Art History / JUSTIN R. WOLF

ART HISTORY & THEORY

The following is a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed articles written on a wide array of (mostly) modern, 20th-century artists, art movements, critics and theory. All content was published between 2009-2013. For reference these clips are divided by content type ("Artists & Critics" and "Art Movements & Theory").

Artists & Critics

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Joseph Beuys - German Sculptor and Performance Artist

"Every man is a plastic artist who must determine things for himself."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Umberto Boccioni - Italian Painter, Sculptor, and Theoretician

"What we want to do is to show the living object in its dynamic growth"

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

John Canaday - Art Historian and Critic

As the chief art critic for The New York Times, from 1959 to 1973, Canaday once accused art professors of brainwashing students into favoring Abstract Expressionist art

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Marc Chagall - French-Russian Draftsman, Painter, and Printmaker

"My hands were too soft. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Elaine de Kooning - American Art Critic and Painter

"Inspiration is indispensable to my work, but it is hard to come by. It is there or it is not; it is a gift of the gods."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Edgar Degas - French Painter, Sculptor, and Printmaker

"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Paul Gauguin - French Draftsman, Painter, Printmaker, and Sculptor

"I am trying to put into these desolate figures the savagery that I see in them and which is in me too... Dammit, I want to consult nature as well but I don't want to leave out what I see there and what comes into my mind."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Alberto Giacometti - Swiss Sculptor and Painter

"Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Clement Greenberg - Art Historian and Critic

"Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space in to which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Philip Guston - American Painter

"Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Thomas B. Hess - Art Historian, Critic and Editor

"The tendencies toward and of abstract painting and Expressionism may be the most important movements in the art of the first half of our century, and the most relevant ones to more recent developments."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Hans Hofmann - German-American Painter and Theoretician

"We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Robert Hughes - Art Historian and Critic

It's because of these deeply-implanted roots, according to Hughes, that America has likewise never produced a truly sensuous painter, its own Matisse in a sense, who possessed what Hughes called an "intelligent sensuousness."

Questroyal Fine Art • May 1, 2012

George Inness, Jr.

Painting largely from the “Inness perspective,” George Inness, Jr. spent the better part of his career traveling throughout Europe and the United States, recording breathtaking scenes of nature, fauna, and religious subjects.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Rosalind Krauss - Art Historian, Critic, Professor and Theoretician

Her greatest contribution to art criticism came when she broke from formalist Greenbergian theory and offered that the art world had entered the “post-medium” age, wherein artistic media had ceased to be important.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

El Lissitzky - Russian Painter, Typographer, and Designer

"The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Robert Motherwell - American Painter and Printmaker

"Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Kenneth Noland - American Painter

"Because of this the representation I'm interested in is of those things only the eye can touch."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Fairfield Porter - American Painter, Printmaker, and Writer

"Any artist has a style which determines and is the particularity of his communication."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Harold Rosenberg - Art Historian and Critic

"Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation."

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Art Movements & Theory

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Art for Art's Sake

The phrase 'art for art's sake' condenses the notion that art has its own value and should be judged apart from any themes which it might touch on, such as morality, religion, history, or politics.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Color Field Painting

"We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Conceptual Art

"Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

De Stijl

"We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Existentialism in Modern Art

Existentialism stressed the special character of personal, subjective experience and it insisted on the freedom and autonomy of the individual.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Expressionism

"Everyone who renders directly and honestly whatever drives him to create is one of us."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Fauvism

"If the trees look yellow to the artist, then painted a bright yellow they must be."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Flatness

By deliberately calling attention to the natural flatness of the canvas in a work of art, artists have exercised a uniquely modern phenomenon, wherein the viewer is not meant to appreciate the depiction of anything, but the act of painting itself.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Formalism in Modern Art

"Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Hard-edge Painting

"Forms are finite, flat, rimmed by a hard, clean edge. These forms are not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollections of specific shapes he may have encountered in some other connection."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Impressionism

"Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Media Purity

Some prominent examples of media purity in Abstract Expressionism include the paintings of Pollock, Hofmann, Newman and Rothko, whose works strived to create "pure" abstractions, void of context, figuration or definitive meaning.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Minimalism

"A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Neo-Expressionism

They did not feel obliged to glorify the world or "tamper with reality," as Clemente once put it, but simply to work with form and depict the world as it existed, in all its harshness and ugliness.

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Pop Art

"Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades. It's basically a U-turn back to a representational visual communication, moving at a break-away speed."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Post-Painterly Abstraction

"A picture is a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more."

The Art Story • May 1, 2009

Clement Greenberg vs Harold Rosenberg

Many modern art movements have been supported and promoted by critics who have sought to shape understandings of the artists' work in distinct ways. Abstract Expressionism is notable for the contributions of two critics, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, who put forward influential interpretations of the movement which were often starkly opposed. The following chart compares and contrasts their ideas.

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