What is going on in this class?

What is going on in this class? • “The Modern”– what modernism is: in the arts and the human Gestalt • Modern Art– how Modernism is manifested in the visual arts: Style and themes • Modern Fiction– how Modernism is manifested in literature: Style and themes

Example: • Picasso– • THEME– ugliness, subjectivity… prostitutes as subject • STYLE– Cubism, many subjective viewpoints at once • O’Conner— • THEME– • STYLE–

Modern Artists Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting “Modernism” Remember, these are just my notes on the video. None of these slides is intended to represent an exhaustive study of the artist. I thought you might find it helpful to make your comparisons to the literature if you could access the art.

Paul Cezanne Still Life with Apples, 1890Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1900 Art = what is meant, not what is seen Relationships are everything. Nothing exists in isolation. Blocks of color carry meaning.

Pablo Picasso Art = Tearing up the world and putting it back Art must Abolish perspective. Art must destroy beauty. The artist must believe in The “ferocious power of the ugly.” Cubism – “not just what the eye sees but what the mind knows” Les Damoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Henri Matisse Art = color and shape Art = JOY!!!! La Chute d’Icare, 1943

Wassily Kandinsky Art = violence andcollision Color is the swirl of passion: He heard and felt colors Landscape with Church, 1913

Piet Mondrian Art =The desire for order Tableau 2, 1922

Salvador Dali Art = “the world inside” Everything we feel certain of, collapses. The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Paul Klee Art = Painting like a child, but a “wise child” Senecio, 1922

Jackson Pollock Art = Abstract Expressionism You can see the bones, the making of the art. His Art produces its own record of creativity. Lavender Mist, 1950

Willem de Kooning Art = a rage of lust and creativity Art = frenzy Art = the Female Great comedy has an element of pathos. Two Women with Still Life, 1952

Mark Rothko Art = the recreation of timeless emotion, for example, how we feel about death and courage and ecstasy Color is everything. Untitled, 1970

Andy Warhol Art = the ordinary The boring can be absorbing. Art bridges the gulf between low brow and high brow. Marilyn, 1967

Jasper Johns Great art = deep visual satisfaction 3 Flags, 1958

Agnes Martin Art = the minimum, always the same, but always different Looking can produce beauty, happiness, and innocence. She doesn’t seek to paint nature, but the feeling of being in nature. 1997

Lucian Freud Art = the battle with dishonesty Every painter stands naked on the grounds of his own reality. Painter Working, Reflection, 1993

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs

Are Artists Going Mad? Saturday, Mar. 24, 1923 • Chesterton said: " It was the whole point of Whistler and his school that they produced the picture without troubling about the meaning. We may say it is the point of Picasso and the rest to paint the meaning without troubling about the picture."

Henry Tyrrell, quoting Elie Faure, writer of the greatest history of art of recent years, says: • " Picasso was undoubtedly a great criminal, in the sense that he is largely responsible for the muddle (sic) which painting has got into lately. It is from him chiefly that the younger artists have taken the notion of looking within themselves to interpret the outer world, instead of, like their elders, looking at the outside world to realize themselves. • Because oftentimes they are unable to distinguish much of anything within themselves, you know what happens (They get themselves called crazy). That is Picasso's crime. But Michael Angelo shares his guilt, and Rembrandt, and Delacroix, and Cezanne."

I AM SISTER WENDY

What is going on in this class?