My name is Anna Nenonen I was born in Finland so I have a funny accent my art History
degree is from europe from Aalborg
University and I also have a master of
finance degree that I did in the US at
Rochester Institute of Technology in
Rochester New York and I'll be your
instructor for the class on contemporary
art. It's an online class co-instructor
is Scott Contreras. Scott
will be helping me but mostly you'll be talking to me and I will be talking to you
and i'm looking forward to
very good discussions. The first in the
series of video lectures is an overview
of art in Europe and the Americas from
1900 to about 1950 and we'll start with
Fauvism. Fauvs were wild beasts with color
Fauvs were a loosely connected group
that didn't have that many exhibitions
but they were influential for modernism
and contemporary art in that they started
to break away from the impressionist
tradition of doing people and
landscapes and scene starts that looked still
somewhat realistic even though they were
impressionistic. do they have still had
some realism to them it was maybe the
first I want Gartmore movement in France
in the twentieth century and they used
colors directly from the 22 at the name
for his smooth progress and the artist
called force which means wildebeest was
going to buy critically work so who
talked about their paintings in several
articles study published one of the
leaders of the focus the movement was on
your artists and the work that we are
looking at now it's his woman with the
hot which shows a woman
unnatural colors and it's not very three
dimensional dis some illusion of space
but we already see artists wanting to
make art that is very kind of flat and
consists of mostly shapes and color
another example of organism is under the
rounds mountains that has DS lose brush
strokes or color directly from the tubes
and uses very very vivid colors and it
really is about color and shape and
those same lines that the strokes make
rather than men to look like a realistic
landscape one of the most famous artists
of the 20th century is popular because
so and he started out being a child
genius he was admitted to the Academy of
Arts or rather the School of Fine Arts
in Barcelona when he was only 13 years
of age so he was like mort said he was
absolutely brilliant already when he was
a teenager
watch out of course was brilliant
already when he was a child prodigy his
father was teaching at the fine arts
school in Barcelona at first I didn't
want to admit because of his father pat
because they do them a demonstration and
his work was so good that he was
admitted he was not the age that was too
because when people got into that school
he's known for a period of starting out
representation only with the blue period
then rose period the African influences
period analytic cubism and synthetic
cubism is also the crystal period so he
reinvented himself many many times early
in his career he was interested is
circus people
and this family also Adam banks is its
people that are touring with the
Traveling Circus London Mazal diamond
you're on the young ladies of Avignon
was a fairly scandalous painting at the
time it was it was it was it submitted
it raised a few eyebrows because of the
sexuality of the women first of all they
are prostitutes from street in Barcelona
and also how he depicted the women on
the left there you have the women's
faces depicted in the Iberian style
which was kinda traditional for Spain
and then on the right the faces are
influenced by African mosques and he is
he is section in the picture plane into
this facet it flat shapes and that's how
the bodies are compost so raw sexuality
and then the in-your-face representation
of a primitive faces and these slut
facets bodies because experimented with
lots of different media and different
styles he even double to it with Neil
classes resumed at some point sometimes
these styles overlapped he also did
sculpture he did ceramics and tedious
done eating sand and drawings he was a
very prolific person that was also
extremely well-connected which
contributed to him being so successful
during his lifetime and he became a
household name cubism was developed by
Georges Braque and public because so
broad and let it sit on
he was very much influenced by his own
and susan is known as being an artists
artist he was an artist other artists
admired a lot and he was influential for
development of Cubism amongst other
things
primitivism was an influence non-western
sources
influences and cubist cuba's thought
that art should not copy nature up to
around 1910 which is when this painting
was painted there was still recognizable
elements in the cuba stick paintings
such as here we have a jock we have a
violin but we have a poll it so if you
look closely you can make out the shapes
of faceted cuba stick shapes that
dominate the campus experimental nature
in that his sculptures are often quite
interesting this is mandolin and
clarinet so what did he do
it's an assemblage talk type of
sculpture scraps of wood and then he
draw the strings of the mandolin into
this peace award and of course this
whole sphere the clarinet with the
breach and primitivism German
Expressionism was born out of this
renewed by a consummate
is a good example of this deep throat
the bridge was formed interest in around
1905 and they are disturbed belong to it
they did not like complete obstruction
they don't show it
figurative subject matter they made
figurative paintings
but they did not even though they were
highly stylized and very primitive
looking as if children had painted them
or crazy people had painted them they
had to be abrasive the colors had to be
abrasive they did not want to go into
complete obstruction another example of
the peruca artists is a more notice
mosques to look at the face is is this
really cool we are you look in the
mirror in the morning we put on one of
those are mosques what is he talking
that we may be put a nice face on Monday
it is how we really are beneath that so
people are always pretending to be
something but but actually it's not such
a nice place over time and the paintings
to be operated on crude in every fashion
this is fairly elegant it is by Aaron
salute me curious now it's a street
scene in Berlin he did the number of
these streets in some interest in some
in Berlin and it depicts prostitutes
weak urine as kind of fairly tragic life
because he took part in a part in the
first world war during 1914 and he
suffered a mental breakdown when he was
a soldier in the war and after that he
was in mental hospitals asylums for
treatment and he finally ended up
killing himself and perhaps his abuse of
alcohol that's something to do with that
too and sometimes you can see some of
the influence of what he had suffered
not necessarily in these paintings but
some of his works of course you have to
be careful about biographical
interpretation of paintings but I am
convinced that many times artists put
their own experiences especially when it
comes to expressionism which is
expressing your feelings or the angst of
the anxiety of
over the world in four months of her
paintings
Sheila an Austrian painter known for
these quashed type of drawing state
combined drawing and painting he is a
good example of viennese Austrian art he
was a student of Gustav Klimt that made
redecorated beautiful paintings often
are women kids is very well known and it
is a gorgeous tender kiss with a lot of
gold and decorative elements to it
clint was incredibly successful and he
took Sheila under his wings so again
sheila was mentored by Gustav Klimt ago
she lists subject matter is often these
two things he himself he made a lot of
self-portraits and then studies are
needed models and they were often
underage girls he married a seventeen
year old artist model and then they went
to different villages to live because
they were handed over the religious
davilla just didn't like them using
underage girls as models and sheila was
briefly accused of improper behavior
towards an underage girl but he was
acquitted and probably not too but went
on but he did like to paint this Android
is very very skinny sexy paintings and
drawings but the human body
and faces mark the large blue horses
France mark was a founding member of the
air blower writer a brotha writer was a
group of artists that consisted of
German Russian experts that lived in
Germany and some hehe a painting
painting start used often this primary
colors red blue and yellow he attributed
attributed masculinity and spirituality
to blow violence and base matter to red
and yellow in his paintings symbolizes
fuhrman enjoy he used animals more often
than people because they have maybe a
more pumped eight connection to nature
and therefore the animal pure and
genuine interpreting universal matter
such as the largeness of nature pictures
of people would be
he was originally lawyer whose offer to
that position as professor of Roman law
in Russia but he turned it down and he
began painting at 8:30 so fairly late in
life eternal community during the First
World War II was in moscow and then he
returned to me and he taught by our
house which is a design school that we
talked about a little bit later by our
house was closed by Nazis in 1933 when
he moved to France and he is often
credited as the person that made the
first abstract paintings to most first
completely abstract paintings
even in paintings like this you can see
maybe a building on the hill doesn't
biomorphic forums and he was interested
in music improvisation that musical term
some of these paintings were called to
compositions he was an accomplished
musician and he said about his work that
color is the keyboard I saw the
harmonies the soul is the piano with
many strings the Odyssey is to hunt that
place touching one key or another to
cause vibration in the soul now if you
think about the relationship between art
and music music is abstract music can be
emotional but it doesn't depict anything
so it's maybe the purest form of
obstruction so how could a picture or a
painting
any work of art be abstract as music and
that was kind of the talents for
kandinsky to make painting that would be
as pure and beautiful abstract music
he also wrote about art and two of the
books that he wrote or treat it is
rather about the spiritual in the art he
also developed Russian Orthodox was
interested in a new age and apocalyptic
themes and he also doubled into your
survey which is kind of a mixture of
different religions Hinduism and
philosophy and Buddhism and Christianity
and then new HME would be the equivalent
of nearly eight thinking today that
feels if it was the time around the turn
of the century and amongst some of the
ideas that he had in his treatise he
thought about world as a triangle and
other top of the triangle is guard at
the bottom of the triangle is ordinary
people that the rest of the humanity
after God comes the artist and the
artist is leading humanity into higher
existence he started out with scenes
from Lauriston villages and then he
developed his style into a complete
obstruction and it was fairly early so
the dates 1913 and this is a very
typical painting or kandinsky very
vibrant and for this abstract shapes and
forms he was obsessed with black holes
for example we don't see one in this one
but he had all kinds of interest then
inspiration for his paintings
another blow writer artist you can see a
few it's mostly abstract art
in its apes in these cases so circles
and but there is by playing there is I
thought our proposal of an airplane
futurism is not really a very important
style for the development of
contemporary art but it was a style that
was really interested in showing
movement and the future is artists often
now they admired fast cars and machinery
but here is the addy in fulfillment of a
person that is running and this is
really cute it's at the outbreak of
albright-knox museum in Buffalo dynamism
mobile dog on a leash so how do you show
movement in a picture that doesn't move
well pictures were developed partially
because of it what my britches
experiment
around 1880 when he had a device called
sooo practice all you could show retired
pictures that he had taken it in a
sequence like a horse running for
example resource and then when you
rotate them you get the sense of
movement and that then became movies
film that we you know we go to the
movies today but in two-dimensional form
without the moment
well perhaps this is the best you can do.
Back to Picasso, Guernica is one of Picassos
most well-known paintings and it was
created in response to the bombing of
Guernica
is a Bosque country country village in northern Spain and it
was bombed by German Italian warplanes
because the Spanish nationalist forces
asked it to be bombed and there was a civil war in Spain and the
nationalist forces we're on one
side of the Civil War and then they
asked allies to destroy this village.
A couple of interesting things in this
it made a world tour after it was painted,
it became a tool for attracting
attention to the Spanish Civil War
worldwide and the horrors of war in
general. You can analyze it in many ways
and many analyses have been made
what does he mean? Why is there a bull and a horse
there are some of the central figures in
it. The sword at the bottom in in the
hand the broken sword maybe that this
the villages defeated under the
oppression of the Italians and Spanish
national forces and Germans, but when
asked about the bull and the horse
Picasso said that the bull is a bull, the  horse is a horse
I paint the objects for what they are. So
he refused to explain what they mean but
he uses Bulls as an alter ego many times
in his etchings and he keeps
going back to bull of course
bullfighting in Spain they are
well-known, kind of a
beautiful bloody dance that ends up in
the death of the bull but it's a
ceremonial show and tradition
and so Spain bull, bulls in ancient art
as Syrian, and Babylonia art would be symbols
of male fertility and Picasso
certainly puts the bull like the Minotaur
in Crete the type of rapist
type of bull into lots of sexual
situations in his etchings on his
paintings and and he seems to identify
with this bull because his love life is
well documented that he has,
he had many wives, and he had several
mistresses, and they were not always
treated that Well.
There is a move called surviving Picasso. I Haven't  seen it because
I will not like him anymore if I saw that.
But anyway you can be a brilliant
artist and you don't need to be a saint.
So he always see people struggle against
operation that various artists struggle
he said something about him having
struggled against the reaction and death
of art all his artistic life so you could see
this as historical and the light bulb
there in the ceiling or in the sky
could be a sign that could be hope but
they are also scholars that have said
something about bombs of some kind of
reference to bomb because bomba and the
light bulb and bomb, and the village
being bombed let's skip a little bit
over the ocean Harlem Renaissance Jacob
Lawrence the migration series was also
called the new Negro movement and it took
place in the nineteen twenties and went
on for several decades there were
artists and scholars and musicians that
we're part of this movement and Jacob
Lawrence is a well known one. He painted
this one it's about the great
migration north by Southern African
Americans and there was also Remar Bearden
the network about southern experience
and he served in World War II studied in
Sorbonne in Paris and was part of a
group called the spiral that then later
was involved in human rights so there
were several very very learned artists
writers and musicians were part of this
this movement, and they drew a lot of
subject matter from African-american
experience. but you see some figures are
very stylized. Ramar
Bearden did collage Jacob Lawrence did
this beautiful paintings back to Europe
and a little bit into Russia, Kashmir
Malevich he was a pioneer of geometric
abstract art and originator of
avant-garde suprematism
in Russia he was he was he was a Polish
Catholic and in 1915 he published a
treaty a little booklet from cubism to
suprematism. He is mostly known for his
black squares, and when he died he was
buried in a grave where there's a black
square as the tombstone, but here
we see eight red rectangles and this is
actually a political painting it looks
like completely abstract art for art's
sake now no story but it does have a
story because it is the troops of the
Revolution the Russian Revolution the
Reds against the whites and the working
classes against ruling classes the
Czars and the landowners so here is
it's a diagonal composition so it's
the advanced meant of the  red
troops and they're going to win so at
this time
Russian suprematist painters
believed in the revolution but later now
they were persecuted by Stalin the then
usually went to exile and Russian arts
went into a completely different
direction namely
this kind of social realism that depicted
workers in a very figurative
realistic almost photo realistic way in
some instances so propaganda art that
everybody but you can see what it is not
some intellectual stuff such as these
red rectangles even though they
symbolize russian troops. Of the Reds
He painted black squares on white backgrounds and he went
as far as white-on-white and now if you
look at a painting like this in a
hostile people that work in this vein
how far can you go
canvases have been turned so you have to
show people the background over the
backside of a painting so that's been
done, canvases have been slashed so there have been
canvases with the little wounds in them so
to say
slashed with a knife white-on-white, well
you can't go more abstract minimalistic
in painting than this well of course
take away the rectangle and then you
just how a canvas and nothing else and
that's been done that so 1918 it was
already done about a hundred years ago.
Constantin Brancusi is modernist
sculptor he was born in Romania but he
lived in France most of his life, he was
interested in universalizing form
and he was interested in what's most
modernist we're interested in namely the
purity and refinement of art. He started
out with more references to nature and
two people and the human body but then
later he started taking out details and
going for this really really simple and
beautiful
shapes in his sculptures he did many of
this story of a young man it's a series
this particular one is in Henson museum
in Washington D.C. It's a small sculpture
and when we look at art in reproductions
this used to be slides, but now its
digital images it's often deceiving
because this is not very big but if it's
blown up on the screen it it perhaps
looks larger than it is and it's wood
and rock and metal. The torso is the
crotch of the man usually torso is
the  upper part of the body but it's
chopped off part of a person's body the
middle body so the legs are coming out
and then there is the belly and it's this
very simplified form
form that he uses he has distorted it into
the essential which is something that
was the goal of the modernists take away
 the inessential and distal
everything to the essential. Newborn
some of his sculptures are still at this
point
biomorphic so looks maybe like an embryo
could this could be the bottom of a baby
or it could be something to do with the
head so you can read all kinds of things
into it but it's a very simple pure form
and shape in this sculpture Brancusi
was interested in
non-european part and especially in 
cyclodic sculptures that were very
popular during the modernist Hayday because
modernist artists like to collect them
and they were so popular that people
started faking them. They are very simple
sculptures from other Cycladic islands
in Greece
from thousands of years ago.
DADAism was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War one
it was an international movement that
was begun by a group of artists and
poets associated with the Cabaret
Voltaire in Zurich Switzerland. There was
an important branch of Berlin DADA in Germany
as well
rejected reason and logic prizing
nonsense, irrationality, and intuition and
in addition to being anti-war, DADA
was also anti-bourgeois and had political
affinities with the radical left. Bourgeois
policy is the middle class in France
that's where the name comes from the
burgers or  the good burghers of say
Holland in the olden times, and those
would be merchants and doctors or
lawyers and typically the upper middle
class now it would be somebody who lives
in a subdivision has a SUV and the
biggest TV ever, and probably has a good job
so they were artists that thought of
themselves as rebels and avant-garde and
they rejected this bourgeois or
middle-class values they thought that
life and the world are
irrational there was no reason anymore,
because if something as horrible as
world war one could happen where people
were gassed and there was slaughtered in
the trenches it was a very cruel war
if something like that can happen then
there's no reason in the world people
are not rational. Rational beings would
not do that to each other they
would be solving conflicts with
diplomacy instead.
and God also goes right out of the
window because if there is a God, God wouldn't
allow that and if God is omnipotent
surely he would do something to stop it.
the DADA poems here is an example and
performances were very bizarre and very
nonsensical they don't make any sense
and that's the irrationality of the world
the world doesn't make any sense anymore
so  art must reflect society in that
art doesn't make any sense either. Marcel Duchamp was not at DADA ist per say
he was causally associated with the DADA ists, 
he is maybe the most important figure in
twentieth-century art in early 20th
century art because he is still
influential. he was very influential for
post-modernism and he still influential.
he was influential for conceptual art he
was influential for it say
photography dressing up as
some fictional characters or emulating
old paintings he started the dressing up
trend, he didn't make that many works but
the works that he made we're very
interesting. Now Fountain is a really
controversial piece because it raises
the question is it art? According to Duchamp
a female friend sent him one of his DADAist
female friends send him a plumbing
fixture as sculpture and it is
found object it's a ready-made Duchamp
put it into a show he was on the
board of society of independent artists
in New York and they put up a show which
was not supposed to be a juried show
but it was a show where anybody could
bring any art and it would be shown and
it was it was a rebel act geared towards
jury it shows where the so called
academic artist or artists were part of
the established art world or well-known
and opinionated they would then during
the pieces that go in and the DADAist type of
art would not have gotten in, but he put
it in the show, it gets rejected even
though everybody said that it shouldn't
be rejected because anybody could bring
anything. What does he do to it well
he puts it on the side and he puts a
signature into it, a
pseudonym R. Mutt and he dates it So, the
question is, is it art and of course now
several doctoral dissertations and books
have been written about this because
it's a philosophical question.Art is what an
artist does says Andy Warhol so if an
artist decides to find an object or
somebody sends him an object and he decides
that yeah this is art and put it into a
show put his name on it then he's chosen
the piece and therefore when the
art world accepts it as art. Then it
becomes art and it stays art. There are
seventy replicas from this from the
1960's and they were all sanctioned by
and approved by Duchamp himself when
the piece was rejected from the show
resigned from the board of the Society
of independent artists so he didn't want
to be associated with them anymore
because he thought they were insincere.
but he went on to make other ready made that we will talk about closely or in more
detail
about in another presentation about
Duchamps work. This is cheap postcard
that Duchamp had
of Mona Lisa and Mona Lisa is now a
very iconic painting we have seen it on
t-shirts and coffee mugs and mousepads
 so that we don't even look at the
painting because it's so etched into popular
culture and into our brain, anybody who's
ever heard anything about art probably knows what Mona Lisa is so he takes this
iconic painting and he makes fun of it
So he pretty much thrashes the canon of
these great artists that have been so admired so his question is why is it so great
and are they really so great, and of course he has a sense of humor his sense of humor
is a very affable man that had a great
sense of humor so it's also a joke and
then what does he do to it he doesn't do
much to it so not much skill goes into
this effort goes into this work of his,
he puts a mustache and a beard on her
and then he put these letters there that are
short for Elle a chaud au cul, she is hot for  it, she has a hot ass and she wants
to get laid. Now that's kind of a little
bit like we see later in post-modernism
in that postmodernist philosophers
especially went against the Western
tradition and they question the Western
tradition and the great narratives and
all these iconic works and the authors
of those works at that often we're dead
white males so in that way Duchamp
was a Pioneer
in questioning hisstory and narrative. Hannach Hoch was one of the main figures in DADA
she was part of Berlin DADA and this is
Cut with the dada kitchen knife Through the
last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany it is a collage that
criticizes that Weimar republic and is
seen as the originator of photo-montage
which is when you cut up photographs and
piece together an artwork out of them
and she uses a collage technique a lot as well.
like in this one when there are different letters
and phrases and pictures cut from our
contemporary magazines and pasted onto a two-dimensional surface and that makes
a collage. Collage is cut and paste. An
important American artists Alfred Stieglitz
the Flatiron Building
photograph from 1903 Alfred Stieglitz
had an amazing career he had all together
for 55 years of photography and he was
married to the well-known artist Georgia
O'Keeffe and apart from being a
brilliant photographer he mentored Avante Garde artists and made it possible
for them to come to the USA and have shows in New York. Georgia O'Keefe his wife did
lots of paintings of New York skyscraper
so they have the same subject here, it's done
in different ways but modernist photo
and modernist painting Georgia O'Keeffe
did flowers, skyscrapers New Mexico
landscapes and she is often referred as
to mother of North
American modernism. She is very well known of her flower paintings and the flower
paintings look a lot like vagina's or
female genitalia but he was she was
always saying that this was not the case
and she wanted to go away from this kind
of Frueidan  she wanted people not to
interpret her paintings in a
freudian  fashion in that they are
female sex organs but they really look
like that because they are close up flowers
with these petals and in the middle
that looks like going into the female womb.
So in 1924 there about she moved into
more representational way of painting
whereas her earlier work was more abstract and
she also painted New Mexico landscapes and
skulls flowers there I'm a
painter honestly I tend to give short
shrift to architecture but we should not
forget modernist architecture and
post-modern architecture and
architecture such as Frank Gehry's
Guggenheim Bilbao and what he's done in
Seattle and Los Angeles so all that is
part of the 20th, important part of 
twentieth century art. Modernist
architecture is very simple usually and it uses rectangles basic forms
what what's the most basic form cubist
use cube well their paintings didn't
actually have a rectangles like
Kazimir Malevich they had this faceted
geometric analytical edgy shapes in
them but cube and rectangle would be
perhaps the simplest you could argue
that it's a circle is simpler or
triangle is simpler and but I would think
that cube wins as being the most simple
and basic element of artistic design
this is part of Adolf Loos' Steiner House in  
Vienna Austria it's an early
example of modernist architecture.
Le Corbusier was a Swiss French
architect he was a designer he was painter he was a writer, and he was also
a very prolific urban planner he was
concerned about people's living
circumstances in crowded cities are so
he came came up with for example a plan
for a contemporary city that had three
million inhabitants that he did in 1922
and he also worked in India helping to
organize a city to be more friendly so
he keep cared about people. This art was
not snotty art for art's sake but he was
very concerned about the space that we
occupied and and where our everyday life
takes place and how architecture is such
a vital part of it
Villa Savoye uses ____ which are these little
reinforced concrete
columns or not so little  the columns
that you see the lowest tier of the
the house and those ____ made it
possible for the Architect to design a free facade
an open floor plan and then large
windows that show a
beautiful view from the inside you get a
beautiful view of the gardens and the
nature around the building and then the
top there is a rooftop garden so
all those elements are in this house and
he or she was very influential in
these designs in that they immediately
where popular in lots of countries
especially in
and Europe there is an architect Alvar Aalto
Finland where I was born that in the
the thirties design a lot of buildings
that influenced by design of Le Corbusier
and other European
modernists. In Marseilles Le Corbusier
made a eutopian apartment block a
utopian means utopia is a place like
imaginary place where everything is ok
the Sun always shines there's always
water this beautiful greenery
everybody's happy everybody has enough
food, everybody has enough money, that he
wanted everybody to be able to live in a
nice place in an apartment that has a
lot of light and it's not too big, not
too small how much do you need you don't
need to have a mansion, but you need to
be comfortable. And that's the
kind of basic tenant in his designing
this apartment blocks that they need to
be comfortable they need to give up
people that live in them a happy
environment to go on with their life
the Chapel Notre-Dame Du Haut in Ron Champ France. Its
massive its biomorphic it is not so
strictly geometric as some of his other
designs its not so heavily relying on a
straight lines and Straight planes and
rectangles and squares but it's more
romantic perhaps or more
looking like something softer and out of
nature. It's made out of concrete and
stone and the stone to stone comes from
came from a chapel was destroyed in World
War two and that was in the same place
The floor follows the natural slope of the
hill towards the altar there are
clerestory windows that bring in this
magical light, and there is also a white
stone from _____
that is used for the for the 
altar to its a very beautiful place with
stained glass and beautifully placed
windows and it's supposed to give you
the spiritual experience like the Gothic
cathedral's did with the stained glass
and going out
up in the sky told Sky going up in
height and that would then to lift your
soul and and make you feel that
spiritual connection with a higher power
in in this case God. Frank Lloyd Wright
perhaps the most famous American
architect Falling Water kind of eccentric
man but more about that later Falling Water was a house that
Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Edgar Kaufmann who owned
Kaufmann  department store and
this house is in rural Pennsylvania.
They discussed the house, Kaufmann was upset about
about Wright wanting to put the house
on top of the falls on top of the falls instead of below the
falls but Wright wanted to give the
experience of the Cascades and he wanted
to anchor the House into nature. He was also
influenced by Japanese architecture and
perhaps that is somewhat evident in
this design it's it's often written
about as maybe the best house in North
America or at least the twenty-ninth
best host ever designed in North America.
Frank Lloyd Wright was rather short so
it's it's not like I mean it's not high
in the ceiling many spaces where I've
been I lived in Buffalo on there were
lots of houses by him that they were
kinda low but that's perhaps because of
his height and because he also like this
elements that we're kinda like stacked
and he tiered this
these rectangular elements to look like
the waterfalls, to mimic the waterfalls, and
the stone of course the masonry is to be
in tune with the rock of the landscape.
it said about this house that Kaufmann was kind of badgering Wright to do the design and
do the drawings and Wright lied to him and said yeah it's ready but he hadn't done
anything so Kaufmann said well okay
I'll be there in two hours so we look at
the drawings and writes assistants were
horrified they were like oh no now you know
we don't have anything but Wright sat
down at his drawing table and calmly
drew those those plans in two hours which was
the time that it took to get there they
had lots of arguments about different
things and there were engineering
problems with this with this house and
it's being repaired since and restored
since also the masonry work had to be
redone again a while Wright was still
alive because he wasn't happy with it
and they were fighting with the
construction company and some point
Wright said to Kaufmann
just give me do my designs back if
you're not going to do what I want you to do
but finally it was there and it's a very
very impressive building. It is what is called a
cantilever structure and that
allowed more rooms and it's made of
reinforced concrete and then it has the
masonry work the Kaufmann's wanted to
have separate bedrooms and they wanted
to have a guest room and they also
wanted to have a room for visitors so the cantilever
structure allows for all these spaces
for them and their guests. Vera Mukhina
a Russian sculptor, sculptress this
is Worker and Collective farm woman
sculpture from the Soviet Pavillion
Paris Universal Exhibition. 
Russian constructivism this is actually
not really Russian constructivism but
Russian constructivism was a movement
during this time until now the social
realism and we have a taste of that the
taste of that took over because here
workers that are celebrated  they are
the new power and they are the ones that
are going to rule in the Soviet Union. Well we know that the didn't go well in
the end because communism is not a
system that really appeals to human
nature is in tune with human nature
because we want to be rewarded for what
we do
according to what we deserve and not
share everything with everybody
perhaps so, and it kills initiative, and
there were other problems too like
oppression and it just wasn't a good
system. Nobody wanted to do anything
because we don't know if you if you
break a track down it's not your
problem to fix
it anyway so social realism becomes the
style in Soviet Union book before that
they were supremacist artists like
El Lissitzky that made these spaces
like the Proun Room. Proun
doesn't have an extra definition. This is in the tradition of Malevich using geometric shapes and
here the room is this is a
reconstruction but it's the station
where one changes from painting into
architecture so they were quite
ambitious in modernist way but when they
handed out by stalin and the race
of social realism in Soviet Union they left.
But their influence was pretty strong
across Europe and elsewhere this is
Piet Mondrian's composition with yellow red and
blue from 1927. Mondrian actually this is
just a footnote but he actually painted
flowers that's maybe a little known fact
that these didn't always sell so well so
he has some gorgeous paintings, some amaryllis lillies, some 
watercolors really breathtaking he was a
contributor to_____ the style which is a dutch art
movement that started around 1917
artists, and architects came together in the
steel and he developed this non
representational art form called neoplasticism and of course the goal is pure
abstraction he later in life lived in
Paris and that's where he had the
freedom to really intellectually perfect
his theories and his paintings he was
interested in philosophy which was kind
of new age religion that was popular
mixed religions that were popular at the time and
during the turn of the century around
1900 he had philosophical aspirations as
well and wrote about art.
composition that refers to music again
yellow red and blue primary colors, and
then square and rectangles the most
basic shapes or art or design
can you go any simpler, you probably can't.
Schroder House an example of rationalism
in architecture this is still a
modernist building but the label or Sub
label is rationalism unit 312 was a
Dutch architect that built this house
for Mrs. Schroeder and her three children and
they worked closely together to achieve
a building that was exactly as Mrs
Schroeder wanted it open space lots of
light coming in different planes of
rectangular shapes and forms, some parts
of primary colors but otherwise a very
toned down palate it over white grey and
black. Interior of Schroder house with the
huge windows maybe a little bit more
comfortable but the chairs iconic you
can buy it on the internet you can buy
the real thing or you can buy a little
mini thing,  a reproduction of this chair but
looks like a really cool place with wood
hardwood floors open floor plan and and
huge windows with lots of light. Bauhaus
 shortly about Bauhaus
was a German School of Design and it
functioned until 1933 when the Nazis
finally closed it. Nazi's were against
contemporary art and modern design
modernism and they were also against
expressionism and Hitler used terms
like ________ which means degenerate
art, so all this was somehow not in the
vein they liked old art and they wanted to
have art
art that it looked in the soviet realism
is something that you could recognize. People
look like people, landscapes look like
landscapes hopefully something
heroic that that shows off the Aryan
race and the policies of the ideology of
Hitler under German Reich.
Bauhaus means construction house, and it was a school where all art
design architecture, topography, graphic
design, industrial design, painting
furniture, you know all about would come
together and be equal. It functioned
environment in this early in from 1919
to that fateful year in 1933 and here's an
example some of the design Mariana
Brandt coffee and tea set was made by
Bauhaus.
Some British Andrew Moore's
recumbent figure sculpture this is
obviously a female figure and it was
made from native stone for the house
where it was located. So it's a
site-specific sculpture originally made
for certain location nearby materials
surrealism, here is a
film still from a film by Louis Bunuel
Un Chien Andalou
Andalusian Dog she's going to have her eye
cut with the razor blade so it's a very
disturbing live film and Bunuel's Films 
are really surreal and
bizarre there's one called the discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie we're just
suddenly a flock of sheep in the living
room when the bourgeoisie policy when the
middle class hostess is entertaining and
here we have a very good special effects
so they're probably used an ache for the
lighting but it it looks really creepy
in the in the movie. Salvador Dali
perhaps the best-known surrealist artist
and he cultivated very eccentric persona
he had ant eaters as pets.
pictures of him walking his Anteaters in
Paris and the cats are flying across the
room and he had this moustache and just
generally wanted to be different he at
some point
print by delayed at some point he was so
arrogant because he was very successful
that he signed  empty papers like
papers where there was nothing he just
put his signature there because he
thought his signatures it was a joke and
a gesture that his signature was already
worked so much that he didn't even need
to do the art well what happened what
course of course some people got
their hands on them I started making fakes on
them
so there are a few new number of fake
Dali's so if we're going to buy or make
sure its original and not one of those
that were signed by him but then
somebody faked something on it.
Birth of Liquid Desires. Salvador Dali is 
technically brilliant his painting are
very detailed. He joined the surrealist group in 1929 and at
the same time he he started a
relationship with Gala Eloard that
was his mistress and wife and was very
beautiful she had lots of lovers and allegedly
Dali has this condition called
_____ where you want to watch your
wife have sex with other men  so
there was this warrioristic to their troubled
relationship but there were really
devoted to each other and Dali used Gala as a model
all the time. From that time is this
painting birth of liquid desires couple
of years later and it's been analyzed in
the following fashion that it has the
Story of William Tell.
Dali had a troubled relationship as a
kid with his father and William Tell is
a story about a Swiss boy that stands
next to a tree and he has an apple on
his head and his father has a bow and
arrow and he shoots that apple off his head and
hits the tree through that Apple so it's
kinda parental assault. So the figures
this father and son and maybe there is a mother as well. Then there are
references such as the artist _____
then there are shapes that may be
Catalonian landscape shapes.
the Apple is beef, and that could be
something to do with castration it's
very troubled relationship with being a
man and and being a son and the forms
are biomorphic in that they remind you
of something kinda like that happens in
forms in nature. The Persistence of
Memory by Salvador Dali. This is perhaps about
sleep, because this form or shape or
character that has eyelashes in the
middle of it and it's sort of a self
portrait but he's asleep so he's
dreaming and surrealists we're very
fascinated by dreams what happens when
you dream and what's the what's the
difference between dream and
reality or why do we have all these
strange dreams
why do our brains work that way, and this is also about space on time because they're
still watch and this was a time when Dali
painted lots of objects they usually are
hearts
painted them to be kind of liquid and soft and there are ants, and the ants stand for
decay and it being eaten
by ants. Max Ernst he was a surrealist
that was
German but he lived in France for a
while and then he was arrested in France
during World War Two but he was released
then he was arrested by Gestapo
and he fled to the US with the help of
Becky Guggenheim that helped lots of
expert at artists and  she had a
gallery showed them in New York he was married
to Becky Guggenheim for a little while
but then married
________ Fireside Angel, some scholars have read
references to the war to this painting
the horrors of the war the second world
war
some suggest that it is fireside you know the home is the Heart, that's where you cook
your food and where everybody hangs out
and that should be a safe place but it
isn't because this is like a monstrous
monstrous angel but there is also
something about Max Ernst's
childhood that could have influenced this
painting because he painted lots of
monstrous birds, and he called them lop lops, and
they figure in many of his paintings and
the Birds derived from  when he
was a child and he was in forest in
Germany and he was afraid of all the
possible monsters and their animals and
demons and darkness of pine trees and
you know the roots and whatever
could be in German forests could excite
the imagination imagination a sensitive child. Great Depression photography, Dorothea Lange's
Migrant Mother, just as a side
note here
really emotionally powerful
picture that has become iconic about
a mother that probably doesn't know what's going to be for dinner and the two
children then she has to protect and
take care of. American Gothic by Grant
Wood is is a painting that has been
parodized and appropriated many many
times people have different spin on it
it's kind of funny painting he was
inspired by the house the Gothic looking
 house there's a window that looks
like a window from a gothic cathedral
and he said that he wanted to paint the
kind of people that would live in that
kind of house the models are the artist
sister and her family dentist she's
wearing this colonial print apron which
is like nineteenth century americana
type of garment, he's holding a
pitchfork and they look very serious so
they are people that work hard, there is this
hard labor and domesticity this whole
being together being a couple working
for a living and then she is very prim
and proper with the _____ at her collar and
the beautiful scalloped apron. Frida Kahlo a mexican artistic
was married unhappily to the Mexican
mural artist Diego Rivera Rivera the two
Frida's this probably influenced by a
couple of paintings that Frida Kahlo saw in the Louvre of two sisters but here she
makes the sisters into a self-portrait
and it's the first large scale work by her.
Sort of European style dress on the right. Her father was German and her mother was Spanish or Indian but then the
hearts were autobiographical as well they
refer to all these surgeries and medical
problems so the blood that she had to
shared that she had a street car
accident she was in a terrible wreck in
a streetcar when she was young and that
resulted in life long suffering and lots
of problems I mean she had to spend a
lot of time in corset,  it in a cast
almost and couldn't very well so all the
suffering and we know the fragility of
the human body and you have this you
know these things that could go wrong, and also the heart could be beating
for Diego because that relationship had
its ups and downs and she desperately
wanted to have children but she couldn't
because of the injuries that she had in
the street car accident and Diego was unfaithful
so she also might be pining for
him
Francis Bacon Head Surrounded by sides of Beef. This is the Pope in the electric
chair why would Francis Bacon paint the
pope in the electric chair? Well Francis Bacon's paintings are
kind of crude anyway but he probably is criticizing the Catholic
Church because of the church not
approving of his lifestyle he was openly
gay and there are interviews where he says he
comes right out with it seems like I
like men and he likes them rough he
liked Street types you know Street
almost like prostitutes are kind of gangster
type guys ruff types
some that hang out in bars and get into bar fights
and make a living by some not very
respect for means in a respectful way
and of course my Catholic Church
wouldn't have anything to do with that 
especially at the time because this was
1954.
Mortality The pope was not immortal
he's sitting in the chair so he's being
executed and then he has slabs of bacon, this carcas hanging on both sides
may have been influenced by paintings by
Shyam Sadeen that painted a lot of flesh and
meat but he also said that he was always
so he was always fascinated by meat
especially when he was a kid and he went
into butchers shops and he saw different
kinds of slices of meat so it looks very
painful but this mortality. We all end up  as corpses
eventually. and the painting is
influenced by the Velazquez Baroque
painting that shows Pope Innocent and
Pope Innocent doesn't look innocent at
all in fact there is another painting by
Velazquez Pope Innocent and his son and
if you are the Pope you're supposed to be celebate, and 
 you're not supposed to have a son
and Velazquez is painting the pope's face as really kind of he looks devious Jackson
Pollock action painting. Now abstract
expressionism was a tremendously
important movement in the US.
and Jackson Pollock perhaps was most
energetic representative of Abstract
expressionism and he developed his style
action painting his early work is a
little bit murky and there are subtle
landscaping their little they strive to
abstraction and they have lots of browns
and some black in them it was an
interesting but then he was introduced
the liquid paint in 1936 at an
experimental workshop in New York City
by a Mexican muralist and he possibly was influenced by
James Sobil as well he said
that those paintings made an impression
on him, so there could be different
influences but he started to drip paint
make these layered compositions of just
swirls of paint and they look very
dynamic in real life and they have
structure some depth to it too
in pre-production maybe they don't look
as good they are very impressive if
you stand in front of one and they're
large scale as you can see from what
he's doing so he started dripping
resin based
paint he was married to ________ that
kind of nursed him because he was nursed
emotionally and physically took care of
him because he was a raging alcoholic
most of his life and he died at 44 in
a drunk driving accident he
crashed He may have been bipolar some
scholars say but he was certainly a
genius of kind and very influential
artist.
Here is autumn rhythm these have movement, they are dynamic, they have
structure to them and they have all these
layers it's almost like calligraphy
beautiful painting. Lee Krasner was a
little bit and the shadow of Jackson
Pollock because he was too really famous
one but she was a very accomplished
artist herself this is The Seasons this 
is still abstract expressionism you can
see some fruit perhaps and some biomorphic and
natural forms greenery on some kind of
fruit. Willem de Kooning was an interesting artists he Dutch, he crossed the ocean to come to the US as a
stowaway on a freighter so he came by boat
as a stowaway and settled in
Virginia to start with where he made a
living painting houses. Then he moved to New York City and
started doing fine art paintings during
his free time where he was not working.
he was very influenced by artists called
___________lots of artists
abstract expressionist we're influenced
by He started this women's series in 1950
when he met his future wife Melinda
Corning and Abstract Expressionists of
the time didn't like these or some
critics didn't like these women because
this is not abstract you still see the
woman so he kinda broke that rule
being like Jackson Pollocks drip
paintings are completely abstract but
these are not, so that was front upon by
some and when i when you look at the
women they are kind of disturbed look at he head and the eyes, and breasts so she is kind of
nutty and somewhat vicious to look at
the mouth but she's powerful she's big
she has
huge boobs. So she embodies desire, frustration, conflict and maybe pleasure at the same
same time so a very conflicted view of
women and of course now the painterly
style it's extraordinary it slashed its
powerful its aggressive. His later
paintings have been criticized a lot
because he had Alzheimer's he was also
drinking a lot
he said once that he started to do that
because of anxiety and somebody's said
have a little drink and then he
did and he had another one and then it
started but he got alzheimer's and he
was still painting and now of course
dealers want these to be masterpieces so
that they can sell them but the jury's
still out whether they are his best work
or whether they are just something that
he still get painting but they're not as
powerful as earlier work of his. Helen
Frankenthaler abstract expressionist
painter very successful New York art
star of her time that made these gorgeous canvases where she would often use raw canvas and then
pour diluted washes on it to make these
paintings are soft and gorgeous and they
are large-scale paintings she is
described as somebody that was one of the
forerunners of color field painting
color field painting itself is a little
bit later style but she certainly one of
the artists could be early color field
and had an influence on what was to come
after that. There's an anecdote about her
that she was so wealthy that she was she
made a deposit on a house in New York
and then changed her mind and the
deposit was $400,000 well it's very very
rare for any artist to make that
that much money but apparently there has
been some in the history of American Art
color field painting. Mark Rothko is still
technically an abstract expressionist
but he was very influential for color
field painting so again he could be also
become a borderline area of going from
abstract expressionism to a subtitle
color field and then color field
painting that is the style that comes
right after this. He was a Jew that was
born in Russia and then he moved to New
York like so many others. He started out making
representational work they often have
mythological landscape as subject but
then he moved on to make paintings that
had rectangular fields of color. The paintings were called
 multiform and he became
incredibly successful and they had some
spiritual dimension at times. For example there is a Mark Rothko
chapel and that has his paintings and
and they have these fields of color and you are supposed
supposed to meditate and gain some kind
of spiritual connection by looking at
these paintings he was successful for a
while but then he was incredibly
depressed and unfortunately ended up
slashing his wrists, his assistant
found him and he had cut his wrists and
bled to death so there is maybe a dark
side to and we'll talk about that later
because he felt different kind of
lectures and there is one where he talks
about death that painting ought to have
some kind of connection to death.
Abstract expressionist Barnett Newman
against somebody the influence color
field painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis
Man Heroicus and Sublime what is this painting
about? it was his largest canvas at the
time when he released it
and it is red with a couple of stripes
in it well there is its scale it is a Heroic painting
just in terms of its scale. What about
being sublime will the color is so vivid
that if you are confronted with so much
to red the red begins to kind of pull
in and sing to you it begins to vibrate
so you probably have an emotional
response to it, and of course you can think
about red lights passion love something,
blood you lots of things that you can
read into the color red but it is
chromatic abstraction and it may be
influenced by_____ he was a
psychologist or psychiatrist like
Sigmund Freud his idea of the
collective conscious.
How does that work in case of painting
well you can take one color and you
remove it from its context and it becomes different it
becomes part of another world and Newman talked about painting this type of
painting that it's kind of the same as
meeting a person and that sounds quite
_________
That you meet the painting and you
react to it and it will be the same as
meeting a person. You kind of think well
what do I think what kind of vibe do I
get from this and say hello or I don't
know so that's some of the perhaps symbolism
behind this painting and
next time we'll go further into
contemporary art by looking at work of
art like pop art by Andy Warhol and
we'll go as far as to end of the
twentieth Century video arts. Tony 
Ousler we look at lots of other things
in between so stay tuned and keep
reading the book and I will be talking
to you.
