HUMANITIES 101Art Appreciation/

Art , Humans, and Society

Course Description

• This course covers the study of Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Cinema, and Literature.

• It will expose students to Classical and contemporary artists, their works, and the environment in which they lived, which inspired them to create.

• The lectures will be supplemented by visits to galleries, museums, studios, and the cinema and other areas relevant to the subject.

General Objectives

• To understand the meaning and importance of the art

• To identify and appreciate the different forms and aspects of art through a study of various elements, mediums, and techniques used in the creation of art

• To enhance enjoyment of the arts particularly local artists and those from the students’ own cultural heritage

HUMANITIES: What is it?

• The term Humanities comes from the Latin word, “humanitas”

• It generally refers to art, literature, music, architecture, dance and the theatre—in which human subjectivity is emphasized and individual expressiveness is dramatized.

How important is Humanities?• The fields of knowledge and study falling under humanities are dedicated to the pursuit of discovering and understanding the nature of man.

• The humanities deal with man as a being of purpose, of values, loves, hates, ideas and sometimes as a seer, or prophet with divine inspiration.

• The humanities aim at educating.

Major Areas of Humanities

•Literature•Visual Arts•Performing Arts•Cinema

Can you identify the following?

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa. C.1503-1506. Oil painting. Louvre Museum, Paris

WHAT IS ART?By Leo N. Tolstoy

The great Russian novelist Leo N. Tolstoy (1828-1910), author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, developed his own original philosophy of art. He argues that art is important even amidst extensive poverty and deprivation.

Salient Points in Tolstoy’s Definition of Art

• In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life.

• Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.

• Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner.

• The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.

• Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same a feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications.

• To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

• Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

• All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity.

Why Do We Make ART?

• Art is a vital and persistent aspect of human experience.

• To impose order on disorder and to create form from formlessness.

• The wish to leave behind after death something of value by which to be remembered.

• The wish to preserve one’s likeness after death.

THE VALUE OF ART

• Works of art are valued not only by artists and patrons, but also by entire cultures. In fact, the periods of history that we tend to identify as the high points of human achievement are those in which art was most highly valued and encouraged.

Material Value

• Works of art may be valued because they are made of a precious material.

• During the Middle Ages in Europe, ancient Greek bronze statues were not valued for their aesthetic character, nor for what they might have revealed about Greek culture. Instead their value lay in the fact that they could be melted down and reformed into weapons.

Benvenuto Cellini, 1540-44Gold, enamel and ebony, 26 x 33,5 cmKunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Ed Defensor, Lin-ay kang Iloilo.Bronze. 15 feet. Iloilo Capitol

Intrinsic Vale

• A work of art may contain valuable material, but that is not the primary basis on which its quality is judged.

• Intrinsic value is not always apparent, and in fact varies in different times and places.

• “Is it art?” is a familiar question, which expresses the dificulty of defining “art” and of recognizing the aesthetic value of an object.

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1928. Bronze, unique cast, 54x8 1/2x6 ½. Museum of Modern Art

Religious Value

• One important way of communicating Bible stories and legends of the saints to a largely illiterate population was through the sculptures, paintings, mosaics, wall hangings, and stained-glass windows in churches.

• Beyond its didactic function, the religious significance of a work of art may be so great that entire groups of people identify with the object.

Nationalistic Value

• Works of art have nationalistic value inasmuch as they express the pride and accomplishment of a particular culture.

Psychological Value

• Our reactions to art span virtually the entire range of human emotion. They include pleasure, fright, amusement, avoidance, and outrage.

• One of the psychological aspects of art is its ability to attract and repel us, and this is not necessarily a function of whether or not we find a particular image aesthetically pleasing.

Art is FORM

• Form means (1) elements of art (2) the principles of design (3) medium of the artist.

• Form, in this context, is concrete and fairly easily described - no matter which piece of art is under scrutiny.

Art is CONTENT

• Content is idea-based and means (1) what the artist meant to portray, (2) what the artist actually did portray and (3) how we react, as individuals, to both the intended and actual messages.

• It includes ways in which a work was influenced - by religion, or politics, or society in general, or even the artist's use of hallucinogenic substances - at the time it was created.

SUBJECT

• Subject is the term used for whatever is represented in a work of art.

• The subject of the work of art answers the question:What is it about?”

• Not all arts have subjects. Those arts are called “nonobjective.”

• Painting, sculpture, the graphic arts, literature, and the theater arts are generally classified as representational

• Music, architecture, and many of the functional arts are non-representational.

• The non-objective arts do not present descriptions, stories or references to identifiable objects or symbols.

Sources of Art Subject• NATURE

–Next to animals and people and their activities, nature as landscape has been the common subject of the art.

–Has been the most common inspiration and subject matter for art.

Fernando Amorsolo, Sunset, 1950. Oil on canvas

Sources of Art Subject

• HISTORY–All art is conditioned by the historical

period in which it is created.–Rulers like to have themselves and the

great deeds of their time perpetuated consequently, statues and paintings of the great are found in each civilization.

Carlos V. Francisco, 1898 Philippine Revolution

'The Executions of the Third of May, 1808

Sources of Art Subject• GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

– Greek and Roman mythology has been a very important source for subjects in the arts.

– Those arts are so well-known that they count as a definite part of our inheritance.

– During the Renaissance period, poets, painters, and sculptors drew largely from Greek and Roman sources for subjects.

Sources of Art Subject

• RELIGION– Religion has played an enormous role in

inspiring works of visual arts, music, architecture, and literature through ages.

– It was during the Renaissance that the European artisans became “artists” and conscious of their role in a way that had never been true before.

The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci

Head of Buddha (Gandhara, India, ca.5th century)

METHODS OF PRESENTING THE

SUBJECT

REALISM • When objects are depicted in the way

they would normally appear in nature, the presentation is said to be realistic.

• It attempts to present the world as it appears to the everyday senses, and sought to depict ordinary lives of ordinary people without exaggeration or idealization.

ABSTRACTION• When an artist becomes so interested and

engrossed in one phase of a scene that he does not show the subject at all as an object reality, but only his idea of it, or his feeling about it, this referred to as abstraction.

• This is a technique of simplifying and reorganizing objects and elements according to the artist’s creative expression.

SYMBOLISM• In the arts, the use of symbols to concentrate

or intensify meaning, making the work more subjective than objective.

• Symbolist painters rejected realism and impressionism. They felt that art should not simply depict, but should suggest ideas, moods, and psychological states through colour, line, and form.

• The artist’s task is not to see things but to see through them to a significance and reality far deeper that what is given in superficial appearance.

• The subject matter of the Symbolists becomes increasingly esoteric and exotic, weird, mysterious, visionary, dream-like, fantastic.

Edvard Much gives us quite disturbing vision of neurotic panic breaking forth in a dreadful but silent scream – the scream heard within the mind under prolonged anxiety. He also presents almost unbearable pictures of the tensions and psychic anguish that beset modern men and the ultimate loneliness that is the inescapable lot of us all.

EDVARD MUCH, The Scream, 1893

FAUVISM• Fauvism (fauves. “wild beasts”) is

characterised by paintings that used intensely vivid, non-naturalistic and exuberant colours.

• The Fauves brought color to a new intensity with startling discords of vermilion and emerald green, cerulean blue and vivid orange held together by sweeping brush strokes and bold patterns.

Derain entirely rejects the subtle harmonies of Impressionism, so expressive of atmospheric and climatic conditions, if favor of a distorted perspective emphasized by clashing yellows, blues, greens, and reds against the black accents of the arches. In this way, the Fauves freed color from its traditional role as the description of the local tone of an object and helped to prepare both artists and public for the use of color as an expressive end in itself. In a sense, the color became the “subject” of the picture.

The composition is an essay in the contrast of warm and cool colors and curving and straight lines. Although the planes of the picture seem to resolve into a single, flat spread, directional lines and the variation in the strength of color suggest a front and back, but in the kind of contrived spatial ambiguity. According to Matisse: “What I am after, above all, is expression...I am unable to distingusih between the feeling I have for life and the way of expressing it...The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. ..everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter’s disposal for the expression of his feelings...”

DADAISM• In 1916 and 1917 – a number of artists

independently stated their disgust with the war and life in general by making works of nonart. This movement was early christened Dada, a nonsense or babytalk term indicative of the conviction that European culture had lost any real meaning at all.

• Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.

Hannah Hoch. Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin

MARCEL DUCHAMP. Fountain. RAOUL HAUSMANN. ABCD

FUTURISM• It emphasized and glorified themes

associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city.

Gicacomo Balla. Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913-1914

An example of Futurist architecture  by Antonio Sant’’Elia

 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space', bronze sculpture by Umberto Boccioni.1913, Museum of Modern Art (New York City)

SURREALISM• Surrealist works feature the element of

surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact.

• It is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.

Dali creates his most haunting allegory of the empty space in which time is at an end. The barren landscape, without horizon, drifts to infinity, lit by some eerie, never setting sun. An amorphous creature sleeps in the foreground, draped with a limp watch. Another such watch hangs from the branch of a dead tree; yet another hangs half over the edge of a rectangular form. The watches are visible by ants and a fly, as if they were decaying, orgnic life, soft and viscous. The watch- a metallic, intricate, and precise instrument – is metamorphosed into an object devourable by busy ants. We recognize the impossible landscape and its impossibe contents as perfectly possible in the dream world.

SALVADOR DALI, The Peristence of Memory, 1931

EXPRESSIONISM• It is an artistic style in which the artist

attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him.

• He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.

IMPRESSSIONISM

• The Impressionists sought to create the illusion of forms bathed in light and atmosphere. This required an intensive study of outdoor light as the source of our experience of color, which revealed that local color – the actual color of the object – is usually modified by the quality of the light in which it is seen, by reflections from the other objects, and by the effects produced by juxtaposed colors.

• The Impressionists achieved remarkably brilliant effects with their characteristically short, choppy brush strokes, which so accurately caught the vibrating quality of light.