and Time Time and motion have always been

linked to art, if only because time is the

element in which we live and motion is

Motion the very sign of life. It was only during

the 20th century, however, that time and
motion truly took their places as
elements of Western art, and this for the
simple reason that through advances in

The Elements of science and technology, daily life itself

became far more dynamic, and the
nature of time and its relationship to
space and the universe more a matter for

Visual Arts thought.

 Alexander Art that moves is called kinetic art, from the
Calder. Southern
Cross. 1963. Greek word kinetos, moving. Calder is
Sheet metal, considered to be one of its founders. But
rod,
bolts, and paint; motion in the experience of art is not confined
height 20'3". to the artworks themselves. As viewers, we also
Courtesy Storm
King Art Center, move, walking around and under Calder’s
Mountainville, Southern Cross, for example, to experience
New York.
what it looks like from different distances and
angles. We walk through architecture to explore
Eva Hesse. its spaces, we draw near to and away from
Repetition paintings to notice details or allow them to blur
Nineteen III.
1968. Nineteen back into the whole. As we saw in Chapter 2,
tubular artists of the 20th century became increasingly
fiberglass units,
height of each conscious of the viewer’s motion over time,
unit 19–201⁄4". especially in the context of gallery and museum
The Museum of
Modern Art, spaces. Indeed, it would be difficult to
New York. understand how a work such as Eva Hesse’s
Repetition Nineteen III can be understood as art
without imagining yourself in the same room
with it, moving
The Greek word kinetos also gave us the word cinema, certainly the most significant new art form
of the 20th century. Film and, later, video provided artists with new ways to work with time and
motion. As these technologies become increasingly affordable and available, artists experimented
with them more and more, to the point where video became an important medium for
contemporary art.
In her video 89 Seconds
at Alcázar, Eve
Sussman uses time and
motion to meditate on
the mysteries of one of
the world’s most
famous paintings, Las
Meninas, by the 17th-
century Spanish painter
Velázquez

Eve Sussman. 89 Seconds at

Alcázar. 2004. Single channel video.
Courtesy Eve Sussman and The
Rufus Corporation.
Line, shape, mass, light, value, color, texture,
pattern, space, time, and motion—these are
the raw materials, the elements, of a work of
art. To introduce them, we have had to look at
each one individually, examining its role in
various works of art. But in fact, we do not
perceive the elements one at a time but
together, and almost any given work of art is
not an example of one element but of many.
 When an artist sets about making any work, he or she is faced
with infinite choices.
How big or small? What kinds of lines and where should the lines go?
What kinds of shapes? How much space between the shapes? How
many colors and how much of each one? What amounts of light and
dark values? Somehow, the elements—line, shape, mass, light, value,
color, texture, space, and possibly time and motion—must be organized
in such a way as to satisfy the artist’s expressive intent.
In two-dimensional art, this organization is often called composition,
but the more inclusive term, applicable to all kinds of art, is design.
The task of making the decisions involved in designing a work of art
would be paralyzing were it not for certain guidelines that, once
understood, become almost instinctive. These guidelines are usually
known as the principles of design.
All of us have some built-in sense of what looks right or
wrong, what “works” or doesn’t. Some—including most
artists—have a stronger sense of what “works” than
others. If two families each decorate a living room, and
one room is attractive, welcoming, and pulled together
while the other seems drab and uninviting, we might
say that the first family has better “taste.”
Taste is a common term that, in this context, describes
how some people make visual selections. What we really
mean by “good taste,” often, is that some people have a
better grasp of the principles of design and how to apply
them in everyday situations.
Unity is a sense of oneness, of things belonging
together and making up a coherent whole.

Variety is difference, which provides interest.

The two was discuss together because the two
generally coexist in a work of art.
The first thing that strikes us when we look at
Matisse’s Memory of Oceania is the exhilarating
variety of the colors and shapes. On longer
acquaintance, however, we can begin to see
how the composition is unified around a few
simple principles. The colors are in fact
limited to six plus black and white, and all of
them but the pale yellow in the upper left
corner repeat, creating visual connections
across the picture plane. The shapes, though
highly varied, fall into three “families”—
rectangles (mostly concentrated in the upper
right quadrant), simple curves (mostly
concentrated at the lower right), and waves
(blue and white, alternating in positive and
negative shapes at the far left and far right).
Only the pale yellow shape is without an
echo. After a lifetime spent painting in his
native France, Matisse had voyaged to Tahiti,
in the South Pacific, hoping to refresh his eyes
in a different kind of light. Memories of Oceania
is a distillation of what he found there.
Henri Matisse. Memory of Oceania. 1953. Gouache on
paper, cut and pasted, and charcoal on white paper; 9'4"
9'47⁄8". The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Conceptual unity predominates as well in the
works of Joseph Cornell, such as The Hotel
Eden. Cornell devoted most of his career to
making boxlike structures that enclosed
many dissimilar but related objects.
Contained within the boxes, these objects
build their own private worlds. Cornell
collected things, odds and ends, wherever he
went. His studio held crates of stuff filed
according to a personal system. There were
even crates labeled “flotsam” and “jetsam.”
When making his box sculptures, Cornell
would select and arrange those objects to
create a conceptual unity that was
meaningful to him, based on his dreams,
nostalgia, and fantasies. By placing such
disparate objects and images together in a
boxed enclosure with still smaller boxlike
divisions within, Cornell imposed a visual
unity that asks us to accept them as a
coherent whole and to spend some time
puzzling out their connections
Joseph Cornell. The Hotel Eden. 1945.
Assemblage with music box, 151⁄8 151⁄8
43⁄4". National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Let’s try
Described the artwork’s
variety and unity.
Annette Messager.
Mes Voeux. 1989. Framed photographs
and handwritten texts, suspended with
twine; 59 153⁄4".
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery,
Paris.
Sculpture, hollow, letters, windows—all have a
certain visual weight, and together they balance
the photograph so that our gaze is never
“stuck” in one place but moves freely around
the image.
 Isamu Noguchi’s delightful
sculpture Red Cube balances impossibly
on one point. Noguchi wittily took the
industrial materials and rectangular forms
of mid-20th-century architecture and
stood them on end, as though the
buildings all around were pedestrians and
his sculpture a dancer in their midst.

Noguchi’s sculpture balances

because its weight is distributed evenly
around a central axis. The photograph of
the sculpture is balanced as well, balanced
visually. The simple red form set starkly
against a dark background draws our
attention strongly to the right. The white
letters pull our eyes more gently to the
left, as do the dark windows and the open
hollow of the sculpture itself.
Isamu Noguchi. Red Cube. 1968. Steel painted red.
Photo courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.
Symmetrical Balance
With symmetrical balance, the implied center
of gravity is the vertical axis, an imaginary line drawn
down the center of the composition. Forms on either
side of the axis correspond to one another in size,
shape, and placement.
Sometimes the symmetry is so perfect that the
two sides of a composition are mirror images of each
other. More often, the correspondence is very close but
not exact—a situation sometimes called relieved
symmetry.
Georgia O’Keeffe used symmetrical balance in
Deer’s Skull with Pedernal. The skull itself is perfectly
symmetrical, and O’Keeffe sets it directly on the vertical
axis. She then softens the symmetry with subtle shifts in
balance. Toward the top of the image, the dead tree branches
off to the right, its branches rhyming with the skull’s horns.
To the bottom of the image, the trunk swerves off to the
right as well, but a pale upward-thrusting branch, a lone
cloud, and the distinctive silhouette of Pedernal mountain
all add visual weight to the left.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Deer’s Skull with Pedernal. 1936. Oil on canvas, 36 30".
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Let’s try
Described the artwork’s
balance
Newar artists at Densatil Monastery,
Central Tibet. Thirteen-Deity
Jnanadakini Mandala. 1417–47.
Opaque watercolor on cotton cloth,
331⁄4 x 287⁄8". The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
Asymmetrical Balance
When you stand with your feet flat on the floor and your arms at your sides, you are
in symmetrical balance. But if you thrust an arm out in one direction and a leg out in the
other, your balance is asymmetrical (not symmetrical).
Similarly, an asymmetrical composition has two sides that do not match. If it seems
to be balanced, that is because the visual weights in the two halves are very similar. What
looks “heavy” and what looks “light”? The only possible answer is, that depends. We do not
perceive absolutes but relationships. The heaviness or lightness of any form varies
depending on its size in relation to other sizes around it, its color in relation to other colors
around it, and its placement in the composition in relation to the placement of other forms
there. The drawing illustrates some very general precepts about asymmetrical or informal
balance:
1. A large form is visually heavier than a smaller form.
2. A dark-value form is visually heavier than a light-value form of the same size.
3. A textured form is visually heavier than a smooth form of the same size.
4. A complex form is visually heavier than a simple form of the same size.
5. Two or more small forms can balance a larger one.
6. A smaller dark form can balance a larger light one.
Those are only a few of the possibilities. Keeping them in mind, you may still
wonder, but how does an artist actually go about balancing a composition? The answer is
unsatisfactory but true: The composition is balanced when it looks balanced. An
understanding of visual weights can help the artist achieve balance or see what is wrong
when balance is off, but it is no exact science
 In Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life,
asymmetrical balance dramatizes the
opposition between life, envisioned to
the right as a billowing form of light-
hued patterns and slumbering human
figures, and death, a dark skeletal
presence at the far left, robed in a
chilling pattern of grave markers. The
two halves of the painting are linked by
the gaze that passes between death and
the woman he has come to claim. Klimt
has placed her face exactly on the
vertical axis of the painting, which here
serves as a sort of symbolic border
between life and death. The only
waking person in the dreaming cloud of
life, she smiles awkwardly and gestures
as if to say, “Me?” Death leers back,
“Yes, you.” The intensity of their gaze
exerts a strong pull on our attention to
the upper left, and Klimt balances this
with an equal pull of visual weight to
the right and down.
Gustav Klimt. Death and Life. Before 1911, finished
1915. Oil on canvas, 5'10" 6'6". Museum Leopold,
Vienna.
Let’s try
Described the
artwork’s balance
Balance, then,
encourages our active
participation in looking.
By using balance to lead
our eyes around a work,
artists structure our
experience of it. As an
important aspect of
form, balance also helps
communicate a mood or
meaning.
Edouard Manet. A Bar at the
Folies-Bergère. 1881–82. Oil on
canvas, 373⁄4 511⁄4". The
Samuel Courtauld Trust,
Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery,
London.
 Emphasis and subordination are complementary
concepts. Emphasis means that our attention is drawn
more to certain parts of a composition than to others.
If the emphasis is on a relatively small, clearly
defined area, we call this a focal point. Subordination
means that certain areas of the composition are
purposefully made less visually interesting, so that
the areas of emphasis stand out.
 There are many ways to create emphasis. In The
Banjo Lesson, Henry Ossawa Tanner used size and
placement to emphasize the figures of the old man and
the young boy. Tanner set the pair in the foreground,
and he posed them so that their visual weights combine
to form a single mass, the largest form in the painting.

Strongly contrasting values of dark skin against a

pale background add further emphasis. Within this
emphasized area, Tanner uses directional lines of sight to
create a focal point on the circular body of the banjo and
the boy’s hand on it. Again contrast plays a role, for the
light form of the banjo is set amid darker values, and the
boy’s hand contrasts dark against light.

Tanner has subordinated the background so that

it does not interfere, blurring the detail and working in a
narrow range of light values.

Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Banjo Lesson. 1893. Oil on canvas,

49 351⁄2". Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia.
 Let’s try
Described the
artwork’s
emphasis and
subordination

Francisco de Goya. Executions

of the Third of May, 1808.
1814–15. Oil on canvas, 8'9"
13'4". Museo del Prado,
Madrid.
 Proportion and scale both have to do with size.

Scale means size in relation to a standard or

“normal” size.
Normal size is the size we expect something to be. For example, a
model airplane is smaller in scale than a real airplane; a 10-pound
prize-winning tomato at the county fair is a tomato on a large
scale.
The artist Claes Oldenburg delights in
the effects that a radical shift in scale can
produce. In Plantoir, created with Coosje
van Bruggen, he presents a humble
gardening tool on a heroic scale. Perhaps
it is a monument, but to what? Part of
the delight in coming across a sculpture
by Oldenburg and Van Bruggen is the
shock of having our own scale
overthrown as the measure of all things.
Many fairy tales and adventure stories
tell of humans who find themselves in a
land of giants. In the sculptures of
Oldenburg and Van Bruggen, the giants
seem to have left an item or two behind.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Plantoir. 2001. Stainless steel,
aluminum, fiber-reinforced plastic, painted with polyurethane enamel; height
23'11". Collection Fundação de Serralves, Porto.
Proportion refers to size relationships between
parts of a whole, or between two or more items
perceived as a unit.
 The Belgian painter René Magritte
used many pictorial strategies to suggest
that the world around us might not be as
rational and ordered as we like to think.
One of his favorites was a shift in scale.
In Delusions of Grandeur II, he invented
a sort of telescoping woman, with each
section rising out of the one before and
continuing on a smaller scale.
Transforming one element into
another was also a favorite ploy, as when
the sky, which looks perfectly normal at
the horizon, is revealed farther up to be
made of solid blue blocks.
René Magritte. Delusions of Grandeur II. 1948. Oil on canvas, 391⁄8 321⁄8".
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
Leonardo da Vinci. Study of Human
Proportions according to Vitruvius.
c. 1485–90. Pen and ink, 131⁄2 93⁄4".
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Proportions of the
golden section and golden
rectangle.
 is based in repetition, and it is a basic part of the
world we find ourselves in.
We speak of the rhythm of the seasons, which recur in the same
pattern every year, the rhythm of the cycles of the moon, the rhythm of
waves upon the shore. These natural rhythms measure out the passing
of time, organizing our experience of it. To the extent that our arts take
place in time, they, too, structure experience through rhythm. Music
and dance are the most obvious examples. Poetry, which is recited or
read over time, also uses rhythm for structure and expression. Looking
at art takes time as well, and rhythm is one of the means that artists
use to structure our experience.
 Lorna Simpson. Still
from Easy to
Remember. 2001.
16mm film
transferred to DVD,
sound. 2:35 minutes
looped.
Paul Klee organized his
strange little Landscape with
Yellow Birds around several
rhythms. First, there is the
rhythm of the bulging, tapered
silvery forms, which sway this
way and that as they repeat
across the image. Then there is
the constellation of alert little
yellow birds, which hold the
composition together by
forming an implied oval as
our eyes follow them around
the landscape. Perhaps they
are circling the full moon,
which forms part of an
implied arc of circular
rhythms. (The rest of the Paul Klee. Landscape with Yellow Birds. 1923. Watercolor and gouache on
circles are in red.) paper, 137⁄8 171⁄4". Private collection.
•UNITY AND VARIETY
•BALANCE
•EMPHASIS AND SUBORDINATION
•SCALE AND PROPORTION
•RHYTHM