Can Art Historians Look at Iconography in Abstract Art or Non Subjective Art

Types of Content

Content in fine art takes the form of portraits, landscapes, yet-lifes, genre art, and narrative art.

Learning Objectives

Describe dissimilar categories of figurative or abstract art.

Fundamental Takeaways

Central Points

• Content in a piece of work of art refers to what is being depicted and might exist helpful in deriving a basic meaning. Information technology appears in the visual arts in several forms , all of which may be figurative (realistic) or abstruse (distorted). Amid them are portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, genre art, and narrative art.
• Portraits represents the likeness of a person and can include a study of the sitter'south mood or personality.
• Landscapes  describe natural scenery such every bit mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject area is a broad view.
• A still-life is a work of art depicting more often than not inanimate subject area matter, typically commonplace objects that may be either natural or man-fabricated.
• Genre art involves the pictorial representation in any of diverse media of scenes or events from everyday life, whereas narrative fine art tells a story that may exist real or imagined.

Content in a work of art refers to what is being depicted and might exist helpful in deriving a basic meaning. Sometimes content is straightforward; in other cases, however, information technology is less obvious and requires boosted data. Content appears in the visual arts in several forms, all of which may be figurative (realistic) or abstruse (distorted). Among them are portraits, landscapes, yet-lifes, genre fine art, and narrative art.

Portraits

A portrait is a painting, photo, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the confront and its expression are predominant. The intent is to brandish the likeness, personality, and fifty-fifty the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a however position. A portrait often shows a person looking straight at the painter or photographer in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer .

Philip Burne–Jones Holding a Cat : George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Landscapes

Landscape painting, as well known as landscape fine art, is the depiction in art of landscapes—natural scenery such every bit mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the principal discipline is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent composition . In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can nonetheless course an important part of the work. Sky is about always included in the view, and weather is oft an chemical element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a singled-out subject are not found in all artistic traditions and develop when at that place is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.

Henri Matisse. Landscape at Collioure (1905): Oil on canvas. 38.viii x 46.6cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Matisse was a member of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"), who used assuming colors to convey emotions.

Withal Lifes

A still life (plural however lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate bailiwick matter, typically commonplace objects that may be either natural (nutrient, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking spectacles, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on). Early still-life paintings, particularly earlier 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Some modernistic still lifes pause the ii-dimensional bulwark and employ three-dimensional mixed media, and use found objects, photography, reckoner graphics, as well every bit video and sound.

Maria van Oosterwijk. Vanitas Still-Life (1668): Oil on canvas. 73 ten 88.5cm. Kunsthistorisches Musuem, Vienna.

Genre Art

Genre art is the pictorial representation in any of various media of scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes. Such representations (also called genre works, genre scenes , or genre views) may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist.

Nicolaes Maes. The Idle Servant (1655): Oil on sail. National Gallery, London. Dutch Baroque genre scenes often have of import moral lessons as their subtexts.

Narrative Art

Narrative fine art is art that tells a story, either as a moment in an ongoing story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time. Some of the primeval prove of homo fine art suggests that people told stories with pictures. However, without some knowledge of the story beingness told, information technology is very hard to read ancient pictures because they are non organized in a systematic way like words on a folio, but rather can unfold in many different directions at once.

Hagesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros. Laocoön and His Sons (Start century BCE): Marble. Vatican Museum, Rome. This marble sculpture depicts a scene from Virgil's epic The Aeneid, in which the Trojan seer Laocoön foresees the Trojan Horse and the destruction of Troy by the Greeks. Before he tin can warn his fellow townspeople, the bounding main god Neptune (an ally of the Greeks) sends his serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons.

Figurative and Abstract Art

Art exists along a continuum from realistic representational work to fully non-representational piece of work.

Learning Objectives

Distinguish between figurative and abstract fine art

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Representational art, or figurative art, references objects or events in the real earth.
• Romanticism , Impressionism , and Expressionism contributed to the emergence of abstract art in the nineteenth century.
• Fifty-fifty representational work is abstracted to some caste; entirely realistic art is elusive.

Key Terms

• verisimilitude:The property of seeming true, of resembling reality; resemblance to reality, realism.

Painting and sculpture can exist divided into the categories of figurative (or representational) and abstract (or not-representational). Figurative art describes artwork – particularly paintings and sculptures – which are clearly derived from real object sources, and therefore are, by definition, representational. Since the inflow of abstract art in the early on twentieth century, the term "figurative" has been used to refer to any course of modernistic art that retains strong references to the existent earth.

Johann Anton Eismann, Ein Meerhafen, 1600s: This figurative work from the 17th century depicts easily recognizable objects—ships, people, and buildings.

Artistic independence was advanced during the nineteenth century, resulting in the emergence of abstract fine art. Three movements which contributed heavily to the evolution of these styles were Romanticism, Impressionism, and Expressionism.

Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in its depiction of imagery . Abstraction exists along a continuum; it can formally refer to compositions that are derived (or bathetic) from figurative or other natural sources, or it can refer to non-representational art and non-objective art that has no derivation from figures or objects.

Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at to the lowest degree theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering, for instance, colour and form in ways that are conspicuous, can exist said to exist partially abstruse.

Robert Delaunay, Le Premier Disque, 1912–1913: Delaunay's work is an example of early on abstruse art.

Non-representational art refers to total abstraction, bearing no trace of any reference to annihilation recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for example, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are nearly mutually sectional, merely figurative or representational art often contains at least one element of abstraction.

Meaning in Nonrepresentational Fine art

Meaning in nonrepresentational art is highly subjective and tin exist difficult to define.

Learning Objectives

Relate the meaning of nonrepresentational art, its goals, and its specific expressions

Key Takeaways

Fundamental Points

• Nonrepresentational artwork refers to art that does not endeavor to represent or reference reality.
• In the late 19th century, artists began to move toward increasing abstraction equally a ways of communicating subjective experience more personally and creatively.
• Artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian viewed fine art as an expression of spirituality.

Key Terms

• expressionism:A move in the arts in which the artist does not depict objective reality, only rather the subjective expression of inner experience.
• nonrepresentational:Not intended to correspond a physical object in reality.

Nonrepresentational fine art refers to compositions which practise not rely on representation or mimesis to any extent. Abstract art , nonfigurative art, nonobjective fine art, and nonrepresentational art are related terms that indicate a departure from reality in the depiction of imagery in art. Meaning in nonrepresentational art is highly subjective and tin can be difficult to define. We can focus on the elements of the artwork (class, shape, line , colour, space , and texture) in terms of the artful value of the piece of work, only the meaning will ever exist personal to the viewer unless the artist has made a statement most his or her intentions.

Generally, we can look at nonrepresentational art as the personal expression of an artist's subjective experience. Certain movements have described their intentions as an aim to evoke moods or emotions in the viewer. A good example are the expressionists of the early 20th century, who aimed to nowadays the earth solely from a subjective perspective , distorting it radically for emotional effect.

Nonrepresentational art has often been explored by artists equally a means to spiritual expression. Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter, printmaker, and art theorist, is one of the most famous 20th century artists and is generally considered the first important painter of modern abstract art. Equally an early modernist in search of new modes of visual expression and spiritual expression, he theorized (every bit did contemporary occultists and theosophists) that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. He posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition 7, 1913: Kandinsky is recognized as the father of modern abstract art in the 20th century.

Piet Mondrian's fine art was as well related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908 he became interested in the theosophical movement launched past Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who believed that it was possible to accomplish a cognition of nature more than profound than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian'south work for the residual of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge.

Iconography

Iconography is the scholarly study of the content of images, including identification, clarification, and estimation.

Learning Objectives

Define iconography and interpret or perform an iconographical analysis of an image

Key Takeaways

Primal Points

• Academic studies of iconography in painting emerged in the 19th century in France and Germany.
• Iconographical scholarship became particularly prominent in art history afterward 1940.
• In the 20th century, studies of iconography have become of interest to a broad public beyond the scholarly community.

Key Terms

• iconography:The branch of art history which studies the identification, clarification, and interpretation of the content of images.

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, clarification, and estimation of the content of images such as the subjects that are depicted, particulars of composition , and other elements that are singled-out from artistic fashion .

Iconography as an academic art historical discipline developed in the nineteenth century in the works of scholars such as Adolphe Napoleon Didron (1806–1867), Anton Heinrich Springer (1825–1891), and Émile Mâle (1862–1954). Christian religious art was the main focus of study throughout this catamenia, and French scholars were specially prominent. They looked back to earlier attempts to classify and organize subjects encyclopedically, every bit guides to understanding works of fine art, both religious and profane, in a more scientific way than the popular aesthetic arroyo of the fourth dimension. These early on contributions paved the way for encyclopedias, manuals, and other publications useful in identifying the content of fine art.

In early on twentieth-century Federal republic of germany, Aby Warburg (1866–1929) and his followers Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) elaborated the practice of identification and classification of motifs in images to using iconography every bit a ways of understanding meaning. Panofsky codified an influential approach to iconography in his 1939 Studies in Iconology, where he defined it as "the branch of the history of fine art which concerns itself with the field of study matter or pregnant of works of art, as opposed to class". The distinction he and other scholars drew between particular definitions of "iconography" (put but, the identification of visual content) and "iconology" (the analysis of the meaning of that content) has non been generally accepted, though it is still used by some writers.

While most iconographical scholarship remains highly dumbo and specialized, some analyses began to attract a much wider audience; for example, Panofsky'south theory (at present by and large out of favor with specialists) is that the writing on the rear wall in The Arnolfini Portrait past Jan van Eyck turned the painting into the record of a marriage contract. Holbein's The Ambassadors has been the subject of books for a general market with new theories as to its iconography; too as existence a double portrait, the painting contains a yet life of several meticulously rendered objects, the pregnant of which is the cause of much fence. The about notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work is the distorted skull which is placed in the bottom center of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective , some other invention of the Early Renaissance , is speculated to have been a reminder of death and mortality.

January van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434: The iconography in this work has historically been the subject of debate due to its many signifiers. Some scholars accept theorized that the painting was really a union contract due to the writing on the wall in the background.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/content/

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