Class Reaction and Notes for 2-28-12

Notes:

Artists of the Vienna Secession were just rebelling against the old way of thinking (the older generation that only liked the traditional styles).

Abstraction is a continuum. It is anything other than literal reality.

The secession group had their own magazine. They wanted an aesthetic continuity in the magazine so any ad required that their magazine artists design the ad. It was a radical way of thinking.

There was a big Art Nouveau exhibition in L.A. in the 60’s and from there it caught on and took the form of our popular psychedelic posters.

Art Nouveau really pushed the envelope of typography. Developed many new and unique type faces.

Peter Barrens (The Kiss) changed the landscape of graphic design.

In 1907 Barrens is hired by AEG Becomes the design consultant for the German Power Company. He was the first to experiment with running san serif type.

He was an early advocate of san serif type. Before him, San serif was just a novelty.

He was the first man to create a comprehensive identity package for a company.

Pioneered the concept of non-loadbearing walls.

While in art school (1904) he gets influenced by a forward thinking professor that works with squares and circles in new ways. The principle of intervals between circles and squares. The Pavilion Exhibition.

He creates the AEG logo: A honeycomb representing worker bees. Established ridged rules for consistent logo, typeface, and layout design.

Takes the principle of interchangeable parts and applied it to products of the power company. Applied these principle to their electric tea pot.

At this time, the first electrified underground cars are seen in London.

Lucian Bernard starts out a starving painter. Enter competition. Makes a last minute work. The dignitary judge is bored with the entries, pulls Bernard’s work out of the trash pile and selects it as the winner. This starts a whole new style in advertising design called Plakatstil.

There is a “We are producers”/”We are artists” battle in AEG

Plakatstil (poster style) becomes very popular in advertising. Large areas of flat color, cartoonistic, simple, minimalistic.

The Axis Power propaganda art is abstract, sometimes dark, and often needing decoding.

Allies feed their propaganda art to you with a spoon. It is about straightforward quality of illustration, not as much about symbolism.

Uncle Sam riffs on a British poster.

Ludwig Hohlwein becomes a major artist in the plakatstil WWI propaganda posters, but takes it to the next level.

His success was overshadowed by his alliance with the losing team twice in a row.

Hitler did not like the German artist’s approach to design. He writes in Mein Kampf that the Allies have much better posters because they speak clearly, even to the uneducated masses.

Hohlwein uses emotional impact through dramatic lighting. Likes to use a multitude of symbolism in his posters. ie. The Und Du poster.

Kauffer presents the first examples of cubist abstraction in his flying birds.

Cubism starts around 1907.

A.M. Cassander 1901-1968 Uses geometry and cubism for his telegraph poster. Cassander is most known for his travel posters. He uses sophisticated structured abstraction for his posters.

Suprematism(art for art sake) happens at the same time as cubism. Influenced by futurism and cubism. Rejects utilitarian function. Rejects pictorial representation.

Dinofuturism?

Kazimir Malevich was the premier Suprematist painter

Avant Garde simply means out in front.

Constructivism:

Tatien

Alexander Rodchenko – things that are functional are art.

Lissitzke – starts out as a suprematist but goes into architecture.  

Personal Thoughts

The art tonight was fascinating. I’ve never seen German wartime poster art and American Wartime poster art of WWI juxtaposed before. It was even more interesting to find out that Hitler thought that the American poster art was more effective. As an art student, I think the German art was far more interesting, but I can understand Hitler’s point - that when you are trying to deliver a message, you want to make it as simple and clear as possible so as to be understood by the broadest possible audience. I think that the reason German poster art was more symbolic was because the creators and promoters themselves wanted to feel intelligent and powerful for being able to understand the symbolism depicted. Maybe they felt that because they were the master race, all Germans should be able to understand the higher meanings behind the abstract ideas of the posters.

It was also a good introduction to suprematism tonight. I liked how the structure and ideas behind composition were explained. It took me a while to see the airplane in the one Malevich painting. Although it is entirely possible that other people saw the plane in completely different ways. I also appreciated the little bit of background when introducing Lucian Bernard to us. Good story about him painting his dad’s house in wild colors. I would like to hear more stories like this with other artists. It makes me care about what they did more.

Questions

How can you tell a good suprematist painting from a bad one?

Isn’t all art functional? Some just functions as entertainment and entertainment is a function, is it not? I suppose that could be debated as well.

Week #6 Notes and Reaction 2-21-12

Notes:

John Ruskin born early 1800 becomes the philosophical leader of the arts movement. He calls for social reform. How can we consciously restructure society for a cooperative and prosperous outcome?

William Morris 1834-1896: Atheist. Wrote over 90 books, illuminated manuscripts, set up a print shop, founded socialist league, most popular poet of his day.

Started off rich from father’s copper mines.

Started a career as an architect, but quit it to become an artist.

Crafted 644 illustration blocks (Kelmscott style). Produced borders, title pages, and other designs.

Arts and crafts react against industrialization. Leads to Art Nouveau.  

Aubrey Beardsley(sex obsessed) also produced vine-work woodblock illustrations in the Kelmscott style.

Morris threatens lawsuit against Beardsley tarnishing the Kelmscott style.

Sarah Bernhardt hires Alphonse Mucha to do a lithography. She loves it. It elevates him to fame and puts his work in high demand.  Mucha went on to make all kinds of advertisements for a wide variety of products.

Whiplash Hair, tile work, plays with depth, flat abstract forms contrast to foreground subjects. Sexuality.

Turn of the century - Pattern work becomes popular. Form is abstracted

Will Bradley. Produces Book covers. Abstraction, black and white pattern. Plays with dimensionality and abstraction of forms. Influenced by Japanese woodcuts. The patterns in his work is flat but the way it is cut plays with 3D form.

Penfield’s work in Harpers Magazine is an example of how Illustrations become flatter, moves towards 2D look.

In Germany, Art Nouveau  is called Jugendstil(youth style)

The Kiss, 1898 Peter Behrens - Jugend Style. Intertwined locks of hair. Both figures androgynous, pushing boundaries of sexuality.

Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts (Scotland)

Founders: Margret and Francis McDonald(sisters), Herbert McNair, and Charles Renee Mackintosh. Known for geometric styles that have curvilinear elements with a rectilinear structure, floral motifs, and symbolism.

Talwin Morris. Bookmaker. Took basic visual elements to make cover and spine designs. Mass produced and widely collected.

In Austria, Art Nouveau is called Sessionstil. Artist of this form break off from.

An example: Gustav Klimt. Koloman Moser.

1889 Klimt work shows outrageous use of negative space.

_­Personal Thoughts

Although the movie was unexpectedly long, it stressed how important William Morris was to art in his time. I liked seeing the slides of his work after the movie. His vine work is amazing. It reminds me of the intricate Celtic knots of the Book of Kells. Those designs always amaze and inspire me.

As always my favorite part of class is looking at and analyzing the different works of art. I would like to see more works of art in the Jugendstil style. Love the way women’s hair flows in that style.

It was interesting to find out how much influence the four founders of the Glasgow School had on the Art Nouveau movement. Would like to learn more and see more of their work.

Questions

What is the Glasgow institute of Art doing now?

Are they currently similar to Ringling or are they more specialized?

How much of the four founder’s style is carried on today at the school?

What was Koloman Moser’s influence on Art Nouveau?

What popular examples produced today can be traced back to the beginnings of Art Nouveau? 

Week 5 Notes and Reaction

Notes for Week 5 (2-7-12)

Pictorial forms evolve into Cunieform.

Cunieform develops out of efficiency.

For the test we need to identify Capitalis Quadrata, Capitalis Rustica,

Caroline Minuscules, and the book of Kells

Xylography is printing from wood.

Earliest expressions of woodblock printing are playing cards and a devotional.

Ars Memorandi: instructions on how to die. Examples of Block Books – books using block printing.

Textura, Black Letter, and Gothic are used interchangeably.

Gutenberg used textura on his early press because it was the type of the time.

He wasn’t an artisan. His foreman was.

Recognize: the punch, matrix, and type mold.

Identify the Letter of Indulgence(an early example of letterpress printing).

Define: Xylography(printing from wood), Ligature, Icunabula(the first 50 years of printing), Fleurons(a flower or decoration within the text).

An exemplar page is a preliminary sketch done before you do the set.

Calendarium included a tippin(moveable page insert).

Steven Daye’s Book of Psalms was an example that he was not an expert in printing.

Romain du Roi(Royal Typeface) identified by the dot on the lowercase el.

Remember: French Rococo – fussy and decorative.

Copper plate engraving allowed for greater contrast between thick and thin.

Rococo evolved into modern style type.

Bodoni was invented in the style of 18^th Century Neo-classical

Bodoni typeface was similar to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in they way that it had interchangeable parts within the design(serif, width, etc.).

Large poster style fonts were from Wood Type. Made possible by the router.

Point size is simply highest to lowest.  Leading is baseline to baseline.

Joseph Niepce took the first photograph from nature in 1826.

Louis Daguerre famous for long exposure Paris street photo.

The first ad men were not creators in any way. They were brokers of space aka advertising solicitor.

Victorian era was visually confusing.

Late1800’s early 1900s:

Scrap cards so called because they were printed to be disposable. They were an example of ephemera.

Late 1800s had lots of expositions going on. Allegory was popular at the time. Trump Loy Effect(sp?) – illusion of pages curling and pictures overlapping. Lots of Chromolithography exposition posters.

Chromolithography begins to be applied to tin containers. The product was beginning to replace the shopkeeper with images being put on the product.

The product became recognizable and name brands became popular.

Corporations begin to form when farmers came together in a consortium instead of competing with each other.

It is a time when the public starts to get manipulated by the media.

Journalists won’t mention the products in order to build trust with the reader, but they put an ad of a product that might be used the recipe next to the article.

Signage gets plastered on any available surface. It becomes a culture of advertising.

People begin to pull back and reduce the ornate style in reaction to the overt advertising culture.

Toy books come into existence. Changes from preaching to entertaining and educating. ie. Walter Crane’s Absurd ABC, 1874

Influence of Japanese prints.

Caldecott – The dish and the spoon. Ridiculousness.

Kate Greenway, Under the Window. Known for images of freely playing children. Uses a generous amount of white space – unusual at the time.

Harper’s becomes an empire of books and magazines for just about everything. The beginning of visual journalism.

Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly was an illustrator that helped bring down Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Although many people couldn’t read, they could understand Nast’s political illustrations.

John Henry Heinz begins by selling horseradish. Starts releasing a line of prepackaged foods (57 of them). He puts up the first large scale electric sign (the giant pickle). The first one to figure out that your employees are your marketing. Hired lots of pretty young girls and had them work in store fronts for people to see. Even gave them a sunning deck to keep them looking good. In a era of grueling working conditions, this company was the diamond in the rough.

Personal Thoughts

It was good to review what was going to be on the test. It helped me to retain the information for the topics to be presented again, but in a slightly different way. What more can I say about the review information that I didn’t already post. As for the new information, I found it interesting, because it started to become more graphic. There was a lot more chromolithography, which I very much enjoy looking at. It is a unique art form that has pretty much disappeared from todays illustration styles. I would love to see a resurgence of the old chromolithographic style. I think it is crazy how overboard the plastered advertisements got. It is interesting to look back on, but I can’t imagine living in an area where there are advertisements on every surface. I suppose there are ads everywhere we go today, but it is a lot more subtle. The advertisements then were right in your face. It is neat to find out where the 57 came from in Heinz57. I thought the whole creation of visual journalism was a fascination part of the presentation. I would like to learn more about that.

Questions

Is the Heinz Corporation still at the same location and if so, how much has it changed?

I wonder how difficult it was to get a job at Heinz, being that it was so rare to find good working conditions at the time.

Were there any other companies that took as good care of their employees as Heinz did?

What companies were the first to follow suit behind Heinz in that respect?

I would like to learn more about Caldecott and the Caldecott Awards.

What did the first toy books with color look like?