Marc Chagall

 “poetic without poetry, mystic without mysticism”. 
Born Moishe Shagal in Belarus, which was then part of the Russian Empire, in 1887. Jews were ostracized within their communities and could not attend "regular" Russian schools and universities. Marc got his early education from Jewish religious school. He was able to attend a Russian high school after his mother bribed the headmaster. There, he saw someone drawing. Not having any art in his own home to have referenced, the process fascinated him. He asked his fellow student how he could draw, and the student told him to find a book in the library to copy the pictures from. He realized he wanted to be a painter. He is arguably one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. An early modernist who dabbled in the Cubist, Symbolist and Fauvist styles.
 "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is"

modernist, creat

Shintaro Ohata

Japanese artist that combines 2d and 3d, normally a 3d sculpture in front of a 2d painting.

He has a somewhat painterly style, even with the sculptures. His pieces are glimpses into bits of every day, with an air of melancholy.

He's been exhibiting since 2004.

Jutta Koether

German artist, musician, and critic based in New York.
Was in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Vladimir Tatlin

Russian Constructivist. Architect and Artist

Conceived sculptures in order to question the traditional idea of painting.

Designed Tatlin's Tower, a conceptual piece that used industrial materials. It was designed to exemplify modernity, and to hold several geometric shapes that had different functions.The structure consisted of a steel frame in a helix shape that held transportation to the various parts of the tower. The base was a cube that would have lecture space, conference rooms, and meeting spaces.It was designed to make a full rotation in a year.  Above that would have been a pyramid that rotated completely in a month and held executive function.   Next highest would have held a cylinder which was to be a broadcasting center, and rotated over the span of a day. At the very top would have been a hemisphere that held broadcasting equipment.

His paintings are also really interesting, and I like his female nudes the best:

Man Ray

"I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence." — Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, but refused to acknowledge himself as anything but Man Ray in his lifetime. His family changed their surname to Ray after immigrating to the United States and seeing prevalent anti-Semitism. American modernist, spent most of his career in France.
Was most famous in his day for his portraits and fashion photography, and now he's known for his work within Dada and Surrealist movements.
Helped Duchamp on several pieces, and with Duchamp and Katherine Dreier helped found the first modern museum of art in the United States.

"There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it." — 1948 essay, "To Be Continued, Unnoticed".

Can sex ever be art, or will it always be porn?

At what point does the line blur for sex to be an art form? In India, there are many temples decorated with sexual acts that are considered sacred. In our society it's considered vulgar. The nude is very much an accepted subject matter in our art, and seeing them interacting in romantic ways (think of all the sculptures portraying seductions from Greek myths) is common. But sex itself is taboo to depict.
If sexual acts are engaged in for the sake of an art film, does that make it art or porn? Does sex have to be faked to be artistic? This brings to mind countless movies with mimicry of sex. If it had been real sex, between two consenting adult actors, would that make it pornography? Can they ever be the same thing? Are pornography and tastefulness mutually exclusive?
The supreme court has ruled that porn is the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience. Arousal is subjective. In addition, if art is meant to evoke emotions or ideas, how does arousal not have a legitimate conveyance through art?

PostModern vs. Modern

Modern:
roughly 1860s to around 1970s
associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.
new ways of seeing and fresh ideas about form and materials and function of art
tendency towards abstraction
Popular modern artists:
Van Gogh
Chagall
Cezanne
Picasso
Matisse
Braque
Derain
Gaugin
Duchamp

Postmodern: 
"Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes."
""Postmodern and contemporary artists often adopt, borrow, steal, recycle and/or sample from earlier modern and classical works. They combine or alter these images to create new, contemporary pieces. And many fill their works with a strong sense of self-awareness.” They also work with and combine artistic, scientific, technological, media and digital/Internet tools."
sought to contradict different aspects of modernism
-intermedia
-installations
-Conceptual art

appropriation, Pop art, collage, simplification, performance art

Chapter Two Discussion Questions

1. Is separating medium necessary to criticizing art? Can criticism be universal across mediums? How much does one have to know about a specific medium to properly criticize it?

2. How often to critics pull references out of works that the artists never intended? Does that make the reference any less valid? How much does the artist's intent really matter in criticism?

Chapter One Discussion Questions

1. Is criticism really necessary in this day and age? Why? What purpose does it serve?

2. How do art and the criticism of it shape each other?

3. How educated does one have to be to be an art critic? Does it require formal training or just a good turn of phrase?

Antoni Gaudi i Cornet

(1852-1926) Catalan architect and figurehead of Catalan Modernism.
Gaudi was not a genius at school, which many attribute to a childhood rheumatic condition. He missed many classes because it was difficult for him to get around. Nevertheless, he illustrated his school's weekly newspaper and moved to Barcelona in 1868 to study architecture.
Gaudi said that architectural styles did not depend on aesthetic ideas but on the social and political atmosphere. This outlook shows in his works all around Barcelona: Park Guell, the Sagrada Familia, even the lampposts along La Rambla. It is interesting to walk around the city and notice all the tiny architectural details he had a hand in. My favorite was the tiled sidewalks.

His interpretation through architecture of the myth of St. George and the Dragon is also pretty interesting.

The top of the rof was designed to mimic the dragon's scales. The turret represents St. George's lance. The bottom two floors are supposed to look like dragon's ribs. 

I especially like the terraces that look like skulls.

His influences were midieval books, gothic illustrations of oriental structures, and organic shapes in nature. He appreciated artist John Ruskin's view that ornament is the origin of architecture. He was proudly Catalan, and the Crest of Catalonia as well as homages to St George(like the house above), who was the patron saint of Catalonia.

His very first project was to design the worker's quarters for Cooperativa Mataronense. Only one section of the factory and a kiosk were built, but his project was presented at the 1878 Paris World Fair, introducing Gaudi to the world. 

His collaboration with architect Martorell allowed him to gain management in 1883 of what is perhaps one of his greatest works, the Sagrada Familia. He spent 43 years working on it, and it's still being finished to this day. 

Plan for the finished Sagrada Familia

What it looks like today

Odilon Redon

(1840-1916)
Born Bertrand-Jean Redon in Bordeaux, France, Odilon Redon is a symbolist painter. His nickname is derived from his mother, Odile.
He studied architecture instead of drawing at the urging of his father, but failed the entrance exams at Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He began a career in sculpture, etching and lithography that was interrupted by his service in the French army for the Franco-Prussian War. Upon his return from the war, he worked in charcal and again with lithography.
Redon was fairly unknown until a novel entitled Rebours(Against Nature) by Jaris-Karl Huysmans, in which an eccentric aristocrat collects Redon's drawings.
Gaining recognition in his later years, he had the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show in 1913.
His work is often labeled as ambiguous, undefinable and sometimes dark. It's a representation of his exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He wanted the "place the visible at the service of the invisible."

http://www.odilon-redon.org/the-complete-works.html

The first painting I ever saw of Redon's was in a show at the High Museum. It was entitled Le Barque (1901). I liked it because it gave me a sense of being unfinished.. There's a place in the sky that looks like Redon covered over after painting something. I'm not sure why that drew me to it so much, but it was nearly ten years ago and I still remember it clearly.

The Chariot of Apollo is another one of Redon's pieces that catches me.

 Pandora (1914)

Vik Muniz

One of my favorite artists that is working now is Vik Muniz. He was born in 1961 in Sao Paolo, Brazil. He's known as a photographer but is famous for working with unconventional materials such as chocolate syrup, trash, plastic toys, and caviar. He appropriates many of his pieces, one of my favorite being "Double Mona Lisa, After Warhol" (1999), in which he recreated the Mona Lisa out of peanut butter on one side and jelly on the other.

He's in a documentary called Waste Land (which is on Netflix). It follows him over three years in his native Brazil, to the largest trash dump in the world in Rio de Janeiro. There, he photographs the "catadores," or trash-pickers as he creates portraits from the items they pick.

"Mother and children (Suellen)"

"I draw with sugar. I draw with wire, thread, things that are very bad to make representations... I don't want people to simply see a representation of something. I want them to feel how it happens. The moment of that embodiment is what I consider a spiritual experience." -Vik Muniz

http://www.vikmuniz.net/

"Valencia Bathes in Sunday Clothes" (from Sugar Children)"Portrait of Jackson Pollock" (from Pictures of Chocolate)