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Good morning everyone and
today we are going to continue
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some of the discussions we have been
having about modern art
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and in particular we are going to be
looking at abstraction.
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What exactly does abstraction
look like in art?
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What exactly is abstract art?
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This is something that has
been around for a long time.
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This is something especially important
in the 20th century.
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This is an aspect of style,
a manner of art
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that continues to be important.
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So we will be looking at that.
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Abstraction is, in fact, a spectrum.
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You can have very abstract art
or marginally abstract art.
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And so what I will show you today is you
don't need to know any of these images
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but I want us to think about
what abstraction is as we
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go through this discussion
or we get to our key images.
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So we start with perhaps the least
abstract work which is on the left here
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and this is a portrait of the
artist Matisse, Matisse's wife.
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And essentially we have no difficulty
looking at this and seeing
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that this is a woman who has turned
her head and she is looking at us
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and has this rather
splendid hat on.
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But in fact what Matisse
is doing is he is using
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a very non naturalistic
color palette here
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and he is using
large patches of white.
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And so to us we are sort of
used to this by now.
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To people of the time they thought
this was very very shocking.
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But there is aspects of this that are
obviously very non naturalistic,
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that are starting
to look abstract.
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Just a few years later when we get to
Picasso you can see that by now
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he has very much abstracted
the face, the features.
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The features are now reduced
pretty much to triangles and ovals
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and all of these very geometric shapes
and yet we still
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have no problem looking at that
and seeing that it is a head.
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Again, at the time people thought
it was outrageously abstract
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and now we don't really have
a difficulty with that.
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But as we get farther into the
twentieth century we get to art
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that is increasingly abstract and
is in fact non representational.
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That is, when you look
at the Mondrian and the Rothko
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there is no representation of anything
that you would see in real life.
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And so this is many ways is very very
abstract an order of magnitude
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more abstract than
Matisse and Picasso's.
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So there is a whole range of art
that falls into this category.
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Now we are talking about
abstraction in modern art
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and what do we mean by modern well
we have talked about this issue
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of modernity and the painters of
modern life we talked about this
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with the realist and the impressionist.
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And basically modernity is a culture
that is very forward looking
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and one that sort of celebrates
a certain amount of change
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and in terms of the art world we have
certainly been in this era of modernity
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and probably since the realists
and the impressionists but certainly
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and especially
in the twentieth century.
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And this goes back to this idea
of the avant garde and the new
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and this idea that art was going to be
reflecting something new and modern.
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Ok, that modern term just means new.
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The term moderno was used in the
Renaissance
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for things they thought were new.
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So this is not something that is
an invention of the twentieth century
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but we tend to think about it as art
of the twentieth century.
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We are in a period of time we think
now called postmodernity
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or we may even be in post post modernity,
whatever that is.
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But we are sort of past that
modern period of time now that
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we are in the twenty first century.
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But modernity in art is roughly the years
say if you think
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about the demoiselles d'avignon 1907.
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You know to the 1960s, the 50s
and 60s when things start to change.
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The reason I bring this up is because
it's important that you understand
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that abstract art and modern art
are not the same thing.
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It is true that a lot of modern art
is abstract but as we will see
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that is not the case for the
entire 20th century
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and in particular in the next class
we will be looking at surrealism
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and dada and performance
and these are works of art
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that are not at all abstract.
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Conversely abstraction has been around
for a great deal of time
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and so we look at something like this
ancient greek cycladic head on the left.
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Now we know these were painted
and they had eyes but even when
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they were painted with eyes they still,
you can see here they are still
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just the essence the bare essence of
what you need to show this face.
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We have the oval,
we have the nose,
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and then the eyes would
have been painted on.
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But it is not anything
that is personalized,
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it is not anything that is naturalistic.
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So even if it were painted, it would
still be something very very abstract.
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Likewise with the image over here
which is, probably looks familiar to you
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if you drink coffee,
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but this is a very
popular image in medieval arts.
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A sort of mermaid but she is
you know she is done
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in this sort of heraldic
symmetric fashion.
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And that is not how you would
view a figure whatsoever
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but the artist has gotten the essential
elements of this creature
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and put them on there.
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Look at the hair,
the hair has become very geometric
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and stylized and abstract.
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And so abstraction,
again this is a style of art.
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Modern art,
this is a chronology.
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Okay and they do overlap very heavily
in the twentieth century but not always.
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Here is another,
here are some others.
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To reinforce that.
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We have, here's some examples
of modern art, okay.
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And we'll talk more about this art
next time but these two images
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over here on the left are
absolutely modern and
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yet we can see that it is
a cup that has fur on it.
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We can see that this is a strange
building with a glove and head on it.
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And we don't know exactly
what that is but you know
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we can tell what the objects are.
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We can't tell in the Mondrian,
you know, what these objects are
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and in fact they are not something.
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The same with the Rothko.
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They are expressive of these
inner feelings and inner philosophies
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and religion that are things that are
not tangible, that are not in
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the natural world and so
they are different.
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Again, modern art, abstract art,
not necessarily the same.
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So today we're going to look at three
different examples of modern art.
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We're going to look at an example
of cubist art over here
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with the Georges Braque.
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We're going to look at an example of
expressionist or Der Blaue Reiter here
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with the Kandinsky and we're going to
look at this work here by Lee Krasner
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from the New York school.
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One of the things that I want to
impress upon you that I hear
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form students sometimes is that they
think that abstract art is not good art.
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Okay, because there's the idea that
it's difficult to render a figure or
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a landscape in a convincing naturalistic
fashion and therefore these artists
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do not necessarily know
what they are doing.
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They are creating work in, you know,
works that look like, you know,
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this looks like maybe some random
line or some random color and
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the same in the Lee Krasner here.
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And I would just remind you that
actually abstraction is it's a very very
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intellectual and difficult process.
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If you've ever written, some of you who
are science majors, if you've ever had to,
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or other majors, if you've ever had to
write a summary of a paper or research
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project, that is called an abstract and
what an abstract is it pulls out all
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the essentially ingredients
and summarizes them.
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Okay, this is a very, this requires a
great deal of critical thinking and
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is actually quite a complicated process.
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It's actually much easier to go out and
sit in front of something and draw it
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the way that you see it.
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It's much more difficult to say
I want to find a way to depict
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my inner most feelings which have to do
with theosophy which is sort of religion
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and philosophy that we see with Kandinsky
and it also expresses my sort of longing
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for my homeland in Russia even though
I'm in Europe and how do you show that?
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You show it in a way that sort of
distills the essence of this.
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And so, you know, abstraction is
very very complicated.
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Likewise, Lee Krasner is really working
on issues of organisms and fertility
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and this sort of life force and so she
gives us this sort of vaguely biomorphic
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forms but they're not really, okay.
They're not meant to show something
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particular because they're beyond that.
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They're showing a larger
concept of something.
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Okay, so it's really important
that we remember that this is
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extraordinarily difficult work to
think through and also to create.
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And if some of you are not convinced,
which every semester I get some who
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are not convinced, I'm more than
happy to talk to you about this in
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office hours or some other time.
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So, we will come back in the next
segment and start with talking about
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Georges Braque and cubism.