Art Nouveau

The Art Nouveau in French means 'new art' and was replaced by modernist style. This movement was inspired by natural forms and structures, in flowers and plants but also in curved lines. During this period show a revival of crafts and of craftsmanship and the development of new typography and graphic design and also the introduction of new materials such as opals and semi-precious stones.

 “Art Nouveau had no claim to novelty but it was genuinely new whenever it sought unusual, original effects and was colourful consistent, harmonious and functional prefiguring the shape of things to come- The Bauhaus, Surrealism and abstract art.”                                                                                                                           

Art Nouveau is known as a style of ornamentation which was designed to made part of ordinary life and was frequently used for covers of novels, advertisements, and exhibition poster and marketing.

They wanted to create a new style which would continue a tradition but not copy it, so the Art Nouveau was inspirited by distant and exotic civilisations like Turkish, Persian and Moorish but especially the Japanese.

“The discovery of Japanese art and their influence on painting was important …. Inspire painters with new outlook or new typographical composition or page layout.”

Another characteristic from Art Nouveau was the frequent use of the woman figure as an allegory and sensuality but the woman figure was use to sold making them the ultimate symbol of the modern consumer world, this strategy combining women with products to sold a lifestyle dream.

“Woman passive and subservient… the lie of woman was controlled by fashion and any feminine gesture might supply the subject matter for a supposed work of art.

Quotations

‘Sources of Art Nouveau’                                                                                                                                                                                             Stephan Tschudi Madsen (1975) by Da Capo Press- New York

www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/art-nouveau-and-the-erotic/

www.nga.gov/feature/nouveau/exhibit_intro.shtm

Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems is an American photographer and artist from Oregon, she abroad the issues about African American and their status on their own country. She is documentary photography and incorporating text and mixed the use of photography, text and images.

“This personal work extends into a metanarrative on the complexities of race, gender and class on American life.”

Carrie Mae Weems is focused in show and inquires about gender roles, racism, sexism and social class and she portray it in a beautiful and powerful way and always tried to storytelling about human conditions this is complement with overtones of humor and sadness of the picture or text. She questions the structure of society through her pictures.

“Used the format of documentary photography and intimate stories about her own family to portray people who are no likely ever to see themselves in work of art.”

One of her best works is Mirror, Mirror, this pictures draw attention because it can be read like a joke using an innocent  line from the story of Snow White but also you can see beyond that and understand that is talking about racial differences in a subtle, yet powerful way.

 “Crude visual and verbal jokes based on racial stereotypes that aren’t funny.”

Quotations

‘Feminism and Contemporary Art’                                                                                                                      Jo Anna Issak (1996) by Routledge

https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/4900

http://carriemaeweems.net/bio.html

Sonia Boyce

Sonia Boyce is a British Afro-Caribbean artist; she is an important figure in the burgeoning black British art-scene of that time.

She works with her identity differences and black culture, using diverse methods like photography, installation and text, her works talk about racial identity and gender in Britain.  She was inspirited by the work of Margaret Harrison from Phoenix – the Feminist Art Collective and National Convention of Black Artists at Wolverhampton College of Art in 1982

In the 1980s she used to show her work through drawing using large chalk-and-pastel drawings and talk about personal experience of her family and friends but has since diversified into photography, mixed media and installation and in more recent years seem like Boyce is returning to drawing again.

Sonia Boyce likes the use of wallpaper patterns and bright colours which are associated with the Caribbean, she likes to used her own personal background and talk of how is to be a black woman in Britain, about the stereotypes in the media and daily life.

... to demonstrate how cultural differences might be articulated, mediated and enjoyed without oppressive compulsion or inequality.”

Quotations

‘Traveloque’                                                                                                                                                       The Whitworth Art Gallery (2002)

peckhamspace.com/project/network/sonia-boyce

195.194.24.19/ccwborderline/node/40

www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/artists_stories/single/63633

Peter Saville

Peter Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic.

During the 1980s, he designed record sleeves for Factory Records for artist like Joy Division and New Order. He became a pioneer of graphic design and culture. These projects mixed with music resulted in remarkable images and elegance as form of self-expression to articulate visual narratives of his life. Saville work with different photographers to design his work and experiment with new techniques of photography and typography.

“That his designs were so entertaining and electic they were simply unlike anything else in the pop world and he was himself using these sleeves to develop a narrative that was his own personal history of graphic design.”

Saville’s reputation consolidated him as a designer of music graphics and this commercialization and excess of work make him works in other areas like fashion and made exhibition and collaborated with other artist.

In 1990 to join the partner-owned Pentagram, disillusioned with design and filled his work with images of exhaustion and depletion, Saville left Pentagram in 1992 and started his own studio in Mayfair. Since then his art is dedicated to the young generation and in his personal projects.

Quotations

‘Designed by Peter Saville’                                                                                                                         (2003) by Frieze/Imprint of Durian Publications Ltd.

www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2011/may/.../joydivision-neword.

www.creativereview.co.uk/.../peter-saville-interview-new-england-shi...

showstudio.com/contributor/peter_saville

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Nutzhorn (Lange) was a photographer from New Jersey. Dorothea changed her last name for her mother's maiden name, when her dad abandoned the family.

Dorothea Lange had opened a successful portrait studio until the Economic Depression in about 1929 and is when she takes interest to show the consequences of the Great Depression. She develops a Documentary photography and used it to chronicle this historical event. Her pictures was focused on humanized the Great Depression and to show how people were affected by this event, she portrays families and the unemployed, women and kids, she portrays the real society.

“… But to imperfect people whose actuality was most likely to be realized in the physical and social circumstances in which they were spending their lives.”

She also shows interest to the evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. With her pictures criticized the government because the detaining of innocent people without charging them with any crime.

“She was picturing some of the disgracefully invisible people of our society, making them visible to all with humane eyes to see.”

Dorothea has a critical eye that allows her to see beyond the simple things with her camera takes photography of the real human condition, she portray the essence of the subject and makes artistic photographs.

Quotations

‘Dorothea Lange with an introductory essay’                                                                                           George P. Elliott (1966) by Doubleday & Company, Inc

www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAPlange.htm

www.ibiblio.org/channel/Lange.html

americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Dorothea_Lange.php

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was French and Post-Impressionist but between Impressionism and Cubism combined the pictorial style and reducing figures to geometric forms, he has a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.

“The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form and to create a purely abstract language of form.”

Paul Cézanne has financial security because his father was a banker; he was studying in Paris, first began to study law but later studied art. Cézanne's early pictures of romantic and classical themes are imbued with dark colors and expressive brushwork eventually he changed for bright colors and paint landscapes like Bathers and The Fisherman. The Impressionism start to show is his works like Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses. Cézanne had a system to give more dimension and to take the viewer into the painting, this is appreciate in his many landscapes he created like Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley. Later Cézanne start to development geometric and volumetric patterns form in his work like in Gardanne.

aul Cézanne compositions were mostly landscapes but also he develop a style of building forms completely from color and creating scenes with distorted perspectival space and he also drawn landscape and figures from his imagination.

Quotations

‘The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernism’                                                                          Victor Burgin

www.abcgallery.com/C/cezanne/cezanne.html

 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pcez/hd_pcez.htm

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American artist from New Jersey, she study in Syracuse University,  she studied with fellow artists/photographers Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel and later she work at Mademoiselle magazine.

Barbara works involve conceptual artist and the use of image on black and white mixed with text in red. The contrast between this images and text, show to different kind of view difficult to coexist. But together contain a message of critic about sexism and power over the cultures.

“I am interested in works that address these material conditions of our lives: that recognize the uses and abuses of power both an intimate and global level.” (Barbara Kruger, 1982)

During her early work she was more focused in feminism, politic, social, racial, gender stereotypes and consumerism and started to develop her techniques as a graphic design. This works were addresses to calls attention to the people using ironic text and simple image. In recent years creating public installations like bus or billboards, wall to assault the viewer and critique the modern American culture.

“The early work may have been more psychoanalytically inflected and later work more focused on late capitalism’s consumerism, it always addresses the complex interconnection of gender and the marketplace.”

Quotations

‘Feminism and Contemporary Art’                                                                                                                    Jo Anna Issak (1996) by Routledge

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html

http://www.barbarakruger.com/

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter and is best now because his cubist movement. He has a wide variety of styles that are reflected on his pictures. In his early years he paint using Realism but over the years his style change to cubism.  One of his most know works is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937)

“They are not even allegorical or symbolical figures” (Andre Salmon, 1912 – Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon)

One of his more representative and best known work. The picture is about whores where one of them wears a mask and other woman is pulling a curtain, every woman is in a different position and draw differently. This painting caused commotion when appeared, not only for the subject, because prostitution was controversial because how was represented and as contortion the use of space in painting and the use of geometric shapes. These works revolutionize the art and develop the beginning of Cubism.

 “Picasso studies an object the way a surgeon dissects a corpse” (poet, Guillaume Apullinaire)

Picasso takes a person or ordinary object and redraws the images and transforms them into something completely different, it gets more interesting and visually intriguing. His work as a Cubist have something that catches your attention and makes it not boring,  you get interest  in his works and try to decipher the message and understand its meaning.

 Picasso's works are interesting to see from the detail and colors. I think it has an interesting way to break down the actual shape of objects and figures and recreate geometrically.

Quotations

‘Introduction modernism’                                                                                                                                Chris Rodriges/Chris Garratt  (2004) by Icon Books Ltd

www.pablopicasso.org/

www.artchive.com/artchive/P/picasso.html

www.picasso.fr/us/picasso_page_index.php

Semiotics

The Semiotics could define as the study of sign. The semiotic are currently surround us and are part of our daily lives even when we don’t realize that we are using it.

 “We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of sign and we have no way of understanding anything except through sign and the codes into which they are organized.”

An example would be using colors to identify the hot and cold water faucets. The color red would be for the hot water because this color is a warm color and we related the color with something really warm or hot, the color blue would be the cold water because we related this color is a cold color and we related the color with something cold or ice. The uses of color always affect how we perceive the things because; the color could change the meaning, for example red could represent passion or intensity and blue can represent depression.

“

Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ‘sign’… in a semiotic sense ‘sign’ take the form of words, images, sound and gestures and objects… study how meaning are made and how reality is represented.”

Quotations

‘Semiotics: The Basics’                                                                                                                                   Daniel Chandler by Routledge

www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02.html

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/10350330.html

Identity

“Identity is made evident through the use of markers such as language, dress, behaviour and choice of space, whose effect depends on their recognition by other social beings. Markers help to create the boundaries that define similarities or differences between the marker wearer and the marker perceivers; their effectiveness depends on a shared understanding of their meaning. In a social context, misunderstandings can arise due to a misinterpretation of the significance of specific markers”

Our identity is what defines us and distinctive us from other people but at the same time is what connects us to other individuals. But the identity of us, it always influenced by certain factors such as social, cultural, religion or the media, this plays a strong factor in the development of identity on a person and to create the roles we uses in our society.

“Transnational business and international transport and communication system have all contributed an increased coherence and integration in the mounting global traffic in people and meaning.”

Thanks to the internalization and the media, our society has changed as social roles and identities, in present times we can appreciate the different between the old roles and the new ones.

For example the role of women during the past was to be housekeeping and raising a family but  During World War II a lot of women took factory jobs to make up for the domestic manpower shortage. After the war the number of working women dropped but the women starts to work and fight for their rights. Currently this role has changed the women work but also raise a family.

Quotations

‘Culture, Society and the Media’                                                                                                            Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curren and Janet Woollacatt

www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/15298868.html

Postmodernism

The Postmodernism departs from modernism and this movement tried to separate eliminated any classification between art, popular culture, and the media and limits and expose the artificiality of style, Art came to be a self-contained study of dimension, color, and composition

 “The effacement of boundary between art and everyday life, the hierarchical distinction between high and mass/popular culture and the celebration of the ‘depthlessness’ of culture, the decline of originality/ genious of artistic producer and assumption that art can only be repetitious.”

The Postmodernism works require of interpretations from the viewers to have a meaning. The Postmodernism to develop an individual opinion from the viewers and made it personal, they want to see how the person have a different response.

This urinal is a mass-produced in a factory; it was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation.

The characteristics of Postmodernism are the use of collage, the presentation of art, the use of past styles in a modern way and develop of movement like Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia.

“The Postmodern would be that which search for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of unpreventable.”

Quotations

‘Theory culture and society: Postmodernism’                                                                                                                                               Mike Featherstone (1988) by SAGE Publications

www.postmodern-art.com/

michaelnewberry.com/av/post/post.htm

Modernism

The Modernism was a new movement extended during 1860s to 1970s and brought new innovations on arts that we can even perceive in present times.  The Modernism transforms the traditional art to more experimentation art with more creative ideas and led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used. The Modernism changes not only affect the artistic view but also the cultural and were influenced by the modern development of the technologies, machinery, scientific development and philosophies.

“Modernism is marked by modernity’s new visual technologies” (Marshall Berman, 1982)

Modernism was the result of a series of sometimes contradictory responses to the situation as it was go through the society like the First and Second World War was the cataclysmic of an immensely traumatic experience for artist and the Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and stability along with machine age.

During this period of art emerged different branches like Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Futurism.

“Such isms- indeed modernism itself- provide clues to the ‘spirit of the age’… Modernism express the new energies sweeping through from the late 19th century onwards- the revolutionary potentials opened up by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and others.”

The modernism has pioneered of art like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from Cubism, Henri Matisse and André Derain from Fauvism, Edvard Munch from Expressionism and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti from Futurism.

Quotations

‘Introduction modernism’                                                                                                                                Chris Rodriges/Chris Garratt  (2004) by Icon Books Ltd

arthistoryresources.net/modernism/roots.html

www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism/