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Arch. Rania Obead
Art is something that has great value in our society. Across the country, art museums are as much a point of civic pride.
Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh, to be an artist was a great and noble calling, even if the price to be paid for it in life was high. In a letter written to keep up his brother Theo s Flagging spirits, he admitted that the two of them were paying a hard price to be a link in the chain of Artists,in health, in youth, in liberty, none of which we enjoy... And yet, he continued, there is an art of the future, and it is going to be so lovely and so young that even if we give up our youth for it, we must gain in serenity by it.
In another letter to his brother, Vincent sounds both prickly and confident. I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell, he writes. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint and my own living, very meager after all, that is put into them. After his death, that prediction came true. Vincent van Gogh. Wheat Field and Cypress Trees. 1889.
Even Van Gogh, however, could not have imagined that in 1990 one of his paintings would sell for 82.5 million dollars, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Sunflowers
Money, of course, is one way in which we express value. Part of the value today of a painting by Van Gogh lies in the fact that his work had a major influence on artists of the next generation, and so when we tell the story of Western art, he plays an important role. Part of the value also comes from the fact that there are a limited number of paintings from his hand, and there will be no more. But much of the value seems to lie elsewhere, in the connection that the painting allows us to feel with the artist himself, who has become a cultural hero for us, both for his accomplishments and for the story of his life. The Starry Night Starry Night Over the Rhône
Mona Lisa The Mona Lisa is an actual painting with a physical existence and a history. It was painted by Leonardo da Vinci during the early years of the 16th century. The sitter was a woman named Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. Leonardo portrays her seated on a balcony that overlooks a landscape of rock and water. Her left forearm rests on the arm of her chair; her right hand settles gently over her left wrist. She turns her head to look at us with a hint of a smile.
Mona Lisa magic When it was placed in the newly created Louvre Museum in Paris. Writers and poets of the 19th century became mesmerized by what they took to be the mystery and mockery of the sitter s smile. They described her as a dangerous beauty, a fatal attraction, a mysterious sphinx, a vampire, and all manner of fanciful things. Today, still in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa attracts over five million visitors every year. The layer of protective varnish covering the paint surface has crackled and yellowed with age. Cleaning techniques exist, but who would take the risk?
The word Art history The ideas we have about art today have not always been in place. Like the fame of the Mona Lisa, they are a development of our modern era, The period that began a little over two hundred years ago, even our use of the word art has a history. During the Middle Ages, the formative period of European culture, art was used in roughly the same sense as craft. Both words had to do with skill in making something. forging a sword, painting a picture, cobbling a shoe, carving a cabinet all of these were spoken of as arts, for they involved specialized skills.
Beginning around 1500, during the period known as the Renaissance, painting, sculpture, and architecture came to be thought of as more elevated forms of art. During the mid 18th century, this division was Given official form when painting, sculpture, and architecture were grouped together with music and poetry as the fine arts on the principle that they were similar kinds of activities. Activities that required not just skill but also genius and imagination, and whose results gave pleasure as opposed to being useful.
Claude Monet. Fisherman s Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville
ART AND BEAUTY Beauty is deeply linked to our thinking about art. Aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that studies art, also studies the nature of beauty. Many of us assume that a work of art should be beautiful, and even that art s entire purpose is to be beautiful. Why should we think that way, and is what we think true?
During the 18th century, when our category of art came into being, beauty and art were discussed together because both were felt to provide pleasure. But paints not always make you happy. Sadness, Giovanni Bellini
Art can indeed produce pleasure, as the first philosophers of aesthetics noted. But it can also inspire sadness, horror, pity, awe, and a full range of other emotions. Francisco de Goya. Saturn Devouring One of His Children.
Pablo Picasso showed talent as a child and was surrounded by people who knew how to nurture it. Like a Renaissance apprentice, he grew up so immersed in art that he mastered traditional techniques while still a teenager. He completed First Communion In 1896 at the age of fifteen, the year he was accepted into art school. Pablo Picasso
After graduation, Picasso moved from Barcelona to Paris, then the center of new directions in art. There he experimented with style after style. The one that launched him on his mature path would become known as Cubism, and it began to take form in paintings such as Three Musicians Three Musicians
Representational art &naturalistic Abstract Art
Louise Bourgeois. Woman with Packages Duane Hanson. Housepainter III
Hathor and Sety Stylized
Nonrepresentational or nonobjective Art Vasily Kandinsky. Swinging. Rebecca Purdum. Chin Up.
Style A term that helps us categorize art by its own appearance is style. Style refers to a characteristic or group of characteristics that we recognize as constant, recurring, or coherent. Artists working in the same culture during the same time often have stylistic features in common, and in this way individual styles contribute to our perception of larger, general styles. There are cultural styles (Aztec style in Mesoamerica), period or historical styles (Gothic style in Europe), and school styles, which are styles shared by a particular group of like-minded artists (Impressionist style).
Form and Content Text book pg 36-37
Context Art does not happen in a vacuum. Strong ties bind a work of art to the Life of its creator, to the tradition it grows from and responds to, the Audience it was made for, and to the society in which it circulated. These circumstances form the context of art, its web of connections to the larger world of human culture. Akan (Fante) linguists at Enyan Abaasa, Ghana, 1974.