The principle intention of this module is to give students general background knowledge of different cultural forms so that they can have a better understanding of the context in which cultural artefacts are produced and consumed. Key elements specific to specialisms will be examined through specific seminars. Themes will be examined within the context of the lectures as well as providing further insight into the specialist area. The scope of this module is wide and serves as an introductory overview to key aspects of art, design and media history in preparation for further study.
Module - Content
- Topics this module could cover include:
- Introduction to Contextual Studies
- Art in context
- The role of art
- Concepts of high/low art
- Art & the state
- Art, science & religion
- The impact of industry and technology
- New ways of seeing -isms
- Realism, Figuration and Abstraction
- Pop Art and popular culture
- Art as commodity
- Post modernity
- Photography - The camera never lies
- Photography - A new aesthetic
- Photography - national differences in the development of photography
- Formulating the rules of design - from Morris to Bauhaus
- The rise of consumerism
- The digital revolution
- Basic film concepts
- Key developments in cinema
- Function - the function of clothing, fabrics, interior spaces, architecture
- Form - the development of style and notions of era
- Themes, recurring themes, trends
- Development of fabrics, materials, technology
- Digital processes, innovation, smart materials
Monday 26th September 2011
The lecture began with an introduction to the subject and an overview of what will be covered and what was expected from the students.
The module has two main elements:
Contextual Studies - Historical context - who/what/when
Critical Analysis - how/why
The main body of the lecture was on the history of art and began with the quote "On the shoulders of giants" which I understood to mean that our culture and society developed over the years and came from the success or failures of our ancestors.
To understand a society we have to first examine their culture which is reflected by their art.
The earliest form of art is cave art which dates back almost 30000 years.
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| Lascaux cave painting |
The artists used materials found locally to the caves red and yellow ochre, manganese oxide, hematite and charcoal. This also is an indication of the level of technology used at the time because as soon as a rock or piece of charcoal is picked up and used to carry out a task, in this case to draw, it becomes a tool.
These are examples of cave tools found in Arkansas in the Narrows cave. Pieces of stone have been used together grind a substance into a powder traces of red ochre can still be seen on the smaller stones.
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| Steve Carter |
Cave paintings appear to depict the artists day to day life and activities. Animals and hunting scenes are regular themes. These may have been done to educate others about their hunting techniques, they may have wished to record their activities in a form of diary, or, they may have had the need to express themselves.
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| Lascaux cave painting |
The images depicting action were cartoon-like as if the artist did not consider that these scenes required the extra detail, the priority seemed to be to get the message across in a straightforward fashion.
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| lascaux cave painting |
There were examples of very detailed images of animals showing that when time and light allowed the artists had the opportunity to produce realistic portrayal of their surroundings.
Chris then showed a photo of a neolithic figure of a female.
This female was large breasted, wide hipped and well fed. She was shown without a face as if she was a representation of all women instead of a specific individual. This appeared to show that her culture valued women as mothers - she had the strength and physique to produce and rear strong healthy children.
This is at odds with our modern culture where women are sexualized and female celebrities are under pressure to retain their size zero shape.
We looked at another neolithic sculpture - The Lion Man
This is an ivory sculpture depicting a creature which is half man half lion. It is the oldest 'zoomorphic' (animal-shaped) figure found to date. By carbon dating the surrounding material where it was found scientists have determined that it is 32 000 years old. There has been debates about the gender of the figure as it does not have the characteristic large mane of a male lion. It has also been described as 'anthropomorphic' (attributing human characteristics to animals)
References:
arthistoryresources.net
hubpages.com
http://www.stevecarter.com/art/art.htm
http://arkarcheology.uark.edu
http://www.showcaves.com
Monday 3rd October 2011
Looking back on the previous lecture - Culture holds the values of the norms of society - what society thinks is normal.
Egyptian, Roman & Greek
Sumerian (Persian) culture pre-dates Egyptian but there are less artefacts found so is often overlooked.
The Egyptians had an infrastructure which was sufficiently advanced for them to build large technical structures like pyramids and temples.
By comparison at a similar time Stonehenge was built in England. The infrastructure in England at the time was limited making the construction of Stonehenge just as challenging.
Todays infrastructure is electronic.
Pyramids were built to inspire fear, they were designed to make the public feel insignificant compared the Pharaoh. He was portrayed and believed to be a god. He was revered as a god. The architecture of the time reinforced this fear and respect. Pharaoh had to keep the people afraid to maintain power.
Today the queen is seen as important and is treated as important, but not as a god. The recent royal wedding at Westminster Abbey reinforced the historical heritage of the royal family.
The general public no longer believe that the royal family are genetically superior. Previous generations had believed this but there are still myths created daily. Not that the queen is a god but there are still people who believe that we are better than the French and that Britain is a powerful nation.
Permanence V Transience.
A day to day record of normal Egyptians has been lost. Papyrus does not last, clay bricks crumble. They had an oral tradition of story telling. Many cultures were similar, it was not recorded in a permanent way.
When Christians fled to Southern Egypt they took over temples and used them for their own worship. They carved primitive crosses on the original relief. They defaced sculptures which depicted nudity.
There is a myth that the work on temples and pyramids was done by unpaid slaves. In reality the level of craftsmanship could only have been carried out by highly trained professionals.
There is a bust of Queen Nefertiti which has discovered in perfect condition which is on display in Berlin's Altes Museum. This sculpture is a lasting testament to the skill of the sculptors.
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| Queen Nefertiti |
Drawings on papyrus show people side on. The skill to translate 3D to 2D not developed till later.
Bass/low relief carvings gave the illusion of depth.
Each artist had set measurements how to depict the human form. This led to a stylised version of the body. this developed into a science and gave what was believed to be perfect proportions, a regulated perfect person. All the figures appeared the same.
The Egyptians used a style of image and text which is still used today. A large central image surrounded by explanatory text.
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| Priest worshipping Pharaoh as a god |
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| modern myth and worship |
Early Greeks found a way to create sculptures which were anatomically perfect. This led to a style of enhancing the sculptures to achieve their vision of perfection (longer legs etc)
The Parthenon exhibits the same architecture of power which reflects the Greek cultural legacy . It was designed and built to a careful design. Each measurement meant something in its relationship with the outside world. The side view of the building was designed to be the exact proportions of the "golden rectangle" It was also built with slight curves to give the appearance of being straight when viewed from ground level.
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| The Parthanon |
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| Golden Rectangle |
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| Aerial view from google earth |
The Greeks thought more about why we are here and the thoughts of their philosopher are still valued today.
Plutarch - "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled"
Greece was a republic and for the first time people rights were considered.
The Spartans however were a warrior race who valued fighting above all other things. Their system of apprenticing young boys into the army involved their sexual exploitation. This was accepted as the norm within their society.
A modern parallel could be drawn with the sexualisation of young girls by the sales of overtly sexy clothing ranges for very young girls and beauty pageants for very young girls. Both of which are considered as normal in our culture.
The transition from Egyptian to Greek culture can be seen. they did not try to eradicate Egyptian buildings and sculptures. The Greek wall relief was deeper and the sculptures were more lifelike.
The Roman Empire dominated the area for hundreds of years. Their homes were very colourful, every floor had mosaics depicting tales of Greek and Roman myths. The walls were painted as were the sculptures whose eyes were often inlaid with gems. When Pompeii was excavated the walls were found to be covered in sexually explicit graffiti. Roman society was very open about their sexual activity. Later Christians covered or defaced statues they felt to be offensive. There is a notorious statue of Pan having sex with a goat in a museum in Naples which was not unusual at the time, there are many explicit statues still remaining which are by modern standards to extreme for public viewing and are kept for viewing by adults only.
Roman architecture was about the power of the empire not of individual leaders. The Roman hierarchy had extreme power over its citizens. The term 'decimation' comes from a punishment meted out to soldiers for wrong doings. Every tenth man was beheaded on the spot.
Roman busts of emperors and political leaders portray them as brutal, powerful, fierce and evil.
Similarities with modern culture:
Sculptures are designed to portray the characteristics of the person the sculptor or artist wishes to portray. The face shown below is clearly intended to carry a message to his society. Todays politicians are shown in a way which suits the photographer or artist, either to support or undermine their position.
The human form was enhanced by sculptors to show what was considered to be the physical ideal. There are no records of how this affected the regular Greek/Roman citizen. The manipulation of photographic images to remove what are considered to be imperfections by modern photographers is known to affect the way people view themselves. Prompting eating disorders and cosmetic surgery in an attempt to reach the ideal.
Much of our culture today is non permanent consisting of electronic and paper records. It is the unlikely that in 1000 years there will be enough information about us for historians to get a picture of our society. The buildings are built out of insubstantial materials apparently already to be replaced within a set number of years. A lot of consumer items have built in obsolescence and are unlikely to be around for many years.
References:
http://coutureallure.blogspot.com/2010/02/proliferation-of-unrealistic-digitally.html
http://sacrednumber.squarespace.com/design-of-the-parthenon/
http://news.bbc.co.uk
http://www.historyguide.org
Seminar
Whilst we discussed the mornings lecture we made pin hole cameras.
We each had a small container which was covered with black card and sealed with black insulation tape. On one side a large hole was cut in the centre which was covered with tin foil. In the centre of the foil a small pin hole was made.
In the darkroom we cut light sensitive paper to fit inside the box opposite the pin hole and sealed the box completely. The pin hole was covered and the box taken outside. The pin hole was open for 12seconds and recovered.
The box was taken back into the darkroom and opened. The paper was placed in a tray of developer for 30seconds, for 1minute in a stopbath, 3 minutes in fixative and then 20 minutes in the wash.
My camera was not successful. The paper was very overexposed and just went black. Possible causes - too long exposure, too large pin hole. unfortunately there was no time for a retest as I had had to dismember my box to get the paper out in the darkroom. I had been so concerned about light leakage I had sealed it tight. The dim red light in the darkroom was not conducive to delicately unwrapping all the tape.
I enjoyed the seminar and hope to try this out again especially after seeing the results obtained by some of my classmates.
Monday 10th October 2011
Chris began the lecture with the information about a useful resource for our research
http://arthistoryresources.net/
The Romans brought infrastructure the countries they occupied not just physical structures and roads but government and communications.
The Christians were a small cult who were persecuted from the start. Egyptian Christians had to flee south and it is said that Roman Christians were put to the lions.
When their emperor converted to Christianity (who when) the Romans became monotheistic (worshipped one god) from worshipping many gods.
Roman empire was overstretched and was weak. Rome itself was sacked by the Gauls, Vandals, Visigoths and the Moors. This lead to the retreat from areas by the Romans leaving a vacuum behind. The infrastructure and military threats also left, leaving the people without direction. This was the start of the "dark ages" People forgot the skill to make metal. They had an oral tradition and this was too complicated to pass on. People lived in small communes, living off the land. There was no trade because they lived simply, provided for themselves and had no need for anything else. There was no art because there was no need. There was no slaves to transport stones and no paid artisans.
The Church became central for art and all art of this period is religious. The art produced was sexually repressed compared with the openness of previous eras. Previously art had promoted the Pharaoh/state as all powerful, it then became like advertising - it was selling religion as a product. The Vatican became, and remains, very powerful financially.
The Roman Empire split.
Byzantine - eastern, turkish
Gothic - northern Europe.
Byzantine pictures were primitive as skills had been lost. The art was produced by monks rather than time served craftsmen.
Manuscripts were illustrated and copied by the monks. A famous example of this is the book of Kells which has been kept at Trinity College, Dublin for the past 350years.
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| Four symbols of the Evangelist from the book of Matthew |
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| The reconstruction of Jerusalem Temple |
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
― Pablo Picasso
Giotto paintings still had faces side on.
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| The betrayal of Judas |
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| St John the Baptist as Angel of the Desert |
Christians merged ideas with pagans - Christmas is at the time of the festival of the Green Man. There are other religious festivals that coincide.
Islamic art began as figurative but changed when it was feared that the pictures themselves were in danger of becoming idols. The use of symbolic art removed the risk of idolatry.
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| Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation ; leaf from a copy of the Majmac al-tawarikh ("Compendium of Histories"), ca. 1425 |
There is no real record of other forms of art of this period. 'High' art was kept and carefully looked after, 'low' art was not valued and thrown away.
The Church was the only organisation with the money to commission art.
As art techniques developed artists learned from others and the paintings became more sophisticated. Raphael was sent as a young man to be apprenticed to Perugino who was a well respected artist of that time. Raphael also studied the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. His work exhibited an understanding of perspective.
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| Raphael - The Betrothal of the Virgin |
In 2001 David Hockney carried out a study into the techniques of 15th century artists. His work was shown on film and in a book. He concluded that the artists used technology to help them produce their work. He believed that the camera lucida, the camera obscura and convex mirrors all could have been used in some way to assist the artists. His findings were ground-breaking and were not well received be everyone. Hockney concedes that his opinions have been attacked by the mainstream art world that has complained that "for an artist to use optical aids would be 'cheating'; that somehow I was attacking the idea of innate genius". As a practising artist himself, his response is persuasive: "optics would have given artists a new tool with which to make images that were more immediate, and more powerful". Hockney concludes that this does not "diminish their achievements. For me, it makes them all the more astounding".
James Hall of the Independant states "But Secret Knowledge is essentially a farrago of nonsense, non-sequiturs and half-truths which should be consigned to the occult section of bookshops. Hockney believes that between 1420-30, thanks to optical devices, northern European artists suddenly started to produce "photographic-looking" pictures, thus instituting a shift towards greater naturalism. An obvious objection is that the portraits of Van Eyck and Campin are pin-sharp, and all the devices Hockney uses produce blurred images. Early glass was murky, so projected images must have been abstract."
As society developed and people congregated into cities, infrastructure developed and wealthy people such as land owners were able to commission their own art. The artworks still remained mainly religious. Artists such as Hieronymous Bosch produced large highly detailed paintings that their owner could show off to important visitors.
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| the outer door of The Garden of Earthly Delights - Bosch |
His portrayal of Heaven, Earth and Hell was allegorical as was much of the art of this period. The paintings are full of small scenes which are packed together to form the whole picture. When faced with a scene like this the viewers would be captivated by the detail and the rich owner would be proud of their possession.
Another early Netherlandish painter was Bruegel whose most famous painting was The Tower of Babel. Unusually for the time, Bruegel also painted ordinary people going about their ordinary business.
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| The Bird Trap - Bruegel |
Van Eyck painting Giovanni Arnolfini and his Bride.
This painting at first sight seemed to be a painting of a newly married couple, possibly the wife is pregnant. There was a fashion at the time to hold the clothing in this manner not just whilst pregnant.
There are many symbols in the painting:
Dog - loyalty
Removal of shoes - sacred
Fruit - wealth
He is dressed as a priest - blessing
Red fabric - passion
Brush - a good housewife
Had this painting been commissioned because she was pregnant it might have been because there was a 50-50 chance she would die in childbirth at this time.
It is possible that this painting was commissioned after she had died. He is wearing black signifying mourning and the symbols were a testament to his wife.
Art tells us a story, artists put clues and symbols in their paintings for the viewer to decode but it's not always possible to decode them all. Some meanings have been lost in history.
An example of a painting containing signs and symbols is The Ambassadors by Holbein.
The painting shows two men who were sent to try and stop Henry VIII from leaving the church in Rome and becoming a protestant.
The symbols:
A lute with broken string - discord
The globe showing the world upside down
Skull on the floor - death
A crucifix partly hidden behind the curtain to the left
A Lutheran hymn book - possible plea for religious harmony
The artist appears to be saying they have forgotten what is important. It is about God, not who pays.
By digital manipulating the painting the skull is shown below.
References
http://secretlexicon.blogspot.com/2011/02/ambassadors-by-hans-holbein.html
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-the-ambassadors
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-van-eyck-the-arnolfini-portrait
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/
http://www.paintingall.com/Early-Netherlandish-Painter-Hieronymus-Bosch-Oil-Paintings/?page=3
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Knowledge-Rediscovering-Techniques-Masters/dp/0500237859
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/secret-knowledge-by-david-hockney-748424.html
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/raphael.html
http://www.islamispeace.org.uk/itm.php?id_top=27
http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/islamic_mo_full/
http://www.stjohnscanberra.org/st_johns_icon
http://agnolobronzino.org/painting-Giotto-Judas-Betrayal-44332.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/67884
http://www.enotes.com/topic/Medieval_art
http://vclass.mgt.psu.ac.th/~parinya/MM/artlessons/g_byzantine.html
http://www.medievalscript.com/2007/05/29/the-book-of-kells-in-the-news/
Monday 17th October 2011
The lecture today covered The Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo periods.
The Renaissance can be split into the early, high and late periods.
Early:
Leonardo Da Vinci was an artist who was responsible for some of the most talked about paintings in art history.
He was innovative in his techniques. In the painting of the last supper, which was painted on the end wall of the dining room in the monastery of Santa Maria del Grazie, Milan, he used the perspective of the rest of the room in the painting. Standing in front of the painting it appears that the room itself continues into the distance. He believed he had found a new way of preserving frescos by painting on dry plaster instead of using tempura on wet plaster. His technique gave a greater range of colours but the painting continuously flakes off the wall and still has to be repaired regularly.
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| The Last Supper |
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| Leda and the swan cartoon |
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| Leda and the Swan |
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| St Jerome |
Her eyes were painted to give the impression that her gaze is upon the viewer wherever she is viewed from.
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| Mona Lisa |
He was also closely studying anatomy, there are many detailed sketches on body parts, both whole and dissected. He worked out how blood flowed through the heart.
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| The Tank |
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| The Helicopter |
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| foetus in the womb - wikimedia commons |
The Annunciation, which is one of earliest works, shows the features in the background of his paintings were shown duller than the main subject giving the impression of distance. This was an innovative style as previously all parts of paintings were painted with equal emphasis.
It's an approach still used today in photography when the main subject needs to be isolated from the background. A shallow depth of field is used to blur the background by selecting a large lens aperture. Lighting is also used to highlight the subject and darken the background.
Below is an example where I have used both techniques to isolate ice on a leaf, a combination of flash an large aperture.
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| The annunciation |
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| ice |
Artists like Da Vici were the celebrities of their time, he led a very colourful lifestyle. As a young man he was charged with sodomy, along with three of his friends, after an incident with a well known male prostitute. The charges were subsequently dropped through lack of evidence. There was speculation at the time that one of his co-accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to the influential Medici family and they arranged for the matter to be resolved quietly.
Sandro Botticelli's paintings were based on Roman as well as Christian mythology. They were very popular because society respected Roman times as being more civilised than the dark ages that followed. His paintings contained nudity but it was more restrained than that depicted in Roman times.
An example is The Birth of Venus
His paintings also manipulated time. This is an advantage that paintings have over photographs because photographs 'capture the moment' whereas paintings such as La Primavera can show a story unfolding. The reading of the picture is from right to left: Zephyrus, the biting wind of March, kidnaps and possesses the nymph Chloris, whom he later marries and transforms into a deity; she becomes the goddess of Spring, eternal bearer of life, and is scattering roses on the ground.
High:
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio became known as Titian produced many iconic paintings over his lifetime but was also became interested in printing.
One of his most famous works was Mary Magdelene which he painted around seven versions. Xrays of the version below have shown that the canvas had been used by Titian to work out his composition in different ways and the painting took a long time to complete.
He developed his skill of depicting the human form and the skin tone over many years and the attactiveness of the images made his work very collectable.
When he began painting artists were regarded as low down on the skills ladder. By the time he died he was a close friend of King Philip the 2nd of Spain.
To begin with the only organisation rich enough to commission art was the church. as society developed rich powerful families commissioned and collected paintings which promoted fashionable artists like Titian to celebrity status.
He produced allegorical works like the An Allegory of Prudence shown below. This image showed himself, his nephew and his son. The triple headed beast - lion, wolf and dog is symbol of prudence.
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| An allegory of prudence |
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| Venus |
His portrait of Pope Innocent X showed the character of the man even though in his position at court the artist will not have had the freedom to show his interpretation. To show the pope in any manner other than deemed suitable would have risked his livelihood. However there can be no doubt how the artist saw the pope.
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| Pope Innocent X |
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| Las Meninas |
By showing himself painting the painting he has broken the "fourth wall"
He was fascinated by the dwarfs at court, when he painted their portraits he was clearly free to show how he felt about the subject because they were not officials at court. His portrait of Lezcano is painted with empathy with his subject.
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| El Nino de Vallecas |
Late:
The paintings of this period exaggerate form.
Michelangelo is most famous for his work on the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel in Rome. This is a vast artwork which took 4 years to complete.
In the creation of the sun and moon the left arm is oversized to give the image impact.
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| Creation of Adam |
In the Separation of Land and Water panel God is shown in what appears to be a dissected right kidney.
He appears to have had a troubled relationship with the church and his self portrait is shown at least twice on corpses depicted in the paintings.
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| Judith beheaded Holofernes |
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| Skinned St Bartholomew |
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| Viewed from the same level |
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| Viewed as the sculptor intended - from below |
During the Baroque period artists moved away from 'mannerism' to realism' which was much darker in content, subject and method of painting.
Caravaggio used lighting to emphasise his subject instead of form. The technique is still used today in studio work where the choice of lighting can put an emphasis on the subject as well as create an atmosphere. The use of light and shadows to create a feeling of depth in the image is called 'chiaroscuro' His paintings were so real they were almost like photographs.
His portrayal of St Thomas inserting his finger into Jesus' wound is almost like a candid photograph. An intimate interaction is going on between the characters and his use of light isolates them from the world outside emphasising the intimacy.
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| Doubting Thomas |
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| Judith beheading Holophernes |
During this period his paintings got even darker
His portrayal of David and Goliath shows the child, David, having just garrotted Goliath. The lighting is even more closed in than before, bringing the viewer into this intimate scene. The severed head is the only face shown clearly and is believed to be a self portrait. This suggests he was trying to show penance for his previous misdeeds.
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| David and Goliath |
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| Sleeping Cupid |
He did not remain in the order long, his temper got the better of him and he was expelled and imprisoned for fighting with another knight. He escaped and fled to Naples. Whilst in Naples some powerful friends back in Rome managed to obtain a pardon for him. He bought passage on a ship but was arrested and missed the boat. He made his way along the coast but became ill and died, possibly, from malaria.
During the Baroque period the buildings remained a formal shape but they were ornamented.
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| Versaille |
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| Ottobeuren Abbey |
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| The death of Hyacynth |
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| Ludwigsburg mirror |
The artist Fragonard painted The Swing, which at first sight appears to be a fancy decorative painting of a young woman on a swing. On closer examination the young nobleman at the front is looking up her skirt and there is a theory that the man at the rear is her priest lover.
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| The Swing |
Gainsborough was a popular artist of this period. He painted rich people in their finery, an example is the portrait of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. The subject and background are highly decorated but he still shows something of their character in the portrait. The use of a large black hat signifies the Duchess was reliant on powerful men.
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| Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire |
Rubens continued the trend for romantic highly decorated paintings, he also revised the fashion for mythological paintings. His figures in these paintings showed acres of flesh which was considered to be perfection in human form. This maybe because society at the time regarded fat people as a sign of success. Peasants were thin, the rich could afford fine food and wanted to show off their girth.
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| Bacchus |
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| The Three Graces |
References
http://rubenspaintings.org/
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/collectionsandlibrary/opulence-anxiety-landscape-paintings-from-the-royal-academy-of-arts-at-compton-verney,349,AR.html
http://www.britsattheirbest.com/creative_brits/cr_gainsborough.html
http://www.saint-petersburg.com/pushkin/catherine-palace.asp
http://18thcenturylove.tumblr.com/post/4149059522/thingsjeffreylikes-mirror-and-stuccowork-in
http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/tiepolo_battista.php
http://europeantravelista.com/tag/rococo-architecture/
http://architecture.about.com/od/periodsstyles/ig/Historic-Styles/Baroque.htm
http://www.greatbuildings.com/types/styles/baroque.html
http://www.caravaggio-foundation.org/The-Decapitation-of-St.-John-the-Baptist,-1608-%28detail%29.html
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/michelangelo-merisi-da-caravaggio
http://www.artbible.info/art/large/10.html
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~vanbma/20th%20century/images/surveydaythirtyone.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2008/oct/29/1000-artworks-to-see-before-you-die-art
http://www.studyarthistory.com/michelangelo-facts-217.php
http://www.famous-painters.org/Michelangelo-paintings/The-Separation-of-Land-and-Water.shtm
http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Fulltext/2010/05000/Concealed_Neuroanatomy_in_Michelangelo_s.1.aspx?WT.mc_id=HPxADx20100319xMP
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/0-Ceiling.html
http://www.michelangelo-gallery.com/top-20-paintings.aspx
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/velazquez/
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/titian
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6093122/Titian-wheeler-dealer-who-created-a-goddess.html
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=536
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-bacchus-and-ariadne
http://www.infoflorence.com/Florence_Itineraries/Uffizi%20Gallery/Botticelli_La_Primavera.htm
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/sandro-botticelli
Capretti, Elena (1 January 2002). Botticelli. Giunti Editore Firenze Italy. ISBN 9788809214330
http://ebookleonardo.com/
http://da-vinci-gallery.org
http://www.leonardo-da-vinci-biography.com
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/vasari1.html
http://arthistory.about.com/cs/leonardo/a/last_supper.htm
31st October 2011
Vermeer was a painter who was an example of the move away from religious to secular art. He was unusual because he painted scenes of ordinary life and interiors. His paintings contained symbols as previous artist had done.
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| The painter in his studio |
The painter is thought to be Vermeer but his face can't be seen.
There are objects in the scene which are out of place like the chandelier and the marble tiles floor, these would be more likely found in a rich house.
The female is Clio, the Muse of History, identified by her laurel wreath and trumpet.
The double headed eagle on the chandelier, symbol of the Austrian Habsberg dynasty, former rulers of Holland, may have represented the catholic faith. Vermeer was a catholic, the majority of Netherlands society was protestant.
The map has a tear in it which separates the north and south of the Netherlands. This symbolises the division between the Dutch north and the Flemish south.
At this time the protestant church was very plain, they did not commission artworks like the catholic church.
George Stubbs painted horses for the rich and famous. He studied anatomy and his paintings are very accurate but also painted with style and evident love for his subject.
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| Whistlejacket |
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| Haymaking |
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| The British Museum |
Art institutions were established because artists now had elevated status. Art became a subject was now worth formal teaching. This lead to artists producing academy paintings which were formulaic.
One such artist was Nicholas Poussin who painted landscapes and religious allegorical paintings.
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| The Ordination |
Chris gave an example of the feeling you get when standing on a mountain top with a view all around.
Theodore Gericaults painting Raft of the Medusa was painted in a classical style but was important because it chronicled a contemporary event. Previous paintings in this style were based on historic or mythical events. The Medusa was a much talked about scandal of the time. Around 147 people were set adrift on a makeshift raft when the ship Medusa ran aground. only 15 people survived the raft being adrift for 13 days.
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| Raft of the Medusa |
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| Oath of the Horatii |
His painting of the Death of Marat is a very famous work. Marat was the editor of the revolutionary paper L’Ami du people.
He suffered from a skin complaint which caused him to spend hours in the bath and it was his custom to conduct his business whilst in the bath. He received a letter requesting an interview from Charlotte Corday who was a Royalist. During the interview she murdered him. The overall lighting is just on the subject, the background is in darkness giving emphasis to the figure in the bath. David painted the light falling on Marat as soft and sympathetic whereas the light falling on the letter is harsh. Possibly showing Davids opinion on the matter. The pen on the floor is shown in more definition than the knife which is half in shadow - the pen is mightier than the sword.
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| Death of Marat |
Eugene Delacroixs painting Liberty guiding the people was of a contemporary event and glamorised the revolution - propaganda
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| Liberty guiding the people |
In the painting of Belshazzar's Feast the lighting on the subjects faces is from lit up ghostly writing on the wall. Belshazzar blasphemously served wine at the feast in sacred vessels, had been judged by god and found wanting. He was found dead the next morning.
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| Belshazzars feast |
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| Nightwatch |
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| Woman bathing |
Thomas Cole painted the theme of the Voyage of Life. He produced four in the series of painting, Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age. The painting reflects the attitude of the phase of life. Childhood everything is bright and new, Youth shows aspirations in the distance, Manhood is a bit darker due to trials of adulthood and Old Age points towards heaven.
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| Childhood |
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| Youth |
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| Manhood |
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| Old Age |
Casper David Frederich painted symbolic landscape. His painting Wanderer above sea of fog shows a visual representation of the term sublime.
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| Wanderer above a sea of fog |
Francisco de Goya was classed as romantic but is seen as the father of modern art.
The 3rd of May Shootings painting chronicles the massacre of Spanish troops by Napoleon. His depiction of the shootings was no more graphic than previous artists paintings but was not dressed up in classic manner. The participants were wearing normal clothes and there ware no cherubs about or symbols to detract from the theme.
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| 3rd of May Shooting |
The theory that modern art was not started until after the renaissance when the camera was invented and the role of artists to record things moved to machines was challenged by the fact that Goya and Turner starting modern art before the camera was invented.
Goya produced a series of etchings showing the atrocities carried out by French soldiers on Spanish soldiers. He saw some of the events first hand and the others were related to him by witnesses. This documentary contained some images which were allegorical.
The theory that painters painted a romantic view and cameras gave cold view was dispelled by Goya and Turners work.
Goya became deaf in later life and remained in his house not coming out at all. Years later, after he died paintings were discovered on his walls. He had continued to paint whilst a recluse and the walls were covered with disturbing images.
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| Saturn devouring his own son |
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| Witches Sabbath |
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| two people laughing |
Joseph Mallord William Turner painted in a way which gave the impression of what it was like to actually be there in the scene. Two of his best known paintings are Rain, Steam and Speed, and, The Fighting Temeraire.
The Fighting Temeraire was an old battleship being towed away to be broken up, it is painted in pale ghostly detail and shown at sunset at the end of its working life.
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| The Fighting Temeraire |
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| Rain, Steam and Speed |
Impressionist paintings were already being painted before photography but the invention of the camera pushed them further.
John Constable was famous for his paintings of the English countryside which have been seen as examples of the ideal view of middle England.
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| The Hay Wain |
He painted most of his paintings in the same area which was the place where he had been with his wife before she died. The idealised views were an attempt to recapture his past happy life - desperate nostalgia.
He produced numerous oil sketches of clouds which he had painted as he saw them.
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| clouds |
The earliest known mechanically recorded (rather than by the artists hand) photograph that has been found was from 1828 by Joseph Niepce - View from a Window.
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| View from a Window |
Manets painting Dejeuner sur l'herb was an important painting. It caused outrage when first shown in Paris. It showed a nude female sitting in a contemporary scene, no symbols, no allegory or historical references. Only nudes in a classical context were considered acceptable.
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| Dejeuner sur l'herb |
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| Olympia |
Monet painted a series of pictures of haystacks in different light. He exaggerated what he could see in order to try and give the impression of what it felt like to be there.
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| Haystack in sunlight |
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| Haystack on foggy morning |
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| Haystack on snowy morning |
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| Haystack in sunshine |
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| The beach at Tourgeville les sablons |
Vincent Van Gogh is referred to as post impressionism, 80 years after Manets picnic. He sufferred from manic depression but did not paint when he was ill. The strong brush strokes came more from intense personality rather than madness. His self portrait below shows the start of expressionism which is about things coming from inside the artist.
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| L'Absinthe |
A development after Van Gogh was Fauvism, which is French for The Wild Beasts. They preferred strong colours and moved away from the realistic work produced by the impressionists.
Paul Cezanne was a post impressionist painter who liked to use strong colours which he used to paint landscapes in the south of France. The colours suited the strong sunlight in the area.
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| L'Estaque |
One of his paintings Death and the Maiden was a very common theme for artists over the years.
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| Death and the Maiden |
Gustav Klimpt was an Austrian symbolism painter who is best known for his highly decorated representations of nudes. He painted figurative portraits and expressive fabrics and styles around the figure. Many of his murals were destroyed by the Nazis because they thought they were obscene.
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| Three ages of women |
Extract from BBC News
3 November 2011 Last updated at 09:07
Klimt painting fetches $40.4m
The work depicts a lake in western Austria
A 1915 Gustav Klimt landscape, looted by the Nazis and recently returned to the owner's grandson, has sold for $40.4m (£25.4m) at a New York auction.
Litzlberg on the Attersee was returned to Georges Jorisch, 83, by Salzburg's Museum of Modern Arts in July.Other highlights of the Sotheby's impressionist and modern art sale included Picasso oil painting L'Aubade, which sold for $23m (£14.5m).
David Norman, of Sotheby's, said the market had "really roared back".
Litzlberg on the Attersee, a painting of a lake in western Austria, was originally owned by Austrian iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl before being passed on to his sister, Amalie Redlich, when he died in 1927.
She was deported in 1941 and never heard of again. Her art collection was seized by the Nazis and sold off.
Auction records were set for French impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, whose Le pont d'Argenteuil et la Seine fetched $9.3m (£5.8m), and Russian-born Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, whose Le reve (Rafaela sur fond vert) sold for $8.5m (£5.3m).
Wednesday's auction fetched an impressive $200m (£125.6m) with 57 of 70 lots sold.
Mr Norman, Sotheby's head of impressionist and modern art, said: "There's just tremendous strength coming from all over the world."
Edvard Munch was a prime example of an impressionist painter. The scream is a painting of the sound of a scream and the figure is reacting to it. The building in the background is a mental institution where Munchs sister was imprisoned. The scream has pierced the sky and changed the landscape.
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| The Scream |
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| Madonna |
References
http://www.munch.museum.no/?id=&mid=&lang=en
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15569885
http://www.egon-schiele.net/
http://www.paul-cezanne.org/
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/gogh/hd_gogh.htm
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/eugene-boudin
http://arthistory.about.com/od/namesbb/a/boudin-eugene.htm
http://www.monetpaintings.org/107/haystacks/
http://www.niepce.com/pagus/pagus-bio.html
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/john-constable
http://www.william-turner.org/
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/goya/hd_goya.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/friedrich/
http://www.explorethomascole.org/tour/items/73/series/
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/rembrandt
http://www.eugenedelacroix.org/
http://www.jacqueslouisdavid.org/
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
http://www.artinthepicture.com/
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
http://www.ibiblio.org/
On Thursday 3rd November 2011 we will be going to The National Media Museum in Bradford primarily to see two exhibitions:
- Daniel Meadows
- Donovan Wylie
- Martin Parr
- Tim Hetherington
- Tom Hunter - specifically 'girl reading repossession order' and consider whose work is it influenced by.
- How and why do we look at other peoples work
- How does it influence our practices
- research Pastiche
- research Homage
- Culture of recycling -fashion/visual arts/music
- How do we look back and use elements of others work
- Jeff Dyer - Ongoing Moment
Daniel Meadows -
"I am a Documentarist
...by which I mean that I am one who, in an attempt to make sense of the times in which we live, engages with others to gather, create and present -- with as few fictional additions as possible -- stories made out of photographs and/or oral testimony"
1970-73 he studied at Manchester Polytechnic 1970-73.
Photography projects
1972 The Shop on Greame Street in Moss Side
collaborations with Martin Parr:
1972 Butlin's by the Sea in Yorkshire
1973 June Street in Salford
1973-74 he toured England in the Free Photographic Omnibus running free portrait studios in towns and cities across the country. The account of that journey: Living Like This - Around Britain in the Seventies (Arrow Books) was published in 1975.
1972: Stockport Gypsies.
1975-77: Photographer-in-Residence, Pendle District, Lancashire.
1975-83: New Society commissions.
1976-81: Welfare State International.
1978: Clayton Ward, Prestwich Hospital, Manchester (for the Observer Magazine).
1978-80 worked as researcher and presenter on Granada TV
1979-80: Factory Records.
1981 and '83: Co. Durham Social Services dept.
1984-87: Suburbia, Bromley, Kent.
1981-94 worked as freelance publicity photographer for film and TV industry.
1995-2000: National Portraits, Now & Then.
He has since worked in TV, radio and education.
Looking through his portraits I was interested to see how much of the subjects personality came out in what appeared to be unstaged photos. There always seems to be a background story hinted at by the picture. One example shown below was a little boy, not really smiling holding up a photo of a similarly looking child - either himself or a relative. There are so many questions that picture provokes. Is the photo someone he has lost? someone he is proud of? someone he misses?
His series of photos from the time spent in the bus were a fascinating collection. The children were so relaxed with him and most were enjoying the attention. One youth caught my attention. He was dressed as all the others and was outwardly as tough but on his own he looked vulnerable. He did not look at the camera and his stance is almost a surrender.
Donovan Wylie
Donovan Wylie was born in 1971 (so we now know how old Katy is!) He was taking photographs from an early age. When he left school at 16 he travelled round Ireland for 3 months taking photographs. This was then published in a book '32 Counties' when he was still a teenager.
He became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1998.
Much of his work, often described as 'Archaeo-logies', has stemmed primarily to date from the political and social landscape of Northern Ireland.
His book The Maze was published to international acclaim in 2004, as was British Watchtowers in 2007. In 2001 he won a BAFTA for his film The Train, and he has had solo exhibitions at the Photographers' Gallery, London, PhotoEspana, Madrid, and the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television, Bradford, England. He has participated in numerous group shows held at, among other venues, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
I am interested in the subjects he has photographed in Ireland and Afghanistan so was keen to see his photos. I looked at them online and in books but they did not inspire me. Reading his background to the maze photos I can see why they were shot that way but they did nothing for me.
His photos in Afghanistan were equally disappointing.
Thursday 3rd November 2011
National Media Museum.
The first exhibition I viewed was the one by Donovan Wylie. I was blown away by his photographs as I looked at them exhibited printed large. At this size the Maze photographs made sense. As I stood there looking at the individual images I was there in the photo. I understood why he took them as he did. The Maze was designed to be uniform and disorientating to the prisoners and this came across in the images.
The watchtowers in Ireland and Afghanistan were just as absorbing. I spent a while at each image looking at the detail contained in each image as well as the overall effect. Whilst I was looking I considered the discussion we had had with Richard about the difference between documentary and aestheticist landscape photographers. Wylie is both. He breaks all the composition rule but his images work as images as well as documenting a scene.
There was one particular image that has stayed with me since leaving the exhibition. It breaks all the rules - its leading lines come in from one side and lead out again before the horizon. But is shows all manner of life getting on side by side. Cattle herders and troops. Its not a popular choice so I have not found a hi res image on the web just this one -
The exhibition by Daniel Meadows was as good as I expected. It was good to see the images printed large. The portraits were interesting as well as the revisit that he did to photograph his original models.
There was one image I have not been able to find a copy on the web. It is in the series of portraits and showed a couple where he was a tall teddy boy type and she was short and quite frail looking. She had a black eye and the way she had her arms round him was possessive verging on desperation. The more I looked at it, the more I was intrigued about the couple - there was definitely a story there.
The other exhibition I went to was the history of photography which showed every type of photograph and camera from the first to the last. It was a fascinating wander through history. As usual I amused myself by watching the reactions of the other visitors to the exhibits. There was a group of old ladies who were pointing out cameras that their father and grandfather had used. When I looked at what they pointed out, I realised that I had used a very similar box brownie as a child. It was interesting to see how technology had progressed and ironic that I was excited because I had an ancient medium format camera to try out at home despite having an all-singing all-dancing dslr in my bag.
The cafe turned out to be an interesting place to people watch, several of us were photographing customers.
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| Loved the hat |
Overall the main thing I got from the visit was to view photographs at a proper size, they have so much more to give than when viewed on screen or in a book. In the same way that artworks are meant to be seen in their original size to get the effect intended by the artist.
Martin Parr
Martin Parrs photographs take the mundane and give it a twist, I can see how he could collaborate with Daniel Meadows, he has an interesting way of viewing the world.
At first sight I did not get his photos but after reading about him and looking through more of his work I began to understand where he is coming from. I particularly like his work abroad, probably because I am an inveterate traveller and people watcher.
Tim Hetherington
Tim Hetherington was a documentary photographer who worked in many of the worlds most dangerous places. He was killed earlier this year covering the conflict in Libya.
I have been an admirer of his work for some time without actually realising it. As I looked thro' his images for this blog there are so many I recognised.
His images are close and intimate in the way that Carravaggio painted.
From a series called Sleeping Soldiers.
The viewer is there with him.
His images have bite.
Tom Hunter - Girl Reading a Repossession Order
This is from a series of photographs taken of a group of squatters in Hackney. His influences? I was so proud of myself when I recognised the style of Vermeer before reading about it. A search revealed the painting he has emulated.
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| Girl reading at open window |
We look at other peoples work to get a new perspective on a subject. Everyone sees things differently, has different life experiences which will put different perspective on images we view.
We study photography because we want to improve our skills and knowledge to varying degrees. I have been told, and have noticed it myself, that my photography has improved since I started the course in September. This is primarily because I have spent most of my time researching art and photography.
We also learn from others mistakes or maybe better described as work that we don't like the result. We can take that experience and run with it a different direction.
Pastiche - is when more than one genre is put together to create portfolio of images.
Homage - is the creation of an image in the style of another as was seen in the girl reading the repossession order in the style of Vermeer.
Culture of recycling - new artists/designers and photographers study the works of previous practisioners in their field, as well as gaining knowledge they find aspects they wish to try themselves.
Modern materials make it easier to create images or garments from the past but with modern functionality.
Digital cameras and processing techniques allow us to produce images in the style of early cameras and film processing techniques.
Early artists looked back to myth and legend for their inspiration, creating classical works reflecting a nostalgia for the past.
There is a popular movement within photography following the style of Vanitas. The photographs use the imagery found in 16th and 17th century dutch paintings in this style.
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| Pieter Claesz |
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| Kevin Best |
Geoff Dyer - The Ongoing Moment.
Dyer is a writer not a photographer. He starts this book by pointing out that he does not own a camera.
He examines what Cartier Bresson called 'The Decisive Moment'
References
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.metmuseum.org/
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/
http://www.nesta.org.uk/
http://agent3155.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.martinparr.com/
http://www.magnumphotos.com/
http://artnews.org/
http://www.photobus.co.uk/
http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/
http://www.magnumphotos.com/
Monday 7th November 2011
Following the invention of the camera, art became more creative as artists were looking how to express themselves in different ways.
Society was also developing towards the industrial revolution.
Modernism - Seen as the progression towards Utopia, everyone happy
Capitalism - Work hard and be rewarded, a meritocracy which leaves behind anyone less able
Socialism - Karl Marx, Communism, everyone working together for the greater good, undermined by greed.
From Dissent to Establishment.
(looking at art and design in late 19th early 20th century)
William Blake, artist and poet, was opposed to progress preferring to take his inspiration from old symbolism.
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| Urizen |
Blake was a technophobe, he lived, naked, in his garden and talked to God all the time.
The Pre Raphaelite brotherhood was so named because they considered Raphael as at a moment in history when art went wrong. They wanted to go back to earlier values.
In the 1900s normal people had really hard lives in industry and poor housing. The Pre Raphaelites wanted to recreate a rural idyllic lifestyle. The paintings were illustrations of myths and classic literary works. They painted women with a distinctive Pre Raphaelite look.
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| Waterhouse - Lady of Shallot |
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| Millais - Ophelia |
William Morris developed the applied arts. His art was not pure gallery art, his art had to have a use - wallpaper and furniture. Fine art has to be without a purpose.
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| Morris wallpaper design from 1882 |
Morris believed that artists were artisans, he took his inspiration from nature and based his factories in the countryside. He wanted to go back to a way of living from before the industrial revolution. His designs were creative solutions to problems. He expected creative people to be multi skilled, not just create the design but to go on and make the wallpaper or furniture they designed. He intended his products to be for the people but handmade goods were too expensive for normal people so only rich people could afford them. He could not compete with mass produced goods from factories.
Art Nouveau designs took the creative approach to functional items. Street furniture design was inspired by nature but exaggerated.
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| Paris metro |
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| Lalique |
Antoni Gaudi designed buildings in Barcelona during this period where the motifs and curves seen in nature can clearly be seen in his designs.
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| Casa Batllo - Gaudi |
Art Deco still took its inspiration from nature but became more simplified. Nature designs were created from geometric shapes.
The transition to Art Deco took around 10 years. Designs went from ornate to simple clean shapes.
Buildings had rounded corners.
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| The Midland Hotel Morecambe |
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| Chrysler Building |
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| Buffalo City Hall |
Bauhause Art and Design School was founded in Germany in 1919.
Morris was the reaction to the lack of thought in design at the time.
Bauhause introduced the idea of thinking about the function of design.
"Students at the Bauhaus took a six-month preliminary course that involved painting and elementary experiments with form, before graduating to three years of workshop training by two masters: one artist, one craftsman. They studied architecture in theory and in practice, working on the actual construction of buildings. The creative scope of the curriculum attracted an extraordinary galaxy of teaching staff. Among the stars were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, the painter and mystic Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Marcel Breuer. Bauhaus students were in day-to-day contact with some of the most important practicing artists and designers of the time.
The school, masterfully marketed, acquired a reputation and an influence out of all proportion to its physical reality as a single institution in the German provinces. The name Bauhaus soon became a bogey word to adherents of the bourgeois style that it so vigorously opposed. German mothers told their children: "If you don't behave, I'll send you to the Bauhaus."
But to those who responded to its uncompromising vision of the future, the term Bauhaus had a certain magic. The school came to be known for the marvelous masked balls and kite processions, experimental light and music evenings, and "Triadic" abstract ballets that it organized. These occasions welded students of many ages and nationalities together into a community. The Bauhaus was the beginning of the art school as an alternative way of life." - Fiona MacCarthyThe school, masterfully marketed, acquired a reputation and an influence out of all proportion to its physical reality as a single institution in the German provinces. The name Bauhaus soon became a bogey word to adherents of the bourgeois style that it so vigorously opposed. German mothers told their children: "If you don't behave, I'll send you to the Bauhaus."
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| Bauhaus Curriculum |
'The House is a machine for living' is a quote by Le Corbusier. He was concerned about the living conditions of people who lived in crowed industrial cities. He worked on designs for innovative flats for residents of the Paris slums to improve their living conditions.
The Ville Contemporaine was never built. He designed it to be a group of sixty story skyscrapers surrounded by parkland. It had its own transport system and segregated pedestrians from cars.
Villa Savoye is one of his successful designs.
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| Villa Savoye |
Ludwig Mies van de Rohe was an architect whose design style was 'Less is More' He designed many of Americas skyscrapers. He was director at Bauhaus. He also believed that 'god is in the detail' he was meticulous in his work.
His work was opposite to the Rococo style of earlier years where it was believed that 'more is more'.
He designed the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago which are two 26storey blocks placed perpendicular to each other.
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| Lake Shore Drive Apartments |
The chair is still made to his specification and embossed with his signature.
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| The Barcelona Chair |
De Stijl (also known as Neoplasticism) was a group of artists who took the idea of minimalism to the extreme. One of the group Piet Mondrian was famous for his black and white artworks.
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| Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue 1935 |
The Russian Revolution brought about a new way of thinking which needed a new way of communicating. It gave rise to constructivists who rejected the idea of autonomous art and believed that art should be for social purposes. Aleksandr Rodchenko was a constructivist, his work consisted of bold imagery to convey simple messages to the people. His posters were montages of designs and photographs showing what the future might look like.
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| Rodchenko poster declaring that the trade union is a defender of female labour |
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| Rodchenko poster advertising the state airline Drobrolet. |
He also produced propagandist posters similar to that produced by Rodchenko.
Moholy Nagy was a Hungarian artist who produced abstract light displays from a machine he developed himself.
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| The Light Prop |
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| Jealousy |
References
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.moholy-nagy.com/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.greatbuildings.com/
http://www.ultimatehouse.tv/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://designhistory.org/
http://www.greatbuildings.com/
http://www.nga.gov/
http://artnouveau.pagesperso-orange.fr
http://www.preraphaelites.org/
http://www.blakearchive.org/
Monday 14th November 2011
New ways of seeing
Art during this period is moving away from figurative work to a more abstract form.
Kandinsky - was a Russian artist whose early work was impressionist, became abstract using natural forms and then developed into geometric shapes on a flat canvas. His work evolved in a similar way to the progression from Art Nouveau to Art Deco.
Impressionistic street scene -
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| Autumn in Bavaria |
Abstract countryside scene -
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| Improvisation 7 |
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| Composition 4 |
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| Black Spot 1 |
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| Composition 8 |
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| Composition 9 |
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| Composition 10 |
Piet Mondrian - Over the course of several years Mondrian developed his art into the distinctive black and white grid lines with coloured squares.
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| red tree |
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| gray tree |
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| tree |
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| composition with tree |
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| line and colour |
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| oval composition tableau |
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| no 7 façade |
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| composition 8 |
Paul Klee was an artist of this period, his art was stylistically varied -
His work Golden Fish was figurative in that the fish were recognisable as fish but the background is abstract.
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| Golden Fish |
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| Dream City |
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| Ancient Sound |
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| Parnassum |
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| Insula Dulcamara |
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| Highways and Byways |
Around 1907 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque formed a movement which they called 'Cubism'. They work together and had clear aims. Cubism was the representation of a three dimensional object by painting it from several different viewing planes.
There are two periods of Cubism
- Analytical Cubism
- Synthetic Cubism
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| Georges Braque - Still life with Le Jour |
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| Georges Braque - Violin and Palette |
Picasso was interested in art styles from outside the west, most art up to then followed on from earlier western art. Picasso borrowed from African tribal culture and children's art.
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| child holding dove |
The art from his blue period was during a time when he was suffering from depression following the death of his friend. This was mainly figurative work painted in blue.
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| Woman with crossed arms |
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| Guernica |
Marks on the painting make it look like newsprint which was an indication that Picasso had not been there, he had seen it through newspaper reports which is also why it is black and white. The fallen soldier holding the sword was originally painted holding his sword up in defiance but by the final version his arm was severed and sword broken.
Picasso seemed to be saying that painting was not powerful enough to change politics but photographs and newspapers might be.
Picasso continued to paint after this period but his work did not progress further. He became a celebrity and invented his own public persona.
A tapestry of Guernica was hung in the UN building in 2003 and is taken on tour for display in art galleries. The tapestry has been sewn in shades of brown.
Analysis of the painting taken from the bbc news website:
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| the wounded horse |
The horse's screaming dagger-shaped tongue and its death-head nostrils focus our attention directly on the terrible pain and suffering that pulls us repeatedly back to witness the horror. If this is a bullfight it has gone horribly wrong, defying all logic of the corrida.
No horse is ever run straight through with a spear in a plaza de toros, as the horse of Guernica has been. In an early version, hidden under layers of paint, Picasso had bent the horse's head down to the ground in submissive defeat.
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Throughout the history of painting the horse has become the universal symbol of man's companion in war, understood by every culture. Guernica was a horrific example of saturation bombing - not the first, nor the last. From Coventry to Dresden, from Hiroshima to Baghdad, people have forged a powerful empathy with this fatally wounded horse.
THE BOMBING
Operation Rugen took place on 26 April 1937 during Spanish Civil War
German and Italian bombers allied with nationalists pounded town in Basque country held by Republicans
Deaths estimated between 200 and over 1,000
Much of town flattened
Bombing brought to international attention by Times journalist George Steer
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| the bull |
In many depictions of artists in their studios, most notably Velazquez's Las Meninas and Goya's Family of Charles IV, both in the Prado, and known to Picasso from his early youth, the artist anchors the left border of the masterpiece.
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Picasso loved in-jokes, secrecy and the rituals of ancient Mediterranean cultures. Fascinated by the Roman cult of Mithraism and the ritual slaughter of the bull by the Sun God Mithras, Picasso places the bull's head between a jagged naked light bulb, a crowing cock and a screaming mother - the Virgin Dolorosa (paraded through every Spanish street during Holy Week).
What are we to make of Guernica's confusing compendium of images weighted so heavily with religious content? The Bull watches the sacrifice. If it is Picasso is it a mere impotent witness? Or, is it the cause of this tragedy?
THE TAPESTRY
Normally hangs at UN
At Whitechapel Gallery to mark reopening
Donated to UN by Nelson Rockefeller in 1985
In lead-up to Iraq war, tapestry was covered by blue cloth for US media conference
Although denied, critics said this was because of anti-war message
More variations in colour compared with painting
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| head |
Early on, in the first few days of painting Guernica, Picasso placed his own self-portrait - recognisable by his characteristic swept-over hairstyle - in the position of this decapitated bust. Turned over, with his gaping mouth to the sky, the final version becomes a kind of "everyman".
Some see in the smashed bust, severed arm and broken sword, which frame the base of the painting, distant echoes and memories of the horrific earthquake that rocked Malaga destroying 10,000 houses in Picasso's early childhood. It is possible. Picasso had an extraordinary memory and throughout his life kept all the gates to his deep and fertile subconscious wide open.
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It was an epic legend that was repeated in Malaga like a mantra and would have fired the imagination of any impressionable young boy. But the source is perhaps closer to hand.
Just months before painting Guernica, Picasso had been asked to create a series of prints to raise funds for the Republic. The Dream and Lie of Franco is a savage attack by Picasso on Franco's regime. Portrayed as a swollen monster, Franco proceeds through a series of scenes to desecrate and destroy all in his path, including a classical bust.
As director of Madrid's Prado gallery, in exile, Picasso felt a deep loathing for the military machine that was prepared to visit indiscriminate violence upon his people and bomb the Prado, while also peddling propaganda about the Republic's alleged war on culture.
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| mother |
Everywhere we look across the painting we see gesture - fingers like sausages, hands carved with lines and an array of clasping, grasping fists. Her grief has depersonalised her. Her eyes are tears. Her tongue a dagger pointing up to the Bull's steaming nostrils.
For Guernica, Picasso produced almost 70 preparatory works that included sketches and paintings, many in black and white but some in dramatic colour. An early sketch for Mother and Child - which travels the entire history of the image including Michelangelo's Pieta - showed the mother and child descending down a ladder.
Picasso, as the Prado's director in-exile, knew the collection inside out. No artist, or anyone with sensibility, could fail to be drawn to the museum's extraordinarily poignant Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden - arguably, the greatest Christian image ever created.
Picasso, as was his will, cannibalised it and gave us this pathetic timeless image of an inconsolable woman that we see repeated today in the newsreels transmitted from Gaza, Rwanda, Bosnia and Sudan.
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| three women |
Picasso's life while painting Guernica represented the worst period in his life. His mother and sister still lived in Barcelona and it was impossible to know where Franco might bomb next.
Picasso's personal life in Paris had become immensely complicated. His wife Olga Khokhlova, a Russian ballet dancer, had become increasingly unhinged as she discovered the artist's infidelities, and wished to sue him for half his estate. This included his works of art - some unfinished, others his working archive.
His suppliant mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, a Grecian beauty less than half his age, had given birth to their daughter Maya and was farmed out to the country for weekends away. Into the empty space came Dora Maar - a dramatic dark-haired beauty, who was as exotic and erotic as an artist could ever ask for.
He first met her on the terrace of the Deux Magots cafe in Paris staring deep into his eyes as she stabbed her fingers through her gloves playing dare with a knife.
In many ways Dora was his intellectual equal. She took photographs of Guernica in progress and also, as it happened, painted many of the markings on the flank of the dying horse.
One day, unexpectedly, Marie-Therese came up from the country to see Picasso in his Paris studio. He was up the ladder painting and Dora was in the room. The fight between the two women was left to run its course by Picasso, who transferred it and distilled it into the image we see today.
Three women at war, three graces, three fates, three women mourning at the cross, all readings are viable. But we must also remember that the woman holding the torch we have seen before - she is Liberty leading the people and, of course, Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty - a copy of which Picasso passed every morning in Paris while walking the dog.
Synthetic Cubism
The second phase of cubism carried the cubism art into the use of different materials in the paintings. Newspapers, wallpaper and other materials were cut and placed to make the image.
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| Picasso - glass and bottle of suze |
Marcel Duchamp painted Nude descending stairs which was ground-breaking because it broke up time as well as the subject.
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| nude descending staircase |
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| bicycle wheel |
His most important piece of work was 'fountain' which he submitted to the Society of Independent Artists under the pseudonym R Mutt 1917. By signing and dating the piece he was presenting it in the standard way with the other exhibitors. He used the pseudonym because he was a member of the committee and realised that for the work to be examined without prejudice he would have to distance himself from its submission. In the end it was not displayed in the exhibition but by that stage Duchamp had made his impact on the art scene. He commissioned a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz which is the only record of the original object as it was accidentally(?) thrown away. The photograph was widely published and continued the argument he had started.
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| The Fountain photograph by Alfred Stieglitz |
Duchamp changed thinking, he questioned what is the process of art, not the ability to paint - craft.
Following this major change in thinking, art could be anything, not just oil and canvas as it has previously been thought.
Late in life Duchamp worked on a secret project for which he left a large ring binder of assembly instructions. It was a wooden door installed in such a way that when anyone stood and looked closely a pressure pad under their feet turned on a light behind the door. When the eye is placed against a lit crack in the door a reclining nude female can be glimpsed. The scene was constructed from different materials not a painting.
References
http://www.philamuseum.org/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.marcelduchamp.net/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.artchive.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7986540.stm
http://www.guggenheim.org/
http://abstractartist.org/paul-klee/
http://www.artinthepicture.com/
http://legacy.earlham.edu/
http://www.pietmondrian.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/
http://www.guggenheim.org/
Monday 21st November 2011
Surrealism
Some of the artists in the Dada movement became interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung and began Surrealism. Freud developed a model of the mind at the centre of which is the ID. At the boundary of ID and SuperEgo there are a series of doors which are open or closed depending on the person.
Ego is our awareness and how we communicate with other people.
Superego is the gateway to ID which we are not aware of.
The Germans have a word for ID - Triebe - which does not have a direct translation into English, it encompasses sex drive, ambition, competition, will to live, motivation etc.
In the 1960s there was a survey done which found that 30% of men questioned would commit rape if they knew they could get away with it. These 30% had a particular door open to their ID that the rest did not.
Surrealists wanted to tap into ID by bypassing ego and superego and they tried different techniques to try and do this.
Salvadore Dali was one of the early surrealist movement but was asked to leave by the other members. He tried to visit Freud but he would not see him.
An early Dali painting called Figure at Window, the viewer does not see the girls face, Dali knew that people like closure so he left unanswered questions in his work.
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| Figure at Window |
One of his most famous paintings is The Persistence of Memory. He said they were dreamscapes but they appear to be more than that. He had a fascination for ants which appear in his paintings.
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| The Persistence of Memory |
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| Sacred Heart of Jesus |
Yves Tanguy was a surrealist artist whose work portrayed an alternative world. An example of which is Indefinite Divisibility. His painting technique is similar to Dali but his landscapes are almost lunar.
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| Indefinite Divisiblity |
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| Reply to Red |
Max Ernst created images using 'frottage' which is involves paper placed over a textured surface and rubbed with a soft pencil. He was inspired by an old wooden floor which had designs in its texture that suggested images. His image The Entire City resembles cities that have been built into rockfaces.
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| Entire City |
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| My portrait of Nat |
I am not sure what the below image says about me, Nat, Jean and Vicky
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| Exquisite Corpse |
This technique developed into the 'juxtaposition' 'chance encounter' method of composition which was inspired by three poets Rimbaid, Bandelaine and Lautreamont.
Lautreamont wrote - "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table"
The artists used shock as they were interested in the effects of shock.
Un Chien Andalou is a film produced by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dali which is designed to cause shock and revulsion by apparently showing someone's eye being slit. This reaction is believed to come from the ID.
Le Sang des betes (blood of the beasts) is a film showing the slaughter men in an abattoir at work. Its commentary is at odds with the gruesome scenes because it is softly spoken like poetry. The reaction to the film is concious - ego, by passing that to look at the imagery within the footage goes towards ID - Surrealism.
At present we are accustomed to surreal images but in the time (postwar) of the film it was revolutionary.
References
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=2&roomid=5318
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=113
http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/tanguy1.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/tanguy/
http://rusart.ca/history/dali.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Monday 28th November 2011
This morning we looked at American art - there had not been an art movement in America until after WWI.
Joseph Cornell had his own ideas and started his own movement. Previously artists had copied what was happening in Europe.
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| Abeilles |
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| pharmacy |
Duchamp used an object.
Picasso integrated objects eg newspaper into his work
Cornell took it further his artwork was apparently random collections of materials.
He was not part of the surrealist movement - they were a tightly knit group in Paris. He was one on his own.
Edward Hopper produced figurative paintings in an impressionist style. The paintings have an atmosphere and they give the impression of what it is like to be in the scene. His paintings also hint at a narrative, there are signs in the pantings that something is behind the view shown on the canvas. He defies convention in his construction of the images, in the NY Movie the image is split into two, separate stories, lighting and style but connected by the location.
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| NY Movie |
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| Gas Station |
His lighthouse painting shows the influence of photography on art. It is a view which conventionally would show the whole of the lighthouse but Hopper paints it like a cropped photograph.
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| Lighthouse |
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| Nighthawks |
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| Banksy Are you using that chair |
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| Homer v The eighteenth amendment |
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| Lego |
Around the time of WWII the first American art movement was started called Abstract Expressionism.
Abstraction - non figurative
Expressionism - the artis expressing there feelings about the subject
Jackson Pollock - his work is more about the physical side of painting.
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| lavender mist |
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| Pollock at work |
Rothko's work needed the viewer to spend time with the work but the public had begun to move away from contemplative work to cinema and photography which needed no study to understand them.
Pop Art
In Britain Pop Art was about challenging what art was about and glorifying popular culture, it began in the early 1950s.
Peter Blake produced an iconic image -
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| The First Real Target |
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| self portrait |
Pop art marks the point when regular culture of normal people, the working classes, becomes part of the art world. Ironically the painting of Pop Art in oil and canvas made it to expensive and inaccessible to the working class.
Pop Art was not popular either side of the channel at the time but gained popularity later.
American pop art began in the late 1950s early 1960s. It was different because its context was different. After WWII Britain suffered major austerity measures like rationing and had large areas of industrial land and housing destroyed by bombing. Britain also owed a large war debt. America did not suffer the bomb damage, incur debt and had industrial infrastructure which was easily converted from war work to consumer goods. Cars became mainstream. The British public did not have sufficient disposable income for consumer goods on the same level.
Richard Hamilton - Just what is it that makes homes so different so appealing - was a transitional piece of Pop Art from British to American. The use of humour identifies the British style of Pop Art.
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| Just what is it that makes homes so different so appealing |
His image of Mick Jagger under arrest on drugs charges entitled Swingeing London gave a hint of his views on this side of popular culture at the time.
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| Swingeing London |
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| Shock and Awe |
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| One Hundred Cans |
His portraits are of famous celebrities who are familiar faces. He used repetition and bright colours to show them as consumer goods. His portrait of Marilyn Monroe was probably completed after her death. He depicted this tragic figure in bright happy colours.
He also produced work depicting death.
His car crashes were in series of colours green, orange etc and were graphic in their showing of the corpses.
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| green car crash |
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| green car crash |
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| car crash |
The public is fascinated by death, money and celebrity. Warhol used all these elements in his work. Opinion is divided on whether he is criticizing or glorifying consumerism.
Roy Lichtenstein was a pop artist who used juxtaposition and irony in childlike cartoons. They are comics images with serious subjects - love, war etc. He criticizes war in his image Whaam.
There is a suggestion of narrative in his work, it leaves unanswered questions, doubts or enigma. None more so than "I can see the whole room"
Claes Oldenburg was a pop art sculptor who made everyday ordinary objects into sculpture by his use of materials and scale.
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| Claes Oldenburg icecream |
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| Claes Oldenburg wheel |
After Pop Art came Op Art - process of seeing. It challenged the way of seeing things.
Bridget Riley was an artist who played around with the mechanics of optics in the eye.
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| Movement in squares Bridget Riley |
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| Lets be hypnotize Bridget Riley |
In the 1970s began Conceptual Art which was considered by many to be a rip off. An example is Carl Andre Bricks which was just a stack of bricks which was not even assembled by the artist himself.
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| Bricks Carl Andre |
References
http://www.op-art.co.uk/bridget-riley/
http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/frames.htm
http://www.warhol.org/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/Richard-Hamilton-British-visionary.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/RichardHamilton
http://www.tate.org.uk/PeterBlake
http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/
http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/
http://search.it.online.fr/covers/?p=182
http://www.edwardhopper.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/
http://www.josephcornellbox.com/menu.htm
Monday 4th December 2011
In the 1970s there was a movement - Land Art, which was art out in the environment away from galleries.
Andy Goldsworthy was an artist who created his work in the open out of things he found. His work challenged the current norms of art in that it was -
- ephemeral, fine art was seen as permanent, only low art was seen as short lived
- being outside open to everyone access to his work was not controlled by gallery owners
- no technology was used in its creation, prior to this all art had some kind of tool used in it's creation even if is was as basic as a stick.
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| Goldsworthy - Icicle Star joined together with saliva |
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| Goldsworthy - Iris leaves and Rowan berries |
Brutalistic Architecture was a movement in 1950s to 1970s. Buildings were designed and built in very blocky repetitive concrete forms. Usually dominant in the locale.
Some examples below:
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| Southbank Royal National Theatre |
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| Trellick Tower, London |
The Middle East nations were beginning to fight against British interference. This challenged the British view of our image within the world. We thought of ourselves as fair to everyone. In countries where we had exploited their resources for our own good, we were viewed differently.
Artists began to look to the past for solutions - Post Modernism which combined old and new e.g. film remakes.
Post Modernism is not a movement but a change of mentality.
Products and buildings began to have built in obsolescence. Buildings in the past were built to be a lasting monument to the architect now they have a planned short life of 40, 20 or even 10years.
Brit Art was the only movement in the Post Modernist era. The artists had nothing in common apart from the fact that they are all British. Young British Artists or YBA mixed old and modern using incongruous juxtaposition in their work.
Brit Art is the most popular art movement in history. Pop Art was only popular later after the moved finished.
YBA have shown in London and New York it was the most successful show in history.
They took over an abandoned factory in 1988 and artwork was created inside with some work painted directly onto the walls. The resulting exhibition was called Freeze.
The exhibition Sensation was done at the pinnacle which was also the end of the movement. It was at the Saatchi Gallery in London. A lot of the work was criticized and misrepresented by the press, Charles Saatchi encouraged this, using the extra free publicity to the shows advantage.
Marcus Harvey exhibited a work called Myra which used the famous police photograph of Myra Hindley. He constructed the image with plaster casts of childrens hands. He used the childrens hands to signify what Hindley had done. He did not like how the press had used the same image to sell papers and profit from the affair without actually contributing to the investigation. The Sun however brought victim Keith Bennett's mother to the exhibition and photographed her in front of the picture being outraged and shocked.
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| Myra - Marcus Harvey |
James Reilly's exhibition of portraits was also called into question by the press who said it was paedo art because there were children in amongst adults some of whom had blacked out faces. The papers said that they were faceless paedophiles.
It was in fact a poignant collection of images of his own family. The ones with blacked out faces were people he could not remember what they looked like.
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| The Shining |
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| Hole through which everything will pass |
Jenny Savilles work was about the female form and explores what is seen as beauty. She photographed the female form pressed against glass as well as self portrait paintings.
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| closed contact 13 |
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| self portrait |
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| Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) |
Douglas Gordon's work 24hr Psycho is the re imaging of art from 20th century - pop art and surrealism. The film lasts for 24hours - it is Hitchcocks film slowed down to last 24hrs. This work is a proposition - "I am going to do that and I don't know what will happen but I will publish the result"
This shows the distinction between cinema and photography.
Cinema is a series of moments which are filmed.
Photography is the capture of the "decisive moment"
The next artist we looked at was Sarah Lucas and it was obvious from the start that Chris does not like her work. He described her as not concerned with the object. She does not try to seduce the audience by making art from things that the audience will like and draw them in. An example he showed was a table with two fried eggs and a kebab.
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| two fried eggs and a kebab |
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| Sarah Lucas self portrait |
Another side of her work is sculpture made of an object meticulously covered in cigarettes. She is usually photographed with cigarettes and described her obsession with covering every inch of the sculpture with cigarettes as similar to masturbation.
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| Nature Abhors A Vacuum |
When the Labour Party was elected and 'Cool Britannia' was in fashion the YBA were invited to No 10 as part of the government's spin.
Jeff Koons produced 'Neo Pop' which was popular at the time as opposed to Pop Art which only became popular much later. His sculptures were huge childlike pieces which dominated their surroundings.
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| Jeff Koons puppy in Bilbao |
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| Jeff Koons balloon dog |
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| Jeff Koons Rabbit - Macy's Thanksgiving Day Balloon |
Tracey Emin is a very abrasive character whose chaotic and drunken personal life is portrayed explicitly in her art. Because of her attitude she is frequently misunderstood by the popular press. An example is her tent entitled Everyone I Have ever Slept with 1963 - 1995. The press derided this as being just about sex. It was actually a poignant list of the people she had slept with shown in a tent which is a safe, womb like structure. This has since been destroyed in a fire.
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| Everyone I have ever slept with 1963 - 1995 |
Her work 'My Bed' shocked the press who just saw it as a bed just put in a gallery and called art. It shows that despite Duchamps breakthrough in 1917 the popular attitude to art has not moved on. The bed is actually her own bed where she lived whilst dealing with depression. It is a display of her world whilst she was ill.
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| My Bed |
Jake and Dinos Chapman aka The Chapman Brothers are obsessed with Goya. They recreated his disasters of war in airfix models.
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| Disasters of War |
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| Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model |
Damien Hirst's work takes two distinct paths -
Natural History.
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| The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living |
Dots. His paintings of dots are more like pop art. The dots are not just randomly arranged the colours all relate to each other.
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| Anthraquinone-1 Diazonium Chloride |
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| ghost |
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| newborn baby |
References
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=26294
http://www.britishmuseum.org/ron_mueck.aspx
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2308&page=1
http://www.jakeanddinoschapman.com/
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/tracey_emin.htm
http://www.jeffkoons.com/site/index.html
http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=65
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=2643&page=1
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/aipe/sensation_royal_academy.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/01/art
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/examples-of-brutalist-architecture-in-england/6433.html
http://www.morning-earth.org/artistnaturalists/an_goldsworthy.html
Monday 12th December 2011
This lecture was covered background knowledge of early photography, looking at key works and photographers as photography develops.
In 1826 Niepce produced what is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph. It was a turning point in the art work as everything changed. People could now have a machine to record the world. Turner had started his impressionist work prior to this point but now the rest of the art world moved in his direction.
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| Niepce |
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| the artists studio |
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| Boulevard du Temple |
Henry Fox Talbot produced the first negative. Previous photographs were positives and as such were one offs. The advent of negatives allowed the images to be produced over and over again without reshooting.
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| Oriel window at Laycock Abbey |
Following on from his development of negativesFox Talbot also produced images using a technique now known as photograms where an item is placed on light sensitive paper and exposed to light producing a representation of its outline.
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| Album di Disegni Fotogenici: The "Bertoloni Album" |
He was then able to send botanical samples to a keen botanist Antonio Bertoloni for use in Album di Disegni Fotogenici: The "Bertoloni Album" species were accurately reproduced by this technique and the images could be shared and studied by botanists all over the world.
The impact of this was felt throughout education. People could now see exactly what people, places and animals looked in places they had never visited. Images could be shared and viewed by all, not only in books but newspapers too opening the world to a large section of society.
An example of the impact on education is how Western Europeans thought foreign wildlife looked. Unless you happened to be a rich colonial type you were taught and believed that the rhinoceros looked like the picture below which was drawn in 1515. This drawing was listed in textbooks until the advent of photography and a photograph replaced it.
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Daguerreotypes are proof that sex drives culture - the porn daguerreotypes are highly collectable and command high prices.
Even early cameras could be bought and operated by members of the public who without training could produce good images. Compared with the years of training carried out by artists before they could paint a recognisable image.
In 1888 Kodak cameras were marketed to the public using the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest"
Kodak's founder George Eastman believed strongly in marketing and advertising his product. His company developed a flexible cellulose film which replaced plates in cameras making them more portable and practical to use. In 1897 the Kodak symbol was the first permanent electric advert in Trafalgar Square.
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson produced photographs that mimicked artworks. They were staged scenes which were contrived to give photography credibility.
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| Newhaven Fishwives |
As photography developed and the cameras became more portable, photographs began to be taken in their own right. Cameras could be taken to places where an easel could not.
Daguerre stated that painting was dead. He did not copyright his invention preferring to give it to the world allowing unlimited use and development.
Fox Talbot on the other hand tried to patent his work and spent the rest of his life trying to sue people for stealing his ideas.
Karl Blossfeldt was a German sculptor and photographer who specialised in macro photography of plants. He produced images of single seed heads and leaves. He believed that nature had already solved our design and architectural problems.
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| Blossfeldt balsam |
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| Blossfeldt nigella |
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| Blossfeldt pumpkin tendrills |
AOP video on Karl Blossfeldt
He took nature out of nature and put in a neutral context - a very modern aesthetic - his images could have been done yesterday. His works were not intended to be so are accidental works of art. He wanted to prove that nature was perfect, but he used a scalpel to doctor his subjects - nature was not perfect enough at close quarters.
Julia Margaret Cameron photographed women as people not as objects. Her subjects look directly at the camera, engaging the viewer. Previously women had been shown looking away or down in submission. Cameron's photographs were powerful images of women. Cameron was accepted in the world of photography by contrast women were not accepted into the world of art until latter years.
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| The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty |
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| Ewen's Bride |
The American Civil War was the first conflict to be documented by photographers on the scene of the battles. The images showed the best and the worst sides of conflict from smart soldiers and tents to bodies strewn over fields. The photographs had a serious effect on the public affecting the long held perceptions of war. War was no longer an heroic gentlemanly affair.
Photographs could be manipulated to portray the message intended by the photographer. The scene outside the Dunker Church taken by Alexander Gardner is rumoured to have been set up by the bodies moved to be photographed in front of the church to make image more powerful.
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| Dunker Church, Antitetam |
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| Hospital Tent photographer unknown |
Roger Fenton photographed the Crimean War.
His photograph of Balaklava Harbour shows a working ship of the line as well as normal people going about their work.
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| Balaklava Harbour |
He photographed the Sevastopol battlefields, one of his most powerful images is entitled The Valley of the Shadow of Death. It shows a battlefield scarred by machinery and strewn with cannonballs. A more accurate description would have been cannonballs fallen off a wagon on the way to a battlefield. Despite the fact that it is a scene on a battlefield the title makes a lie of the photograph.
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| The Valley of the Shadow of Death |
All photographs lie by omission - all photographs leave something out because they cannot include everything.
Ansell Adams was a landscape and nature photographer who was passionate about the preservation of Yosemite. He was a key player in the establishment of National Parks. He showed the beauty of nature in its own environment.
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| Ansel Adams - Aspens |
He was a founder member of the f/64 group which was a group of photographers who used the smallest possible aperture to get the maximum depth of field in their photographs. This produced landscape images which were sharp thought out the range of view.
Adams developed a way of exposing and printing which is used today. He developed the "zone system" which was a complex method of controlling and relating exposure and development which enabled photographers to visualise the image and then produce a photograph which matches that visualisation. His methods are still used today.
The two images below are examples of his images where the scene shows the maximum depth of field and has both extremes of light and dark areas to expose for. The results show his great skill.
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| Canyon de Chelly |
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| Grand Canyon |
A movement started in America called 'Photo Secessionists"
Imogen Cunningham was a photographer who specialised in photographs of plants in an abstract way emphasising the aesthetics.
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| Agave Design 1 |
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| Two Callas |
Alfred Stieglitz believed that photographs were as valid as paintings as artwork. He produced photographs created to show that they could be a medium for artistic expression. His images show real scenes but demonstrating their aesthetics not just their content. He breaks accepted rules of art by splitting the frame.
His photograph of 'The Steerage' shows the two classes of travellers separated by a gang plank, graphically showing the difference between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'
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| The Steerage |
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| Flatiron Building |
Paul Strand was a photographer who created powerful images which were plain, stark and sometimes abstract. His portraits were of ordinary people whose faces showed they had hard lives.
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| Blind |
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| Wall Street |
Edward Westons photographs are studies of form, shape and light. His most famous image of a pepper which demonstrates a wide range of tones giving depth to the image. To achieve this he placed the pepper in a terracotta pot giving depth to the shadow.
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| Pepper |
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| Nautilus Shell |
His landscapes demonstrate the same attention to form and light.
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| White Dune |
During the Inter-war period there was the Great Depression. The FSA (Farm Security Administration) commissioned to document America.
Walker Evans photographs show the grinding poverty endured by the rural poor.
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| Family |
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| Allie Mae Burroughs |
Dorothea Lange also photographed the poor in their environment.
Her portrait of a migrant mother and child used the same composition as religious images.
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| Migrant Mother |
Sebastian Salgados image of a gold mine 'Ladders' give a graphic portrayal of the horrendous working conditions in Brazil. The photo was taken in 1986 despite looking like a scene from centuries before.
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| Ladders |
It also raises the question of the ethics of photographing those in dire circumstances, selling the photographs and therefore profiting in the suffering of others. This is one of the questions I examine in my essay.
References
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/salgado/salgado_ladders_full.html
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/L/lange/lange.html
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm
http://www.edward-weston.com/
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pstd/hd_pstd.htm
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/stieglitz/stieglitz_flatiron_building_full.html
http://www.imogencunningham.com/
http://www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams/
http://masters-of-photography.com/A/adams/adams_aspens_full.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/fenton/exhibition.shtm
http://www.nga.gov/feature/artnation/cameron/index.shtm
http://news.discovery.com/history/civil-war-photography-110411.html
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artist,show,1,30,0,0,0,0,0,0,karl_blossfeldt.html
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hlad/hd_hlad.htm
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/corp/historyOfKodak/eastmanTheMan.jhtml
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1997.382.1
Monday 9th January 2012
Russia - Constructionists
Alexander Rodchenko - was both a great graphic designer and photographer. He produced purely photographic images.
Photographs are not the real thing but constructed images. Rodchencko chose his camera angles showing that it is a photograph not a painting. An artist would not set an easel up on a ledge looking down into a street.
His photograph of prisoners en route to work on the construction of the White Sea Canal demonstrates his use of camera angle. By looking down on the huddled prisoners from a view behind the guard shows the powerlessness of the prisoners. The inclusion of the view of a further guard below right shows that there were layers of control in the scene.
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| The White Sea Canal 1933 |
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| Pioneer Girl |
Another example is the image below of a group of workers playing music to their collegues whilst taking a break. The graphical nature of the construction of the image is typical of Rodchenkos work.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a painter who became constructivist photographer in the 1920s.
His photograph of Marseilles Old Harbour is shot in a similar way to Rodchenko. Looking down and tilted at an unusual angle giving the work a constructed graphic design.
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| Marseilles Old Harbour |
He built sculptures designed to have light shone through them creating an image on photographic paper.
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| The light-space modulator |
Man Ray was an artist and photographer who experimented with different methods of image production. He was French and went to live and work on America. He produced photograms (placing objects on light sensitive paper to produce an image) which he called Rayographs after himself. Research
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| Five light bulbs |
He developed the technique of Solarization which creates a halo around the subject bringing art ideas into the production of photographs. Research
During this period the Russians and Americans were using photography for political purposes.
The French were more interested in the artistic development of photography.
Eugene Atget was an old man who had old photography equipment and took photographs in and around Paris in the 1900s.
The image of the cathedral photographed through the trees gives the trees the emphasis in the image. The cathedral is shown as a ghostly image. The overall impression of the image is that nature is permanent and man-made objects transient.
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His street images are simple but effective compositions which capture the feel of Paris of the time.
Henri Cartier Bresson was a natural successor to Atget. He was a documentary photographer who pioneered the use of a 35mm rangefinder camera. He was widely exhibited and described the instant the photograph was taken should be at the 'Decisive Moment'
He explained his approach to photography as "For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression."
Below are examples of his work, each image is a master-class in the theory of decisive moment. A second early or later and the image would not have had the same impact.
Robert Capa was a Hungarian photographer who specialised in war and documentary photography.
In his coverage of the Spanish Civil war he produced one of his most iconic and most questioned images. The Falling Soldier image depicted a loyalist soldier at the point just after he had been shot and was falling to the ground. Its power has never been in question but there has been many arguments over whether it had been staged.
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| The Falling Soldier |
Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson founded Magnum. Research
Capa died whilst covering the Indochina war. He was getting into a position to photograph advancing troops when he stepped on a landmine. He died of his injuries.
Kevin Carter was a South African who grew up in the Apartheid era. He was a photojournalist for the Johannesburg Star and realised after his photos of an execution were widely seen that he could highlight injustices in society with his photographs.
His work came to international attention when he photographed the famine in Sudan. Amongst his photographs was one of an apparently dying small child with a vulture watching her close by (shown below). This image was one of many taken in the area but the composition made it a powerful image that caught the attention of the public. He was the subject of a lot of hostility when he was unable to follow up the photo with a happy ending. He was described in the press as no better than the vulture.
Carter had a history of depression and was haunted by the terrible things he had seen. He committed suicide in 1994.
History Revisionists have questioned Carters image in the same way as Capa dying soldier. Calling into question the authenticity and the photographers actions. This type of revision detracts from the power of the images.
Britain in the 20th century
Photography and cinema are similar in the image composition but are very different in medium.
Single moment - photography -v- Moving image - cinema
Social realist photography
In Britain there is a strong history of socialism and a strong sense of social responsibility. Social documentary photographers feel that they can maybe affect the situation of their subjects.
Tony Ray Jones was a pioneer of social photography. His photographs of the ordinary person at in the street were keenly observed and showed multiple stories in a single shot. His photograph taken in Ramsgate shown below appears to be a compilation of so many stories in one image.
Martin Parr was a middle class man from Middle England who photographed the working classes. He was criticized because of his class difference. However as he came from a different world from his subjects he was able to look at situations with fresh eyes and capture powerful images. He produced a book of photographs entitled The Last Resort which showed the working class at leisure.
Chris Killip is a photographer who started his profession as a beach photographer on the Isle of Man before moving on to documentary projects. One of his projects was to photograph the effects of de-industrialisation during the Thatcher years. His black and white images grimly show the lives and living conditions of his subjects. His work was produced in a book called In Flagrante. Below are some images from the book.
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| Youth on a wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, Northumberland |
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| Helen and Hula-hoop, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland |
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| Angelic Upstarts at a Miners’ Benefit Dance at the Barbary Coast Club, Sunderland, Wearside |
References
http://nickwaplington.co.uk/
http://we-english.co.uk/blog/?p=1121
http://www.chriskillip.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3572433/Picture-of-the-month-The-Last-Resort-by-Martin-Parr.html
http://www.martinparr.com/index1.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/gallery/jones.shtml
http://www.thebangbangclub.com/kevin-carter.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981431,00.html
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R14YQNW&nm=Robert%20Capa
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&l1=0&pid=2K7O3R14T1LX&nm=Henri%20Cartier-Bresson
http://www.atgetphotography.com/
http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/index.php
http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/gallery/ray.shtml
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4703447
http://www.manraytrust.com/
http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/moholy_nagy/page2.html
http://artblart.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/exhibition-laszlo-moholy-nagy-retrospective-at-schirn-kunsthalle-frankfurt/
http://www.moholy-nagy.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3671028/Alexander-Rodchenko-A-man-who-took-life-lying-down.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/gallery/rodchenko.shtml
Monday 30th January 2012
In Chris Aughtons absence Steve Pickles is filling in and introduced us to semiotics.
Decoding images
'Nothing Comes from Nothing'
As professionals we have to recognise that our skills & practices have to be in context with previous and current practices.
Research and Analysis
- close analysis of texts(visual, written, objects, moving images)
- description of texts - be obvious ie dont assume too much knowledge of reader.
- description - what are we looking at/considering, how made, colour, composition, media, use of materials
- interpretation - what does the text convey
- evaluation
Walter Paton on Mona Lisa
- Highly subjective
- fancy prose
- very pretentious
Decoding images
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| Lego Vampire |
- projected image
- larger than life
- plastic mass produced
- recognisable hands
- simple drawn on face
- widows peak
- fangs
- red eyes
- cape with large collar - historical representation of outfit used in theatrical performances where vampires had high collars which they drew across their faces before disappearing on stage.
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| Bela Lugosi Dracula |
- actor
- theatrical pose
- background - crypt?
- clothes - gentleman - polished shoes, cloak, waistcoat, medallion
History of vampire mythology
- folk tales give night danger
- explanation for disease
- legend of succubus (macbeth)
- 17 - 18th century Europe, Croatia, Prussia, Serbia
- Dracula
A video clip from the film Master and Commander
- scene shows period of 'Enlightenment'
- scientific exploration
- foundations of modern society
- Darwins voyage to the Galapagos 30 years after the film was based
- British power on the sea
- imperialism, cricket
- calm sunny weather
Pre Enlightenment - miraculous power of objects.
Siege of Constantinople
The church bells were rung, procession of priests and people with holy icons outside the church of St Sophia.
Turned towards the supernatural - took icons and relics from the church hoping that God would intervene.
Ultimate method of raising the defenders morale (post enlightenment view)
Reliquaries were used to display holy relics, an example below shows a silver hand made in the 13th century in Flanders. It has windows in the fingers through which you would originally have been able to see the hand bones of a saint.
Enlightenment
Taxonomy
System of classification/ordering essential to the management of knowledge.
For some people the enlightenment made the world less interesting because it took away the mystery of for example the supernatural. This possibly led to Romanticism.
Monday 6th February 2012
The French and Industrial Revolutions reduced the power of the church and monarchy, this can be attributed to the enlightenment.
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| Velasquez Infanta Margarita Teresa 1660 |
- Child dressed as an adult - childhood not recognised as a separate state at the time.
- luxurious clothing as befits royalty
- skirt impractical, as much material as possible to show wealth
- whole outfit impractical showing she will not have to do anything practical or work
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| Dagoty - Marie Antoinette 1775 |
- impractical dress
- needs lots of servants for day to day tasks
- lots of fabric
- sumptuous room decor and hangings
- hand on globe symbolises power
- hairstyle
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| Queens bedroom Palace of Versailles |
Marie Antoinettes bedroom
- decoration overload
- gilt
- unreal
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| Reynolds The Ladies Waldegrave 1780 |
The Ladies waldegrave
- clothes slightly simpler
- hair still up
- working together on needlework - signify having an occupation
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| Romney Miss Constable 1787 |
Miss Constable
- hair is now down and loose
- dress is more natural
- hat is countryfied
- playing the role of a countrygirl
- human being not a doll
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| Jacques Louis David Portrait of Madame Recamier 1800 |
- roman style - empire dress
- greek and roman style
- french saw themselves as heirs to greek empire
- furniture simple style
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| Lady Hamilton 19th century mezzotint |
Lady Hamilton
- dressed like a mythical goddess
- printed image - celebrity of time
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| Palace of Versailles hall of mirrors |
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| British Museum Room of Enlightenment |
- enlightenment room
- classical statues
- book
- clean, simple, rational
Societies were formed at this time, people would go along to lectures on recent experiments. There was rational scientific progress.
Monday 27th Feb 2012
Steve showed a clip from the recent film adaptation of The Last of The Mohicans as an example of romanticism.
Hawkeye - played by Daniel Day Lewis - is the romantic hero, a european orphan brought up by an indian and his son.
18th century, British wars with French in America.
Theme - self determination for Americans as opposed to loyalty to Britain.
Grand Passions
- people sacrificing themselves
- stunning landscapes
- the noble savage - mohican kills the bad guy
Camera work
- close in shots
- wide scenery
- film slows during intense moments - elastic time
- no dialogue
John Vanderlyn's painting - The Death of Jane McCrea depicts the corruption of the 'noble savage' by the British. She was killed by native Americans who were fighting for the British in the American Revolutionary War. The British had always maintained that their methods were always 'cleaner' than the Americans so this incident was used extensively as propaganda by the opposition to undermine their moral position.
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| The Death of Jane McCrea |
In 1908 Mills & Boon novels began to be published - trashy romantic fiction
- A world where a happy ending is guaranteed
- Men are masterful and stern
- Men are capable of rape
Modern feminists of 1970s fall into two camps -
Socialist feminists
- society has created men, they are not bad themselves
- pre industrial men worked at home in the family e.g. weavers
- post industrial men were taken out of this stable place to work with other men in unhealthy environments
Racial feminists
Sublime Landscape- biological determination
- separate lives - women have to live in communes away from men to achieve their goals
- small figures in impressive landscape, some of the camerawork in the Last of the Mohicans shows this in the wide shots in the mountains and the film characters insignificant in the foreground.
John Motions painting of Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion is a good example.
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| Sadak In Search of the Waters of Oblivion. |
Further examples
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| Hannibal crossing the Alps - Turner |
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| The Great Day of his Wrath - Martin |
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| The Snowstorm - Turner |
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| Portrait of William Style of Langley - |
The legacy of Romanticism
Extreme environments
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| Sea of Ice - Friedrich |
Shackleton polar exhibition (1914 1917)
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| The Endurance Trapped in the Ice - Hurley |
literature - T S Elliot - The Wasteland
American Landscape
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| Moonrise over Glacier Point - Adams |
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| Rocky Mountains - Bierstadt |
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| Blue Poles - Pollock |
Pollock was photographed in action painting and became the romantic hero.
Artists are seen as romantic heros when they are perceived as going beyond the role of a painter.
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| Jackson Pollock painting, Summer 1950 photo: Hans Namuth |
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| Vertical Seconds - Nicholson |
Tortured by alcoholism
Bipolar
Worked on the edge of what was possible and died at 44.
Paradoxically abstract impressionism was covertly supported by the CIA as propaganda for the greatness of America.
Napoleon -
An outsider, a Corsican artillery officer who became a great military leader.
Ruthless - abandoned his army in Egypt.
Made France powerful.
Overambitious - 1812 invasion of Russia.
He had to be defeated twice before eventual exile and death.
Paintings - hero on horseback, sublime scenery
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| Napoleon crossing the Alps - David |
When in Egypt took scholars, artists and engravers to document what they found.
He produced large books (20 volumes) on the research. "Description D L'egypt" (reported to have been destroyed in a fire at the Cairo's Institute for Scientific Research during the protests in 2011)
Found the Rosetta Stone which was subsequently stolen by the British and is now on display in the British Museum.
The dark side of the romantic myth comes to the fore - looking for altered states, drugs, psychosis, occult.
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| Self Portrait of the Desperate Man - Gustav Corbet |
WB Yeats - lifelong interest in the occult
Kurt Cobain - musician suffered from depression and heroin addiction, suicide at 27.
Amy Winehouse - singer died of alcohol poisoning at 27.
Cult of Golden Dawn - In its heyday, many celebrities belonged to the Golden Dawn, such as actress Florence Farr, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, Irish writer William Butler Yeats, Welsh author Arthur Machen, English author Evelyn Underhill, and English author Aleister Crowley.
American Marshal Applewhite founded the Heavens Gate religious group which believed that they would be taken by aliens in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. Many of his followers joined him in committing suicide in 1997 as the comet passed in the belief that they would leave their bodies to join the aliens.
Shakespeare
Lady Macbeth speech
"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’ "
Raven - bird of ill omen
Duncan (the king) a good man
Invoking spirits
Removal of traditional womanly feelings - kindness, softness, nurturing
Dark - suffocating like a blanket.
The painting by John Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare was very popular and was believed to have influenced novelists of the early 19th century including Mary Shelley, most famous for Frankenstein. Shelleys parents knew Fuseli and she would have been very familiar with his work.
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| The Nightmare - Fuseli |
The 1922 film Nosferatu tapped into the current fascination with the dark side of human nature.
It was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stokers Dracula.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was another film produced in the early 20th century which explored the darkest side of human nature. The film contains mysticism, magic, dark forces, ghosts, death, apocalypse, paranoia etc
The film is shot in a single set, the make up and the actions are over exaggerated giving a very claustrophobic feel to the film.
The main character Caligari owns a slave Cesare who he kills but the film ends on a positive note when a doctor steps forward and offers to cure Caligari.
There are parallels in the film with the rise of Hitler. Hitler believed he was a romantic hero, he was an artist and music lover. The exaggerated actions by Cesare are similar to the gestures used by Hitler during his speeches.
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| Cesare |
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| Hitler |
References
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.turnercontemporary.org/
http://pietmondriaan.com/
http://www.tate.org.uk/
http://www.theasc.com/
http://www.anseladams.com
http://allart.biz/
http://nga.gov.au/
http://beta.tate.org.uk/
http://www.jacqueslouisdavid.org/
http://english.ahram.org.eg/
http://www.dia.org/
http://nosferatumovie.com/
History of Photography Timeline from photo.net to gather all the above together.
http://photo.net/history/timeline
- ancient times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole
- 16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens
- 17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs
- 1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.
- 1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.
- 1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper
- 1826: Niépce creates a permanent image
- 1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper.
- 1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process.
- 1841: Talbot patents his process under the name "calotype".
- 1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.
- 1853: Nadar (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris
- 1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade
- 1855: Beginning of stereoscopic era
- 1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.
- 1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the "color separation" method.
- 1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives
- 1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography.
- 1870: Center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.
- 1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the "dry plate" process.
- 1877: Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse.
- 1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.
- 1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.
- 1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
- 1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
- 1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of tenament life in New york City
- 1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced.
- 1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City
- 1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.
- 1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
- 1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working mills.
- 1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz, develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film.
- 1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo.
- 1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris
- 1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.
- 1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he begins an 11-year project photographing street life
- 1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful, close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects; Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6 cm image on rollfilm.; Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature
- 1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT
- 1932: Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman, aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and shoots himself.
- 1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit
- 1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition to film.
- 1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next six years. Roman Vishniac begins his project of the soon-to-be-killed-by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.
- 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
- World War II:
- Development of multi-layer color negative films
- Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
- 1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
- 1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm; Polaroid sells instant black and white film
- 1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
- 1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art
- 1959: Nikon F introduced.
- 1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City.
- 1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
- 1970: William Wegman begins photographing his Weimaraner, Man Ray.
- 1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame
- 1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22
- 1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"; Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the first working CCD-based digital still camera
- 1976: First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William Eggleston's Guide
- 1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed in 1980; Jan Grooverbegins exploring kitchen utensils
- 1978: Hiroshi Sugimoto begins work on seascapes.
- 1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid.
- 1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera
- 1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera)
- 1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US); In the American West by Richard Avedon
- 1988: Sally Mann begins publishing nude photos of her children
- 1987: The popular Canon EOS system introduced, with new all-electronic lens mount
- 1990: Adobe Photoshop released.
- 1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3
- 1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD
- 1993: Founding of photo.net (this Web site), an early Internet online community; Sebastiao Salgado publishes Workers; Mary Ellen Mark publishes book documenting life in an Indian circus.
- 1995: Material World, by Peter Menzel published.
- 1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics
- 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a leading manufacturer.
- 2000: Camera phone introduced in Japan by Sharp/J-Phone
- 2001: Polaroid goes bankrupt
- 2003: Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with the Olympus E-1; Canon Digital Rebel introduced for less than $1000
- 2004: Kodak ceases production of film cameras
- 2005: Canon EOS 5D, first consumer-priced full-frame digital SLR, with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000;
