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A World of Art

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On February 12, 2005, across the 843-acreexpanse of New York City’s Central Park,7,503 saffron-colored fabric panels weredropped from the top of 7,503 saffron-

painted steel gates, each 16 feet tall, to billow in thewind about 7 feet above the ground. The gates werepositioned 12 feet apart (except where low-hangingtree branches extended above the walkways) and were

of various widths, depending on the widths of thewalkways they covered (there are 25 different widths ofwalkways in the park’s 23 miles of paths). Seen fromthe skyscrapers that surround the park, the gateslooked like golden-orange rivers meandering throughthe bare branches of the park’s trees (Fig. 1). In thebright sun of New York’s chilly February days, theyglowed with an autumnal warmth.

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Fig. 1 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates, New York City, Central Park, aerial view, 1979–2005.Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2005 Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

P A R T 1

THE VISUALWORLD

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A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.

2 Part 1 The Visual World

The Gates, New York City, Central Park was thecreation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the husband-and-wife team that for the last 40 years has wrappedbuildings around the world. Like their other projects,The Gates was a temporary work, up for a few weeksand then dismantled, leaving no trace of their pres-ence behind. The total cost of the project was $21 mil-lion, financed entirely by the artists, as is true of alltheir projects, through the sale of preparatory studies,drawings, collages, scale models, and other works (Fig. 2). All of the materials used in the project wererecycled—the fabric went to a firm in Pennsylvania,where it was shredded and respun; the vinyl framing wasground into half a million pounds of orange chips usedto make fencing; and the steel, including the screws,went to a scrap yard in New Jersey, where it was melteddown and sold worldwide. Christo and Jeanne-Claudedonated merchandising rights to a not-for-profit envi-ronmental organization dedicated to preserving naturein New York City’s urban setting, which in turn sharedits profits from the project with the Central ParkConservancy.

New Yorkers generally received The Gates withenthusiasm. For many, the work represented the reju-venation of the city after the tragedy of 9/11, a festive

celebration of life. The gates’ presence certainly revi-talized the city’s economy, as more than four millionpeople visited the park in just over two weeks,contributing an estimated 1/4 billion dollars to citybusinesses. Those who complained generally foundthe steel, vinyl, and fabric constructions an intrusiveviolation of the natural landscape. But, Christo wasquick to point out, the geometric grid pattern of thehundreds of city blocks surrounding Central Park—tosay nothing of the rectangular design of the park as awhole—was reflected in the rectangular structure ofthe gates themselves. Furthermore, the park itself wasa man-made construction. More than 150 years ago,the original architects, Frederick Law Olmsted andCalvert Vaux, were commissioned by the city to createa park out of a rocky, swampy, and almost treelesslandscape to the north of what was then the cityproper. So barren was the area that the soil was inade-quate to sustain the trees and shrubs that were pur-chased for the site. Olmsted and Vaux had 500,000cubic feet of topsoil carted in from New Jersey. Theycreated lakes, blasted out boulders, and sculpted hill-sides. If today the park looks natural, it was originallyas artificial—as constructed—as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work of art.

Fig. 2 Christo, The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City, 2003.Drawing in two parts, pencil, charcoal, pastel, wax crayon, technical data, fabric sample, aerial photograph, and tapeon paper, 15 � 96 in. and 42 � 96 in. Collection Christo and Jeanne-Claude.Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © Christo 2003 / Getty Images, Inc.

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Chapter 1 A World of Art 3

to produce a work of art, the artist must be able torespond to the unexpected, the chance occurrences orresults that are part of the creative process. In otherwords, the artist must be something of an explorerand inventor. The artist must always be open to newways of seeing. The landscape painter John Constablespoke of this openness as “the art of seeing nature.”This art of seeing leads to imagining, which leads inturn to making. Creativity is the sum of this process,from seeing to imagining to making. In the process ofmaking a work of art, the artist also engages in a self-critical process—questioning assumptions, revisingand rethinking choices and decisions, exploring newdirections and possibilities. In other words, the artistis also a critical thinker, and the creative process is, atleast in part, an exercise in critical thinking.

Exploring the creative process is the focus of thisbook. We hope you take from this book the knowledgethat the kind of creative and critical thinking engagedin by artists is fundamental to every discipline. This

If, as critic Michael Kimmelman wrotein the New York Times, “The Gates is a workof pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good-will and simple eloquence, the first greatpublic art event of the 21st century,” view-ers from Japan saw it in a different light. Forthem, it echoed the famous Fushimi InariShrine in Kyoto (Fig. 3), dedicated to theShinto god of rice, where more than 10,000orange and black torii gates line 4 kilometersof mountain trails. The similarity betweenthe two structures suggested an importantenvironmental message to Japanese audi-ences. They saw The Gates, especially in itscommitment to recycling and its support ofthe environmental organization, as a com-mentary on the refusal of the United Statesto ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an inter-national agreement designed to lower theoverall emissions of six greenhouse gases thatare believed to be a factor in global warming.

If the experience of The Gates projectwas undoubtedly different for its Japaneseand American viewers, both groups never-theless asked themselves the same ques-tions. What is the purpose of this work ofart (and what is the purpose of art in gen-eral)? What does it mean? What is myreaction to the work and why do I feel thisway? How do the formal qualities of thework—such as its color, its organization,its size and scale—affect my reaction?What do I value in works of art? These aresome of the questions that this book is designed tohelp you address. Appreciating art is never just aquestion of accepting visual stimuli, but of intelli-gently contemplating why and how works of artcome to be made and have meaning. By helping youunderstand the artist’s creative process, we hope thatyour own critical ability, the process by which youcreate your own ideas, will be engaged as well.

THE WORLD AS ARTISTS SEE IT

The Gates project demonstrates how two differentcultures might understand and value the same workof art in different ways. Similarly, different artists,responding to their world in different times andplaces, might see the world in apparently divergentterms. They do, however, share the fundamentaldesire to create. All people are creative, but not allpeople possess the energy, ingenuity, and courageof conviction that are required to make art. In order

Fig. 3 Torii gates, Fushimi Inari Shrine, Kyoto, Japan, eighth century.Photo: © David Samuel Robbins / Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

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same path leads to discovery in science, breakthroughsin engineering, and new research in the social sci-ences. We can all learn from studying the creativeprocess itself.

Roles of the ArtistMost artists think of themselves as assuming one offour fundamental roles—or some combination ofthe four—as they approach their work: 1) they helpus to see the world in new and innovative ways;2) they create a visual record of their time andplace; 3) they make functional objects and struc-tures more pleasurable by imbuing them withbeauty and meaning; and 4) they give form to theimmaterial ideas and feelings.

1) Artists help us to see the world in new or innovativeways.

This is one of the primary roles that Christo andJeanne-Claude assumed in creating The Gates. In fact,

almost all of their work is designed to transform ourexperience of the world, jar us out of our complacency,and create new ways for us to see and think about theworld around us. As visitor after visitor to The Gatescommented, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art trans-formed their experience of Central Park forever, alteringtheir sense of its space, deepening their understandingof its history, and heightening their appreciation forits beauty.

The work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama hasmuch the same effect. Kusama is widely known for herfascination with polka-dots. In the late 1950s, shebegan to produce paintings that she called “InfinityNets,” huge canvases painted all over in tiny circles.The paintings were a means of coming to grips with anobsessive hallucinatory vision that she first experi-enced as a child:

One day I was looking at the red flower patterns ofthe tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I sawthe same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows

Fig. 4 Yayoi Kusama, You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies, 2005.Mixed media. The Phoenix Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds provided by Jan and Howard Hendler(2005.146).

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Fig. 5 John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Pat, 1982.Painted cast plaster, 281/2 � 161/2 � 11 in. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin,New York. Collection Norma and William Roth, Winter Haven, Florida.Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.

and the walls, and finally all over the room, mybody and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless timeand the absoluteness of space, and be reduced tonothingness.

Over a career that has spanned the last 50 years,she has covered people, rooms, buildings, and land-scapes with her polka-dot patterns, and she hascreated installations—room-sized environments—that quite literally reflect her sense of “the infinity ofendless time.” You Who Are Getting Obliterated in theDancing Swarm of Fireflies (Fig. 4) is an example.Created for the new 2005 addition to the PhoenixMuseum of Art—where it has quickly become themost popular work of art in the collection—it consistsof a room, the ceiling, floor, and walls of which arecovered with mirrors that reflect the flickering glow oftiny dots of LED lights suspended in the space onsmall strings. Passing through, the viewer feels literallyawash in a space so vast that all sense of self—or atleast self-importance—is obliterated. Kusama makesus aware of just how small we are in the grand schemeof things.

2) Artists make a visual record of the people, places,and events of their time and place.

Sometimes artists are not so much interested in see-ing things anew as they are in simply recording,accurately, what it is that they see. The sculpture ofPat (Fig. 5) almost looks as if it is alive, and cer-tainly anyone meeting the real “Pat” would recog-nize her from this sculpture. In fact, Pat is one ofmany plaster casts made from life by John Ahearnand Rigoberto Torres, residents of the South Bronxin New York City. In 1980, Ahearn moved to theSouth Bronx and began to work in collaborationwith local resident Torres. Torres had learned the artof plaster casting from his uncle, who had cast plas-ter statues for churches and cemeteries. TogetherAhearn and Torres set out to capture the spirit of acommunity that was financially impoverished butthat possessed real, if unrecognized, dignity. “Thekey to my work is life—lifecasting,” says Ahearn.“The people I cast know that they are as responsiblefor my work as I am, even more so. The people makemy sculptures.”

Portraiture is, in fact, one of the longest stand-ing traditions in art. Until the invention of photog-raphy, the portrait—whether drawn, painted, orsculpted—was the only way to preserve the physicallikeness of a human being. And artists have alwaysunderstood that in the myriad expressions and atti-

tudes visible in the faces of the people who make uptheir world, something like the spirit of their agemight be discovered.

In the sixteenth century, portraiture becameespecially valued by the Muslim Mughal leaders ofIndia. When the Mughal ruler Akbar took thethrone in 1556 at the age of just 14 years, he estab-lished a school of painting in India, open to bothHindu and Islamic artists, taught by masters broughtfrom Tabriz, Persia. He also urged his artists to studythe Western paintings and prints that Portuguesetraders began to bring into the country in the 1570s.By the end of Akbar’s reign, a state studio of morethan 1,000 artists had created a library of over 24,000illuminated manuscripts.

Akbar ruled over a court of thousands of bureau-crats, courtiers, servants, wives, and concubines.Fully aware that the population was by and largeHindu, Akbar practiced an official policy of religioustoleration. He believed that a synthesis of the world’sfaiths would surpass the teachings of any one ofthem. Thus he invited Christians, Jews, Hindus,Buddhists, and others to his court to debate withMuslim scholars. Despite taxing the peasantry heav-

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Fig. 6 Attributed to Manohar, Jahangir inDarbar, Mughal period, India, about 1620.Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 133/4 � 77/8 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.Francis Bartlett Donation of 1912 and PictureFund 14.654.

ily to support the luxurious lifestyle that he enjoyed,he also instituted a number of reforms, particularlybanning the practice of immolating surviving wiveson the funeral pyres of their husbands.

Under the rule of Akbar’s son, Jahangir, portrai-ture found even greater favor in India. The paintingJahangir in Darbar is exemplary (Fig. 6). It showsJahangir, whose name means “World Seizer,” seated

between the two pillars at the top ofthe painting, holding an audience,or darbar, at court. His son, thefuture emperor Shah Jahan, standsjust behind him. The figures in thestreet are a medley of portraits, com-posed in all likelihood from albumsof portraits kept by court artists.Among them is a Jesuit priest fromEurope dressed in his black robes.The stiff formality of the figures,depicted in profile facing left andright toward a central axis, makes asharp contrast to the variety of faceswith different racial and ethnic fea-tures that fills the scene. But thepainting does, nevertheless, fullydocument the variety and toleranceof the Mughal court.

No one would mistake ClaudeMonet’s representation of the GareSaint-Lazare (Fig. 7) for a portrait.And yet his depiction of the Paristrain station that by 1868 was han-dling over 13 million commuterpassengers a year captures, as fullyas Jahangir in Darbar, the spirit ofits age. Beginning in 1852, Parishad undergone a complete transfor-mation. Long, straight, wide boule-vards had been extended across thecity. Working-class citizens, whohad previously lived in thelabyrinth of ancient streets that theboulevards replaced, were removedto the suburbs, along with the

industry they supported. Shops, cafés, and theworld’s first department stores lined the broad side-walks of the new promenades. New parks, squares,and gardens were built, and the avenues were linedwith over 100,000 newly planted trees. In order toallow traffic to flow seamlessly around the train sta-tion, a massive new bridge, the Pont de l’Europe,was built over the tracks. By the time Monet painted

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the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877,these changes had been effected.His painting captures the transfor-mation of not only Paris, butmodernity itself. Here is a portraitof the new modern world, for bet-ter or worse—both the promise ofthe railroad, of modern speed andindustry, and the atmosphere ofsteam and smoke created in itswake. All around this scene—andMonet painted it seven times in1877—are the new open avenuesof airy light, but here, Monetseems to suggest, just belowground level, lies the heart of thenew modern city. In describing theworld, the artist is free to celebrateand praise it, or critique andridicule it, or, as is the case here,acknowledge its ambiguities.

3) Artists make functional objectsand structures (buildings) morepleasurable and elevate them or imbue them with meaning.

It is, perhaps, somewhat surprising to recognize thatthe sculpture of a cocoa pod by African artist KaneKwei (Fig. 8) is actually a coffin. Trained as a carpen-ter, Kwei first made a decorative coffin for a dyinguncle, who asked him to produce one in the shape of aboat. In Ghana, coffins possess a ritual significance,celebrating a successful life, and Kwei’s coffinsdelighted the community. Soon he was making fish

and whale coffins for fishermen, hens with chicks forwomen with large families, Mercedes Benz coffins forthe wealthy, and cash crops for farmers, such as the 81/2-foot cocoa bean coffin illustrated here. In 1974, anenterprising San Francisco art dealer brought exam-ples of Kwei’s work to the United States, and todaythe artist’s large workshop makes coffins for bothfunerals and the art market.

Fig. 8 Kane Kwei (Teshi tribe, Ghana, Africa), Coffin Orange, in the Shape of a Cocoa Pod, c. 1970.Polychrome wood, 34 � 1051/2 � 24 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Vivian Burns, Inc., 74.8.

Fig. 7 Claude Monet, Le Pont de l’Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877.Oil on canvas, 251/4 � 317/8 in. Musée Marmottan, Paris, France.Giraudon / Art Resource, New York.

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Fig. 9 Karaori kimono, Middle Edo Period, Japan, c. 1700.Brocaded silk, length 60 in. Tokyo National Museum.


Perhaps the object upon which cultures lavishtheir attention most is clothing. Clothing serves manymore purposes than just protecting us from the ele-ments: It announces the wearer’s taste, self-image,and, perhaps above all, social status. The Karaorikimono illustrated here (Fig. 9) was worn by a maleperformer who played the part of a woman in JapaneseNoh theater. In its sheer beauty, it announced thedignity and status of the actor’s character. Made ofsilk, brocaded with silver and gold, each panel in therobe depicts autumn grasses, flowers, and leaves. Thus,

the kimono is more an aesthetic object than a func-tional one—that is, it is conceived to stimulate a senseof beauty in the viewer.

Almost all of us apply, or would like to apply, thisaesthetic sense to the places in which we live. We deco-rate our walls with pictures, choose apartments for theirvisual appeal, ask architects to design our homes, plantflowers in our gardens, and seek out well-maintainedand pleasant neighborhoods. We want city planners andgovernment officials to work with us to make our livingspaces more appealing.

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Fig. 10 Renzo Piano, Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center, Nouméa, New Caledonia, 1991–1998.© Hans Schlupp / architekturphoto.

Public space is particularly susceptible to aesthetictreatments. One of the newest standards of aestheticbeauty in public space has become its compatibilitywith the environment. A building’s beauty is mea-sured, in the minds of many, by its self-sufficiency(that is, its lack of reliance on nonsustainable energysources such as coal), its use of sustainable buildingmaterials (the elimination of steel, for instance, sinceit is a product of iron ore, a nonrenewable resource),and its suitability to the climate and culture in whichit is built (a glass tower, however attractive in its ownright, would seem out of place rising out of a tropicalrainforest). These are the principles of what has cometo be known as “green architecture.”

The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center inNouméa, New Caledonia, an island in the SouthPacific, illustrates these principles (Fig. 10). Thearchitect is Renzo Piano, an Italian, but the princi-ples guiding his design are anything but Western.The Center is named after a leader of the island’sindigenous people, the Kanak, and it is dedicated topreserving and transmitting Kanak culture. Pianostudied Kanak culture thoroughly, and his design

blends Kanak tradition with green architectural prin-ciples. The buildings are constructed of wood andbamboo, easily renewable resources of the region.Each of the Center’s ten pavilions represents a typi-cal Kanak dwelling (in a finished dwelling the verti-cal staves would rise to meet at the top, and thehorizontal elements would weave in and out betweenthe staves, as in basketry). Piano left the dwellingforms unfinished, as if under construction, but to apurpose—they serve as wind scoops, catching breezesoff the nearby ocean and directing them down tocool the inner rooms, the roofs of which face south atan angle that allows them to be lit largely by directdaylight. As in a Kanak village, the pavilions arelinked with a covered walkway. Piano describes theproject as “an expression of the harmonious relation-ship with the environment that is typical of the localculture. They are curved structures resembling huts,built out of wooden joists and ribs; they are contain-ers of an archaic appearance, whose interiors areequipped with all the possibilities offered by moderntechnology.”

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Fig. 11 Pablo Picasso, SeatedBather (La Baigneuse), 1930.Oil on canvas, 641/4 � 51 in. Mrs.Simon Guggenheim Fund. (82.1950).The Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, NY.Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art /Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY. © 2007Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

For many people, the main purpose of art is tosatisfy our aesthetic sense, our desire to see and experi-ence the beautiful. Many of Pablo Picasso’s representa-tions of women in the late 1920s and early 1930s arealmost demonic in character. Most biographers believeimages such as his Seated Bather by the Sea (Fig. 11) to beportraits of his wife, the Russian ballerina OlgaKoklova, whom he married in 1918. By the late 1920s,their marriage was in shambles, and Picasso portrays herhere as a skeletal horror, her back and buttocks almostcrustacean in appearance, her horizontal mouth look-ing like some archaic mandible. Her pose is ironic,inspired by classical representations of the nude, andthe sea behind her is as empty as the Mediterranean skyis gray. Picasso means nothing in this painting to bepleasing, except our recognition of his extraordinary

ability to invent expressive images of tension. His entirecareer, since his portrayal of a brothel in his 1907 LesDemoiselles d’Avignon (see Works in Progress, pp. 12–13),he represented his relation to women as a sort of battle-field between attraction and repulsion. There can be nodoubt which side has won the battle in this painting.

From a certain point of view, the experience ofsuch dynamic tension is itself pleasing, and it is theability of works of art to create and sustain suchmoments that many people value most about them.That is, many people find such moments aestheticallypleasing. The work of art may not itself be beautiful,but it triggers a higher level of thought and awarenessin the viewer, and the viewer experiences this intel-lectual and imaginative stimulus—this higher orderof thought—as a form of beauty in its own right.

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4) Artists give form to the immaterial—hidden oruniversal truths, spiritual forces, personalfeelings.

Picasso’s treatment of women in both SeatedBather and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon givesform to his own, often tormented, feelingsabout the opposite sex. In Les Demoisellesd’Avignon, the power of these feelings was height-ened by his incorporation of African masks intothe composition.

When Westerners first encountered Africanmasks in the ethnographic museums of Europe inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,they saw them in a context far removed from theiroriginal settings and purposes. In the West, we areused to approaching everyday objects made inAfrican, Oceanic, Native American, or Asian culturesin museums as “works of art.” But in their cultures oforigin, such objects might serve to define family andcommunity relationships, establishing social orderand structure. Or they might document momentousevents in the history of a people. They might serve asimple utilitarian function, such as a pot to carry wateror a spoon to eat with. Or they might be sacred instru-ments that provide insight into hidden or spiritualforces believed to guide the universe.

A fascinating example of the latter is a type ofmagical figure that arose in the Kongo in the latenineteenth century (Fig. 12). Known as a minkisi(“sacred medicine”), for the Kongo tribes such fig-ures embodied their own resistance to the imposi-tion of foreign ideas as European states colonizedthe continent. Throughout Central Africa, all sig-nificant human powers are believed to result fromcommunication with the dead. Certain individualscan communicate with the spirits in their roles ashealers, diviners, and defenders of the living. Theyare believed to harness the powers of the spiritworld through minkisi (singular nkisi). Among themost formidable of minkisi is the type known asminkonde (singular nkonde), which are said to pursuewitches, thieves, adulterers, and wrongdoers bynight. The communicator activates a nkonde by driv-ing nails, blades, and other pieces of iron into it sothat it will deliver similar injuries to those worthyof punishment.

Minkonde figures usually stand upright, as if readyto spring forward. One arm is raised and holds a knifeor spear (often missing, as here), suggesting that it isready to attack. A hole in the figure’s stomach con-tained magical “medicines,” often kaolin, a whiteclay believed to be closely linked to the world of thedead, and red ocher, linked symbolically to blood.


Fig. 12 Magical figure, nkisi nkonde, Kongo (Muserongo), Zaire, late nineteenth century.Wood, iron nails, glass, resin, height 20 in. The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA. The Stanley Collection, X1986.573.

Such horrific figures—designed to evoke awe in thespectator—were seen by European missionaries asdirect evidence of African idolatry and witchcraft,and the missionaries destroyed many of them. Moreaccurately, the minkonde represented a form ofanimism, a foundation to many religions referring tothe belief in the existence of souls and the convic-tion that nonhuman things can also be endowedwith a soul. However, European military commanders

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No one could look at Picasso’s large painting of1906–07, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Fig. 15),and call it aesthetically beautiful, but it is, formany people, one of his most aesthetically

interesting works. Nearly 8 feet square, it would cometo be considered one of the first major paintingsof the modern era—and one of the least beautiful.The title, chosen not by Picasso but by a close friend,literally means “the young ladies of Avignon,” but itssomewhat tongue-in-cheek reference is specifically tothe prostitutes of Avignon Street, the red-light dis-trict of Barcelona, Spain, Picasso’s hometown. Weknow a great deal about Picasso’s process as he workedon the canvas from late 1906 into the early summermonths of 1907, not only because many of his work-ing sketches survive but also because the canvas itselfhas been submitted to extensive examination, includ-ing X-ray analysis. This reveals early versions of cer-tain passages, particularly the figure at the left andthe two figures on the right, which lie under the finallayers of paint.

An early sketch (Fig. 13) reveals that the paintingwas originally conceived to include seven figures—five prostitutes, a sailor seated in their midst, and,

entering from the left, a medical student carrying abook. Picasso probably had in mind some anecdotalor narrative idea contrasting the dangers and joys ofboth work and pleasure, but he soon abandoned themale figures. By doing so, he involved the viewermuch more fully in the scene. No longer does the cur-tain open up at the left to allow the medical studentto enter. Now the curtain is opened by one of theprostitutes as if she were admitting us, the audience,into the bordello. We are implicated in the scene.

And an extraordinary scene it is. Picasso seems tohave willingly abdicated any traditional aestheticsense of beauty. There is nothing enticing or alluringhere. Of all the nudes, the two central ones are themost traditional, but their bodies are composed of aseries of long lozenge shapes, hard angles, and only afew traditional curves. It is unclear whether the sec-ond nude from the left is standing or sitting, or possi-bly even lying down. (In the early drawing, she isclearly seated.) Picasso seems to have made her posi-tion in space intentionally ambiguous.

We know, through X-rays, that all five nudes orig-inally looked like the central two. We also know thatsometime after he began painting Les Demoiselles,

Picasso visited the Trocadero, now theMuseum of Man, in Paris, and saw itscollection of African sculpture, partic-ularly African masks. He was stronglyaffected by the experience. The masksseemed to him imbued with power thatallowed him, for the first time, to seeart, he said, as “a form of magicdesigned to be a mediator between thestrange, hostile world and us, a way ofseizing power by giving form to our ter-rors as well as our desires.” As a result,he quickly transformed the faces ofthree of the five prostitutes in hispainting into African masks. The


Fig. 13 Pablo Picasso, Medical Student, Sailor,and Five Nudes in a Bordello (study for LesDemoiselles d’Avignon), Paris, early 1907.Charcoal and pastel, 181/2 � 25 in. OeffentlicheKunstsammlung, Kupferstichkabinett Basel.Photo: Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung, Martin Buhler. © 2007 Estateof Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. 14 PabloPicasso, Study for LesDemoiselles d’Avignon.Head of the SquattingDemoiselle, 1907. Inv.:MP 539. Gouache andIndian ink on paper, 243/4 � 187/8 in. MuséePicasso, Paris.Reunion des MuséesNationaux / Art Resource, NY.© 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.

Fig. 15 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoisellesd’Avignon, 1907.Oil on canvas. 8 ft. � 7 ft. 8 in. Acquiredthrough the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. TheMuseum of Modern Art / Licensed byScala-Art Resource, NY.© 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Creative PROCESS and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’avignon

masks freed him from representing exactly what hissubjects looked like and allowed him to represent hisidea of them instead.

That idea is clearly ambivalent. Picasso probablysaw in these masks something both frightening andliberating. They freed him from a slavish concern foraccurate representation, and they allowed him to cre-ate a much more emotionally charged scene than hewould have otherwise been able to accomplish. Ratherthan offering us a single point of view, he offers usmany, both literally and figuratively. The painting isabout the ambiguity of experience.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the squatting fig-ure in the lower-right-hand corner of the painting.She seems twisted around on herself in the final ver-sion, her back to us, but her head is impossibly turnedto face us, her chin resting on her grotesque, clawlikehand. We see her, in other words, from both front andback. (Notice, incidentally, that even the nudes in thesketch possess something of this“double” point of view: Theirnoses are in profile though theyface the viewer.) But thiscrouching figure is even morecomplex. An early drawing(Fig. 14) reveals that her facewas originally conceived as aheadless torso. What wouldbecome her hand was originallyher arm. What would becomeher eyes were her breasts. Andher mouth would begin as herbellybutton. Here we are wit-ness to the extraordinary free-dom of invention that definesall of Picasso’s art, as well as to aremarkable demonstration ofthe creative process itself.

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saw them as evidence of an aggressive native opposi-tion to colonial control. Despite their suppressionduring the colonial era, such figures are still madetoday and continue to be used by the peoples of theKongo.

In the West, the desire to give form to spiritualbelief is especially apparent in the traditions of Christianreligious art. For example, the idea of daring to representthe Christian God has, throughout the history of theWestern world, aroused controversy. In seventeenth-century Holland, images of God were banned fromProtestant churches. As one contemporary Protestanttheologian put it, “The image of God is His Word”—that is, the Bible—and “statues in human form, being anearthen image of visible, earthborn man [are] far awayfrom the truth.” In fact, one of the reasons that Jesus, forChristians the son of God, is so often represented inWestern art is that representing the son, a real person, isfar easier than representing the father, a spiritualunknown who can only be imagined.

Nevertheless, one of the most successful depic-tions of the Christian God in Western culture waspainted by Jan van Eyck nearly 600 years ago as part ofan altarpiece for the city of Ghent in Flanders (Figs. 16

and 17). Van Eyck’s God is almost frail, sur-prisingly young, apparently merciful andkind, and certainly richly adorned. Indeed, in

the richness of his vestments, van Eyck’s God appar-ently values worldly things. Van Eyck’s painting seemsto celebrate a materialism that is the proper right ofbenevolent kings. Behind God’s head, across the topof the throne, are Latin words that, translated intoEnglish, read: “This is God, all powerful in his divinemajesty; of all the best, by the gentleness of his good-ness; the most liberal giver, because of his infinite gen-erosity.” God’s mercy and love are indicated by thepelicans embroidered on the tapestry behind him,which in Christian tradition symbolize self-sacrificinglove, for pelicans were believed to wound themselvesin order to feed their young with their own blood ifother food was unavailable. In the context of theentire altarpiece, where God is flanked by Mary andJohn the Baptist, choirs of angels, and, at the outeredges, Adam and Eve, God rules over an earthlyassembly of worshippers, his divine beneficence is pro-tecting all.

In a group of works known as the Siluetas (Fig. 18),done in the 1970s, Cuban-born Ana Mendietaattempted to come to grips with her own complicatedheritage by transferring the silhouette of her own bodyinto the landscape. In 1961, following the Communist


Fig. 16 Jan van Eyck, God. Panel from The Ghent Altarpiece, c. 1432.Church of St. Bavo, Ghent, Belgium.Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Take a Closer Look onMyArtsLab

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Fig. 17 Jan van Eyck, The GhentAltarpiece, c. 1432.11 ft. 5 in. � 15 ft. 1 in. Church of St.Bavo, Ghent, Belgium.Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 18 Ana Mendieta, Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973–1977.Color photograph, 193/8 � 269/16 in. The Museum of Contemporary Art,Los Angeles. Purchased with grant provided by the Judith RothschildFoundation.

Revolution of Fidel Castro, Mendieta’s parentsarranged to have her flown out of Cuba along withthousands of other children in what was known asOperation Peter Pan. For several years after, she livedin a Catholic orphanage in Iowa. “The making of mysilueta,” she explained, “makes the transition betweenmy homeland and my new home. It is a way ofreclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature.Although the culture in which I live is part of me, myroots and cultural identity are a result of my Cubanheritage.” That heritage, on her mother’s side, extendsback to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of theAmericas. When she created the Silueta pictured here,in Mexico, she stained it with red paint to evoke theoppression, even genocide, endured by the native peo-ples of the Americas after the conquest. Here the sil-houette of the body seems transformed into theimprint of a large, bloody sword on the earth, the headand arms its hilt, the body its blade. The imprint ofthe live body evokes the grave of her forebears andgives form to the tragedy of her ancestral past.

THE WORLD AS WE PERCEIVE IT

Many of us assume, almost without question, that wecan trust our eyes to give us accurate informationabout the world. Seeing, as we say, is believing. Ourword “idea” derives, in fact, from the Greek word idein,meaning “to see,” and it is no accident that when wesay “I see” we really mean “I understand.”

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The Process of SeeingBut the act of seeing is not a simple matter of ourvision making a direct recording of the reality.Seeing is both a physical and psychological process.Physically, visual processing can be divided intothree steps:

reception → extraction → inference

In the first step, reception, external stimuli enter thenervous system through our eyes—“we see the light.”Next, the retina, which is a collection of nerve cells atthe back of the eye, extracts the basic information itneeds and sends this information to the visual cortex,the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli.There are approximately 100 million sensors in theretina, but only 5 million channels to the visual cor-tex. In other words, the retina does a lot of “editing,”and so does the visual cortex. There, special mecha-nisms capable of extracting specific information aboutsuch features as color, motion, orientation, and size“create” what is finally seen. What you see is theinference your visual cortex extracts from the informa-tion your retina sends it.

Seeing, in other words, is an inherently creativeprocess. The visual system makes conclusions aboutthe world. It represents the world for you by selectingout information, deciding what is important and what

is not. Consider, for example, what sort of visual infor-mation you have stored about the American flag. Youknow its colors—red, white, and blue—and that it has50 stars and 13 stripes. You know, roughly, its shape—rectangular. But do you know its proportions? Do youeven know, without looking, what color stripe is at theflag’s top, or what color is at the bottom? How manyshort stripes are there, and how many long ones? Howmany horizontal rows of stars are there? How manylong rows? How many short ones? The point is thatnot only do we each perceive the same things differ-ently, remembering different details, but also wedo not usually see things as thoroughly or accuratelyas we might suppose. As the philosopher NelsonGoodman explains, “The eye functions not as aninstrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutifulmember of a complex and capricious organism. Notonly how but what it sees is regulated by need andprejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates,associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does notso much mirror as take and make.” In other words, theeye mirrors each individual’s complex perceptions ofthe world.

Active SeeingEverything you see is filtered through a long history offears, prejudices, desires, emotions, customs, and

beliefs. Through art, we canbegin to understand those fil-ters and learn to look moreclosely at the visual world.Jasper Johns’s Three Flags (Fig.19) presents an opportunityto look closely at a familiarimage. According to Johns,when he created this work,the flag was something “seenbut not looked at, not exam-ined.” Three Flags was paintedat a time when the nation wasobsessed with patriotism,spawned by Senator JosephMcCarthy’s anti-communisthearings in 1954, by PresidentEisenhower’s affirmation of allthings American, and by theSoviet Union’s challenge ofAmerican supremacy throughthe space race. Many of thepainting’s first audiences sawthe fact that the flag becomesless grand and physically

Fig. 19 Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958.Encaustic on canvas, 307/8 � 451/2 � 5 in. 50th Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation, Inc., the Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, an anonymous donor, and purchase 80.32. Collection of WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New York.Photo: Geoffrey Clements. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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smaller the closer it gets to the viewer as a challengeto their idea of America. While contemporary viewersmay not have experienced that Cold War era, thework still asks us to consider what the flag represents.

Faith Ringgold’s God Bless America (Fig. 20) has asits historical context the Civil Rights movement. Init, the American flag has been turned into a prisoncell. Painted during a time when white prejudiceagainst African Americans was enforced by the legalsystem, the star of the flag becomes a sheriff ’s badge,and its red and white stripes are transformed into theblack bars of the jail. The white woman portrayed inthe painting is the very image of contradiction, atonce a patriot, pledging allegiance to the flag, and aracist, denying blacks the right to vote. She is a pris-oner to her own bigotry.

Flags inevitably raise questions of national prideand identity. In a series of museum installations,Yukinori Yanagi has used ant farms as a means tomake witty assaults on nationalism. For a museuminstallation entitled America (Fig. 21), Yanagi createda grid of plastic boxes, each filled with colored sand inthe pattern of a national flag—representing the 36countries of the Americas. Each box was connectedto adjacent boxes by plastic tubing. Yanagi thenintroduced ants into the system, which immediatelybegan carrying colored sand between flags, transform-ing and corrupting the flags’ original designs. As eachflag’s integrity was degraded by these “border cross-ings,” a new “cross-cultural” network of multinationalsymbols and identities began to establish itself.

Yanagi’s work directlyaddresses the permeableboundaries that existbetween countries shar-ing a single land mass; hisother work makes a simi-lar statement about bor-der crossings on a globalscale. Audiences haveinterpreted the work asan image of the destruc-tion of local cultures or asthe creation of a newmulticulturalism. Whilethe meaning of the workis open for interpretation,there is no question of itspower to draw us into acloser examination of ourperceptions of the world.

Fig. 20 Faith Ringgold, God Bless America, 1964.Oil on canvas, 31 � 19 in.© Faith Ringgold, Inc. 1964.

Fig. 21 Yukinori Yanagi, America, 1994.Ants, colored sand, plastic boxes, and plastic tubes, 36 boxes, each 8 � 12 in. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1994. Collection of the artist.

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THE CRITICAL PROCESS Thinking about Making and Seeing

In this chapter, we have discovered that the world ofart is as vast and various as it is not only because dif-ferent artists in different cultures see and respond tothe world in different ways, but also because each of

us sees and responds to a given work of art in a differ-ent way. Artists are engaged in a creative process. Werespond to their work through a process of criticalthinking. At the end of each chapter of A World of Artis a section like this one titled The Critical Process inwhich, through a series of questions, you are invited tothink for yourself about the issues raised in the chap-ter. In each case, additional insights are provided atthe end of the text, in the section titled The CriticalProcess: Thinking Some More about the Chapter Questions.After you have thought about the questions raised,turn to the back and see if you are headed in the rightdirection.

Here, Andy Warhol’s Race Riot (Fig. 22) depictsevents of May 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, whenpolice commissioner BullConnor employed attackdogs and fire hoses to dis-perse civil rights demon-strators led by ReverendMartin Luther King, Jr.The traditional roles ofthe artist—to help us seethe world in new or inno-vative ways; to make avisual record of the peo-ple, places, and events oftheir time and place; to

make functional objects and structures more pleasur-able and elevate them or imbue them with meaning;and to give form to the immaterial, hidden or universaltruths, spiritual forces, or personal feelings—are all partof a more general creative impulse that leads, ulti-mately, to the work of art. Which of these is, in youropinion, the most important for Warhol in creating thiswork? Did any of the other traditional roles play a partin the process? What do you think Warhol feels aboutthe events (note that the print followed soon after theevents themselves)? How does his use of color con-tribute to his composition? Can you think why there aretwo red panels, and only one white and one blue?Emotionally, what is the impact of the red panels? Inother words, what is the work’s psychological impact?What reactions other than your own can you imaginethe work generating? These are just a few of the ques-tions raised by Warhol’s work, questions to help you ini-tiate the critical process for yourself.

Fig. 22 Andy Warhol, RaceRiot, 1963.Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas,four panels, each 20 � 33 in.© 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation for theVisual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York.

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