Monday, 24 October 2022

History of contemporary art

Introduction
- the analysis of an artwork starts with:
1) the identi cation of the technique,
2) then the period,
3) artistic movement,
4) artist,
5) reference of any periods, artistic movements, artists, subjects,
the interpretation of the work, it’s meaning related to the artist’s research,
6) and then the description of the in uence and legacy the work or the artist might have had.

Artwork, art piece in the visual Altus is a physical two or three dimensional object that is professionally determined or
otherwise considered to ful l a primarily independent aesthetic function.

Work of art may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature and music,
these terms apply principally to tangible, portable forms of visual art.

What we consider as contemporary art in this course is the art starting from the invention of photography 1939 and
the salon des refusés (1863 the rst exhibition impressionist) up to today contemporary artistic interpretations.

BUT WHAT WAS ART BEFORE?

- COLOURS: as symbols, as blend of materials, as tool to simulate the reality ex. Color yellow = evil, traitors, Giudas. -
people didn’t know how to read, most of them couldn’t afford school or books so painters used the same colours or
symbol to let people
- know the full stories of the paintings without read em.)
- DRAWINGS: proportion and perspective. In the 15 century, was discovered how to paint and draw the perspective
of for example mountains or buildings.
- COMPOSITION: an artist was trapped in many rules, not only in the compositions, but also in the positions and on
the light of the characters. For example they used to enlighten the protagonist of the painting, also putting them at
the top of the painting/ of the triangle.
- SYMBOLS AND ICONOGRAPHY: liberal education, knowledge of the religious texts but also of Kabala, profane
literature and symbology. For us is dif cult to understand the meanings of some of the symbols in old paintings
because we lost the knowledge and the meaning of them.

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 WHAT WAS THE ARTIST BEFORE?
- Artisan: he rarely signed his works and his creativity And personals interpretation were restricted by the
commission especially of aristocrats and the church in middle age and renaissance and by the power of the
academies in XVII and XVIII.
- Scientist: he knew about chemistry and physics to be able to mix colours, about anatomy to draw proportions
correctly.
- Architect and or sculptor: as Michelangelo lots of artist knew how to paint but also how to build a dome, a church
or how to make spectacular sculptures.
- Educated man : to draw the symbols, you must know rst the meanings of them
- Manager and entrepreneur:

WHY DO WE CONSIDER THE ART OF THE PAST BEAUTIFUL

because of the artwork:
- looks similar to real even if the subject is of fantasy
- Behind it there is such hard work, talent and ability that the artist end up to be someone special and different.
- Ability: nowadays anyone can learn how to paint exactly as the old masters. Art became not a matters of ability but
rather a matter of imagination and creativity.
- Similar to real: nowadays it is not interesting to represent the reality as it is by the eye anymore. Today the artist
needs to put in his/her work his/her personal point of view, his ideas or feelings

THREE ELEMENTS THAT MAKE ART CHANGE:

1) the advent of photography 1939: postcards were made by photographer.
2) Discovery and representation of the unconscious
3) Introduction of personal arbitrary and subjective parameters. Their point of view, what they feel/ felt during the
paint eccc. Later it was discovered the unconscious with Freud ecc.
To understand contemporary art you need to leave behind all the criteria you might have used to look at art

DISCOVERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
1939
- is an evolution of the discovery of the principle of the camera obscura.
- Scientist experimented many ways of the use of camera oscura.
- The rst attempt of Nicephore Niepce of bringing the camera obscura and the photosensitive substances together
and to capture camera images in permanent is unsuccessful.
- From this point the development of photography largely related to technological improvements in
- three areas: speed, resolution and permanence.
- The rst attempt of Nicéphore Niépce of bringing the camera obscura and the photosensitive
- substances together and to capture camera images in permanent is unsuccessful.
- Later Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre goes on to develop the daquerreotype (so-called from his
- surname) process, and is the rst to publicly announce the success of the photographic process.
- In 1839 the photographic process is commercially introduced and therefore that is the date generally
- accepted as the birth year of practical photography.
- The photography is of great interest for the young generation of artists for it is clear that it
- could be a precious instrument to a more precise analysis, description and knowledge of the reality.
- The in uence of photography on artists, especially painters, is of two kinds:

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 1. they become interested on the idea of objectivity of the vision bringing in their compositions new framings, new
cuts, and new points of view
2. function of photography: they start searching for a way of a more free expressions, true Color’s, and given that
photography undertook the traditional assignment of verisimilitude they sorta to resort to imagination.

In searching for a way of a more free expression artists start to resort to imagination and to
interpret reality. They also introduce dreams and unconscious as subject of the artworks and the use of colors for
expressing feelings.

Starting with the representation of their own feelings and the interpretation of reality artists go
forward with the transformation of the image through a new use of colors, shapes, and
materials and letting the traditional parameters behind.

An artist was just a normal person who wanted to recreate reality through his eyes.

LESSON 2: THE REALITY AS OPTICAL AND SOCIAL

IMPRESSIONISM:
A group of artist freed from representing the reality, starts to look to nature by the eye and to register the
impressions they receive from it.
The subject of the painting turns to be unnecessary and they start to focus on colors and shapes as the
eye can catch, living the narrative part of the painting behind. The subjects become an opportunity to
study the light effects.
in addition to photography;, the new generation was strongly in uenced by two great painters of the
previous generation; Camille Corot (1796 -1875) and Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).
The great in uence of Corot is based on the fact that he painted en plein air and furthermore he
suppressed the topographical detail in favour of mood and atmosphere..
- The rst one: geometry again, but stain of colour, if u notice the church is very recognisable but again they
weren’t precise (corot)
- Second painting: Composition is unusual and imprecise. Roofs, didn’t have any importance. Corot started to do
photography instead. Light and the shadow built the image (after Impressionism). Second painting: very
geometrical images. (Corot)
COURBET:
The in uence of Courbet was related more to the attitude the artist had to the state run Salon system pioneering the
solo retrospective as a private commercial venture,
Furthermore, in the process of clearing away the rhetoric of Academy painting, Courbet often
settled on compositions that seemed collaged and crude to prevailing sensibilities. He also
abandoned carful modelling for promoting ampli ed surface texture with stylistic innovations such as applying paint
thickly in broken ecks and slabs.
In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an
exhibition in Paris independent from the of cial Salon, that launched the movement called Impressionism.
The Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, exhibited in this occasion, gave the Impressionist movement its name when
the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “Impression”, not a nished painting.
- The woman: He’s looking for atmosphere. Impressionists younger than C, understood their painting could be
made differently, with the use of colours and lighting

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 CLAUDE MONET:
Monet was a founder member of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. and throughout his
long career, he consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the
Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture
on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.
Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, en plein air, then reworked and completed them in
his studio. He was obsessed with COLOURS and LIGHTING.
Monet's asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasised their two-dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear
perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modelling. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using
unmediated colours, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light coloured primers
instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.
- Monet Sunrise 1872: Dirty details, we can recognise the different subjects of the painting by its details. Very
recognisable subjects.
- Claude Joseph Vernet A landscape at Sunset, 1773: the subjects are all invented, like the temple, the sun in
Monet one is like very visible, the protagonist of the image, in this one it mixes the light with the sky, it isn’t
highlighted.
Colours were made in studio, made by painters. The 19 century (?) industry produced the Colors in tubes
- Claude Monet, Poppies blooming 1873:
- Garden at Giverny: really all about colours and light. Everything is mixed up together. He was in love with his
garden, not because it was a lover of owers ecc. But because they were their favourite subjects cause they
changed colours with the quantity of light in the sky.
- Rouen Cathedral 1892: Monet painted more than thirty views of Rouen Cathedral. He painted the facade with
highly textured brushstrokes that both convey the aspect of sculpted stone and make the atmosphere and light
palpable. The pictures in the series are more than a record of the cathedral's appearance at different times of the
day; they are the record of the artist's subjective experience of light and atmosphere. A cathedral is a static subject,
Monet painted how the light changed the cathedral, during the seasons.
- Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1918-1926: installation, a whole room that becomes a work of art. Both
monumental and intimate, Water Lilies (Les Nymphéas) are the ultimate expression of Claude Monet's artistic
ideas, an incredible project that explores all the variations of light in the artist’s garden in Giverny. The paintings
are housed in two elliptical rooms, and encourage the visitor to gaze in endless contemplation. Monet wanted his
work to take on this aesthetic and poetic dimension, and provide a haven for peaceful meditation. If you really go
in detail what was in the previous paintings, in here we can understand wether is the re ection on the water.the
result is just a stain of colours to give the impression of calm and peace environment, like Monet used to feel in his
garden. No images are recognisable.

EDGAR DEGAS:
Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called
a realist. Unlike Monet he reproduced on canvas not what the eye can see, but what the memory has selected through
the lter of the artist taste and ideas. Degas showed little interest in painting plein air landscapes, favoring scenes of
modern life in theatres and cafés illuminated by arti cial light.
He had a strong interest in ballet dancers since 1870s, and eventually he produced approximately 1,500 works on
the subject. These are not traditional portraits, but studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring
the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points
Degas had a lively, scienti c interest in a wide range of media, including engraving, monotype, and photography. He
experimented with an array of techniques, breaking up surface textures with hatching, contrasting dry pastel with wet,

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 and using gouache and water-colours to soften the contours of his gures. He as obsessed by MOVEMENT. He took
his own photographies to study the movement of objects/ people. Unusually the main subject. Revolutionary artist
because of his studies of the movement and on the reality.
- The star, Rosita Mauri, 1876: she was a very famous ballet dancer. He isolated herself to paint her. We perceive
she is in movement because of her legs. The brushstrokes in the red part are very very fast because he was not
interested in rendering details but highlighted instead the main character of his painting.
- A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers, 1865:
- The Tub, 1886: not to be realistic but to propose to the public something different. Common woman not a
goddess. She’s not centred e her position is very dif cult, the rest is not important. The important one is her and the
lighting in the painting that highlighted the woman.
- A woman bathing in a stream 1654, Rembrandt: she’s more of a goddess than the other one because fo the
environment (forest) and because of the jewellery. She knows we are watching her.
- First photo: it was very important to do photography to capture the exact movements and reality, not the idealised
one.
- Four Dancers: En attendant L’entrée en scene, 1900: he painted in the studio, his work required calm and
silence.
- Two Ballet Dancers, 1879: they are studied to follow the lines of the oorr.
- Little dancer aged Fourteen: sculpture in bronze. He mixed real elements and a typical material of sculptures.
AUGUST RENOIR:
Renoir was a founding member of the Impressionist movement, nevertheless he ceased to exhibit with the group
after 1877 because he doubts about the spontaneity and impermanence of the Impressionist aesthetic .
Renoir always remained dedicated to gure painting, portraits, sensual nudes and charming scenes of pretty
women. His penchant for portraiture attracted the attention of a range of patrons with avant-garde sensibilities.
From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, he developed a monumental, classically inspired style that
in uenced such avant-garde giants as Pablo Picasso. He was painting en plain air and he was giving the reality a very
personal interpretation through light.
- Dance at le Moulin de la Galette, 1876: we can see how he uses light to represent how people chatted,
moved ecc. This painting represents the reality of Parisians people. All the light comes from the trees, but in reality
it was an effect to give the idea of movement and happiness and partying and good time. To give the idea of the
moment and the atmosphere not someone in particular as subject
- Madame Charpentier: the important one, the mother and the committee of the painting is positioned higher
than the two little girls. There’s also a dog which represents delity and security. Flowers and some objects

EDOUARD MANET
Manet was a pivotal gure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism: "Manet is a point of departure, the
symptomatic precursor of a revolution," wrote the critic Louis Gonse.
Already in 1861, he was awarded the Salon's honourable mention, but at the subsequent Salon of 1863 he was
rejected and he fell back to participate to the Salon des Refusés where he exhibited the scandalous Déjeuner sur
l'herbe. Again in 1865 his Olympia was considered the most shocking work at the Salon.
He shared with Monet and Degas the interest in modern subjects, plein air painting, bright colors (often purchased
ready-made, in tube form), and visually arresting cropping (inspired by both photographs and Japanese prints). He
was trusted as a very good painter, before he brought the rules.
-Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, 1863: you can tell how traditional he was in the use of colours and
composition. We are focused on this young man. Characteristic face. That was boring for Manet and broke the rules so
he— painting dopo

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- Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862- 1863: so he took a classic image in the imagination of French people and
transformed. Not realistic people, the skin doesn’t have the real colour of the real skin. She doesn’t feel ashamed of
her nudity, she looks to us. She’s not a goddess she’s probably a prostitute. The other woman is more far, very little,
the details of the her dress. This painting was a scandal because Manet was known to represent subjects in a good
way but in this painting he didn’t want to focus on the details but on the women of the paintings which are the
main characters of the painting. It was scandalous also for the naked woman and because of the collective idea of
this painting that it was Sacra.
- Titian, Concerto Campestre 1510: She’s giving the back to us, she doesn’t have characteristic face, no features.
This woman doesn’t seem a real woman instead mire if a goddess one. Probably they are also artists. She’s ethereal
(because of the proportions - she’s bigger, the face is always the same).
- Marc Antonio Raimondi, Giudizio di Paride 1513/1514:
- Olympia, 1863: the features of the Venus are recognisable and seem like the woman from the other painting.
She had a dark cat on her feet, she’s completely untrustworthy, she’s receiving owers from an admirer. She has no
fear in the eyes and she is very conscious of her beauty and secure of herself. She’s not afraid of people watching
her. Brushes used are at. The composition is disturbing for that time.
- Titian, venere di Urbino, 1538: completely different
- A bar at The Folies Bergere, 1882: a mirror was used to give the effect of a window (?). The mirror, in the
background. Behind the girl there’s the frame of the mirror, so we have the perception that the party is behind her,
but instead it is in front of her, we are part of the party and she’s asking us what we’re going to drink. The girl and
the man talking, is a trick to trick us into spthinking this is not real but a dream. The leg on the left of an acrobat is
cutted. We have the beautiful still life the owers on the dress.

THE MACCHIAIOLI
The Macchiaioli were a group of rebellious artists working in Florence in the mid 1855s, mainly from Tuscany but also
from other parts of the country. “Macchiaioli” comes from “macchia” the Italian term for “stain” and was a pejorative
label that appeared in the press in 1862 and which they then adopted.
The Macchiaioli used a sketch technique to record their initial impressions of nature—often as seen from a distance—by
means of color and light. Their painting, similar to that of the later French Impressionists, were made of lush color,
tonal contrasts and spatial placements .
The Macchiaioli rebelled against the established art academy stultifying conventions of ‘ nished paintings’ and
thematic restrictions to biblical and historical or courtly subjects. They innovated the chiaroscuro method of
enriching tonal expressions and spatial depth relations in a modern context.
Because of how the painted with stains, macchia. Interested in the famous and important event
Difference with the Impressionism: Macchiaioli we’re focused on a social subjects/ categories impressionism were
more focused on super cial themes like cities and bourgeoisie

GIOVANNI FATTORI
Fattori was one of the leaders (together with Signorini and Lega) of the group the Macchiaioli.
He was initially a painter of historical themes and military subjects (no battle scene, but rather soldiers in
encampments, soldiers mustering, or infantry units at rest) . He used to paint mainly soldiers/ war.
Inspired by the French painters of landscape, he became one of the leading Italian plein-airists, painting landscapes,
rural scenes, and scenes of military life where he paid attention to the social conditions of his subjects. Stains were not
blurred and imprecise. They were kind of geometric.
-La rotonda dei bagni Palmieri, 1866: reality is very simpli ed. We don’t see the drawing here but just the
scheme and it’s colours. We don’t have features of the faces because they are just stains.

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 - In Vedetta 1872: soldiers that are not battling and no celebration of the power of soldiers and weapon and war,
they just looking for something which is not known. Fattori isolated the soldiers and the horses with a white
background which is a wall. The main subjects are the soldiers. The diagonal of wall help us to concentrate
attention on the soldiers. Again the photography was very useful to the composition of the scene.
- Denis Dighton, The Battle of Waterloo, 1816 : dramatic, glorifying of war. All the gures and soldiers are
battling in a heroic way. Very chaotic and dramatic scene. War was represented like this.
- Il Riposo (Il carro Rosso) 1887: black and white composition to make it even de ned to the composition, it is
very solid, the volumes are very de ned. The subject is nothing relevant, not celebrating anything. It just
represents a common situation at that time.
- Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Il Quarto Stato, 1899-1901: movement. The subject is the quarto stato last
social. Poor people, and they are marching toward the viewer compact. They are kind of asking something for their
condition. The woman with the baby represent the fact that even women were involved in this. Always the same
colours, brownish, not strong colouring, like a lter- very compact. It was refused by the academies because big
paintings were dedicated only to celebrating subjects just like war. Bigger the painting bigger the celebration. The
subject itself wasn’t appalling and important for that period of time because no ones wanted to know their
conditions. After the refusal it became the symbol of Macchiaioli.

SCULPTING
Was very related to the materials which were used, they were not exible. They require a very speci c skill and talent.
To change the rules and the technical approach was not simple. But what changed at that time, is the subjects
represented. After 1861 many young Italian sculptors sought for a realistic approach. This new challenge brought
them to a renovated vocabulary of subjects and a different technique similar to the one used by the contemporary
painters made of thick strokes and broken ecks that in sculpture was a way to convey the light and make the gures
move. Nevertheless those artists still in uenced by the mark of traditional sculpture. Bronze marble
Social subjects.
Putting on a stone for never forget. The other subject (Pescatore). A boy grabbing a sh, very common and normal.
Nothing in exceptional. But the difference, the important thing the way the material is treated. In pescatore the
position very very common, and realistic, the other one boy position is very elegant, no emotion instead of the very
speci c pescatore’s emotions which are depicted in the sculpture.
This boy is much more close to us because of the emotions.

MEDARDO ROSSO
Rosso already as a student in Art Academy protested against the traditional teaching methods. Indeed he preferred
contemporary subjects: ordinary people and the destitution of modern urban life, which he captured faithfully with
photographic accuracy.
Notably, however, this “search for truth” was not synonymous with a sterile representation of phenomena; rather, a
lively emotional involvement permeated by vestigial Romanticism, can be detected. His attempt was to bring
sculpture closer to painting and to achieve formal “dematerialisation” by means of light.
Rosso moved to Paris, where he stayed until c. 1915. Through his contacts with the Post-Impressionists, between 1890
and 1893 Rosso began to make an even closer study of psychological dynamics.

- Medardo Rosso, Mother with child, 1886: he wants to represent the real subject, real life and emotions. He
used new material such as WAX. Property of being very manipulative. We can call it impressionist’s effect, because
the image is very effective but blurred. He doesn’t look to de ned subjects but he focus on the emotions and
images that re ected reality, in this case in a way that looks like Madonna and the child. The arms are carved in a

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 very pictorial way from the wax. Painting happens just on the surface we see, the frontal one, and in medardo
Rosso it is the same, behind the subjects there’s no other things.
- Medardo Rosso, The Bookmaker, 1894: bronze sculpture. The stamp gave it the form of the soldier. The effect
of wax in noticeable. The details are just visible this is a portrait of a real person which was recognisable. The person
was zoppo
- Enfant à la Bouchée de Pain (Child in the soup kitchen) , 1897: only thing that is elaborated is the little
face of the baby. Subject with a cloud/ veil. Fingerprints of the artist are visible, which was caused by the thing he
made the sculpture.
- Ecce Puer 1906: tries to give us the emotion he has in rent of the subject. The signs of the wax dropping down
while the artist is processing the artwork. It becomes an active part of what is the protagonist of the subject.

François-Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917)

Rodin was deeply inspired by tradition in the use of various materials such as bronze, marble, plaster, and clay, yet
rebelled against its idealised forms, introducing innovative practices that paved the way for modern sculpture.
Rodin’s genius was to express inner truths of the human psyche, and his gaze penetrated beneath the external
appearance of the world. Exploring this realm beneath the surface, Rodin developed an agile technique for rendering
the extreme physical states. The hallmarks of Rodin's style are his af nity for the partial gure, his focus on
formal qualities and relationships rather than on narrative structure, and his desire to retain the marks of the
sculptural process on his nished works.
Rodin sculpted a universe of great passion and tragedy, a world of imagination that exceeded the mundane reality of
everyday existence. Traditional way at rst but always looking to a modern result.
- Flora 1865-1870: (destra ) not real face, because perfect. Also because of the proportion.(sinistra) Something
very close to reality, look at the eyebrows, more realistic proportion. The hair here are ruffed and not treated and in
contrast of the face and neck of the woman. The features of her body is kind of close reality and modern=/ perfect
waves of the hair.
- The Age of bronze 1875-1877: changed the rules of the composition of the body and on proportions. This man
represents the age of bronze, something that is not real but symbolic. Not perfect. Position of the arms very simple
and he’s very common.In contrast with the other one from Canova, in the position of the subject, we have Apollo,
the perfection of the body of a man, the face is unrealistic, the position and proportion and how we feel Apollo is
not a man from our world. It’s completely different from the one of Rodin. Apollo has the perfect amount of
mussels.
- The hand of God 1896: it’s polished. Made of mat. Manipulations the two gures to obtain the woman and the
man. An hand which it’s giving power. Inspired by Michelangelo’s Non Finito, block of marble not nished the
whole part of the body and didn’t polished it. The subject is already inside the block of the marble and the artist
caved it from it. So we imagine this subject trapped in the piece of marble, very dramatic.
- The Athlete 1904: it’s a celebrate because he has accomplished an impossible very dif cult task. Special human
being. Nothing glorious here, an athlete during his pause, is rest. Not detailed and polished (ex. The feet). The face
is characterised, real man and expression. The proportion and mussels are telling the story of the athlete, probably
a boxer because of its arms and legs which are not as big as the arms.
- The Gates of Hell 1880-1917: he was commissioned from Paris for a door, and this became the most famous
sculpture of his. Revolution The idea of a door. All these pieces are analysed and made many many times and then
placed all together. different scenes n
- But not as Lorenzo Ghilberti’s door, just in a way more uent. It represents the inferno, purgatorio, with different
stories of Dante Alighieri. On top of the door there’s a man gure that Is supposed to be god who looks under to
see the souls that are suffering in hell. The door of hell became a pretext to study the single I don’t know. God is

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 represented as a thinker of its own creatures, thinking of what he did wrong because the souls are in hell. The
position of a thinker, it usually is represented in a more dramatic way, instead of a simple man who is thinking of
how mistakes, not powerful. He’s really into his thoughts even the hair are not de ned. In 1880 Rodin was
commissioned to create a set of bronze doors for a new museum in Paris. Inspired by The Divine Comedy, written
by Dante Alighieri (Italian, c. 1265– 1324), Rodin planned to decorate the doors with characters that Dante met on
his ctional journey through hell. The sculptor eventually discarded the idea of a strict narrative and instead
created a weightless, chaotic world lled with more than 200 gures in the throes of pain and despair .
- The Gates of Hell is the de ning project of Rodin's career and a key to understanding his artistic aims. Work on The
Gates occupied him for thirty-seven years and during this period he regularly added, removed, and altered the
more than two hundred gures that appear on the doors.
- Near the end of his life, as Rodin was making plans for the creation of a museum devoted to his work, he had a
new plaster made of The Gates since the original model was falling apart after so much reworking. Due to the
sculptor's failing health and the outbreak of World War I, his plans to carve the work in marble never came to
fruition, and The Gates existed only in plaster at the time of his death.
- The three Shades:proportion symbolic gures, again the proportion and composition unrealistic but realistic in
the way of movement. Two diagonals crossing on the knees, which are crossing (the diagonals).
- Ugolino and his children: another story from Divina commedia. Ugolino was imprisoned and he was hungry
and ate his own children and went to hell.
- Monument to Balzac 1898: the sculpture of Balzac was inspired by the Bookmaker, but the idea of one block,
representing the gure a little bit tilted. And that was a way that Rodin approaches the of cial sculpting.
Committed by the city of Paris, but Balzac was kind of a dog, an important writer and should be represented in a
very of cial way. So in here Balzac is represented in pijamas. Doesn’t have any book in his hand so is it labelled as
the famous writer that France gave birth to. He’s lost in his thoughts and he’s just woke up (look at the hair and his
expression) . Not of cial shape and Balzac as a writer had to be represented with a book, or a pen. That was rejected
by the city of Paris. Deconstruct the of cial idea of someone and to take this massive personage to make them
more real, more part of the regular world.

LESSON 3: THE REALITY AS OPTICAL and SOCIAL

POST-IMPRESSIONISM
- Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent
artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper
symbolism. Through the use of simpli ed colours and de nitive forms, their art was characterised by a renewed
aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies.
- Among the nascent generation of artists responding to Impressionism, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Georges Seurat
(1859–1891), Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890), and the eldest of the group, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), followed
diverse stylistic paths in search of authentic intellectual and artistic achievements.
- Although they did not view themselves as part of a collective movement at the time, Roger Fry (1866–1934), critic
and artist, broadly categorised them as "Post-Impressionists," a term that he coined in his seminal exhibition Manet
and the Post-Impressionists installed at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910.

POINTILLISM
Pointillism is a form of painting in which tiny strokes, dots and dashes of primary- colors are used to generate
secondary colours. It is an offshoot of Impressionism, and is also called either Neo-Impressionism or Divisionism.
Encouraged by contemporary writing on colour theory—the treatises of Charles Henry, Eugène Chevreul, and Odgen
Rood for example—Neo-Impressionists came to believe that separate touches of interwoven pigment result in a

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 greater vibrancy of colour in the observer's eye than is achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the
palette. Known as mélange optic (optical mixture), this meticulous paint application would, they felt, realise a
pulsating shimmer of light on the canvas.
The term "Pointillism" was rst used in 1886 with respect to the work of Georges Seurat, and he is the artist most
closely associated with the movement. The relatively few artists who worked in this style also included Paul Signac and
Henri-Edmond Cross.
Tiny tiny dots of pure colours, not mixed. Poured close to one another

Michel Eugène Chevreul

The Law of «Simultaneous Contrast»
Pointillism
The chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul introduced his (incomplete) attempt at producing a systematic approach to
seeing colours in 1839.
He designed a 72-part colour-circle whose radii, in addition to the three primaries of red, yellow and blue, depict three
secondary mixtures of orange, green and violet as well as six further secondary mixtures. The resultant sectors were
each subdivided into ve zones and all radii were separated into 20 segments to accommodate the different
brightness levels. This is the rst time that we have been confronted with the active role of the brain in the formation
of colours, and we should once more remind ourselves that colours are also effects which are created in the world
inside our heads.

GEORGES SEURAT (French, 1859-1891)

Seurat is considered one of the most important Post- Impressionist painters. He moved away from the apparent
spontaneity and rapidity of Impressionism and developed a structured, more monumental art to depict modern urban
life. Seurat combined a traditional approach, based on his academic training, with a study of modern techniques that
he also acquire from contemporary optical theories of color relationships. Seurat invented the term ‘chromo-
luminarism’, to convey his dual interest in intensifying the effect of color and light .
He attered the image.
- Bathers at Asnières, 1883-1884:
- La grande jatte, 1884: points are very little so we don’t see them anymore, extremely small dots. Final resolution
is at and geometrical - like the shadows, the lady is not natural, even tho is the only one more detailed.
- The circus, 1890-189: gures drowned in a very fantastic way we can tell by the movements of the horses which
are running, it’s absolutely fantastic and unreal. What was important was both of the techniques of pointillism. It
feels like a dream: colours of the clothing of the people in the back, the movements, the ballerina, clown is closing
the show, we are watching it we’re not part of the show.

SYMBOLISM
Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s and thereafter it became an international
avant-garde movement that spread across Europe and North America during the last two decades of the nineteenth
century. Symbolist painters believed that art should re ect an emotion or an idea rather than represent the natural
world in the objective, quasi-scienti c manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism. Returning to the personal
expressivity, they felt that the symbolic value or meaning of a work of art derived from the recreation of emotional
experiences in the viewer through colours, line, and composition.
Symbolist artists produced imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious gures from biblical stories and Greek
mythology as well as fantastical, often monstrous, creatures. Their suggestive imagery established what would
become the most pervasive themes in Symbolist art: love, fear, anguish, death, sexual awakening, and unrequited

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desire. Woman became the favoured symbol for the expression of these universal emotions, appearing alternately as
wistful virgins and menacing femmes fatales.
The rejection of Symbolists for naturalism and narrative in favor of the subjective representation of an idea or emotion
would have a signi cant effect on the artwork of the twentieth century, particularly the formulation of German.
Expressionism and Abstraction.
Choice of the subject . Effort to represent something only existing like a concept like sadness, happiness or someone’s
thinking. Difference techniques but with the same task.

- Odilodon Redon, Pandora, 1914: mythological person a woman surrounded by owers and trees.
- Arnold Böcklin, Island of the Dead, 1880: white gure, boat with someone who goes to the island, this isn’t a
real island. Probably the goat goes to the island as a ghost.

HENRI ROUSSEAU LE DOUANIER (French, 1844-1910)

Rousseau Le Douanier (from his profession) is considered the archetype of the modern naive artist. He is known for his
richly coloured and meticulously detailed pictures of lush jungles, wild beasts, and exotic gures.
- The Snake-Charmer, 1907: we don’t know if it’s a woman or man

GAETANO PREVIATI (Italian, 1852-1920)

Previati was a Symbolist painter in the Divisionism style. He elaborated a personal style made by long strokes of colors
to suggest a dreaming atmosphere in subject half way between fantasy And reality.
- Danza Della ore , 1899: Moon and sun, angels running over and over again on the moon symbolising the time.

Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Liberty (same movement)

From the 1880s until the First World War, western Europe and the United States witnessed the development of Art
Nouveau ("New Art"). Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of the natural world, Art Nouveau in uenced art and
architecture especially in the applied arts, graphic work, and illustration. Sinuous lines and "whiplash" curves were
derived, in part, from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms.
The term Art Nouveau rst appeared in the 1880s in the Belgian journal L'Art Moderne to describe the work of “Les
Vingt”, twenty painters and sculptors seeking reform through art. “Les Vingt” advocated the unity of all the arts,
arguing against segregation between the ne arts of painting and sculpture and the so-called lesser decorative arts.
Art Nouveau designers endeavoured to achieve the synthesis of art and craft, and further, the creation of the spiritually
uplifting Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art") encompassing a variety of media. Painting styles such as Post-
Impressionism and Symbolism (the "Nabis") shared close ties with Art Nouveau and each was practiced by designers
who adapted them for the applied arts, architecture, interior designs, furnishings, and patterns.
The “New Art" was called by different names in the various style centres where it developed throughout Europe. In
Germany, it was Jugendstil or "young style," after the popular journal Die Jugend. Part of the broader Modernista
movement in Barcelona, its chief exponent was the architect Antoni Gaudí (1852– 1926). In Italy, it was named Stile
Liberty. Art Nouveau was a short-lived movement whose brief incandescence was a precursor of industrial design and
modernism, which emphasized function over form and the elimination of super uous ornament.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893: he made graphic no details, image is at ( look at the dress), the
dancer is very simple in the lines, her body creates lines in the drawing.

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 The Vienna Secession (1897)
On May 22, 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of artists to resign the Viennese Künstlerhaus, a state- sponsored art
institution under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture. The dispute was a question of value and status of art itself:
the resigning artists, many of them had been working in the Jugendstil, believed that art and culture should be left to
the artists, rather than statesmen. This break led to the formation of the Vienna Secession and Vienna’s entrance in the
ranks of the European avant-garde.
Vienna at the turn of the century was the place where the antiquated traditional order met twentieth- century
modernism. Its centre had been newly rebuild and decorated with buildings designed by Otto Wagner. Vienna was
famous for its culture, but because of its traditionalism, Vienna was considered provincial by the rest of Europe. The
Secessionists wanted to break that isolation, organising and participating in international exhibitions.
The foundation of the Secession house was laid on April 28, 1898. It was designed by Joseph Olbrich, a student of
Otto Wagner. The building represented one of the best-known examples of European architecture at the transition
from historicism to modernism. Olbrich saw the need for a versatile exhibition place that could accommodate the
group’s vision of Gesamkunstwerk that is, where all disciplines of the arts could be exhibited simultaneously.
From 1898 to 1903 the Viennese Secession published its of cial magazine, Ver Sacrum (‘Sacred Spring’ in Latin)
which pioneered new techniques in graphic design such as the use of modular grid system and custom designed
typography. Klimt used to be a glass decorator.

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862-1918)

Gustav Klimt began his career as a decorator, gaining fame with his historical and naturalistic mural decorations.
For Klimt, myths provided a whole language of symbols and allusions that he could use to establish communication
with the viewer. By making the viewer think and interpret the symbolical meaning of the images, Klimt was raising
public consciousness and provoking debate. Increasingly, Klimt (like Freud) began to use classical symbols to serve as
a metaphorical bridge to the excavation of the instinctual world of being.
In the last fteen years of his life, Klimt perfected his portraiture of women of whom he showed the psychological
state of humanity, unveiling the dark and ugly features of the unconscious, and drawing attention to the ultimate
truths that had been covered by conventional morality.
- Secession Poster, 1898: Magazine that he promoted: very graphic, on top the mussels of the men are all
detailed, we don’t see any tipping else than the woman on red, different kind of letters that are transformed.
- Farm House with Birch Trees, 1900:
- Poppy Field, 1907: All is merged, realistically owers, everything is on the same level, no sensation of something
far away from us.
Klimt was very famous to capture the personality and gesture of people he represented in their portraits:
- Portrait of Sonja Knips, 1898: the rest very blurred on the contrary she is sitting on the side of the painting, she
stopped reading to watch the artist, emptiness also in Beethoven freeze, gives some suspense to the canvas and
portrait. Give us the idea that there’s a little story behind this painting. Very expressive face.
Gold: was used in icons, for sacred representations, is something which belongs to another world.
- The Sun ower, 1902:
- Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I, 1907:

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 EGON SCHIELE (Austrian, 1890-1918)
A protégé of Klimt, Schiele is celebrated for his singular style of draftsmanship, unusual use of colour, and physically
raw, often sexually provocative depictions of his sitters.
Schiele made many drawings from these willing models, some of which were extremely erotic. He seems to have
made part of his income by supplying collectors of pornography, who abounded in Vienna at that time. Schiele was
also fascinated by his own appearance, and made self-portraits in large numbers.
His way of life inevitably aroused animosity, and in April 1912 he was arrested. This experience was a traumatic and
pivotal period in Schiele's life and had consequences on the evolution of his style that became even more rough.
Schiele expressive style and controversial subject matter played an important role in the advancement of modernism
in Europe. In symbolism women were considered half evil and half angel. WE
- A woman with a black hat, 1909: snake in her hands, two types of meaning behind woman, half evil and half
angels. Red women were considered as evil.
- Self Portrait with Arm Twisting above Head, 1910: Sensation is torturing, doesn’t want to appear in a good
way but in a tormented way, evil eye
- Fighter, 1913: colours are unreal, Green yellow, he doesn’t want a real effect of the body. He’s fascinated by
different positions of the body.
- Windows (Facade of a house) 1914: geometrical elements we don’t see the roof, the rest becomes a group of
geometrical gures and colours like an Abstract painting. Isolate a gure and make it graphic
- Woman with legs drawn up 1917: something graphic that belongs to the idea of making everything graphical
and elegant. All lines touch of colour in green, that makes the outlines more heavier. Women were not able to be
represented naked or natural position.
- Sitting Woman, 1914:

PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906)

Paul Cézanne is one of the most in uential artists in the history of twentieth-century painting, with his unique method
of building form with colours and his analytical approach to nature he in uenced generations of modern artists.
After his rst Impressionist exhibition in 1874 (although he was not fully in line with the Impressionist technique) he
abandoned his relatively dark palette in exchange for brilliant tones and began painting out-of-doors developing a
style of tonal scale.
Cézanne artistic evolution and mastery of this style is made of building forms completely from colour and creating
scenes with distorted perspectival space.
The objects in his painting are rendered without use of light or shadow, but through extremely subtle gradations of
colours and in the landscapes, he ignores the laws of classical perspective, allowing each object to be independent
within the space of a picture while the relationship of one object to another takes precedence over traditional single-
point perspective.
- Still life with open drawer, 1877: he focused on the use of colours, the rest of the painting is lled with the
different size of the volumes of the glasses, geometrical shapes that made the objects.
- Still Life with Apples, 1890: surface of the table we don’t see the deep the third dimension of the table, we just
understand that it is a surface that focus on the objects on it. Cezanne used to use photography to deconstruct the
images to paint them. Studying the movement and the light and shadows.
- The Bather, 1885: it’s just useful to study how the light can re ect on the body
- Gardanne, 1885–86: un nished. Some crayons just to build geometrical shapes. Normally in a traditional way of
painting the p. … but Cezanne deconstruct the image in geometrical shapes and uses colours to build them.

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 - Mont Sainte–Victoire, 1882-1885: he didn’t started in a traditional way, we already see here the geometrical
approach, there’s no perception of realistic elements like the house without windows and the bridge that is just a
white line p, trees very simpli ed.
- Mont Sainte–Victoire, 1887- 1890: the process is even more simpli ed like the tree and the landscape. Trees
are just stains of colours with the use of the colour green. The arches of the bridge are even simpli ed. We don’t
see the profundity of the landscape.
- Mont Sainte–Victoire, 1900-1902: extreme simpli ed landscape. The countryside is not green anymore,
brownish, it is more of the sensation of the eye.
- Mont Sainte–Victoire, 1905: extreme simpli ed landscape, we don’t recognise the mountains and the bridge,
mountains are not separated from the sky, expect for a black line establishing its top. Unusual and new modality to
represent reality.
- Bathers, 1874-1875: this is more realistic, the bathers are unrealistic because of the proportion and positions,
but more realistic. Cezanne just continues to paint the same subject every time more simpli ed than the last.
- The Large Bathers, 1898-1906: it’s the typical French subject where it is applied the same technique he used
with la montagne, faces absolutely not characterised, the nature is unrealistic like the tree which are like curtains
on a stage. Landscape in the back is unreal and has nothing to do with reality. The colours are blurred all over the
painting, unrealistic shadows.

PAUL GAUGUIN 1848 - 1903

Paul Gauguin styled himself and his art as "savage“. Although he began his artistic career with the Impressionists in
Paris, during the late 1880s he ed farther from urban civilisation in search of an edenic paradise where he could
create pure, "primitive" art in the South Seas.
Gauguin adopted and adapted Cézanne's parallel, constructive brushstrokes, however he freed the color from mimetic
representation and distorted form for expressive purposes.
Gauguin's pictures showed a preoccupation with dreams, mystery, and evocative symbols. He also sculpted, carved
wood reliefs and objects, and made ceramics, signaling an interest in three-dimensional decorative objects from the
beginning of his career.
Gauguin used broad, matte elds of stridently non- naturalistic colours to achieve a new synthetic style that combined
decorative abstract patterning with guration.
- Vision after the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1861: something impossible and unreal but
those women are coming out of the church they all have the bretons clothing and what makes this so much unreal
is the colour of the ground red that gives more drama to the painting also because of the brown line cutting the
scene in 2. Gauguin was obsessed with Japanese art, he took the idea of the Japanese cherry tree in the use of
natural elements
- Onana Maria, 1891: his painting mixed together the culture of his paese and the new one where he was staying
in Haiti. The two gures is very naive but the position of
- Fatata te miti, 1892: the idea was to just recall the sensation the composition is in uenced by Japanese art.
Stains of colours without any characteristics. The gure on top is captured with the use of photography. G. Was
focused on getting the primitive art.

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 VINCENT VAN GOGH
Largely self-taught, Van Gogh gained his footing as an artist by zealously copying prints and studying nineteenth-
century drawing manuals and lesson books.
Van Gogh's admiration for the French artists, in uenced his decision to paint rural life and in 1885 he departed to
Paris joining his brother Theo. There he saw the work of the Impressionists rst-hand and also the latest innovations by
the Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat. In response, he lightened his palette and experimented with the broken
brushstrokes of the Impressionists as well as the pointillist touch of the Neo-Impressionists.
Van Gogh’s in uence by Japanese prints, which he also collected, is to be found in his great verve and linear
invention.
- The potato peelers, 1885:
- La Berceuse, 1889:
- Vs: the one of Gauguin:
- Sun owers, 1889: Van Gogh put in each of his work his own personal symbolism: sun owers were joyous and
life-af rming, unlaced shoes were emblematic for his itinerant existence, etc
Became friends with Gauguin, there’s no dept no realistic, the perception of the chair and the dress is very at and
essential. Confronted with the one of g. - very simple volume of the body of the girl and the same exactly as the one of
Van Gogh.
- The Bedroom in Arles, 1889: When he gained more self consciousness Van Gogh always used realistic colours
and what makes unreal is the fact that he simpli ed the shapes of the gures. He gave the whole composition of an
unrealistic subject.
Van Gogh used realistic landscapes but didn’t represented them in a realistic way because of his mental illnesses. This
is his room, the longings, the light of the composition comes from somewhere we don’t understand, we see no
shadows here. The perspective is very extreme. The bed is too much big, the perspective is wrong and the chairs are
too big or too small. It is unrealistic because it is the personal view of the artist, as he was perceiving the world and
reality.
- The Starry Night, 1889: something fantastic dreamy and unreal because of the shapes used. Moon is never that
shape, shapes are transforming to give to the viewer the perception of dreaming. Tree menacing the village( the stain
black in the back of the village). People are living there and not conscious of the evil presence approaching them. Is
not romantic as it appears but actually the opposite.

EDVARD MUNCH (Norwegian, 1863- 1944)

Edvard Munch was an expressionist painter and printer. He played a great role in German expressionism and in the
art form that later followed; namely because of the strong mental anguish that was displayed in many of the pieces
that he created.
Much of the work which Edvard Munch created, was referred to as the style known as Symbolism. This is mainly
because of the fact that the pieces which he created, and the paintings he made, focused on the internal view of the
objects, as opposed to the exterior, and what the eye could see.
Much of his work depicts life and death scenes, love and terror, and the feeling of loneliness was often a feeling which
viewers would note that his work patterns focused on. These emotions were depicted by the contrasting lines, the
darker colours, blocks of colour, somber tones, and a concise and exaggerated form, which depicted the darker side of
the art which he was designing.
- vampire 1893: the woman (red hair, evil, half angel half evil) she’s the vampire and he’s the victim. the rst
appearance of the painting is a loving and romantic scenario is in reality the opposite.
- Madonna 1894: ha always sees the dark side of the reality and wants to represent it. The evil version of the
Madonna from the classical one. She has nothing of sacred and angelic in this painting. The child which is Jesus is

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 very terri ed by her, is not a classical representation of the virgin with the son, complete opposite. Symbol of the
fact she was not virgin, something more erotic than saint and also she could be any woman.
- The Dance of life : the sun that re ects to the see, proportions and shapes are wrong and uncomfortable feeling
watching it. Two gures a woman and a man where she’s like a zombie, dark hair and eyes, walking as dead. He
also doesn’t have a mouth we don’t understand if they are lovers or something else. The only thing we get from
this painting is that something terrible was happening there.
- The snow in the avenue, 1906: use of photography here is evident. And those gures which are not
recognisable are walking out of the painting, arriving from a situation not relaxing because in the back of the
avenue is all black.
- The scream 1893: this is the most famous of munch. In here again uses colours and shapes to give the sensation
and the sound of the scream. He took an event that happened to him directly and transformed in a painting: He
was left over his friends on the bridge and he was feeling abandoned and sad so he screamed. The people were
involved in his scream. He described the face of the gure as any of us can be this gure. The shape of the head is
more similar to a skull and also the hands and the whole body is describing the waves of the scream. Shapes=
waving like the scream. Essentially this famous picture is autobiographical, an expressionistic construction based
on Munch's actual experience of a scream piercing through nature while on a walk, after his two companions, seen
in the background, had left him. Fitting the fact that the sound must have been heard at a time when his mind was
in an abnormal state, Munch renders it in a style which if pushed to extremes can destroy human integrity. As
previously noted, the owing curves of art nouveau represent a subjective linear fusion imposed upon nature,
whereby the multiplicity of particulars is uni ed into a totality of organic suggestion with feminine overtones. But
man is part of nature, and absorption into such a totality liquidates the individual. Beginning at this time Munch
included art nouveau elements in many pictures but usually only in a limited or modi ed way. Here, however, in
depicting his own morbid experience, he has let go, and allowed the foreground gure to become distorted by the
subjectivized ow of nature; the scream could be interpreted as expressing the agony of the obliteration of human
personality by this unifying force. Signi cantly, although it was Munch himself who underwent the experience
depicted, the protagonist bears no resemblance to him or anyone else. The creature in the foreground has been
depersonalized and crushed into sexlessness or, if anything, stamped with a trace of the femininity of the world
that has come close to assimilating it. The 1895 pastel-on-board version of the painting was sold at Sotheby's for a
record US$120 million at auction on 2 May 2012

The Berlin Secession

The Berlin Secession grew out of the rejection by a group of artists who by 1892 had repudiated, as the Viennese
Secession did one year before, the academic view of art. The protest was triggered when an exhibition showing works
by Edvard Munch was closed down in November 1892 by members of the Verein Berliner Künstler [Association of
Berlin Artists] because they found Munch's paintings offensive, vehement protest was voiced. In May 1898 sixty- ve
artists came together to form the Berlin Secession, with the well- known Naturalist and Impressionist artist Max
Liebermann as its rst president.
Along with Liebermann, the artists Walter Leistikow (1865-1908) and Lovis Corinth (1858- 1925), and the cousins
Bruno (1871-1941) and Paul Cassirer (1871-1926), owners of a Berlin gallery and publishing house, played a key role
in the group, which successfully supported avant-garde styles, offering an essential alternative to the “true art”
promoted by the of cial art.
Over the course of the Berlin Secession’s fteen-year history, its membership would include some of the most
in uential artists of the day. By 1910, however, its commitment to stylistic diversity began to falter, as the group found
it increasingly dif cult to accommodate the work of a younger, more robust generation of Expressionist artists.
- Max Liebermann, Jewish Street in Amsterdam, 1905: all described with colours instead of shapes.

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 - Lovis Corinth, laughing self portrait, 1908: it was an experiment to know how to create a connection to
feelings and paintings. Brushstrokes in the back.

THE EXPRESSIONISM
In 1905 the artists' association Brücke (The Bridge) was founded by four students of architecture - Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - in the city of Dresden.
Their aim was to nd, as other vanguard groups, new ways of artistic expression and to free themselves from the
traditional academic style of the time. The Brücke is therefore one of the earliest German artists’ associations which
had a crucial impact on the development of classical modern art. The artists collectively created a style which was to be
de ned within 20th century art history as "Expressionism".
Apart from their own artistic work, Brücke members two most important aims were to establish contact with artists of
similar convictions and to introduce their avant-garde art to the public through collective exhibitions.
The Brücke style attempts the creation of pure expression through colour and form. Painted motives such as
landscapes or nudes in natural settings become the symbolic expression of an inner experience of the world. Forms
and shapes are reduced to their essentials and express the artist’s subjective feelings. Traditional rules of perspective
and academic proportion are abandoned to heighten immediacy. In this context the artists gained important impulses
from their examination of the art of indigenous peoples. Colour too was soon detached from naturalistic
representation and became a means of expressing of emotion: it was applied radiantly with impulsive and
spontaneous brushstrokes.
- Emil Nolde, Excited People, 1913: Person with half yellow and Green face
- Erich Heckel, Geschwister, 1913: hair of the female very geometric not real, the proportion of the face of
Frankenstein not real. The importance here is represented by the feeling the expression and sensation of the
people.
- Red street, 1917: completely unrealistic and dramatic because of the red Colour. Blood
- Seated girls, 1910: simpli cation fo the shape makes her unreal and not a real woman.
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908: the feeling here is he hated the city life, the oor is pink,
unrealistic, the people is made by fancies no features, not characteristic, the shape of the hands earns evil people.
The girl is a monster with an enormous head. The sensation to the public that he doesn’t feel comfortable in the
crowd and in the city so true colours and the distortion of the reality makes it evident to the public. At the time he
made this painting, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was living in Dresden, a large city in southeast Germany. Kirchner
heightened the colours of this city scene, depicting the gures with masklike faces and vacant eyes in order to
capture the excitement and psychological alienation wrought by modernization. The crowded city street—here,
Dresden’s fashionable and wealthy Königstrasse (King Street)—was a frequent subject for artists in the German
Expressionist collective. Many members of the Expressionist movement were con icted about life in the city. On
one hand, they were disgusted by the materialistic lifestyle of the middle class in Germany’s big cities. On the
other, they enjoyed the excitement and bustling activity that cities offered. Early Expressionist street scenes are
lled with depictions of nightclubs and wealthy theatre-goers as well as scenes of loneliness and isolation.

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THE FAUVES (beasts), 1905
Some paintings exposed at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 inspired the critic Louis Vauxcelles to call the artists
who made them, Fauves ("wild beasts") referring to their use of arbitrary combinations of bright colors and energetic
brushwork to structure the composition.
The Fauve painters were the rst to break with Impressionism as well as with older, traditional methods of perception.
Their spontaneous, often subjective response to nature was expressed in bold, undisguised brushstrokes and high-
keyed, vibrant colours directly from the tube.
The Fauves were a loosely shaped group of artists sharing a similar approach to nature, but they had no de nitive
program. Their leader was Matisse, who had arrived at the Fauve style after earlier experimenting with the various
Post-Impressionist styles.
Other important Fauvists were Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Charles Camoin,Henri-Charles
Manguin, Othon Friesz, Jean Puy, Louis Valtat, and Georges Rouault. These were joined in 1906 by Georges Braque
and Raoul Dufy. Yet for most of these artists, Fauvism was a transitional, learning stage.
The Fauvist movement has been compared to German Expressionism, but the difference is that the French were more
concerned with the formal aspects of pictorial organisation, while the German Expressionists were more emotionally
involved in their subjects.
They wanted to represent the reality as they perceived it without any in uence.
- André Derain, Pont de Charing Cross, London, 1906: Blue and red trees, skyline with towers spun blue and
sky and water yellow, nally free to use colours as they wanted. It was used nally for colours and not to describe
reality.
- André Derain, Pont de Charing Cross, London, 1906:
- Raoul Dufy, Posters at Trouville, 1906
- Kees van Dongen, Portrait of Fernande Olivier, 1905: the woman: =/ the one of expressionists: the woman
has green in her face, she still have something realistic and she’s more friendly than the one of expressionists.

HENRI MATISSE (French, 1869-1954)

Henri Matisse is one of the most in uential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with
those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally affected the art of several generations of younger painters. His vast oeuvre
encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints),
paper cutouts, and book illustration.
In his early works, Matisse created brilliantly coloured canvases structured by color applied in a variety of brushwork,
ranging from thick impasto to at areas of pure pigment, sometimes accompanied by a sinuous, arabesque- like line.
Subsequently, Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim
always remained the same: to discover, as he wrote, "the essential character of things" and to produce an art “of
balance, purity, and serenity”.
Paper cutouts, drawing and sculpture were another mediums pursued by Matisse since his early years that were
frequently used either to nd a solution to pictorial problems or became an inspiration to painting and new ideas. He
was focused mainly on the use of colours and on the research of them. The technique is stains of colours with the idea
of making the blurring effect that comes from impressionists and pointillism.
- Midday Snack also known as Golf of Saint-Tropez, 1904:
- Woman with a hat, 1905: Matisse and André Derain introduced unnaturalistic color and vivid brushstrokes into
their paintings in the summer of 1905, working together in the small shing port of Collioure on the Mediterranean
coast.
Matisse had arrived at the Fauve style after earlier experimenting with the various Post- Impressionist styles of Van
Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, and the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat, Cross, and Signac. These in uences inspired him

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to reject traditional three-dimensional space and seek instead a new picture space de ned by the movement of color
planes. shape of the head is an excuse to use more colours. Even the background doesn’t describes something but he
focused on its colours. Matisse had a really open minded mind so he experimented a more geometrical, essential
approach-
- ,:he couldn’t express himself entirely he was blocked in a way
- View of Notre-Dame , 1914:
- The Red Studio , 1911: we normally consider colours to make things more visible and heavy but in here Matisse
uses the colour red to paint the whole room and eliminated all the things that didn’t matter except of some
painting, a glass, he cancelled what wasn’t important for him.
- Odalisque with Red Pants , 1921: the idea of patterns in colours that describing the whole subject, she’s
wearing something to the pattern of the wall in the back. He used colours like light blue ecc. To make me focus o;
the red pants which are the important part of the painting. No line that describes the subject, the tapestry in the
back is not important or relevant.
- Standing Blue Nude, 1952: he already took some papers already coloured to obtain the body of the woman,
collage.
- La Gerbe, 1953: the result is very close to abstraction. No details, simpli cation.
- The Back Series, 1908-1931: was also a sculpture, what we saw in its work is that he continued to simplify what
he saw and these sculptures are the representation of this process. The hair are tracing to divide the body in two
parts. The head is a square. Final result: the body is a whole massive rectangle. Matisse cutted off everything that
wasn’t important.
- Not painted on the wall
Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, 1948–51: The Rosaire chapel has been conceived by Henri Matisse from 1948 to
1951. Matisse drew up the plans for the edi ce and all the details of its decoration: stain glass windows, ceramics,
stalls, stoup, cult objects, priestly ornaments... he entirely designed every detail of a monument, from the architecture
to the furniture. The rst stone of the chapel was laid in 1949. The inauguration and consecration of Notre Dame of
Rosary, took place in 1951. For Henry Matisse, “this work required me four years of an exclusive and untiring effort
and it is the fruit of my whole working life. In spite of all its imperfections I consider it as my masterpiece”.
The completed chapel contains three sets of stained glass windows — making use of a color trio: a vivid green, an
intense yellow and a vibrant blue. The two windows beside the altar depict abstract forms synonymous with the hand
of Matisse, entitled The Tree of Life. Adorning the side walls are abstract images of owers and an image of the
Madonna and Child, all created in black outlines on white tiles. Rather than the usual image of clasping the child to
herself, Matisse chose to show Mary offering her son to the world. On the back wall of the chapel are the traditional
fourteen Stations of the Cross. Usually, the fourteen stations are depicted individually; however, Matisse chose to
incorporate all of them on one wall in a single cohesive composition.
The vestments within the chapel use the ecclesiastical colors of the religious seasons: black, purple, rose, green and
red. There are also two doors carved out of wood designed by Matisse, for the confessionals.
The exterior of the chapel can only be recognized by its blue and white tiles, and its centerpiece of a wrought iron
cross ordained with crescent moons and golden ames, standing at an extraordinary thirteen meters high. In
Matisse’s words, he ‘wanted those entering the chapel to feel themselves puri ed and lightened of their burdens

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 LESSON 4: THE SHAPE, STATIC, and in MOTION
CUBISM
Cubism was one of the most in uential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism
after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L'Estaque in emulation of Cézanne.
Cubism’s starting point is recognised to be the stylisation and distortion of Picasso's ground- breaking Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted in 1907 where it can be seen the early in uences linked to Cézanne, Primitivism and
African art.
The Cubist painters wanted to emphasise the two-dimensionality of the canvas, so they reduced and fractured objects
into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow relief like space. They also used multiple or
contrasting vantage points. During “Analytic Cubism” (1910–12), Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that
they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or
blacks.
“Synthetic Cubism” (1912–13)—initiated by Picasso’s papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper
themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes
bear a graphic element that clari es the association.
This new visual language was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger, Robert and
Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger.
Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound in uence on twentieth- century sculpture
and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques
Lipchitz.
Surface at, no prospective, attering the image
Two periods, analytical and synthetic
Lasts only 3/4 years after synthetical cubism there’s something in style of it but we can’t say it’s cubism.

PABLO PICASSO
The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled
magnitude. His proli c output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and
costumes that convey myriad intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages. His creative styles transcend
realism and abstraction, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism.
Picasso's paintings from late 1901 to about the middle of 1904, referred to as his Blue Period, depict themes of
poverty, loneliness, and despair. From 1905, Picasso directs his attention toward more pleasant themes such as
carnival performers, harlequins, and clowns: this is labeled his Rose Period. In 1907 he showed his masterpiece Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon a painting that signals the nascent stages of Cubism. After World War I Picasso reverted to
traditional styles inspired by the classical world of Italy (Neoclassical Period). Picasso's contribution to the Spanish
Pavilion in the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris was the enormous mural Guernica. From the late 1940s through
the '60s, Picasso continued to paint, make ceramics, and experiment with printmaking.
His international fame increased with large exhibitions. He produced an enormous number of works and reaped the
nancial bene ts of his success. He experimented very very techniques, he was the most important painter in the 20s,
and was also a sculpture.

- Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907: rst experiment, we still recognise the subject (5 women), no deep in the
composition, women very simpli ed as cezanne before him, faces not characterised, body cutted in very very sharp
geometrical objects, he simpli ed the grapes and apples, geometrical shapes. Light blue, terracotta. He started to
left to right. Simpli cation of Africa pan masks.

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 - Masks: Japanese and African in uences were very important. The simpli cation he found in the African masks was
very interesting. We still recognise the faces but very geometrical and simple, still with a very expressive faces.
- Georges Braque, The Viaduct at L'Estaque, 1908: approaching landscapes, is easier to geometricalise. Lack
of detail, but we still have some idea of depth, because of the shadows and idea of prospective.
- The life, 1903: blue period, blue the colour of melancholy, blue period is related to private life and emotions,
relatives and family because of its atmosphere, suspended soft and melancholic.
- Family of Saltimbanques, 1905: pink period, strange people physically and emotionally. They entertained the
public and make them laugh but in reality they had a very miserable life because of the conditions of the circus
life. They are people for the show, people are not interested in their life but also in their exhibition which make
them laugh and enjoy.
- Accordionist, 1911: analytical cubism, and process, someone that plays and instrument, and then representing
all these pieces coming from the back, side or front. Not recognisable. Piece of the instrument, on top there we just
perceive an head or something. All the image is played around brownish
- Maquette for Guitar, 1912: synthetic cubism, is when you have many pieces like puzzle, and you put them all
together and get the all image. The shape is more recognisable, of course, so in here we have a guitar that is kind
of recognisable and the new element comes in synthetic cubism, so for the rst time collages is used in paintings,
and it was the rst Time. The idea was to not use paintings to copy reality, but to use the reality to reproduce the
painting. Guitar makes music so we have a pentagram with notes. Picasso use a piece of a newspaper, more cosy
and familiar Also with the use of the wallpaper.
- Three women at the spring, 1921: Picasso abandoned the idea of cubism and started to paint in a more
classical way. Actually we see something classical also in the meaning of the clothing etc. but the structure of the
women is not at anymore, but the geometry is still visible and in their bodies.
- Portrait the Dora Maar, 1932: this is not cubism anymore. What comes after is in the style of cubism using this
idea of geometry, simpli cation, representation of the different sizes and positions of the things like the eyes of
this woman. Also the background is very short and narrow and we don’t have any depth behind her and the colours
are unrealistic.
- Guernica, 1937: An accurate depiction of a cruel, dramatic situation, Guernica was created to be part of the
Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937. Pablo Picasso’s motivation for painting the scene
in this great work was the news of the German aerial bombing of the Basque town whose name the piece bears,
which the artist had seen in the dramatic photographs published in various periodicals, including the French
newspaper L'Humanité. Despite that, neither the studies nor the nished picture contain a single allusion to a
speci c event, constituting instead a generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war. The huge picture is
conceived as a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing and a forewarning of
what was to come in the Second World War. The muted colors, the intensity of each and every one of the motifs and
the way they are articulated are all essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would become the emblem
for all the devastating tragedies of modern society. Guernica has attracted a number of controversial
interpretations, doubtless due in part to the deliberate use in the painting of only greyish tones. Analyzing the
iconography in the painting, one Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the protagonists of the pyramidal
composition into two groups, the rst of which is made up of three animals; the bull, the wounded horse and the
winged bird that can just be made out in the background on the left. The second group is made up of the human
beings, consisting of a dead soldier and a number of women: the one on the upper right, holding a lamp and
leaning through a window, the mother on the left, wailing as she holds her dead child, the one rushing in from the
right and nally the one who is crying out to the heavens, her arms raised as a house burns down behind her. The
government of the Spanish Republic acquired the mural "Guernica" from Picasso in 1937. When World War II
broke out, the artist decided that the painting should remain in the custody of New York's Museum of Modern Art
for safekeeping until the con ict ended. In 1958 Picasso extended the loan of the painting to MoMA for an

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 inde nite period, until such time that democracy had been restored in Spain. The work nally returned to this
country in 1981. Not cubism but still we recognise some of it. The approach of the artist was not to experiment it,
but right now we have a new style of Picasso. One of the most famous paintings of Picasso. Only civilians this event
became the symbol of the injustice of the war. When he was invited in the worlds exhibition in 1937, he decides to
represent this war to stop that cruelty and injustice. The idea in to make it black and white, is to make even more
similar to the reality, because the photos back then where like that, black and white. The idea of cutting the images
with these lines which are very dramatic it gives more drama to this representation. How he creates the sound of
the people screaming, by making them with the mouths wide open, they catch more your attention.
- Pablo Picasso, Ceramics: very interesting because he uses the shape of the objects at representation of other
things like the one of the woman, or the horse.

GEORGES BRAQUE
French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. From 1909, after a period of contact with the Fauves,
Pablo Picasso and Braque worked together in developing Cubism; by 1911 their styles were extremely similar and
their artistic collaboration lasted until 1914.
After the Cubism period, he included in his paintings many compositions of still lives and interiors with contrasting
patterns and more complex effects of space free and less schematic. In the mid-1920s Braque designed the decor for
two Sergei Diaghilev ballets and then returned to a more realistic interpretation of nature, although certain aspects of
Cubism always remained present in his work.
From the late 1940s he treated various recurring themes such as birds, ateliers, landscapes, and seascapes in addition
to lithographs, engravings, and sculptures.
- Landscape in l’estaque, 1906:
- Man with a guitar, 1911/1912:
- Nature morte, 1913: synthetic cubism, collage is very important to synthetic cubism.
- Woman with a mandolin, 1925:
- : The former royal antechamber retained its original, richly-carved ceiling, executed in 1557 by the wood- carver
Scibec de Carpi. Georges Braque was commissioned to produce a series of three ceiling paintings within Carpi's
design. The resulting decorative design, The Birds, was inaugurated in 1953.

CUBISM other paintings

Juan Gris, Violin and Playing Cards, 1913:
Albert Gleizes, The Schoolboy, 1924:
Fernand Léger "Composition (The Typographer)" 1918-19:
Jean Metzinger, Table by a Window, 1917:
Analytical you have an image and the. You fractured it. New technique: collage

PURISM 1918
The movement was founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as the modern architect Le Corbusier) and Amédée
Ozenfant. They set out the theory of purism in their book Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918. They
criticized the fragmentation of the object in cubism and the way in which cubism had become, in their view,
decorative by that time. Instead they proposed a kind of painting in which objects were represented as powerful basic
forms stripped of detail. Fernand Léger was another key artist associated with purism.
A crucial element of purism was its embrace of technology and the machine and it aimed to give mechanical and
industrial subject matter a timeless, classical quality.

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 Purism reached a climax in Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), built in 1925 for
the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. This was hung with work by the three principals
and also included the cubists, Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz. After this the key relationship between Ozenfant and Le
Corbusier broke up. The study of the purity in geometrical shapes. Connected to technology and machines.
- Amédée Ozenfant, Glasses and Bottles, 1922–6 c. : this shape is analysed in the inside and outside,
confusing because they are together. Taking all the useless details off and keeping the original shape and at
colours.
- Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Nature morte au violon rouge, 1920:
- Le corbousier, femme et mains, 1948
- Maison-atelier du peintre Amédée Ozenfant, Paris, 1922
- Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925

ORPHISM
The term was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912 to refer to a new kind of joyously sensuous art, whose roots
were in Cubism and which had a tendency towards abstraction. The word Orphic had been used by the Symbolists and
originated in the Greek myth of Orpheus, who was signi cant as the artist’s power to create entirely new forms and
colours. Accordingly, Orphism could signify a direct sensuous address by means of colour and light, an analogy
between colour and music, as well as an innovative creative process.
Apollinaire de ned ‘Orphic Cubism’ as the art of painting new totalities with elements that the artist does not take
from visual reality, but creates entirely by himself; he gives them a powerful reality. An Orphic painter’s works should
convey an untroubled aesthetic pleasure, but at the same time a meaningful structure and sublime signi cance. In
other words, they must re ect the subject. This is pure art.
Apollinaire’s friendship with Robert Delaunay led to close collaboration until March 1913 when Orphism was
displayed to the public for the rst time at the Salon des Indépendants. After Apollinaire became increasingly
interested in other artists and did not use the term Orphism again in his art criticism.
If restricted to the implications of color and light, the expression of abstract-rhythmic color- compositions, the term
Orphism would most obviously embrace pictures by Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay. About colours, takes from
cubism the idea of geometrical sensation and organisation of the image. The difference between Cubism and
Orphism is to represent something that doesn’t exist.
- circular forms 1930: geometrical forms as an artistic subject.

Sonia Delaunay Terk (Ukrainian, 1885-1979)

The colour, “skin of this world of ours”, as she herself has de ned it, has been the center of the life of Sonia Delaunay,
together with her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay. It was evident for her that the research on the geometrical
deconstruction and its re-composition based on colours lling, the so-called “Orphic Cubism” – a de nition from their
friend and poet Guillaume Apollinaire – could be also continued thanks to applied arts, including fashion. She thus
created the “simultaneous dresses”, based on the same principles: the structure is visibly decomposed by pure colours
in waves, triangles, zigzag lines, concentric circles, rectangles or rhombs. Sonia transformed the 20’s wardrobe into an
artistic avant- garde, where the tunic-dresses with neat lines represented an ideal “canvas” for her experimentations
and the rst simultaneous dresses were created in 1913.
She set the latest trend in the cultivated élite of Paris, with her robes poèmes, dresses where the colors blocks are
alternated with dada mottos and in 1922 she founded the “Atelier Simultané”, a laboratory of fashion, graphic art and
interior decorations. Fabrics and dresses get more and more sophisticated: wool and silk embroideries, sometimes
with fur or metal inserts, allowed her to sharpen the sewing method she invented, the point du jour. For the Atelier,

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 Robert and she created a tissu patron, a basic model for the dress cutting, together with a machinery to show the fabric
while moving.
She stop the production of the “Atelier Simultané” in 1931, but her successful career in the textile design eld has
in uenced many designers, more or less evidently: from the Saint- Laurent, Walter Albini, Pierre Cardin, Paco
Rabanne, and Missoni. Applied the idea of Colours in clothing. She made texture and dresses not only the patterns
but also the shapes of the dresses. Geometry applied to fashion, to something everybody uses.

FUTURISM, 1909
In the early 1900s, a group of young Italian writers and artists were frustrated by Italy’s declining status and believed
that the “Machine Age” would result in an entirely new world order and even a renewed consciousness. Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, the ringleader of this group, called the movement Futurism. Its members sought to capture the
idea of modernity, the sensations and aesthetics of speed, movement, and industrial development.
Marinetti launched Futurism in 1909 with the publication his “Futurist manifesto” on the front page of the French
newspaper Le Figaro.
Futurism quickly grew into an international movement and its participants were involved in different type of art:
painting, sculpture, architecture, music, photography, cinema—even clothing.
The Futurist painters—Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla—signed their
rst manifesto in 1910. Entranced by the idea of the “dynamic”, the Futurists sought to represent an object’s
sensations, rhythms and movements in their images, poems and manifestos. Although futurist painting had rst
looked to the color and the optical experiments, to better obtain the dynamic effect they start fracturing the images as
the Cubists were doing almost at the same time.
Futurism was also a politicised art movements, it merged artistic and political agendas in order to propel change in
Italy and across Europe. They believed that agitation and destruction would end the status quo and allow for the
regeneration of a stronger, energised Italy.
These positions led the Futurists to support the coming war, and like most of the group’s members, leading painter
Boccioni enlisted in the army during World War I.
After the war, the Futurism continued to develop new areas of focus (Aeropittura, for example) and attracted new
members—the so-called “second generation” of Futurist artists.
Similar to cubism but very different, the looked at machines, modernity, movement. Difference is not only esthetician
but also the core of the art, fragramtation of modernity, technology etc. They travelled to Paris, to see some paintings
of cubism.
- Carlo Carrà, The Horse and Rider, 1913
- Gino Severini, The White Dancer, 1912

UMBERTO BOCCIONI
Umberto Boccioni was one of the most prominent and in uential artists among the Italian Futurists.
Boccioni was important not only in developing the movement's theories, but also in introducing the visual
innovations that led to the dynamic, Cubist-like style now so closely associated with the group. Emerging rst as a
painter, Boccioni later produced some signi cant Futurist sculpture.
Boccioni rst matured as a Neo-Impressionist painter. It was not until he encountered Cubism that he developed a
style that matched the ideology of dynamism at the heart of Futurism. Boccioni borrowed the geometric forms typical
of the French style, and employed them to evoke crashing, startling sounds to accompany the depicted movement.
Boccioni had a strong belief in the importance of intuition encouraging him to give it symbolic, almost mythical
dimensions that evoked the artist's emotions as much as the objective reality of modern life. In this respect, Boccioni's
approach is very different from that of the Cubists, whose work was grounded in an attempt to closely describe the

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 physical character of objects, albeit in a new way. He’s one the rst painters of futurism. Started to represent the
movement by celebrate the work of enlarging cities.
- the city rises, 1910: .
- Elasticity, 1912: no representation of all the seize of the objects. In here when you watch something moving,
that confusing moment of the movement, it’s what we see here. Arti cial light was not exactly common, something
very very modern. Elasticity gives the idea of movement
- Dynamism of a soccer player, 1913: this is impossible to know what is the subject. We just see the power and
speed of movement of this image. Repetition of triangles, makes us understand that repeats the same shape.
Experimented the idea of movement even in sculpting
- Unique forms of continuity in space, 1913: In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni puts speed and
force into sculptural form. The gure strides forward. Surpassing the limits of the body, its lines ripple outward in
curving and streamlined ags, as if molded by the wind of its passing. Boccioni had developed these shapes over
two years in paintings, drawings, and sculptures, exacting studies of human musculature. The result is a three-
dimensional portrait of a powerful body in action. In the early twentieth century, the new speed and force of
machinery seemed to pour its power into radical social energy. The new technologies and the ideas attached to
them would later reveal threatening aspects, but for Futurist artists like Boccioni, they were tremendously
exhilarating. Innovative as Boccioni was, in 1912, he had attacked the domination of sculpture by "the blind and
foolish imitation of formulas inherited from the past," and particularly by "the burdensome weight of Greece."
Here the body itself is reshaped, as if the new conditions of modernity were producing a new man. The contours of
this marching gure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind–swept
silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by
Boccioni and other Futurist artists. He took a body and made ten element which are legs and arms, moving. We
don’t see the arms and in the legs the idea of the movement are the trousers. When someone’s is moving we don’t
recognise the single elements. BOCCIONI was the most extreme cause he put together geometralisation and
movement.

GIACOMO BALLA
Balla was one of the founding members of the rst wave of Futurist painters. Balla's participation in the Futurist
movement coincided with a dramatic change in his painting style, when in about 1909 he became preoccupied with
the pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed as outlined by the Futurists primary objective to depict
movement. These paintings addressed themes of work and humanitarian issues, re ecting his Socialist politics.
Through Futurism Balla celebrated the machine and his early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing gures
and objects in motion by showing the forms in repeated sequence. He gave expression to movement by means of
abstract forms showing that to represent a new concept of space, i.e. space- time, it was necessary to do it with a new
formal vocabulary so his compositions gradually moved closer to total abstraction.
In the Twenties, gradually giving more value to geometric forms, his style regularly alternated between abstract
machine- like constructions and gurative representations. Afterward he distanced himself from the so-called second
wave of Futurism and his style returned strongly gurative for the remainder of his career. .
- GIRL ON THE BALCONY, 1912: rationing the subject, repeating the same subject to give the idea of the girl
moving, running from on side to the other. Balcony cause the vertical lines are the grid of the balcony, it’s not just a
random running, we are able to see the step of the running. These are experiments that are interesting for balla.
Balla uses the idea of the division of true Colours =/ from pointillism, helping our eye to perceive the movement.
- Black and white synthetic of movement, 1917: to represent the movement only takes the lines of the
movements. Dynamic is given, describing the movement on the ipotetical movement.

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 - Canaringatti gatti futuristi, 1925: after the futurism, balla and Picasso, used the idea of fractioning the
colours in a very pleasant and simple way. In here we don’t have movement

FUTURISM and ARCHITECTURE

Sant’Elia decided to break away from his formal academic training, cast aside the dictates of secessionist stylistic
canons and set his mind to creating an architecture that would embrace the urban revolution of modernity. Around
him the expansion of the city of Milan was being driven by the needs of industrialised society and the technological
revolution. In this highly stimulating environment he began to work on simplifying structural architectural elements,
relying where possible on the most advanced building methods using iron, concrete and glass. In a series of
drawings, later dubbed by the futurists as “architectural dynamisms”, he sketched agile and slender volumes with no
speci cally stated use, formal exercises stripped of all decorative encumbrances to reveal juxtapositions and the
intersections of frames, pilasters, buttresses, pyramids and cylindrical or rectangular towers that added relief and
depth to stark geometric gures.
As time went by, and after a number of months of work on the rough urban design drawings, the stripped down
skeletons of buildings steadily evolved into so many portions of modern cities, becoming ideas for dwellings, hangars
for airplanes and dirigibles, bridges, theatres and electrical power stations, speci cally intended to be freed from the
shells and adornments that would conceal or obfuscate their practical use. In 1914 he signed the “Manifesto of
Futurist Architecture” that it was nothing less than the dreamt of city of the new millennium “like a huge agile, mobile
and dynamic building site” with houses “like gigantic machines” and brought Sant’Elia’s genius to the world.
Hired by Giovanni Agnelli, structural engineer Giacomo Mattè-Trucco designed the Fiat automobile factory with Ford's
assembly methods in mind. Production owed from bottom to top, with nished cars arriving at the kilometer-long
banked rooftop test track- the building's most recognisable feature. Here, nished cars were tested, and then driven
down to the street via spiral ramps with concrete structural ribs. With 16 million sq ft of manufacturing space to
accommodate 6,000 workers, Lingotto was unprecedented in size and scale. Le Corbusier featured the factory in his
manifesto “Towards a New Architecture” solidifying its iconic status.

ÈCOLE DE PARIS
Those young artists were supported especially by the private market which developed in the second half of the XIX
century and provided for the dif cult surviving conditions of many artists. It is in this moment that the myth of the
Bohemian artist that began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class, gypsy neighbourhoods.
Bohémien was a common term for the Romani people of France, who had been wrongly considered to reach France
during the 15th century via Bohemia, at that time the only protestant and therefore heretic country among Western
Christians. Although the bohemian population was differently involved in musical, artistic, or literary pursuits, one
particular aspect of how they lived served as a unifying factor: the rejection of bourgeois values such as private
property, strict moral, and pursuit of wealth living solely for art and literature's sake .
The pioneeristic activity of the Parisian gallerist of Paul Durand-Ruel accompanied the whole evolution of the
Impressionists. Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune are the rst to deal with Cézanne, the néo-impressionists as Seurat
and later with the Futurists and Fauves. Julien Tanguy, a curious gure of second hand dealer and painting supplier
seller, and Theo Van Gogh also had a pivotal rule in promoting art of young independent artists (Theo as the brother of
Vincent, had a key rule for sponsoring his art). From 1895 Amboise Vollard started to sell in his gallery artists such as
Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Gauguin.
An important role was played also by collectors as Gachet, friend of Cézanne and Van Gogh, and Leo and Gertrude
Stein
From 1900 until about 1940, Paris was a thriving centre of artistic activity that provided unparalleled conditions for
the exchange of creative ideas. A wave of artists of all nationalities gravitated to the French capital and fostered an

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 inspiring climate of imaginative cross- fertilisation. Because of the enormous in ux of non-French artists living and
working in Paris, a loosely de ned af liation developed referred to as the School of Paris (École de Paris). The
international activity associated with this group in Paris was initially concentrated in Montmartre, but subsequently
moved to Montparnasse in the early 1910s.
Focusing on conventional subjects such as portraiture, gure studies, landscapes, cityscapes, and still lives, artists of
the School of Paris employed a diversity of styles and techniques including the bold, dynamic colours of Fauvism, the
revolutionary methods of Cubism, the animated qualities of Expressionism, and the private worlds of Symbolism.
A leading gures of the School of Paris were, among others, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, Amedeo
Modigliani, Constantin Brancusi, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, and Fernand Légér.
The unprecedented migration to Paris of foreign artists who worked in tandem with French luminaries came to an end
with the outbreak of World War II (1939–45). Many artists ed to New York or returned to their homeland and the
frenzied activity experienced by members of the School of Paris concluded. They used to meet in cafés. A lot artists
came from Europe. Being all together in the same, crowd, a lot of them are not into the same style, but they loved
their group even with all the differences.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI
Constantin Brancusi, he left Romania permanently in 1903, traveling through Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Zurich, and
Basel on his way to Paris. There his work of the period attracted the attention of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
Brancusi looked for inspiration to non-European cultures as a source of ‘primitive’ vitality and, in 1907, under their
impact abandoned modelling in favour of carving. In his dependence on forms of folk art such as Romanian masks,
another aspect of his primitivist impulse, Brancusi demonstrated his alliance with the concerns of other avant- garde
artists. In 1909 Brancusi introduced ovoids as virtually self-suf cient objects, remaining on the threshold of
abstraction through the identi cation of the forms with the human body.
Brancusi showed also an interest for photography. His photographs are not simply records of his sculpture; they show
a concern with light and environment inherent in his sculptural works and often document the evolution of a
sculpture.
Brancusi concentrated his attention largely on re ning and simplifying his favourite motifs to which he remained
faithful to the end of his life
- Mlle Pogany 1913: simpli cation of these features came from African masks. It is in bronze like not medardo
rosso l’altro. The contrast between one material and the other. Not nished hands like Michelangelo.
- Black and white 1926: face of the model, simpli ed like the African masks, very minimalists elements.
- Man ray and Brancusi, 1927: contrast between the hair, and simpli cation of the face. Process goes even
deeper.
- The sleeping muse, 1910: process of simpli cation goes even deeper.
- The newborn, 1920: only the lines of the head
- Bird in Space, 1928
- Young Bird, 1928: mixing to materials, contrast, simpli cation of the birds, the movement.
- Endless Column, 1938, Târgu-Jiu, Romania: try to give the idea of in nity and something that goes over the
sky.

AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (Italian, 1884–1920 )

Modigliani is acknowledged to be one of the major artists of his generation. He moved to Paris in 1906, initially
working alongside the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Modigliani made, from about 1909 to 1915, a series
of sculptures with elongated features, oval heads, and thinly incised eyes that show the de nitive in uence of
Brancusi as well as of African sculpture. Modigliani was not as experimental: his models were Toulouse-Lautrec, the

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Fauvism, Picasso’s Blue Period, and Cézanne’s late portraits. Given Modigliani’s limited subject-matter in painting and
sculpture, he achieved an extraordinary range of psychological interpretations of the human face, maintaining his
individuality through his distinctive elongations of face or form.
Perfectly corresponding to the bohemian artist cliché, he died in Paris of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by
poverty, overworking, and an excessive use of alcohol and narcotics. Personi cation of bohemien life.
- Caryatid, 1914 c. :
- Caryatid, (1914):
- Woman’s head, 1915: longest neck that means beauty, idealistic beauty. The eyes are empty, because they
don’t have expression. Celebration of the beauty of a woman.
- Madame Georges van Muyden, 1917: we see the pupil, visible, some speci c characteristics. Neck is long and
the way of the use of colour is at, again unrealistic, make her very similar to others.
- Jeanne Hebuterne with Hat and Necklace, 1917: it’s his lover.

CHAIM SOUTINE, (Russian, 1893-1943)

Chaim Soutine lived and worked in Paris at the height of the modern era. Despite dominant trends toward
abstraction, Soutine maintained a rm connection to recognisable subject matter. His innovation was in the way he
chose to represent his subjects: with a thick impasto of paint covering the surface of the canvas, the palette, visible
brushwork, and forms translated the artist's inner torment.
As an expatriate Russian Jew living within Paris, with few friends beyond fellow artist Amedeo Modigliani, Soutine
interpreted common themes with the eye of an outsider, further enhancing his unique perspective regarding his
human subjects, landscapes, and still lives and lending them a particular vanitas and poignancy. A prototypical wild
artist, Soutine's temper and depression are both well documented and were poured into the paint he layered on the
canvas. Soutine's body of work transcends the movements that dominated the avant-garde during his lifetime,
expressing a clear personal and artistic vision that both looks back at historic themes as well as toward future
modernist styles.
- Woman in blue, 1919 c.: in here we don’t see any of the touch of making a woman like a goddess. In here this
woman is very real, and touchable, anything that makes her beautiful and elegant. He’s in uenced by
expressionism, in the way he in interprates reality.
- Group of Trees, 1922 c.: feeling of anxiety, he transmits this feeling to the viewer,
- Le Boeuf Ecorché, (1925): traditional subject, but what was very famous, is the one of Rembrandt. This is an
example on how soutin viewed life, how he interprets reality. He wanted to show us how much he was disturbed
and how much his life was complicated and cruel.
- Rembrant, Carcass of Beef, 1657: We can see our death in the future. We don’t see cruelty or a lot of blood,
more a representation of the thing not on the details.

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LESSON 5: RIGOR and CREATIVITY
DADAISM
Artistic and literary movement launched in Zurich in 1916 but shared by independent groups in New York, Berlin,
Paris and elsewhere. Dadaists were united not by a common style but by a rejection of conventions in art and thought,
seeking through many forms, including outrageous performances, festivals, readings, erotic mechanism Orphic art,
nonsensical chance-generated poetry, found objects, and political satire in photomontage. The name Dada itself was
typical of the movement’s anti-rationalism. Various members of the Zurich group are credited with the invention of
the name; according to one account it was selected by the insertion of a knife into a dictionary, and was retained for its
multilingual, childish and nonsensical connotations.
Over several years it developed in New York as well as many European cities—primarily Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris,
and Hannover—through the activities of such artists and writers as Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst,
George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heart eld, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan
Tzara. The last Dadaist group in Paris ended in 1922–3, although further Dada activities continued among those
unwilling to join Surrealism in 1924. Zurich Dada’s roots lay in the pre-war international avant-garde such as
Kandinsky’s abstraction and theoretical writings, together with Cubism and the development of collage.

Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968)

French painter, sculptor and writer. The art and ideas of Duchamp, have served to exemplify the range of possibilities
inherent in a more conceptual approach to the art-making process. His conception of the ready-made decisively
altered our understanding of what constitutes an object of art. Duchamp refused to accept the standards and practices
of an established art system: he refused to repeat himself, to develop a recognisable style or to show his work
regularly.
In 1913 he starts asking himself whether it was possible for an artist to make works that were not works of art in the
sense of being motivated by aesthetic considerations. He answered this question before with his creation of the
Bicycle Wheel. Although he did not identify it as such when it was made, this was the rst Ready-made, an existing
manufactured object deemed to be a work of art simply through its selection by an artist. In 1915 he moved to New
York and began the construction of the Large Glass whose construction is designed to exercise the rites of courtship
and lovemaking. In 1920 Man Ray become Duchamp’s closest artistic con dant and collaborator.
Duchamp’s decision to abandon painting became well known in art circles during the early 1920s, and his
professional involvement with chess caused many to conclude that he had ceased artistic activities altogether. He only
seldom published amusing plays on words under his female pseudonym, Rrose Sélavy.

- Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913 (lost or destroyed; editioned replica, 1964): two objects with a
purpose, combined together with no meaning.
- Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912: Cubism, together with his knowledge of the
chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey and the photographic sequences of Eadweard Muybridge, directly
affected Duchamp’s conception of Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, based on a preliminary study painted in oil on
cardboard, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 1 (Dec 1911). This work, which later became his most famous painting,
has often been described as a stylistic fusion of Cubism and Futurism, but Duchamp later maintained that at the time
he had not yet seen any Futurist paintings at rst hand; the rst major Futurist exhibition in Paris opened at
Bernheim-Jeune in February 1912.
A few months after it was painted, Duchamp submitted Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 to the Salon des
Indépendants in Paris, but the hanging committee, dominated by Cubists, including his brothers and a number of
friends, objected to it and particularly to its title, inscribed directly on the canvas, which they thought too provocative
and not in keeping with the more traditional subjects they determined appropriate for serious Cubist painting.

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 Duchamp withdrew his submission, an event that became the turning-point in his artistic career. Before the end of the
year, however, the painting was given two public showings: rst in May at an exhibition of Cubism at the Galeries
Dalmau in Barcelona and in October at the Salon de la Section d’Or at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris. It was only
when it was shown in New York, however, at the Armory show in February 1913, where it became the cause célèbre of
the exhibition, that Duchamp’s name and reputation became forever linked to the notoriety of this picture. This
painting was the rst scandalous painting, confusing subject, the person descending the stairs is like a robot. In here
duchamp is not interested in representing something real, but only something that can be in uenced by
photography, and movement.
- Cubism, together with his knowledge of the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey and the photographic
sequences of Eadweard Muybridge, directly affected Duchamp’s conception of Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2,
based on a preliminary study painted in oil on cardboard, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 1 (Dec 1911). This work,
which later became his most famous painting, has often been described as a stylistic fusion of Cubism and Futurism,
but Duchamp later maintained that at the time he had not yet seen any Futurist paintings at rst hand; the rst major
Futurist exhibition in Paris opened at Bernheim-Jeune in February 1912.
A few months after it was painted, Duchamp submitted Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 to the Salon des
Indépendants in Paris, but the hanging committee, dominated by Cubists, including his brothers and a number of
friends, objected to it and particularly to its title, inscribed directly on the canvas, which they thought too provocative
and not in keeping with the more traditional subjects they determined appropriate for serious Cubist painting.
Duchamp withdrew his submission, an event that became the turning-point in his artistic career. Before the end of the
year, however, the painting was given two public showings: rst in May at an exhibition of Cubism at the Galeries
Dalmau in Barcelona and in October at the Salon de la Section d’Or at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris. It was only
when it was shown in New York, however, at the Armory show in February 1913, where it became the cause célèbre of
the exhibition, that Duchamp’s name and reputation became forever linked to the notoriety of this picture.
- Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, The Large Glass, 1915–23:
In 1915 Duchamp began the construction of this work, probably the most complex and intricate he realized. Most of
its details, however, had been determined in sketches and preparatory studies completed in Paris in 1913–14.
Mechanomorphic imagery, themes of sexual opposition, references to geometry and physics and a reliance on chance
operations and existing objects were all factors in its conception and design. It consists of two glass panels, with the
bride’s domain con ned to the upper section and the bachelors below. Duchamp later explained that the idea for the
subject had been suggested by the games he had seen in country fairs, where, in order to win a prize, contestants
throw balls at the gure of a bride and her surrounding retinue; others, however, have chosen to interpret the Large
Glass as a more personal and self- referential statement, pointing out, for example, that the conjunction of bride and
bachelors in the French title contains an amalgam of Duchamp’s rst name: MAR(iée) and CÉL(ibataires).
It is unclear whether or not the stripping bride, whose biomorphic forms are derived from an earlier picture, ever
attains union with the sexually aroused bachelors represented by the nine mouldlike gures below. What is evident,
however, is that the pseudo-machinery of this elaborate construction is designed with one primary function in mind:
to exercise the rites of courtship and lovemaking. According to the notes Duchamp wrote about it, it is the bride’s
desire that stimulates the bachelors and in turn causes the ow of ‘illuminating gas’ into their mouldlike bodies. In
response they seem to receive a constant source of energy from an ‘imaginary waterfall’ that descends upon the
blades of a ‘glider’ or ‘sleigh’ attached to the base of the ‘chocolate grinder’ positioned in the immediate central
foreground. The fact that none of the elements in this fanciful construction appears to function either literally or
guratively, contributing to a sense of the ultimate lack of ful lment, is just one more intentionally frustrating or futile
aspect of its design. Appropriately to its theme, Duchamp left the Large Glass in a state of permanent incompletion
when he signed the un nished work in 1923. After an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1926, the
glass was shattered in transit. Duchamp accepted the accident as yet one more aspect of its design determined by
chance; in 1936 he spent weeks painstakingly reassembling the pieces.

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 - The fountain 1917: the relationship between artist and public, how public believe that everything an artist do is
art, it’s not for him.
RROSE- SÉLAVY: He transformed himself as a queer king- empty bottle of perfume (c’est la vie) without anything in it,
only hair from Paris 🤣 🤣 a whole queer king blessed with sarcasm. A lot of intellectual and simple arts.

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890–1976)

American photographer and painter. He was brought up in New York, and he adopted the pseudonym Man Ray as
early as 1909. He was one of the leading spirits of Dada and Surrealism and the only American artist to play a
prominent role in the launching of those two in uential movements. Throughout the 1910s he was involved with
avant-garde activities that pre gured the Dada movement. He pursued his interest in the atness of modern
abstraction in a series of paintings and collages.
In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris where he made it his home for 20 years. There he was an in uential member of the
international Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers which appreciated the transformation of ordinary objects
into mysterious images; in 1922 he began to exploit his personal variant of the photogram, which he called the
‘rayograph’, a method of producing images directly from objects on photo-sensitive paper. Although he continued to
paint and make objects throughout his career, it was as a photographer that he made his greatest impact on 20th-
century art. Beginning in the late 1920s he experimented with the Sabattier, or solarisation process, a technique that
won him critical esteem, especially from the Surrealists. Man Ray also made substantial contributions to avant-garde
lm. In his earliest incursion into lm, Man Ray created the rst ‘cine-rayographs’, sequences of camera-less
photographic images. Dadaist and surrealist. Always keeping his own approach and personality. He plays with the
idea of transforming objects.
- Rayograph, 1922: He invented also a new technique to making photographs which is putting some objects, put
them together and enlighten them, collaging them and the nal effect is interesting because the objects just make a
composition function, that become a geometric object.
- Gift, c. 1958 : Object prouvè : iron transformed with all this spikes glued on the bottom of it, transforming it in
another object.

COLLAGE
Collage is an art form and technique, incorporating the use of pre-existing materials or objects attached as part of a
two-dimensional surface. Despite occasional usage by earlier artists and wide informal use in popular art, collage is
closely associated with 20th-century art, in which it has often served as a correlation with the pace and discontinuity of
the modern world. In particular it often made use of the Objet Trouvé, while the principle of collage was extended into
sculpture in the form of the Assemblage. The rst deliberate and innovative use of collage in ne art came in the work
by Picasso in the spring of 1912, Still-life with Chair-caning. At about the same time Georges Braque, by combining a
faux bois paper, af xed to a white sheet, with drawing, created the papier collé (‘pasted paper’), a speci c form of
collage, closer to traditional drawing than to painting, consisting essentially of a collage of paper elements with a
paper support. The technique was also adopted by such Italian artists as Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino
Severini, and by Kazimir Malevich, who af xed new materials such as a thermometer and Carrà, working with the
Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, developed the hybrid dipinto parolibero (‘free-word painting’) to describe their word-
poems in collage. The Dadaists, however, adapted it to their own ends. Hans Arp produced abstract collages and Kurt
Schwitters used the form extensively notably in his series of Merzpictures (Merzbilder), made from discarded
materials found in the streets of Hannover. Other artists associated with the Berlin Dada group used photographs and
newspaper cuttings in a political, satirical and socially critical fashion (Photomontage). More recently the possibilities
of fantasy and disjunction on one hand and a recurrent interest in material texture and shape on the other continued
to attract the attention of 20th-century artists.

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 Objet Trouvé: Term applied in the 20th century to existing objects, manufactured or of natural origin, used in, or as,
works of art. With the exception of the Ready-made, in which a manufactured object is generally presented on its own
without mediation, the objet trouvé is most often used as raw material in an Assemblage, with juxtaposition as a
guiding principle.
- Picasso, Still-life with Chair-caning, 1912: meaning of a chair, recreating a chair using the materials and that
type of canvas.
- Carlo Carrà, Manifestazione interventista, 1914: idea of spreading the voices.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919: clearly de ned as
dada. Cut out any image that was inspiring for her, no meaning just collage.
- Kurt Schwitters, Picture of Spatial Growths - Picture with Two Small Dogs, 1920-39: paper and wood, and
other types of materials. Calendar letter, wood etc. no meaning. Only aesthetic pleasure.
- Kurt Schwitters, '(Relief in Relief)' circa 1942-5: not as Picasso but just to explore;g the eastethic random
pieces.

ABSTRACTION
Term used in an art context in several ways: in general for processes of imagemaking in which only some of the visual
elements usually ascribed to ‘the natural world’ are extracted (i.e. ‘to abstract’), and also for the description of certain
works that fall only partially, if at all, into what is commonly understood to be representational.
‘Abstract’ as applied to works of art is not a merely passive negative characterisation, but has a further privative force. A
non-representational painting is abstract in that it lacks a certain function or feature that is usual for and expected of
paintings in general, while representationality (or more generally, denotationality) is not usual in or expected of
architectural or musical works, and its absence in such a work does not constitute a lack or deprivation, or the
classi cation of the work as abstract. Among artists and critics, abstraction, that is, absence of representation, is not a
lack or deprivation but a puri cation.
Like a picture that does not picture, these works are deprived of a normal denotative function and refer directly by
showing rather than saying, as by exemplifying patterns or expressing feelings.
It still remains, however, that abstraction, whether deprivation or puri cation, is a matter of what a work does not do or
what features it does not have. To say that a work is abstract is to say only that it does not represent and is not even
representational, so ‘Abstract’ is often combined with another term that indicates a primary function or feature of a
work, as for example in ‘Abstract Expressionist’.

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944)

Kandinsky was a painter, printmaker, stage designer, decorative artist and theorist: a central gure in the
development of 20th-century art and speci cally in the transition from representational to abstract art.
His early work consisted of scenes of knights and riders, romantic fairytale subjects rather fanciful reminiscences of
Russia for which he used a variety of printmaking techniques. In 1908 Kandinsky had already developed a distinctive
style of painting in which motifs were still recognisable, but the work gradually became more abstract, emphasising
the synthesis of colour line and form over straightforward representation.
Kandinsky’s shift away from landscape painting towards abstraction was paralleled by a change in the character of his
titles. In 1909 he painted his rst Improvisation, the following year the rst Composition and in 1911 the
Impressions. These titles, to which numbers were assigned, were impersonal, non-speci c, abstract categories derived
from musical terminology. He emphasised the effects of colour and discussed the associative properties of speci c
colours and the analogies between certain hues and the sounds of musical instruments.

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 In 1911 Kandinsky and Marc began to prepare Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, which was published in Munich in the
spring of 1912. In subsequent years Kandinsky pursued his long-standing interest in a variety of art forms, his
predilection for geometric forms becoming clearly articulated during the Bauhaus period (1922-1932).
In his latest works he employed a combination of biomorphic and geometric forms as the basis for an abstract style
Russian tradition. A lot of material.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Fishing Boats, Sestri, 1905: boats obtained only with the layers of colours, the lake ip, no
search of identical to reality, he interprets the reality through colours.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Coloful life, 1907: old man and he’s represented with a beard and a yellow jacket and
some stains of another yellow for his body, but we don’t see it in details, very simpli ed geometric shapes.
Simpli cation.
- Rock (Membership Card for the New Artists' Association Munich), 1908-1909: stilography, ancient
technique has been used to print books at the very beginning of history of books. It’s obtained by curving wood. You
can’t go in detail because the tools and the wood don’t allow you to be very detailed.
Lyrical (Lyrics), 1911: horse with a rider,
- Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Rain, 1913: rain = vertical lines, very simpli ed objects and lines. The rest
is just colours. IDEA: Representing the image only by colours. all objects are complementary to the others.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Black Lines, 1913: he mixes lines colours and shapes but the new thing in here, aesthetic
reader has of possibility of shapes, lines and colours.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923: the perfection version of the other one. A line can be thick and
thin long or short, round or curvy, can crops another shape, blurred or de ned, many uses of the same thing,
geometrical shape that give rhythm to the composition.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow–Red–Blue, 1925: music is considered the only really abstract art, you cannot repeat
capture or see music. This inspired Kandinsky to paint this painting, allowed the image to come from his head.
Completely free painting.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Upward , 1929
- Wassily Kandinsky, Sky Blue , 1940: living creatures with strange shapes, very close to geometry. In here we
see geometry like a square or triangle.
- Wassily Kandinsky, Reciprocal Accords, 1942

Suprematism (1915)
Term coined in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich for a new system of art. The term itself implied the supremacy of this new
art in relation to the past. Malevich saw it as purely aesthetic and concerned only with form, free from any political or
social meaning. He stressed the purity of shape, particularly of the square, and he regarded Suprematism as primarily
an exploration of visual language comparable to contemporary developments in writing.
For an unrealized production of the Russian Futurist opera Pobeda nad solntsem (‘Victory over the sun’) in 1915,
Malevich proposed a black square as a backdrop. At the exhibition 0.10, the Black Square (1915; Moscow, Tret’yakov
Gal.), painted on a square canvas surrounded by a margin of white, was hung across the corner of the separate room
where works by Malevich and his followers were displayed; it was announced as the essential Suprematist work.
Malevich formed a Suprematist group and his rejection of representational imagery and his study of the dynamics of
geometrical form in pictorial space was widely in uential.
In 1919 Malevich converted El Lissitzky to Suprematism and opened the way to Suprematist design. In 1922 El
Lissitzky left Russia for western Europe establishing contact with many groups of artists across Europe.
Although Malevich later returned to representational painting, Suprematism had an undoubted impact on the
development of abstract art in the Soviet Union and in Western Europe, an impact that has been increasingly studied
since the 1950s

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 Kazimir Malevich (Russian, 1878–1935)
Russian painter, printmaker, decorative artist and writer of Ukrainian birth. One of the pioneers of abstract art,
Malevich was a central gure in a succession of avant-garde movements during the period of the Russian revolutions
of 1905 and 1917 and immediately after.
At rst painted mainly Post-Impressionist landscapes. Began c. 1909 to paint peasant subjects, developing by 1912 a
tubular stylisation related to Cubism; then made paintings of still lives and gures 1913-14 in a Cubo-Futurist style.
In 1915 embarked on a completely abstract style to which he gave the name Suprematism based on pure geometrical
elements in relationships suggesting oating, falling, and ascending.
Malevich abandoned painting for several years, concentrating on teaching and writing, but continued to develop
Suprematist ideas in his ‘architectural’ works. He began in 1919 to make architectural models as well as paintings,
and had his rst one-man exhibition in Moscow. Travelled to Warsaw and Berlin in 1927 with an exhibition of his
works, and visited the Bauhaus at Dessau.
In his last years, reverted to painting pictures of very stylized gures.
- Kazimir Malevich, On the Boulevard, 1903
- Kazimir Malevich, Samovar, 1913: tries to simplify
- Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism Composition, 1915: reduces his palette to only primary colours. Only uses
straight lines and rectangular no circles = no movement.
- Kazimir Malevich, Black Square and Red Square,1915: what is pure, not the movement in the shape of the
canva, only squares (most static shape, regular, doesn’t give any particular emotion) he chooses the square as the
perfect shape. Static heavy, massive in the composition. Red square 🟥 gives a bit of disorder, cause it’s curved.
- Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915: hats why here we only have the Percy artwork, where we have the only
black square. It’s a 50 by 50 canva. So simple and basic that we are extremely attracted from it. He tried to continue his
research and made another one.
In 1916 Malevic declared the square to be the ‘face of the new art ... the rst step of pure
creation’. True to these principles, Black Square is radically non-representational.
On the one hand the slab of black paint that dominates the canvas it was radically nihilistic and could be interpreted
as a gesture of rejection, providing no narrative, theme, composition or picture space, apparently rejecting all pictorial
conventions and offering a canvas of unprecedented blankness; on the other hand Malevich himself regarded his
minimalistic geometrical forms as the secular equivalents of Russian icons, a form of painting which aspires to
present the divine as pure or unmediated reality and by referring to this tradition its rejection of convention was not
total.
In icon painting the illusion of pictorial space was minimal, gures were frequently centrally placed and frontally
presented, the head of Christ sometimes set against a symmetrical cross, circular halo and square format. The forms of
this language were strictly geometrical, but they rapidly evolved into increasingly complex paintings in which the
geometrical elements employed richer colors and inhabited an ambiguous and complex pictorial space.
Despite its reference to the icon tradition, the Black Square presented no recognizably Christian image, but for
Malevich himself Suprematism remained a mystical experience associated with concepts of the Fourth dimension and
the nature of time.
- Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, White on White, 1918: he wasn’t satis ed enough cause the
square didn’t spiccava
In uences: Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid:

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 Constructivists
Avant-garde tendency in 20th-century painting, sculpture, photography, design and architecture, with associated
developments in literature, theatre and lm. The term was rst coined by artists in Russia in early 1921 and achieved
wide international currency in the 1920s.
Russian Constructivism refers speci cally to a group of artists who sought to move beyond the autonomous art object,
extending the formal language of abstract art into practical design work. This development was prompted by the
utopian climate following the October Revolution of 1917, which led artists to seek to create a new visual
environment, embodying the social needs and values of the new Communist order. The concept of International
Constructivism de nes a broader current in Western art, most vital from around 1922 until the end of the 1920s, that
was centred primarily in Germany.
International Constructivists were inspired by the Russian example, both artistically and politically. They continued,
however, to work in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, while also experimenting with lm and
photography and recognising the potential of the new formal language for utilitarian design.
The term Constructivism has frequently been used since the 1920s, in a looser fashion, to evoke a continuing tradition
of geometric abstract art that is ‘constructed’ from autonomous visual elements such as lines and planes, and
characterised by such qualities as precision, impersonality, a clear formal order, simplicity and economy of
organization and the use of contemporary materials such as plastic and metal. Plain shapes lines and dots. Mainly
related to design and architecture. Most famous project was
- Vladimir Tatlin,Monument to the Third International, 1919-1924: most famous building. Tower. Unite
technology with design with new materials and engineering. Core of the movement.
- Naum Gabo, Head of a Woman, 1917-20: structure very complicated and uses the knowledge
- Aleksandr Rodchenko, Spatial Construction no. 12, 1920: new material wood, nobody used it in art cause
was considered a poor material.
- El Lissitzky, Proun 19D 1920 or 1921:
- László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram No. 1
- The Mirror circa 1928 print from a 1922-23 photogram Gelatin silver print:

Neo-plasticism
Term coined by Piet Mondrian and rst used in 1919 as the title of a collection of his writings published by the dealer
Léonce Rosenberg. It gained currency as a descriptive term applied to Mondrian’s theories of art and to his style of
painting, in which a grid, delineated by black lines, was lled with blocks of primary colour. The original term applied
to some of his principles was nieuwe beelining (new imagery); he also used abstract-reële schilderkunst (abstract-real
painting) and Neo-Cubism. Neo-plasticism applied to all aspects of design that were part of daily life. The evanescence
of natural shapes was reduced to a few essential expressive means: horizontal and vertical lines, areas of primary
colour and black and white. Mondrian published Le Néo-plasticisme while in Paris, having become convinced that his
theories, published in De Stijl, were almost unknown beyond his native country.
No distinct school of Neo-plasticists ever existed, although some works by artists including Jean Gorin, César Domela,
Jean Helion and Burgoyne Diller may be described as Neo-plasticist. Mondrian’s theories were to a large extent
disseminated by verbal communication through numerous discussions with other painters, sculptors, architects and
writers. Neo-plasticism was promoted from 1929 by the movement Cercle et carré, founded by Michel Seuphor, and
three issues of its eponymous journal (1930). Mondrian and other artists exhibited in an exhibition of Neo-plasticism
in 1930 at the Galerie 23 in Paris. The style spread to the USA when Mondrian visited in 1940 and became a member
of American abstract artists, many of whom experimented with Neo-plasticism.

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Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944)
Mondrian is a pioneer of abstract art, who developed from early landscape pictures to geometric abstract works of a
most rigorous kind. He began to work in a more vividly colored and sometimes pointillist style in 1908 and made
some works of a Symbolist character.
While living in Paris 1912-14 he was in uenced by Cubism, which he carried to the point of abstraction. Returned to
Holland in 1914 and step by step evolved a more simpli ed abstract style which he called Neo-Plasticism, restricted to
the three primary colors and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground. He then associated with
van Doesburg in the de Stijl movement 1917-25 and returned to Paris where he joined the group Abstraction-
Création in 1931. Moved to London in 1938, then in 1940 to New York where he started to develop a more colorful
style, with colored lines and syncopated rhythms. His study of abstract Started from nature, the simpli cation of
reality.
Oostzijdse Mill with Extended Blue, Yellow and Purple Sky, 1907-1908: it’s already visible the simpli cation of the
reality. Geometrical shape as the moulin, in a rectangular. Reality simpli ed.
- Red Tree, 1908:
- Tree, 1911:
- Blue Tree, 1911: brunches of the tree even more simpli ed and geometrical shape, but also still recognisable
- Flowering Apple Tree , 1912: even more pushed forward. Brunches really de ning. Not brunches anymore.
Cutting the space in geometrical shapes. We know that it’s a tree cause it’s written in the title and we give for granted
this. Colours all around are the blossom that go all around the space. In this the brunches start by the trunk
- Trees in Blossom, 1912: the lines or brunches are de nitely describing and cutting the shapes in the space. Trunk
described with two vertical lines. In here the brunches don’t start from the trunk
- Piet Mondrian, Composition with Color Planes 5, 1917: here the tree disappeared completely. No tree it’s
only composition. The research is focusing in the shapes and colours (all of them). The grid are invisible.
- Piet Mondrian, Composition C, 1920: green which is lling all the space in the canva. Filling the void that the
grid leaves. Mondrian is looking for perfection. Gris is visible with black lines.
- Piet Mondrian, Composition C, 1921: starts to use only primary colours. He doesn’t want to put too many, to
experiment and to go deep to the all possibilities.
- Piet Mondrian, Tableau I:
- Lozenge with Four Lines and Gray, 1926:
- Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1937-42:
- Piet Mondrian, Victory Boogie Woogie, 1942-1944: coloured lines made by dots of colours. To give the idea
of movement and dynamic.

De Stijl (1917-1932)
Dutch periodical founded by Theo Van Doesburg in 1917 and published in Leiden until 1932; the name was also
applied from the 1920s to a distinctive movement and to the group of artists associated with it. De Stijl movement
attempted to use the principles of visual and conceptual perfection as a basis for interiors, houses, blocks of ats and
even whole towns. Re ecting this endeavour, the De Stijl switches from Mondrian's ethereal art to supposedly
practical applications underlining that the artistic production of Theo Van Doesburg and Bart Van der Leck went
beyond merely imitating Mondrian, though, on its own, it makes little sense.
Van Doesburg, fascinated by physics and mathematics, experimented with the fourth dimension. His tesseracts –
cubes in a 4D space – demand attention: it does show the importance of science to De Stijl. Such abstract speculation
gave rise to drawings and models for buildings and furnishings. Some 1920s designers were convinced they were
creating a new style for a rational and absolutely modern world. In 1925 Frederick Kiesler came up with his “City in

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 Space”, a mixture of technology and science ction. In 1930 Vantongerloo designed his “Skyscraper City” and Oud his
housing projects. The drawings and elevations are pristine in their purity.

Abstract Sculpture
There are two main kinds of Nonrepresentational sculpture:
Abstract sculpture uses nature not as subject matter to be represented but as a source of formal ideas. For
sculptors who work in this way, the forms that are observed in nature serve as a starting point for a kind of creative
play, the end products of which may bear little or no resemblance to their original source.
Nonobjective sculpture is a more completely nonrepresentational form that does not even have a starting point in
nature. It arises from a constructive manipulation of the sculptor's generalised, abstract ideas of spatial relations,
volume, line, colour, texture, and so on. The approach of the nonobjective sculptor has been likened to that of the
composer of music, who manipulates the elements of his art in a similar manner.
In the Nonobjective sculpture can be also recognised other branches: Biomorphic sculpture, Formalism, Minimalism,
Process and Conceptual sculpture, and Installations.
Biomorphic is a term most commonly associated with abstract art to describe a form that is irregular or organic, often
derived from shapes found in nature. Biomorphic forms are frequently found in Surrealist art.
Formalism emphasises the form or structural qualities of a work over its content or context. Minimalism aims to
eliminate self-expression by using geometrical shapes and unmodulated colours to
obtain pure self-referential forms.
Conceptual sculpture's primary emphasis is the communication of the idea behind the work and process sculpture
have an emphasis on the artefacts resulting from the process of creation.
Installation art incorporates almost any media to create a visceral and/or conceptual experience in a particular
environment.

Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976)

Sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker and designer. In 1926 Calder began his sojourns in Paris, where he was
particularly in uenced by the inventive collages of Joan Miró. In Paris Calder made wood and wire animals with
movable parts and designed the rst pieces of his miniature Circus. From 1927 to 1930 he constructed gures,
animals and portrait heads in wire and carved similar subjects in wood, but after visiting Piet Mondrian’s studio in
1930, Calder began to experiment with abstract constructions. His major contribution to modern sculpture was the
Mobile, a kinetic construction of disparate elements that describe individual movements. After an initial involvement
with geometric elements and machine imagery, he introduced biomorphic forms into his kinetic sculptures. Both the
painted constructions and the brightly coloured mobiles synthesised Constructivist methods and materials with
abstract forms derived from Surrealist imagery. Stabiles, large- scale constructions in cut and painted metal sheets, the
rst of which he created in the 1930s, appeared in substantial numbers from the 1950s when he also produced new
forms, including the Towers, wire constructions attached to the wall, with moving elements, and Gongs, metal pieces
intended to produce various sounds. In his mature years his production included paintings, drawings, prints, book
illustrations, jewellery and tapestries, all of which were composed of bold, abstract elements in primary colors. During
the 1960s and 1970s Calder’s arching forms, dynamic surfaces and biomorphic imagery were the appropriate
complement for the geometric regularity and severity of modern architectural complexes.
- Cascading Flowers, 1949: sculpted aesthetically pleasing, movement around becomes moving. Occupy
- Constellation with Tow Pins, 1943
- Alexander Calder, Teodolapio, Spoleto, 1962: imaginative creature. Not abstract in the sense of mondrian but
he uses colours to something that is not real, lyrical

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 Jean Arp (French, 1886-1966)
French sculptor, painter, collagist, printmaker and poet. He was a pioneer of abstract art and one of the founders of
Dada in Zurich, but he also participated actively in both Surrealism and Constructivism. In his early works, Arp
transformed people into objects; conversely, objects became humanised. The most typical form was the navel that was
a model of the primitive in an unchanging world that was nevertheless in a permanent state of ux.
Right from the beginning Arp exhibited his work with the Surrealists. Surrealism accentuated the intuitive, absurd and
dream-like aspects of his work, his dependence on free association and automatic writing, and his inquisitive need to
try out unusual methods and materials.
Arp had also close links with Constructivist groups and under this in uence he began to introduce straight lines and
sharp-angled notches into his curvilinear reliefs.
Arp preferred his sculptures not to be mounted on a base, so that they could simply take their place in nature. A
number of them were conceived without a predetermined orientation and could be positioned in any direction. In his
later work the search for a greater renunciation linked to verticality and symmetry gave an archetypal dimension,
expressing his search for a deeper spirituality through stability, peace and a longing for the sacred.
- Birds in an Aquarium, 1920
- Leaves and Navels, I, 1930
- Sirène, 1942: an arm bent and the ank, movement he simpli es the body of a woman that becomes a curvy
volume that goes and follows more or less the curves. It’s important the perception of a mermaid,
- Torso of Muse, 1959: atters the body. No rst level or second, everything is exactly the same. The use of white,
one colour makes abstract.

Henry Moore (British, 1898-1986)

English sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker. Generally acknowledged as the most important British sculptor of the
20th century, he took the human gure as his central subject-matter throughout his career.
Although he witnessed revolutionary stylistic changes and the emergence of new sculptural materials during his
working life, he borrowed from diverse cultural traditions (such as Palaeolithic fertility goddesses, Cycladic and early
Greek art, Sumerian, Egyptian and Etruscan sculpture, African, Oceanic, Peruvian and Pre-Columbian) and artists in
order to give his work a profound resonance with the art of the past. Moore believed passionately in direct carving and
in ‘truth to materials’, respecting the inherent character of stone or wood.
His female gures, echoing the forms of mountains, valleys, cliffs and caves, extended and enriched the landscape
tradition, which he embraced as part of his English artistic heritage.
- Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1939:it’s all an evolution of empty and lled parts. The arm and legs are visible.
- Reclining Figure, 1953-54: in here the process of simpli cation si more extreme cause he followed the direction
of the body, but the voids are too much and in the wrong places. Head is empty.
- Large Reclining Figure, 1984: he placed what is full and what is empty. We can recognise the shape of the body,
but at rst sight we can’t see it.

The Bauhaus (1919-1933)

German school of art, design and architecture, founded by Walter Gropius. It was active in Weimar from 1919 to 1925,
in Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and in Berlin from 1932 to 1933, when it was closed down by the Nazi authorities. The
Bauhaus’s name referred to the medieval Bauhütten or masons’ lodges. The
school re-established workshop training, as opposed to impractical academic studio education. Its contribution to the
development of Functionalism in architecture was widely in uential. It exempli ed the contemporary desire to form
uni ed academies incorporating art colleges, colleges of arts and crafts and schools of architecture, thus promoting a
closer cooperation between the practice of ‘ ne’ and ‘applied’ art and architecture.

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 The origins of the school lay in attempts in the 19th and early 20th centuries to re-establish the bond between artistic
creativity and manufacturing that had been broken by the Industrial Revolution. Many artists have been teachers at
the Bauhaus, among others:
Paul Klee (Painting class, 1920-1931); Wassily Kandinsky (Painting workshops, 1922-1933); László Moholy-Nagy
(director of the preliminary course and head of the metal workshop in Weimar, 1923-28

Paul Klee (German, 1879-1940)

German watercolorist, painter and etcher of fantastic works, mostly small in scale; one of the most inventive artists of
the 20th century. He took great interest in music as well as painting. Settled in Munich he met Kandinsky, Jawlensky,
Macke and Marc in 1911 and was included in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition 1912. He grew interest in color,
began to work largely in watercolor. His Pedagogical Sketchbook were published in 1925. Afterwards Klee taught at
Düsseldorf Academy 1931-3. Dismissed by the Nazis in 1933 he returned to Bern. He is regarded as a major
theoretician among modern artists and as a master of humor and mystery. In much of his work, he aspired to achieve
a naive and untutored quality, but his art is also among the most cerebral of any of the 20th century. Klee’s wide-
ranging intellectual curiosity is evident in an art profoundly informed by structures and themes drawn from music,
nature and poetry.
In 1920, Walter Gropius appointed Klee to the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. He became the Director of the
bookbinding workshop in 1921, of the metal workshop in 1922 and of the glass painting workshop from 1922/23 to
1925. From 1921 to 1924/25 in Weimar, Klee taught classes in elemental design theory as part of the preliminary
course. In 1925, Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook was the second volume in the series of Bauhaus Books published by
the Bauhaus. From 1925 to 1930, he taught elemental design theory in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus
Dessau. From 1926/27 to 1930, he was the Director of free sculptural and artistic design. From 1927, he was Head of
the free painting workshop and classes. From 1927 to 1929/30, he taught the theory of design in the weaving
workshop. Klee left the Bauhaus on 1st April 1931.

- Highway and Byways, 1929: streets that are crossing the land, are squares, geometricalisation of the land.
Simpli cation of the land.
- Intoxication, 1939:the composes the body in pieces, like a doll. Transforms the body in pieces like making them
geometric. Even the details of the face are geometrical. The idea is geometricalisation always.

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)

Abstract painter, designer, typographer, photographer, lm-maker and theorist. Born in Bácsborsód. He began to paint
abstract pictures in 1920 under the in uence of Malevich and Lissitzky. Afterwards he became much involved with
experimental photography, including photograms, and published Malerei, Fotographie, Film 1925. He made a 'Light-
Space-Modulator' in 1922-30 and stage designs, abstract lms and typographical works. In the 30s he began to make
paintings incorporating plastics.
His ideologies related to the relationship between space, time and light and the interaction of man with these forces.
His great achievement was that he applied his mystical outlook to highly practical enterprises and always recognised
the purpose behind his creativity.
In March 1923, Walter Gropius appointed him as a master at the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Here, his work centred
on typographic design and experimental lm. From 1923 to 1925, Moholy-Nagy was the Director of the preliminary
course and Head of the metal workshop in Weimar. From 1925 to 1928, he resumed the same posts in Dessau.
Together with Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy began to publish the series of Bauhaus Books. Moholy-Nagy left the
Bauhaus after ve years in 1928 and established his own studio for typography, exhibition design, photomontage

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 and photo collage in Berlin. In 1939, Moholy-Nagy founded the successor to the School of Design in Chicago, which
was restructured in 1944 as the Institute of Design and is now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).
Three moveable metal and/or glass structures arranged on a rotating disc form the core of the “Light-Space
Modulator”. However, it only develops its impact in a darkened space, where it produces spectacular shadow
formations in an interplay with colored and white light which were obtained from at or curved panels of transparent
Rhodoid plastic, the designs of which interrelated with their own, metamorphosed light projections
- László Moholy-Nagy, K VII, 1922 :
- László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator, 1922-1930: working with light, creating the teathre of light and
shadows.

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944)

Page 17
In June 1922, Walter Gropius appointed Wassily Kandinsky to the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught
until its closure in Berlin in 1933. From 1922 to 1925, he directed the wall painting workshop at the Bauhaus Weimar
and taught classes on abstract form elements and analytical drawing in the preliminary course. In 1924, Kandinsky
founded the artists’ association Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four) group together with Alexej Jawlensky, Paul Klee and
Lyonel Feininger.
At the Bauhaus in Dessau, he taught abstract form elements and analytical drawing in the preliminary course from
1925 to 1932. From the winter semester of 1926/27, he was the Head of painting and from 1927, he directed the free
painting workshop and free painting class. In 1926, he published the important Bauhaus book Point and Line to
Plane. From 1932 to 1933 at the Bauhaus in Berlin, he was Head of the preliminary course classes in abstract form
elements and analytical drawing and of the free painting class. Reference to many students. He was very into graphic.
Postcard for Bauhaus exhibition Weimar July September 1923.
Mixing together the arts to create the beautiful.

LESSON 7: ART INFORMEL - GESTURAL, GRAPHIC and MATERIAL

The Post war: From Paris to New York. Art Informel: Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme, and Graphism.
European In uence on America Art
At the beginning of the XX century American Artists were still painting with an Impressionist style the sheer variety
and scale of life in the changing, surging metropolis. Four main events changed their view toward art:
1913 The International Exposition of Modern Art (the "Armory Show") is held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New
York and introduces Americans to the modernist work of Matisse, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Picasso, Braque, and others on
a large scale. Nude Descending a Staircase, a Cubist canvas by Marcel Duchamp, creates a public sensation. Theodore
Roosevelt labels the Futurist and Cubist artists in the exhibition "the lunatic fringe." Smaller versions of the show
subsequently travel to Chicago and Boston.
1929: The Museum of Modern Art had opened and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism
and Abstract Art, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, and retrospectives of Matisse and Picasso, among others.
30s-40s The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works
Progress Administration (WPA, 1938-1942), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group
participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path. A wave of European artists, architects and
intellectuals emigrated to the United States escaping from the political situation in their country, especially Germany
and France. Their in uence has been very strong because they become teachers in important Universities such as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and moreover they easily conquered the art scene in New York,
exposing in the major galleries and livening the intellectual life up.

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Art Informel
The term Art Informel was originated by the French critic Michel Tapié and popularized in his 1952 book Un Art autre
(Another art). A Parisian counterpart of Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel emphasized intuition and spontaneity
over the Cubist tradition that had dominated School of Paris painting. An important source of this kind of painting was
the surrealist doctrine of automatism. It mainly refers to European art, but does also embrace American abstract
expressionism.
The resulting abstractions took a variety of forms and, in Europe, three major expression forms:
- Gestural: the gesture of painting is the main form of expression, inheritance of the surrealistic automatism
- Material: the material itself (the color, any kind of random material that inspires the artist), experimented in all his
potentiality, expresses the artistic message
- Graphic: The artist chooses and in ects a sign in different, an unlimited combinations
Translating Art Informel as “informal art” or “informalism” is misleading. The point is not that artists renounced their
concern for formal values but that they rejected the discipline and structure of geometric abstraction in favor of a less
cerebral approach.

Abstract Expressionism
A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely af liated artists
created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's
focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did,
however, share some common assumptions.
Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally
scaled works that stood as re ections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal
inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to
process. Their work resists stylistic categorisation, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis
on dynamic, energetic gesture (Action Painting), in contrast to a re ective, cerebral focus on more open elds of color
(Colour Field). In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual
realities, the Abstract Expressionists favoured a highly abstracted mode.
The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young
artists anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of
meaning and substance. Direct contact with European Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on
tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in
which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Action Painting
Jackson Pollock (American, 1912-1956)
Chief pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, Pollock moved from Wyoming to New York and in 1929. In uenced by the
regionalist style and later by the Mexican mural painters and Picasso. He worked as an easel painter on the WPA
Federal Art Project 1938-42. Paintings of ritual violence or sexuality, with turbulent clashes of movement and
fragmentary archetypal imagery, which led gradually in the early 1940s to a completely abstract 'all-over' style to
which was given the name Abstract Expressionism. He held his rst one-man exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's
gallery ‘Art of This Century’ in New York in 1943. His involvement with gestural painting, inspired partly by the sand
painting of the American Indians and partly by Surrealism, culminated in his use from 1947 when he developed a
radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional
methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The

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 paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no
brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers of dripping trails of paint onto a canvas
laid at on the oor. Pollock settled with his wife at Springs, Long Island in 1946 where he painted a number of works,
in black and white, and many with re-emerging imagery of anatomical motifs. Died in a car crash at East Hampton in
1947. In uenced on surrealism, not only in the subject but especially in the concept, he embraced the idea of
suprematism magic and fantasy, something that doesn’t belong to the real world. Wanted to free his mind to work
freely on the canvas. Gesture is the most important thing, being free to move on the canva and to paint everything we
want. Inspired by the rituals of Native Americans and their culture.
- Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, 1942: strange gures kind of monsters, preluding what he’ll be in the
future, colours.
- Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946: abstract expressionism, in colours, expression of feelings in colours
but still able to recognise some elements like the eyes.
- Jackson Pollock, Number 8, 1949: name of its gesture: dripping, with a rhythm like a dance. This allows
pollock’s feelings to come off without the mind blocking them. No geometrical shape.
- Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1950: one layer of dripping.

Willem De Kooning (Dutch, 1904-1997)

De Kooning moved New York in 1927 where he was employed in the Works Progress Administration Federal Art
Project. In 1938 developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and
powerful iconic gurative images, he started his rst Women series, which would become a major recurrent theme.
De Kooning felt a strong pull towards traditional subjects and he never fully abandoned the depiction of the human
gure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and guration. Heavily in uenced by
the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending gure and ground in his pictures while
dismembering, re-assembling and distorting his gures in the process.
De Kooning often left canvases with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of
moving and settling and coming into de nition. In this sense his paintings exemplify action painting - they are like
records of a violent encounter.
- Willem De Kooning, Valentine, 1947: gesture is important as in pollocks. Brushes are describing the subject.
He was very angry in the approach of art and painting.
- Willem De Kooning, Woman, I, 1950-52: not real, rushstroks in the shape of a woman. Gestures are all the
brushstrokes. We’d be able to count them.
- Willem De Kooning, Untitled, 1976: shape of the woman disappeared. Complex image, untitled. Makes the
composition to distract the viewer from searching a woman.
- Willem De Kooning, Rider (Untitled VII), 1985: we don’t recognise how many brushstrokes he used.
Simpli ed brushstrokes. Action thinking is not recognisable anymore. This is how an artist evolves.

Barnett Newman (American, 1905-1970)

Youtube
Newman shared the Abstract Expressionists' interests in myth and the primitive unconscious, but the huge elds of
colour and trademark "zips" in his pictures distanced him from the gestural abstraction toward the re ective and
cerebral Colour Field painters.
He devised an approach that avoided painting's conventional oppositions of gure and ground and he created a
symbol, the “zip”, which might reach out and invoke the viewer standing before it. Newman brought a more
philosophical edge to his paintings, infusing them with his own self, and inviting the audience to experience them
with both their bodies and their psyches.

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 In a 1962 interview Newman gave to Art in America magazine, he remarked, "The central issue of painting is the
subject matter... My subject is anti-anecdotal." An anecdotal painting, he believed, was like an episode or a piece in a
longer sequence. Newman believed that if a painting is anti-anecdotal, then it somehow becomes more whole, self-
suf cient and independent. He described his reductivism as one means of "... freeing ourselves of the obsolete props
of an outmoded and antiquated legend ... freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia,
legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting." Meditation kind of work, meditated on
colours.
- Barnett Newman, Untitled, 1945: in uenced by surrealism, fantastic creatures, the colours are still the main
part of the painting. Yellow and green colours.
- Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948: trying to describe the true soul. line, not de ned like a ame because it
represents the soul.
- Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51: once in front of a painting, you have to get lost in
colours, and he invented the ZIP, that is a line very precise made with a tape to make it perfect, Because if you open
the ZIP, it will show you another dimension. When you pray and meditate you repeat always the same formula to
relax and you get lost. Compared to an electrocardiogram, the rhythm to the heart in this case and to the painting.
Red, impulsive colour.

Mark Rothko (Markus Rotkowičs, Russian-Latvian, 1903-1970)

In 1913 he emigrated to the USA and in 1923 he arrived in New York. Highly informed by Nietzsche, Greek
mythology, and his Russian-Jewish heritage, Rothko's art was profoundly imbued with emotional content that he
articulated through a range of styles that evolved from gurative to abstract.
Rothko's early gurative work - including landscapes, still lives, gure studies, and portraits - demonstrated an ability
to blend Expressionism and Surrealism. His search for new forms of expression led to his Colour Field paintings,
which employed shimmering colour to convey a sense of spirituality. His goal to achieve the "sublime" rather than the
"beautiful” put Rothko to nevertheless explore the compositional potential of colour and form on the human psyche.
To stand in front of a Rothko is to be in the presence of the pulsing vibrancy of his enormous canvases; it is to feel, if
only momentarily, something of the sublime spirituality he relentlessly sought to evoke.
Rothko maintained the social revolutionary ideas throughout all his life. In particular he supported artist's total
freedom of expression, which he felt was compromised by the market. This belief often put him at odds with the art
world establishment, leading him to publicly respond to critics, and occasionally refuse commissions, sales and
exhibitions. Same way as Barnett but the nal effect is totally different. Fantastic creatures and magic creatures
- Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944: in uenced by halfway to surrealism (idea of
unconscious as Barnett) and Abstract. Fantastic creatures and magic, dreamy situation.
- Mark Rothko, No. 5/No. 22, 1950: he applause colours to make stripes, are the experience involving you in the
canva. They should be observed at 5 cm distance because he wanted the viewer to get involved completely and the
canvas were made big just to be seen only them by the viewer. Willing to transmit some feelings to the viewer =/
turner cause he studied the sunlights. But Rothko tried to get the same feelings of one of his works, so like using
the same colours to get the same atmosphere but not redoing them.
- Mark Rothko, No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black), 1958: door.
- M.W. Turner, A Pink Sky above a Grey Sea, 1822:
- J.M.W. Turner, Storm Clouds: Sunset With A Pink Sky, 1824:
- J.M.W. Turner, Yacht approaching the coast, 1835:
- J.M.W. Turner, Norham Castle Sunrise, 1845:

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 Mark Rothko and the Seagram Building
In June 1958, Mark Rothko accepted a commission to decorate a dining room in the Four Seasons restaurant of the
Seagram Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a new modernist skyscraper by Philip Johnson and Mies van der
Rohe. Departing from his wonted format of oating rectangles in glowing colours, Rothko
produced wine-dark paintings with ambiguous portal shapes evoking what he called a “closed space”. From the fall of
1958 into 1959 he was completely absorbed, making more than thirty even though the room only offered places for
seven. At the same time, he became increasingly doubtful that a luxury restaurant with its wealthy patrons was the
appropriate venue for his art. He withdrew, canceling what would have been his rst painted environment—a “place”,
as he ambitiously said, rather than just a group of paintings.
Rothko's work began to darken dramatically during the late 1950s in relation to his work on the mural commission for
the Four Seasons restaurant. Here Rothko turned to a palette of red, maroon, brown, and black. In 1960, due to
misgivings about the restaurant as a proper setting for his work for he didn’t want his work to be considered
“decoration” in addition to feeling “anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a
picture of mine”, Rothko eventually withdrew from this project, even if he had already produced a number of studies
and nished canvases. In the Seagram panels, Rothko changed his motif from a closed to an open form, suggesting a
threshold or portal. This element may have been related to the architectural setting for which these works were
intended. He cancelled it he kept the canvas for him. He didn’t want people to see his canvas in restaurants and not
observing them.
- Black on Marron, 1958: door
- Rothko Chapel, Houston, 1971: The Rothko Chapel, founded by Houston philanthropists John and Dominique
de Menil, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief.It was the dramatic
suite of paintings for the Four Seasons that the de Menils saw in Rothko’s studio and that ultimately informed their
decision to commission the powerful murals in the Chapel in 1964.Mark Rothko was given the opportunity to
shape and control a total environment to encompass his work, resulting in a group of fourteen paintings created
specially for the meditative space. He worked closely with the original architect, Philip Johnson, on the plans, and
then with Houston architects Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry who completed the building.Rothko created
the paintings in his studio in New York, where he built mock walls of the size he desired for the chapel. He devised
a pulley system so he could adjust the height of the canvases to establish the con guration. And in the more than
two years of experimentation and work, he arrived at a new look for his work: seven canvases with hard-edged
black rectangles on maroon ground, and seven purple tonal paintings.In 1966 he wrote a letter to the de Menils,
saying,"...The magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me,
exceeds all of my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for
me."
Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901-1985)
The French term was coined by Jean Dubuffet, who posited an inventive, non-conformist art that should be perfectly
brut, unprocessed and spontaneous, and emphatically distinct from what he saw as the derivative stereotypes of
of cial culture.
Jean Dubuffet disliked authority gaining notoriety for his attacks on conformism and mainstream culture, which he
described as "asphyxiating." He was attracted to the art of children and the mentally ill, and did much to promote
their work, collecting it and promulgating the notion of Art Brut.
His early work was in uenced by that of outsiders, but it was also shaped by the interests in materiality that
preoccupied many post-war French artists associated with the Art Informel movement. While the public looked for
beauty, he gave them pictures with coarse textures and drab colors, thick textured and gritty surfaces, which critics
linked to dirt and excrement. The emphasis on texture and materiality in Dubuffet's paintings might be read as an

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 insistence on the real. In the aftermath of the war, it represented an appeal to acknowledge humanity's failings and
begin again from the ground - literally the soil - up.
In the early 1960s, he developed a radically new, graphic style, which he called "Hourloupe," and would deploy it on
many important public commissions. Hourloupe style developed from a chance doodle while he was on the
telephone. The basis of it was a tangle of clean black lines that forms cells, which are sometimes lled with unmixed
color. He believed the style evoked the manner in which objects appear in the mind. This contrast between physical
and mental representation later encouraged him to use the approach to create sculpture
- Jean Dubuffet, The Blue Bird, 1949: circle that can be the moon but nothing in here is meant to have a
meaning, experimenting new materials like dust, blue.
- Jean Dubuffet, Moonrise in Ghost, 1951:
- Site domestique (au fusil espadon) avec tete d'Inca et petit fauteuil a droite, 1966: the rst that
painted with doodles (scarabocchi). Don’t have any order or meaning, not driven by ration ability. And that gives
the pattern of the painting. Not only invented the art of doodles but also transformed them as sculptures.
- Jean Dubuffet, Groupe de 4 arbres, Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York City, 1970-1972: in here we
have trees made by doodles in 3 dimension later than life. Interesting because they still have the signs of doodles
and the space follows all the levels of the doodle. He both uses colours and dots, we can say that the only colours
that he uses are black, blue and red. Not many colours because the thing that was important was the shape, to
focus on.

Alberto Burri (Italian, 1915-1995)

Burri began his career not as an artist but as a doctor and serving as a physician in the Italian army during World War
II. Following his unit’s capture in northern Africa, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas, in
1944, where he started to paint on the burlap that was readily at hand. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to
Rome. Like many Italian artists of his generation who reacted against the politicized realism popular in the late 1940s,
Burri soon turned to abstraction, becoming a proponent of Art Informel. Around 1949–50 he experimented with
various unorthodox materials, fabricating tactile collages with pumice, tar, and burlap as in his sacchi (sacks), which
were initially considered assaults against the aesthetic canon. At this time, he also commenced the muffe (molds) and
the gobbo (hunchback) paintings; the latter were humped canvases that broke with the traditional two- dimensional
plane. This preoccupation with the ambiguity of the pictorial surface and with non-art materials put Burri in opposition
to the increasingly decorative nature of abstraction. In the mid-1950s Burri began burning his materials, a technique
he termed combustione (combustion). Persevering with the combustione technique, Burri started to burn plastic in
the early 1960s and in the early 1970s he embarked on his “cracked” paintings, creviced earthlike surfaces that play
with notions of trompe l’oeil. In 1979 Burri turned to another industrial material, Celotex, and continued to use it
throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
- Alberto Burri, Sacco 5P, 1953: abstraction through materials.
- Alberto Burri, Grande Bianco Plastica, 1962: he pushes materials forward experimenting new actions on the
materials, not only cutting. Uses plastic, burns it to obtain the holes and blurred effect. The part of the chance is still
important, because using re is not safe nor make you feel sure about the nal result cause it’s completely out of
hand.
- Alberto Burri, Rosso Plastica, 1964: pushing materials to the extreme.
- Alberto Burri, Il Viaggio n. 4, 1979: colours Drieing on the canva makes the canva looks like desert. Final
effect is a surprise because he couldn’t predict how it turned out.
- Alberto Burri, Grande Cretto Nero, 1977: on top the blur is very strong and then the rest is very black. Colour
is not a de nition of something but a dynamic material. Used as a proper material.

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- Alberto Burri, Cretto, Gibellina, 1973: to do the cracktle. Gibellina was a town in Sicily destroyed during ?.
Created a painting with the materials of gibellina and making the streets look like the old g. Art that nature.

Hans Hartung (German, 1904-1989)

Hartung was a major gure in Art Informel. He cultivated interests in philosophy, astronomy, music, and religion at a
young age before he turned to painting. At just 17, he began to experiment with abstraction, synthesizing the graphic
techniques of his artistic models while completely eliminating gurative elements.
In the years leading up to World War II, Hartung's work re ected his attempts to reconcile chance and control,
combining expressive graphic elements with patches of black and color to produce a sense of spontaneity. After being
gravely wounded at the German Front, one of his legs amputated, he returned to Paris in 1945 and resumed painting.
While Hartung's postwar paintings are generally described as exhibiting a calligraphic quality, his work moved
through a series of phases, becoming less spontaneous and more formally aggressive than his work from the late
1930s. In many works of the late 1940s and early 1950s he applied large areas of color to the canvas on which he
painted a combination of bold black brushstrokes and thinner frenetic linear strokes
- Hans Hartung, T1947-3 (Bleu et vert chemin de fer), 1947:
- Hans Hartung, o.T., 1962:
- Leica (?)

Mark Tobey (American, 1890-1976)

In 1911 Tobey arrived in New York, where he worked as a fashion illustrator and developed a reputation for his portrait
drawings in charcoal.
This period was one of great experimentation for Tobey: in 1918 Tobey converted to the Bahai faith and in 1923 he
met the Chinese painter Deng Kui, who taught him techniques of Chinese calligraphy. He began using a technique of
‘white writing’ using swift calligraphic brushstrokes, mostly in white, on a variously colored background.
Tobey’s paintings have elegant gestural quality and small size founded not on the artist’s individual psyche but on a
universalist religion. He worked on graphic alphabets, languages or symbols of religion or thing like that. Inspired by
the Chinese writing All signs have a meaning.
- Mark Tobey, Chinese Grocery, 1957: graphic signs that create the surface of the canva.
- Mark Tobey, Wild Field, 1959:in here even more graphic signs. He creates a world of them.

Giuseppe Capogrossi (Italian, 1900-1972)

Capogrossi’s unique contribution to 20th-century art, tracing the evolution of his signature abstract style of grandiose
orchestrations of mark and color, and its numerous variations over the subsequent decades. Giuseppe Capogrossi’s
artistic development extends from the surprising debut of his gurative period and his relationship with the Roman
School to the radical non gurative innovation. With his endlessly inventive deployment of his highly personal fork-
like symbol, Capogrossi became in the fties and sixties, the forefront of the contemporary international art scene as a
trailblazing and highly original gure. Chosed this symbol that looks like among us.
- Surface n. 25, 1952:
- Surface n. 359, 1960: you cannot imagine how many possibilities of a painting, you can create through of a
single symbol.
- Surface n. 691, 1970:

Carla Accardi (Italian, 1924-2014)

In the 1950s, Accardi was involved in the wide-reaching attempts to revolutionize abstraction through the
hybridization of geometric abstraction and gestural painting. After forswearing painting from 1952 to 1953, Accardi

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 began to introduce pseudo-calligraphic signs into abstract images, while reducing her palette to white-on-
blackcompositionstoexplore therelationshipbetween gureandground.In1961Accardi reintegrated color and began
painting on sicofoil, a transparent plastic, instead of canvas. Symbol curvy
- Large Integration, c. 1958: she experimented new supports where we will connect this painting with others.
She isolates the symbol itself on a transparent sheet where the rest of the canva disappears. Aims to emphasise the
symbol.
- Homage to the President Kennedy, 1964:
- Segni d’oro, 1967-76:

CoBrA (1948-1951)
International group of artists founded in the Café Notre-Dame, Paris. The name was a con ation of the initial letters of
the names of the capital cities of the countries of origin of the rst members of the group: Copenhagen, Brussels and
Amsterdam.
The initiators and spokesmen of the group were Asger Jorn, Christian Dotremont and Constant. All were searching, by
way of experimental methods, for new paths of creative expression, and all shared similar expectations of the years
following World War II: a new society and a new art. Inspired by Marxism, they rejected Western culture and its
aesthetics. They also emphatically repudiated Surrealism, although they had found useful points of departure within
the movement. Their working method was based on spontaneity and experiment, and they drew their inspiration in
particular from children’s drawings, from primitive art forms and from the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró.
The Cobra Movement stands for creative freedom and experimentation, passion and vitality, and social engagement.
Although the group emphasised versatility and diversity, their common in uences and interests led to an almost
recognisable Cobra ‘language’, characterised by their world of fantastic beings, the use of vivid colours and a
spontaneous interplay of line and colour.

Asger Jorn (Asger Jørgensen, Danish, 1914-1973)

During World WarII, Jorn remained in Denmark, painting canvases that re ect the in uence of James Ensor, Vasily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró with a new, freer, more color-orientated concept of painting. In 1948 Jorn formed
the Cobra group. Over the next three years the group organized several exhibitions and published a series of small
monographs, a journal and some illustrated volumes of poetry. In 1951 he disassociated himself from the movement
and returned to Denmark and in 1953 he began his intensive work in ceramics. He settled in Albisola, Italy, and his
activities included painting, collage, book illustration, prints, drawings, ceramics, tapestries, commissions for murals,
and, in his last years, sculpture. He tried to revive the activities of the Cobra years, holding a large festival of ceramics
and an open-air exhibition. After the mid-1950s Jorn divided his time between Paris and Albisola. Jorn’s mature
painting style developed during the late 1950s, and by continuous experiment he enriched his original concept of the
spontaneous–abstract idiom. His use of different materials in combination with oil paint stemmed from his work with
ceramics. Among the main in uences on Jorn’s paintings were the calligraphic style by the late works of Jackson
Pollock. However, his paintings continued to be based on the principle of ambiguity and the free ow of color in
relation to the gure, and, in his bronze and marble sculptures he pursued the concept of the multi-faceted,
ambiguous image
- Asger Jorn, In the Wing beat of the Swans, 1963: dripping gives more drama and idea of action. Suggest us
images even if it’s totally abstract - confusion.
- Asger Jorn, The Moon Dog, 1953: inspired by creations of kids cause in the meaning of being naive,
immediate comprehension. Invented kind of gure, but we feel a more or less the face of a baby, more related to
an artwork like this one rather then the others one. Not abstract cause it’s recognisable.

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Emilio Vedova (Italian, 1919-2006):
Vedova participated in the activities of the Corrente group with whom adopted an anti-19th-century style of painting
that rejected aesthetic indulgence and demanded the spectator's participation. Vedova attempted to remain faithful
to the sense of disinterested moral involvement that he regarded as the basis of each work of art. He re proposed the
geometric strictness of Cubism in modern terms and tempered its tonal harshness with a sense of emotional
involvement. The painting style developed by Vedova required the will to experiment and a great expenditure of
physical energy. It is, therefore, no coincidence that his early studies give the impression of feverishness or
convulsion.
From 1948 Vedova began producing series that are either dynamic themselves or structured to exploit the dynamic
qualities of light. In 1959 he created large polyptychs, sometimes asymmetrical and L- shaped, consisting of a
number of works on the same theme.
In his later creations Vedova continued to pursue his investigations into physical space independently of any
prejudged attitudes towards balance, logic and behaviour; his spectacular, centralised creations are a con rmation of
the feelings of alarm and distress that pervade contemporary society. Inspired in the approach toward the canva: his
brush is very aggressive and violent and we can feel it. Physically arguing with the brush and canva.
- Emilio Vedova, Image of Time (Barrier), 1951: dramatic order and rhythm they give strong feelings in to the
dark. Yellow brushstrokes is registered by our brain as a light that comes from a divine source.
- Emilio Vedova, Homage to Dada Berlin 1964-65: considering the canva as a support and not only
something hanged on a wall. Colour panels, that are coloured with the same approach of the canvas. Action
painting kind of approach. Transforming canvas.

LESSON 8
CONTINUITY AND INDEPENDENCE: Neocubism in France and in Italy. Independent researcher:
Sutherland, Bacon, Fontana, Giacometti and Manzoni. The American New Dada.

New-Dada
The Neo-Dada movement was initiated by the composer John Cage, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and the dancer and
choreographer Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1952. These artists rebelled
against the emotionally charged paintings of the Abstract Expressionists opposing their interest in the emphasis on
chance, individuality, interaction with the audience, and multiple media all combined into a singular work.
Neo-Dada simultaneously mocked and celebrated consumer culture, united opposing conventions of abstraction and
realism, and disregarded boundaries between media through experimentation with assemblage, performance, and
other hybrid fusions. Neo-Dada artists often encouraged viewers to look beyond traditional aesthetic standards and
interpret meaning through a process of critical thinking generated by contradictions, absurd juxtapositions, coded
narratives, and other mixed signals.
Neo-Dada artists adhered to Marcel Duchamp's premise that works of art are intermediaries in a process that the artist
begins and the viewer completes. Encouraging the shift toward the viewer as part of the artwork, many Neo-Dada
artists adhered to a notion that the viewer's interpretation of a work - not the artist's intent - determined its meaning.
This was emphasized through the use of chance, found objects, and mass media, as well as a penchant for
performance which helped eliminate the artist's predetermined signi cance and instead placed the focus on the
viewer's reading of the piece.

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 Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008)
In the early 50s Rauschenberg produced several series of abstract paintings that he presented as screens whose
appearance changed in response to the lighting conditions and the shadows cast on them by the spectators.
In 1954 Rauschenberg began to produce paintings which combined objets trouvés, postcards and other printed
materials into a frantic and physically substantial surface as a way of alluding to what he referred to as the ‘gap’
between art and life. Rauschenberg called these works combines because of their mixture of techniques, but at their
most sculptural it was clear that their debt was to traditions not only of collage but of assemblage especially of Kurt
Schwitters.
Rauschenberg stopped making combine paintings in 1962, when he found a way of adapting his method of transfer
drawing to canvas by applying found images through the photomechanical process of screen-printing. Often he
painted over this printed surface in oils and, after 1964, he remained interested in textural effects and in apparently
spontaneous methods of organizing his imagery, which gave these works a more personal touch.
Rauschenberg did not create any radically new directions in the 1980s, but he continued to develop provocative
variations on his standard methods, regarding his art as an agent of social interchange and communication.
- Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (Glossy Black Painting), c. 1951: not at, surface with water that create
imperfections with the wind. Not static black but in movement, dynamic, search of feeling of Dadaism instead of
real Dadaism.
- Robert Rauschenberg, Erased De Kooning Drawing, 1953:object Trouvé, he personalised it by cancelling
the traces of the drawing before. It’s another artwork transformed by
- Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1953: typical example of Rauschenberg painting. The process is very similar to the
Kooning drawing, but in here he put something personal and that doesn’t involve others artists. He personalises
the bed with a touch of colours, personalises his room = Van Gogh one but more personal. Same technique as
pollock because he doesn’t control how the colours drops on the canvas.
- Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59: he found this stuff animal and around it tries to create his
artwork.

Jasper Johns (American, born 1930)

Johns’s friendship with Rauschenberg, provided a sustaining intellectual exchange that became the foundation of his
artistic development. In 1954, as a sign of his commitment to creating original work, Johns destroyed all of the
paintings and drawings he had made up to that point. He was also inspired by Cage’s aesthetic theories of
indeterminacy and chance, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the readymade. He bucked the dominant trend of
Abstract Expressionism by including everyday images and materials in his works. Using a wax encaustic technique to
create sensuous, tactile surfaces, Johns painted familiar signs such as targets, numerals, and the American ag—which
he described as “things the mind already knows”: they were his ideal subject because of the host of varied meanings
each carried with it. This fostered the perceptual ambiguity and semiotic play at the heart of his works.
Through his use of shreds of newspaper, found objects, and even mass- produced goods, Johns erased the division
between ne art and mass culture artistically initiating a dialogue in each artwork that was meant to be resolved
within the mind of the viewer.
Although perhaps best known for his paintings, Johns has worked extensively in ink on plastic, as well as
experimenting relentlessly with lithography, etchings, and monoprints. He is also celebrated for his sculptures of
lightbulbs and other everyday objects. In the 1980s, the imagery in his work began to include his personal
possessions and art- historical interests.
- Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55:
- Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), 1960: made in bronze, classic material and technique, comes from
a wax preparation then melted, and then apply the colours, the labels on top of the cans, dimensions colours and

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 sizes real, realistic. But he could’ve painted the cans in green which he did not cause he wanted something
inspired but the reality, but not real. Pierce of art rather than just two cans. Something that elevates the artwork
from something of everyday to something that is part of the art.
- Jasper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983: American ag, repetition of it. The repetition nulli es the value of the
object. Collage.

Lucio Fontana (Italian, 1899-1968)

From Argentina, Fontana settled in Milan and from 1928 to 1930 he abandoned any lingering gurative elements in
favor of a strict and coherent form of abstraction. At this time he used both at, geometrically regular shapes and
organic biomorphic forms with undulating contours suggestive of enlarged cells. Alongside his search for a geometric
perfection he also produced an extensive group of ceramics in which gures or objects are suggested in a fragmented
and violently disturbed form that draws attention to the manipulation of the clay by his hand. During World War II
Fontana returned to Argentina, where in 1946 he collaborated on the Mani esto blanco where he questioned the
traditional reliance in Western art on a at support such as canvas or paper, proposing instead that the time had come
for artists to work in three or rather four physical dimensions. Following his return to Italy in 1948 Fontana exhibited
his rst Spatial Environment and in the early 1950s collaborated with the architect Luciano Baldessari on the design of
several exhibition pavilions. Fontana’s concept of Spazialismo, as formulated in the texts that he published on his
return to Italy, was based on the principle that in our age matter should be transformed into energy in order to invade
space in a dynamic form. He applied these theories to a feverish, violent, subversive and radical production in which
he synthesized the various elements of his art. He devised the generic title Concetto spaziale (‘spatial concept’) for
these works and used it for almost all his later paintings. These can be divided into broad categories: the Buchi
(‘holes’), beginning in 1949, and the Tagli (‘slashes’), which he instituted in the mid- 1950s. In both types of painting
Fontana assaulted the heretofore sacrosanct surface of the canvas, either by making holes in it or by slashing it with
sharp linear cuts
- Lucio Fontana, Scultura astratta, 1934:
- Lucio Fontana, Signorina seduta, 1934: GOLD= colours of divinity, god, goddess, fantastic= Colour of the
skin gold. Fontana wanted to give the idea that the girl was from another dimension, she has no name, it’s the
abstracted idea of a girl sit.
- Lucio Fontana, Due uccellini, 1958: ceramic, two birds, no details but only their movement. Something that
gives the sensation of the subjects, cut out of the space. Ceramic gives the movement and the space. Fontana
foundEd a movement that is called Spazialismo, people interested in part of the space intended as dimensions,
something that goes in the space we are living.
- Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 49-b3, 1949: ideas of this space, his art is like a door between space
occupied and the space behind it. If in sculpting he creates his idea of movement and shape, using the canvas he
begins to create holes in the surface. Canva is not a surface anymore but in this case, it has the holes so it’s not
anymore. Third dimension object, so a sculpture. Holes suggesting another dimesions.
- Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1956: gives the idea of dimension we are in. Two dimesions 1) goes down
made in painting. 2) goes towards the viewer which is glass, in little stones he applied of the surface of the canvas
that gives the idea of the dimension we are in.
- Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1959: nal result that he got, with this idea of another dimension.
Still remain some holes, but cuts are already used to give the idea of another dimension, to create even more this
effect, he put a veil behind the canva to create the black effect.
- Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1963-1964: gives a rhythm to the composition. Attese means

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 - Umberto Boccioni, Stati d‘Animo, Quelli che restano, 1911: 3 canvas that are part of the same artwork. 1
the one they stay, vertical lines that are racing giving the Thor them to the composition, almost like trapped in
vertical lines, not aloud to move forward.
- Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1963: one space and the other space. Colour Depending on the feeling wants to
give to the viewer.
- Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1967: example of one white surface, unique and essential. One
cut. Has a very strong impact on the viewer.
- Of ce Building, Via Senato 11, Milano, 1947-50: fontanas art very malleabile used also in architecture.
- Neon Structure for the IX Triennale at the Museo del Novecento, Milan: you can turn it in the shape he
wants. He analysed the power of light in the space. He made it for the main stairs of triennale.
- Luciano Baldessari, Lucio Fontana and Attilio Rossi, Cinema for the Sidercomit Pavillion, Milan
1953:

Piero Manzoni (Italian, 1933-1963)

Painter and conceptual artist, he was self-taught as an artist. Shortly after he began painting he started to question the
traditional aims and methods of the artist, expressing the nature of his searching in both writings and the objects that
he produced.
He stressed the relationship between artistic expression and the collective unconscious, arguing that through extreme
self-awareness the artist is able to tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values; the canvas
should remain an area of freedom in which the artist may go in search of primal images.
Around 1957 Manzoni began the Achromes series. Some were executed in raw gesso that had been scratched and
scored, and others consisted of cut or pleated canvas and kaolin. His own Achromes signify something different from
Klein’s monochromatic works: the desire to create a space devoid of any image of colour, mark or material. During the
last years of his life Manzoni continued producing Achromes using a vast range of new materials: wads of cotton,
canvas or cotton chemically treated so that changes in temperature would alter the colour, dinner rolls sealed in
plastic and covered with kaolin, waste paper, stones and other materials .
In early 1958 Manzoni began to call into question the nature of the art object in works that pre gured Conceptual Art.
- Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1958-59:
- Piero Manzoni, Achromes, 1958-1963:
- Piero Manzoni, Line, 1960:
- Piero Manzoni, Socle du Monde (Base of the World), 1961: the pedistale of the world, upside down cause
he’s holding the whole world. We are part of it so part of the artwork. Instead of creating something you take the
perso; you want and make her stand on the piedistale and then it’s an artwork. Simple easy and more effective.
- Piero Manzoni, Consumption of dynamic art by the art- devouring public, 1960:
- Piero Manzoni, Living Sculptures and Magic bases, 1961:
- Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Breath, 1960:
- Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Shit, 1961: double concept, the trust you put in the artist, and also the value of
creating something from the artist, like ngerprints.
- Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1962:
- Man Ray, Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 1920: he was a photographer created the enigma, covered an object
making the viewer wondering what’s inside. Manzoni was inspired by this idea.

Lucian Freud (British, 1922-2011)

Freud began to turn his attention to painting experimenting with Surrealism. He established his own artistic identity,
however, in meticulously executed realist works, imbued with a pervasive mood of alienation with an eagerness to

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 establish a highly charged situation, in which the artist is free to explore formal and optical problems rather than
expressive or interpretative ones.
By the late 1950s Freud had lost interest in achieving a meticulous sheen on the surface of his pictures: brushmarks
became spatial as he began to describe the face and body in terms of shape and structure. Attention to tonal detail
had become so acute, however, that paint was built up in concentrations devoid of any compositional function.
Throughout his career a close relationship with sitters was often important for Freud and his palette remained
distinctly muted.
- Lucian Freud, Interior in Paddington, 1951: in contrast with something we don’t see in the canva. He’s tall as
the plant, so we don’t understand the prospective.
- Lucian Freud, Ali, 1974: disturbing perception that doesn’t allow to de ne contours. Ali is a male or female
name, he doesn’t make us understand if it’s a man or a woman, very detailed skin and veins, extremely realistic.
- Lucian Freud, Re ection (Self-portrait), 1985:

Francis Bacon (British, 1909-1992)

Bacon settled in London since 1929 where he tried to establish himself as an interior decorator, but in 1943–4 Bacon
turned to painting as a full-time activity. Bacon had begun by this time to base his imagery largely on a great variety of
photographs, often combining elements taken from several completely different types in the same picture. His
principal sources included images printed in newspapers, lm stills, photographs of big game, studies of the human
gure and animals in motion by the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. However complex and
mysterious the imagery in some of these works might be, the pictures were not intended to have a precise meaning
but, in Bacon’s own words, to ‘trap reality’ with the greatest possible intensity without falling into illustration. Starting
c. 1953–4, Bacon began to develop a less distorted style that was more directly based on
images of contemporary life and sometimes on speci c friends or acquaintances. A characteristic subject at this time
was that of a man dressed like an executive seated in a darkened room in front of curtains or venetian blinds. A few of
these works were even painted partly from life with a technique that sometimes gave the gures an insubstantial,
almost ghost-like character.
Beginning in the late 1950s, a favorite subject was that of a single gure, sometimes nude, seen in a well-lit space,
seated or lying on a comfortable padded couch. Instead of just being sketched in as a blurred and shadowy presence
that fades away into the darkness, the forms are simpli ed and solidly modelled, and the body is given bulk and
volume. Bacon’s later work consisted mainly of paintings of particular people he knew, and it was therefore more
intimately connected with his personal life.
- Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946: focusing on the dark side of his subjects. Underlined not only the personality
but the part that is hidden in them. It’s a composition with a gure. Anxious feeling, full of dead corpse, blood.
- Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953: he recreated the portrait of this
pope, made by Velazquez. He was very famous artist and considered able to capture the personality of the subject,
and give the real expressions of the subjects he painted. Scream of the pope that relieves all his bad feelings.
Rounded lines before and now vertical lines like a cage. The pope is exploding in a way, even more dramatic and
strong so the scream that we here it’s not profound but as a painful relieve.
- Diego Vélazquez, Portrait of Pope Innocenzo X, 1650:
- Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953: images of the past, inspired futurists aswell. Two ghters, almost merging
one in the other representing two men ghting in a box, alone and isolated from the rest of the world. Faces not
detailed because he doesn’t want to give detailed characteristics to the men because it wasn’t the main goal,
focusing instead on the movement of the men. Wondering if they are making love or ghting. Alone isolated in a
box, it connected to the world, he focused on the FEELING.
- R. Muybridge reproductions found in Bacon's studio:

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 - Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976: distortion of the face. Movement of the head makes distortion photos of it.
- Arturo Bragaglia, Polyophysiognomical portrait of Boccioni, 1913: scienti c
- Francis Bacon, Man In Blue I, 1954: he’s closed ina box were the vertical lines indicate the box. Bluish lines
makes dramatic and dark sensations. Troubled or desperate man.
- Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Crouching, 1966: he’s going to dive in a place where there’s not a
comeback. Unrecognisable.
- Francis Bacon, Study of the Human Body , 1982: stain of blood, simpli cation progress, we have a switch of
elements that makes us understand that this process is happening in a room, anxiety and drama = red. Strong
sensation.
- Francis Bacon, Blood on the Floor-Painting, 1986:

Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966)

Giacometti's work of the 1930s represents probably the most important contribution to Surrealist sculpture. In an
effort to explore themes derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, like sexuality, obsession and trauma, he developed a
variety of different sculptural objects. Some were in uenced by primitive art, but perhaps most striking were those
that resemble games, toys, and architectural models. They almost encourage the viewer to physically interact with
them, an idea which was very radical at the time.
In the late 1930s, Giacometti abandoned abstraction and Surrealism, becoming more interested in how to represent
the human gure in a convincing illusion of real space. He wanted to depict gures in such a way as to capture a
palpable sense of spatial distance, so that we, as viewers, might share in the artist's own sense of distance from his
model, or from the encounter that inspired the work. The solution he arrived at involved whittling the gures down to
the slenderest proportions.
After the war, he led the way in creating a style that summed up the Existentialism philosophy's interests in
perception, alienation and anxiety. Although the 1950s art world of both Europe and the United States was
dominated by abstract painting, Giacometti's gurative sculpture came to be a hugely in uential model of how the
human gure might return to art. His gures represented human beings alone in the world, turned in on themselves
and failing to communicate with their fellows, despite their overwhelming desire to reach out
- Alberto Giacometti, Gazing Head, 1928:
- Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930: shape without identity, if the ball was able to go down and touch
the banana, but the lo doesn’t permit that, so we have a feeling of anxiety and suspense. Fantastic suspension
- Alberto Giacometti, Hands Holding the Void , 1934: simpli cation of a body with a chair. Unrealistic. But too
long and head too squared, not realistic.
- Alberto Giacometti, Tall Figure II and Tall Figure III, both 1960: examples of what is his nal and classical
works, shadow of itself. Effect of Second World War, the humanity after the violence of the war, remains only a
shadow of the man, that’s why 2 gures. Rough and black material, idea of long body is because of the shadow,
our soul in a way. He represent what it stays in a way. The feet are very big and heavy compared to the body, Ba use
it is what keep the body/ gure and the shadow on the earth. Portion of the shadow
- Annette with Chariot, 1950: made by many lines that cross each other and at the end you’ll nd the meaning.
He starts from lines. Simpli cation from lines of everything.

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 LESSON: 9
Art is Pop, Minimal, Kinetic and Visual
Pop Art
The term rst appeared in Britain during the 1950s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in
the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products. The 1950s were a period of
optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place: the
manufacturing industry that had expanded during the war now began to mass-produce everything.
Signi cantly, the development of television, as well as changes in print advertising, placed new emphasis
on graphic images and recognizable brand logos. In uenced by American artists such as Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauschenberg, British artists such as Richard Hamilton aimed at broadening taste into more
popular, less academic art. Hamilton helped organize the 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition with its landmark
image Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? (1956).
Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents shared some interest in the urban, consumer,
modern experience. In contrast to the dripping paint and slashing brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism,
Pop artists applied their paint to imitate with an ironic approach the look of industrial
printing techniques. As the decade progressed, artists shifted away from painting towards the use of
industrial techniques. American Pop art emerged suddenly in the early 1960s and was in general characterized by a
stark and emblematic presentation that contrasted with the narrative and analytical tendencies of its British
counterpart. At its most rigorous, American Pop art insisted on a direct relationship between its use of the
imagery of mass production and its adoption of modern technological procedures. Whereas British Pop
art often celebrated or satirized consumer culture, American Pop artists tended to have a more ambiguous
attitude towards their subject-matter. Compared to the disparate nature of British Pop art, from the early
1960s American Pop art appeared to be a uni ed movement. Its shared formal characteristics included
aggressively contemporary imagery, anonymity of surface, strong, atly applied colors and a stylistic
unity often associated with centralized compositions. Each of the American artists was quick to establish
his or her identity, often with the ironic suggestion that the art was like any consumer product or brand
name to be marketed. POP: stands for popular
- Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956:
Hamilton’s 1956 collage was a seminal piece for the evolution of Pop art and is often cited as the very rst work of
Pop art. Created for the exhibition This is Tomorrow at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Hamilton's image
was used both in the catalogue for the exhibition and on posters advertising it. The collage presents viewers with
an updated Adam and Eve (a body-builder and a burlesque dancer) surrounded by all the conveniences modern
life provided, including a vacuum cleaner, canned ham, and television. Constructed using a variety of cutouts from
magazine advertisements, Hamilton created a domestic interior scene that both lauded consumerism and
critiqued the decadence that was emblematic of the American post-war economic boom years. The title is long but
explains what it is telling. There are the typical things that you can nd inside a house at the time with also beautiful
women and men. Hamilton made a collage attaching what was surrounded people everyday, he wanted people to
recognize all the images in this piece of art. From the window we see what is the real culture.

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)

Painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator, lm maker, writer and collector. In 1949 he moved to New York
and began working as a commercial artist and illustrator for magazines and newspapers. Warhol continued to support
himself through his commercial work until at least 1963, but from 1960 he determined to establish his name as a
painter with a series of pictures based on crude advertisements and on images from comic strips. In their calculated

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 exclusion of all conventional signs of personality, in their apparent rejection of invention and in their blatant vulgarity
these rst Pop works were brutal and shocking, designed to offend the sensibilities of an audience accustomed to
thinking of art as an intimate medium for conveying emotion. Warhol extended these concerns through techniques
that gave his images a printed appearance, including the use of stencils, rubber stamps and hand-cut silk-screens, and
in his choice of subject-matter. From autumn 1962 Warhol’s paintings were made almost exclusively by. screen-
printing photographic images on to backgrounds painted either in a single color or in at interlocking areas that
corresponded approximately to the contours of the superimposed images. In these works, executed with the help of
assistants in the studio that he called ‘The Factory’, he succeeded in removing his hand even more decisively from the
canvas and in challenging the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image
until it appeared to be drained of all meaning.
- Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962:He was not looking for the beauty and the perfection but a link
between art and the public and the link was everyday objects. People has this things in their houses so they
recognize the artwork easily. Those are all the variety produced by the Campbell’s factory. He wanted to reproduce
exactly the same object for people being familiar with that. All these pieces are made mechanically, they are silk
printed, he never touched brushes or colors. Another element important for him is the repetition- same exact
colors and shapes because it nulli ed the value of the object. This process is applied to any kind of object for Andy.
- Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes, 1969:This again is a soup but here we just see the box reproduced exactly as the
real one but here is made of wood so this is not the real material. It makes it abstract in the way that it loses the
characteristics that the object has.
- Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967: Marilyn Monroe is repeated and nulli ed as the previous work of art and he want
to lost the identity by using different and unusual colors.
- Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962: Here she is not repeated. Gold- to make the subject kind of a
divinity, celebrate the gure. Does not repeat her because the purpose is celebration not nulli cation.
- Madonna Advocata (or Madonna of the Monasterium Tempuli), VII c.
- Andy Warhol, Electric Chairs, 1971
- Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964-1973
- Andy Warhol, Mona Lisa, 1980
-
Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923–1997)
American painter, sculptor, printmaker and decorative artist. His paintings based on the motifs and procedures of
comic strips and advertisements made him one of the central gures of American Pop Art. In 1961 Lichtenstein made
the nal break with his early work. Whereas he had previously translated his source materials into personal variants of
Cubism or Constructivism, he now appropriated from comic strips not only+ the subject-matter but also the style. In
these Pop paintings he favored highly simpli ed color schemes and procedures that mimicked commercial
printing techniques, representing tonal variations with patterns of colored circles that imitated the half-tone screens
of Ben Day dots used in newspaper printing, and surrounding these with black outlines similar to
those used to conceal imperfections in cheap newsprint. Having established this apparently anonymous style as,
paradoxically, his personal style, Lichtenstein began to apply it also to paintings based on familiar works by other
artists. The essence of Lichtenstein’s procedure lay in the enlargement and uni cation of his source material on the
basis of strict artistic principles. By enlarging his source material, Lichtenstein emphasized the banality and emptiness
of his motifs as an equivalent to the impersonal, mechanized style of drawing. This led to speculation as to his
intended criticism of modern industrial America. The formalization and irony could be taken to support such a theory,
but Lichtenstein ultimately would appear to accept the environment as revealed by his reference material as

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 part of American capitalist industrial culture. Lichtenstein also periodically produced groups of sculptures and of
furniture in which he made punning use of linear devices from his paintings to produce three-dimensional but at-
looking representations of familiar objects.
- Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Ball, 1961
- Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963: He takes details of cartoons that started to be very famous and he
isolate this detail. To make it more a cartoon he made the typographic dots. Reminds to pointillism.
- Roy Lichtenstein, Woman with Flowered Hat , 1963: How he realizes the typographic dots, halfway
between a handmade and a mechanical process because it uses a stencil. Picasso painting and what he
interpretative of the Picasso painting some details are different but keeping the whole composition the same. It
transforms the Picasso subject on a cartoon and with a pop effect. Some pieces are at because he just gave the
effect.
- Roy Lichtenstein, Seascape I from New York Ten, 1964-65: It transformed the subject. Represent the sea
with dots while the sky is bubbles and the land is just a piece of collage. Bubbles are dots and dots are the ones he
uses for the sea.
- Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstrokes, 1964-65: He transformed also brush strokes seen as a media, a tool and he
transformed them in something cartooning celebrating them. He reproduces the effect but the brush strokes is
simpli ed as a cartoon.
- Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1996: He transformed the brush strokes in a sculpture, a 3D object.

Claes Oldenburg (Swedish-American, born 1929)

Artist and architect he is best known for his oppy sculpturesand larger-than-life public works of consumer goods,
musical instruments, and everyday objects. Oldenburg’s embrace of the commodities of materialist culture as subject-
matter placed him in the forefront of what became known as Pop Art. The soft canvas props that Oldenburg sewed led
to the large- scale soft sculptures. By grossly enlarging the scale of familiarobjects and by reversing their
characteristics of hard and soft, rigid or yielding, Oldenburg created an art of parody and humor. This same
displacement of characteristics precipitated Oldenburg’s involvement with commercial fabrication. It also signaled his
exploitation of geometrical volumes with hard surfaces and clean contours. Sometimes the same subject was
executed in ‘hard’, ‘soft’ and ‘ghost’ versions, the latter being both soft and colorless, as a way of emphasizing its
formal qualities. In 1965 Oldenburg turned his attention to drawings and projects for imaginary outdoor monuments.
As he became more involved in the projects, he moved from a simple placement of gargantuan objects on to a
landscape to a more studied relationship between object andsite.
- Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake, 1962: Slice of cake where we recognize cream, chocolate, nuts but it is bigger
than a real one so we nd ourselves lost in front of something like that.
- Claes Oldenburg, Fag End, 1968: Proper sculpture celebrating a cigarette that represent a real cigarette.
Maximization of the object is a celebration, he wants to give importance to the subject.
- Knife Slicing Through Wall, 1989, Installed at 817 Hillsdale Avenue, Los Angeles: He collaborates very
much in public sculptures. There is a knife cutting the building and a stamp on a park. He chooses his own subject
to convey a message. He feels that he needs to communicate
- Free Stamp, 1991, Willard Park, Cleveland, Ohio:
- Claes Oldenburg, Ago, Filo e Nodo (Needle, Thread, and Knot), 2000, Piazza Cadorna, Milano:

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 Binoculars Building
Built between 1985-1991 for advertising agency Chiat/Day (now TBWA\Chiat\Day) as its West Coast corporate
headquarters, it was designed by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry. Form 2011 the building has been leased by
Google. Headquarter of and advertising company. Advertising means that they are able to look far and see things that
is why he represented this building as a telescope.

James Rosenquist (American, born 1933)

Rosenquist’s debt to Surrealism in his reliance on seemingly irrational juxtapositions was evident in the
majority of his paintings. His references, however, to mass-produced goods and to magazines, lms and other
aspects of the mass media, together with his dispassionate and seemingly anonymous technique, caused him to be
regarded as one of the key gures in the development of Pop art in the USA. Rosenquist’s treatment of typical Pop
subject-matter such as sex and consumerism had little in common with the directness and immediacy of work by such
artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; rather than seeking to duplicate his source material, he preferred to
impose himself on it through procedures of disruption and dislocation. From his renowned Pop canvases to his
billboard-sized works and continuing with his recent use of abstract painting techniques, the artist endures his
interest in and mastery of texture, color, line, and shape that continues to dazzle audiences and in uence
younger generations of artists.
- James Rosenquist, Marilyn Monroe I, 1962: Marilyn divided in different details of her face that we can
recognize. So it is a collage of details of her face in a more elaborate way. No mechanical process
- James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1960-61/1964: JFK, a slice of cake and a car, all those images emerge to
make on unique image. He resumes three images all together in one canvas.
.
Nouveau Réalisme
In 1960 French art critic Pierre Restany rst used the term Nouveau Réalisme in a manifesto foran exhibition at the
Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. In this exhibition he brought together artworks created through the appropriation of
ordinary materials and objects by artists such as Arman, César, Christo, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely, among others.
Like the Dadaists and the Surrealists, these artists performed archaeological excavations of everyday life; their works
ranged from torn and lacerated posters, wrapped objects, and accumulations of found objects to assemblages of junk
materials and urban detritus (automobile parts, fabrics, rope, dishes, etc.).
As a result of its vernacular bias, Nouveau Réalisme is often considered a counterpart to Neo- Dada and Pop art.
Thus the Nouveaux Réalistes advocated a return to "reality" in opposition to the lyricism of abstract painting. They also
wanted to avoid what they saw as the traps of gurative art, which was seen as either petty-bourgeois or as Stalinist
socialist realism. Hence the Nouveau Réalistes used exterior objects to give an account of the reality of their time.
Nouveau Réalistes made extensive use of collage and assemblage, using real objects incorporated directly into the
work and acknowledging a debt to the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.

Arman (Armand Pierre Fernandez, French, 1928-2005)

Arman's most notable work was preoccupied with the consequences of mass production: in his Accumulations, often
re ected on the identical character of modern objects, he piled up identical salvaged objects, modifying their
meaning by repetition and giving the construction an ironic title; his Poubelles, or "trash cans," considered the waste
that results when these objects are discarded; and his Coleres, or “rages," expressed an almost irrational rage at
objects that, in modern times, threatened to dominate everyday life. Arman was important in pioneering the
European return to Marcel Duchamp's idea of the Readymade. Arman's fascination with it points to his belief that

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 contemporary sculpture had to confront the commodity. That is, sculpture could no longer be crafted by hand, or
displayed as a testimony to craft skills and imagination; instead it had to respond to the characteristics of mass-
produced consumer goods. Arman's persistent use of trash was a deliberate nod to the waste that mass production
generates when time passes and goods are discarded. Many of Arman's early sculptures point to the strangeness
inherent in the idea of identical, mass produced objects. Gathering these identical objects together, he distracts us
from their functional purpose and presents them instead as endlessly repeated forms - forms which seem to have a
deeper meaning that, via the processes of modernization, has been lost to us.
- Arman, In nity of Typewriters, 1962: They are not typewriter anymore because they are vertical and most of
them are broken. It is not just an objet trouvé because the artist does not changed it but the fact that is repeated
nulli ed the value of the object.
- Arman, Poubelle Ménagère, 1962: Does an operation of transforming a trash in a box with a plexiglass into
art. The artist does not look for beauty it just a transformation of something that we are used to see in art.
- Arman, Untitled, 1962: Destroys and transforms it not changing color or putting it in a different place but by
cutting it. Here he divided the object in pieces where each become independent. To underline this process of
nulli cation of the object he does not give any title. (Similar process-Cubism) Arman was inspired by Cubism.
- Arman, Joue Contre Joue, 1974: Here as well it is not a violin but it is the reinterpretation of a violin made by
the artist.

Yves Klein (French, 1928-1962)

Yves Klein was the most in uential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. He is
remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own:
International Klein Blue. The monochrome blue paintings might be read as a satire on abstract art, for not only do
the pictures carry no motif, but Klein insisted there was nothing there at all, only "the void.” But the success of his
short-lived career lay in attacking many of the ideas that underpinned the abstract painting that had been dominant
in France since the end of the Second World War. For some critics he is a descendent of Marcel Duchamp, a prankster
who lampooned settled understandings of painting and opened art up to new media. And even in the ways he used
performance later on in his career, he is like many artists who rediscovered some of the tactics of earlier avant-gardes
in the 1950s and '60s. Klein was intrigued by Eastern religion and Rosicrucianism, and was even in uenced by judo.
He was genuinely fascinated by mystical ideas, by notions of the in nite, the inde nable, the absolute, and his use of
a single rich and suggestive tone of blue might be seen as an attempt to free the viewer from all imposed ideas and
let his/her mind soar. For, as Klein believed, lines in pictures were a form of "prison grating," and only color offered
the path to freedom. Although he was never speci cally opposed to creating art objects, many of Klein's later works
seem to want to abandon the object as a vehicle for art and instead nd ways to more directly transmit ideas and
experiences.
- Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, 1961: He created his own blue starting with minerals. Perfect result of his
research that relates to in nity, sky, sea, water. Blue is connected to something in nity that does not have order.
- Yves Klein, Sponge, 1959: Canva is limited. He was trying to nd something that could became the color such
as sponge that absorb the color.
- Yves Klein, First Experiments of the Living Brushes, 1958: He wanted the subject to go directly without the
help of tools to the canvas, without the intervention of the artist. She impress the image on her own without the
help of the artist but only with his direction, the artist is only guiding the subject.
- Yves Klein, Anthropométrie de l’epoque bleue, 1960:

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 Kinetic Art
Kinetic art - art that depends on movement for its effects - ourished into a lively avant-garde trend following the
landmark exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1955, after which it attracted a wide
international following. At its heart were artists who were fascinated by the possibilities of movement in art - its
potential to create new and more interactive relationships with the viewer and new visual experiences. It inspired new
kinds of art that went beyond the boundaries of the traditional, handcrafted, static object, encouraging the idea that
the beauty of an object could be the product of optical illusions or mechanical movement. But the group was split
between those such as Jean Tinguely, who were interested in employing actual movement, and those such as Victor
Vasarely, who were interested in optical effects and the illusion of movement and went on to be more closely
associated with the Op art movement. Kinetic art thrived for a decade and achieved considerable prominence. But Op
art proved almost too successful in capturing the public's imagination, while Kinetic art eventually began to be seen
as a stale and accepted genre. By the mid-1960s, these developments led to a decline in artists' interest in movement.

Jean Tinguely (Swiss, 1925-1991)

As early as the late 1930s, Tinguely began to create hanging sculptures that used motors to propel them into motion.
He later called his form of mechanized sculpture Méta-Malevich. In 1954, art historian Pontus Hultén coined the term
Méta- mécaniques (meta-mechanical devices) by which these works are now known. Tinguely’s interest in self-
propelled motion is central to his sculptural oeuvre. In the late 1950s, he created a series of automatic drawing
machines, the Meta-Matics, which use chalk or markers to create abstract works of art through a mechanized process.
His constructions, which combine junk sculpture with kinetics, are often witty, humorous, and ironic, owing a great
deal to the Dadaist legacy of anti-art. Tinguely was also a pioneer in the eld of art that engenders social engagement.
His sculptures often rely on the spectator to push a button, pull a lever, or somehow cause them to start moving.
During the 1970s, Tinguley had embarked on a series of fountain projects. The birds’ simultaneous and unpredictable
movements are typical of Tinguely’s art and representative of his central belief in subverting the utilitarian purpose of
the machine.
- Jean Tinguely, Metamechanical Sculpture with Tripod, 1954: Machine made with pieces that he found
and make them move.
- Jean Tinguely, Meta-matic Number 10, 1959: Artistic machine able to draw on this piece of paper.
- Jean Tinguely, Fountain Jo Siffert, 1984: fountain moving
- Jean Tinguely, (La) Cascade ou (l') Epilepsie stabilisée, 1991: Mixing something that is industrial with
nature. The button activate the sculpture that can make noise, it is not always pleasant. The relationship with the
public is only to touch the button.

Gianni Colombo (Italian, 1937-1993)

Colombo is one of the most important artist in Italy in experiencing kinetic and a member of the Arte Programmata
movement. Between ’59 and ’60 he founds the “T Group”, linked to the international movement of “Nouvelle
Tendence”. He experiences in different elds of physics which include electrical and magnet devices, industrial neon
lights and laser, all to exalt the aesthetic potential of technological rationalism. In the 1960s he made experimental
lms, kinetics object and environments.
- Gianni Colombo, Pulsating Structure, 1959: This is a surface of polystyrene that pulses in a random way by
pressing a button.
- Gianni Colombo, Fluid Structure, 1960: Wire that moves and goes all around following the properties of the
material.

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- Elastic Space, 1967-68: Colombo ask the public not only to press the button but also to interact with his art. He
occupied whole rooms and asks the public to go through the space because that is what creates the interaction. So
the public becomes part of the artwork because the room in itself it is un nished, there is something missing.
- Ambients and Bariestesia, 1975:.

Op Art (stands for optical)

Op Art is the abbreviation of ‘optical art’ to refer to painting and sculpture that exploits the illusions or optical effects
of perceptual processes. It was used for the rst time by a writer in an unsigned article in Time magazine (23 Oct
1964) and entered common usage to designate, in particular, two-dimensional structures with strong
psychophysiological effects. The exhibition, The Responsive Eye, held in 1965 at MOMA, New York, under the direction
of William C. Seitz, showed side by side two types of visual solicitations already practiced by artists for some time:
perceptual ambiguity created by colored surfaces, then at the fore in the USA, and the coercive suggestion of
movement created by lines and patterns in black and white, used abundantly by European artists engaged in Kinetic
art. Op artists, including among others Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, managed to exploit various phenomena: the
after-image and consecutive movement; line interference; the effect of dazzle; ambiguous gures and reversible
perspective; successive color contrasts and chromatic vibration; and in three-dimensional works different viewpoints
and the superimposition of elements in space. Although Op art must be considered in its entirety as an ephemeral art
trend, it has nevertheless had some permanent effects on the perceptual qualities of the spectator, on the relationship
between artists, architects and town planners and on the systematic application of optical phenomena in
technologically highly-developed art forms.

Victor Vasarely (Hungarian, 1908-1997)

Starting in 1930-40 as a commercial artist, mainly designing posters, Vasarely devoted himself exclusively to painting
from 1944. In 1947 he decided to concentrate on constructive-geometric abstraction: he pioneered Op art in the later
1950s with compositions based on a continual aggressive interaction between different kinds of pattern, and
invented a plastic alphabet of standardized colors, shapes, etc., which could be used in a wide range of permutations
and would lend itself to endless reproduction. He also designed screen-prints and tapestries.
- Victor Vasarely, Tigers, 1938: Optical effect is given by how the artist use the colors, the waving lines and the
movement that goes around the tigers.
- Victor Vasarely, Vega, 1957-59: Abstract, it uses geometrical shapes and outer eye perceive a concave or a
conveys shape.
- Victor Vasarely, Homok, 1969-1973: Gives the idea of depth and third dimension. Very famous also in
fashion.

Bridget Riley (British, born 1931)

After her experiments with pointillism Riley turned to color eld painting (1959–61), but she was more interested in
the optical effects or ‘bleeps’ between the shapes than in the relationship of gure to ground itself. She used simple
shapes, such as squares, triangles and circles, and distorted them in every conceivable way. From 1961 to 1965 Riley
worked in black and white. The sharp contrast means that some pictures of this period make an aggressive and violent
assault on the eye. Riley admitted that she was working off some psychological pressures at the time. After 1964 her
works became more serene. She reintroduced color in modulations of grey tinged with red and blue. The variations of
tone and the undulating shapes gradually gave way to juxtaposed lines of pure color, at rst two colors, then a variety.
In the 1970s Riley adopted color induction; mainly through the use of white she in ltrated one color into another,

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 either to form a third or to diminish the effect of the others and she also reintroduced black, which gave them a
profundity. In the 80’s it was clear that her works are not psychological experiments in color relationships or designs
for sophisticated interior decoration, but penetrating visual presentations about the world and human experience.
- Bridget Riley, Movements In Squares, 1961: Here we have the optical effect that something goes inside but
we have more than one effect. We see that the dimension changes with a mathematical proportion. (Vasarely is
more evident and use different shapes while Riley uses only one shapes so the result is more surprising).
- Bridget Riley, D, 1968: The effect is more complex because she use very much color and gives the impression of
something that moves constantly and never stops.
- Bridget Riley, Elongated Triangles 5 , 1971: Her optical effect can be easily used as pattern, into something
design. She also uses her pattern in fashion.

Op Art in Fashion
The monochrome geometric prints of Op Art perfectly complemented the bold shapes of the mod look that was about
looking forward to the future: sharp, bold, minimalist – modernist. As Op Art and the artists at the movement’s
forefront gained recognition, the youth culture explosion of the sixties was gaining momentum. The mod style, which
was already waning in the U.K., reached the other side of the Atlantic at around the same time as the 1965 exhibition
The Responsive Eye in New York, which showcased the work of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. Suddenly Op Art
patterns started appearing on everything from clothes to advertisements, stationery, furnishing fabrics and that useful
garment peculiar to the 1960s: the paper dress. Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely had polar opposite views on the
commercialization of their work. While Vasarely thought that art should be for everyone and even collaborated with
textile rms, Riley was dismayed at seeing her original work co-opted for commercial use without her permission.
Textile companies Heal’s, Hull Traders and Edinburgh Weavers led the way in developing Op Art prints into furnishing
fabrics; though usually the colors and patterns were more muted than the eye straining patterns used for clothing.
Edinburgh Weavers was the experimental arm of Scottish textile rm Morton Sundour, which commissioned leading
artists, including Victor Vasarely, to create patterns.

Minimalism
Although many works of art can be described as “minimal,” the name Minimalism refers speci cally to a kind of
reductive abstract art that emerged during the early 1960s. At the time, some critics preferred names like “ABC,”
“Boring,” or “Literal” Art, and even “No-Art Nihilism,” which they believed best summed up the literal presentation and
lack of expressive content characterizing this new aesthetic. While scholars have recently argued for a broader
de nition of Minimalism that would include artists in number of disciplines, the term remains closely linked to
sculpture of the period. What most people nd disturbing about Minimalism is its lack of any apparent meaning. Like
Pop Art, which emerged simultaneously, Minimalism presented ordinary subject matter in a literal way that lacked
expressive features or metaphorical content; likewise, the use of commercial processes smacked of mass production
and seemed to reject traditional expectations of skill and originality in art. In these ways, both movements were, in
part, a response to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, which had held that painting conveys profound
subjective meaning. However, whereas Pop artists depicted recognizable images from kitsch sources, the Minimalists
exhibited their plywood boxes, orescent lights and concrete blocks directly on gallery oors, which seemed even
more dif cult to distinguish as “Art.” “What you see is what you see”, that Stella’s comment implied that, not only was
no meaning in the artworks, but that none was necessary to demonstrate the object’s artistic value.

Donald Judd (American, 1928-1994)

Donald Judd was an American artist, whose rejection of both traditional painting and sculpture led him to a
conception of art built upon the idea of the object as it exists in the environment. Judd's works belong to the

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 Minimalist movement, whose goal was to rid art of the Abstract Expressionists' reliance on the self-referential trace of
the painter in order to form pieces that were free from emotion. To accomplish this task, artists such as Judd created
works comprising of single or repeated geometric forms produced from industrialized, machine-made materials that
eschewed the artist’s touch. Judd's geometric and modular creations have often been criticized for a seeming lack of
content; it is this simplicity, however, that calls into question the nature of art and that posits Minimalist sculpture as
an object of contemplation, one whose literal and insistent presence informs the process of beholding. Unlike
traditional sculpture, which was placed upon a plinth, thus setting it apart as a work of art, Judd's works stand directly
on the oor and as a result, force the viewer to confront them according to their own, material existence. Judd often
presented his work in a serialized manner, a strategy that related to the reality of postwar, consumer culture as well as
to the standardization and de-subjectifying nature of identical, multiple forms or systems. The multiple was another
way to reinforce their materiality.
- Donald Judd, Untitled (Stack), 1967: The artist never appears, each box is perfectly the same and they have
the same exact distance from each other. Also there is no title, it is just what we see. Minimalism is focusing on
geometrical shapes and colors. The artist gives direction.
- Donald Judd, Untitled (Six Boxes), 1974: Re ection is important because all the elements are dialoguing
with the environment around and they are hiding their shapes and presence in the room. Cube that do not have an
identity, they just occupies the space and re ect what is around. There is no explanation of drop there. Minimalism
in the presence of the artist not just in shapes and colors.
- Design and interiors: recreated a university in the middle of nowhere to dedicate it into its design

Carl Andre (American, born 1935)

During the 1960s and 1970s, Carl Andre produced a number of sculptures which are now counted among the most
innovative of his generation playing a central role in de ning the nature of Minimalist Art. His most signi cant
contribution was to distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or constructing, and to make works that
simply involved sorting and placing. Before him, few had imagined that sculpture could consist of ordinary, factory-
nished raw materials, arranged into straightforward con gurations and set directly on the ground. He neither carves
into substances, nor models forms. His work involves the positioning of raw materials - such as bricks, blocks, ingots,
or plates. He uses no xatives to hold them in place. Andre has suggested that his procedure for building up a
sculpture from small, regularly-shaped units is based on “the principle of masonry construction" - like stacking up
bricks to build a wall. Andre claims that his sculpture is an exploration of the properties of matter: the characteristics of
every unit of material he selects, and the arrangement and position of the sculpture in its environment, forms the
substance of his art.
- Carl Andre, Uncarved Blocks, 1975: Uses blocks or elements coming directly from nature without being
transformed and plays with the combination. Here minimalism is not the absence of the artist but it’s the simple of
the nature and the mind of the artist because it allows to compose hundreds of installation.

Robert Morris(American, born 1931)

Robert Morris was one of the central gures of Minimalism. Through both his own sculptures of the 1960s and
theoretical writings, Morris set forth a vision of art pared down to simple geometric shapes stripped of metaphorical
associations, and focused on the artwork’s interaction with the viewer. However, in contrast to fellow Minimalists
Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Morris had a strikingly diverse range that extended well beyond the Minimalist ethos.
Through both his artwork and his critical writings, Morris explored new notions of chance, temporality, and
ephemerality. In the mid-1960s, Morris created some of the key exemplars of Minimalist sculpture: enormous,
repeated geometric forms, such as cubes and rectangular beams devoid of guration, surface texture, or expressive
content. These works forced the viewer to consider the arrangement and scale of the forms themselves, and how

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 perception shifted as one moved around them, which was a central preoccupation of Minimalism. In the late 1960s,
Morris began introducing indeterminacy and temporality into the artistic process, referred to as Process art or Anti-
Form. By cutting, dropping, or stacking everyday materials such as felt or rags, Morris emphasized the ephemeral
nature of the artwork, which would ultimately change every time it was installed in a new space.
- Robert Morris, Felt, 1967: He worked with the property of the material, the rough without changing it. He
explores the material to see how it reacts with his touch. He put a nail on the wall and decided to hang the felt
which is cut perfectly. All this comes from a human mind. Here minimalism is to use a material as it is.

Dan Flavin (American, 1933-1996)

Few artists can boast having explored a single medium, and an unusual one at that, as tenaciously and consistently as
Dan Flavin with his signature uorescent light tubes. In using Readymade objects in the style of Dadaist Marcel
Duchamp, he exploited the possibilities of the most banal and in some ways ugly material: harsh uorescent lights -
surely the stuff of futuristic anti-aestheticism. Flavin began incorporating electric lights into his works in the early
1960s with his breakthrough Icons series. Having hit upon his chosen medium, he abandoned painting altogether,
focusing on light works for the remainder of his career, where he produced installations and sculptural pieces made
exclusively of uorescent light xtures and tubes that came in a limited range of colors and sizes. Working with
prefabricated rather than hand-crafted materials allowed Flavin to focus on the light itself and the way in which it
transformed (“sculpted") the exhibition space. A clear progression in scale and ambition marks Flavin's site-speci c
light installations, sculptural and architectural environments commissioned by a wide-range of artistic and religious
institutions for the rest of his career.
- Diagonal of May 25, 1963: Also Fontana used neon. Flavin explore the power of light as it is, how the lights
occupies the space and spread the color in the space. The rst one is very minimal but you see that it enlightens
only the part around the neon. The light is the color applied on the canvas and the neon is the media.
- Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), 1972-73: Here he created a whole room immerse in yellow lights. The
room becomes yellow because of the light. Except for this part of the wall to give the idea of how a light can be
kind of a color so we imagine the room as a canva and the yellow and blu lights as colors applied on the canva.
Form this side of the room we see yellow and from the other we see blu and one stripe yellow.

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 Lesson 10:
Land Art. The Arte Povera. Hyperrealism. Conceptual Art.
The Performance and Body Art.

Land Art
Land art, or Earth art, a term coined by artist Robert Smithson, refers to an art movement in
which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. It is an art form that is created in
nature, using natural materials such as soil, rock (bed rock, boulders, stones), organic media
(logs, branches, leaves), and water with introduced materials such as concrete, metal,
asphalt, or mineral pigments. It is typical of a time when artists rejected the traditional art
object, expanded de nitions of sculpture, and sought to move art outside the conventional
art world structure of galleries and museums. 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 well away from civilization, left to change and erode under natural conditions. Many of the rst 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. They also pioneered a category of art called site-speci c sculpture, designed
for a particular outdoor location. The movement began in October 1968 with the group exhibition Earth Works at the
Dwan Gallery in New York.

Robert Smithson (American, 1938-1973)

A formidable writer and critic as well as an artist, Robert Smithsons’ interests ranged from Catholicism to mineralogy
to science ction. His earliest pieces were paintings and collages, but he soon came to focus on sculpture; he
responded to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the early 1960s and he started to expand his work
out of galleries and into the landscape. Smithson sought to abandon even more aspects of traditional sculpture: he
constructed sculptures from scattered materials, he
found ways to confuse the viewer's understanding of sculpture (often by using mirrors or confusing scales), and his
work
sometimes referred to sites and objects outside of the gallery, leading the viewer to question where the art object
really resided.
Smithson's concepts of Site and Nonsite - the former being a location outside the gallery, the latter being a body of
objects and documentation inside the gallery - helped many to think about the purpose art might have in the
landscape, after the demise of the tradition of commemorative public sculpture. Much of Smithson's output was
shaped by his interest in the concept of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics that predicts the eventual
exhaustion and collapse of any given system. His interest in geology and mineralogy con rmed this law to him, since
in rocks and rubble he saw evidence of how the earth slows and cools.

- Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970: Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty
(1970) is located at Rozel Point peninsula on the northeastern shore of Great Salt Lake. Using over six thousand
tons of black basalt rocks and earth from the site, Smithson formed a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that
winds counterclockwise off the shore into the water. The artist chose to create Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake due in
part to the lake’s unusual physical qualities, including the reddish coloration of the water caused by microbes, as
well as how salt deposits crystallized on the black basalt rocks, formed from molten lava of nearby extinct
volcanoes, that were scattered along the peninsula. Created at a time when water levels were particularly low, the
artwork was submerged from 1972 onward, and was only known through documentation. However, regional

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 droughts thirty years later caused the lake to recede such that by 2002, a salt-encrusted Spiral Jetty reappeared for
the rst prolonged period in its history. Smithson often asserted that by responding to the landscape, rather than
imposing itself upon it, Spiral Jetty is a site to actively walk on rather than a sculpture to behold. Alongside aerial
footage of Spiral Jetty is a poetic sequence of the artist running along the spiral to rest at its innermost coil.

Richard Long (British, born 1945)

Long made his international reputation during the 1970s with sculptures made as the result of epic walks, sometimes
lasting many days, to remote parts of the world. Guided by a great respect for nature and by the formal structure of
basic shapes, especially circles, he never allowed facile exotic connotations to intrude into his work, although some of
his sculptures evoked the mysterious connotations of ancient stone circles and other
such monuments. Different modes of presentation, sometimes combined, were used to bring his experience of nature
back into the museum or gallery. From 1981 he also alluded to the terms of painting by applying mud in a very liquid
state by hand to a wall in similar con gurations, establishing a dialogue between the primal gesture of the hand-print
and the formal elegance of its display. He stressed that the meaning of his work lay in the visibility of his actions
rather than in the representation of a particular landscape. Long broke with traditional sculptural methods both by
conceiving his works outside of the studio, in nature itself, and by rejecting the fetishization of the object through his
use of photography, which was still questioned as an artistic medium, and large installations, which were
dif cult to exploit as commercial commodities. Long distinguished himself from American land artists by the lightness
of his interventions on the ground; he saw this both as an ethical principle, in refusing to despoil or
exploit the landscape, and as an aesthetic one.
- Richard Long, A Line of Sticks in Somerset, 1974:
- Richard Long, Cornish Slate Ellipse, 2009:

Christo (Christo Javacheff, American, born Bulgaria 1935-2020)

Like his contemporaries, Christo rebelled against abstraction, seeing it as too theoretical and proposing in its place a
manifestly physical art composed of real things. He then began by wrapping everyday objects, including tin cans and
bottles, stacks of magazines, furniture, etc. From 1961 he collaborated with his wife, Jeanne-Claude. Industrial
materials held in place with irregularly tied ropes, were used for the wrappings. The use of fabric sometimes involved
wrapping an object, sometimes a bundle; these coverings partly obscured the object’s contours and hampered its
function, thus transforming it into an aesthetic presence. Christo and his wife work on the principle that the alteration
of one element in a context affected all of its parts: with its normal interior function unimpeded, the obscured
structure would become a disquieting presence in its urban setting. Subsequently they directed their energies
primarily to the realization of temporary projects in which they varied the notions of obscuring through wrapping,
blocking and the altering of context by the intrusion of an unexpected element, accompanied by an increasingly large
scale made possible by the use of industrial technique and engineering. With such works Christo and Jeanne-Claude
helped establish the terms of a new art form known as Environmental art.
- Christo, Wrapped Motorcycle, 1962:
- Christo, Wall of Oil Barrels - The Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris, 1961-62:
- Christo, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95:

Arte Povera
The term Arte Povera was rst used by Italian art critic Germano Celant to describe a broad category of art being
produced by an international cross section of artists in the late 1960s through the 1970s and was the most signi cant
and in uential avant-garde movement to emerge in Europe in the 1960s. It grouped the work of around a dozen
Italian artists whose most distinctly recognizable trait was their use of commonplace materials that might evoke a pre-

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 industrial age, such as earth, rocks, clothing, paper and rope. Their work marked a reaction against the modernist
abstract painting that had dominated European art in the 1950s, hence much of the group's work is sculptural. In
addition to opposing the technological design of American Minimalism, artists associated with Arte Povera also
rejected what they perceived as its scienti c rationalism. By contrast, they conjured a world of myth whose mysteries
couldn’t be easily explained. Or they presented absurd, jarring and comical juxtapositions, often of the
new and the old, or the highly processed and the pre-industrial. Believing that modernity threatened to erase our
sense of memory along with all signs of the past, the Arte Povera group sought to contrast the new and the old in
order to complicate our sense of the effects of passing time. Arte Povera's interest in "poor" materials has to be related
to an art that was much more interested in materiality and physicality, and borrowed forms and materials from
everyday life, in addition to their interest in modes such as performance and installation.
Arte Povera – Italian Artists
As well as expressing their interest in social issues, the Italians were preoccupied with creating various forms of
physical interaction between the work of art and its viewer. From the early 1960s Michelangelo Pistoletto had been
making life-size images of people that were attached to mirrored surfaces so that the re ections of the spectator
became part of the work. Other artists pursued more esoteric conceptual interests. Giulio Paolini created replicas of
historic sculptures or paintings, which are given the status of original works of art by the ideas behind them, if not by
their form. The Greek exile Jannis Kounellis was particularly concerned with expressing the disintegration of culture in
the modern world. The Arte Povera artists did not restrict themselves to allusions to Western civilization; from
1968, for example, Mario Merz made igloos, referring to nomadic societies, which he admired particularly for being
exible and well adapted to their environments. Around 1970 Merz also became preoccupied with the Fibonacci
series of numbers, which he presented as the mathematical structure underlying a wide range of natural and
manmade objects. A more active interference with nature and its processes was achieved by Giuseppe Penone and
Giovanni Anselmo. The emphasis on the sculpture’s impermanence shattered conventional notions of how art can
transcend the normal processes of mortality. Anselmo pursued his interest in such phenomena as gravity into the
1980s, often using blocks of granite. In general, his colleagues also showed remarkable consistency in both their
themes and imagery, although from the late 1970s the prevailing trend towards gurative art was re ected in some
of the artists’ work.

Michelangelo Pistoletto (Italian, born 1933)

I believe that Man’s rst real gurative experience is the recognition of his own image in the mirror: the ction which
comes closest to reality. But it is not long before the re ection begins to send back the same unknowns, the same
questions, the same problems, as reality itself: unknowns and questions which Man is driven to re-propose in
the form of pictures.–Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1964 Though they appear to be made from mirrors, Pistoletto’s works
are actually made from highly polished stainless-steel panels, to which he applies painted tissue-paper cutouts (paint
side down) in such a way as to suggest photographic reproduction. He wrote: “I am afraid that it is incorrect to de ne
my works as ‘paintings on mirrors,’ for the mirror is an object. Everything would change in my pictures were
they to be taken off their mirror backgrounds... . The world that surrounds me is really the inner world. Everything is
within me just as everything within the gures I paint is an interior reality.”
Pistoletto’s use of imagery from popular culture likens his works to the paintings of American
artists Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. He compared his work to Warhol’s, suggesting that
whereas Warhol’s use of repetition demysti ed the original photograph, his own pieces
reproduced the photographic material in depth. Pistoletto’s works also embody an element of
performance by placing the viewer within the picture.
- Michelangelo Pistoletto, Three Girls on a balcony, 1962-64:

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 Mario Merz (Italian, 1925-2003)
Made of clay, metal, glass, asphalt, jute or bundles of small branches, Merz’s igloo nds materials and proportions in
organic relation with the places, and becomes double or triple, alternating conditions of opening and closing,
transparency and opacity. A real and symbolic form, the igloo in three-dimensional space represents the dynamism of
the spiral, a sign of the cosmic movement governing the artist’s iconography. In a mathematical context, this
corresponds to the Fibonacci series, the sequence of numbers discovered by abbot Leonardo da Pisa at the start of the
13th century, by which each number corresponds to the sum of the two preceding ones (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,
34...). Merz uses the Fibonacci numbers as a datum describing the laws of nature through the truth of numbers,
recognizing a system in the sequence able to depict the growth of an object in space. With the Fibonacci series, the
artist inserts his own works in the continuous cycle of transformation governing the physical universe, projecting it
towards in nity.
- Mario Merz, Fibonacci Igloo, 1972:

Giuseppe Penone (Italian, born 1947)

Tree of 12 Metres was made by scraping away the wood from a felled tree, which had rst been roughly sawn into a
beam, to reveal its internal structure of narrow core and developing branches. Penone's aim was to return the tree to
the form it had had at an earlier stage of its growth, making visible natural processes which
are normally hidden. He made the rst of his Albero or Tree works in 1969. These early Trees were still partially
attached to the industrially-sawn beams into which they had disappeared and from which they now emerged like
sculptural reliefs. In this semi-emergent state they were supported horizontally or propped diagonally against the wall
in the space in which they were exhibited. With experience, Penone was able to work on increasingly thicker beams
which contained the tree's entire core and to cut all the background support away, freeing the tree's center so that it
could stand vertically on its own.In the early 1980s he began to leave short lengths of the beams untouched to
provide free- standing bases, from which the forms of the younger trees arise. In this version of the Tree of 12
Metres the artist has left top and bottom ends still trapped inside the beam. A cut at the vertical mid-point has
converted it into two pieces, each of which stands on a base formed by the remnant of the beam. The top part of the
tree is thus inverted.
- Giuseppe Penone, Tree of 12 Meters, 1980-82:
- Giuseppe Penone, Tree of 12 Meters, 1980-82:

Giulio Paolini, (Italian, born 1940)

In Mimesis Paolini placed two plaster casts of the same Classical statue opposite each other as if they were in
conversation. This transforms the viewer’s perception of the original sculpture by depicting the gures in silent
dialogue with each other, rather than with the onlooker, and by shattering the concept of a work of art as being a
unique creative act. Mimesis presents the duplicates as if they were ready-mades rather than the products of an
individual artist.
- Giulio Paolini, Mimesis, 1975:

Jannis Kounellis (Greek, born 1936)

In 1973, during an era of protest against hypocritical values and reactionary systems, Kounellis placed a suggestive
“still life” with fragments of a classical statue on display. He sees himself as a rebel – but not as an iconoclast. Quite
the contrary. As critical as he is poetic, he creates real, new images from fragments of cultural history. His appeal to
society is not a break with the past; instead, he points to the deep truths buried in myths – without being
conscious of them, collective progress isn’t conceivable. For him, perceiving history is a key to recognizing the present
and shaping the future. This untitled work, the so-called “Apollo”, is one of Kounellis’ main works – and beyond that,

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 the embodiment of an idea of art that leads to insights. The “image” was originally tied to a performance: the artist sat
behind the fragments of the Greek statue and held the mask of “Apollo’s” head in front of his face while a utist
played a Mozart melody. A short time later, Kounellis gave the work a different touch by coloring the plaster a sun-
hued yellow and, under the in uence of Brecht, having Weill played on a cello. The artist appears here as a creator. He
participates in shaping the world with his creative abilities. In front of him lies – metaphorically – a cultural heritage
that must be revived. At his side is a visionary bird: an attribute of the God of light and prophecy, Apollo.
- Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1973:
- Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1973

Giovanni Anselmo (Italian, born 1934)

Giovanni Anselmo began his career as a founding member of Arte Povera, engaging in research that emphasizes the
potential presence of the invisible within the visible, exposing the close relationship that exists between the nite and
the in nite. Formulating a personal dialectic that often entails the juxtaposition of materials with opposing values,
through his work, Anselmo attempts to reveal the innate energy of materials. Each work stems from the manifestation
in space and time of the suppressed and emergent forces that the elements, arranged by the artist, produce as they
encounter one another. In Senza titolo (Untitled), 1967, a sheet of Plexiglas is slightly bent and held taut by a small,
hooked iron rod. This work exempli es Anselmo’s investigation and the use of simple means to create the conditions
for initiating situations that contain tension. The work is the physical energy that it contains and that exists without the
need for stable connections, in a situation of slight precariousness.
- Giovanni Anselmo, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1967:

Happening and Performance Art

Initiated by the Futurists and Dadaists in the 1910s and 1920s, the term Happening was coined by New
York artist Allan Kaprow in 1959 as a name for the antinarrative theatrical pieces that he and such artists
as Claes Oldenburg staged in studios, galleries, and offbeat locations, usually with direct audience
involvement. These multimedia Performance events radically altered the conventional role of audience
members who were assaulted by an array of auditory, visual, and physical phenomena. Each instance a
Happening occurred the viewer was used to add in an element of chance so, every time a piece was
performed or exhibited it would never be the same as the previous time. Unlike preceding works of art
which were, by de nition, static, Happenings could evolve and provide a unique encounter for each
individual who partook of the experience. There was not a de nite or consistent style for Happenings, as they greatly
varied in size and intricacy. However, all artists staging Happenings operated with the fundamental belief that art
could be brought into the realm of everyday life. Composed out of the absurdities and banalities of everyday life and
ltered through the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, these spectacles incorporated junk
materials, found and manipulated objects, and live or electronic music, sometimes in elaborate
constructed environments intended to break down the boundaries between art and life. They explored
the objecti cation of mundane movements and play-related activities, as well as the depersonalization of
their participants. The concept of the ephemeral was important to Happenings, as the performance was a temporary
experience, and, as such could not be exhibited in a museum in the traditional sense. The only artifacts
remaining from original Happenings are photographs and oral histories. This was a challenge to the art
that had previously been de ned by the art object itself. Art was now de ned by the action, activity,
occasion, and/or experience that constituted the Happening, which was fundamentally eeting and
immaterial.

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 Allan Kaprow (American, 1927-2006)
Allan Kaprow was a pivotal gure in the shifting art world of the 1960s; his Happenings, a form of spontaneous, non-
linear action, revolutionized the practice of performance art. While Kaprow began as a painter, by the mid 1950s his
interest turned to the theoretical, based primarily on the shifting concepts of space as subjectively experienced by
the viewer. Kaprow emerged from the group of artists known as the Rutgers Group, based out of Rutgers University
where Kaprow taught art history and studio art. Kaprow was among the many artists and critics who focused on an
intellectual and theorized view of art, rejecting the monumental nature of Abstract Expressionist works and instead
focusing on the act of their production. In particular, he called for an end to craftsmanship and permanence in art and
instead demanded that artists shift their attention to "non-concrete," or ephemeral, modes of production. “Art” was no
longer an object to be viewed hanging on a wall or set on a pedestal; rather, it could now be anything at all,
including movement, sound, and even scent. Kaprow was very clear that his works were connected with art and not
theater. He believed that formal aesthetics were no longer relevant when the art left the canvas. Kaprow's work was
based on an "aesthetic of regular experience," a transient and momentary experience felt by the viewer being as
signi cant as a painting on canvas.
- Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1961: Kaprow created Yard for Martha Jackson Gallery's backyard, creating an immersive
environment with which the audience interacted. This work contained a high element of play, but within the
boundaries Kaprow had pre xed. The piece illustrates sculpture's expansion in scale and the increasingly blurred
boundaries between a "life like" and an "art like" art. In Kaprow’s determination, there was no distinction between
the viewer and the artwork; the viewer became part of the piece. “Yard consisted of hundreds of used tires covering
the ground in no particular order. Five tarpaper mounds emerged from the tires .... (The tarpaper actually covered
Mrs. Jackson’s sculpture collection, which couldn’t be moved!). Visitors were encouraged to walk on the tires, and
to throw them around as they pleased. Since 1961, the work has been remade seven or eight times in Europe and
America; and on each occasion it was changed, more or less greatly, to t the particular spaces and contexts.”
- Allan Kaprow, Fluids, 1967: Fluids is one of Kaprow's most ambitious works. In it, he recruited groups of local
residents to build huge ice structures in various locations in Pasadena, CA during a mid career retrospective. The
original "score" for the piece was displayed on billboards around the city. The idea of collective action resulting in
the inevitable melting of the ice was a comment on the obsolete nature of human labor - a "dystopian allegory of
capitalist production and consumption,"refuting the permanence of the art object. Documentation of the event
includes photographs, lm, the billboard score, the artist's notes and drawings, letters and press clippings.

John Cage (American, 1912-1992)

Working during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, John Cage honed his skills in the midst of the growing
American avant garde. Neither a painter or a sculptor, Cage is best known for revolutionizing modern music through
his incorporation of unconventional instrumentation and the idea of environmental music dictated by chance. His
approach to composition was deeply in uenced by Asian philosophies, focusing on the harmony that exists in nature,
as well as elements of chance. Cage discovered that chance was as important of a force governing a musical
composition as the artist's will, and allowed it to play a central role in all of his compositions. Although each piece has
a basic, composed structure, the overall effect varied with each performance as different variables like the location and
audience directly affected the sounds that were produced. Cage is famous not only for his radical works, like
4'33" (1952), in which the ambient noise of the recital hall created the music, but also for his innovative
collaborations with artists like Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. These partnerships helped break down
the divisions between the various realms of art production, such as music, performance, painting, and dance, allowing
for new interdisciplinary work to be produced. Cage's in uence ushered in groundbreaking stylistic developments key
to contemporary art and paved the way for the postmodern artistic inquiries, which began in the late 1960s and
further challenged the established de nition of ne art.

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 Merce Cunningham (American, 1919-2009)
Merce Cunningham was a leader of the American avant-garde throughout his seventy year
career and is considered one of the most important choreographers of our time. Through much
of his life, he was also one of the greatest American dancers. With an artistic career
distinguished by constant innovation, Cunningham expanded the frontiers not only of dance,
but also of contemporary visual and performing arts. His collaborations with artistic innovators
from every creative discipline have yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music, and
visual art. “If a dancer dances – which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying
to dance or remembering in his body someone else’s dance – but if the dancer dances, everything is there. . .
Our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of
the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom...” Merce Cunningham (1952) Of all his
collaborations, Cunningham’s work with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992, had
the greatest in uence on his practice. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. The
most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded
may occur in the same time and space, but should be created independently of one another. The two also made
extensive use of chance procedures, abandoning not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional
elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax. For Cunningham the subject of
his dances was always dance itself.

Cunningham and Rauschenberg

Until 1965 Rauschenberg travelled with Merce Cunningham’s company, for which he had designed sets and
costumes from 1954 and acted as lighting director and stage manager from 1961. Rauschenberg staged his own
performances from 1963, with the première of Pelican, which he choreographed and designed, through to 1967.
Nam June Paik (Korean, 1932-2006)
He attended the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt in 1957, when he met Karlheinz
Stockhausen, and in 1958, when he met John Cage. Cage, and through him Marcel Duchamp, had
a signi cant in uence on Paik as he became a major force in the avant-garde through performances. In Hommage à
John Cage (1959), Paik employed audiotape and performance to attack traditional musical instrumentation and
compositional practices, splicing together piano playing, screaming, bits of classical music, and sound effects.
Realizing that taped sound was not enough, he decided to move into performance, rst by introducing performative
actions into his audio works. In 1962 Paik participated in the Fluxus International Festival of the New Music in
Weisbaden. Paik's rst exhibition, entitled Exposition of Music - Electronic Television, in 1963 at Galerie Parnass at
Wuppertal, launched his transition from composer and performance artist to the inventor of a new art form: an
engagement with the material site of television as an instrument. In 1964 Paik traveled to
the US. He quickly settled in New York and became a leading innovator among an emerging generation of artists
seeking new modes of artistic expression and distribution. Paik also developed large altars and architectural-scale
installations of television monitors in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Nam June Paik, TV Cello, 1971: TV Cello is a sculpture designed to think about the possible innovations of TV’s.
It is made to look like a cello made out of TV’s and that he is playing it.
- Nam June Paik, Live Feed, 1972 -1994:
- Nam June Paik, Video Flag, 1985-96:

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 Fluxus
Informal international group of avant-garde artists working in a wide range of media and active from the
early 1960s to the late 1970s. Their activities included public concerts or festivals and the dissemination of
innovatively designed anthologies and publications, including scores for electronic music, theatrical
performances, ephemeral events, gestures and actions constituted from the individual’s everyday
experience. Other types of work included the distribution of object editions, correspondence art and
concrete poetry. According to the directions of the artist, Fluxus works often required the participation of a
spectator in order to be completed (see Performance Art).
The name Fluxus, taken from the Latin for ‘ ow’, was originally conceived by the American writer,
performance artist and composer George Maciunas (1931–78) in 1961 as the title for a projected series of
anthologies pro ling the work of artists engaged in experimental music, concrete poetry, performance
events and ‘anti- lms’. In a manifesto of 1962, Maciunas categorized this diversity under the broad heading
of ‘Neo-Dada’ and stressed the interest shared by all the artists in manifesting time and space as concrete
phenomena. In uences of Fluxus noted by Maciunas included John Cage’s concrete music (1939) and
intermedia event at Black Mountain College, NC (1952), with Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and
others. The typical Fluxconcert consisted of a rapid series of performances of short events of scored actions and
music. These events frequently consisted of physical performances representative of mundane activities, or
music based on non-musical sound sources. They were often humorous and concerned with involving the
audience, speci cally to disrupt the expected conventions of musical and theatrical performance and
spectatorship; their ‘event scores’ were characterized by reduction, repetition, improvisation and chance.

Body Art
Body art covers a wide range of art from about 1960 on, encompassing a variety of
different approaches. It includes much performance art, where the artist is directly
concerned with the body in the form of improvised or choreographed actions, happenings
and staged events. Body art is also used for explorations of the body in a variety of other media including painting,
sculpture, photography, lm and video. Body art is generally concerned with issues of gender and personal identity. A
major theme is the relationship of body and mind, explored in work consisting of feats of physical endurance
designed to test the limits of the body and the ability of the mind to suffer pain. Body art also often highlights the
visceral or abject aspects of the body, focusing on bodily substances or the theme of nourishment. Contrasts such as
those between clothed and nude, internal and external, parts of the body and the whole are also a common theme. In
some work, the body is seen as the vehicle for language.

Gina Pane (French, 1939-1990)

Gina Pane made a deep impression on the art of the 1970s with a series of “actions” carrying a deep symbolic charge.
The emotions and reactions of rejection provoked by the wounds she used to in ict upon herself with a razor blade, in
which the body was offered as a mirror to the “anaesthetised” spectator, and the blood as life-bearing gift have.
Gina Pane has a symbolic vocabulary: the theme of the sacred, for example, is one of the main structures
underpinning her work. The omnipresence of the motif of the cross, the giving of self, the suffering
body of the martyr, form a group of references and signs through a precise language built up over time, the traces of
which can be found in all of the artist’s œuvre.
- Action sentimentale, 1973:
- Gina Pane, Escalade non anesthésiée , 1971:

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 Vito Acconci (American, born 1940)
Acconci initially devoted himself to poetry and writing but began to produce visual work in 1969, most of which
incorporates subversive social comment. From 1970 until 1974 he staged a series of activities and performances and
after 1974 and for the remainder of the 1970s Acconci’s presence was only registered at most through recorded tapes
of his voice. In the 1980s Acconci turned to permanent sculptures and installations and he also produced sculpture
and furniture made from natural and incongruous mass- produced objects.
Acconci’s early performances were extremely controversial, transgressing assumed boundaries between public and
private space, and between audience and performer. Positioning his own body as the simultaneous subject and object
of the work, Acconci’s early video tapes took advantage of the medium’s self-re exive potential in mediating his own
and the viewer’s attention. Consistently exploring the dynamics of intimacy, trust, and power, the focus of Acconci’s
projects gradually moved from his physical body toward the psychology of interpersonal transactions, and
later, to the cultural and political implications of the performative space he set up for the camera.
- Vito Acconci, Self-in icted Incisions, 1972
- Art & Architecture Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, 2003

Marina Abramović (Serbian, born 1946)

Marina Abramović is a performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Her work explores the relationship
between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and thepossibilities of the mind. Abramovic's work is typical
of the ritualistic strain in 1960s performance art. It often involves putting herself in grave danger and performing
lengthy, harmful routines that result in her being cut or burnt, or enduring some privation. She views her art almost as
a sacri cial and religious rite, performed by herself for a congregation of viewers. And the physical ordeals she
endures form the basis for exploring such themes as trust, endurance, cleansing, exhaustion, and departure. Yet far
from conceiving her body as simply a surface, she has said that she thinks of it as the "point of departure for any
spiritual development.” Between 1976 and 1988 she collaborated with the German-born artist known as Ulay. The
performances the pair created during this time often exploited their duality to investigate ideas such as the division
between mind and body, nature and culture, active and passive attitudes, and, of course, between male and female.
- Marina Abramović, Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, 1975
- Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1977
- Marina Abramović, Imponderabilia, 1977
- Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010

Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954)

While still growing up Sherman was drawn to the television environment of the 1960s and fascinated by disguise and
make- up. Her photographs are portraits of herself in various scenarios that parody stereotypes of woman. A panoply
of characters and settings is drawn from sources of popular culture: old movies, television soaps and pulp magazines.
Sherman rapidly rose to celebrity status in the international art world during the early 1980s with the presentation of
a series of untitled ‘ lm stills’ in various group and solo exhibitions across America and Europe. Among 130 ‘ lm stills’
taken between 1978 and 1980 are portraits of Sherman in the role of such screen idols as Sophia Loren and Marilyn
Monroe. While the mood of Sherman’s early works ranges from quiet introspection to provocative sensuality, there are
elements of horror and decay in the series from 1988–9. Studies from the early 1990s make pointed caricatures of
characters depicted through art history, with Sherman appearing as a grotesque creature in period costume. Her
approach forms an ironic message that creation is impossible without the use of prototypes; identity lies in
appearance, not in reality. In this, the artist has assimilated, even while retaining a critical stance, the

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 visual tyranny of television, advertising and magazines.
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled, Film Still #8, 1978
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled #153, 1985
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #216, 1989
- Jean Fouquet, Madonna and child, 1450
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled #463, 2007/2008

Photorealism – Hyper-Realism
The name Photorealism (also known as Hyperrealism or Superrealism) was coined in reference to those artists whose
work depended heavily on photographs, which they often projected onto canvas allowing images to be replicated
with precision and accuracy. The exactness was often aided further by the use of an airbrush, which was originally
designed to retouch photographs. Flourishing during the 1970s, the movement expressed a strong interest in realism
in art, over that of idealism and abstraction. Photorealism complicates the notion of realism by successfully mixing
together that which is real with that which is unreal. While the image on the canvas is recognizable and carefully
delineated to suggest that it is accurate, the artist based their work upon photographs rather than direct observation.
Therefore, their canvases remain distanced from reality factually and metaphorically. Since the advent of photography
artists would never reveal in paint their dependency on photographs as to do so was seen as "cheating". In contrast,
Photorealists acknowledge the modern world's mass production and proliferation of photographs, and they do not
deny their dependence on photographs. In fact, several artists attempt to ape the affects that photography, rather than
the vision of the eye, such as blurriness, multiple-viewpoints, because they favor the aesthetic and look. Photorealists
reintroduced the importance of process and deliberate planning over that of improvisation and automatism, into the
making of art, draftsmanship, and exacting brushwork. In other words, the traditional techniques of academic art are
again of great signi cance, and painstaking craftsmanship is prized after decades of the spontaneous, accidental, and
improvisational.

Duane Hanson (American, 1925-1996)

Duane Hanson was an American artist and sculptor, who worked primarily in a hyperrealistic, Pop- in uenced style.
Best known for his uncanny, life-size depictions of solitary tourists, derelicts, and housewives, his work explores social
issues and the complexities of American identity. Hanson is considered one of the central members of the
international Photorealist movement of the late twentieth century, a loose congregation of artists who
favored naturalistic depiction over the abstract motifs of their contemporaries.
- Duane Hanson, Young Shopper, 1973
- Duane Hanson, Tourists II, 1988

Domenico Gnoli (Italian, 1933-1970)

- Due dormienti, 1966
- Hair Partition, 1968

Conceptual Art
Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works. An amalgam of
various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances,
happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and
writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art. Their chief claim - that the articulation of an artistic idea
suf ces as a work of art - implied that, as Duchamps’ Readymades before them had rattled the very de nition of the
work of art, concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by which art

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 was usually judged. So drastically simpli ed, it might seem to many people that what passes for Conceptual art is not
in fact “art" at all. Conceptual artists reduced the material presence of the work to an absolute minimum for art need
not look like a traditional work of art, or even take any physical form at all. But it is important to understand
Conceptual art in a succession of avant-garde movements (Cubism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, etc.) that
succeeded in self-consciously expanding the boundaries of art. Conceptualists put themselves at the extreme end of
this avant-garde tradition. Conceptual artists successfully rede ne the concept of a work of art to the extent that
their efforts are widely accepted as art by collectors, gallerists, and museum curators. The analysis of art that was
pursued by many Conceptual artists encouraged them to believe that if the artist began the artwork, the museum or
gallery and the audience in some way completed it. Much Conceptual art is self-conscious or self-referential. Like
Duchamp and other modernists, they created art that is about art, and pushed its limits by using minimal materials
and even text.

Joseph Kosuth (American, born 1945)

Joseph Kosuth was one of the originators of Conceptual art in the mid-1960s. He pioneered the use of words in place
of visual imagery of any kind and explored the relationship between ideas and the images and words used to convey
them. His series of One and Three installations (1965), in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object,
and an enlarged photographic copy of the dictionary de nition of it, explored these relationships directly. His
enlarged photostats of dictionary de nitions in his series Art as Idea as Idea (1966-68) eliminated objects and images
completely in order to focus on meaning conveyed purely with language. Kosuth believed that images and any traces
of artistic skill and craft should be eliminated from art so that ideas could be conveyed as directly, immediately, and
purely as possible. There should be no obstacles to conveying ideas, and so images should be eliminated since
he considered them obstacles. Since the 1970s, he has made numerous site-speci c installations that continue to
explore how we experience, comprehend, and respond to language.
- Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965
- Joseph Kosuth, Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass – a Description, 1965
- Joseph Kosuth, Four Colors Four Words, 1966

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007)

Sol LeWitt earned a place in the history of art for his leading role in the Conceptual movement. His belief in the artist
as a generator of ideas was instrumental in the transition from the modern to the postmodern era. Conceptual art,
expounded by LeWitt as an intellectual, pragmatic act, added a new dimension to the artist's role.
LeWitt believed the idea itself could be the work of art, and maintained that, like an architect who creates a blueprint
for a building and then turns the project over to a construction crew, an artist should be able to conceive of a work and
then either delegate its actual production to others or perhaps even never make it at all. LeWitt's work ranged from
sculpture, painting, and drawing to almost exclusively conceptual pieces that existed only as ideas or elements of
the artistic process itself. LeWitt's re ned vocabulary of visual art consisted of lines, basic colors and simpli ed shapes.
He applied them according to formulate of his own invention, which hinted at mathematical equations and
architectural speci cations, but were neither predictable nor necessarily logical. For LeWitt, the directions for
producing a work of art became the work itself; a work was no longer required to have an actual material presence in
order to be considered art. His emphasis is most often on process and materials rather than on imbuing a work with a
speci c message or narrative. Art, for LeWitt, could exist for its own sake. Meaning was not a requirement. LeWitt
appreciated the ephemeral character and impermanence of Conceptual art. In short, he let the traditional materials
speak for themselves, to demonstrate their own vulnerability to decay, destruction, or obsolescence.
- Sol LeWitt, ABCD 9 (Row), 1966
- Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 138, 2009

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- Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 138, 2009
- Tadao Ando, Rokko Housing, Kobe, 1983
- Tadao Ando, Langen Foundation, Neuss – Germany, 2002-2004

Joseph Beuys (German, 1921-1986)

Joseph Beuys came to be loosely associated with that era’s international, proto-Conceptual art movement, Fluxus.
Beuys's diverse body of work ranges from traditional media of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented,
or time-based "action" art, the performance of which suggested how art may exercise a healing effect
(on both the artist and the audience) when it takes up psychological, social, and/or political subjects. Beuys is
especially famous for works incorporating animal fat and felt, two common materials - one organic, the other
fabricated, or industrial - that had profound personal meaning to the artist. They were also recurring motifs in works
suggesting that art, common materials, and one's "everyday life" were ultimately inseparable. From roughly the
1950s through the early 1980s, Beuys demonstrated how art might originate in personal
experience yet also address universal artistic, political, and/or social ideas. According to Beuys, “everyone is an artist”,
in fact each human being has a creative potential in Beuys’ eyes. This potential is to be realized in communion with
others. So the particular activities of individuals do matter but gain full meaning only if they lead to building
a new society based on solidarity, creativity and freedom. In this regard, Beuys's work signals a new era in which art
has increasingly become engaged with social commentary and political activism.
- Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair, 1964-1985
- Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969
- Joseph Beuys, I like America and America likes me, 1974
- Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks: City Forestation Instead of City Administration, 1982-1987
- Peter Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, 2007: Zumthor had remarked: “I think materials somehow stand
above form. Artists such as Beuys have used materials in a more essential, basic way than many contemporary
architects. There is an unwritten code which de nes the meanings of materials in particular contexts and in my
buildings I like to work with that (...) To me, there is something revealing about the work of Joseph Beuys and
some of the artists of the Arte Povera group. What impresses me is the precise and sensuous way they use
materials. It seems anchored in an ancient, elemental knowledge about man’s use of materials, and at the same
time t o expose the very essence of these materials, which is beyond all culturally conveyed meaning.”
- Peter Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, 2007

Emilio Isgrò (Italian, born 1937)

Isgrò, a “critical” exponent of the Visual Poetry movement, based his focal word-image interpretation on the principle
of “erasing”, the apparent denial of the written text, with which he generates active compositions on a visual and
meaning level, beyond what is instantly visible. As the artist has claimed on several occasions, “erasure” is
not a method of destruction or removal, but can instead be a moment of revelation, to highlight what is concealed.
The text is hidden, but it is there, albeit illegible. The author stated at the end of the 1960s: “The erasing
certainly serves to create an absence and to start the viewer’s brain working, always wanting to know ‘what lies
beneath’. But at the same time (and this function is much more important) it is a speci c, unequivocal linguistic sign.
Not so much a gap to be lled, therefore, as a presence, a compact solid, that stimulates and at the same time refuses
any projection by the viewer…”
- Emilio Isgrò, Freedom

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 LESSON 11: New-Expressionism, Transvanguardia, Graf ti Art, The
Young British Artists, and big independent artists
New-Expressionism, Transavanguardia, Graf ti Art, The Young British Artists, and big
independent artists

Neo-Expressionism
The return to Expressionism was inaugurated by Georg Baselitz, who led a revival that dominated German
art in the 1970s. By the 1980s, this resurgence had become part of an international return to the
sensuousness of painting - and away from the stylistically cool, distant sparseness of Minimalism and
Conceptualism. Very different artists, especially in the United States, turned in expressive directions to
create work that af rmed the redemptive power of art in general and painting in particular, drawing upon a
variety of themes including the mythological, the cultural, the historical, the nationalist, and the erotic.
Neo-Expressionism accepted and rejuvenated historical and mythological imagery -- as opposed to the
modernists' tendency to reject storytelling . The artists depicted their subjects in an almost raw and brutish
manner, newly resurrecting in their frequently large-scale works, the highly textural and expressive
brushwork and intense colors that had been rejected by the immediately preceding art movements.
Because the work of the Neo-Expressionist artists was so closely linked to buying, selling, and the
commercial system of art with its galleries, critics, and media hype, some in the eld began to question its
authenticity as art that was as purely motivated. Thus its popularity was also the seed of its demise.
- Means artist express his feelings to a new way, new approach. They uses different kind of materials not only
paintings. MAINLY IN GERMANY.

Georg Baselitz (German, born 1938)

Georg Baselitz was enormously in uential in showing a generation of German artists how they might come to terms
with issues of art and national identity in the wake of the Second World War. He revived the German Expressionism
that had been denounced by the Nazis, and returned the human gure to a central position in painting af rming his
belief in romantic traditions that earlier Expressionists had adopted in protest against aspects of modern life.
Although the gure has often been central in Baselitz's painting, his approach to it suggests a deep unease about the
possibility of celebrating humanity in the wake of the
Holocaust and WWII. Among his early series are images of Heroes, and Partisans, and yet these warriors seem
awkward giants, clad in tattered rags. His later strategy of depicting gures upside-down, who have been traditionally
seen as outcasts from society, might be read as another recognition of the same dif culty. His handling sometimes
suggests awkward scratches and smears, an effect which compounds the anguish of the gures he depicts. Subjects
belong to his life, are people he loves or places he visited.
- Georg Baselitz, Elke, 1965: upside down, kind of gurative (recognisable), they don’t have a place where we
are able to understand the story. The whole canva is full of strong colours. Strong colours and thick colours because
of expressionism. Like Decuni uses the brushes with strength and thickness. Upside down to create disorientation
in the viewer, a girl crying, named Elke. Huge canva, not realistic transformed the subject in something that is not
real, like a nightmare or dream.
- Georg Baselitz, The Wood On Its Head, 1969: applied the same thing as upside down. You see an abstract
thing everything is changed as a new world, to experience a dream an interpretation to his world. Not exactly what

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 we see but how we feel it. He tries to see what it is behind the reality, the subject, something that can be
underneath the reality.

Julian Schnabel (American, born 1951) schnabel

Julian Schnabel began his artistic career in the late 1970s and was part of a contingent of 1980s artists who
endeavoured to restore painting to its pre-abstraction status. Their style permitted expressivity, even exuberance, and
balanced technical concerns with emotional resonance. As a Neo-Expressionist, Schnabel reintroduced human
sentiment to painting and eschewed atness, heaping materials onto unconventional supports such as black velvet,
weathered tarpaulins, and cardboard. In addition to painting, Schnabel's
expansive creative impulse led him to branch out into music, photography, and lm. His works, heavily laden not only
with emotion - often there is an edge of brutal expressivity - but also quite literally with highly unconventional
materials, are his manifestoes. Constructed on irregular supports like black velvet and aged
tarpaulins, the lavish chaos of Schnabel's collage-like paintings is in itself a rejection of Minimalist asceticism, a true
turning point for painting. It’s not clear what he wanted to communicate cause his world is really complicated. Mixes
traditional painting with untraditional paintings. He tries to make a connection because in his view, the 2nd ww made
a broke the Germany.
- Julian Schnabel, The Student of Prague, 1983: present element= traditional element: 3 parts of it, really
big. We don’t see the ground, the trees are cutted, it’s a piece of what he wanted to represent. He wants to give the
idea of human presence in nature. Famous for long winters, snow.
- Julian Schnabel, Fakires, 1993: he gives some clues and few elements like letters, the gesture of painting, real
element some collage, some unusual materials, emptiness around and title gives some clues, suggest a subject or
a story, he doesn’t want to interfere the experience we have towards this painting.

ANSELM KIEFER
Anselm Kiefer's monumental, often confrontational canvases were groundbreaking and most known for his subject
matter dealing with German history and myth, particularly as it relates to the Holocaust. These works forced his
contemporaries to deal with Germany's past in an era when acknowledgment of Nazism was taboo. Kiefer
incorporates heavy impasto and uncommon materials into his pieces for their symbolic potency, such as lead, glass
shards, dried owers, strands of hay, straw, earth, and tree roots reference both time and patterns of life,
death, and decay. He is a history painter in the traditional sense and his repertoire of imagery is wide ranging,
incorporating representational and symbolic motifs, including sigils, occult icons, architectural interiors, and
landscape elements to provoke an emotional and psychological effect on the viewer. Derived from his interest in
mythology, history, and knowledge, Kiefer often uses books as subject matter representing knowledge and
civilisation. Similarly, he frequently incorporates text into his paintings, including excerpts from poems, novels, and
nationalist slogans as well as names of seminal gures, written in a scrawling script.
- Anselm Kiefer, Deutschlands Geisteshelden (German Spiritual Heroes), 1973: he give the
reconstruction of what was a church in the middle age. Made of wood, res, and for each columns and re (that
represents life), there are important gures that made the history of Germany. Central prospective, more drama,
this keeps us inside the church. Immediately inside the space. Celebration of the most important people of history
of Germany.
- Anselm Kiefer, Bohemia Lies by the Sea, 1996: land scape, central point of view exactly in the middle, the
artist guides us inside the canva. Very big canva to allow the public to feel surrounded by the landscape. The
technique is interesting cause ancient technique very similar to Affresco, very rough and full of materials and
colours. This path doesn’t end, we have the idea of this way, never ends.

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 - Anselm Kiefer, The Seven Heavenly Palaces, 2004: 7 towers, each of them has a whole meaning and story
related to religious books. They don’t stick to a single technique but they do research, this is an installation mixed
with a sculpture. Idea of travel because of the containers that make the towers. The site-speci c installation,
created for HangarBicocca in 2004, is one of the most important works by the German artist Anselm
Kiefer.Expressly for this space Kiefer has designed seven monumental towers that symbolise the mystical
experience of the ascent through the seven levels of spirituality. The towers, which consist of a “strati cation” of
structural elements made of reinforced concrete and lead, adopt the “universal section” of the container for the
shipping of goods as a modular “measure”, a recurrent feature in the artist’s most recent output and symbol of the
globalisation of the urban landscape. Kiefer has experimented with the use of this “material of our time” to create
his own aesthetic utopia at his workshop in Barjac, France, where he has been living since 1993. The towers (which
have been given the titles Falling Stars, Deposit of Stars/Sternenlager, Die Se roth, Tzim-Tzum, Shevirat Ha-Kelim,
Tiqqun and The Seven Heavenly Palaces) represent the metaphysical principles corresponding to the various levels
of human participation in the divine. They are also associated with the emotional situations that characterise the
daily life of every individual and that can lend it order and meaning.

Transavanguardia
The Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva used the term "Transavanguardia" (beyond the avant-garde) in Flash Art
magazine in October 1979, when referring to international Neo- Expressionism. But since then it has been used only
to describe the work of Italian artists working in the style during the 1980s and 1990s. They include Sandro Chia
(born 1946), Francesco Clemente (born 1952), Enzo Cucchi (born 1949), and Mimmo Paladino (born, 1948).
Transavantgarde artists employed a free, gurative style of painting, with nostalgic references to the Renaissance and
its iconography. They painted large-scale works in oil, including realistic and imaginary portraits, religious and
allegorical history paintings, and were inspired also by the Symbolists as well as the colorism of the Fauvists. Chia
incorporated Italian Mannerism, Cubism, Futurism and Fauvism in his narrative religious works; Paladino
composed large mythological pictures with both geometric and gurative motifs; Cucchi produced romantic
Surrealism-inspired scenes of giants and mountains, and incorporated the use of extra items, made from metal or
clay, in his painted works; Clemente was noted for his self-portraiture and intimate gurative works. Aim to go back to
traditional Italy.
- Francesco Clemente, Name, 1983: studies a lot of time and changes kind of research. The portrait repeats
several times, and then we have another gure coming from the mouth and eyes, trying to go deep through the
repetition of the singular person.
- Mimmo Paladino, San Francesco, 1993: recalls the simplicity if primitive drawing, very outlined and simple in
the volumes, colours are at and basic.
- Enzo Cucchi, Terra d’Uomo, 1980: magic atmosphere, simple and basic. Idea of surrealism. Dog size is not real.
Black hole could be a cloud, just a presence that makes the canva mysterious. Trees similar to Carra, taking back the
idea of Giotto, where nature is very basic and geometric. Idea of being very essential is connecting to very old and
traditional Italian art.
- Sandro Chia, Water Bearer, 1981: full of colours but the gure recalls the Roman bases, opposition between
human and animal force, very traditional theme.

Graf ti Art
Graf ti is a style of painting associated with hip-hop, a cultural movement which sprang up in various
American cities, especially on New York subway trains, during the 1970s and 1980s. B-boys, the rst
generation of hip-hop voiced the frustrations of urban minorities in their attempt to create their own form
of art, a non-commercial one that did not seek to please the general public. They employed stencils, marker

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 pens, and aerosol spray cans, and wrote with industrial spray paint and acrylic on all types of support:
stone, plaster, metal, wood, and plastic. Their "canvases" were subway trains, walls in urban areas and
industrial wastelands, subways, roofs and billboards. During the 1970s, Graf ti Art spread to Europe and
Japan and eventually crossed over from the street into the gallery. The heart of the movement however,
was New York City.
From 1971, artists in New York began adopting signature calligraphic styles to distinguish their work, and
also began breaking into subway train depots in order to apply their tag on the sides of trains - a process
called "bombing" - with maximum effect. The train thus became their "gallery" as it showed their work off
across the city. The size and scale of tags also increased leading in 1972 to "Top-to-bottoms" - works
spanning the entire height of a subway car - as well as scenery and cartoon characters. Gradually the
mainstream art world started to take notice.
The United Graf ti Artists (UGA), a group founded in 1972 by Hugo Martinez, expanded its membership to
include many of the leading graf ti artists, with a view to showing works in of cial venues. By the mid-1970s
most of the creative standards in graf ti writing had already been established, and so the NYC Metro Transit
Authority began a twofold campaign to secure depots and erase graf ti on a continuing basis. As a result,
taggers forsook the subway and took to the streets, where their static art necessarily received far less
exposure. During the late 1980s and 1990s, more graf ti artists began showing their works in galleries and
renting art studios.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988)

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the "Punk" scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graf ti artist who
successfully crossed over from his "downtown" origins to the international art gallery circuit. In a few fast-paced years,
Basquiat swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American
"naif" painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement. Despite his work's "unstudied"
appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions,
practices, and styles (from Greek, Roman, and African art to jazz, pop culture, and his artistic contemporaries such as
Andy Warhol) to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, in part, from his urban origins, and in another a
more distant, African-Caribbean heritage. Basquiat's work is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could
reintroduce the human gure in their work after the wide success of Minimalism and Conceptualism. First way to
communicate to the public. He became a superstar because they asked him to transfer his art to the galleries. Goes
deep to the related disciplines of medicine, philosophy and Italian art
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Notary, 1983: Pluto is a Greek philosopher, study of anatomy we have lungs and a
spine + texts. It’s his way to express his tone. His art can seem confused and chaotic that’s exactly the mirror of
himself.
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (head), 1981: self portrait full of colours and drama, and the signs and lines
that are creating the pro le of this skull are very dark and precise. Half way between an head and a skull.
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flexible, 1984: art in this case is more interesting way. Intimate interpretation of his
personality and life.
- Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Zenith 1⁄2), 1984: class friends, he asked him to
collaborate very much. We recognise the touch of the two: B. Where the paint is visible, the heads and gurine
here, the green signs and then A. Numbers, ecc. They are independent.

Keith Haring (American, 1958-1990)

One of the key gures in New York's East Village art scene in the 1970s and 1980s, Keith Haring found fame through
his work on the city's subways, streets, and sidewalks before his paintings and drawings began appearing in art

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 galleries. He developed a unique and distinctly personal vocabulary of bold, graphic icons—hearts, ying saucers,
winged gures, and a crawling "radiant baby"—which he combined with abstract marks and patterns in densely
packed, allover compositions. Haring used the popularity of his work, which was immediately recognizable and widely
appealing, as a powerful platform for social activism bene tting causes including AIDS awareness, anti-drug
campaigns, and community outreach. Though Haring's career was cut short by his death at the age of 31, his work
continues to have an enduring impact. Always looking for a way to bridge the gap between the art
world and the real world, Haring once said, "My work in the subway was available to everyone and everyone was
equal in ownership of it. It is almost a responsibility to continue that stance and make my work available to all kinds of
people.” The one among the graf ti artists that stays more closer to the public, even when he became famous, he went
to the subways to paint even being very famous. The fact that he searched for the connection to the public, he needs to
communicate good vibes and good values. Very basic and cartoonish style, simple and captivating.
- Keith Haring, Untitled, 1982: we see a television, a snake, pipes, a man holding a cross ecc. He had an
alphabet of gures, that we are able to capture in a inistinctive way.
- Keith Haring, Retrospect, 1989: we don’t understand the exact meaning but we can perceive it because of the
colours, the poses, and the gures.
- Keith Haring, Capoeira Dancers, 1987: he create a foundation with the aim of making artworks affordable for
everyone. To reach the majority if people, also for any kind of person who wanted to have a piece of his art. He
wanted to be spread everywhere in the world. He made also sculptures

Banksy (British, ?)
The English artist known as Banksy has become famous for his graf ti art, which has appeared throughout London and
other locations, from Los Angeles to Melbourne. Arguably the perfect example of postmodernist art, Banksy's satirical
stencilled images are a mixture of pure vandalism, narcissistic posturing, irreverent humour, vivid imagery if rather
mediocre painting, and left-wing politics. One of the most controversial of 20th century painters, his identity remains
as yet unknown, although media speculation suggests his name is Robert or Robin Banks, or Robin Gunningham. In
addition to his mural painting, which he also promotes through a variety of stunts (or happenings), Banksy has been
involved in lmmaking and writing. His work typically combines humorous, striking imagery with some sort of anti-
establishment message or slogan. Although, or perhaps because, his avant garde art sells for six- gure sums at
Sotheby's and other auction houses, he has become a highly contentious gure within the world of popular culture. Is
he following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp and Dada, or is he simply an opportunist trying to make a buck out
of his stencil painting?
- 1: string place Berlin Wall, able to suggest that behind the wall there’s a paradise, which is shown by a police man
that keeps order and doesn’t allow people to go behind the wall. Message very strong and bansky became famous
for its strong messages.
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Young British Artists

The Young British Artists (YBAs) rst appeared on the scene in the 1980s, and were of cially
recognized in 1997 in the "Sensation" exhibition. Owing much to early 20th century styles like
Dada and Surrealism, their work is often called "Britart." The group comprised a number of
painters, sculptors, conceptual and installation artists working in the United Kingdom, many of
whom attended Goldsmiths College in London, its members gained considerable media
coverage for their shocking artworks and dominated British art during the 1990s. Leading

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 members are Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
Arguably, many YBAs would never have succeeded but for the patronage and promotion of
their works by millionaire contemporary art collector Charles Saatchi who, by 1992, was not
only Hirst's principal patron, but also the biggest sponsor for the other Young British Artists. In
response to the collapse of the contemporary art market in London, Saatchi hosted a series of
exhibitions at his Saatchi Gallery, promoting the name "Young British Art" from which the
movement retrospectively acquired its identity.
In 1997, Young British Artists went mainstream when the London Royal Academy, in conjunction
with Saatchi, hosted "Sensation", a de nitive exhibition of YBA art, amid no little controversy. It
then travelled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. In 1999, Tracey Emin's work "My
Bed" was nominated for the Turner Prize, while in 2000, YBA exhibits were included in the new
Tate Modern, all of which con rmed the established reputation of the group.

Damien Hirst (British, born 1965)

Damien Hirst was a leading gure in the group of ‘Young British Artists'. His works are explicitly concerned with the
fundamental dilemmas of human existence; his constant themes have included the fragility of life, society's
reluctance to confront death, and the nature of love and desire, often clothed in titles which exist somewhere between
the naive and the disingenuous. Dead animals are frequently used in Hirst's installations, forcing viewers to consider
their own and society's attitudes to death. Containers such as aquariums and vitrines are used as
devices to impose control on the fragile subject-matter contained within them and as barriers between the viewer and
the viewed. The animals are preserved as in life, but at the same time are emphatically dead, with their entrails and
esh exposed. Hirst's paintings can be seen as a foil to his sculptural work, though they are similarly inconclusive. The
‘spot' paintings are named after pharmaceutical stimulants and narcotics, the chemical enhancers of human emotion,
and yet take the form of mechanical and unemotional Minimalist paintings. Their detachment is further emphasized
by the exploitation of procedures that can be simply carried out by assistants under his instruction. Hirst's interest in
contemporary society is further re ected in collaborative pop music projects and in his designs for the Pharmacy and
Quo Vadis restaurants, London.
- The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991: means that us that we are
living, cannot imagine of what death is.
- Damien Hirst, Chloropamide (pfs), 1996
- Damien Hirst, Lullaby, the Seasons, 2002 (detail): pills, colours are captivating, mirror behind the artwork to
duplicate all the pills.
- Damien Hirst, Love Of God, 2007: real human skull, covered by real diamonds,

Tracey Emin (British, born 1963)

A consummate storyteller, Tracey Emin engages the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Well-
known for her confessional art, Tracey Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her
expressions of universal emotions. Her ability to integrate her work and personal life enables Emin to establish an
intimacy with the viewer. Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts,
stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin
shares her most personal space, revealing she is as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.
- My Bed, 1998: feeling: disgusted vision, it means that touched a cord to your brain.

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 Chris O li (British, born 1968)
O li has built an international reputation with his works that bridge the sacred and the profane, popular culture and
beliefs. His exuberant paintings are renowned for their rich layering and inventive use of media, including balls of
elephant dung that punctuate the canvas and support them at their base, as well as glitter, resin, map pins and
magazine cut-outs. O li's early works draw on a wide range of in uences, from Zimbabwean cave painting to
blaxploitation movies, fusing comic book heroes and icons of funk and hip-hop. While adopting a simpli ed colour
palette and pared-down forms, his recent works continue to draw on diverse sources of inspiration, and are full of
references to sensual and Biblical themes as well as explore Trinidad’s landscape and mythology. A scintillating
cornucopia of jewel-like dots and glitter, interlaced by collaged faces with cloud-like afros and mounds of signature
elephant dung, Chris O li’s Afrodizzia is the ultimate manifestation of the artist’s epoch-de ning dialogue between
black identity, stereotype and popular culture. At once a glorious psychedelic celebration of ethnicity and exploration
of race, this sensational standing canvas plays literally upon the notion of Afrocentricity which proliferated following
the international Civil Rights movement during the 1960s and 1970s. O li has collaged a symphony of individual
faces that punctuate a confetti of intricate patter-nation. Perfectly silhouetting and sitting atop each head like a halo,
O li has adorned his pantheon of black faces with hand-painted Afros. Notable gures and celebrities of recent
decades are here recognisable; from Louis Armstrong and James Brown to Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur; Martin
Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela to Spike Lee and Will Smith, O li has culled their likenesses from magazines to
create a palimpsest that melds sports heroes with icons of funk and hip-hop culture. Interwoven within decadent
layers of resin, glitter and map pins, O li's resplendent surface is at once reminiscent of African fabrics whilst also
re ecting the cultural climate of 1960s psychedelics, 1970s disco culture and the in uence of 1970s Blaxploitation
movies.
- Afrodizzia, 1996: elephant shit, typical animal in Africa, very bright colours and strong colours, celebration of
African culture.

Louise Bourgeois (French, 1911-2010)

In 1938, after marrying Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, critic and curator, she went to New York and
during World War II she worked with Joan Miró, André Masson and other European
expatriates. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists—and, like them, drew from the unconscious
—she never became an abstract artist. Instead, she created symbolic objects and drawings expressing themes of
loneliness and con ict, frustration and vulnerability. Bourgeois's artwork is renowned for its highly
personal thematic content involving the unconscious, sexual desire, and the body. She transformed her experiences
into a highly personal visual language through the use of mythological and archetypal imagery, adopting objects
such as spirals, spiders, cages, medical tools, and sewn appendages to symbolize the feminine psyche, beauty, and
psychological pain. Through the use of abstract form and a wide variety of media, Bourgeois dealt with notions of
universal balance, playfully juxtaposing materials conventionally considered male or female. She would, for example,
use rough or hard materials most strongly associated with masculinity to sculpt soft biomorphic forms suggestive of
femininity.
- Louise Bourgeois, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1947-49: table of the kitchen where she stayed when her
parents argued. She was often down on the ground and under the table offer the idea of the multiplication of the
legs of the table, which create a cage where she can be defended but also trapped. Aware of taptile sensations
materials
- Louise Bourgeois, Personnages, 1940-50 ca.: following the personality of the people she represents.
- Louise Bourgeois, Forêt (Night Garden), 1953: sensation the she has in a wood is something that is very
deep, dark and scary, different dimensions give dimension to the sculpture you can go through it but it’s really
dif cult. Not positive feeling.

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 - Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father, 1974: she never forgave her mother to accept the adultery
of his father, cause for Louise her mother was weak and his father was the bad guy. The father is killed or tortured:
sacri ced of the father, elements feminine, the women in general have round and soft shapes. Then there are piece
of the body of the father to be scari ed. Atmosphere of a secret ritual.
- Louise Bourgeois, Fillette, 1968: half way of a penis and a little girl. Where we have a head and the breasts.
But we immediately perceive is a Penis, hunged because she wants the public to perceive the pain.
- Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999: if you go under the spider, you’ll be defended. She defend the eggs and the
children. Even if she was suffering she tried to protect her children.

Jeff Koons (American, born 1955)

American artist. He trained at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (BA 1976), and worked as a Wall Street
commodities broker before embarking upon his career as an artist. In the 1980s he won international recognition as a
radical exponent of Neo-Geo, an American movement concerned with appropriation and parody. Following the
example of Pop artists of the 1960s, Koons used his work to re ect the commercial systems of the modern world. He
also referred back to the Duchampian tradition, appropriating an art status to selected products. His immaculate
replicas of domestic products, advertisements, kitsch toys and models exercised an enthusiastic endorsement of
unlimited consumption, unlike the veiled criticism of some work of the rst generation of Pop artists.
Koons perceived Western civilisation as a driven society, attered by narcissistic images and with a voracious appetite
for glamorous commodities. In his expressions of the ecstatic and the banal he did not hesitate to breach the
borderlines of taste as in explicit sexual photographs and models of himself with his wife, the pornostar Ilona Staller
(‘Cicciolina’).
- Jeff Koons, New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker, 1981: celebrate the objects everyday objects, the
repetition doesn’t minimise the object but celebrate them.
- Jeff Koons, Pink Panther (Banality series), 1988: panther everyday image. Beautiful woman with big
breasts and blonde. She holds a puppete in the shape of the pink panther that is something really innocent, but
the banality disappears when you notice the hand of the panther.
- Jeff Koons, Ilona on Top - Rosa Background, (Made in Heaven series), 1990: ironic point of view,
celebration fo the couple life. Porno culture exaggerated.
- Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Magenta), (Celebration series), 1994-2000: another way to celebrate the
meaningless and the banality of everyday life. Something that is very common, in kids birthday parties. Sparkly
captivating and strong colour, but actually hypnotised by it.

Takashi Murakami (Japanese, born 1962)

Murakami began to gain recognition as a sculptor in the early 1990s. Drawing on Minimalism and conceptual art, his
work often explored the clash between contemporary Japanese and American culture with an aggressive, sardonic
character of his work, as well as the in uence of commercial display. In the late 1990s Murakami gained more
recognition as a painter, and began to blend abstraction and cartoon imagery in highly coloured images painted in
at space. Some works are abstract, others depict monstrous spiralling totems with bulbous heads, often spouting
colourful uids. This style has also been expanded into other media: the Polyrhythm series of the late 1990s consists
of erotic, even scatological, breglass sculptures of cartoon characters. Some of the abstract painted imagery has also
appeared on a series of balloons and Murakami’s interest in consumerism has led him to produce a range of small
multiples that are versions of the larger originals.
- Takashi Murakami, And Then And Then And Then And Then, 1996: manga culture. Idea of creating a
personage with big eyes, captivating smile, half way between a human form and non real person.
- Takashi Murakami, Hiropan and My Lonesome Cowboy, 1998

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 - Takashi Murakami, Tan tan bo, 2001: full of bad side, if we have a nice kind of mouse, we also have a dark
smile, not smile, not invitations. Small creatures all around, even aggressive, and the whole world is like
transforming from good in bad.
- Takashi Murakami, Flowers from the village of Ponkotan, 2011:
- Murakami for Vuitton: transforming art to adapt to fashion.

William Kentridge (South African, born 1955)

The son of one of South Africa’s most prominent anti-apartheid lawyers, Kentridge rst studied politics and African
Studies before studying Fine Art. Throughout this time he was heavily involved in theatre, designing and acting in a
number of productions. His interest in theatre continued throughout his career and clearly informs the dramatic and
narrative character of his art as well as his interests in linking drawing and lm. His work as a draughtsman has been
expressionistic and dominated by pastel and charcoal, and generally the drawings are conceived as the basis of
animated lms. From 1989 to 1996 Kentridge made an important cycle of lms that allegorise South Africa’s political
upheavals through the lives of three characters: a greedy property developer, his neglected wife and her poet lover.
Kentridge has always had an ambivalent relationship to the in uence of European art and culture, focused by his own
German, Jewish and Lithuanian roots. The in uence of satirists such as Daumier, Goya and Hogarth is clear, and he
also often used European classical themes as frameworks for contemporary African subjects. Kentridge’s fusion of
Expressionism, art and theatre nds its context in the interests of South Africa’s Resistance Art movement of the
1980s, and his work was largely unknown outside the country until he established an
international reputation in the early 1990s.
- Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, 1989. Production still
- Drawing for 'Other Faces', (Protestors - close up), 2011

Olafur Eliasson (Danish, born 1967)

Olafur Eliasson injects his work with a universal conscience that catapults art outside of its normal con nes and
challenges the way we inhabit the world. With each endeavor , he asks people to fully embody their human
experience by expanding their feelings of self into a connection with the broader public sphere. His art is derived
through a sincere practice in which he collaborates with experts in various elds to create diverse pieces intended to
propose critical interventions within existing social systems, an effort that is designed to inspire debate and fresh
perceptions, or to catalyse change. Eliasson has become a progressive leader in the kind of creative thinking that
provokes the way people perceive culture, community, and the natural environment around them. Eliasson strives to
jostle the status quo by creating work that compels uncertainty, transforming the role of art beyond its simple
aesthetic or experiential value and into a powerful tool for battling complacency. The artist's presentation of our
communal experience of space, ambiguous materialization, and its constant state of ux is often derived from the
juxtaposition of manmade and ephemeral elements. His interactions with natural phenomena such as light, water,
air, and the environment have vastly dissolved the boundaries of what is considered traditional artistic medium.
- Olafur Eliasson, Ventilator, 1997: works with air, we don’t see it but it’s around us and for perceive it we have
to use a natural element.
- Olafur Eliasson, Weather Project, 2003: reproduce a sunset huge room, since we live because of the sun,
- Olafur Eliasson, Your rainbow panorama, 2011: the whole surrounding changes depending on the inputs
that we have or the perception. Because changes following some inputs or different relation with the environment.

Maurizio Cattelan (Italian, born 1960)

Cattelan, who has no formal training and considers himself an “art worker” rather than an artist, has often been
characterised as the court jester of the art world. This label speaks not only to his taste for irreverence and the absurd,

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 but also his profound interrogation of socially ingrained norms and hierarchies, subjects historically only available to
the court fool. Best known for his facetious art productions, which are as surprising as they are unsettling, Cattelan is
the ultimate sideliner artist, poking holes in art, art history, monumentality, and nationalism. He seems to mock the
forced optimism of the art world and the authoritative status of the museum. Cattelan began his career designing
furniture but turned to sculpture and conceptual art in the early 1990s and quickly garnered a reputation for a
sense of humour and a penchant for blurring the distinction between art and reality. He described himself as a “lazy”
artist and told The Guardian newspaper that “I don’t do anything.”
- Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 1993: Fontana inspired. Drama. Makes fun of all this drama of the canva by
making a Z for zorro. Making fun of Fontana and art world.
- Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001: small size of hitler, positioned in knees like he’s being punished by a teacher.
Size of a little boy, asking for forgiving and mercy make him not valuable.
- Maurizio Cattelan, The Wrong Gallery, 2002: he creates this door, just a door on a street and the wrong
gallery because it’s not a gallery. Makes fun of the art industry.

Peter Fischli (Swiss, born 1952) and David Weiss (Swiss, 1946-2012)
From 1979 to 2012, Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss collaborated on a body of work that offers a deceptively casual
meditation on how we perceive everyday life. Through a witty “misuse” of cultural genres—from low-budget
Hollywood movies and picture- postcard views to the art historical notion of the readymade—they transformed the
ordinary into something decisively not. Never ones to issue statements or dictate meaning, Fischli and Weiss
pondered questions great and small, sometimes imitating whimsical philosophers. Perhaps in part because they were
a team of two, they challenged the idea of dualism, a cornerstone of Western thought. In one way or another,
everything the artists produced playfully unravels what they understood to be “popular opposites”—labor versus
leisure, ction versus reality, kitsch versus beauty, and the banal versus the sublime, among others. Fischli and Weiss
undid false divisions with the conviction that bewilderment itself might be a desirable state. They aimed to confuse
hierarchies and values by creating systems doomed to fail and found beauty in states of imminent collapse.
- Fischl and Weiss, The Way Things go, 1987: dealing with the single materials and process
- Fischl and Weiss, Equilibrios, 1984-1986: balance between the materials and ?. Moving to the dimensions
and of course they were putting in this spot he second the photo was taken. Just a moment to take the photo
- Fischl and Weiss, Suddenly This Overview, 1981-2012: little sculptures celebrating very normal events,
someone sleeping or reading ecc. Effect if non celebration for the colour, different pieces of history

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 Lesson 12:
Is photography art? Video and Installation Video Art and Installation Art.
Photographers of the XX century. What does it mean to be an artist today? How do we
look to contemporary art?

Installation Art
Installation artworks (also sometimes described as ‘environments’) often occupy an entire room or gallery
space that the spectator has to walk through in order to engage fully with the work of art. Some
installations, however, are designed simply to be walked around and contemplated, or are so fragile that
they can only be viewed from a doorway, or one end of a room. What makes installation art different from
sculpture or other traditional art forms is that it is a complete uni ed experience, rather than a display of
separate, individual artworks. The focus on how the viewer experiences the work and the desire to
provide an intense experience for them is a dominant theme in installation art.
Installation art is a mostly used to describe artworks that are made “in situ”. This means that the work is
created or installed within the speci c space where it is meant to be viewed. For this reason, Installation
art is often large in scale and created with a variety of different media and mediums. Installation art can be
made either to be temporary or permanent. This often depends on the space where the installation piece
is made, for whom the installation is created, and which materials were used to make the installation.
Installation art emerged out of environments which artists such as Allan Kaprow, made from about 1957
onward, though there were important precursors, such as Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau 1933, an environment
of several rooms created in the artist’s own house in Hanover.
Sculpture is an external body object, a proper object that has its own identity and occupies a space
in itself. While installation needs the participation of the viewer. Used a s a way to express artistic ideas.
From the 1960s the creation of installations has become a major strand in modern art. This was
increasingly the case from the early 1990s when the ‘crash’ of the art market in the late 1980s led to a
reawakening of interest in conceptual art (art focused on ideas rather than objects). Miscellaneous
materials (mixed media), light and sound have remained fundamental to installation art.

- Rachel Whiteread, Embankment, 2005 – 2006, displayed at the Tate Modern in London, UK: occupies
a whole space
- David Spriggs, Vision II , 2017: different layers and the nal impression is an exploding materials for an eye.
The viewer participates by his presence.
- Sarah Sze, Untitled (Portable Planetarium), 2009: many materials used as a collage (as dadaism that did
the rst installation) here there is plastic, wire, any kind of materials.

Video Art
The genre known as video art is a medium of expression initiated by such experimental artists as Andy Warhol and
Nam June Paik, recent advances in digital computer and video technology, enabling artists to edit and manipulate
lm sequences. Video art typically appears in two basic varieties: single-channel and installation. In single- channel
works, a video is screened, projected or shown as a single series of images. Installations typically comprise either an
environment made up of several distinct pieces of video screened simultaneously, or a combination of video with
Assemblage, or Performance art. Installation video is part of the multi-media fashion for combining architecture,
design, sculpture, electronic and digital art. Latest developments include the use of the Internet and computer art to
manipulate lm imagery and to control videos from the world wide web or remote locations. Video differs from lm
(including avant garde cinema) in its disregard for the conventions of traditional movie-making. While lm producers

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juggle with storyline, screenplay, actors and dialogue - the basic elements of entertainment movies - the video artist is
concerned with exploring the medium itself, or to use it to challenge the viewer's ideas of space, time and
form. Filming there is a hole crew. While in video art there is the artist and eventually a set but everything is created
with the intent of not being narrative but analyzing aspects of life.
Bill Viola (American, born 1951)
Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image
technology in New Media. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound
—employ state- of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity.
Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works
focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern
and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Su sm, and Christian mysticism.
Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide
audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.
- Martyrs series – Water Martyr, 2014: frame of a video, 4 elements, human being tourtured by these 4
elements. Natural elements, the most important things on the earth, fundamental they give life and at the same
time they kill you.Frame of a video where he put the four elements of nature that torture a man. They are
considered vitals but here they are considered negatively because they gave life and deaths at the same time.

Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941)

One of the world’s most prominent living artists, Bruce Nauman has contributed to writing the history of
contemporary art since the mid-1960s, thanks to his pioneering research across a variety of media, including
installation, video, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and sound. His art is distinguished by an interest in
understanding the human experience and its conventions, as well as the inner workings of the psyche, which he
investigates through the perception of the body, and interactions with space, time, and language. Nauman’s work also
makes frequent use of wordplay, with which he explores alternative methods of communication.
- Nauman’s “Human Nature/Life Death/Knows Doesn’t Know,” from 1983: Videos and installation can be
used together.

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN SHORT

Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910)
Nadar was a writer, a caricaturist, a balloonist, a part-time political activist, a photographer, and a friend of the
painters, writers, and intellectuals in Paris during the time of Napoleon III. He is remembered as a photographer, for
the portraits that he made of his great contemporaries. Nadar should have considered painters his friends,
since he learned so much and borrowed so freely from their traditions. The building of his studio became a local
landmark and a favourite meeting place of the intelligentsia of Paris. When in 1874 the painters
later known as Impressionists needed a place to hold their rst exhibit, Nadar lent them his gallery.
His portraits are a woodburytype, a kind of print in which the image is formed by ink that has been transferred from a
lead intaglio plate. Unlike modern systems of photomechanical reproduction, the woodburytype did not use a
halftone screen, and thus achieved a truly continuous scale of gray values. The process produced prints of great
beauty and exceptional permanence, and was practical for making editions of several hundred prints from a single
plate. Nadar was a tireless innovator. In 1855 he patented the idea of using aerial photographs in mapmaking and
surveying. In 1858 he began to photograph by electric light, making a series of photographs of Paris sewers. Later, in
1886, he made the rst “photo interview,” a series of 21 photographs giving a vivid impression of the interviwed’s
personality. Nadar also wrote novels, essays, satires, and autobiographical works.

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Claude Monet, 1885: Able to portrait many personalities as well as regular people - 30 years between the two photos.
The one on the left is all focused and also the pellicula is different so it appears more realistic.
Alexandre Dumas, 1855: Both of them are captured as in a paintings. Use of the lights and people were naturally
driven to get captured by Nadar. The one on the right is more blurred and Nadar wanted to captured the face and the
eyes

Photo Secession
Founded by Alfred Stieglitz in New York in 1902, the name was invented by him as a way of af liating the
photographers with the modernist secession movements in Europe. These photographers broke away from the
Camera Club of New York in 1902 and pursued Pictorialism, or techniques of manipulating negatives and prints so as
to approximate the effects of drawings, etchings, and oil paintings. The results were printed in their magazine Camera
Work that Stieglitz edited from 1903–7, and exhibited in their gallery, The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later
known simply as 291. By 1910, however, the members of the Photo-Secession had become divided. Some continued
to manipulate their negatives and prints to achieve nonphotographic effects, while others came to feel that such
manipulation destroyed tone and texture and was inappropriate to photography. Torn by this division, the group soon
dissolved.
- Clarence White, The Mirror, 1920:

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)

Alfred Stieglitz was determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting
or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, he espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and
published work by photographers who shared his conviction. When the rank-and- le membership of the Camera Club
began to agitate against his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz broke away from the group in 1902 to form the
Photo- Secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography that he achieved
through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, and steam to unify the components of
a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole. Through the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession founded in 1905,
and familiarly known as “291”, Stieglitz supported photographers and other modern American artists, while also
apprising artists of the latest developments in early twentieth-century European modernism. His photography is
based on several modernist ideas: the idea of the fragmented sense of self, brought about by the rapid pace of
modern life; the idea that a personality, like the outside world, is constantly changing, and may be interrupted but not
halted by the intervention of the camera; and, nally, the realization that truth in the modern world is relative and that
photographs are as much an expression of the photographer’s feelings for the subject as they are a re ection of the
subject depicted. Promoter of the photo secession
- Paula Sunlight shadows Berlin, 1889:Lights coming from the outside gives kind of a narrative and romantic
to the photo more than there is in regular photographies. Photography can be as emotional as art, sculpting and
painting.
- Two Towers, 1911: From here public started to accept photography as a form of art. It was dif cult at rst
because people used to see the machine to take photos as impossible to replace the brushstrokes. The technical
method is the reason why photographers were not taken as artist before.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)

Atget became interested in photography in his early 30s. The earliest known photographs by him seem to have
been made in the north of France. These works depict rural scenes, plants, and farming technology (e.g., plows,
horses in harnesses, and windmills), and they were presumably made as studies for painters and illustrators. By the
early 1890s, Atget was working in Paris, but it was not until late in that decade that he changed the focus of

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his photographic business to concentrate on the city of Paris—a subject that proved of inexhaustible interest, and
one that continued to nourish his mind and enrich his work for the remaining 30 years of his life.
- Rue St. Rustique, Montmartre, 1922:Important for us to know how people used to live in the city and the
artistic touch is how he captured the city, the corners, the streets. Considered as an artist for transmitting
sensations, captured banal aspects that become special because of his eye.
- Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, Paris, 1912:

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)

Sander’s work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his
portraits, as exempli ed by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of
society during the Weimar Republic. He took up photography as a hobby and, after military service, pursued it
professionally, working in a series of photographic rms and studios in Germany. After photographing local farmers
near Cologne, Sander was inspired to produce a series of portraits of German people from all strata of society. His
portraits were usually stark, photographed straight on in natural light, with facts of the sitters’ class and profession
alluded to through clothing, gesture, and backdrop.
- Blacksmiths, 1926: deep truth photos, In their environment. Characterization of people. Depressed for what
they do
- Young Farmers, 1914: dressed for the Sunday. Search for reality. Something that was a real piece of life. Young
people that tell us a story just through a photo.

Brassaï (Gyula Halasz) (Transylvanian, 1899-1984)

Brassaï arrived in Paris as a journalist: “I worked as a journalist to earn a living; there is a positive side to having a
talent for journalism: you have a curiosity about everything—you’re a good observer and can capture whatever is or
seems to be interesting”. In the early thirties he set about photographing the night of Paris, especially at its more
colorful and more disreputable levels. The results this project --- a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps,
madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers — was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit,
one of the most remarkable of all photographic books. Making photographs in the dark bistros
and darker streets presented a dif cult technical problem. Lights photographed at night developed into chalky whites,
too stark against the black of the night. He learned to avoid halos by using elements of the “set”—walls, trees, bridges
—to mask the street lights, converting direct into indirect lighting whenever possible. Photographing in hazy, rainy
weather proved best, providing the atmosphere that would absorb or re ect light and attenuate excessive contrasts.
Brassaï would venture into the most deserted areas of the streets. Moody, expressionistic photographs are the result of
his work at night. In addition to street photography, Brassaï captured stark, revealing images of the people of the
night. First to photo during the night without ash.
- Winter, 1946: he took advantage of what he had, to make atmosphere with light. Like Caravaggio took
advantage of the dark and light. Drama to composition to help viewer to understand the story behind the art
pieces.
- Suzy’s, 1932: bodies are coming out of the dark and give a drama feeling. The only light is on top of the mirror
he took advatange of what he had to create atmosphere. Moody expressionist atmosphere sensation are very
strong and visible.
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Andre Kertesz, is one of the most in uential photographers of XX century. Not only he helped change the way
photographers and picture magazines look at the world and de ned the use of the hand-held camera, but in the early
1930's he also opened museum doors for the collecting of photography as ne art. During the 1920's, Kertesz lived in

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 Paris and became part of the international art world, becoming friends with Leger, Chagall, Calder, Delaunay,
Giacometti and Mondrian. He moved to the United States in 1936 and til 1939, he freelanced for major American
magazines - Life, Look, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. In addition to his original quality of formal invention, there is in
the work of Kertesz another quality: the elliptical view, the unexpected detail, the ephemeral moment, and the sense
of the sweetness of life, a free and childlike pleasure in the beauty of the world and the preciousness of sight. One of
the rst using the hand camera. Able to cqapture details and transform them into art. He was able to see in an artistic
way.
- Stairs of Montmarte, Paris, 1925: lines of the gate, handrails, the stairs + shadows and 2 presence of two
gures that are interacting in a geometric way, diagonal way. Creation of the effect very interesting artistic and
geometric. Here we can see the shadows of the handrails that goes diagonal giving drama. We have also the
shadow of the middle handrail that goes on the opposite diagonal of the handrail one creating contrast.
- Landing Pigeon, 1960: capture details. He had the eye that was to be able to see what was interesting for the
composition and introduced the pigeons to y. American Social Realist Photography. Here we can see a facade
which is very geometrical and had the eyes to make geometrical elements made the composition special and
added the pigeon.

AMERICAN SOCIAL REALIST PHOTOGRAPHY

Two de ning events of the 1930s, the Great depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe,
prompted many American artists to turn away from abstract art and to adopt realistic styles of
painting. For Regionalists, this meant the promotion of an idealized, often chauvinistic vision of
America's agrarian past. Social Realists, however, felt the need for a more socially conscious art.
Photographers were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document rural
poverty and exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant labourers in an attempt to garner
support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The photographs were distributed free
of charge to newspapers across the country and brought the plight of displaced farming
communities to the public’s attention The most famous images were made by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans,
whose black-and- white stills of starving fruit-pickers in California became iconic symbols of the Great Depression.

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)

Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers
were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. While Lange sometimes grew
frustrated that her work didn’t always provoke society to correct the injustices she documented, her photography has
endured and greatly in uenced generations of documentary photographers. Focused on the most depressed, people
and places. Wanted to show what was going on the people. Portrait of people that were not asking for compassion.
- The migrant mother, Nipomo, California, 1936: She specialized in the representation of people that were
not asking for compassion but she wanted to document and that the people were witnesses, not victims.

- Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)

A staffer at Fortune and Time magazines, Evans actually reached the height of his powers toward
the end of The Great Depression. Drawing deeply on the American literary tradition, he went further than others in his
refusal to romanticize poverty. Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Evans's
forthright approach to portraiture and documentary rede ned these genres for generations to come, and shaped how
a nation remembers itself. Document what was happening through the poor people.
- penale children hale country Alabama 1936: Able to capture street life as it was so people were able to
realize how much poverty and depression were in the country. The country became aware of the condition.

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 Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Bresson’s theory that photography can capture the meaning beneath outward appearance in instants of extraordinary
clarity and his humane, spontaneous photographs helped establish photojournalism as an art form. In 1933 he
purchased his rst 35-mm Leica. The use of this type of camera was particularly relevant to Cartier-Bresson. It lent itself
not only to spontaneity but to anonymity as well. So much did Cartier- Bresson wish to remain a silent, and even
unseen, witness, that he covered the bright chromium parts of his camera with black tape to render it less visible, and
he sometimes hid the camera under a handkerchief so that he became totally immersed in the environment. His Leica
—his notebook, as he called it— accompanied him wherever he went, and, consistent with his training as a painter, he
always carried a small sketch pad. There was for Cartier-Bresson a kind of social implication in the
camera. Anonymous and spontaneity of the photos, captured the moment before something big had happen. Able to
capture people without made them realize to be in photos.
- Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare, 1932: jump. Just the moment before something. He’s jumping on
water, so a lot of questions erase, did he fall, did he get wet?….
- Quai Saint-Bernard, Paris, 1932: 2 diagonals, 2 gures watching something that is coming or happening. The
rest is to ll the emptiness, not in balance the 2 parts, suspense feeling to the viewer.

Robert Capa (Hungarian, 1913-1954)

Photographer whose images of war made him one of the greatest photojournalists of the 20th century. By 1936 his
mature style fully emerged in grim, close-up views of death such as Loyalist Soldier, Spain. Such immediate images
embodied Capa’s famous saying, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough.” In World War II
he covered much of the heaviest ghting in Africa, Sicily, and Italy for Life magazine, and his photographs of the
Normandy Invasion became some of the most memorable of the war. Capa in 1947 joined with the photographers
Henri Cartier- Bresson and David (“Chim”) Seymour to found Magnum Photos, the rst cooperative agency of
international freelance photographers. War photographers, documented what was happening the suffering of people
in war.
- The Falling Soldier. Spain. September, 1936: people thought it was fake. Passionate and specialized in
following soldiers and war event. One of the most controversial photo war. Can be hit by a bullet but people think
it is not possible that he captured the exact moment. Photographers must be objective. They could ask the subjects
to express feelings so here the photographer could have asked to simulate a fall.
- Man carrying girl with bandaged leg, Troina, Sicily, 1943:

Joel Meyerowitz (American, born 1938)

Joel Meyerowitz is recognized as one of the earliest and most accomplished advocates of color ne art photography,
and today he is among the world's most prominent and respected documentarians. He began taking photographs in
1962. Although he has always seen himself as a street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and
Robert Frank he transformed the mode with his pioneering use of color. Development of technology made photos in
colors. Before colors were added after the negative with watercolors for example. Now people no more have to guess
colors but can see photos as the photographer at the moment of the photo taken.
- Camel Coats, 5th Avenue, New York City, 1975: Foam cuts the vision of the photo and becomes a narrative
element. He became a street photographer able to capture the moment. Here he captured the moment where all
the set is kinda brown and when the new york smoke comes out.
- 34th St, New York City, 1976: human presence is very little and insigni cant. Colors are brother because of the
sky. Study of the composition, rst time that a photographer combine composition and colours. Here he captured a

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 repetitions of colors and lines. Everybody can see those things but photographers are able to cut the space and
create a narrative. Skyscraper are captured right before the end to make them seem in nite.

Düsseldorf School of Photography

The Dusseldorf School of Photography refers to a group of photographers who studied at the Kunstakademie
Dusseldorf in the mid 1970s under the in uential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Known for their rigorous
devotion to the 1920s German tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the Bechers’ photographs were clear,
black and white pictures of industrial archetypes (pitheads, water towers, coal bunkers). Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff
and Thomas Struth modi ed the approach of their teachers by applying new technical possibilities and a personal
and contemporary vision, while retaining the documentary method their tutors propounded.
- Neuves Maisons, Lorraine, 1986: going deep in the study of the industrial reality. Like a dossier that the artist
gave and proposed to the public. After those approach. There is something attractive because of the lines, the
dimensions and the complexity of the buildings. They studied those elements in details and represent a series of
photos in order to create a story, something studied deeply.

Candida Höfer (German, born 1944)

Her breakthrough to fame came with a series of photographs showing guest workers in Germany, after which she
concentrated on the subjects "Interiors", "Rooms" and "Zoological Gardens". Höfer specializes in large-format
photographs of empty interiors and social spaces that capture the "psychology of social architecture". Her
photographs are taken from a classic straight- on frontal angle or seek a diagonal in the composition.
From her earliest creations, she has been interested in representing public spaces such as museums, libraries,
national archives, or opera houses devoid of all human presence.
- Girolamini Library Naples I, 2009:

Thomas Ruff (German, born 1958)

Thomas Ruff explores a breadth of themes that is re ected in the range of techniques he employs:
analogue and digital exposures taken by the artist exist in his practice alongside computer generated imagery,
photographs from scienti c archives, and pictures culled and manipulated from newspapers, magazines, and the
Internet. He has been described as “a master of edited and reimagined images”. During the 1980s the artist created
large- scale works in color, displaying building facades and printing them in monumental sizes, changing the
outlook on architecture. Thomas is well known for his somber portraits of friends that have a unique aesthetics of
police photographs from the 1970s.
- Selected Portraits, 1984-1985: no facial expressions, but color in the background exalts the personality of
these subjects. Not telling stories of these models.

Thomas Struth (German, born 1954)

Struth is a German photographer who is best known for his Museum Photographs, family
portraits and 1970s black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York.
His early works largely consisted of black-and-white shots of streets and skyscrapers with many
of his photographs attempting to show the relationship people have with their modern-day environment. In the
mid-1980s, Struth added a new dimension to his work when he started to produce family portraits. These works
attempt to show the underlying social dynamics within a seemingly still photograph. In 1989, Struth began work on
his best-known cycle, Museum Photographs, devoted to the visitors to some of the world's great museums and
buildings. By including in his photographs people who are looking at art, Struth makes viewers aware of their own

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active participation in the completion of the work's meaning, not as passive consumers but as re-interpreters of the
past.
- National Gallery I, London, 1989: cold family members neutral

EVOLUTION of ART WORLD

Up to XVII c.: artist— commissioner
XVIII-XIX centuries: artist— academy— collector
XIX century: artist— dealer — collector
xx century: artist — critic curator — collector/Gallery dealer
NOW:

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