8. Around the time that people in Greece settled down in houses and villages, and began planting their own crops and herding animals , they also began to produce pottery . This Neolithic period was around 6000 BC . The first pottery was plain, but very soon people began to decorate it. The earliest kind of decorated pottery in Greece is called Rainbow Ware, though it is really only black and red, because of the way the colors blend into each other.
Impressionism Centered in France in the 1860's to 1880's. Impressionism is a light, spontaneous manner of painting which began in France as a reaction against the restrictions and conventions of the dominant Academic art . Its naturalistic and down-to-earth treatment of its subject matter, most commonly landscapes, was a reaction to thee invention of the camera which made it easier to capture realistic likenesses. The hallmark of the style is the attempt to capture the subjective impression of light in a scene. The invention of tube paints made it easier for artists to paint landscapes. Oscar-Claude Monet French painter who was the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the light or as his interest shifted. These series were frequently exhibited in groups—for example, his images of haystacks (1891) and the Rouen Cathedral (1894). At his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his last series of paintings . His popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century, when his works traveled the world in museum exhibitions that attracted record-breaking crowds and marketed popular commercial items featuring imagery from his art.
Social Realism, America, 1930's Social Realism is a naturalistic realism focusing specifically on social issues and the hardships of everyday life. The term usually refers to the urban American Scene artists of the Depression era, who were greatly influenced by the Ashcan School of early 20th century New York.Social Realism is somewhat of a pejorative label in the United States, where overtly political art, not to mention socialist politics, are extremely out of favor.
Born July 6, 1907 in Mexico, Frida Kahlo survived many difficult events in her life, including contracting polio as a child a long recovery from a serious car accident, two failed marraiges and several miscarriages. She used these experiences, combined with strong Mexican and Native american cultural influences, to create highly personal paintings. Kahlo used personal symbolism mixed with surrealism to express her suffering through her work and considered herself a realist. She died July 13th, 1954 of pulmonary embolism.
Abstract Expressionism Centered in New York City, 1946 to 1960's. Abstract Expressionism is a type of art in which the artist expresses himself purely through the use of form and color. It non-representational, or non-objective, art, which means that there are no actual objects represented. Now considered to be the first American artistic movement of international importance, the term was originally used to describe the work of Willem de Kooning , Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky .The movement can be more or less divided into two groups: Action Painting , typified by artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline , and Philip Guston , stressed the physical action involved in painting; Color Field Painting , practiced by Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland , among others, was primarily concerned with exploring the effects of pure color on a canvas ote: Pollock was one of the leading proponents of Abstract Expression in the 1940s and 1950s. His art, lifestyle, and untimely death have been elevated to the status of legend. In 1928, he studied at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, and during this time was exposed to European modernism, analytical psychology, and Surrealist automatism. In 1930, he settled in New York, and studied with the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s he lived in poverty and worked as a mural assistant for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. His work before 1938 shows the influence of Benton, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and the Mexican muralists. In 1938, he was hospitalized for alcoholism during which time he used automatic drawing as therapy. From this, Pollock developed his early style, one of totemic male and female figures and images of eyes or mythic beasts that constituted a personal iconography. A fine example of this period is "Guardians of the Secret," a work of late-Surrealist style and frenetic brushwork that would hint at his later mature style. He met the painter Lee Krasner in 1941 and they married in 1945. Pollock is best known for working methods of pouring or dripping paint onto a large canvas on the floor, moving about it as he worked, the entire art process being a kind of performance. Typically moving from left to right as if "writing" the work, Pollock laid the key vertical and horizontal elements down first, mostly black or white, and then intertwined subsequent colors within it. This method of organizing a space into panels echoes Benton's theories of mural composition. Pollock was one of the first celebrity painters of the Post-War era in the USA, his free-form style and dramatic personality capturing the spirit of the Beat Generation of the early 1950s. He was killed in a car accident in 1956.
Born Andrew Warhola, August 6, 1928, in the industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol is best known for his exploration of Pop Art, mass producing images of mass produced objects.His most famous works depicted Campbell's soup cans. Enlarged, hand-painted or silkscreened, framed, and hung in an art gallery, Warhol succeeded in turning these mundane images into ironic "art".Warhol experimented in media such as film, sculpture, paint, and silkscreen, but perhaps his greatest work was his invention of himself as an international celebrity and pop culture icon.
Chuck Close b. 1940 Monroe, Washington ainter; photographer; printmaker merican huck Close began studying art when he was about ten years old. At school, drawing and painting were the few areas he excelled in and found rewarding. Throughout the 1960s, Close studied Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Europe. After years of painting abstract images, Close became frustrated by his inability to paint original shapes or use more than the same few colors. His portrait painting evolved from early investigations that explored the relationship between reality and illusion. lose began painting portraits of his family and friends on extremely large-scale canvases in 1970. Rather than working with live models, Close uses photographs of his subjects as the foundation for their portraits. He precisely incorporates every detail of the photograph, allowing himself limited interpretive freedom and providing a disciplinary ". . . set of right and wrongs." According to this literal standard, an accurately depicted detail is right; anything not in the photograph is wrong and should not be depicted in the painting. Although Close follows the same process for each portrait, he has experimented with various materials and techniques to achieve the effects he desires.
