flourished in the early 20th century, created works and sponsored events that pointed out the absurdity of all definitions. One of the most famous dada works was exhibited in 1917 by French-born artist Marcel Duchamp: a urinal turned on its back, titled “Fountain,” and signed with a fictitious name (R. Mutt) that plays on the urinal manufacturer’s name (J. R. Mott) rather than Duchamp’s own name.

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Smithson’s Spiral Jetty Robert Smithson was one of the pioneering artists of the earthworks movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In Spiral Jetty (1970), one of the best-known earthworks, Smithson explored time and entropy—the tendency toward disorder in nature. Spiral Jetty, a narrow coil of black rock edged in salt, extends about 460 m (500 yds) into the Great Salt Lake in Utah and is periodically submerged by water. 38

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The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms Pop artists revived the dada spirit during the

1960s, with Jasper Johns’s painted flags and Andy Warhol’s painted soup can labels. Contemporary artists, aware of earlier traditions, can choose to work in traditional media (including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and now photography), combine media (collage and assemblage), or avoid the traditional categories entirely.

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The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms For example, some artists create so-called

environments that we can walk around or through. Others, such as Bulgarian-born Christo and American Robert Smithson, have rearranged the natural landscape in ways that cannot really be called architecture, landscape architecture, or sculpture.

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Bicycle Wheel

French-born artist Marcel Duchamp changed the course of modern art in 19 by exhibiting a bicycle wheel turned up down and mounted on a kitchen stool. Bicycle Wheel was the first of Duchamp so-called ready mades, ordinary objects he turned into objects of art by changin their context and exhibiting them as sculpture. Shown here is a 1964 replica of the original, which is now los 41

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The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms Art critics have coined the terms land art and earthworks

for such endeavors. Still other artists have focused attention on the monetary value we give to what we call art, by creating works that cannot be sold, as some conceptual artists did in the last decades of the 20th century (see Conceptual Art). Artists today can ignore the line that the academies drew to separate fine art from craft, or they can affirm essential differences between one art form and another according to their beliefs.

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ART IN NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES Other Purposes While the study of world

art can broaden our way of thinking about art in general, it can also present difficulties to those trained in the Western tradition. First, Westerners tend to impose Western categories and Western values on the art of other cultures. African masks, for example, have been admired for at least a century by Western collectors, who see them as forms of sculpture to be hung on walls and admired for their powerful abstract qualities.

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ART IN NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES Other Purposes But in an African society, masks are only one part of a

ritual dance, which involves elaborately costumed performers who take on specific roles that dramatize important social interactions. For these societies the mask has value and symbolic meaning only while it is used in the dance. The mask has no special distinction as a sculpture, while the ritual dance does not distinguish between the visual arts, dance, music, and theater within it.

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Bwa Masked Dancers Several different masks are shown here in a Bwa dance ceremony. The Bwa, who live in Burkina Faso and Mali, perform mask ceremonies on occasions such as market days, funerals, or the initiation of young people into adulthood. Each mask takes the form of an animal, and represents a spirit that is thought to inhabit the surrounding forests, rivers, and bush country. A Bwa performer dances to drums while wearing a mask and a costume made of raffia. The mask dance honors the spirits, and thereby helps enlist the spirits' help in protecting the village against evil forces. 45

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ART IN NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES Other Values Even when the art of a non-Western culture

seems quite similar to Western art, aspects of it may be valued quite differently. For example, during the Northern Song period in China (960-1126), respected artists with individual styles made brush paintings of landscapes and other subjects comparable to those found in Western art.

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ART IN NON-WESTERN SOCIETIES Other Values Western viewers might note differences in brushwork or in the illusion of threedimensional space in the Chinese works but would tend to overlook other differences that have no counterpart in the Western tradition. Yet in Chinese art, individual strokes of ink themselves conveyed meaning and were not simply a way to represent the subject, as in Western art.

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Other Values Artists in China were carefully trained to form a variety of

strokes, a skill very close to the art of calligraphy. This skill points to another fundamental difference between Chinese art and Western art: Chinese writings about art set calligraphy above all other art forms, rather than painting (as Westerners think of it), sculpture, and architecture. Chinese artists even thought of the ink stone on which they prepared their inks as an art object in itself, whereas Western painters give little thought to how their tubes of paint or palettes look.

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Bird and Flower Painting Emperors of the Northern Song dynasty established an imperial academy of painting, and were active patrons of the arts. Paintings of birds and flowers were especially popular with the court. Hawk and Pheasant (early to mid-12th century, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington) is by Li Anzhong, a painter in the imperial academy who was known for his detailed renderings of birds.

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Avoiding Misconceptions Another difficulty in looking at the art of other cultures

is a tendency to oversimplify—that is, to see all the art of a wide area as the same or else to see it as fundamentally opposite from ours. In thinking about Chinese art and Western art, we should keep in mind that art in China forms a continuous tradition dating back about 5,000 years. The Western tradition, in contrast, is generally said to start with Greek art in the 8th century BC, making it little more than half as old as Chinese art.

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Avoiding Misconceptions

Soldiers of the Imperial Bodyguard These terra-cotta figures form part of 6,000 life size models of soldiers and horses that were made in 210 BC for the tomb of Emperor Shi Huangdi of the Qin dynasty in China. They were originally painted in bright colors. The burial mound, in the northern province of Shaanxi, was discovered in 1974 and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. 51

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Avoiding Misconceptions Whereas Western viewers might regard Chinese art as

unchanging, Chinese art in fact reflects the many changes in cultural centers, political systems, and religious beliefs through the centuries. With African art, Westerners tend to think solely of the art of Africa south of the Sahara, omitting Egyptian art and the Christian art of Ethiopia. Another tendency is to think of all the different cultures of Africa as the same—and totally unlike the so-called civilized cultures of the European tradition.

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Avoiding Misconceptions Until recently, anthropologists studied African art more

often than art historians did, and scholars compared it to the art of prehistoric people or children. In several African languages, however, words used to describe art translate into English as “accomplishment, skill, and value,” “things made by hand,” and “things to look at.” The first two definitions are quite comparable to European definitions of art until the Renaissance, whereas the last is closer to Western definitions of art from the 18th century on.

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Benin Bronze Plaque The kingdom of Benin (12th century to 17th century), in what is now Nigeria, produced some of Africa’s finest artwork. A bronze plaque from the kingdom shows military figures in high relief.

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Avoiding Misconceptions Africa has famous individuals

who make art, just as Europe and the Americas do, and African art over the centuries has also displayed stylistic change and innovation. Some aspects of African art remain similar from one culture to another, such as a tendency to create abstract (simplified and generalized) forms or a preference for three-dimensional art over painting.

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Avoiding Misconceptions There are, however, great differences in

the arts of the different African regions and cultures. A number of books on African and other non-Western cultures have addressed Western misconceptions and raised awareness of the vast variety and richness of art traditions throughout the world.

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That’s all for tonight class! 

Thank you for listening

Introduction Historical View of Fine Art

Anitquity: Skill or Technique The Middle Ages: Craftsmanship The Renaissance: Genius and Design The 17th to the 19th Century: The Fine Arts The 19th century: Self-Expression The 20th and 21st Centuries: New Media, New Art Forms

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Defining Arts

Difficulties Is a definition necessary Art in non-western societies Other Purposes Other values Avoiding misconceptions

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