Art Appreciation

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Themes of Art

The Purpose an Artwork is Made NOT the Purpose it Serves Now (i.e. Mona Lisa was a commissioned portrait of a real woman even though now it is an important historical painting its purpose or theme must relate to its original reason for being made)

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Invention and Fantasy - The absurd, fantastical, dreamlike ideas, etc. Things that do not exist in reality or artwork that shows something that did not exist at the time the artwork was made (di Vinci made all sorts of inventions including many that now exist but they didn’t when he thought them up)

Art for Art - Art inspired by another artwork, movement, media, etc. OR art that is JUST meant to be beautiful without a deeper meaning (non-representational)

Looking Outward: The Here and Now - Art that looks at what is happening in the world around us. It can be simple like a still life - looking at everyday objects or go deeper and question society.

The Sacred Realm - Artwork that deepens your spiritual connection or faith to any of the many world religions

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Looking Inward: The Human Experience - Artwork that looks at what it means to be human or how we experience the world (singular)

Stories and Histories - recording history, commemoration (even the photo albums you have are commemorating your loved ones), epic tales of heroes, stories of the greek gods and goddesses (these do not fall into The Sacred Realm because history has shown us that many of the story such as Troy has some truth to it)

Politics and Social Order - Artwork dealing with Politics, Political leaders, or artwork in protest of it

The Natural World - Artwork depicting the natural world or work that brings our focus to the natural world

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Méret Oppenheim, Object, 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, 2⅞” high. MOMA, New York

Surrealist object: surrealism was a movement about dreamlike states and fantasy. One simply doesn’t drink out of fur-lined teacups.

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Theme: Invention and Fantasy, Art for Art, Looking Outward: The Here and Now, Art and Art

Function: Art for Delight, Art for Commentary

This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim's fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, "Even this cup and saucer." Soon after, when asked by André Breton, Surrealism's leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. In so doing, she transformed genteel items traditionally associated with feminine decorum into sensuous, sexually punning tableware.

Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1966. Acrylic, cloth, wood, cord, and steel, 72 x 84 x 78”. Art Institute of Chicago

Hang-Up is a minimalist sculpture that makes a statement about painting.

Privileging painting’s marginal feature—the frame—Hang Up playfully ignores the medium’s inherent two-dimensionality by means of the cord that protrudes awkwardly into the gallery space. Playing with language, the title refers both to installing a painting and to a psychological preoccupation.

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Theme: Art and Art

Function: Art for Delight, Art as Self-Expression

Eva Hesse produced an extraordinarily influential body of work that responded to the reductive formalism of Minimalist sculpture through an exploration of the expressive possibilities of abstraction. Trained as a painter under Josef Albers at Yale University from 1957 to 1959, she considered the sculpture Hang Up to be her first significant work of art. An ironic commentary on painting, Hang Up was, according to the artist, her first piece to achieve the level of “absurdity or extreme feeling” she intended. Privileging painting’s marginal feature—the frame—Hang Up playfully ignores the medium’s inherent two-dimensionality by means of the cord that protrudes awkwardly into the gallery space. Playing with language, the title refers both to installing a painting and to a psychological preoccupation.

Paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period

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Photographer Kristina Lewis, in collaboration with Lonewolf Magazine, did a series inspired by Picasso's Blue Period.

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Patrick Frank

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Dorothea Lange took this photograph in 1936, while employed by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) program, formed during the Great Depression to raise awareness of and provide aid to impoverished farmers. In Nipomo, California, Lange came across Florence Owens Thompson and her children in a camp filled with field workers whose livelihoods were devastated by the failure of the pea crops.

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

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Theme: Looking Inward: The Human Experience, Looking Outward: The Here and Now, Stories and Histories

Function: Art for Commentary

Recalling her encounter with Thompson years later, she said, “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction.”1 One photograph from that shoot, now known as Migrant Mother, was widely circulated to magazines and newspapers and became a symbol of the plight of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression.

As Lange described Thompson’s situation, “She and her children had been living on frozen vegetables from the field and wild birds the children caught. The pea crop had frozen; there was no work. Yet they could not move on, for she had just sold the tires from the car to buy food.”2 However, Thompson later contested Lange’s account. When a reporter interviewed her in the 1970s, she insisted that she and Lange did not speak to each other, nor did she sell the tires of her car. Thompson said that Lange had either confused her for another farmer or embellished what she had understood of her situation in order to make a better story.

Guanyin. Song dynasty, c. 1100.

Painted wood, height 7′11″.

Guanyin refers to the Buddhist bodhisattva (someone who has reached nirvana but stays on earth to help others to reach it) associated with compassion and venerated chiefly by followers of Mahayana Buddhist schools as practiced in the sinosphere.

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Patrick Frank

Theme: The Sacred Realm

Function: Worship and Ritual

The bodhisattva Guanyin, known in India as Avalokiteshvara (see 11.5), became the object of special affection in China. As Guanyin of the Southern Seas, he was believed to reside high on a mountain and offer his special protection to all who traveled the sea. Carved from wood and richly painted and gilded, the sculpture here depicts Guanyin atop his sacred mountain (19.19). Left leg dangling down, right leg drawn up, he sits in a position known as the pose of royal ease, as befits his princely nature. He would have been surrounded on his altar by attendants, making his high status even clearer. Cascading swags of drapery animate this serene figure, whose benevolent gaze is like a beacon of calm in the storm, saving us from shipwreck, both at sea and in life. The sculptor has given Guanyin a lithe, slightly feminized body. Chinese Buddhism gradually began to imagine Guanyin as a female deity, and later depictions often show her wearing flowing white robes.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889

The artist makes clear his state of mind here, one of peril. The space is confined, closed off (note both doors are blocked and the window looks as if it cannot open) the pictures look like they will fall off the wall onto the giant bed at any moment. The walls look like they are closing in.

Van Gogh painted three versions of his bedroom. Just one year after completing his bedroom series he killed himself in this room in bed. He shot himself in the stomach and died two days later in this very bed.

Because we have a sense of how the artist feels and what his experience is as a person this falls under: Looking Inward: The Human Experience.

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Theme: Looking Inward: The Human Experience

Function: Art as Self-Expression

Vincent van Gogh's three versions of this composition are the only record he made of the interior of the Yellow House, where he lived while he was in Arles in the south of France.

The house embodied the artist's dream of a "Studio of the South," a community of like-minded artists working in harmony to create art for the future. The first version of The Bedroom (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) was one of the paintings Van Gogh made to decorate the house in anticipation of the arrival of his first guest, Paul Gauguin. "It's just simply my bedroom," he wrote, "only here color is to do everything ... to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination."

Gauguin's stay at the Yellow House would be fraught with tension: after two months, Van Gogh's self-mutilation and Gauguin's flight back to Paris ended the Studio of the South. Van Gogh made this second version of The Bedroom about a year after the first, while he was living at an asylum in Saint-Rémy.

The death of Vincent van Gogh occurred in July 1890 just one year after completing his bedroom series. He shot himself in his room. Although now, some experts say that he may have been killed by an acquaintance. Van Gogh was shot in the stomach, either by himself or by others, and died two days later.

Chuck Close, Self Portrait, 1997. Oil on canvas, 8’6” × 7’. MOMA, New York

Chuck Close has face blindness. He can see the parts of your face perfectly well, but he cannot put the parts together into a pattern that leaves an impression on his memory. He once failed to recognize a woman he had lived with for a year.

If Close transforms your photograph into one of his huge portraits, he may remember your face — at least when he's looking at you straight on. “Everything about my work is driven by my disabilities,"

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

If you ever meet Chuck Close he won't recognize you if he sees you again. He has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. He can see the parts of your face perfectly well — your nose, eyes, forehead and so on — but he cannot put the parts together into a pattern that leaves an impression on his memory. He once failed to recognize a woman he had lived with for a year.

If, however, Close takes a photograph of you and transforms it into one of his huge portraits, he may remember your face — at least when he's looking at you straight on. As he explained to neuroscientists at the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans last fall, "Once I change the face into a two-dimensional object, I can commit it to memory. I have a photographic memory for things that are two-dimensional.” "Everything about my work is driven by my disabilities," he told the audience.

Chuck Close, Big Self Portrait, 1967, Oil on Canvas

Close had to alter this signature style after 1988 when, at the age of 48, he became paralyzed from the chest down due to a collapsed or occluded artery supplying blood to his spinal cord. After several months of therapy he regained some use of his hands and arms, but he lost some of the fine motor control of his hands and had to resort to slightly larger "pixels" filled with slightly less detailed shapes. Still, a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art 10 years after his paralysis challenged viewers to identify paintings made before Close's stroke with those made after, and few could do so, the artist said. The stroke "didn't make me better," Close said, "but it didn't stop me.”

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Close is best known for huge portraits created from a straight-on photograph he has taken of the subject's face. He divides the photograph and the canvas into a grid containing the same number of squares and fills the squares, which resemble computer pixels, with circles, ovals, and other shapes containing carefully layered colors. The process allows him to combine his early love of abstract art with the photorealism of his first portraits. With this technique he produces enormous faces that change in detail and complexity depending on the distance from which they are viewed.

Chuck Close, Self Portrait, detail

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

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On top of that he was afflicted with an undiagnosed condition that prevented him from holding his arms over his head, running, throwing or catching a ball, or participating in any type of physically demanding game. To keep friends around him he performed magic tricks and drew pictures. If someone asked him to draw a World War II airplane, he would, and during one class variety show he entertained the audience during intermission by drawing caricatures of the teachers.

Close cannot add or subtract without thinking of the dots on dominos. He also has profound dyslexia — a word he never even heard until he had children. Although he can read somewhat, he can't remember anything he reads. He has an excellent memory for anything he hears, however, so in school he studied for tests by entering what he called his "sensory deprivation tank."

"I would go into the bathroom, fill the bathtub, and put a board across it," he said. "I would turn off the lights, and with a single bright light shining on the book, and I would read every line five times out loud so I could hear it."

By hearing the words come from his own mouth he could retain them long enough to take the test the next day. "I don't learn from reading; I learn by ear," he said.

His teachers told him college was out of the question for him, but a junior college in his hometown of Monroe, Wash., had open enrollment, so he signed up for courses that required him to write papers rather than take tests. Then he hired a typist and dictated the papers, relying on his memory for what his teachers said in class. He did well enough to enroll at the University of Washington, where he studied art and graduated magna cum laude in 1962.

That might have been the end of his formal education, but the Vietnam War was heating up and the draft board, needing more draftees, rescinded his deferment for poor eyesight and flat feet. To get a student deferment Close applied to the graduate art program at Yale, where his classmates included many of the luminaries of his generation, with several of them, such as sculptor Richard Serra and painter Janet Fish, ending up as subjects of portraits.

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Patrick Frank

Today Close wheels around his studio in lower Manhattan in an electric wheelchair, and works on giant canvases mounted on an electric easel that lifts and rotates with the push of a button. He wears a brace that supports his paintbrush and allows his weakened hands to make it do whatever he wants. Close is more prolific than ever and is believed to be one of the wealthiest artists alive.

But he gives no credit at all for his success to special talent or inspiration. "Inspiration is for amateurs," he told the gathered neurologists. "I just show up and get to work. You don't need to be more gifted than everybody else. You only have to work harder."

Chuck Close, Self Portrait, 1997. Oil on canvas, 8’6” × 7’. MOMA, New York

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

Shepard Fairey, We the People, 2017, Set of Prints.

There is a link on D2L if you want Fairey himself to explain the posters (its a good article) but these fall under protest of the social order.

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Patrick Frank

Theme: Politics and Social Order

Function: Art for Persuasion

Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm, c. 1937. Gelatin silver Mural.

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

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Ansel Adams’ love of nature and his work in capturing vistas within the Sierras and other protected lands for all to see changed the American art world to include nature photography. Adams’ work became an important part of the American conservation movement, providing a constant reminder of the landscapes that need to be protected.

One of the most important legacies of Adams is the way in which his photographs contributed to the American conservation movement. His technical expertise and the undeniable beauty of his work paved the way for photography to be exhibited beside traditional painting and portraiture in national galleries. The portfolios that Adams published gained worldwide recognition and made America famous for its special public lands.

Blue Man Group perform at Melodi festival, 2010, Sweden

Click to watch the video. Take the quiz when finished.

Prebles' Artforms, Eleventh Edition

Patrick Frank

The history of Blue Man Group originates with three friends fresh out of college who made a life-defining decision together. Chris Wink, Phil Stanton, and Matt Goldman determined they would achieve lives of meaning and purpose, forging their own road, following their own path.

When their creative impulses led them to develop a bald and blue character they called Blue Man (to evoke the word ‘human’), more than a few people raised eyebrows. Undeterred, the partners invested their time and resources into following this curious character into a small theatre in New York City. What transpired was a ground-breaking performance that moved and inspired audiences. This unprecedented theatrical success led to ongoing accolades, awards and genre-jumping opportunities.

Blue Man Productions is now a global entertainment company best known for the award-winning Blue Man Group show, performed in over 20 countries and seen by more than 35 million people worldwide since 1991. A dynamic combination of art, music, comedy and technology, the show’s euphoric celebration of human connection has universal appeal for a broad range of age groups and cultural backgrounds. The show is continually refreshed with new music, fresh stories, custom instruments and state-of-the-art technology.