Abstract Ancient Egypt had a significant impact on early Greek culture, as can be evidenced by enduring artifacts. Egyptian sculptures, primarily created for the pharaohs or high-ranking officials and essentially religious in function, significantly influenced the form and style of statues of the early Archaic Age. Poses were rather rigid and very conventional and facial expression was confined to the typical Egyptian half smile. The paper shows that over time, Greek artisans began developing their own approach. By the late Archaic and definitely prior to the beginning of the Golden Age or Classical Period, artwork started to reflect evolving philosophies and ideals and to celebrate the human figure. Sculptures portrayed more elaborate features and less static stances.
From the Paper "The statues also represented the society's hierarchy. At the bottom of the rung were the slaves, tomb builders and farmers. Further up came the craftspeople, educators, doctors, noblemen and priests. The pharaoh filled more than the role of king and ruler. He was considered a god on earth. (Grant 1990, 23) Egyptians used the size of their statues to illustrate the social order. The pharaoh was larger then life size, scribes and court officials life size and workers and peasants always shown working. The images of the pharaoh, always larger than life, made him appear all the more god-like. The large works of sculpture were often displayed at temples that were built for the pharaoh's chosen deity."
Abstract This paper briefly covers the educational background of Elliot W. Eisner, professor of Education at and art at Stanford University. The paper goes on to review Eisner's theory about the role of ideologies in the educational system, the primary aims that Eisner believes schools should incorporate into their curriculum, and the views expressed in Eisner's book "The Kind of School We Need."
From the Paper "Eisner believes that all students should access to the arts in schools, and stresses the importance of including arts in the curriculum. Due to the fact that the school curriculum tells the students is important to learn, students that do not have arts in the curriculum will not see arts as something of importance. This will, ultimately, stunt their cultural growth."
Abstract This paper stresses that, even though Western artists are looking for new ideas when they seek Oriental input, they can only interrupt the Orient through their own Western culture. The author explains that French painter Eugene Delacroix' "Death of Sardanapalus" and Austrian artist Leopold Carl Muller's "The Market in Cairo" are examples of orientalism in Western art. The author states that the Beatles, seeking the teachings of India's gurus, brought orientalism into modern pop culture.
From the Paper "The Western World that Delacroix knew lay on the brink of the Victorian age. Painted in 1827, the Death of Sardanapalus speaks to a people already grown accustomed to the strictures of middle-class morality. As older and wilder days ended, North Americans and Europeans were already entering into a new era of strong religious devotion, clean living, and sexual repression. The wanton abandoning of oneself to pleasure like Sardanapalus seemed to be something that was still possible only within the hidden corridors of the seraglio, a place where leering, bearded despots sought freely to satisfy their carnal lusts. The fact that Sardanapalus's world is about to be consumed in fire is but a fitting moral judgment. Though he can gape at the writhing, sensuous forms of the King's doomed attendants, the European or North American man can only dream of what he cannot have ? the pleasures of the flesh are condemned hellfire."
Abstract This paper discusses how between the years 1495 and 1538, following the Byzantine/Gothic periods, a powerful new vitality was stirring amongst the great thinkers and artists which eventually brought about significant and beneficial change in the world of art known as the Renaissance era. It looks at how during the advent of this era, the artist began to view the world around him quite differently and saw that it could be utilized to express true artistic observations. It shows how in the early years of the sixteenth century, this artistic viewpoint became more than a direction, for it blossomed into a theory and a doctrine. It analyzes how the basic premise of the Renaissance era in relation to art stressed the importance of personal experience, the artist's right to know by experimentation, the futility of formal philosophies so prevalent in the preceding eras and the beauty and value of things in the external world.
From the Paper "Within a thirty year span, beginning approximately in 1495, the city of Rome replaced Florence as the Italian seat of artistic pre-eminence. A series of powerful and ambitious popes, most notably Julius II and those associated with the family Medici, created a new papal state with Rome as its capitol and artistic center of Europe. These popes embellished Rome with great works of art and invited artists from all over Italy to take on some very challenging tasks. In its duration, the "High Renaissance" saw works of such authority and magnitude produced that later generations of artists were virtually instructed in how to represent the natural world in painting and sculpture. The various "masters" of this period had of course inherited the pictorial science of their predecessors, yet they made a distinct break from the past and occupied new and lofty ground that had never been explored before."
Abstract This paper examines how through a ten year period the work of Van Gogh ranged in style and meaning and how many of the changes he experienced were founded in the fact that he spent time with other artists. It provides a outline of his life and analyzes some of the life experiences and influences that affected his work. It discusses the different types of his work which ranged from self portraits and portraits to irises and vineyards.
From the Paper "Vincent Van Gogh has frequently been referred to as the greatest Dutch painter since the time and work of Rembrandt. One of the most remembered accomplishments of Van Gogh in the world of art is his powerful and long lasting contribution to the changes in the genre of Expressionism. He influenced that genre not only with his works and statements within those works but also with the changes that his work underwent as the genre adapted to those changes. He is single-handedly noted for affecting the genre and influencing changes.
One of the most unusual facts about Van Gogh is the span of his works. Most artists that sustain historic recognition spend their entire life producing the works that become classics. Van Gogh produced all of the works the world admires in a short ten year span of life."
Abstract As long as there has been art there has been public art. But this does not mean that public art has always meant the same thing to the people who made it or the community that it was made for. This paper examines four moments in history and four specific artworks as a way of examining how the function of art in public places has changed, as well as the ways in which it has not changed, over the centuries. This paper begins at a moment long before many people would place the beginnings of public art ? with the Paleolithic drawings on the walls in French caves and ends with the works of Maya Lin. As each moment in time presents a different form of public art, no single, overriding definition of the term is offered here. Rather, each moment in history and each example of art requires its own definition of public art.
From the Paper "Some nineteenth-century scholars argued that the cave paintings should be seen as attempts to influence reality, that the images painted on cave walls (and this would perhaps have been especially true of the portrayals of animals) had a totemistic value. In other words, people painted animals to help hunters have better luck in the hunt, either in terms of capturing prey or in terms of surviving the hunt without injury. In a similar vein, other important types of Paleolithic that seem to celebrate female fertility, such as the Venus of Wallendorf, might have been used as totems that would help to ensure the continuing existence of the tribe itself."
Tags: Ice, Age, cathedrals, Diego, Rivera, Allegory, of, California
Abstract From Pokemon to Yu-Gi-Oh, anime has captured the imaginations of thousands of American children. Anime works for adults, such as "Ghost in the Shell", "Vampire Princess Miyu" and "Gundam Wing", often inspire as much dedication in adults as their counterparts do among children. This paper explores Japanese anime, including manga (comic books) which evolved out of a synthesis between traditional American comics and ancient traditions of illustration and written literature. The paper looks at how anime differs from American animation, including differences in characters, plots and style.
From the Paper "Japanese culture is highly open regarding nudity, and public bath houses are a common sight both in the country itself and in anime. Scenes involving individuals bathing together are not necessarily meant to be sexual (though of course there are numerous exceptions), and nudity is frequently treated in a casual and open manner. However, there are limits to this openness. As in many cultures in which nudity is acceptable, there are very tight strictures regarding actual indecency. It is illegal, throughout the country, to portray genitals or detailed pubic areas. This results in many hentai in which genital areas, when glimpsed, have been either blurred out or made androgynously featureless. It has also resulted, however, in a wide variety of creative and exotic ways of working around the rules. Hentai frequently uses excessive bodily fluids in the portrayal of graphic sex in order to hide the actual genitals. Creative "camera angles" can portray the most intimate encounters while subtly skipping around the genitalia. Additionally, much of the fascination with creature hentai comes from the fact that non-human genitals have no restrictions placed on their suitability for public consumption."
Abstract This paper looks at some of the controversial works of Andres Serrano such as "Piss Christ"; "Pneumonia Due to Drowning" and ?Grand Dragon of the Invisible Empire.? The paper discusses how, when reviewing Serrano's works, it is important to look beyond the historical, monetary and political controversy for a moment and to evaluate his productions of art as works of art in and of themselves.
From the Paper "The photography and other works of the artist Andres Serrano have, in many ways, become synonymous with the 1980's and 1990's cultural wars, specifically with the fight of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) to secure continued funding and to secure its continued existence from the United States Congress. The images of Serrano such as his "Piss Christ" in which an image of Christ on a crucifix was submerged in urine was used as a kind of "look at what the NEA hath wrought" proof of the organization's funding. Of course, even the greatest work of art can be rendered in a verbally reductive sense, as in ?Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" is just a picture of a woman with a funny smile, what's the big deal?? It is important, when reviewing Serrano's works, to look beyond the historical monetary and political controversy for a moment, and to evaluate his productions of art as works of art in and of themselves."
Abstract This paper, divided into three parts, presents a formal analysis of two paintings and then compares them to one another. The first painting discussed is Honore Daumier's "Third Class Carriage" (1862) which depicts a train carriage full of peasants. The second part examines Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" of 1942, which is set in a largely deserted city district, where three individuals sit around a rounded, open table in the middle of a diner. The third part of the paper compares the two works. The paper shows that both works, despite their common subject matters and techniques, must be viewed as parts of different traditions. Daumier's work stems from the European reaction to Romanticism, while Hopper's work stems from the American evolution and adaptation of European techniques to create a new, more eviscerating social critique of the life of the common man in America.
From the Paper "Both pieces depict observed images of the lives of ordinary people, conducting ordinary acts of life such as traveling or eating. Both pieces depict individuals in public rather than private spaces. Both pieces depict individuals in transition, in one case on a train in transit, in the other case, waiting to leave a coffee shop with someone, or for a meeting elsewhere, or (in the case of the waiter) just waiting for the night to pass him by. Both works demonstrate how by simply portraying ordinary aspects of life, those acts accrue a significance in the mind of the viewer."
Abstract Claude Monet is widely recognized as one of the towering figures in the art world. His paintings of haystacks and the gardens at Giverny continue to attract visitors to museums all over the world. Both the subjects of his paintings and his techniques are dominant representations of the Impressionist movement. The first part of the paper looks at Monet's biography, including his early training and influences. The next part then examines Monet's role in the development of the Impressionist movement, the break from classical painting and the beginnings of modernist art. In the last section, the paper looks at how Monet's contributions to Impressionism continues to influence artists decades after his death.
From the Paper "Despite this early success, the Salon later rejected many of Monet's later pieces. This included the massive Women in the Garden, which Monet submitted in 1866. After this rejection, Monet began to work on smaller paintings, as seen in the series of outdoor landscapes he painted with Renoir in 1869. The subject of these paintings was La Grenouillere, a fashionable bathing area along Paris' Seine River (Tucker 64). These paintings showed the beginnings of Monet's impressionist style, where daubs of fresh color were used to capture the spontaneity of the scene and the flowing water."
Abstract Using the art of the Parthenon and the play "The Oresteia", written by the Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, this paper determines a number of morals and ideals that the Ancient Greeks held in high esteem. In the first few paragraphs, the paper describes the various metopes in the Parthenon. It examines which gods and important Greek characters are depicted, what it is they are doing and how this represents a given Greek ideal. The paper then explores "The Oresteia" and uses important lines to either determine other Greek ideals or uses them to underscore the importance of an ideal already talked about in the segment on the Parthenon. Through comparing the Parthenon and "The Oresteia" the paper determines that the Greeks were a highly civilized people that believed highly in bravery, pride, civic duty, civility, order and justice.
From the Paper "Greeks were the most civilized peoples in the fifth century BCE as well as the best fighters. This was, of course, according to their standards. Their success as warriors and the importance of the Apollonian way of life is inscribed on the walls of the Parthenon and within the pages of The Oresteia. The Parthenon's gracefully sculpted friezes unite with "schylus" trilogy and both are founded on pride and bravery. There is an obvious mindset, almost a moral code among the Athenians. They believed moderation and civility were the keys to success and it was up to them to impose this onto other races. An Athenian who didn?t abide by this code was a pariah of sorts, to say the least, and was portrayed as such through the Parthenon and The Oresteia."
Abstract This essay will discuss a Water Lily painting by Claude Monet, as it appears in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. By studying the techniques, color scheme, historical, and musically based theme, we can see this impressionist painter in his full scope.
Abstract This is a 10-page paper that analyzes the role of Palladio, Serlio, Sabbattini and Furttenbach and their contribution to Italian theaters in the Renaissance period and in today's theaters.
