3. Freedom and feeling
Emphasis of Romanticism
Reason to feeling
calculation to intuition
Objective nature to subjective emotion
4. Dark Ages and the World of fantasy –
the imaginary, the ghoulish, the infernal,
the terrible, the nightmarish,
the grotesque, the sadistic,
images that emerge from horror
“when reason sleeps”
Qualities that manifest in works
5. The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters
1798 Etching and aquatint
Francisco Goya
6. Romanticism (1800-1840)
A period that flourished between
Neoclassicism and Realism
Work that speak to emotions rather than
inviting philosophical meditation or
revealing some grand order (Greco-Roman
ideals) present in Neoclassical works
8. the sublime Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
• A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757
• Sublime - mixture of awe and mixed with terror
• Burke observed that pain or fear evoked the most intense
human emotions and that these emotions could also be
thrilling
• Examples are images ‘raging rivers, great storms at sea could
be sublime to their viewers’… a taste for the fantastic, the
occult, and the macabre (voyaging into the dangerous reaches
of the subconscious)
10. Romanticism (1800-1840)
Neoclassicism = Rationality
reinforced the Enlightenment –
Voltaire’s views;
Romanticism = Desire for Freedom
(Rousseau) – Belief that the path to
freedom was through imagination
rather than reason and functioned
through feeling rather than through
thinking
11. Abstract
Expressionism
Abstract expressionism is the term applied to
new forms of abstract art developed by
American painters such as Jackson Pollock,
Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the
1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by
gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the
impression of spontaneity. (Tate Museum)
15. How is the artist’s
expression of
emotions different
from ordinary
expressions?
16. Surrealism
A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that
explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the
poetic and the revolutionary (TATE)
17. Dog Fight
Ang Kiukok
oil on canvas
Painting
90 x 114 cm. (35 3/8 x 44 7/8 in.)
CUBISM, SURREALISM, EXPRESSIONISM
They were inspired by the surrealist idea that art should come from the unconscious mind, and by the automatism of artist Joan Miró. (TATE)
TYPES OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Within abstract expressionism were two broad groupings: the so-called action painters, who attacked their canvases with expressive brush strokes; and the colour field painters who filled their canvases with large areas of a single colour.
The action painters were led by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who worked in a spontaneous improvisatory manner often using large brushes to make sweeping gestural marks. Pollock famously placed his canvas on the ground and danced around it pouring paint from the can or trailing it from the brush or a stick. In this way the action painters directly placed their inner impulses onto the canvas.
The second grouping included Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. They were deeply interested in religion and myth and created simple compositions with large areas of colour intended to produce a contemplative or meditational response in the viewer. In an essay written in 1948 Barnett Newmann said: 'Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘'life'’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings'. This approach to painting developed from around 1960 into what became known as colour field painting, characterised by artists using large areas of more or less a single flat colou
One of the most attractive pieces in the exhibition, is the lolloping Saluki entitled simply Dog, which was carved in 1951 and cast in bronze in 1957. He rarely sculpted animals, apart from his brother Diego’s Cat who ’passed just like a ray of light,’ between objects, and a couple of horses, none of which is in the exhibition.
Frail yet erect, a man gestures with his left arm and points with his right. We have no idea what he points to, or why. Anonymous and alone, he is also almost a skeleton. For the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in fact, Giacometti's sculpture was "always halfway between nothingness and being."
Such sculptures were full of meaning to Sartre, who said of them, "At first glance we seem to be up against the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald. But a moment later we have a quite different conception: these fine and slender natures rise up to heaven. We seem to have come across a group of Ascensions."
In the years leading up to World War II, Giacometti abandoned his earlier Surrealism. Dissatisfied with the resource of imagination, he returned to the resource of vision, focusing on the human figure and working from live models. Under his eyes, however, these models seem virtually to have dissolved. Working in clay (the preparation to casting in bronze), Giacometti scraped away the body's musculature, so that the flesh seems eaten off by a terrible surrounding emptiness, or to register the air around it as a hostile pressure. Recording the touch of the artist's fingers, the surface of Man Pointing is as rough as if charred or corroded. At the same time, the figure dominates its space, even from a distance.
Alberto Giacometti City Square1948
Bronze
Thanks to a relative with the same name, Ang Kiukok went from Hua Shing, which means “Chinese Born,” to Kiukok, which can be translated to “Save the Country.”
A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary
At one point, Ang was a man full of anger.
This can be seen in his paintings, in his depictions of fighting roosters and mad dogs. In addressing the issue, Ang said, "Open your eyes, look around you. So much anger, sorrow, ugliness, and also madness."
