Jesse Bryant Wilder - Art History For Dummies

After World War II, American artists seemed to drop a bomb on German Expressionism, splattering the representational side of it and leaving only the naked expression. In German Expressionism, emotion distorts the face of reality, the way human faces are distorted by extreme feelings, but are still recognizable. In Abstract Expressionism, emotion distorts reality beyond all recognition. The most famous Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, achieved this effect by throwing paint on his canvases.

In the early ’60s, Pop Art artists decided to co-opt the new styles of advertising, the fantasies of stardom, and the over-the-top optimism and hunger for ever-new stuff that characterizes post–World War II America. Their art is sometimes hard to distinguish from the movies, ads, and comic books they borrowed from and parodied.

In the late ’60s, the art world fractured into many minor movements. In one movement, artists believed that they didn’t need to produce any artwork but simply generate concepts.

In reality, conceptual art, as it’s known, is often a type of performance or “happening” that can be very spontaneous and interactive. Sometimes it’s simply writing on a wall. One early conceptual artist camped out with a coyote for a week in an art gallery to get people thinking about the treatment of Native Americans.

Feminist art is sometimes linked with conceptual art in that it focuses on ideas related to the inequalities faced by women and tries to provoke change. But the movement has no set style. It might include a painting on canvas or a group of women dressed up in gorilla costumes crashing a public event to pass out pamphlets.

Postmodern means life “after Modernism.” And Modernism refers to art made between about 1890 and 1970. Postmodernist thinkers view contemporary society as a fragmented world that has no coherent center, no absolutes, no cultural baseline. How do you capture the mosaic of the mixed-up Postmodern world on canvas or in a building? Artists and architects do it by borrowing from the past and by mixing old styles until they wind up with a new style that reflects contemporary society as well as the past societies it evolved from.

Part 2

IN THIS PART …

Exploring prehistoric painting and sculpture

Grappling with megalithic architecture

Reading between the lines in visual narratives

Hanging out in Babylon

Digging into the art of pyramids and tombs

Discovering why Egyptian statues are so colossal

Touring Greek and Roman ruins

Recognizing propaganda in “realistic” ancient art

Chapter 4

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deciphering the world’s oldest paintings

Cozying up to a Stone Age fertility symbol

Grappling with New Stone Age architecture like Stonehenge

During the last great Ice Age, a vast sheet of ice buried much of the world. In about 120,000 BC, Homo sapiens sapiens (the doubly wise — sapiens means “wise” — known today as humans) appeared on this frozen stage. They’ve stolen the show ever since.

Humans shared the scene with herds of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, aurochs (extinct horned oxen), saber-toothed cats, bison, horses, and deer, which roamed much of the planet. The first humans survived in this glacial wilderness as nomadic hunter-gatherers. We don’t know much about them because they left no written records, no art, and no permanent settlements.

The earliest surviving art came into the picture about 90,000 years later in the Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age, which lasted roughly from 40,000 BC to 8000 BC. This “primitive” art was already highly developed in 30,000 BC — at the peak of its game, as if the prehistoric artists who made it studied their craft in some Stone Age art school. More likely, their skills were handed down from master to apprentice and honed over thousands of years. They painted highly accomplished depictions of wild animals in the world’s first art galleries, the walls of caves. More cave art continues to be discovered; the oldest thus far was found in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating from at least 40,000 BC. To date, the most advanced cave art may be in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in southern France and Altamira in northern Spain. Their pictures of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, and aurochs are the most accurate images we have of these extinct species.

In this chapter, I introduce you to the earliest artists — those who lived in the Stone Age and New Stone Age.

Before humans could make art, they had to be able to make tools. Apes use sticks as tools to knock down bananas, for example, but they don’t produce tools (or art). Our earliest ancestors got onto their feet about four million years ago. We don’t know what they did with their hands until two million years later, when the first primitive tools appeared in east-central Africa. These tools were simply stones with sharpened edges made by our ancestors Homo habilis (which means “handy man” or “able man”). Tools were slowly refined over the millennia from handy man’s rough-flaked stones used for cutting meat and pelts (about 2,000,000 BC) to the invention of the hand ax (about 1,300,000 BC) and the spear (about 1,000,000 BC). The bow and arrow were invented around 10,000 BC. Our forebears were slowly learning to master their environment — and art was just around the corner.

Cave artists used feathers, fur, moss, chewed sticks, and their fingers as paintbrushes. Sometimes they incised (cut into) the outlines of pictures into cave walls with sharp stones or charcoal sticks. They ground minerals like red and yellow ochre, manganese, and hematite into red, violet, yellow, brown, and black powders, which they applied directly to the damp limestone walls to create painted fur for bears and bison, and spots for leopards and hyenas. Today, 15,000 to 25,000 years later, this primitive paint still hasn’t peeled! (Don’t you wish you could find stuff like that at the local hardware store.)

Prehistoric artists also “spray-painted” their pictures to cover larger areas more efficiently by blowing colored powders through hollowed-out reeds or bones. Some of these hollow tubes have been discovered in the caves with traces of color still in them.

Cave painters sometimes used bumps and crevices on cave walls to emphasize an animal’s contours: a bulge for a belly, an indentation for an eye, a bump for a hump. In the Chauvet cave in southwestern France, an artist painted a bear’s paw over a knob in the wall, making it appear more threatening, as if the animal were reaching into real space to claw somebody!