Ancient Studies
Laura Auricchio is an art historian teaching at the Parsons School for Design as part of The New School in New York City. In the piece to be critiqued, Auricchio focuses upon techniques, styles, and subject matter of eighteenth century paintings. Auricchio's focus in her article is upon the female painter, Adelaide Labille-Guiard. Though Auricchio examines several of Labille-Guiard's major works, her primary examination is of the painting Self-Portrait with Two Students (1785). Auricchio argues that Labille-Guiard makes deliberate politically motivated choices in content and composition in the painting that express and reflect upon European female artistry and experience of the eighteenth century. This paper will briefly describe and critique Auricchio's main ideas and themes in her interpretation of the work and of the artist.
Auricchio, as an art historian and as a woman, is interested in female artists. She is interested in female artists primarily because their work and their experiences have been intentionally overlooked, dismissed, and omitted from historical records. Auricchio researches female artists because they exist; their knowledge of their existence could inspire artists both female and male. Her ambition is more historical than art related. Nonetheless, French art in the eighteenth century was vibrant. Women painters and visual artists contributed to the vibrancy of this movement. As part of her quest to understand life in eighteenth century Paris, Auricchio studies the histories and bodies of work by female artists of the time. Adding...
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 then moved away from it toward a new type of painting. In the case of Cezanne, the basis of his art had much to do with studying nature in a new way, for his aim
In Braque's "Woman with a Guitar we can see the foreshadowing of the Synthetic Cubism period, when he introduces stenciling and lettering, a practice that Picasso was soon to imitate. Figure 7: Picasso, Le Guitariste"(1910 Figure 8: Braque "Woman with a Guitar" (1913 Synthetic Cubism/Collage 1912-1914: Braque was beginning to experiment further now by mixing materials such as sand and sawdust into his paint to create a more textured, built- up look and what
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 forced nineteenth century artists to analyze their function and to study closely the physical nature of their medium. Hyde, Minor, Art History's History. 32-35. Baroque Art emerged in Europe around 1600, as a reaction against
Courbet's the Sleepers is thus one of the first honest depictions of lesbian love in the history of Western art. There is no distortion of either of the two women's bodies, as we find in Ingres's painting. All of the details look nearly photographic in their authenticity. That is not to say that the image is crude, or inharmonious in its depiction of forms. The curvature of the women's
In Spirit of the Dead Watching, Gaugin also depicts a Tahitian woman with open sexuality. The woman in Spirit of the Dead Watching lays prostrate on a bed, exposing her naked buttocks while gazing directly at the viewer. Her position is submissive, in spite of the alluring look in the woman's eyes. The spirit of the dead represents traditional Tahitian religious beliefs, which would have been in direct conflict
This painting deals with a terrifying massacre and refers to an historical event when twenty thousand Greeks were killed by Turks on the Greek island of Chios. While there are references to nature in the representation of the landscape and the sky, the central focus of the work is the terrible and emotionally moving historical event and its human effect. The painting is intended to evoke a response in the viewer
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