Wednesday April 28, 1999

Announcements:

• slide sheets were made available

    Paul Gauguin

    "The Yellow Christ," Paul Gauguin, 1888-89

• response to Van Gogh's non-local color
• Gauguin use art to investigate emotion, feeling

• upsets our reading of space
• broken up by a tree
• cow seems to be dangling
• we search for something real, authentic

• figures, landscapes collapse into unnatural depictions
• complex
• title in Tahitian at the top
• audial quality--you can almost hear it
• merges Christian traditions with Tahitians/South Sea traditions
• visionary, artificial world
• not an observable reality

• depicts unease at the end of the 19th century

• mask like faces in crowd scene
• modern society
• social/civil unrest, tension
• falsehood in interactions
• Christ entering on donkey--located at center
• overwhelmed by secular environment
• placed in the context of the society of His own time

• artists who strive for language to address new society
• through color

    "The Green Stripe," 1905
    "The Red Studio," 1911

• not interested in content, but focuses on formal issues
• way color interacts
• how we respond to perspective]
• sophistication in use of color
• reduced linear room must be transformed into a three dimensional space by the viewer

• eve of WWI
• situation tense and problematic
• painters deeply concerned with the problems of their time
• concerned with content

        Two branches of German Expressionism

• Die Brücke (the bridge)--1st branch

• keeping with the exploration of deeply personal content, not formal values
• insight, internal feelings trying to change society through paintings
• Christ not idolized
• sincerity to subject matter
• grotesqueness
 
• Der Blaue Reiter--2nd branch
• intently concerned with social ills and addresses them, but not like the 1st branch
• communicated in abstracted form

• abstracted forms
• shafts of colors
• pillars of energy
• cry of nature

• paints completely in abstract forms
• no reference to anything
• generic--just experience it
• tremendous issues through abstract form and color

    "Still Life with Violin and Pitcher," Georges Braque, 1909-10

• upset traditional dimensions (3) with fourth: time and movement
• not looking at object in 1 perspective, but collapse of other things on this object
• frustration and conflict

• first to show "Cubism"

• African art was an influence