From the Paper
"German Expressionism Die Br?cke 1905-1910

German Expressionism art arose in the early years of the twentieth century in Dresden, Berlin and Munich, as much a state of mind as a type of visual art. The young artists who gathered in various German cities were profoundly critical of the bourgeois materialism of modern life. They were more interested in man's spiritual condition and a harmonious relationship between people and their environment. These early twentieth century German artists were less interested in resemblance of their work to the subject matter than artistic vision, They wished to penetrate appearances in order to perceive the inner essence of things (Uhr 10).

The purpose of this paper is to explore and define German ..."

From the Paper
"John Trumbull:
John Trumbull, a colonel in the Revolutionary War, was the son of a distinguished scholar and governor of the state of Connecticut during the revolution. In the war, Trumbull used his skills as a draftsman by drawing plans of various works in which the army was interested. After his time in the army, Trumbull went to Europe to continue his studies of painting. Beginning in 1783, he studied day and night with Benjamin West in London. Under the tutelage of West and John S. Copley he devoted himself to art as a profession (National Cyclopedia 334).

Later, Trumbull would be considered the painter of the Revolution. In his early works, he painted subjects from Greek and Roman history, but he soon abandoned these in favor of contemporary history. His first such works were "Death of ..."

From the Paper
"Tagging and Graffiti


Public agencies, law enforcement officers, and business people in the nation's urban areas, struggle to keep up with graffiti damage inflicted by the recent nightly tagging activity of gang members. At times it seems like a race against the impossible; some observers even say that graffiti is a social statement or an art form. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss tagging, its role as art and social statement and other related issues of gang activity.


The graffiti movement began in New York City as an illegal, calligraphic, mobile public art in which gang members spray-painted their "tags" (gang names or nicknames) onto subway trains. The best writers or taggers became heros to their friends, and their unusual visual renderings commanded the..."

From the Paper
"Albrecht Durer's Religious Art


Albrecht Durer, a German Renaissance artist, has been likened to Leonardo da Vinci because of his search into man's physical and psychological being. He was interested in what was called "humors" or the temperament of people and has been termed the first true humanist of the North (Snyder 316). The word "humor" referred to the fluids in the body, and in the fifteenth century there were said to be four. The two secreted by the liver were gall and bile which caused despair and greed. Melancholia was also said to be the result of the humors of the liver. Phlegm, created in the lungs, was said to cause apathy, gluttony, and sloth. The sanguine humor was the product of overly active blood circulation, provoking vices of lust or lechery."

From the Paper
"Editor Hal Foster states in the preface to his book, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, that he brought together the essays for this work in an effort to present a dialogue on the meaning of postmodern culture as reflected in all the arts. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss postmodern culture, its theory and practice, its affect on design issues, and its influence on society and reaction from society.


Foster defines postmodernism as a "conflict of new and old modes--cultural and economic" (xi). The anti-aesthetic relates to an interdisciplinary cultural position on the present time. It is his aim to reflect various different views coming from different art forms in order to stimulate thinking about the diverse nature of postmodernism and the anti-aesthetic.


In theory, postmodernism refers to the moving away of the..."

From the Paper
"Ansel Adams was born February 20, 1902 in San Francisco. He was a photographer best known for technical innovations in his work and for masterly representations of mountainous terrain. He started out as a student of music rather than photography, but photography was an avocation until 1927 when he published his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. This consisted of photographs in the style of the old Pictorialists who had imitated Impressionist painting by suppressing detail in favor of soft, misty effects often achieved in the darkroom rather than in the camera (Moritz, 1977, pp. 1-2).


Trained as a pianist, Adams divided his time between music and photography until 1930. That was when he was first impressed by the work of photographer Paul Strand, an American whose work emphasized beauty of tone and sharp detail. Adams then decided..."

From the Paper
"The readings under discussion concern the issues of modernism and postmodernism and the manner in which each has been manifested in terms of the shaping of urban space. Modernism is, after all, part of an effort to create a new environment to replace the old around the turn of the century, following in the wake of similar changes in political, social, literary, and other spheres of society. The application of these ideas to public space extends their meaning directly to society as a whole, attempting to alter the way we think of ourselves in relation to our external, public environment in keeping with the other changes taking place in human thought and attitude. Postmodernity was similarly a reaction to modernity and again a new way of viewing the world and our relationship to it. Each successive movement seems to build on the last either by..."

From the Paper
"Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) worked passionately to insure that photography be accepted as a unique art form. His unrelenting dedication to the idea that a photograph was as much an artistic expression as an oil painter's "handwork," lead him to expound on the virtues of aesthetic notions such as light, balance, inner vision, and poetry. To Stieglitz, a photograph could be a poem written in the language of photography.


At the same time that he pronounced the virtues of straight photography (a picture should be a combination of subject, just the right moment, and an artist's unique vision, rather than a product of darkroom manipulation or other painterly contrivances), he encouraged, and became mentor to, photographers who unabashedly imitated the aesthetics of painting. Stieglitz believed that "art is the only true expression of the..."

From the Paper
"The painter known as Titian was the most versatile and productive painter of his day. His name was Tiziano Vecellio. He lived in the village of Pieve di Cadore in the Italian Alps, and he remained always a child of the mountains in spite of his fame and success:
The ambition that drove him came as much from his ingrained attitudes as it did from the need to find outlets for his talent. Like a peasant whose one concern is to store up grain against the winter, Titan worked for security (Williams 7).


The name Titian is an anglicized version of Tiziano, and Titian and Raphael (for Raffaello) are the only Italians whose names have consistently been anglicized in this manner, a reflection of the lasting nature of their fame (Gould 7)."

From the Paper
"The "First Ladies" of the French Impressionist movement were undeniably the Frenchwoman Berthe Morisot (1841-95) and the American expatriate Mary Cassatt (1944-1926). They were also, by reason of default, the "second," "third" and "fourth"-tiered women of Impressionism as well - for there were no other female Impressionists of note, despite the fact that one or two other women had associations and hangings with the movement's acknowledged inner-circle of males: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pisarro (1830-1903), Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and (by others' judgement if not his own) Edouard Manet (1832-83). By default or not, Morisot and - to a much larger degree - Cassatt stand firmly in the midst of that company of gentlemen because they were good at their art, not by any condescension on the part of either critics or ... "

From the Paper
"This paper is a history of the altarpieces of Renaissance Venice, typified by the most famous artist of the form, Giovanni Bellini. Bellini's altarpieces represent a very particular type of painting, unique to its time and place. They visually chart the evolution of Venetian society's movement from its Gothic and Byzantine roots into the full flowering of the Renaissance. This was a difficult transition for the republic; Bellini's work exhibits the pride and grace with which his fellow citizens ultimately came to embrace the new order.

... Giovanni Bellini as "a master whose long career, extending from about 1460 until his death in 1516, dominates Venetian painting for most of the period.". Bellini's work, more than that of any other painter of his age, reflects the pressures and influences working on the Venetian republic as ... "

From the Paper
"Auguste Rodin was a French sculptor who was also one of the most influential European artists of the late nineteenth century. He was born in 1840 and died in 1917. He was contemporary with C?zanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, but he was the first sculptor in a long time to occupy a central position in public attention as he opened up new possibilities for his art much as the Impressionists and post-Impressionists were doing for painting. Rodin came from a poor background and was rejected by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts three times. For many years, he worked as an ornamental mason. He went to Italy in 1875, and it was there he was exposed to the works of Michelangelo, who would serve as his inspiration for his first major work, The Age of Bronze, exhibited in 1878. This work caused controversy because of its naturalistic treatment of the naked figure, an approach quite ... "

From the Paper
"Rococo. The very term has become commonplace as the synonym for "decorative," "frilly" and "frivolous" art. That in itself is a step up from its origins as a derogatory term derived from the French word rocaille. The original invention of the term in the early 1800s was essentially a caricature, a satirical disparagement which consigned the entire Rococo period (circa 1680-1775) to being little more than an architectural style of playful decoration.. Likewise, our contemporary art historians and critics are rarely kind to the Rococo style - and are particularly hard on its artists. "The eighteenth century," one college text proclaims,. "did not produce a single figure in the visual arts to rank with the universal masters of previous epochs." Like all such sweeping generalizations, both criticisms - new and old - miss key elements in the character of Rococo ..."

From the Paper
"Van Gogh

Introduction
This analysis focuses on an individual artist from a specific European country. One of the interesting things about individual artists, however, is that in many instances they are more European than specifically German or French, at least in the modern era.
For example, in looking at Van Gogh and his work, there is more than one identification. While he is a Dutch artist, born in that country and with a "Dutch" period in his work, he is often associated with the French impressionists and, in one of the sources used for this analysis, he is categorized as a French artist (Kostenevich, 1995). The intention in this paper is to briefly trace his development."

From the Paper
"The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Dutch painter Johannes (Jan) Vermeer's The Allegory of Painting, also known as The Art of Painting. Many art historians have thought that this work was created in praise of the "art of painting." However, this paper will show that The Allegory of Painting was instead a political statement on Vermeer's part.

Vermeer lived during the seventeenth century, a time which is known as the "Golden Age" of Holland. This was a period when great changes took place in virtually every area of Dutch life, creating an environment in which the arts flourished. The changes of the day were largely shaped by political events, as this was the time during which Holland won its status as an independent nation.-. There was also a current of religious tolerance in the air due to the spread of Protestantism in the ..."