Classical and Renaissance Notions of Visual Beauty

Western and Non-Western Notions of the Ideal●Images: (left) Michelangelo’s David, 1500-1501 and (right) Idealized Male Figure from Mali, 15 th-20th

c.

European Modernism and Non-Western Art, late 19th-early 20th c. ●African , Asian, and Polynesian art inspire European artists such as Picasso, Gauguin, and Matisse to question the role of beauty in art—its necessity, form, and purpose.

Images below: (left) Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin and (right) Mbuya Sickness Mask

European Modernism and Non-Western Art II

●Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1906-1907 (right) combined stylistic features of non-Western art with a Western sensibility.

Beyond Picasso and an “Anti-aesthetic” in 20th c. Art— ●The Transformation of “Classical” Beauty in Western Culture: From the Beauty of the Body to the Beauty of the Machine ● The Machine Aesthetic emerges in early 20th c. Europe and AmericaImage on the right: Lewis Hine’s Powerhouse Mechanic, 1925

Precisionism, or the Machine Aesthetic, in 20th c. American Art Images: (left) Charles Sheeler’s Wheels (photograph), 1939 and (right) Sheeler’s River Rouge Plant (Ford Motor Co.), 1932

Machine Aesthetic in America II

Images: Charles Sheeler’s Steam Turbine, 1936 and Charles Demuth’s My Egypt, 1932

Georgia O’Keeffe as Precisionist

Images: O’Keeffe, The Radiator Building and O’Keeffe, Light Lily

O’Keeffe, Nature, and Beauty (Aesthetic Abstraction)

Images: O’Keeffe, Music—Pink and Blue and O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull with Camelia

Russian Suprematism, 1915-1917 (Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Popova)The Beauty of Abstraction and Geometry

Piet Mondrian and Pure Abstraction, 1930s and 1940s(Seeking universals, including a universal beauty, in abstraction)

Images: Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-44 and Mondrian’s Composition

Wassily Kandinsky and the Beauty of Abstraction, 1910s to 1930s (Seeking universals, including a universal beauty, in abstraction)

Modernist Architecture—The Marriage of the Machine Aesthetic and the Beauty of Abstraction

Building: Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy, France, 1928-30

Modernist Architecture (II)Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy (interior) and the Centre Le Corbusier, Switzerland

Christian Philosophy and Twentieth-Century Art (Kaethe Kollwitz)●An anti-aesthetic in the service of social reform

Images: Kollwitz’s Mother with Dead Child, 1903 and Kollwitz’s Poverty

Kollwitz and The Weavers’ Rebellion Series 1890s—1900s

Kollwitz and Non-Western Art Models

Images: Kollwitz’s The Parents (grieving), woodcut and Sculpture from Tonga

The Value of Art for Christian Philosophers Today●The Photographs of Sebastiao Salgado in the Service of Social Reform Today