Art and World Cultures Unit 2 Lesson 3 Wrapping Up Unit 2

Unit two Lesson 3

Artists' Journeys

INTRODUCTION

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists often took advantage of innovations in transportation by traveling to exotic or rural locations. Driven in part past their dissatisfaction with the mod urban center, many artists sought out places resembling untouched earthly paradises. In these areas, away from the bustle of the modern city, artists were able to focus on their work and discover nature firsthand; considering of this, many radical creative experiments occurred in the near rural and least "modern" of settings.

Escaping from the urban environment had an effect on certain artists' work. In gild to evoke the awareness of beingness in a harmonious, warm, and tranquil coastal setting, for example, Matisse experimented with vibrant colors and sketchy brushwork that was suitable for the setting in which he painted. Similarly, the Russian creative person Vasily Kandinsky, working in the quiet rural setting of Murnau, away from his habitation in the bustling city of Munich, experimented with colors and subject affair that reflected the unspoilt rural environment.

LESSON OBJECTIVES

• Students will analyze modernistic artists' interest in travel.
• Students will talk over modern artists' radical and unusual use of artistic materials.
• Students will look at the ways in which modernistic artists were inspired by unusual artistic sources.

IMAGE-BASED Word

Requite your students a moment to look at Noa Noa (Fragrance). And then begin the discussion by asking them to describe what they run into in this work. Inquire them who they think the figures might be and what they might be doing.

Paul Gauguin: Noa (Fragrance) from Noa Noa (Fragrance), one from a series of ten woodcuts, 39.three×24.4 cm, 1893–4 (New York, Museum of Modern Fine art); photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Ask your students to look closely at the medium that the artist used. Ask them how they would describe information technology, using 5 adjectives. (For more information on the processes of printmaking, see www.moma.org/whatisaprint). In 1891, disgusted past what he saw equally a corrupt and decadent bourgeois culture in Paris, the French artist Paul Gauguin decided to seek an unspoilt, simpler society. Abandoning his family, friends, and artistic career in Paris, he went on a voyage to Tahiti, in French Polynesia, a journey of over ix,500 miles. Afterward returning to Paris, in 1893, Gauguin created the Noa Noa woodcuts (Tahitian for "fragrance"), which he had intended to print in book form alongside poems to explain his reasons for traveling to Tahiti. The book, however, was not published in France until Gauguin'due south return to Tahiti, in 1901.
• Ask your students what clues about Gauguin's experience of Tahiti they pick upwards from this image?
• Inquire how they think Gauguin evoked the thought of "fragrance" in this work. Make sure they give examples to back up their ideas.

Henri Matisse: Written report for 'Luxe, calme et volupté', oil on canvas, 32.seven×40.six cm, 1904 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photograph © The Museum of Modern Fine art, New York

• Have your students compare and dissimilarity Matisse's Report for "Luxe, calme et volupté" with Gauguin's print Noa Noa. Ask them to describe the main similarities and differences. Henri Matisse painted this work, an oil sketch for a larger work, in the small fishing hamlet of Saint-Tropez, in the s of France, where he and his family were on vacation with the painter Paul Signac. One twenty-four hour period, after an statement with Signac, Matisse, his wife Amélie, and their son Pierre went for a walk, during which Matisse painted an earlier version of this study. In that version, only Amélie and Pierre are visible, sitting past the edge of the ocean; in this version, Matisse has added non only a picnic coating and food, but as well a boat and nude women drying themselves afterward a swim. The title for this work, Luxe, calme et volupté (Richness, calm, and pleasure), was inspired past a poem past the French poet Charles Baudelaire, called Invitation to the Voyage:

   My kid, my sis, dream
How sweet all things would seem
Were we in that kind land to live together,
And at that place love irksome and long,
There love and die amongst
Those scenes that epitome y'all, that sumptuous weather.
Drowned suns that blink there
Through cloud-disheveled air
Motion me with such a mystery as appears
Inside those other skies
Of your treacherous eyes
When I behold them shining through their tears.

There, there is nothing else but grace and mensurate,
Richness, at-home and pleasure.

   Article of furniture that wears
The luster of the years
Softly would glow inside our glowing bedchamber.
Flowers of rarest bloom
Proffering their perfume
Mixed with the vague fragrances of amber;
Golden ceilings would at that place be,
Mirrors deep as the sea,
The walls all in an Eastern splendor hung—
Zilch simply should address
The soul's loneliness,
Speaking her sweet and cloak-and-dagger native tongue.

There, there is nil else simply grace and measure,
Richness, calm and pleasance.

   See, sheltered from the swells
There in the still canals
Those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth;
It is to satisfy
Your least desire, they ply
Here through all the waters of the globe.
—The sun at close of day
Clothes the fields of hay,
Then the canals, at terminal the town entire
In hyacinth and gilt: Slowly the land is rolled
Sleepward under a sea of gentle fire.

There, there is null else only grace and measure,
Richness, calm and pleasure.

[Charles Baudelaire, Invitation to the Voyage from The Flowers of Evil, c. 1850s; repr. Baudelaire: Invitation to the Voyage, a Poem illustrated, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Bulfinch Press, 1997).]

• Enquire your students how they retrieve Matisse attempted to create "richness," "calm," and "pleasure" in his painting. Inquire for examples that back up their ideas.
• Enquire them how Matisse's utilise of color creates an atmosphere. Enquire if they retrieve the atmosphere Matisse conjured with color is like the temper Baudelaire created with words. When Matisse painted this work, the Southward of France was a pop tourist destination. The new railways from Paris to the South made travel quick and piece of cake. For artists, the distinctively vivid light of the South and the opportunity to paint outdoors were particularly tempting. Like Gauguin, Matisse and some of his contemporaries sought out locations untouched by the modernistic world, valuing unspoilt landscapes in the same manner regular urban center-dwelling vacationers did.
• Ask your students how knowing this information well-nigh the new railways affects their ideas nearly the painting.
• Ask your students to consider Baudelaire's poem. Inquire them how they think Matisse created a sense of surroundings in Written report for "Luxe, calme et volupté."
• Ask your students to compare and contrast Matisse's Study for "Luxe, calme et volupté" with Landscape at Collioure, also by Matisse. Ask what they recollect changed in the fashion the artist used pigment to draw a scene. Ask why they remember this might be. In May 1905 Matisse traveled to Collioure, a small village near the French-Spanish border. His wife Amélie had suggested the location, since she grew upwards nearby and had family living there. The Matisses stayed in Collioure until early September, by which fourth dimension Matisse had created about fifteen canvases, forty watercolors, and over ane hundred drawings. André Derain joined the Matisses in Collioure in June 1905 and wrote to his beau painter Maurice de Vlaminck about his feel, saying that he had discovered ". . . a new concept of low-cal, which consists in the following: the negation of shadow. Hither, the light is very potent, the shadows very clear." [Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory: 1900-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 64.] In Landscape at Collioure, Matisse applied oil paint onto an unprepared (unprimed) canvas, using paint in nonnaturalistic colors, sometimes directly from the tube and often with quick, sketchy strokes. Despite the fact that some of the canvas was left untouched, showing raw cloth between the strokes of pigment, this painting is considered a "finished" work. By contrast, Matisse'south Study for "Luxe, calme et volupté" was a sketch made as grooming for another painting, and was never intended to be displayed as a finished piece of work of art.

Henri Matisse: Landscape at Collioure, oil on canvas, 38.8×46.half-dozen cm, 1905 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); © 2007 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• How does knowing this information affect your ideas almost the work? Some art critics and historians accept described work such equally Matisse'southward Landscape at Collioure every bit "unfinished." Audiences at the fourth dimension were used to paintings that filled the entire canvas, and that were rendered in naturalistic colors and were often varnished. Withal, later on fine art critics discussed the idea of "finished" and "unfinished" works of fine art equally existence something distinctively modern. Using this thought and Matisse's Mural at Collioure as starting points, have your students hash out what makes a finished piece of work of art.
• Ask your students how they know when they have finished a painting, sculpture, or other work of art.
• Ask them to remember most works of art they have fabricated at school or at domicile. Inquire them why they stopped when they did. Ask if they think they could accept stopped before.
• Ask your students to consider why Matisse might take stopped painting Landscape at Collioure when he did. Ask what they retrieve the piece of work would accept been similar if he had continued working on it.
• Testify your students Picture with an Archer by Vasily Kandinsky. Ask them to await at information technology carefully for a few moments. Take them compare this painting with Matisse's Landscape at Collioure. Ask them to describe the principal similarities and differences. Vasily Kandinsky painted this piece of work during a summer visit to a minor town called Murnau in the southward Bavarian Alps, a particularly dramatic and mountainous region that he and 3 other avant-garde artists who lived in Munich visited regularly between 1908 and 1911. Famous for its local folk art, peculiarly paintings on glass, which the visiting artists collected and emulated, Murnau was similar to the small rural towns that Kandinsky had visited while practicing law in his native Russian federation.

Vasily Kandinsky: Picture with an Archer, oil on canvas, 175×144.6 cm, 1909 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• Ask your students to recall about how Kandinsky evoked the atmosphere of a rural culture or setting in Flick with an Archer. Ask them to give examples from the work to back up their ideas.

ACTIVITIES/PROJECTS

one. Gauguin in Tahiti (Image Ix)

What Gauguin institute in Tahiti was a culture significantly altered by 125 years of French colonial rule. Although native traditions were all but wiped out, he attempted to evoke an untouched and harmonious civilisation in his work. Gauguin'south image of precolonial Tahiti was largely based on an 1837 book by a Belgian explorer, Jacques Antoine Moerenhout. Nearly of Gauguin'due south Tahitian works had very picayune connection to the reality of the Tahiti that he experienced.

Take your students create their own "travel periodical," just as Gauguin did, based on either a real visit or on an imaginary one. They should reverberate on whether or not the visit lived up to their expectations. They should consider how the feel was unlike from what they were expecting, what their expectations were based on, and whether or not they would visit over again.

ii. The Blaue Reiter (Prototype Twelve)

Research the lives and works of other artists associated with the Blaue Reiter group. How would y'all compare their work with Kandinsky's? Wait closely at piece of work by 1 of these artists before and after his or her membership in the group. How was the artist'south work afflicted by being part of this grouping? How did it change subsequently the group dissolved? Look at connections with other artists working at the fourth dimension, such as the Dutch creative person Piet Mondrian. What was distinctive about the Blaue Reiter artists?

Kandinsky was interested in creating an art that described the essence, rather than the external appearance, of things he saw in the world. This was largely due to the influence of Theosophy, a spiritual move that foretold a hereafter in which all material things would be destroyed, leaving only their essence. This informed his intentions of creating an art of "internal necessity." [Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 89.] For example, he once saw a painting of a haystack in an exhibition and was unable to recognize what the subject area was. He remarked:

"It was from the catalogue that I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I too thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion."

[The Modernist Journals Project]

• Enquire your students how they think Kandinsky'southward ideas most abstruse art are reflected in Picture show with an Archer. They should give examples from the work to support their ideas.
• Ask your students why, based on the information given in these lessons, they call back the Blaue Reiter artists chose to create images in the manner that they did.

3. Kandinsky Goes Abstract (Epitome 12)

The word "abstract" is used to describe ideas or images that exercise not describe the visual advent of things in the world in a naturalistic manner. Kandinsky did not desire us to look at an image and endeavor to figure out what it depicts or what story information technology tells; rather, he invites us to leave behind our attachment to the textile earth and immerse ourselves instead in the color and rhythm of the image.

Ask your students to inquiry the meaning of abstract art past looking at examples of abstraction throughout the twentieth century. Examples from Grove Art Online that could be used include Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and Piet Mondrian. Discuss why these examples might exist thought of every bit abstract, and why the artists might have wanted to brand this kind of fine art. Ask your students how they would define abstruse art, judging by the works they have looked at in their inquiry. Ask how they would compare their definition with Kandinsky'due south idea of abstraction. Ask them if they can make any connections betwixt their ideas and other works of fine art discussed in this guide.

GROVE ART ONLINE: Suggested Reading

Below is a list of selected articles which provide more information on the specific topics discussed in this lesson.

• Paul Gauguin: Life and Piece of work, 1891–three: First visit to Tahiti
• Paul Gauguin: Life and Work 1893–5: Render to France
• Paul Gauguin: Working Methods and Technique
• Vasily Kandinsky: Early years and Munich, before 1914
• Henri Matisse: The Fauvist Period: 1904-half dozen

Unit ii: 1893–1913

• Lesson One: Ascension of the Modern Metropolis
• Lesson Two: Portraiture
• Lesson Three: Artists' Journeys

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Source: https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/unit-2-lesson-3/unit-2-lesson-3

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