HISTORY OF ART

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Jacques Louis David was born into a prosperous family in Paris. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his architect uncles. He received an excellent education at the College des Quatre-Nations, but he was never a good student. He covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, "I was always hiding behind the instructor's chair, drawing for the duration of the class". Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect. He overcame the opposition, and went to learn from Francois Boucher, the leading painter of the time. Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style. Boucher decided that instead of taking over David's tutelage, he would send David to his friend Joseph-Marie Vien, painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo. There David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre. David attempted to win the Prix de Rome, an art scholarship to the French Academy in Rome, four times between 1770 and 1774. Finally, in 1774, David won the Prix de Rome. He went to Italy with Vien in 1775. While in Italy, David observed the Italian masterpieces and the ruins of ancient Rome. He met the influencial early neoclassical painter Raphael Mengs and through Mengs was introduced to the theories of art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In 1779, David was able to see the ruins of Pompeii. He sought to revolutionize the art world with the "eternal" concepts of classicism.

Jacques-Louis David Paris, August 30th, 1748 Bruxelles, December 29th, 1825

This painting occupies an extremely important place among Jacques-Louis David's works and in the history of French painting. David was inspired by one of the great elements of Raffaello’s paintings, which consisted in giving to each character his own autonomy.

The Oath of the Horatii was commissioned by the Administrator of Royal Residences in 1784 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon. The story was taken from Titus-Livy. We are in the period of the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C. It has been decided that the dispute between the two cities must be fought by two groups of three champions each. The two groups are the three Horatii brothers and the three Curiatii brothers. One of the sisters of the Curiatii, Sabina, is married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii, Camilla, is betrothed to one of the Curiatii. The Horatii's father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey, despite the lamentations of the women.

David succeeded in ennobling these passions and transforming these virtues into something sublime. The subject has the purpose of representing and teaching Roman civic virtues – in fact the young men swear to win or die for Rome. He chose the idea of the oath in order to transform the event into a solemn act. David treated the beginning of the action, seeing it as being charged with greater intensity and more grandeur.

The composition of characters is organized into three different groups. The elder Horatius is in the center, while his sons, endowed with heroic determination, are on the left representing the spontaneous vigor and strength of the oath. The women on the right show tearful anguish and grief, and the children display their troubled innocence. The superior harmony of the colours and the spiritual density of the figures could be taken as a symbol for a new aesthetic and moral order. The painter intended it to be a proclamation of the new neoclassical style.

Jacques-Louis David The Oath of the Horatii Oil on canvas, 330x425 cm, 1784 Musée du Louvre at Paris

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The decor is reduced to a more abstract order, that of architectural space – massive columns, equally massive arches, opening out onto a majestic shadow. The three archways correspond to the three groups.

The contemplative atmosphere is softened by shades of green, brown, pink, and red. Instead of opening his painting out onto a landscape,

David bathes it in shadow.

The Crystal Palace was a glass and cast iron structure built in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Prince Albert, head of the Society of Arts, had the idea of an exhibition to impress the world with Britain's industrial achievements. The building was designed by the architect and gardener Sir Joseph Paxton. The temporary exhibition building would display the latest technologies and innovations from around the world: The “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations.” The structure had to be as economical as possible in terms of money and time. Paxton’s design was based on a 10in x 49in module, the size of the largest glass sheet available at the time. The modular system consisted of right-angled triangles, mirrored and multiplied, supported by a grid of cast iron beams and pillars. These basic units were extremely light and strong and were extended to an incredible length of 564 meters. 5000 workers handled more than 1000 iron columns and 84,000 square meters of glass. All parts were prefabricated and easy to erect, and every modular unit was self-supporting. The construction, acting as a self-supporting shell, maximized interior space, and the glass cover enabled daylight. The method of construction was a breakthrough in technology and design, and paved the way for more sophisticated pre-fabricated design. For this reason Paxton could be considered as the founder of cast-iron architecture. When the Great Exhibition was over, the Hyde Park site had to return back to its previous green state. Faced with the potential loss of his building, Paxton set up a company to find it a new home, despite the fact it was intended only as a temporary structure. The Crystal Palace was re-erected in Sydenham on the outskirts of London. Tragically, the building was destroyed in a fire in 1936. Until that disastrous fire, the Crystal Palace for over eighty years was one of London’s major venues for events and exhibitions as well as a tourist attraction.

Sir Joseph Paxton Crystal Palace Glass and cast iron structure, 1851 London

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Gustave Eiffel Tour Eiffel 1887-1889 Paris

Giuseppe Mengoni Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II 1865-1877 Milan

Queen Victoria on May 1st 1851

"This day is one of the greatest and most glorious of our lives… It is a day which makes my heart swell with thankfulness… The Park presented

a wonderful spectacle, crowds streaming through it, – carriages and troops passing… The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of

densely crowded human beings, in the highest good humour… before we neared the Crystal Palace, the sun shone and gleamed upon the

gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of every nation were flying… The sight as we came to the centre where the steps and chair (on which I did not sit) was placed, facing the beautiful crystal fountain was magic and impressive. The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decoration and exhibits, the

sound of the organ… all this was indeed moving."

Le Corbusier in Architectural

Review on February 1937

“One of the great

monuments of nineteenth-century

architecture… I could not tear my eyes from

the spectacle of its triumphant harmony.”

Crystal Palace, Sydenham, London, in ruins following the fire of 30 November 1936

Georges Seurat A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte Oil on canvas, 207x308 cm, 1884-1886 Art Institute of Chicago

In his best-known painting, Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. Although Seurat embraced the subject matter of modern life preferred by artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he went beyond their concern for capturing the accidental and instantaneous qualities of light in nature. Seurat sought to evoke permanence by recalling the art of the past, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture and even Italian Renaissance frescoes. However, some contemporary critics found his figures to be a commentary on the posturing and artificiality of modern Parisian society. Seurat was able to capture an interesting glimpse of wealthy Parisian life in the 19th century. The painting sparked numerous interpretations and was criticized for being too mathematical: his decision to only depict people facing sideways or straight on makes the entire scene seem very rigid and like toy soldiers. Seurat went through many sketched drafts before he arrived on the final plan for the painted piece. The cast comprised three dogs, eight boats and 48 people as they congregated for a Sunday afternoon in the sunny park. Seurat's work included a wide range of characters including; boaters, soldiers, the young and old and people of different social classes. Some sections of his work required extra care and attention to detail and had specific pre-planning studies, such as the seated women in the foreground.

Seurat started his project in May of 1884 and intended it to be exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants of 1885 but the exhibition was cancelled. The change in plans meant that Seurat went back to add details to the work and these mainly consisted of his most recent thoughts on colour and its use in

paintings. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was eventually exhibited in the eighth Impressionist exhibition of May 1886.

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Georges Seurat A Sunday Afternoon on the Island

of La Grande Jatte (details)

The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns, beginning in 1884 with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colours. He later added small dots, also in complementary colours, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance. Seurat's use of this systematic and "scientific" technique distinguished his art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists. The artists of the Neo-Impressionist circle renounced the random spontaneity of Impressionism in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics. Encouraged by contemporary writing on colour theory (Eugène Chevreul’s treatises, for example) Neo-Impressionists came to believe that separate touches of pigment result in a greater vibrancy of colour in the observer’s eye than is achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the palette. The separation of colour through individual strokes of pigment came to be known as Divisionism, while the application of precise dots of paint came to be called Pointillism.

Pablo Picasso Malaga, October 25th, 1881 Mougins, April 8th, 1973

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga in 1881, the son of the painter. He attended the Art Academy La Lonja in Barcelona in 1895, where his father taught. He studied at the Madrid Academy in 1897. Picasso's early work began with the melancholic pictures of the "Blue Period". The "Rose Period" followed from 1905 to 1907, a period in which his circus paintings were made. The painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" marked the beginning of Cubism in 1907, which Pablo Picasso developed together with Georges Braque and that can be separated into two categories, the "analytical Cubism" and the "synthetic Cubism". His women also played a big role for his artistic oeuvre, they were his lovers, his models and his muses. Their facial features appeared in many of his works. Pablo Picasso's work after 1918 can not be clearly categorized in terms of stylistic terminology, it contains objective-realistic, classicist, symbolistic, surreal and also abstracts elements. The painter created a new artistic ground in terms of composition, finding inspiration in his own reality. Besides paintings, a vast graphic oeuvre was created. Picasso made more and more sculpture, as well as mixed media objects with wires and assemblages. Picasso executed the large-size painting "Guernica" for the Spanish pavilion at the world exhibition in Paris in 1937, a haunting anti-war painting, which is seen as the key work of art of the 20th century. As the lithography became the predominant graphic technique, Picasso made objects of utility and pottery objects. Picasso died in Mougins in 1973. The Museo Picasso was opened in Barcelona as early as in 1963, which got most of his estate after his death. The Musée Picasso in Paris was opened in 1985.

Pablo Picasso Guernica Oil on canvas, 350x780 cm, 1937 Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid

Probably Picasso's most famous work, Guernica is certainly his most powerful political statement, painted as an immediate reaction to the Nazi's devastating casual bombing practice on the Basque town of Guernica during Spanish Civil War. At the time, he was working on a mural for the Paris Exhibition to be held in the summer of 1937, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government. The huge picture is conceived as a giant poster, testimony to the horror that the Spanish Civil War was causing and a forewarning of what was to come in the Second World War. The muted colours and the way they are articulated are essential to the extreme tragedy of the scene, which would become the emblem for all the devastating tragedies of modern society. This work has become a reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. It also helped bring the Spanish Civil War to the world's attention. Guernica is blue, black and white. Analysing the iconography in the painting, we can divide the protagonists of the pyramidal composition into two groups: the first of which is made up of three animals; the bull, the wounded horse and the winged bird. The second group is made up of the human beings, consisting of a dead soldier and a number of women. The one holding a lamp and leaning through a window, the mother on the left, holding her dead child, the one who is crying out to the heavens, her arms raised as a house burns down behind her. There are two dominant elements: the bull and the horse, who are important characters in Spanish culture. The bull represents the onslaught of Fascism and the horse represents the people of Guernica. Learn

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The oil lamp and the lamp on the ceiling let us think the setting is inside and outside at the same time – there is a building burning in the background. This simultaneousness of vision is not only an element of

Cubism but conveys the tragedy of the bombing with immediate violence. The oil lamp could be taken as a symbol of regression typical

of war periods.

https://bc.edu http://www.archdaily.com/ http://www.metmuseum.org/ http://www.artble.com/ http://www.artic.edu/ http://www.jacqueslouisdavid.org/ http://www.pablo--picasso.com/ http://www.pablopicasso.org/ http://www.museoreinasofia.es/

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