This painting is David's masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art because, by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile. What is most surprising in this very unusual visual poem is that it was painted very quickly. When one th Continue Reading...
De La Croix, 865-66. Artists in the nineteenth century were confronted by three innovations that fatefully affected their craft: the camera, the mass produced print, and the printed reproduction. The collective techniques of an industrial age force Continue Reading...
French Revolution a major symbol liberty equality Western world historically, terror oppression. Its failure led Napoleonic Wars July Revolution 1830. Illustrate idea art propaganda examination work artists period.
The French Revolution has had a st Continue Reading...
The exoticism and escapism of Romantic Art is manifest by the focus in the features of Napoleon on the bright or the wider scenes of the battlefield. However, it is the works of Francisco Goya that perhaps most perfectly epitomizes the intense indiv Continue Reading...
The most famous genre painting by David is undoubtedly the Death of Marat (1793) which depicts French radical Jean-Paul Marat slumped over in his bathtub while holding a letter which he obviously was writing just before being killed by Charlotte Co Continue Reading...
Four men stand out as the penultimate figures of Post-Impressionism, namely, Georges Suerat (1859-1891), Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Paul Gauguin (1843-1903) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), all of whom at first accepted the Impressionist methods and Continue Reading...
This painting shows the philosopher, unjustly condemned to die for his beliefs by the government, as a kind of pagan saint, statue-like and stoic in his beliefs and powerful and noble in the dark, stark anatomical shadings of the work. David's Death Continue Reading...
Art History Time Travel
Our first stop will be the eighteenth century, where we will investigate Neoclassical painting. We will be visiting Sir Joshua Reynolds, as he works on his 1770 oil on canvas "Portrait of a Black Man" -- and we will be asking Continue Reading...
Because David became a
court painter of Napoleon, he could not openly challenge the leader's
beliefs or position of authority. Art in the service of politics to some
extent requires the artist to stifle some of his or her iconoclastic
feelings. Neoc Continue Reading...
This is what connects Americans with Iraqis more fundamentally -- a common humanity, not abstract desires to change the government.
Discussion 2: Beethoven
This passage prompts the question -- why do we tend to classify Beethoven as a Romantic art Continue Reading...
But even as the memory of the terrors that inspired the work have come and gone, the figures in Goya's painting, to a contemporary viewer, come to represent all innocent persons who suffer at the hands of soldiers in wartime. In the face of the haun Continue Reading...