Art Essays

During and after the First World War, the pioneers of abstract art formulated a new plastic language in which local, particular and national differences were gradually absorbed into a universal expression. From the child to the mature individual, and from faraway cultures to the centers of modern civilization, this new ABC of a world art in the making is open for all to read...

The twentieth century heralded a new -and far more momentous- era in American advertising history. Industry leaders quickly converted outdoor advertising, the oldest form of the craft, into the latest rage when the first electric sign was erected in New York in 1891. Retailers actively engaged in- and depended on- advertising to boost sales...

Within the analytic tradition, those of us who take art as our field of study call ourselves either philosophers of art or aestheticians. From one perspective, these alternative labels could be seen as a harmless sort of shorthand. For two major concerns of the field, however it is named, are the theory of art, which traditionally pertains to questions about the nature of the art object, and aesthetic theory...

The motifs, materials, and symbols used by African American visual artists during the sixties and later were chosen consciously to represent the African cultural and aesthetic legacy. The infuence of the African aesthetic legacy on visual artists was felt throughout the seventies and continued into the early eighties...

In the great process of subtraction that has to take place if one wishes to delimit the sphere of African art, there will drop out then the broad areas transformed or influenced by Hamitic civilization: East Africa, including Abyssinia, which has had a special development...

Modern American architecture includes all the architecture of America which has recently been built, or is being built to-day. It includes the conservative and the radical, the archeological and the original. To limit modern architecture to that which seems to embody what are called modernistic tendencies would be not only foolish, but arrogant...

Of all the painters working today in the service - or thrall - of a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular. It seems that the salient metaphysical question lately is "Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans?"...

Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure. It is very necessary, in the outset of all inquiry, to distinguish between Architecture and Building...

By whatever measure one ranks the founders of contemporary American abstract art, Arshile Gorky has a place on the top row. In different ways, he influenced several who were to become most influential: de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Nakian...

Though the earliest manifestations of Baroque art appeared well before the year 1600, Mannerism was still a living force in many European centres during the first decades of the seventeenth century. The end of the Baroque is even less clear-cut than its beginning...

Dickinson, Stein, Plath, and many of the poets of the Black Arts movement found themshy; selves in a similar situation: defined by the culture in an extremely limiting way and suppressed on that account, they resisted silence through a poetics of excess...

The influx of scholars to Britain in the mid-twentieth century, many of whom had fled persecution in Nazi-occupied Europe , meant British architecture was scrutinized for the first time in any depth by a set of intellectual and philosophical conventions that had not rested easily in existing British academic traditions...

The mature paintings of Cezanne Paul offer at first sight little of human interest in their subjects. We are led at once to his art as a colorist and composer. He has treated the forms and tones of his mute apples, faces, and trees with the same seriousness that the old masters brought to a grandiose subject in order to dramatize it for the eye...

The Howard Pyle students, Frank Schoonover, Stanley Arthurs, Jessie Wilcox Smith, George Harding, Edward A. Wilson, Harvey Dunn, Thornton Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green and others, were not only a company of prolific picture makers but also many of them taught illustration and tried to pass the Pyle tradition on to their students...

As the history of Chinese art unfolds, we will find that its characteristic and unique beauty lies in the fact that it is an expression of this very sense of attunement. Is that one reason why Westerners, often with no other interest in Chinese civilization, collect and admire Chinese art with such enthusiasm...

No art is born suddenly out of nothing; continuity has always been an essential of every phase, and it was especially important in early Christian art. All the regions of the nearer East where Christianity was first preached and practiced had something to give, and there has been a good deal of argument...

An underlying paradox characterizes Claude Monet studies: while the art of Claude Claude Monet has elicited a greater volume of research, publications, and exhibitions than that of almost any other Western artist (on par, perhaps, with Picasso), it is still possible to discover facets of his work that have remained unexplored until now...

The origin of Mexican comic books is shrouded in myth and obscurity. The Mexican association of comic-book authors and illustrators, El Circulo de Tlacuilcos de Mexico, founded in 1970, traces the origin of Mexican comic books to pre-Columbian codices and mural painting...

Cubism was, if not necessarily the most important, at least the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance. New forms of society, changing patronage, varying geographic conditions, all these things have gone to produce over the past five hundred years a succession of different schools...

In 1929 Diego Rivera, then an artist of world renown, was to acknowledge his country's debt and his own to the greatest of his Mexican masters by painting Posada on the walls of the National Palace and by preparing, in collaboration with Paul O'Higgins and Frances Toor...

Pages 1 2 3