Hi everybody! My name is Carol and
welcome to The Study of Art History
Survey I. Which will be a study of art
from prehistory, 30,000 years ago, up
until roughly the 13th century 12 or 13,
around what we call gothic times, at the
Age of the Great Cathedrals. I think what
I would like to just say to you about
the study of art history in general is
that it's not an art class,
it's not a history class, it's not a
criticism class. Art history is a pretty
unique phenomenon in that the thing that
we're thinking about is what did people
make and why. What was the culture that
the artwork made within? What were those
people like? Why did they make the works
they made? And I have found over the
years that I've been teaching this that
there seems to be a deeper reason that
all people have made art whether it's
prehistoric cave art, whether it's modern
artist who's like Jackson Pollock who's
throwing paint on a canvas on the floor,
there seems to be this need inside, this
place inside of us where we want to
connect to the greater world at large.
And artists are among the few people
that are able to do this in a visual way. Although, of course, now we have digital art, we
have sound art, we have, but it's all art
of the senses.
I guess that's what I'm trying to say is
that we process the world around us in
some kind of way
create an image or a sculpture or song
or poem and whatever the product of that
process is that's what is presented to
the viewer at large. And is all different
kinds of reasons sometimes art is made,
because if there's a religion or a
ritual or survival, sometimes it's may
just for pure beauty, sometimes propa,
propaganda and in the course of this art
history. What we will study is all the
different reasons different works of art
were made and so we're going to, it's
very important that you see that we look
at this art in context.
Ok, so what is art? And this first slide
has an image of Vincent van Gogh on the
left and the Sphinx on the right. Now the
image by Van Gogh it's an oil painting,
it's a self-portrait, and maybe some of
you have heard of an Van Gogh, he's pretty
famous, that's why I put him here. And
it's a painting of him painting. So he's
making this message, he's creating an
artwork to talk about himself, about his
own worldview. The Sphinx on the other
hand it's a mystery.
Nobody really knows why it was made, many
scholars theorized that it's a portrait
of Ramses II. We don't know. It's
setting outside the Pyramids of Giza and
if you look very, very carefully on the
slide you can see like this little tiny
doorway thing and there might even be
some people in there. There's like a little
house down by his left paw that gives
you a sense of the scale of this thing.
The monumental size of this piece of art
that has been around for thousands of
years. The interesting thing about these
two images is the composition. If you
forget about the fact that what their
pictures of. So we have to digital images
on a PowerPoint slide inside a computer,
maybe you're looking at this on your
phone,
maybe you're looking at on a laptop,
maybe you're on your iPad, maybe you're
not looking at it in the at all and
you're listening to this lecture in the
car, but you are definitely not getting
an experience of either artwork as it
was created or as it was intended.
You're seeing these two artworks put
onto this slide is an illustration of
what art is. But the composition on these
two slides we have negative space at the
top, we have the main figure which in the
picture the Sphinx of course the figures
the Sphinx then Van Gogh is the figure on the
left, the shape of his easel roughly is
the shape of the pyramid so
compositionally the photographer has
made the the photographer on the right
has used some of the same compositional
elements to give the importance of the
main subject that Van Gogh did when he
made his self-portrait. Now what we know
about Van Gogh is he was schizophrenic,
he cut off his left ear, he spent a lot
of time in an insane asylum, and we don't
know which of his paintings he was
making here but it doesn't matter.
Because both of these artworks what they
have in common is they are an expression
of a maker to the viewer of something
from deep within themselves. In this
slide we're talking about content.
Content is the subject matter of a work
of art, it's what the artist is
representing. So it has to do with the
ideas of the artists and it has to do
with the ideas of the culture around him.
All artwork exist within a particular
culture and it is a construct of the
ideas, the culture, the environment, and
all of those forces that are upon any
artist at any given time. The reception
of the work also is very different
depending on whether that work is viewed
within the culture from which it comes
or somewhere different.
So if you look at this sculpture you
might see a very different idea than
that which the original sculpture at
intended. This is meant as a view of the
in the most beautiful woman, that an
ideal a few male beauty, and it's a
sculpture of Kali who is a Hindu goddess
and in this guise she is in her
aesthetic form. Which means that she has
given up all things of this earth and
she is meditating on the earth beyond,
that she has achieved ultimate
perfection, she's given away every single
earthly possession, she only eats barely
what she needs to be able to be sit up
and stay in this meditative state.
So the
religious worshipper that would view her
would see her as an ideal to ascribe to. They would see her as beautiful,
they would see this as an ideal of human,
female beauty. In our culture if we saw a
picture of a woman that looked like this
we might not think of it as a perfectly
beautiful woman, because we are
trained to have a very different idea of
what female beauty is. There are three
traditional historical art forms. Which
form what's called in the Western art
historical trajectory the cannon and if
you study Dr. Holz introduction lectures,
that word document that I've put in this
unit,
she gives a very good description of
what that cannon is. Originally the first
art form was sculpture. As you're going
to see we see prehistoric little figures,
there's a Paleolithic figure of a woman
that you're going to study in
prehistoric art. It predates the cave
paintings that we're going to see.
Architecture comes a little bit later
and a lot of that has to do with
materials and technology and the fact
that in early times we had nomadic
cultures. So although they had a form of
architecture we don't really have much
record of what it was, because their
materials would have been transient. They
would have used things that were
portable so we don't really have
anything to say how sophisticated they
were or weren't in their building. But by
the time we get to the beginnings of the
study of art history as a discipline, the
Greeks have come and gone and they have
invented a whole system of philosophy
and of looking at things. And within the
Greek historical trajectory and the Greek
philosophical trajectory, architecture
was seen as one of the highest forms of
creation. So in Western art history these
originally architecture and sculpture
we're seeing this forms a very high art
painting came a little later. But for the
first several centuries of the study of
art history these three forms painting,
architecture, and sculpture
considered the traditional true art
forms. And other kinds of media a lot of
the things on the list and the two
previous slides were not considered as
seriously. So to illustrate this idea,
this painting. This is a fresco which is
a wet plaster mixed with pigment and
placed on a wall so they literally, if
you've ever seen plaster maybe when
you're little you said made plaster out
of a mask or they used to make casts out
of faster if you broke your leg.
It's like a white powder made out of
gypsum. And it hardens up so these early
Italian artist, this is a renaissance, so
it's actually you're not going to study
this in this course. This is a survey one
course, but I'm showing it to here to
help you understand the way that we look
at art and how it's changed. So today
Leonardo DaVinci is thought of as one of
the greatest artists in the history of
Western art. However, at the time that he
made this painting this was seen as a
mural, it was on a cafeteria wall, it's on the
wall of the refectory in a monastery. And
if you look at the bottom of this
painting you see that door, that door was
actually added a little later. The monks
just chop the door right into the
painting. It was as if you just had any
mural like the mural on the library
wall at ETSU and they just carve the door
into it. They did not look at painting at
that time as a sacred thing or a
valuable thing. The painter was
considered a workman. Later on it got a
different view. Architecture can be all
different kinds of things and so I
wanted you just to see these two forms
just to kind of give you a flavor of it.
Now
the one on the top is considered one of
the seven wonders of the world. If you ever
take a non Western course you'll get to
see this, you'll get to learn about it, it's
called the Taj Mahal and it was built as
a tomb, it's a mausoleum, built by a man
named Shajahan for his wife who died
and is out in India. The image on the
bottom is an image of a mammoth bone
house it's actually from the Ukraine and
it was made around 16,000 to 10,000 BCE. So the thing about
architecture is this. It's
three-dimensional and it's made so
people could go inside, so it's highly
spatial, whatever the design might be. It
always has some kind of function whether
it's a place that people live, whether they
worship, whether they gather there, market,
whatever it might be.
It's built for humans to have a use of
some form. So again the Taj Mahal was
built as a tomb. so for the dead to live
in if you will. The image on the bottom
it's a reconstruction drawing. They found
the mammoth bones and they could tell by
the way the bones were carved the way
that they were put together, but it's
always bound by the materials and
technology available at the time. So
again although we're really not going to
look at that much architecture in this
class until Greeks is the Egyptians and
the Greeks are the first real architects.
The Egyptians I would say in the ancient
near east we have some ziggurats and
Egypt we start to have temples. In
ancient Greece they actually begin to
develop a philosophical system for it.
There may have been as sophisticated
ideas in building 30,000 years ago and
the only reason that we don't know about
it is because the materials that they
used have long since disintegrated.