Exploring Modern Art Movements and Styles

Hey guys, today we're going to talk about the history of modern art. Modern art includes works that were created between the years 1860 and 1970. And the reason we are focusing on this time period is because it marks a drastic change and period of experimentation that begins in the span of art history. So when comparing work that was made before and after this period, you'll notice that we go from images that look fairly realistic to these bizarre abstract representations of our subjects. This is mostly due to the invention of the camera and the widespread use of photography that began around 1850. So rather than artists being responsible for recording history as accurately as possible, they can now start experimenting with aesthetics. Aesthetics refers to the philosophy of beauty carried by certain individuals and subcultures. So like there are punk rock aesthetics, there are goth aesthetics or whatever. It all refers to the way things look and, you know, the certain things that people honor visually within those subcultures. So artists from different art movements have a certain aesthetic. Another word that I'm going to use is avant-garde, and that refers to things that are ahead of their time and not quite yet understood or embraced by the majority. One example of this is in The Hunger Games when Katniss is taken to the Capitol. Like the people she meets there have this sort of avant-garde aesthetic about them. You know, the crazy outfits, the poofy multicolored hairdos. They are supposed to appear as though they are this highly advanced metropolis ahead of their time. So many modern artists were considered avant-garde and their styles were more or less hated and rejected by the public. People didn't understand it, they didn't find it to be aesthetically pleasing. You know, Hitler especially hated modern art. He called it degenerate art. It was deemed unacceptable to him and as a result much of it was burned and destroyed as the Nazis came into power during the Second World War. When you look at the styles that appear over the course of modern art you'll notice a definite pattern. Like seriously take a moment and flip through your packet. Compare movements with those that came before and after and you'll see this pattern of like tension and release. We have this very complex, very ornate decorative style followed by a style that is by contrast very abstract and simplified. This happens in fashion, in music, trends that people follow. You know, in order for something to appear totally new and different, it must contrast with its predecessor. So that's what that's all about. And then there are different reasons for creating art. There are personal and cultural functions of art. We see how these fit into the movements that we study. You know, people make art for spiritual and religious purposes, to honor people that they consider good or noble. They also make art for political purposes, to speak passionately about their beliefs. or the beliefs of their culture. They also keep a record of history and commemorate events. Sometimes art is made for purely aesthetic purposes, you know, like I want to hang something beautiful on the wall, I'm going to paint a picture. Also for self-expression, like how do I express who I am and what I'm feeling through a visual medium. What can you get through studying art history? Well, art nears society, right? And in addition to the satisfaction and pleasure it affords, A study of art can help you gain a better understanding of yourself and those around you. You could begin studying works created by artists representing cultures and time periods different from your own, and by studying the creative expressions of artists from all backgrounds, you could become aware of the beliefs, ideas, feelings of other people of various ethnic origins, religions, or cultures. It may surprise you to learn by studying art you prepare yourself for an active role in keeping your culture alive. Artists, writers, and musicians cannot hope to accomplish this task alone. They require your support as a part of a knowledgeable and appreciative audience. Okay, the first movement we're going to look at is Impressionism. And I want to go over some of the pronunciations of artist names. Like, you know, the one that looks like Monet is actually Monet. There's Manet. They're two different artists. Degas and Renoir. So that's how you say those names that you're seeing. Impressionist artists mostly look to capture the effect of light on objects. So, you know, Monet would sit out in the field and he would look at haystacks, right? And he would observe the way that light played off of the grains and whatever in the haystacks at different times during the day. Like how did this haystack look in the morning compared to how it looks at three o'clock in the afternoon or whatever. So, you know, they were interested in light. They also wanted to capture their impression of a subject rather than like painting it totally accurately. You'll notice that in Impressionist paintings they use a lot of like light pastel colors and their brush strokes are really choppy. They say about Impressionist painting like if you look at it from far away the picture makes sense but if you get up close you know it just looks like a series of like brush strokes and blobs of paint and whatever so that's Impressionism. So Impressionism started in France, but there was also some connections in Pennsylvania. Like there was actually a school in Pennsylvania, it was an Impressionist school. It was down by New Hope, that's like outside the Philly area, in Bucks County, near the Delaware River. One of the big names that we associate with the New Hope Impressionists is Walter Emerson Baum. And Baum painted landscapes from around his home in the Delaware Valley. You'll see lots of barns and fields and, you know, like scenes of the river around his home. He's kind of a big deal in southern Pennsylvania and in the Lehigh Valley. There's a school named after him in Allentown. It's the Baum School of Art. Another name that we associate with Pennsylvania impressionists is Mary Cassatt. And Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania. She painted pictures of the private lives of women, particularly the bonds between mothers and children. However, Mary Cassatt left for France and she spent most of her life over there, so she was hanging out with the French Impressionists and not really part of the same scene that Baum was a part of, although I assume that she was probably influenced by it in one way or another. Take a look at some of these prints and notice how closely they resemble the aesthetics of Japanese prints. This is going to be pretty significant and I'll talk about that later on in the lecture. When Mary Cassatt went to Paris, she met Edgar Degas, and Degas was noted for being a painter of ballet dancers. Half of his paintings are of dancers. What's unique about them and kind of like avant-garde is that they express a very voyeuristic viewpoint, right? And we know that a voyeur is somebody that watches other people without them knowing about it. Well, if you take a look at all of the dancers in these paintings, none of them seem like they're aware that they're being watched. you know they're sort of being painted without their permission. Edward Manet was another famous French impressionist. His works are of cafe scenes and social life in 19th century Paris and they represent the observations of a French flaneur. A flaneur is like a leisurely street idler, like an urban explorer, you know just a guy that kind of hangs out. They're based on sketches that he executed on the spot. And they're referred to as painted snapshots of bohemianism. So those are people that are living like sort of artsy, non-traditional lifestyles as compared to like the urban working class and the bourgeoisie, which is just the normal like, you know, upper middle class people. All right. And last but not least, we have Pierre Auguste Renoir. And Renoir was... like he was the big name in impressionism like a lot of people just immediately think of him when you say the word impressionism these are some of his paintings the next movement that i want to talk about is post-impressionism and the post-impressionist extended impressionism while rejecting its limitations they continued using vivid colors often thick application of paint and real-life subject matter but they were more inclined to emphasize like geometric forms and to distort form for expressive effects They also used unnatural or arbitrary color. So George Seurat and Paul Signat were two artists that experimented with the science of color mixing. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Chate was the one by George Seurat, and The Portrait of Felix Feignon is by Paul Signat. They used a technique that they developed called pointillism, and if you look really closely at both of the paintings, you will notice distinct dots of pure color. So rather than mixing colors before applying them to the canvas, they relied on color theory. So like, you know, they put primary colors next to one another so that when viewed from far away, they blended to create like secondary hues, you know, like blue dots next to yellow dots, make sort of a greenish hue. The next artist on our list is described as a self-taught genius and best known for his paintings of jungle scenes. Henry Rousseau never left France or saw a jungle. He composed these paintings based on observations of animals at the local zoo. So he would just visit the public gardens near his home to gather samples of tropical leaves, and even like look through picture books and everything. And he would compose these like really elaborate jungle scenes. And a large percentage of his paintings feature animals attacking other animals. So that's pretty interesting. The next artist is Cezanne, and he was interested in the simplification of forms to their geometric essentials. Cezanne was an important artist because he paved the way for later art movements where forms are being totally abstracted into basic shapes. We'll look at that when we talk about Picasso, but Cezanne was the forerunner of that, and you could see the attention that he gives to shapes in his still lifes and landscape paintings. Everyone knows Van Gogh as the Dutch artist who suffered from severe mental illness and ate chemical Latin paint straight from the tube. Van Gogh supposedly only sold one painting in his lifetime, which was the Red Vineyard. It was for 400 francs, which is about like sixteen hundred dollars in our day and age. Today, seven of his paintings alone, however, sold for over seven hundred and nineteen million dollars. So that's a sad irony for this artist who died impoverished and very unappreciated. Van Gogh is also well known as the artist that cut off his own ear. That's how insane he was. This was over an argument with his close friend, Paul Gauguin, which is the next artist we'll be looking at. Vince had gone angry at Paul and he severed the ear and then sent it in a box to a bar where Paul was hanging out. So he did this just to prove a point. So... Here is a self-portrait painted by Vincent when he had his ear bandaged after he had cut it off. So we conclude that he was somewhat unbalanced, but also that from tragedy and despair can come very beautiful, very moving artwork. He also creates some of the groundwork for Expressionism, which is a later movement in which artists sought to create paintings that expressed strong emotion. Anyway, Vincent's friend... the artist Paul Gauguin left his wife and children and moved to the island of Tahiti, where he spent his life painting self-portraits and portraits of the Tahitian natives. Gauguin's paintings sparked people's interest in primitivism, which is synonymous with native art. So under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, he reduced his forms to areas of pure color, separated by heavy black outlines. And you can especially see the folk influence and his use of arbitrary color, like random color, in this print titled The Yellow Christ. Another artist who distorted color somewhat is Henry Day Toulouse-Lautrec. And check out this painting of a nightclub scene. You will notice the greenish tones that he's using in this woman's face. That was kind of unusual at the time. Lautrec painted pictures depicting Paris nightlife. He was a wealthy aristocrat and had a bit of an eccentric personality. This was his scene. You know, he ended up designing posters and advertisements for the Moulin Rouge and the famous dancer Jane Avriel. So these are all the people that he was surrounded by on a nightly basis. So that's it for post-impressionists. The next two topics that I'm going to cover are Art Nouveau and Art Deco. And they are not actually considered art movements, but rather art styles. And I'm covering them because I noticed that a lot of folks get them mixed up. Like people will refer to, you know, things that are very obviously Art Nouveau, they'll call them Art Deco and vice versa. So anyway, I'm here to explain the difference. Art Nouveau was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It is French for new art, and it spanned from 1890 to 1910. It extended to the fine arts, art, architecture and the decorative arts. So that's like household objects, you know, like dishes and like fabrics and things like that. It incorporates the use of curvy, free-flowing organic lines and flowery designs. So very nature-influenced. Producing these new designs en masse was made possible by the many technological innovations of the late 19th century. Nouveau was an international style, so there were artists from all over the world that were a part of it. They include Alphonse Mucha, known for his illustrations featuring young women in flowing neoclassical robes, surrounded by halos of lush flowers. Aubrey Beardsley, an English illustrator and author known for his decadent pen and ink Japanese woodcut style drawing. Gustav Klimt, a popular and controversial artist who created single large-scale murals. incorporating glass and tile and gold leaf. Many of his works were lost when the Nazis set fire to the Schloss Immendorf castle where his work had covered the walls. So luckily during Klimt's lifetime he supervised the making of a book that contained printed reproductions of his work. So because of this book that exists we still have color reproductions of some of the lost pieces. Lewis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer famous for his elaborate stained glass pieces. If you've ever heard anyone talk about Tiffany lamps, this is what they are referring to. This last artist is none but the Scottish architect, designer, and watercolorist Charles René Macintosh. His work was considered art nouveau, but contained some of the geometric influences of Art Deco. So... Here's where we get into Art Deco and you will notice a much different aesthetic is at play. Now we have these hard geometric shapes rather than the flea-flowing, flowery, organic look that defined Art Nouveau. The artists that are synonymous with Art Deco are this guy called Cassandra. He was a French-Ukrainian painter and commercial artist known for his bizarre magazine covers and travel posters. We also have the American architect William Van Allen, known for designing the Chrysler building in New York City. And then we have the diversely talented Erte, or Erte, whose designs take a very serious nod to Japanese style prints. He was like a fashion designer. He designed sets for theater. You know, he was all over the place. But anyway, think back to a few minutes ago when I mentioned how Mary Cassatt's prints referenced Japanese designs. Yes. and look at some of the artists that we've covered, you know, from that point. So Aubrey Beardsley, you know, his work was very Japanese influenced, even like Paul Gauguin's stuff, how it was kind of flat and it had those dark outlines. So there's a lot of, you know, this Japanese influence going on in these earlier movements. And this has a lot to do with something called Japanism. After more than 200 years of seclusion, Foreign merchant ships of various nationalities again began to visit Japan. Japan ended this long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the west including photography and printing techniques. So in turn many Japanese ceramics and Yukido prints followed by Japanese textiles, bronzes. enamels and other arts came to Europe and America and soon gained popularity. So we began trading with them again. And there was this big craze and people were collecting Japanese art. So perhaps it's kind of similar to how Japanese anime styles are popular today. So people were way into this and of course it influenced the way that they were creating art. The next few art topics in your packet have ties to the events of World War I and II. You can imagine that people's lives were totally turned upside down by the events of war. You know, cultural artifacts were destroyed, cities were totally bombed out, you know, many people were displaced. And I think many of these movements or styles existed as sort of a coping mechanism, and then others out of the need for society to reconstruct itself and pick up the pieces after war. The first artist that I want to talk about is Pablo Picasso, and he's noted as being one of the founders of a style called cubism. And this is a style in which the artist will depict an object from multiple viewpoints and like mash all of those viewpoints together. It's supposed to represent the subject in a greater context. And the effect is like that we have this broken up, abstracted figure. Also, I get a feeling, although I've never heard an art historian say this, that Picasso had drawn his influence from the ruins of war and the rubble of the burned, bombed out and destroyed cities around him. His figures remind me a lot of broken buildings. But contrary to what people might think about Picasso, he didn't paint this way because he was unable to render his images realistically. He did this on purpose, and here are some of his earlier pieces to prove that. The next few movements that I want to talk about also came out of the events of war. We have constructivism, which was very closely tied to the Russian Revolution that was happening around that time. That included lots of propaganda posters, you know, art in service of social events and, you know, pushing forward the cause of the revolution. We had futurism. which is kind of like cubism aesthetically but only instead of looking at an object from multiple viewpoints we're looking at an object across a period of time so the artists would fragment things like boats or you know bicycles or people to make it appear as though there was a lot of movement going on in the picture and futurism as a movement favored speed technology violence youth culture so everything that um was associated with the new world. They were tossing aside the old order and embracing everything new. Bauhaus was a school of design in which artists tried to reduce all things to their simplest forms. De Stijl meant the style. So the style was meant to have this universal appeal and to reduce design to its simplest forms. It was made accessible to everyone in every culture. And you could see how important this was. You know, after a nation or a country had been torn apart by a war, people needed to come back together and sort of pick up the pieces. So these were movements rooted in beginning again and finding peace. So now that we've spent some time looking at a few of the movements that surrounded World War I and II, I'd like you to look at a couple artists that were around during this time and try to pick out some visual characteristics in their work that ties them to one of the movements that we just talked about. Feel free to pause the video and take your time looking at these slides. Now I'm going to talk about two of my favorite art movements, Dada and Surrealism. Dada came about in 1916. It was an artistic anti-art movement, which meant that the artists involved tried to do all that they could to break the existing rules and conventions that people held regarding art. So they did this by playing a number of art pranks, some of which include the concept of the ready-made. Ready-mades were just found objects that were placed in the context of the gallery, thus elevated to the status of art. Ready-mades are important within the context of art history because they force us to question the criteria that we have regarding the nature of art, like what makes something art and what makes something not art. Another thing that Marcel Duchamp did was he took a postcard of the Mona Lisa and he totally defaced it as a protest against popular art. When he was asked to contribute a work of art to an exhibit, he took two miles of string or like 16 miles of string or whatever it was and he roped off the entire gallery so that nobody could see any of the paintings inside. Dadaists created art according to the laws of chance which meant you know they could take a piece of paper and tear it up into several pieces toss them all in the air and whatever uh wherever they landed they would be glued down and that would become the work of art. They created poetry this way. They would take newspaper articles and cut up all of the words, put the words in a bag, and then draw them out at random. Explored the use of collage. They made these images which they termed photo montages and they were just pictures of people that were created from cut up magazine pages. And many of them were kind of horrific looking and they were supposed to represent images of men that were disfigured in the war. The artist in this photograph is Hugo Ball. Hugo founded the Dada movement. In this picture, he is on stage wearing a cardboard suit that he created and reciting nonsense poetry. And nonsense poetry was just sound poetry. It didn't make any sense. It outraged people because they felt that Hugo was mocking the art of poetry. Last but not least, we have the assemblage. An assemblage was a type of sculpture made of found objects that were put together in unusual ways. And this was very different from how people were making sculpture at that time. Usually they would carve something out of plaster or cast it in bronze. And this was just, like I said, found objects. So avant-garde. So just to reiterate, Dada is an artistic anti-art movement. because it sought to defy conventions and rules that people had regarding art at that time. Okay, so now moving on to surrealism. What does it mean for something to be surreal? Well, it means that it has very dreamlike qualities. Typically, images are rendered in a manner that's very realistic looking, but they're placed in situations that don't quite make sense. Surrealism was inspired by the discoveries of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who did research in like on the subconscious mind and sort of sparked people's interest in examining that and trying to interpret their dreams. So that's where all of this comes from. Some of the famous surrealists that we talk about are Salvador Dali. He was a Spanish surrealist best known for his eccentric personality and the striking bizarre images in his work. We also talk about the artist Frida Kahlo. She was a Mexican surrealist and her body of work includes self-portraits that depict pain and suffering. You know, comment on the pain and suffering she felt in real life due to a terrible traffic accident that she was in. There's also the Belgian surrealist Renée Magritte who was known for witty and thought-provoking images that challenged observers'preconditioned perceptions of reality. We have the Spanish Mexican painter whose style had an allegorical nature and was kind of like Renaissance art, that was Remedios Vero. We have the British surrealist Lenora Carrington, whose works have a somewhat macabre aesthetic, depicting ritual, mysticism, and animals as psychic guides. We have the American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Dorothea Tanning, whose paintings are described as precise, figurative renderings of dreamlike situations. Another really cool artist that I wanted to share with you is M.C. Escher. And M.C. Escher isn't officially a surrealist, but his works have some very surreal qualities. So I'm just going to show you a few slides right here. He's not mentioned in your packet, but he's an artist that you should probably know about. Okay, on to Favism and Expressionism. What is Favism? This was a name given to an art movement in which participants used color in a very non-traditional way. They employed the use of arbitrary color or random color and although this is nothing new to us now, it was very shocking and controversial to people in the early 1900s. So the term fave is French for wild beast because of their random colors and the way in which they applied the paint, art critics thought that they were pretty wild so that's why they were called this. Expressionism was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany as a reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities. People were spending their days working in factories around machinery. Working conditions were not good. The factory environment was soul-crushing. Life was very difficult and not everyone could afford to live comfortably. There was a culture of malaise and depression that sprang up around this. And expressionist artists sought to, above all else, convey strong emotion in their artwork. This is a movement focused on feelings and self-expression. And the two movements overlapped as the expressionist employed the fauve practice of using arbitrary colors so that they were better able to convey strong emotions. A few of the fauve and expressionist artists include Henri Matisse, a French painter and rival of Picasso. He later developed a technique called painting with scissors, so that's what he became best known for later on. and he was just cutting out shapes from colored pieces of paper and arranging them to form pictures. We have the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who did expressive figurative and landscape paintings. They were, of course, labeled degenerate by the Nazis, and many of them were destroyed. There's the Belgian expressionist James Ensor, whose works feature creepy carnivals, masks, puppets. and skeletons. We have Edvard Munch who is best known for his 1893 painting titled The Scream. but also has a variety of other really gorgeous artworks that we seldom see because they are overshadowed by the screen. Kathy Kollwitz, a German artist whose empathy for the less fortunate and victims of poverty, hunger, and war was expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut prints. Wassily Kandinsky was another expressionist who allowed music to guide his paintings. He would listen to records and the lines and colors that he used. apparently represented different parts of the musical composition that he was hearing. He did this using a process called automatism, which meant that he would just let himself zone out and allow his subconscious mind to take over as he was painting. The work of Vossley Kandinsky provides a nice transition into our next movement, which is abstract expressionism. I have mixed feelings about abstract expressionism, but it was an important cultural milestone. for our country because it was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the map in the Western art world. So actually, when you're looking at photos of abstract expressionist work in a textbook or whatever, they look rather unimpressive, like something anybody can do. But some of the pieces are actually kind of breathtaking when you see them in person, because they are done on these really large monumental canvases. And there's a lot of texture that comes forward with the layering of paint. It might look really easy, but when you think about it, it's probably pretty challenging to create an abstract painting that's going to stop somebody in their tracks and get them to really look at and appreciate the work and not just write it off as something like, you know, a kindergarten student can do or whatever. We all know that to abstract something means to break it down into its simplest forms. And we just covered what expressionism is all about. So yeah. If you could define this movement without using the words abstract or expressionism, you would probably describe it as being non-objective work through which the artist seeks to create visual harmony among the elements and principles of design. As you may or may not know, the elements are the basic building blocks of design. They include things such as line, shape, color, texture, value, space, and form. And the principles of design refer to the way in which these basic building blocks are arranged to achieve a sense of balance, variety, movement, rhythm, and emphasis. So even though abstract expressionist work isn't showing us images that are objective or recognizable, we can still make judgments about whether or not the work is good based on how successfully the artist was able to create a unified design or skillfully blend the elements and principles. Anyway, some well-known abstract expressionists include Jackson Pollock, who is famous for his unconventional method of dripping paint onto the canvas, otherwise known as splatter painting. William de Kooning, who is famous for his horrific abstract paintings of women. Mark Rothko, who created the color field painting where one color might slowly blend into another or two contrasting colors might be placed side by side. As I mentioned before, some of the work that doesn't hold up well in a photograph is actually kind of nice when you see it in person. Rothko paintings are like that. They're very calming, and you can stare at them and kind of relax and meditate. Then there's the work of Kai Twombly, which is actually the first abstract expressionist work I remember seeing as a child. My parents took me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I remember seeing these pieces, and they kind of blew my mind as a kid. I made a comment about how they looked kind of like the scribbles and gestures that... my little brother was creating in elementary school and I was really confused by this as a kid. You know, how did this work end up in a museum? This is really weird, etc. We do have a famous abstract expressionist from our area. The artist Franz Klein was born in Wilkes-Barre, PA. There's actually a plaque somewhere downtown dedicated to him. The majority of his work consists of large white canvases that are marked with heavy black lines. And I was kind of surprised when I found these photographs. They actually look kind of nice hanging up on the living room wall. Yeah, so Georgia O'Keeffe is the final artist that I'm going to talk about in the abstract expressionism movement. She's from the Midwest, and she painted close-up images of flowers and animal bones. that looked abstracted because of their scale. So yeah, that's abstract expressionism. And once again, if the abstract expressionists are painting non-objective images exclusively and have no visual references to guide them, they must take into consideration the elements and principles of design in order to make sure that they arrive at an aesthetically pleasing finished piece. At the end of the modern art period, we have pop art, and pop art reflected American life and culture in the 1960s. We were now watching television on a regular basis. We were bombarded by advertising. Pop art has similarities to the concept of the ready-made that we talked about when we were looking at Dadaism. But rather than taking ordinary found objects and elevating them to the status of fine art, they took existing images from pop culture and turned them into art. There was a little bit of irony to doing this. Some of the images that they glorified were elements of kitsch. And kitsch is like a cheesy, mass-produced decorative object, kind of like a plastic flamingo or like the Velvet Elvis paintings. And part of the underlying subtext of this is just that our culture is mass produced, and we are taking a lesser role in creating it. Factories and merchandisers are now doing that for us. So anyway, one of the artists who is famous for appropriating or stealing images from pop culture and turning them into art is Andy Warhol. And Andy was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started as a graphic designer. He was making advertisements in the 1950s. He worked in many different mediums but then discovered the silkscreen process, which is kind of like a stenciling process that was used to print t-shirts and other commercial graphics. He used this process to create paintings and you know that was a new thing at that time. It was very it was very impersonal method of creating art. In fact at one point he had other people printing the art for him and he would just put his name on it. You know another Dada concept that nods to the ready-made. But anyway, Andy Warhol himself was a very popular cultural icon. He cultivated the celebrity personality. He called his art studio the factory and had quite a following among the urban hipsters of New York City who would hang out at the factory and create weird experimental artwork. Next we have James Rosenquist, who was known for being a billboard painter. Eventually he just started creating these large billboard-like paintings featuring vignettes of popular. images that reflected life in the 1960s. Claus Oldenburg was a sculptor famous for making large replications of everyday objects. If you go into Philadelphia, you'll see the Claus Oldenburg clothespin on display outside of City Hall. He also has other things like the giant spoon and cherry bridge in St. Louis. I think it's in St. Louis. And, you know, like... ice cream cones and safety pins. There's these really large sculptures of weird things. We have Wayne Teabod, who was a painter known for his delicious looking images of cakes and pies. They were covered with such a thick layer of paint that it resembled icing. He is less known for his landscape paintings, but I think that they are also very beautiful and worth checking out. Jasper Johns was an artist who used encaustic paints. which are just paints that are combined with wax and have a really thick texture when applied to the canvas. His work features iconic symbols such as numbers, targets, maps, and the American flag. Roy Lichtenstein was also a pop artist. He was famous for taking scenes from comics, enlarging them on canvas, and incorporating what were known as Ben Day dots. They were primary colors that appeared on printed surfaces. in the form of dots back in the 1960s and that was just because of the types of print making procedures that were used. So he emulated those on canvas and created large comic panels which was pretty cool. The 1970s marked the end of pop art. and the end of modern art. There was a transition into post-modernism. Some of the transitional movements or ideas that were occurring at this time include minimalism. The concept of minimalism is to strip everything down to its essential qualities in order to achieve simplicity. All parts or details are considered to be reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design. Some popular minimalist artists include Eva Hesse and Donald Judd. Next we have happenings and performance art. A happening or performance is an event or situation meant to be considered art. Happenings can occur anywhere and are usually planned, but the artists sometimes keep room for improvisation. Improv Everywhere is a comedic performance art group based in New York City. They formed in 2001 and carry the slogan, We Cause Scenes. This group carries out pranks, which they call missions, in public places. The stated goal of each mission is to cause a scene of chaos and joy. Some of the group's missions use hundreds or even thousands of performers, while others utilize only a few. The Best Buy uniform prank involved a team of 80 Improv Everywhere agents who entered a Best Buy store dressed in blue shirts and khaki pants. They answered questions for customers, though denied being an employee if asked. While many of the store's actual employees laughed and took photos of the pranksters, the store's management called the police. After assessing the situation, the police informed the Best Buy staff that they could not do anything except ask the Improv Everywhere agents to leave. the store as there was nothing illegal about wearing a blue polo shirt with khaki pants. Now we'll talk about conceptual art. 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 then the execution of the idea becomes the machine that makes the art. A good example of a conceptual artist is Yukinori Inagi. He's a Japanese artist. He made this piece called World Flag Ant Farm, in which he created a series of interconnecting boxes, each filled with colored sand in the pattern of a national flag. These flags represented the nations of the world. He then released ants into the system, who were able to travel between all of the networked flags, transporting food and sand. Each flag's integrity, being slowly diluted, created a multinational cross-cultural network. Land art or earth art is an art movement in which landscapes and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is also an art form that is created using natural materials such as soil, rock, organic media like logs, branches, leaves, and water. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape, rather the landscape is the means of their creation. Often earth moving equipment is involved. The works frequently exist in the open, located away from civilization, and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Many of the first works created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents. Andy Goldsworthy is a really good example of an earth artist who creates sculptures from natural materials and then creates a photographic record of them before they are destroyed by wind, rain, or left to break down into the environment. Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Sandy Skoglund is a popular installation artist. She'll transform the appearance of a room by painting it a specific color and filling it with animal sculptures in a contrasting color or covering objects within the space using an unusual material such as popcorn. or cheese curls. Like Andy Goldsworthy, the remnants of her work exist only in photographs. Last but not least, we have street art or activist art and much of this stuff is created outside the context of a gallery. It's created in open public spaces and includes a lot of graffiti work that also has kind of a political message surrounding it or like a good social message. Developments in digital photography and the widespread exchange of images via the internet help some of these movements to thrive. A lot of these movements bridge into postmodernism. Postmodernism is pretty difficult to define because the context surrounding it is still incomplete. We're living in it. In general, movements such as installation art, conceptual art, and performance art are described as being postmodern. There are several characteristics which lend art to being postmodern. These include the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation of images, the recycling of past styles and themes in a contemporary context, as well as the breakup of the barrier between fine art, high art, low art, and popular culture. The history of postmodern art is currently under construction. It describes some of the work being created today by contemporary artists, although not all of the work being created today. can be considered postmodern. So Janet Fish is a contemporary artist who is alive and well in producing artwork, although her style is not postmodern. Damien Hirst is another artist alive today producing artwork who is most definitely postmodern. The best way to tell the difference between them is if you look at the work and it leaves you questioning why or asking like what's the point? What is this about? It's really hard to define postmodernism, but you know it when you see it. The final question in your packet asks you to contemplate what the difference is between postmodern and merely contemporary art. So please explain for me in your own words how you are able to tell the difference. Thank you for watching my video on the history of modern art. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you now have a better understanding of the art world. Remember there's so many other artists out there that I was not able to cover during this video. You know I did this within 45 minutes and I think to talk about the entirety of modern art it would just take like hours and hours. So anyway I'm looking forward to seeing which artists you gravitate toward for your final projects and I hope that you got something out of watching this video.

Aesthetics refers to the philosophy of beauty carried by certain individuals and subcultures. So like there are punk rock aesthetics, there are goth aesthetics or whatever. It all refers to the way things look and, you know, the certain things that people honor visually within those subcultures.

So artists from different art movements have a certain aesthetic. Another word that I'm going to use is avant-garde, and that refers to things that are ahead of their time and not quite yet understood or embraced by the majority. One example of this is in The Hunger Games when Katniss is taken to the Capitol. Like the people she meets there have this sort of avant-garde aesthetic about them. You know, the crazy outfits, the poofy multicolored hairdos.

They are supposed to appear as though they are this highly advanced metropolis ahead of their time. So many modern artists were considered avant-garde and their styles were more or less hated and rejected by the public. People didn't understand it, they didn't find it to be aesthetically pleasing.

You know, Hitler especially hated modern art. He called it degenerate art. It was deemed unacceptable to him and as a result much of it was burned and destroyed as the Nazis came into power during the Second World War.

When you look at the styles that appear over the course of modern art you'll notice a definite pattern. Like seriously take a moment and flip through your packet. Compare movements with those that came before and after and you'll see this pattern of like tension and release. We have this very complex, very ornate decorative style followed by a style that is by contrast very abstract and simplified.

This happens in fashion, in music, trends that people follow. You know, in order for something to appear totally new and different, it must contrast with its predecessor. So that's what that's all about.

And then there are different reasons for creating art. There are personal and cultural functions of art. We see how these fit into the movements that we study. You know, people make art for spiritual and religious purposes, to honor people that they consider good or noble.

They also make art for political purposes, to speak passionately about their beliefs. or the beliefs of their culture. They also keep a record of history and commemorate events.

Sometimes art is made for purely aesthetic purposes, you know, like I want to hang something beautiful on the wall, I'm going to paint a picture. Also for self-expression, like how do I express who I am and what I'm feeling through a visual medium. What can you get through studying art history?

Well, art nears society, right? And in addition to the satisfaction and pleasure it affords, A study of art can help you gain a better understanding of yourself and those around you. You could begin studying works created by artists representing cultures and time periods different from your own, and by studying the creative expressions of artists from all backgrounds, you could become aware of the beliefs, ideas, feelings of other people of various ethnic origins, religions, or cultures.

It may surprise you to learn by studying art you prepare yourself for an active role in keeping your culture alive. Artists, writers, and musicians cannot hope to accomplish this task alone. They require your support as a part of a knowledgeable and appreciative audience. Okay, the first movement we're going to look at is Impressionism.

And I want to go over some of the pronunciations of artist names. Like, you know, the one that looks like Monet is actually Monet. There's Manet. They're two different artists.

Degas and Renoir. So that's how you say those names that you're seeing. Impressionist artists mostly look to capture the effect of light on objects.

So, you know, Monet would sit out in the field and he would look at haystacks, right? And he would observe the way that light played off of the grains and whatever in the haystacks at different times during the day. Like how did this haystack look in the morning compared to how it looks at three o'clock in the afternoon or whatever. So, you know, they were interested in light.

They also wanted to capture their impression of a subject rather than like painting it totally accurately. You'll notice that in Impressionist paintings they use a lot of like light pastel colors and their brush strokes are really choppy. They say about Impressionist painting like if you look at it from far away the picture makes sense but if you get up close you know it just looks like a series of like brush strokes and blobs of paint and whatever so that's Impressionism.

So Impressionism started in France, but there was also some connections in Pennsylvania. Like there was actually a school in Pennsylvania, it was an Impressionist school. It was down by New Hope, that's like outside the Philly area, in Bucks County, near the Delaware River.

One of the big names that we associate with the New Hope Impressionists is Walter Emerson Baum. And Baum painted landscapes from around his home in the Delaware Valley. You'll see lots of barns and fields and, you know, like scenes of the river around his home.

He's kind of a big deal in southern Pennsylvania and in the Lehigh Valley. There's a school named after him in Allentown. It's the Baum School of Art.

Another name that we associate with Pennsylvania impressionists is Mary Cassatt. And Mary Cassatt was born in Pennsylvania. She painted pictures of the private lives of women, particularly the bonds between mothers and children.

However, Mary Cassatt left for France and she spent most of her life over there, so she was hanging out with the French Impressionists and not really part of the same scene that Baum was a part of, although I assume that she was probably influenced by it in one way or another. Take a look at some of these prints and notice how closely they resemble the aesthetics of Japanese prints. This is going to be pretty significant and I'll talk about that later on in the lecture. When Mary Cassatt went to Paris, she met Edgar Degas, and Degas was noted for being a painter of ballet dancers.

Half of his paintings are of dancers. What's unique about them and kind of like avant-garde is that they express a very voyeuristic viewpoint, right? And we know that a voyeur is somebody that watches other people without them knowing about it. Well, if you take a look at all of the dancers in these paintings, none of them seem like they're aware that they're being watched. you know they're sort of being painted without their permission.

Edward Manet was another famous French impressionist. His works are of cafe scenes and social life in 19th century Paris and they represent the observations of a French flaneur. A flaneur is like a leisurely street idler, like an urban explorer, you know just a guy that kind of hangs out. They're based on sketches that he executed on the spot. And they're referred to as painted snapshots of bohemianism.

So those are people that are living like sort of artsy, non-traditional lifestyles as compared to like the urban working class and the bourgeoisie, which is just the normal like, you know, upper middle class people. All right. And last but not least, we have Pierre Auguste Renoir.

And Renoir was... like he was the big name in impressionism like a lot of people just immediately think of him when you say the word impressionism these are some of his paintings the next movement that i want to talk about is post-impressionism and the post-impressionist extended impressionism while rejecting its limitations they continued using vivid colors often thick application of paint and real-life subject matter but they were more inclined to emphasize like geometric forms and to distort form for expressive effects They also used unnatural or arbitrary color. So George Seurat and Paul Signat were two artists that experimented with the science of color mixing. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Chate was the one by George Seurat, and The Portrait of Felix Feignon is by Paul Signat.

They used a technique that they developed called pointillism, and if you look really closely at both of the paintings, you will notice distinct dots of pure color. So rather than mixing colors before applying them to the canvas, they relied on color theory. So like, you know, they put primary colors next to one another so that when viewed from far away, they blended to create like secondary hues, you know, like blue dots next to yellow dots, make sort of a greenish hue.

The next artist on our list is described as a self-taught genius and best known for his paintings of jungle scenes. Henry Rousseau never left France or saw a jungle. He composed these paintings based on observations of animals at the local zoo. So he would just visit the public gardens near his home to gather samples of tropical leaves, and even like look through picture books and everything.

And he would compose these like really elaborate jungle scenes. And a large percentage of his paintings feature animals attacking other animals. So that's pretty interesting.

The next artist is Cezanne, and he was interested in the simplification of forms to their geometric essentials. Cezanne was an important artist because he paved the way for later art movements where forms are being totally abstracted into basic shapes. We'll look at that when we talk about Picasso, but Cezanne was the forerunner of that, and you could see the attention that he gives to shapes in his still lifes and landscape paintings.

Everyone knows Van Gogh as the Dutch artist who suffered from severe mental illness and ate chemical Latin paint straight from the tube. Van Gogh supposedly only sold one painting in his lifetime, which was the Red Vineyard. It was for 400 francs, which is about like sixteen hundred dollars in our day and age.

Today, seven of his paintings alone, however, sold for over seven hundred and nineteen million dollars. So that's a sad irony for this artist who died impoverished and very unappreciated. Van Gogh is also well known as the artist that cut off his own ear.

That's how insane he was. This was over an argument with his close friend, Paul Gauguin, which is the next artist we'll be looking at. Vince had gone angry at Paul and he severed the ear and then sent it in a box to a bar where Paul was hanging out.

So he did this just to prove a point. So... Here is a self-portrait painted by Vincent when he had his ear bandaged after he had cut it off.

So we conclude that he was somewhat unbalanced, but also that from tragedy and despair can come very beautiful, very moving artwork. He also creates some of the groundwork for Expressionism, which is a later movement in which artists sought to create paintings that expressed strong emotion. Anyway, Vincent's friend...

the artist Paul Gauguin left his wife and children and moved to the island of Tahiti, where he spent his life painting self-portraits and portraits of the Tahitian natives. Gauguin's paintings sparked people's interest in primitivism, which is synonymous with native art. So under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, he reduced his forms to areas of pure color, separated by heavy black outlines.

And you can especially see the folk influence and his use of arbitrary color, like random color, in this print titled The Yellow Christ. Another artist who distorted color somewhat is Henry Day Toulouse-Lautrec. And check out this painting of a nightclub scene. You will notice the greenish tones that he's using in this woman's face. That was kind of unusual at the time.

Lautrec painted pictures depicting Paris nightlife. He was a wealthy aristocrat and had a bit of an eccentric personality. This was his scene.

You know, he ended up designing posters and advertisements for the Moulin Rouge and the famous dancer Jane Avriel. So these are all the people that he was surrounded by on a nightly basis. So that's it for post-impressionists.

The next two topics that I'm going to cover are Art Nouveau and Art Deco. And they are not actually considered art movements, but rather art styles. And I'm covering them because I noticed that a lot of folks get them mixed up.

Like people will refer to, you know, things that are very obviously Art Nouveau, they'll call them Art Deco and vice versa. So anyway, I'm here to explain the difference. Art Nouveau was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It is French for new art, and it spanned from 1890 to 1910. It extended to the fine arts, art, architecture and the decorative arts. So that's like household objects, you know, like dishes and like fabrics and things like that.

It incorporates the use of curvy, free-flowing organic lines and flowery designs. So very nature-influenced. Producing these new designs en masse was made possible by the many technological innovations of the late 19th century. Nouveau was an international style, so there were artists from all over the world that were a part of it. They include Alphonse Mucha, known for his illustrations featuring young women in flowing neoclassical robes, surrounded by halos of lush flowers.

Aubrey Beardsley, an English illustrator and author known for his decadent pen and ink Japanese woodcut style drawing. Gustav Klimt, a popular and controversial artist who created single large-scale murals. incorporating glass and tile and gold leaf.

Many of his works were lost when the Nazis set fire to the Schloss Immendorf castle where his work had covered the walls. So luckily during Klimt's lifetime he supervised the making of a book that contained printed reproductions of his work. So because of this book that exists we still have color reproductions of some of the lost pieces. Lewis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer famous for his elaborate stained glass pieces.

If you've ever heard anyone talk about Tiffany lamps, this is what they are referring to. This last artist is none but the Scottish architect, designer, and watercolorist Charles René Macintosh. His work was considered art nouveau, but contained some of the geometric influences of Art Deco.

So... Here's where we get into Art Deco and you will notice a much different aesthetic is at play. Now we have these hard geometric shapes rather than the flea-flowing, flowery, organic look that defined Art Nouveau.

The artists that are synonymous with Art Deco are this guy called Cassandra. He was a French-Ukrainian painter and commercial artist known for his bizarre magazine covers and travel posters. We also have the American architect William Van Allen, known for designing the Chrysler building in New York City. And then we have the diversely talented Erte, or Erte, whose designs take a very serious nod to Japanese style prints.

He was like a fashion designer. He designed sets for theater. You know, he was all over the place. But anyway, think back to a few minutes ago when I mentioned how Mary Cassatt's prints referenced Japanese designs.

Yes. and look at some of the artists that we've covered, you know, from that point. So Aubrey Beardsley, you know, his work was very Japanese influenced, even like Paul Gauguin's stuff, how it was kind of flat and it had those dark outlines.

So there's a lot of, you know, this Japanese influence going on in these earlier movements. And this has a lot to do with something called Japanism. After more than 200 years of seclusion, Foreign merchant ships of various nationalities again began to visit Japan. Japan ended this long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the west including photography and printing techniques. So in turn many Japanese ceramics and Yukido prints followed by Japanese textiles, bronzes.

enamels and other arts came to Europe and America and soon gained popularity. So we began trading with them again. And there was this big craze and people were collecting Japanese art.

So perhaps it's kind of similar to how Japanese anime styles are popular today. So people were way into this and of course it influenced the way that they were creating art. The next few art topics in your packet have ties to the events of World War I and II.

You can imagine that people's lives were totally turned upside down by the events of war. You know, cultural artifacts were destroyed, cities were totally bombed out, you know, many people were displaced. And I think many of these movements or styles existed as sort of a coping mechanism, and then others out of the need for society to reconstruct itself and pick up the pieces after war. The first artist that I want to talk about is Pablo Picasso, and he's noted as being one of the founders of a style called cubism. And this is a style in which the artist will depict an object from multiple viewpoints and like mash all of those viewpoints together.

It's supposed to represent the subject in a greater context. And the effect is like that we have this broken up, abstracted figure. Also, I get a feeling, although I've never heard an art historian say this, that Picasso had drawn his influence from the ruins of war and the rubble of the burned, bombed out and destroyed cities around him.

His figures remind me a lot of broken buildings. But contrary to what people might think about Picasso, he didn't paint this way because he was unable to render his images realistically. He did this on purpose, and here are some of his earlier pieces to prove that.

The next few movements that I want to talk about also came out of the events of war. We have constructivism, which was very closely tied to the Russian Revolution that was happening around that time. That included lots of propaganda posters, you know, art in service of social events and, you know, pushing forward the cause of the revolution.

We had futurism. which is kind of like cubism aesthetically but only instead of looking at an object from multiple viewpoints we're looking at an object across a period of time so the artists would fragment things like boats or you know bicycles or people to make it appear as though there was a lot of movement going on in the picture and futurism as a movement favored speed technology violence youth culture so everything that um was associated with the new world. They were tossing aside the old order and embracing everything new.

Bauhaus was a school of design in which artists tried to reduce all things to their simplest forms. De Stijl meant the style. So the style was meant to have this universal appeal and to reduce design to its simplest forms. It was made accessible to everyone in every culture.

And you could see how important this was. You know, after a nation or a country had been torn apart by a war, people needed to come back together and sort of pick up the pieces. So these were movements rooted in beginning again and finding peace. So now that we've spent some time looking at a few of the movements that surrounded World War I and II, I'd like you to look at a couple artists that were around during this time and try to pick out some visual characteristics in their work that ties them to one of the movements that we just talked about.

Feel free to pause the video and take your time looking at these slides. Now I'm going to talk about two of my favorite art movements, Dada and Surrealism. Dada came about in 1916. It was an artistic anti-art movement, which meant that the artists involved tried to do all that they could to break the existing rules and conventions that people held regarding art.

So they did this by playing a number of art pranks, some of which include the concept of the ready-made. Ready-mades were just found objects that were placed in the context of the gallery, thus elevated to the status of art. Ready-mades are important within the context of art history because they force us to question the criteria that we have regarding the nature of art, like what makes something art and what makes something not art. Another thing that Marcel Duchamp did was he took a postcard of the Mona Lisa and he totally defaced it as a protest against popular art.

When he was asked to contribute a work of art to an exhibit, he took two miles of string or like 16 miles of string or whatever it was and he roped off the entire gallery so that nobody could see any of the paintings inside. Dadaists created art according to the laws of chance which meant you know they could take a piece of paper and tear it up into several pieces toss them all in the air and whatever uh wherever they landed they would be glued down and that would become the work of art. They created poetry this way. They would take newspaper articles and cut up all of the words, put the words in a bag, and then draw them out at random.

Explored the use of collage. They made these images which they termed photo montages and they were just pictures of people that were created from cut up magazine pages. And many of them were kind of horrific looking and they were supposed to represent images of men that were disfigured in the war.

The artist in this photograph is Hugo Ball. Hugo founded the Dada movement. In this picture, he is on stage wearing a cardboard suit that he created and reciting nonsense poetry. And nonsense poetry was just sound poetry.

It didn't make any sense. It outraged people because they felt that Hugo was mocking the art of poetry. Last but not least, we have the assemblage. An assemblage was a type of sculpture made of found objects that were put together in unusual ways.

And this was very different from how people were making sculpture at that time. Usually they would carve something out of plaster or cast it in bronze. And this was just, like I said, found objects. So avant-garde.

So just to reiterate, Dada is an artistic anti-art movement. because it sought to defy conventions and rules that people had regarding art at that time. Okay, so now moving on to surrealism.

What does it mean for something to be surreal? Well, it means that it has very dreamlike qualities. Typically, images are rendered in a manner that's very realistic looking, but they're placed in situations that don't quite make sense. Surrealism was inspired by the discoveries of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who did research in like on the subconscious mind and sort of sparked people's interest in examining that and trying to interpret their dreams. So that's where all of this comes from.

Some of the famous surrealists that we talk about are Salvador Dali. He was a Spanish surrealist best known for his eccentric personality and the striking bizarre images in his work. We also talk about the artist Frida Kahlo. She was a Mexican surrealist and her body of work includes self-portraits that depict pain and suffering. You know, comment on the pain and suffering she felt in real life due to a terrible traffic accident that she was in.

There's also the Belgian surrealist Renée Magritte who was known for witty and thought-provoking images that challenged observers'preconditioned perceptions of reality. We have the Spanish Mexican painter whose style had an allegorical nature and was kind of like Renaissance art, that was Remedios Vero. We have the British surrealist Lenora Carrington, whose works have a somewhat macabre aesthetic, depicting ritual, mysticism, and animals as psychic guides.

We have the American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Dorothea Tanning, whose paintings are described as precise, figurative renderings of dreamlike situations. Another really cool artist that I wanted to share with you is M.C. Escher.

And M.C. Escher isn't officially a surrealist, but his works have some very surreal qualities. So I'm just going to show you a few slides right here. He's not mentioned in your packet, but he's an artist that you should probably know about. Okay, on to Favism and Expressionism. What is Favism?

This was a name given to an art movement in which participants used color in a very non-traditional way. They employed the use of arbitrary color or random color and although this is nothing new to us now, it was very shocking and controversial to people in the early 1900s. So the term fave is French for wild beast because of their random colors and the way in which they applied the paint, art critics thought that they were pretty wild so that's why they were called this.

Expressionism was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany as a reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities. People were spending their days working in factories around machinery. Working conditions were not good.

The factory environment was soul-crushing. Life was very difficult and not everyone could afford to live comfortably. There was a culture of malaise and depression that sprang up around this. And expressionist artists sought to, above all else, convey strong emotion in their artwork. This is a movement focused on feelings and self-expression.

And the two movements overlapped as the expressionist employed the fauve practice of using arbitrary colors so that they were better able to convey strong emotions. A few of the fauve and expressionist artists include Henri Matisse, a French painter and rival of Picasso. He later developed a technique called painting with scissors, so that's what he became best known for later on. and he was just cutting out shapes from colored pieces of paper and arranging them to form pictures. We have the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who did expressive figurative and landscape paintings.

They were, of course, labeled degenerate by the Nazis, and many of them were destroyed. There's the Belgian expressionist James Ensor, whose works feature creepy carnivals, masks, puppets. and skeletons.

We have Edvard Munch who is best known for his 1893 painting titled The Scream. but also has a variety of other really gorgeous artworks that we seldom see because they are overshadowed by the screen. Kathy Kollwitz, a German artist whose empathy for the less fortunate and victims of poverty, hunger, and war was expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut prints. Wassily Kandinsky was another expressionist who allowed music to guide his paintings. He would listen to records and the lines and colors that he used.

apparently represented different parts of the musical composition that he was hearing. He did this using a process called automatism, which meant that he would just let himself zone out and allow his subconscious mind to take over as he was painting. The work of Vossley Kandinsky provides a nice transition into our next movement, which is abstract expressionism.

I have mixed feelings about abstract expressionism, but it was an important cultural milestone. for our country because it was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the map in the Western art world. So actually, when you're looking at photos of abstract expressionist work in a textbook or whatever, they look rather unimpressive, like something anybody can do. But some of the pieces are actually kind of breathtaking when you see them in person, because they are done on these really large monumental canvases.

And there's a lot of texture that comes forward with the layering of paint. It might look really easy, but when you think about it, it's probably pretty challenging to create an abstract painting that's going to stop somebody in their tracks and get them to really look at and appreciate the work and not just write it off as something like, you know, a kindergarten student can do or whatever. We all know that to abstract something means to break it down into its simplest forms. And we just covered what expressionism is all about. So yeah.

If you could define this movement without using the words abstract or expressionism, you would probably describe it as being non-objective work through which the artist seeks to create visual harmony among the elements and principles of design. As you may or may not know, the elements are the basic building blocks of design. They include things such as line, shape, color, texture, value, space, and form.

And the principles of design refer to the way in which these basic building blocks are arranged to achieve a sense of balance, variety, movement, rhythm, and emphasis. So even though abstract expressionist work isn't showing us images that are objective or recognizable, we can still make judgments about whether or not the work is good based on how successfully the artist was able to create a unified design or skillfully blend the elements and principles. Anyway, some well-known abstract expressionists include Jackson Pollock, who is famous for his unconventional method of dripping paint onto the canvas, otherwise known as splatter painting.

William de Kooning, who is famous for his horrific abstract paintings of women. Mark Rothko, who created the color field painting where one color might slowly blend into another or two contrasting colors might be placed side by side. As I mentioned before, some of the work that doesn't hold up well in a photograph is actually kind of nice when you see it in person. Rothko paintings are like that.

They're very calming, and you can stare at them and kind of relax and meditate. Then there's the work of Kai Twombly, which is actually the first abstract expressionist work I remember seeing as a child. My parents took me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I remember seeing these pieces, and they kind of blew my mind as a kid. I made a comment about how they looked kind of like the scribbles and gestures that... my little brother was creating in elementary school and I was really confused by this as a kid.

You know, how did this work end up in a museum? This is really weird, etc. We do have a famous abstract expressionist from our area.

The artist Franz Klein was born in Wilkes-Barre, PA. There's actually a plaque somewhere downtown dedicated to him. The majority of his work consists of large white canvases that are marked with heavy black lines.

And I was kind of surprised when I found these photographs. They actually look kind of nice hanging up on the living room wall. Yeah, so Georgia O'Keeffe is the final artist that I'm going to talk about in the abstract expressionism movement. She's from the Midwest, and she painted close-up images of flowers and animal bones.

that looked abstracted because of their scale. So yeah, that's abstract expressionism. And once again, if the abstract expressionists are painting non-objective images exclusively and have no visual references to guide them, they must take into consideration the elements and principles of design in order to make sure that they arrive at an aesthetically pleasing finished piece.

At the end of the modern art period, we have pop art, and pop art reflected American life and culture in the 1960s. We were now watching television on a regular basis. We were bombarded by advertising. Pop art has similarities to the concept of the ready-made that we talked about when we were looking at Dadaism. But rather than taking ordinary found objects and elevating them to the status of fine art, they took existing images from pop culture and turned them into art.

There was a little bit of irony to doing this. Some of the images that they glorified were elements of kitsch. And kitsch is like a cheesy, mass-produced decorative object, kind of like a plastic flamingo or like the Velvet Elvis paintings. And part of the underlying subtext of this is just that our culture is mass produced, and we are taking a lesser role in creating it. Factories and merchandisers are now doing that for us.

So anyway, one of the artists who is famous for appropriating or stealing images from pop culture and turning them into art is Andy Warhol. And Andy was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He started as a graphic designer.

He was making advertisements in the 1950s. He worked in many different mediums but then discovered the silkscreen process, which is kind of like a stenciling process that was used to print t-shirts and other commercial graphics. He used this process to create paintings and you know that was a new thing at that time.

It was very it was very impersonal method of creating art. In fact at one point he had other people printing the art for him and he would just put his name on it. You know another Dada concept that nods to the ready-made.

But anyway, Andy Warhol himself was a very popular cultural icon. He cultivated the celebrity personality. He called his art studio the factory and had quite a following among the urban hipsters of New York City who would hang out at the factory and create weird experimental artwork.

Next we have James Rosenquist, who was known for being a billboard painter. Eventually he just started creating these large billboard-like paintings featuring vignettes of popular. images that reflected life in the 1960s.

Claus Oldenburg was a sculptor famous for making large replications of everyday objects. If you go into Philadelphia, you'll see the Claus Oldenburg clothespin on display outside of City Hall. He also has other things like the giant spoon and cherry bridge in St. Louis.

I think it's in St. Louis. And, you know, like... ice cream cones and safety pins.

There's these really large sculptures of weird things. We have Wayne Teabod, who was a painter known for his delicious looking images of cakes and pies. They were covered with such a thick layer of paint that it resembled icing. He is less known for his landscape paintings, but I think that they are also very beautiful and worth checking out. Jasper Johns was an artist who used encaustic paints.

which are just paints that are combined with wax and have a really thick texture when applied to the canvas. His work features iconic symbols such as numbers, targets, maps, and the American flag. Roy Lichtenstein was also a pop artist.

He was famous for taking scenes from comics, enlarging them on canvas, and incorporating what were known as Ben Day dots. They were primary colors that appeared on printed surfaces. in the form of dots back in the 1960s and that was just because of the types of print making procedures that were used. So he emulated those on canvas and created large comic panels which was pretty cool.

The 1970s marked the end of pop art. and the end of modern art. There was a transition into post-modernism. Some of the transitional movements or ideas that were occurring at this time include minimalism. The concept of minimalism is to strip everything down to its essential qualities in order to achieve simplicity. All parts or details are considered to be reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design.

Some popular minimalist artists include Eva Hesse and Donald Judd. Next we have happenings and performance art. A happening or performance is an event or situation meant to be considered art.

Happenings can occur anywhere and are usually planned, but the artists sometimes keep room for improvisation. Improv Everywhere is a comedic performance art group based in New York City. They formed in 2001 and carry the slogan, We Cause Scenes.

This group carries out pranks, which they call missions, in public places. The stated goal of each mission is to cause a scene of chaos and joy. Some of the group's missions use hundreds or even thousands of performers, while others utilize only a few. The Best Buy uniform prank involved a team of 80 Improv Everywhere agents who entered a Best Buy store dressed in blue shirts and khaki pants.

They answered questions for customers, though denied being an employee if asked. While many of the store's actual employees laughed and took photos of the pranksters, the store's management called the police. After assessing the situation, the police informed the Best Buy staff that they could not do anything except ask the Improv Everywhere agents to leave. the store as there was nothing illegal about wearing a blue polo shirt with khaki pants.

Now we'll talk about conceptual art. 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 then the execution of the idea becomes the machine that makes the art. A good example of a conceptual artist is Yukinori Inagi. He's a Japanese artist.

He made this piece called World Flag Ant Farm, in which he created a series of interconnecting boxes, each filled with colored sand in the pattern of a national flag. These flags represented the nations of the world. He then released ants into the system, who were able to travel between all of the networked flags, transporting food and sand.

Each flag's integrity, being slowly diluted, created a multinational cross-cultural network. Land art or earth art is an art movement in which landscapes and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is also an art form that is created using natural materials such as soil, rock, organic media like logs, branches, leaves, and water. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape, rather the landscape is the means of their creation.

Often earth moving equipment is involved. The works frequently exist in the open, located away from civilization, and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Many of the first works created in the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, or Arizona were ephemeral in nature and now only exist as video recordings or photographic documents.

Andy Goldsworthy is a really good example of an earth artist who creates sculptures from natural materials and then creates a photographic record of them before they are destroyed by wind, rain, or left to break down into the environment. Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Sandy Skoglund is a popular installation artist.

She'll transform the appearance of a room by painting it a specific color and filling it with animal sculptures in a contrasting color or covering objects within the space using an unusual material such as popcorn. or cheese curls. Like Andy Goldsworthy, the remnants of her work exist only in photographs.

Last but not least, we have street art or activist art and much of this stuff is created outside the context of a gallery. It's created in open public spaces and includes a lot of graffiti work that also has kind of a political message surrounding it or like a good social message. Developments in digital photography and the widespread exchange of images via the internet help some of these movements to thrive.

A lot of these movements bridge into postmodernism. Postmodernism is pretty difficult to define because the context surrounding it is still incomplete. We're living in it.

In general, movements such as installation art, conceptual art, and performance art are described as being postmodern. There are several characteristics which lend art to being postmodern. These include the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation of images, the recycling of past styles and themes in a contemporary context, as well as the breakup of the barrier between fine art, high art, low art, and popular culture.

The history of postmodern art is currently under construction. It describes some of the work being created today by contemporary artists, although not all of the work being created today. can be considered postmodern. So Janet Fish is a contemporary artist who is alive and well in producing artwork, although her style is not postmodern.

Damien Hirst is another artist alive today producing artwork who is most definitely postmodern. The best way to tell the difference between them is if you look at the work and it leaves you questioning why or asking like what's the point? What is this about? It's really hard to define postmodernism, but you know it when you see it. The final question in your packet asks you to contemplate what the difference is between postmodern and merely contemporary art.

So please explain for me in your own words how you are able to tell the difference. Thank you for watching my video on the history of modern art. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you now have a better understanding of the art world.

Remember there's so many other artists out there that I was not able to cover during this video. You know I did this within 45 minutes and I think to talk about the entirety of modern art it would just take like hours and hours. So anyway I'm looking forward to seeing which artists you gravitate toward for your final projects and I hope that you got something out of watching this video.

Transcript for:Exploring Modern Art Movements and Styles

Transcript for:
Exploring Modern Art Movements and Styles