Art

Degas sensitively conveyed the union of a musician with his instrument in this work. It represents an intermediary stage in the development of the violinist featured in "The Dance Lesson" (1971.185). Based on a more preliminary sketch, Degas worked up the composition in pastel and squared it for transfer. Curiously, he executed it on the back of a bookseller's advertisement; however, the green tone of the paper perfectly suited the use of pastel.

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Kiefer based this watercolor on a photograph of refugees in a picture book dating from World War II. It was an unusual subject for him, as his interest was not so much in the subject per se as in the image— a mass of people. The title, a Latin term meaning "fear of empty space," is inscribed in gouache within the form of a palette. In this and a number of small drawings, the artist painted dots and drips like snow ("another kind of horror vacui," according to Kiefer) across the surface, much like an Abstract Expressionist allover composition. The image demonstrates the artist’s black humor, connecting wartime hardship, natural phenomena, and art.

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Early 20th century.

Vogel worked for the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal initiative that put artists to work during the Great Depression. The Division’s New York workshop fostered a vibrant community of leftist printmakers. There, Vogel created Vision, a Surrealist montage of abstracted figures that conveys the horrors of an impending world war. A prophetic figure at left faces figures, including a horse, whose ribcages are exposed; at right, a figure hangs from a noose. Vogel made Vision after returning from Spain, where he had moved for a brief period to support the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War. While in Spain, Vogel saw Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937), whose blend of abstract style and political subject matter made a profound impact on the artist.

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Between the two world wars, Renger-Patzsch was one of the champions of straight photography in Germany and an advocate for a modern aesthetic style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). He believed that photography’s chief value lay in its ability to render the texture and detail of physical objects with absolute precision. This close-up of the suffering face of Christ from a German Gothic Pietà was reproduced in the artist’s landmark book Die Welt ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful), published in 1928. The book’s sequence of one hundred tightly cropped and sharply focused images of plants, animals, landscapes, and industrial subjects suggested that the camera could disclose aspects of the essential nature of objects that were otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

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Smith’s mezzotint reproduces Fuseli’s striking conception of the witches as first encountered by Macbeth and Banquo in Shakespeare’s play (act 1, scene 3), prompting Banquo to ask: "What are these
So wither’d and wild in their attire, That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,
And yet are on’t?.../ You seem to understand me, By each at once her chappy finger laying /
Upon her skinny lips . . ." After a seven-year sojourn in Rome, Fuseli settled in London in 1779 and became known for painting imaginative and disturbing subjects. The overlapping, profile presentation of the witches echoes classical reliefs, but their features, gestures, and flying skull-headed companion demonstrate an equal familiarity with macabre precedents in the work of Italian painters such as Domenico Veneziano and Salvator Rosa.

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Meryon was plagued by mental illness and spent the last years of his brief life in an asylum. The dark, gothic tenor that characterizes many of his prints has been interpreted as symptomatic of his tumultuous life. This print, taken from his album Eaux-fortes sur Paris, shows a grotesque gargoyle from Notre-Dame Cathedral against an aerial view of the expanding French capital. Surrounded by a flock of darkly colored birds, the sculpture takes on a menacing, monstrous appearance, especially as it dominates the right half of the composition. Meryon added a verse of his own creation to this later state of the print, describing the figure as an "insatiable vampire, eternal lust" who "covets its food in the great city." The artist continued to revise the plate over the course of a decade, producing a total of ten states of the etching before his untimely death in 1868.

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Even the story is Halloween appropriate.

Born to a mixed-race family in rural Georgia, Benny Andrews rose from impoverished conditions and the anti-Black discrimination of the Jim Crow South to become a leading figurative painter of American life and a social justice advocate. He learned to draw as a child from his father, a self-taught artist and sharecropper. After serving in the Korean War, Andrews studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, using funds from the GI Bill, and moved to New York in 1958. There, he befriended a group of artists exploring figuration, including Red Grooms and Alice Neel, and developed his signature technique of "rough collage," combining bits of paper and fabric onto his painted canvases.

This startling and satirical scene of a patriotic woman astride a nude soldier forms part of Andrews’ ambitious Bicentennial Series, begun in 1970 in response to the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The painting cycle combines a potent confrontation of racial inequities with a critique of unguarded patriotism. Andrews created this particular work in response to the Vietnam War, saying that it represented a powerful image of "the military being used by misguided citizenry." It depicts a woman clutching a miniature American flag as she straddles a gaunt figure clad only in boots, a helmet, and the insignia of a US Army sergeant. Here, the military—represented by the helmeted form—submits to the will of "the people"—the patriotic woman. Crushed under the weight of jingoistic fervor, the person on its hands and knees turns this anti-war allegory into a scene of sexual domination and submission.

American Gothic takes its name from a more famous painting by Grant Wood that hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where Andrews would have seen it. While that work represents a farmer and his daughter stiffly posed in front of their house and has been interpreted as a positive depiction of Midwestern spirit, Andrews portrays a similarly enigmatic but more skeptical view of American values. The main figures also bear an unexpected resemblance to depictions of Aristotle and Phyllis, a moral tale of the Medieval period in which the ancient Greek philosopher debases himself before the seductive mistress of Alexander the Great, allowing her to ride him like a horse. Though the story has no relation to this painting’s contemporary anti-war message, it provides a powerful basis for the figurative group at the center of American Gothic.

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I like the use of a blurry look to show movement in still art. Find it very effective.

After seeing the 1877 French Impressionist exhibition in Paris, Weir grumbled that it was “worse than the Chamber of Horrors.” Much later, working in the Connecticut countryside under the influence of friends such as Theodore Robinson and inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, he converted to Impressionism. In this canvas, he captured the severe industrial form of a new iron truss bridge, covered with red priming paint, over the Shetucket River in Windham. The fundamentally solid forms and restrained veneer of broken brushwork epitomize Weir’s conservative brand of Impressionism.

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The extreme familiarity of this image today makes it hard to realize how shocking it and other works by Munch were when they were created slightly over a hundred years ago. Munch's art represented his own emotions, mostly the darker ones of fear, dread, loneliness, and sexual longing, with extraordinary expressiveness. The screaming figure personifies existential horror. A precursor of this image is a drawing of a man (Munch himself) on a similar bridge, with a blood-red sky above. A text accompanying this drawing states: "I walked with two friends. Then the sun sank. Suddenly the sky turned as red as blood ... My friends walked on, and I was left alone, trembling with fear. I felt as if all nature were filled with one mighty unending shriek."