4 2011-2012 International academy of business human development batsueva d.I.

INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF BUSINESS HAND ––OUTS
Human Development Lecture 14. Modern Art Styles: Surrealism, Pop Art, etc. – 2 hours. Lecturer: Batsueva Dinah Iuryevna, senior lecturer	The Chair of Humanities 2 term 2011-2012 academic year

The brief contents of the lecture

Symbolism - An art movement which rejected the purely visual realism of the Impressionists, and the rationality of the Industrial Age, in order to depict the symbols of ideas. Influenced by Romanticism it thrived in France in the late nineteenth century, its influence spreading throughout much of Europe. Rather than the precise equivalents of ideas or emotions, its symbols were meant to be more mysterious, ambiguous suggestions of meanings. , Employing some of the imagery of Symbolist writers , including monsters and glowing or smoky spirits, synthesized from elements of Bible stories and ancient myths. “I believe only in what I can’t see with my eyes.”

Abstract Expressionism or abstract expressionism - A painting movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly, and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings and emotions, painting gesturally, non-geometrically, sometimes applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Their work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned. Some Abstract Expressionist artists were concerned with adopting a peaceful and mystical approach to a purely abstract image. Usually there was no effort to represent subject matter. Not all work was abstract, nor was all work expressive, but it was generally believed that the spontaneity of the artists' approach to their work would draw from and release the creativity of their unconscious minds. The expressive method of painting was often considered as important as the painting itself.

Pop Art - An art movement and style that had its origins in England in the 1950s and made its way to the United States during the 1960s. Pop artists have focused attention upon familiar images of the popular culture such as billboards, comic strips, magazine advertisements, and supermarket products. Leading exponents are Richard Hamilton (British, 1922-), Andy Warhol (American, 1928?1930?-1987), Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997), Claes Oldenburg (American, 1929-), Jasper Johns (American, 1930-), and Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925-).

• "Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything." Andy Warhol (1928?1930?-1987), American Pop artist.

• "I am for an art that takes its forms from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself." Claes Oldenburg (1929-), American Pop artist. In an exhibition catalogue, 1961.

  Of all the Pop artists who emerged in New York and on the international scene in the early 1960s, none is more famous or more typifies the movement than Andy Warhol. Although he had a traditional art education at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, as a young man in the 1950s he supported himself doing commercial art in New York. About 1959 he decided to concentrate his energies on painting, calling upon both his formal training and commercial experience in his new work. Warhol purposely sought an alternative to the emotionally charged paintings of the Abstract Expressionists by adopting a commercial, hands-off approach to art. His aim was to demystify art by making it look as if anyone could have done it. To this end, he borrowed images from American popular culture and celebrated ordinary consumer goods, such as Brillo pads, Campbell's soup cans, and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as media and political personalities, including Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong. He featured them in individually colored serial paintings and prints that relied on commercial silkscreening techniques for reproduction. After the early 1960s his most frequent subjects were the famous people he knew, and occasionally he was his own subject. In this eerie, premonitory self-portrait, produced just a few months before his death in February 1987, Warhol appears as a haunting, disembodied mask. His head floats in a dark black void and his face and hair are ghostly pale, covered in a militaristic camouflage pattern of green, gray, and black.

  To many people, Roy Lichtenstein's paintings based on comic strips are synonymous with Pop Art. These depictions of characters in tense, dramatic situations are intended as ironic commentaries on modern man's plight, in which mass media — magazines, advertisements, and television — shapes everything, even our emotions. Lichtenstein also based paintings on well-known masterpieces of art, perhaps commenting, as did Andy Warhol in his "Mona Lisa," on the conversion of art into commodity. Like Warhol, Lichtenstein, who had an art-school background, also worked as a commercial artist and graphic designer (1951–57), an experience that influenced the subject matter of his later paintings. Lichtenstein's fame as a Pop artist began with his first one-man exhibition, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962, and continued to characterize his career throughout his life.

In reduplicating this photograph of a heroine shared by millions, Warhol denied the sense of the uniqueness of the artist's personality that had been implicit in the gestural painting of the 1950s. He also used a commercial technique— silkscreening—that gives the picture a crisp, artificial look; even as Warhol canonizes Monroe, he reveals her public image as a carefully structured illusion. Redolent of 1950s glamour, the face in Gold Marilyn Monroe is much like the star herself—high gloss, yet transient; bold, yet vulnerable; compelling, yet elusive. Surrounded by a void, it is like the fadeout at the end of a movie.

Surrealism: the art of Self Discovery

"The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life." - Carl Jung

Art has always been an integral part of humanity's great quest for knowledge. The interchange of knowledge between artists and scientists has led to many of our most important advances. For example:

• It was artists' zeal to perfect their craft that led to a better understanding of human anatomy. Masters of the human form, such as Michelangelo, broke social taboos and laws in order to study the human body through the dissection of corpses. Their anatomical research later became a vital part of medical knowledge.

• Geographers and map makers created mathematical grids to make accurate maps. Artists used that innovation to translate three dimensions into two dimensions.

• It was painters who discovered the principles of optics while examining how the eye sees in order to better "trick" the eye with their images.

Around the beginning of 20th Century, another important interaction between the arts and science began. A medical doctor, Sigmund Freud, discovered the "psyche" or "soul," while trying to find the cause of his patients' unusual symptoms. Psyche is the Greek equivalent for Anima, the Latin word for soul. Both refer to something metaphysical–beyond the physical, invisible to our eyes.

In this way, Freud unwittingly rekindled an interest in the metaphysical realm, which science had shunned in its quest for knowledge. He then endeavored to study it in the same way the physical level had been: By applying reason. One of Freud's most prominent disciples, Dr. Carl Jung, further developed the field of psychology and the understanding of the psyche. While Freud laid the scientific groundwork, Jung leaped forward in his exploration of how the unconscious reveals itself though symbols. In this respect, artists once again were needed to join the quest for knowledge. Jung himself painted and sculpted his dreams and visions so that he could better understand them.