To Teach Art History: Lecture Six: Modern Art in the Netherlands

About Styles:

You don't need to know the style of a painting to appreciate and understand it.
But if you do know the style, it gives you a way into the painting.
Painters tend to be experimental and self-conscious about style early in their careers; then they use what they learn to develop their own style.
Fauvism as such lasted only a few years. The key component of Fauvism was manipulation of color for expressive reasons. It morphed into Expressionism.
Matisse did 3 times as many Expressionist canvases as Fauvist.
Analytic and synthetic cubism were experimental phases that lasted only a few years. The key component of cubism was manipulation of shapes for expressive reasons. They became a more generalized form of cubism.
Picasso continued to paint in a generalized Cubist style sometimes; he also did Surrealism and Expressionism.

About biography:

You don't need to know the biography of a painter to appreciate a painting.
Biography is a distraction; the artist is not writing a diary.
He is trying to create an image that generalizes his experience.
He is trying to transcend his personal struggles to create something more general, more symbolic.
Example: Picasso's Woman in Armchair

Returning to the City of Paris Museum:

Transition to Modern Art in the Netherlands:
Show map of the Netherlands

Dutch art in the 19th Century:

Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam:

Has the largest collection of van Gogh.
Does not allow photography.
When we were there last, many of their best pieces were on tour and the museum was being renovated, so their galleries were disrupted.

Kroller-Muller Museum:

Second largest collection.
This museum was established by a woman named Helene Kröller-Müller.
She recognized his value early and picked up a great quantity cheap.
She was heir to a German industrial fortune and married Kroller, a Dutch industrial magnate.
She had plenty of money to spend.She and her husband donated the museum and the surrounding park land to the nation.
The building we visited was built fairly recently on the site of the original.
Second big attraction is her big collection of pointillism.
They also have a few other classics from earlier in the 19th century.
Review slides.
Mention Dan's blog on sculpture garden.

Return to Gementemuseum:

Conclusion:

Last week we worked hard to learn the styles and big names of 20th C. art.
Tonight, we reaped the benefit of our investment.
We visited three museums: The Gementemuseum, the Kroller-Muller, and the Stedelijk.
We saw works by artists we already knew.
We saw works in styles we already understood.
We also built on that by adding new styles and new artists.

Notes:

Kirchner was a German expressionist.
Sol Lewitt is not Dutch. Born here. Parents from Ukraine.
Théo van Rysselberghe, 1862-1926 is a Belgian.
James Ensor is Belgian, associated with expressionism and symbolism.
Jawlensky was a Russian expressionist painter who lived in Germany.
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was an important German expressionist, but she died age 31.
She painted with tempera, with a limited choice of pigments. She scratched into the paint.
Sol LeWitt: "In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

To Teach Art History