The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. With the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert, the State Dept. initially organised and paid for touring international exhibition to show US was as sophisticated democracy as France but it faced backlash at home (McCarthyism). To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in and the agency was staffed mainly by graduates from Yale and Harvard, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time. CIA used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of Renaissance, the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists but unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash". You had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better. This new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was the ideal front organisation for the CIA campaign, which became a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds. CIA subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm and heavily promoted America's avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was ("free enterprise painting"), the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions. Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division (IOD), was executive secretary of the museum in 1949. These paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation." Hidden Hands' on BBC Channel 4. 'first generation' ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (Bay Area Figurative School Movement) This was personal abstract expression, as opposed to Cubist, Surrealist movements and geometric abstraction ('cold abstraction'). The style is direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegee, poured, and splashed paint. What is "Contemporary art"? Is this Art? The period from 1960 to the present is one of the greatest periods for painting although it is also one of the most chaotic and confusing. This is partly because there has been such a great plurality of styles, as well as the fact that painters have increased access to a wealth of cultural material via the exponential growth in new technologies and digital media. FLUXUS- They ignored art theories and aesthetic objectives, often creating mixed-media works from an array of found materials. While much is made of the do it yourself approach to art, it is vital to recognize that this idea emerges in music where anyone can create work of any kind from a score, acknowledging the composer as the originator of the work while realizing the work freely and even interpreting it in far different ways from those the original composer might have done. Fluxus artists shared several characteristics including wit and "childlikeness", though they lacked a consistent identity as an artistic community POST-MINIMALISTIC- artworks are usually everyday objects, use simple materials, and sometimes take on a "pure", formalist aesthetic. GRAFFITI ART- Also known as "Writing", "Spraycan Art" and "Aerosol Art", Graffiti is a style of painting associated with hip-hop, a cultural movement which sprang up in various American cities, especially on New York subway trains B-boys, the first generation of hip-hop voiced the frustrations of urban minorities in their attempt to create their own form of art, a non-commercial one that did not seek to please the general public. HAPPENINGS & PERFORMANCE ART (acting)- This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer. Henceforth, the interactions between the audience and the artwork makes the audience, in a sense, part of the art. performance art draws on the collaboration of the web world and tangible reality to conduct a new, modern "Happening." Body painting/Art Armenian-born American painter, Arshile Gorky, who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. His work as lyrical abstraction was a "new language. But his oeuvre is a phenomenal achievement in its own right, synthesizing Surrealism and the sensuous color and painterliness of the School of Paris with his own highly personal formal vocabulary. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide. Helen Frankenthaler is credited with pioneering this new technique, known as "soak stain", in which color gained primacy and became both composition and subject matter. In it, she introduced the technique of painting directly onto an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique and her use of landscape to inform her abstract work, changed the way artists conceived of and used color. This technique was used by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and others; and was adopted by other artists notably Morris Louis (1912–1962), and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), and launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting. COLOUR FIELD / Post-Painterly Abstraction / Painting & Action Painting There is an emphasis on brush-strokes, high compositional drama, dynamic compositional tension. At its peak of popularity in the fifties, it was responsible for the widest gulf in history between American artists and the American public. And it was a separation that would not begin to close until Modernism gave up its last gasp and died a natural death, starved for anything "new" with which to shock the art world. themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. it was aimed to employ images of popular (rather than elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.
'second generation' or Second wave ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (New York School) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh377ecvrsc Robert Motherwell was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined) The American artist, Barnett Newman is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. "zip," (a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work) became Newman's signature mark. The artist applied the light cadmium red zip atop a strip of masking tape with a palette knife. This thick, irregular band on the smooth field of Indian Reds. Lawrence Poons's paintings conveyed a sense of movement, and were categorized as op art. Although he exhibited with optical artists in 1965, by 1966 he had moved away from the optical art towards looser and more painterly abstract canvases. Northeast Grave in 1964 (Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas, 203.5 X 228.8 cm) by Lawrence Poons. The values of the blues and green seem be mute or flatten out each other at times until the viewer looks at the next color. However, the contrast in the value of red versus the value of the blues and greens helps the blue and green shapes to stand out. The red in this painting gives a positive and lively feel to the work as if it is energized. This painting helps reveal the effect of gestalt, or the brain’s tendency to group and connect the dots, finding meaning from every point it examines. The eye automatically groups the individual elements it sees into distinct sets so that it can make sense and complete an image, piecing together the missing components. With this painting, specifically, it does this by grouping things together by proximity and similarity. The observer can formulate multiple different ideas and meanings from the one (seemingly simple) pattern. Minimalism - colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. they wanted to show aesthetics in simpler designs that can bring more expression. Reacting against the crowded canvases of the Abstract Expressionists and greatly influenced from constructivist, these were art devoid of references, spare or stripped to its essentials. Unlike abstract expressionism, it did not imitate previous artists. The idea was given the most importance. They wanted to show aesthetics in simpler, orderly, balanced designs that can bring more expression. Mountains and Sea in 1952 by the American abstract expressionist painter, Helen Frankenthaler. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as Color Field. Born in New York City, she was influenced by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. Greenberg’s ‘formalism’ is more limited than Fry’s, but at the same time it is more rigorous. Greenberg borrowed a crucial principle from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (who was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era). That the notion that an art form achieved its greatest excellence when it was truest to its own unique characteristics, the ones it shared with no other art form. Greenberg demands a modern art that is difficult and highly sophisticated, technically and intellectually. Such art should be challenging enough to seem ‘ugly’ at first, as he said of Pollock; only then will it be worthy of becoming ‘beauty’ and joining the western high art tradition For Greenberg the arts of Europe had taken a mistaken direction from the 17th century, when, as he argued, literature had become the dominant art form; painting and sculpture, in particular, had wrongly attempted to imitate literary values rather than remaining true to their own visual media. Thus the task of modern art, as Greenberg saw it, was above all to free itself from subservience to literature, to subject-matter and representational content. Paradoxically, the modern arts learned to reassert the ‘purity’ of their own forms by modelling themselves, no longer on literature, but instead on music. Music could serve as the exemplary art form because its sensuous form was saturated with content or meaning. Instead Greenberg presents music, as an art of ‘pure form’ that does away with content altogether, one ‘which is abstract because it is almost nothing but sensuous’. Just as music reaches excellence by restricting itself to its sensuous medium, pure sound, so the visual arts, for Greenberg, should purge themselves of everything that is not integral to their sensuous media: coloured pigments on a flat surface for painting; wood, metal, or stone for sculpture. The visual arts first purge themselves of literary content. But that is not enough: each of the individual arts must then ‘purify’ itself more completely, by rejecting anything that might be shared with another art. With relentless logic Greenberg reasons that the only thing a particular art form can claim exclusively for itself is its medium, the physical materials out of which it is made. This emphasis on the physical medium is more restrictive, but also clearer and more concrete, than Fry’s ‘design’ or Bell’s ‘significant form’. The medium of painting, according to Greenberg, involves ‘the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment’. Whereas old master painting had sought to deny or conceal these physical characteristics, for instance by creating a powerful illusion of three-dimensional space, modernist painting brought them to the fore. ‘Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures’, Greenberg writes, ‘by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted’; then the Impressionists emphasized the materiality of pigments; then Cézanne designed his pictures to emphasize the rectangle of the canvas. However, Greenberg was obliged to admit that absolute flatness is unattainable: ‘The first mark made on a canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness, and the result of the marks made on it by an artist like Mondrian is still a kind of illusion that suggests a kind of third dimension.’ Abstract art, Greenberg says, can ‘train us’, can ‘refine our eyes for the appreciation of non-abstract art’. Formalism might be valuable, then, as a way of teaching ourselves to see. But we should be philosophically unwise, as well as foolishly self-denying, if we were to stop there. The American painter, Robert Ryman is best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He is identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. Ryman’s paintings are a series of experiments playing with the effects of texture, brushstroke, thickness, and surface in order to call attention to the work’s physicality. Since Ryman’s paintings are purely non-representational, they are not about symbolism, narrative, or even abstraction. Instead, they muse on their relationship to broader elements, such as the behavior of their medium and the environment in which they exist. The American designer, George Nelson was one of the founders of American Modernism. He defended the modernist principles, arguing against colleagues who, as "industrial designers", made too many concessions to the commercial forces of the industry. Nelson believed that the work of a designer should be to better the world. In his view, nature was already perfect, but man ruined it by making things that didn't follow the rules of nature. One of George Nelson's areas of interest was the reduction of pollution. He introduced the concept of the "family room", and the "storage wall". The storage wall was essentially the idea of recessed, built-in bookcases or shelving occupying space previously lost between walls. After consulting with experts in psychology, anthropology, and various other fields, Robert Propst had created the Action Office II line, which is better known today as the "Office cubicle", for Herman Miller, after Nelson was removed from the his supervisory role. For it George Nelson won the prestigious Alcoa Award but he disowned the project and sent a letter to the Vice-President in which he described the system as "dehumanizing effect as a working environment." He summed up his feeling by saying: "One does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that AO II is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for "employees" (as against individuals), for "personnel," corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market." In 1947 George Nelson designed these sturdy, light-weight, (brushed, nickel-plated steel) wire-framed lamps, covered with translucent plastic membrane, which cast a soft, even light. George Nelson Associates, also designed a large series of wall and table clocks for the Howard Miller company including the Ball, Kite, Eye, Turbine, Spindle, Petal and Spike clocks, as well as a handful of desk clocks. Op-art (Optical art) Its a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions & derived from the constructivist practices of the Bauhaus, the German school, founded by Walter Gropius, stressed the relationship of form and function within a framework of analysis and rationality. Tricks explore ideas of illusions of the eyes, movement, understanding, seeing, psychology, properties of lines to create tension & dynamism , responses to the eyes Bridget Riley is well known for her mastery of the simulation of movement in a static two-dimensional plane. Her paintings work only as an active collaboration between artist and viewer. The viewer gets confronted with the mechanisms of one’s own perception. She explores optical phenomena and juxtaposes color either by using a chromatic technique of identifiable hues or by selecting achromatic colors (black, white or gray). In doing so, her work appears to flicker, pulsate and move, encouraging the viewer’s visual tension. As an added bonus to entice you to see them up close is that the longer you look, the more mesmerizing presence they feel. "I couldn’t get near what I wanted through seeing, recognizing and recreating, so I stood the problem on its head. I started studying squares, rectangles, triangles and the sensations they give rise to... It is untrue that my work depends on any literary impulse or has any illustrative intention. The marks on the canvas are sole and essential agents in a series of relationships which form the structure of the painting." She said she made the first of her black-and-white paintings in 1960 as "an extreme statement of something violent". Shock and anger were a common response. Her early canvases hurt people's eyes and made them dizzy. Even their titles – Shiver, Current, Blaze, Burn – spelt danger. One was initially called Discharge because it aimed to transfix the spectator, "like arrows being discharged in your face as you looked at it". Riley’s vibrant optical pattern paintings, which she painted in the 1960s, were hugely popular and become a hallmark of the period. Her work was ruthlessly reproduced and commercialised on clothes, album covers and even Japanese matchbox backs. The mid- 1980s saw Bridget Riley's work move progressively away from a build up of sensation giving rise to a perceptual response, and instead towards an art of pure visual sensation, treating form and colour as 'ultimate identities', as things in themselves. Units of colour were arranged according to principles of relation and chromatic interaction, but increasingly were connected to the implication of rhythm, space and depth. She explores optical phenomena and juxtaposes color either by using a chromatic technique of identifiable hues or by selecting achromatic colors (black, white or gray). In doing so, her work appears to flicker, pulsate and move, encouraging the viewer’s visual tension. As an added bonus to entice you to see them up close is that the longer you look, the more mesmerizing presence they feel. Riley works meticulously, carefully mixing her colors to achieve the exact hue and intensity she desires. She explores color interaction first in small gouache color studies, then moving to full-size paper-ad-gouache designs. The large-scale canvases are then marked up and painted entirely by hand — first in acrylics, then in oil.
NEW REALISM & PHOTO REALISM- they sought to bring life and art closer together by 'poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality'. they wanted detailed reality rather then abstract. They also wanted to avoid what they saw as the traps of figurative art, which was seen as either petty-bourgeois or as stalinist / propaganda (Social Realism).
Pop art They wanted to defuse the personal symbolism and 'painterly looseness' of Abstract Expressionism and they did it in a renewed spirit of “let me have fun”. Mark Rothko is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter". His paintings are characterized by many things. The most recent one being that they take the form of abstract expressionist art. In fact, Rothkowitz himself see art in general as a means of expressing one’s emotions and religious beliefs. His paintings also featured a combination of and careful regard for balance, color, composition, depth, scale, and shape. The set of Mark Rothko paintings originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York are the treasure of Tate Modern. They occupy a room of their own, low-lit and filled with brooding intensity. The hazy outlines of what might be doors, windows, or the gates of heaven and hell hover on the wine red and imperial purple surfaces of Rothko's mural-scale abstractions. In all of them darkness beckons, mordantly inviting the beholder to imagine vast apocalyptic landscapes, undefinable events on a cosmic scale. Almost everyone who enters the room feels an urge to sit down on the benches in the middle of the space. It's as if the emotional weight of these sombre works instinctively makes you sit, instantly drained by them. Before you even have time to try to compose a rational understanding of them, they have a psychological impact. Deep reds, abstract and empty, and illusory depictions of doors leading to spaces beyond, are characteristic of ancient Roman fresco painting. Opening up the imagination like a raw wound. Rothko was impressed by the blind windows that grimly decorate this room – classical window frames that, instead of letting in light, are blocked off by Michelangelo to close down the spectator's curiosity. As well as these blind window frames, it has gargantuan stone scrolls, a staircase that sprawls like an octopus on a fish stall, and overwhelming colours of grey and bone white. The Rothko room at Tate Modern strives to recapture the claustrophobic, disorientating feel of Michelangelo's room. The Laurentian Library vestibule also has a deliberately oppressive effect on you – and here, too, it starts as soon as you step into the room, as if you had crossed a threshold from normal life into some waiting room in hell. Rothko was fascinated by the idea of shaping a room with art, using abstract painting as a type of architecture.
One aspect of the definition of Arte Povera was about breaking down the hierarchies of "art" and common things to create art of impoverished materials. Lucio Fontana was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to the modern art movement, Arte Povera. Frank Stella is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction
Hyena Stomp (oil on canvas) in 1962 by Frank Stella. Hyena Stomp is part of a series of large paintings known as Concentric Squares and Mitred Mazes. With this series Stella continued to use the same Benjamin Moore alkyd house paint he used in earlier works, using the six primary and secondary colours in this work. The title Hyena Stomp comes from a track by the American jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton. Stella was thinking about syncopation while working on the painting: the alternation of colours appearing to have an irregular but rhythmic pattern. The French artist, Yves Klein is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art, as well as Pop art. The American artist, Brice Marden may have been able to evade Modernism’s breakthrough requirement because he made his entrance at a time when painting as a whole had supposedly ground to a halt. He is artist who has spent his career assiduously converting the rule-ridden zone of Minimalist abstraction into a capacious yet disciplined place, pushing it toward landscape and the figure while reconnecting it to its roots in Abstract Expressionism and beyond, in non-Western art. It makes perfect sense that one of the greatest influences on Mr. Marden’s recent work has been Chinese art, where originality is a much fuzzier, more nuanced concept. His inspirations include calligraphy, landscape painting, scholars’ rocks and ceramics. in his paintings each is gray, but each is different, variously tinged with tones of silver, green, yellow and plum. Their closed surfaces are seductively smooth and strangely matte, because Mr. Marden was adding beeswax to his oil paint and applying it to his canvas, like the workmen, with a palette knife. The art critic who dismissed these paintings as “Jasper Johns backgrounds” was right to some extent, although these “backgrounds” came as much from Goya, Manet and Velazquez as from Johns. Marden’s dense planes of color simply emphasized to the exclusion of all else the most obtrusive fact of most paintings — shape and background color. He brought them forward and made them unavoidable, not unlike Donald Judd’s Minimalist boxes. (Adolph Frederick) Ad Reinhardt was a New York painter of the mid-20th Century who started as an abstract expressionist and ended up a minimalist. In a slow progression away from color and image, he distilled his work to a series of black paintings. On the face of it, they are pictures of nothing, these big black canvases. Viewed close up and in person, they reward the serious viewer with subtle geometries, squares and rectangles, in a range of velvety black hues from red to green. Abstract art, for Reinhardt and others of his generation, is not a meaningless pattern even if it is not a picture of anything.
The German-born American artist and educator, Josef Albers most significant achievements were in abstract painting and theory. His influence fell heavily on American artists of the late 1950s and the 1960s. "Hard-edge" abstract painters drew on his use of patterns and intense colors, while Op artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception. Albers's work represents a transition between traditional European art and the new American art. It incorporated European influences from the constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, and its intensity and smallness of scale were typically European. The American painter, Franz Jozef Kline best known abstract expressionist paintings are in black and white. Kline re-introduced color into his paintings around 1955, though he used color more consistently after 1959. Kline's paintings are deceptively subtle. While generally his paintings have a dynamic, spontaneous and dramatic impact, Kline often closely referred to his compositional drawings. Kline carefully rendered many of his most complex pictures from studies. There seem to be references to Japanese calligraphy in Kline's black and white paintings, although he always denied that connection. Bridges, tunnels, buildings, engines, railroads and other architectural and industrial icons are often suggested as imagery informing Kline's work. Number 30 (Autumn Rhythm) by the influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, (Paul) Jackson Pollock. He married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Art can be an interpretation of what Kant meant by insisting that the judgement of taste was both ‘subjective’ (Greenberg’s word is ‘relative’) and ‘universal’ (Greenberg’s ‘general agreement’). As the critic Clement Greenberg puts it: Quality in art can be neither ascertained nor proved by logic or discourse. . . This is what all serious philosophers of art since Immanuel Kant have concluded. Yet, quality in art is not just a matter of private experience. There is a consensus of taste. The best taste is that of the people who, in each generation, spend the most time and trouble on art, and this best taste has always turned out to be unanimous, within certain limits, in its verdicts. The art of Jackson Pollock now wins virtually universal aesthetic approval from art critics, historians, and audiences. It should be noted that Greenberg’s argument for consensus, unlike Kant’s, is empirical; he claims, somewhat tendentiously, that consensus has actually existed in history. Kant argues on safer ground that when we make the judgement of taste we are asking for the agreement of other people; thus the empirical question of whether people actually do agree makes no difference to Kant’s argument. Nonetheless, Greenberg’s allegiance to Kantian aesthetics is a distinguishing feature of his criticism, together with his forthright advocacy of abstract art and his powerful deployment of a formalist method to interpret that art. Indeed, it is largely through Greenberg’s exceptional fame, as the foremost American art critic of the twentieth century, that formalist criticism, Kantian aesthetics, and abstract art have come to seem inseparable from one another. But they are separable, and Greenberg gives a very particular slant to the Kantian tradition. This is at once evident in his assumption, closer to Roger Fry than to the Critique of Judgement, that the consensus of taste is displayed exclusively in relation to art. Moreover, the assumption leads (again as in Fry) to the establishment of a standard or rule for taste, something that Kant was determined to avoid. The essay makes an impassioned and committed case for preserving the values of high art against what Greenberg saw as the tendency of both totalitarian regimes (the essay was published at the height of the power of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin) and the ‘culture industry’ of the ‘free’ world to reduce art to trivial entertainment. Thus it was crucial to Greenberg, in the historical circumstances of 1939, to make a sharp division between high art (which he calls ‘avant-garde’) and the art of mere entertainment, or ‘kitsch’. Christo and Jeanne-Claude In March 1958, Christo arrived in Paris where he created his first wrapped cans. It started with a small, empty paint can, of which there were many lying around in his studio. Christo wrapped the insignificant object in resin-soaked canvas, tied it up and coated the result with a mixture of glue, varnish and sand and a thin layer of dark-black or brown lacquer. If we consider the fact that Christo always contrasted his wrapped cans with versions with no wrapping, it soon becomes clear that he was interested not only in the concealment of the object but also in the comparative analysis of the three-dimensional qualities of different objects, surfaces and materials. He had the choice of either wrapping the cans or painting them. Others he left unchanged, so that the company name or at least parts of it could still be deciphered under the many blotches of paint. The first of these ensembles was limited to only two cans, but soon whole groups appeared consisting of a variety of wrapped, painted and unaltered cans and bottles. It is important to point out that none of the works are mounted on a base, which implies that Christo did not explicitly prescribe the arrangement of the individual components. In reality, the cans, now scattered among collections, were once part of a large installation of wrapped, painted and unaltered cans, bottles and crates that Christo did between 1958 and 1960 and baptized Inventory. All the works were originally conceived to be presented in the corner of a room as an ensemble, roughly comparable to the household inventory that one piles in the corner of a room when one moves into a new house. In addition to the fact that the work has been fragmented into its separate parts, there is the aggravating circumstance that only fragments of the many pieces still exist today. When Christo and Jeanne-Claude moved to New York in 1964 and were unable to pay the rent on their storeroom in Gentilly, a suburb of Paris, their landlord threw all the works in the garbage. The only reason that some of the cans, bottles and barrels survived is that Christo had several small studios and storage rooms at the time, among them a basement room attached to the apartment belonging to Jeanne-Claude’s mother. It is believed, however, that the many crates, of which only a few black-and-white and color photos exist today, were all destroyed. Wrapped Trees by Christo and Jeanne-Claude for Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have worked with trees for many years. Nursery trees are commonly found with both their roots and crowns wrapped and it is also common to see trees temporarily wrapped as protection against frost or during transport. Christo created his first Wrapped Tree in 1966 as part of his personal exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. By placing the tree, with its roots wrapped in fabric and branches wrapped in polyethylene, inside the museum, where it was shown on a pedestal, Christo changed its natural habitat to a novel one creating a paradoxical sight. In the same year, Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed to wrap the crowns of about forty live trees near the Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park, Missouri. Christo and Jeanne-Claude wanted to wrap the trees in winter, when they are leafless and dormant, but the project fell through because the university that owned the park opposed it. In 1969, the artists started to negotiate permission for wrapping the 330 trees bordering the Avenue des Champs-Elysées and the Rond Point in Paris. The project was denied by Maurice Papon, Prefect of Paris, because the city had decided instead to decorate the trees with electric Christmas lights. 32 years after their initial attempt to wrap live trees, Christo and Jeanne-Claude finally succeeded with Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98 when they wrapped 178 live trees. Brazilian architect, Lina Bo Bardi (originally named Achillina Bo), 1914-1992 Born in Italy in 1914, she left Rome and followed her Milanese classmate and boyfriend Carlo Pagani to the more progressive north. Away from what she described as the stale environment of the capital, she received a second education in Milan, where she worked as an editor and freelance designer, struggling to create constructive alternatives and humanize design amid massive physical, social and moral devastation. In 1946, she decided, rather impulsively, to marry the influential art dealer and journalist Pietro Maria Bardi and join him in a commercial venture to sell his art collection in South America. Personal and political conflicts, however, kept her from working in Salvador after the 1964 coup d’état, which installed a military regime that lasted two decades. The SESC Pompeia, a social and cultural centre formed in an old factory in Sao Paulo, is a place for community interaction, housing swimming, football, theatre, art, dance, and a canteen – while allowing space purely for passing through. The building was due for demolition until Bo Bardi proposed for the centre to be constructed within it. She then listened to those constructing her visions and developed the building with them. Only recently had she begun to receive recognition for her long and prolific career as a designer, which began with her education in Rome, where she was born in 1914, and matured in Brazil, the country of her adopted citizenship, where she moved in 1946 and worked until her death in 1992. She spoke against a tradition that she traced back to the Enlightenment, a “set of classical rules that were codified in books and erudite treatises.” However she also defined good design by the old term "beauty." She rejected the term ‘modernism’, refusing to be aligned with either modernist or postmodernist in Brazil. Her work ascribed great values to the use of new and progressive materials and created buildings which truly sat within their context. She was against the idea that architecture and design education were problem-solving endeavors. Architects, she believed, did not need to know how to solve everything. They needed to know how to think innovatively about where to look for solutions. She offered this advice to young architects: “When we design, even as a student, it is important that a building serves a purpose and that it has the connotation of use. It is necessary that the work does not fall from the sky over its inhabitants, but rather expresses a need.” In 1958, at a lecture in Salvador, Bo Bardi defined architecture as “an adventure in which people are called to intimately participate as actors”. She had no office, preferring to work on construction sites during the day and draft in her home at night; she refined her designs years after completion, listening and collaborating to the people who passed through them. Bo Bardi’s greatest legacy: she established an architectural vocabulary that favoured collaboration, participation and social mixing, and she lived it as much as she preached it.
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“painting is becoming sculpture, is becoming ceramic, is becoming three-dimensional weaving, is becoming jewellery” Italian industrial designer, Achille Castiglioni was often inspired by everyday things and made use of ordinary materials. He preferred to use a minimal amount of materials to create forms with maximal effect. Babela chair by the brothers Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni, with Dino Gavina. It was designed to solve the furnishing needs of large meeting rooms and conference halls. The chair is built light so that it can be easily moved around, and stackable with minimal clearance. It can be arranged to create long straight rows, armrest against armrest, making the most of the available space. Its functionality is enhanced by a pronounced feeling of comfort and correct posture. Scrittarello, a writing desk by the Italian industrial designer, Achille Castiglioni It has a broad table top made of beech-veneered plywood and white laminate providing ample space to spread papers out on.Its two shelves, also made beech-veneered plywood and white laminate, provide storage for books making this a handy desk for those lacking space.It has saw horse legs in solid natural beech that keep the overall design light and provide a sturdy base for this classic writing desk. RR 126 stereo system (plastic laminate, masonite, steel) in 1965 by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. The components of a stereo system are arranged to design a "musical pet" with loudspeaker ears, a witty face, and the capacity to move around on its casters. Floor lamp Toio consists of a polychrome steel base, a transformator and a car light from the year 1962 by the Italian industrial designer, Achille Castiglioni. Th floor lamp Toio by Flos providing indirect light has an angle iron and formed steel base. The lamp is available in painted white, black and red. The hexagonal nickel-plated brass stem is height-adjustable with its telescopic head and can be moved down to 370 mm. Sancarlo armchair and sofa by the Italian industrial designer, Achille Castiglioni. It consist of a basic structure with an added metal tubing frame, upholstered with padding in variable degrees of thickness to ensure optimal support to every part of the body. Sets and individual pieces of Alessi Caccia Cutlery by the Italian industrial designer, Achille Castiglioni At some point in the early years of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, engineering and architecture had come apart, or at least a split had begun to appear between two radically different ways of solving large structural problems. Perhaps the attitudes which finally threatened architecture as conceived ever since the Renaissance sprang most immediately out of an interest in a new material, iron, viewed by most architects as profoundly un-architectural. For someone used to arched stone, brick or concrete construction, familiar since the Romans, iron bridge appeared to defy basic rules and to take little notice of gravity. The resulting jump in scale is enormous. Suddenly iron and glass are thinkable for the most monumental constructions. Railway sheds had already employed the new technology. A crucial step in admitting the new materials to aesthetic respectability occurs with Eiffel’s design for a monumental marker for the Paris Exposition of 1889. His skeletal iron tower, which did nothing to clothe and little to prettify itself, caused shock and consternation but quickly imprinted itself as an unforgettable icon.Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism. Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God. The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term "avant-garde“ (non elitist culture, no high design, no craftsmanship, trashy but with humour), with which the movement was labelled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).
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AuthorI am interested in unfolding scene design, character design and image design; representing contemporary narrative strategy, narrative shot and narrative style. The flowing images, which combine aesthetics and ideology. NoticeThis site contains copyrighted material for purposes that constitutes 'fair use'; and has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. No fee is charged, and no money is made off this site. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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