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The Art History Thread
Vann Diras
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
wlecome to art history yes be most welcome please
post whatever suits you, please educate us on some cool art throughout the ages
i will start with giorgio de chirico, because my class has been focusing on the surrealists lately so they are in my head
dude started off his career painting these silent dreamscapes, which were fuckin' rad as hell. look at this business:
interestingly, when andre breton was going around cherry picking artists for his little surrealism movement in the 1920s, these are the paintings he loved. chirico eventually met the surrealists and was officially inducted into the movement in 1924, the same year the surrealist manifesto was written by breton. chirico would be pretty massively influential on the movement. until he started painting like this:
breton and the other surrealists were very hostile toward chirico after he moved on from his "metaphysical period" into this new style of work, and eventually chirico said "you guys are assholes" and split with the group. he would continue to be extremely prolific well into his later years, while still maintaining a bit of resentment to the surrealists and critics who never took to his newer work as they did his metaphysical paintings.
oh well, poor giorgio de chirico.
post whatever suits you, please educate us on some cool art throughout the ages
i will start with giorgio de chirico, because my class has been focusing on the surrealists lately so they are in my head
dude started off his career painting these silent dreamscapes, which were fuckin' rad as hell. look at this business:
interestingly, when andre breton was going around cherry picking artists for his little surrealism movement in the 1920s, these are the paintings he loved. chirico eventually met the surrealists and was officially inducted into the movement in 1924, the same year the surrealist manifesto was written by breton. chirico would be pretty massively influential on the movement. until he started painting like this:
breton and the other surrealists were very hostile toward chirico after he moved on from his "metaphysical period" into this new style of work, and eventually chirico said "you guys are assholes" and split with the group. he would continue to be extremely prolific well into his later years, while still maintaining a bit of resentment to the surrealists and critics who never took to his newer work as they did his metaphysical paintings.
oh well, poor giorgio de chirico.
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I think when I finish my degree I'm going to take it as a minor though.
also your image is broken, fix it
teach us somethin' yo
teach us something about ART
So I played the Georgia O'Keeffe card (I forget what the green card was) and he did not pick it because he did not know who that was.
no yeah that was pretty much exactly my point
i recognized the style and was all oh hey this is a pretty, recognizable thing in that style!
also it's fine on my screen so eh, going to get the url again is too much effort
Me too!
I ended up leaving it to do design, but I might go back and finish it one day.
could very well have been started by jokes from her male contemporaries who said they looked like vaginas. peers and critics constantly attributed freudian readings to her work, despite conscious efforts on her part to move them away from that
it never worked, and thus o'keefe will forever be remembered in the art historical narrative as the vagina lady
i knew who bob ross was but i mean i was like six so fuck public access amirite
but then, thanks to tumblr, i got to see a lot of clips and quotes from him, a lot of which were really insightful and beautiful, and thus my appreciation for him was born
i also took a college art course one summer and i never turned in anything including my final project and portfolio and i got a B
17th century Dutch art.
The pretty much the entire 1600s mark the glory days of the Netherlands, even though they weren't called that at the time. The Baroque style was in vogue at the time and it certainly influenced the Dutch style and indeed the likes of Vemeer and Rembrandt are considered notable examples of the Baroque movement. There is a notable difference between 'traditional' Baroque work and what many of the Dutch artists were producing however.
The Dutch masters were, generally speaking, interested in presenting a realistic image of Dutch life and this is one of the main reasons why I love their work so much. Paintings that seem to be peeking through open doors, windows and corners onto regular Dutch folk going about their business captures some kind insight into what life was about at the time is just so engaging to me.
As the Dutch empire was arguably one of the richest in all of Europe around that time, there were huge comissions to be had painting portraits for rich members of Dutch society. This has meant we have a wealth of exquisite works, depicting the elite of Dutch society. The attention to detail and the humanity these artists were able to bring to their work is staggering.
As a major naval power, another focus for Dutch painters at the time was maritime scenes. Willem van de Velde is probably my favourite maritime painter but honestly, they're all fantastic. There was the peaceful, landscapes of ships at dock and the more violent, fantastical productions of Dutch warhips on the high sea, battling the despicable Spainish. Both styles are fantastic in their own right and I recommend you check them out.
The pure skill shown by the Dutch golden age artists is just completely mind blowing and I have to say, seeing some of their works in the flesh nearly moved me to tears a few times
Here's some of my favourites:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
the sculpture of Aphrodite on the island of C(K?)nidos is the first life sized nude lady. She covers her ladyparts with her hand to hide them, but if you walk around her to a certain angle you can see her vulva.. which happens to be the angle where she is looking you in the eyes. OOOOO.
Dudes supposedly tried to have sex with her.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Someone riff to me about French Impressionism because that shit is hot. I've read wikipedia but I wanna hear about how rad Monet and Friends are
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
futurism is very similar to cubism in its aesthetics, though it moved away from the strictly flat canvas and heavy geometric shapes that defined cubism. now that's the only image i'm going to post because really what i love about futurists are their fuckin' crazy as hell manifestos. BEHOLD, THE FUTURIST MANIFESTO:
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.
Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.
"Come, my friends!" I said. "Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness."
We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel — a guillotine knife — which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. "Smell," I exclaimed, "smell is good enough for wild beasts!"
And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.
And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!
We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.
Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.
"Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!"
As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself — vlan! — head over heels in a ditch.
Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!
As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.
We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins.
Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.
Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?
What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?
To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?
Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.
For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.
They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.
Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!
Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: "We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors," it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head!
Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!
really in general avant-garde manifestos are crazy, inflammatory things rife with awesome language and really funny insults.
BREAK STUFF FUCK YOU BREAK STUFF
you can almost taste the sweaty masculinity
that's just
too
something
you're right i did neglect that crucial piece of the futurist narrative
for the uninformed, or for those who don't want to read the manifesto on account of it being crazy-pants-wacko, the futurists were all about two things, masculine virility and "presentness". they loved progress, technology, anything that was NOW. libraries and art movements of the past were garbage, museums should be burned down, etc because they were all concerned with the past. and they were very pro-war, as seen in this excerpt from the manifesto:
this would turn out to be increasingly tragic, as the futurism movement came about just before the start of WW1. needless to say, those who made it through were no longer futurists.
heck yeah. I was lucky enough to catch a great exhibit on Dali at the Tate modern when I was in London. They had a huge collection of works that they'd got on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in NYC and from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. It blew my mind to see all those paintings and sculptures. They've got some good work from Man Ray in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam which was really cool to see too.
They had a surrealist exhibiton with stuff from Dali, Ray, Ernst and Magritte come to my town about a year ago and I always regretted no going to it
@BugBoy favourite surrealist painting/sculpture GO
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Thomas Hart Benton fucking rules fuck that high brow bullshit
Benton was part of the American Regionalism movement
and generally didn't like modern life
he also did try to restart the futurism movement after WW1
like come on dude are you serious
I wondered where I had seen that before
this is the library at VCU, and it was built in 1976 i think? it's pretty neat and the guy it's named after, james branch cabell, was a good friend of aleister crowley's!
If you like being bummed out all the time.
I should write an essay about internet-manufactured nostalgia, but not in this thread. Instead, I'll just say that Sara and I got to see some of the notable Giorgio de Chirico stuff a month or so ago, which was cool. Some cool stuff by Romare Bearden I hadn't seen before. They also had some fucking rad stuff from Joan Miro, with whom I was not previously familiar.
I'd google some pictures, but I just got off work and am tired as fuck. Sara might have taken some actual pictures on her phone, though.
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin