Why art matters module 2

Module 2
Art Illustrates
the Human
Experience

Works of art are
expressions of lived
human experience. To
understand art, one must
be concerned with
understanding the
experience from which
art grew, because art
reflects the diversity of
art traditions, which
evolved in societies from
widely differing cultures. Thomas Struth. Art Institute of Chicago
II, Chicago, 1990.

DEATH AND
SUFFERING
The Dying Gaul portrays a Gallic
warrior in his final moments, his
face contorted in pain as he falls
from a fatal wound to the chest.
The Dying Gaul was unearthed in
Rome in the gardens of the Villa
Ludovisi during excavations for
the villa’s foundation between
1621 and 1623.
The sculpture is a Roman copy
of a Greek bronze original
created in the third century BC to
commemorate the victory of the
king of Pergamon over the Gauls.
Dying Gaul, Roman, 1st or 2nd century AD
marble, 37 x 73 7/16 x 35 1/16 in.
Sovrintendenza Capitolina — Musei Capitolini,
Rome, Italy.

The image of the Dying Gaul has been well known since it
was discovered. The sculpture depicts a wounded warrior
propping up his body with his right hand. Blood is shown
dripping from the wound in his right side.
The metal ring around his neck, his full head of hair and
his mustache, indicate that he is a Gaul. The lack of a full
beard suggests that he is a leader.
Dying Gaul, Roman,
1st or 2nd century AD
Marble, 37 x 73 7/16 x
35 1/16 in. Detail

The figure is depicted as fallen on his oval
shield. Close to his body are his trumpet and
his sword. The sculpture depicts the death of
a warrior and acknowledges the cost of war.
Contemporary viewers connect with the
emotions of an ancient warrior through this
artwork.
Dying Gaul, Roman, 1st or 2nd
century AD.
Marble, 37 x 73 7/16 x 35 1/16 in.
Detail

Käthe Kollwitz around 1910. Photo:
Hänse Herrmann, Kollwitz Estate
©Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
Käthe Kollwitz
Throughout her entire career, Käthe
Kollwitz, focused on experiences of war
and death. The artist adopted
printmaking as her primary medium.
While her interest in printmaking and
sometimes her subject matter were
similar to the Expressionist painters in
Germany, she remained independent
from them.
While trained as a painter, Kollwitz was
a printmaker, and sculptor.
Sometimes drawing on religious
themes, Kollwitz's sculpture embody a
deep empathy with human suffering.

Käthe Kollwitz, 1867-1945, German
Death Seizes a Woman,1934
Crayon lithograph on paper.
RISD Museum, Providence, RI.
For the majority of her prints after 1920,
Kollwitz used lithography, a technique that
she believed worked well in
communicating the content of her work.
Her final print series, Death, is the
culminating expression of the artist’s
lifelong dialogue with the subject.
Her expressive draftsmanship and
restrained style contrasts with her earlier
lithographic technique, and creates an
extraordinary impact.

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers,
1849. Oil on canvas. 5ft x 8ft.
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
POVERTY
Gustave Courbet depicted road workers
wearing ripped clothing in this painting.
This painting is an accurate account
of the deprivation that was common
during the mid 19th century French rural
life. Courbet wanted to show what was
really occurring at the time.
The two stone breakers of different ages
symbolize the cycle of poverty. The
figures are painted in colors contrasting
the shadow of the hills behind them and
the small patch of blue in the upper right
ls to emphasize their plight .

Courbet added details to the painting add
a little more about their lives. Their
clothes are clearly worn and dirty.
A cooking pot, a loaf of bread and a
spoon are on the right of the painting,
sitting on an old cloth, showing that
there is little respite from their hard work.
On the left we see a basket for carrying
debris, with a scythe lying on the rocks
between the workers. This suggests that
the laborers are breaking the stones and
clearing the land as well.

Honoré Daumier, The Third-Class
Carriage, c. 1862. Oil on canvas.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City
THE PLIGHT OF URBAN POOR
In this painting Daumier depicts the
hardship and quiet determination of
third-class railway travelers in a
realistic manner.
These are working-class Parisians.
Daumier painted several versions of
this painting.
Third-class railway carriages were
crowded and dirty, with hard wooden
benches.

Franceso de Goya. The Third of May,
1808. Museo del Prado, Madrid
HORRORS OF
VIOLENCE
This painting was commissioned by
the provisional government of
Spain, to commemorate resistance
to the invasion of Spain by
Napoleon’s troops in 1808.
The painting depicts the horrors of
war. The focus is on one man,
illuminated in white light in the
middle of the painting, arms held out
to the sides, facing a French firing
squad. His companions have alerady
been executed.

FRANCESCO DE GOYA (1746-1828)
Francesco Goya’s work extended over a period of
more than 60 years, for he continued to draw and
paint until his 82nd year.
In 1814, when Ferdinand VII resumed the Spanish
throne, Goya painted two pictures to
commemorate Spanish resistance to French
occupation.
The first, entitled The Second of May, 1808,
portrays the Spanish uprising against Napoleon's
cavalry; the second, and more famous, Third of
May, 1808 depicts the French reprisals.

Honoré Daumier. Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril,
1834. Plate 24 of l'Association mensuelle.
July 1834. Lithograph. 14 5/16 x 21 11/16 in.
Metropolitan Museum. NY
HONORE DAUMIER
Rue Transnonain was the
grimmest scene that Daumier
ever created. It depicts the
assassination by the National
Guard of innocent citizens
during an uprisings in Paris in
April 1834.
Troops responded to
gunshots fired from the top-
floor windows at number 12,
rue Transnonain.
In response, troops went
through the building killing
and wounding residents.

This artwork sums up the violence of that night: the murder of an old
man, of a woman, and of a wounded man lying upon the body of a
little baby. This is a bloody page from the history the modern era.
This artwork is not a document. It was made to evoke the brutality of
the event. That is why Daumier depicted the stillness and silence of
death.
Government officials immediately confiscated the lithographic stone,
and tracked down the impressions of the print and destroyed them.
At the time Daumier published Rue Transnonain, he could face again
criminal charges, and imprisonment.
Daumier and his publisher already served six months in prison for
another artwork he did before he worked on the print, Rue
Transnonain. After Rue Transnonain, Daumier changed his focus to
social commentary.

Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of
Calais, 1884-86. Bronze. 6ft 10” high.
DISPAIR AND DEFIANCE
In 1884, the town council of Calais
commissioned Auguste Rodin to create a
monument commemorating the end of the
siege of 1346-47 laid by the English king
Edward III .
After conquering Calais, the English
agreed to accept the town’s surrender
without punishment if six prominent
citizens (burghers) would offer themselves
as permanent hostages.
Rodin depicted the internal struggle of
each man, with necks encircled by ropes,
clothed only in rough robes, walking
barefoot to deliver the keys of the town.

Auguste Rodin
French Sculptor
1840 - 1917
Rodin is considered the father of modern
sculpture.
His achievement as a sculptor was to create
sculpture that expresses the fleeting mobility of
the modern individual.
He made sculptures with rougher, more
unfinished surfaces, which better expressed
movement, the constant motion characteristic of
life in modern times.

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker
1880 (bronze cast in 1902)
The Thinker is the best known sculpture of
Rodin.
The Thinker represents modern man. He has a
strong in mind and body, but he is lonely and
doubtful.
Although he is seated and deeply in thought, the
angles of the body create a dynamic pose that
gives him a sense of movement.
Over fifty casts were made of this sculpture,
which are installed in museums around the
world, making it one of Rodin's most
recognizable works.

VINCENT VAN GOGH:
MISSUNDERSTOOD GENIUS
Born on March 30, 1853, van Gogh is considered the
greatest Dutch painter and draughtsman after
Rembrandt. In May 1889 he went at his own request
into an asylum at St Rémy, near Arles.
During the year he spent there he completed 150
paintings and drawings, including Starry Night.
In the last few years of his life his style became
bolder, which was interpreted as a sign of madness.
But there was intentionality in the technique he
created to support his imagination.
In his last letter to his brother Theo, found on the
artist at his death, he had written: "Well, my own
work, I am risking my life for it, and my reason has
half foundered because of it."
Vincent Van Gogh. Self-
portrait dedicated to Paul
Gauguin, September
1888. Oil on canvas,
Fogg Art Museum

Vincent van Gogh. The Night Café
September 1888.
Van Gogh wrote many letters to his
brother Theo van Gogh, and often
included details of his latest work. The
artist wrote his brother more than once
about The Night Café.
In August 1888 the artist told his brother
in a letter:
“Today I am probably going to begin on
the interior of the cafe where I have a
room, by gas light, in the evening. It is
what they call here a cafe de nuit (they
are fairly frequent here), staying open all
night. Night prowlers can take refuge
there when they have no money to pay
for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken
in.”

Van Gogh told his brother about painting the interior of the night
café, where he had slept among the night prowlers of Arles for three
nights. On September 9, 1888 he wrote Theo:
“I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means
of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a
green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps
with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and
contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little
sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue.
The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for
instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the
counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the
landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or
pale luminous green.”

Vincent Van Gogh
Starry Night over the Rhone
Van Gogh's emotional state highly
affected his artistic work .
He had a deep appreciation for
night, as he wrote to his brother
Theo : "It often seems to me that
the night is much more alive and
richly colored than the day.“

Vincent van Gogh. Starry Night.
Oil on canvas. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 ¼ inches
Museum of Modern Art, NY.
Van Gogh painted his most
memorable painting, Starry
Night (1889), while he was a
patient at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole
Asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-
Provence, France.
When he looked at the night sky,
he wrote to Theo in August 1888,
he saw "the mysterious
brightness of a pale star in the
infinite."
He utilized impasto technique
with bold symbolic colors and
vigorous, impulsive, and
expressive brushwork.

Vincent Van Gogh. Wheat
Field Under Threatening
Skies, 1890. Oil on canvas.
Vincent van Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam
Wheatfield with Crows was his last painting. In it he expressed his emotions
loudly and clearly as in a finale that can only be called apocalyptic. Van Gogh
shot himself soon after painting it and died two days later.

Van Gogh spent most of the last two years of his life in asylums, first
in Arles and then in Saint-Rémy. In a tremendous burst of intense
activity during the last 70 days of his life, he painted 70 canvases.
He painted what he could see through the bars of his window . He
wrote to his brother Theo from Saint-Rémy in 1889: "Life passes like
this, time does not return, but I am dead set on my work, for just this
very reason, that I know the opportunities of working do not return.
Especially in my case, in which a more violent attack may forever
destroy my power to paint.“
He sold only one painting during his lifetime (Red Vineyard at Arles),
and was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his
fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence on Expressionism,
Fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in
many other aspects of 20th-century art.

EXISTENTIALIST ANGST
The philosophy of Existentialism was influential in the
in post-war art. Themes such as trauma, anxiety, and
alienation were pervasive.
EDVARD MUNCH
The artist was born on December 12, 1863 in Løten,
Norway. His childhood was impacted by the death of
his mother and sister from tuberculosis as wells as
his father’s mental illness.
Munch began his career painting in an academic style.
Later his work focused on subjectivity, mood,
emotion, or memory. He grappled with dark, unsettling
themes like sickness, death, depression and
alienation.
Edvard Munch
Self-Portrait. Between the
Clock and the Bed. 1940-
1943. Munch Museum,
Oslo, Norway

The Sick Child is the title of a group of six
paintings and a number of lithographs,
and etchings Much created between 1885
and 1926. They depict a moment before
the death of his older sister Johanne
Sophie (1862–1877) from tuberculosis at
age 15.
In all six versions Sophie is sitting up,
propped by a large white pillow, looking
towards a curtain likely intended as a
symbol of death.
The older woman, dressed in black, seems
to comfort her, but she is grief-stricken
evident in how her head is bowed.
Edvard Munch, The Sick Child
1885–86. The original version.
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo.

Edward Munch, The Dance of Life. 1899-1900
Oil on canvas. 49 1/2 x 75 in. National Gallery,
Oslo.
In the 1890s Munch created
an ambitious multi-canvas
series called The Frieze of
Life .
The twenty-two canvases
Munch painted extended his
obsessive exploration of
mortality. The series was
never completed.
The Frieze of Life included
Munch's iconic image of
modern angst, The Scream ;
as with many of his
paintings, he created several
versions of it.

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1910, Tempera
and casein on board, 66 x 83 cm. The
Munch Museum, Oslo
Munch greatly influenced the course of
twentieth-century art and in particular, the
development of Expressionism.
Munch developed a simplified language of
bold color and sinuous line to express his
view of human suffering.
Beneath a yellow, orange and red sky, an
androgynous figure stands on a bridge.
Beneath the bridge there is a torrent of
ominous water.
The figure holds up both hands on either
side of his skull-like head, and unleashes a
scream.

Following a nervous breakdown in 1908
and subsequent rehabilitation, Munch
largely turned away from images of
private despair and anguish and created
more colorful, optimistic paintings.
Edvard Munch, Children in the Street.
1915, oil on canvas.
Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway

Francis Bacon
The artist painted some of the most iconic images of
wounded and traumatized humanity. He is one of the
most recognized artists of figurative art in the 1940s
and 1950s.
Bacon was Influenced by Surrealism, film,
photography, and the Old Masters. He portrayed his
subjects distorted, isolated, and tormented by
existential dilemmas.
The scene in Painting, 1946, is a butcher's shop with a
carcass which - like the Rembrandt carcass’
(Slaughtered Ox) in the Louvre - is also a headless
Crucifixion. In front of this, under an umbrella, is a
figure which seems to be that of a politician or even a
Pope addressing an audience.
Francis Bacon, Painting,
1946. Oil on canvas. 6’ 6”
× 4’ 4”, The Museum of
Modern Art, NY

Figure Study II, led to the Great butcher's shop
image Painting, 1946, in its palette and in its use
of an open umbrella as a dominant image.
The open mouth of the woman, conveys in
subtler style the mood of anguished tragedy set,
incongruously, in an anonymous foyer to a
private hell.
Bacon’s early years in London and Dublin
during World War I left Francis Bacon with a
lifelong awareness of human suffering and the
violence of everyday life.
Following World War II, as painters were
increasingly drawn to an art of abstraction,
Bacon boldly conveyed a sense of postwar
existential despair though his distortion of the
human figure.
Francis Bacon, Figure Study II
Oil on Canvas, 1945 – 1946.
Huddersfield Art Gallery

Francis Bacon
Study after
Velazquez's Portrait of
Pope Innocent X, 1953
Velazquez, Portrait of
Innocent X, c. 1650. Oil on
canvas, 141 x 119 cm
Galleria Doria-Pamphili,
Rome
Bacon established his
mature style in the late
1940s
He borrowed from:
depictions of motion in film
photography, (studies of
figures in action).
Old Masters, particularly
Diego Velazquez's Portrait
of Pope Innocent X (c.1650)
which Bacon used for his
own famous series of
"screaming popes.“

Still from Sergei Eisenstein’s film
The Battleship Potemkin, 1925
Bacon borrowed from Eisenstein’s film
The Battleship Potemkin, which Bacon
used for his series of "screaming popes.“
This image inspired screams and anguish
in other of his paintings.

Study for Portrait V is the fifth of eight variations painted in 1953.
It began as a portrait study of art critic David Sylvester and evolved
into a satirical reinterpretation of Diego Velasquez's "Portrait of
Pope Innocent X" (1650) as a grotesque, godless being.
The menacing grimace and rubbed-out eyes convey a sardonic,
soulless creature more indicative of the "innocent" pope's corrupt
nature.
Gold paint strokes suggest three-dimensional space and define a
throne that entraps the figure as he floats in a dark void.

Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait V &
VI, 1953
Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait I & II,
1953
Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait III & IV,
1953
Francis Bacon
Studies for Portrait VII &
VIII, 1953

Conceived as a shifting sequence of images, Bacon's serial format
was influenced by Eadward Muybridge's nineteenth-century
photographic studies of figures in motion.
Related canvases from 1951 present a similar papal figure emitting
an anguished scream that intensifies even more the sense of terror,
the absence of God, and the violence of human existence conveyed
in "Study for Portrait V.“
Perhaps Bacon's most famous image - the so-called 'screaming
pope' in Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) -
became the touchstone for the longest series of paintings in his
career, the Papal Portraits of 1953.
This series of eight papal portraits was painted during a period of
just a few weeks in the summer of 1953,

LOST IN THE WORLD’S IMENSITY
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor and painter known
as a surrealist. He explored the reality of the human figure.
Giacometti was primarily concerned with reporting the
precise visual perception of objects and their relationship to
the enveloping space.
He reduced form to its essence that appears to comment on
the nature of humankind in the contemporary world.
The artist studied Egyptian and Renaissance art and used
them to determine the value and position of man in the 20th
century. Giacometti tried to show the downfall
(dehumanization) of mankind.
Alberto Giacometti
Head of a Man on a
Rod/ 1947, Bronze.
21-3⁄4”high.
Private collection

After the war Giacometti’s sculptures that summed
up his Existentialist views. His figurative
representations reflect the alienation and anxiety of
the period.
He employs the figure as a symbol of suffering and
post-war trauma. Although he created paintings and
drawings, Giacometti is best known for his sculpture.
Alberto Giacometti. Man
Pointing, 1947. Bronze.
5′ 10″ x 3′ 5″ x 1′ 4″

Giacometti’s sculpture embody
the existential doubts of the
period after the World War II.
Jean-Paul Sartre recognized
the existential tendencies in
Giacometti’s sculpture.
Alberto Giacometti. The Forest (Composition
with Seven Figures and One Head). 1950.
Painted bronze. 22 × 24 × 19-1⁄4”. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

PAINTING THE PAIN
Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits show pain and
passion. She is celebrated in Mexico for her
depiction of the female experience.
Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly
died in a bus accident as a teenager in which she
suffered multiple fractures. She started to focus
heavily on painting while recovering in a body
cast.
Life experience is a common theme in Kahlo's art.
The devastation to her body from the bus accident
is shown in stark detail in The Broken Column.
Kahlo is depicted split down the middle, with her
spine presented as a broken decorative column.
Her skin is dotted with nails. She is also fitted with
a surgical brace.
Frida Kahlo, The Broken
Column, 1944. Oil on masonite.

Frida Kahlo typically uses the
visual symbolism of physical
pain in an attempt to understand
emotional suffering.
This painting was completed
shortly after her divorce from
Diego Rivera. In this double
portrait Kahlo shows Frida's two
different personalities. One is the
traditional Frida in Tehuana
costume, with a broken heart,
sitting next to an independent,
modern dressed Frida.
Prior to Kahlo's efforts, the
subject has not be used by a
woman.
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939
Oil on canvas, 68.3 in × 68 in
Museo de Arte Moderna, Mexico City

Louis Bourgeois
Spider 1996. Bronze # 26.
CONFRONTING THE PAST
Louise Bourgeois was born in 1911 in
Paris. She was the middle child,
between her sister and her brother. This
position gave her a sense of instability.
Unresolved conflicts and ambiguous
memories from childhood were retained
as memories of a family in which the
mother was the protective figure.
The father, the authoritarian figure,
cheated her mother with Saddie, the
family's tutor.

The family home, the relationships among the members of the
family, and the child's anguish make up the "childhood
motivations" which are the basis of Louise Bourgeois’ art.
She entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics in 1932 but
turned to art the following year, enrolling at several art schools,
including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in addition to
apprenticing in artists' studios.
She emigrated to New York, in 1938, and continued her studies at
the Art Students League. In 1982 the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, organized a retrospective.
Her father had a tapestry restoration business, a craft which
acquires a symbolic meaning in her work. Unlike her father's
business of mending tapestries, a spider weaves its web. The
huge Spider signifies labor, giving, protection and foresight. The
potency of the web is in either welcoming or entangling us as if
we were prey.

Bourgeois’ sculptures of spiders
define the late artist’s career. Some
of the spiders are 30 high and
menacingly loom over viewers’
heads.
Perhaps influenced in part by her
early years at the tapestry
restoration business, Bourgeois
once explained that she chose the
spider as a subject because its
traits reminded her of her mother.
“She was deliberate, clever, patient,
soothing, reasonable, dainty,
subtle, indispensable, neat, and as
useful as a spider,” the artist said.
Installation view of a Louise Bourgeois
exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris
in 2008.

Grant Wood, American Gothic,
1930. Oil on beaverboard. The
Art Institute of Chicago
LIFE IN THE HEARTLAND
After World War I, many American artists
rejected the European influences. Instead they
adopted realism in depicting American urban
and rural scenes.
Grant Wood adopted the style of precise realism
of 15th-century northern European artists, and
he supper-imposed it on his native Iowa,
providing the artist with his subject matter.
Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one of the
most familiar images of 20th-century American
art. The house depicted in the painting is located
in Eldon, Iowa.

American Gothic depicts a farmer and his spinster daughter
posing before their house, whose gabled window and tracery, in
the American gothic style, inspired the painting's title.
Wood was accused of creating in this work a satire on the
intolerance and rigidity that the insular nature of rural life can
produce; he denied the accusation.
American Gothic is an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic
and virtues that he believed dignified the Midwestern character.
With the success of American Gothic, Wood received the
validation of his talent that he’d been seeking all his life.
He was declared the founder of a new school of art, called
Regionalism, and he was quick to embrace it.

THE SUNNY SIDE OF
TECHNOLOGY
Fernand Léger built his reputation on being a
Cubist. His style varied considerably from decade
to decade, ranging from figuration to complete
abstraction.
His style was consistently graphic, favoring
primary colors, depicting humans or abstract
shapes in action to convey the movement of daily
life.
Léger understood the Cubist concept of freeing
the painter from a responsibility to realism, yet he
was more interested in materialism than other
Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso.
Fernand Léger, Propellers
1918. Oil on canvas.
Museum of Modern Art, NY

Léger's Tubist style was
influential on many abstract
painters and sculptors. His
legacy lies more in his
attempt to make art that
"everyone can understand,"
one of the artist's favorite
expressions.
His bold use of color in
combination with the idea of
art for the masses inspired
many Pop artists.
His belief that art unifies
people may have influenced
community-based art as
activism movements, such as
Fluxus.
Fernand Leger.
The City, 1919, oil on canvas. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York

Fernand Léger, La partie de cartes (Soldiers Playing at
Cards), 1917, oil on canvas,
Léger's work captures
the essence of modern
life, and yet he also
used painting as an
analytical means of
slowing down a fast-
paced society.
Léger's experiences in
World War I had a
significant effect on his
work. He was mobilized
in August 1914 for
service in the French
Army, and spent two
years at the front in
Argonne.

Following World War I, Leger
concentrated more and more on
urban and machine imagery.
He favored sharply delineated, flat
shapes, un-modeled color areas, and
combinations of human and machine
forms.
After 1930, Leger's style favored
precisely delineated and monumental
forms modeled in planes and set in
shallow space, and he concentrated
on depicting scenes of proletarian
life, such as his Great Parade (1954;
Guggenheim Museum, New York
City).
Fernand Léger.
The Great Parade, 1954. Oil on canvas,
117 3/4 x 157 1/2 inches.
Solomon Guggenheim Museum

HYPER-REALISM
Duane Hanson's main interest was in
recreating the human form in a hyper-
realist style.
Pop art of the 1960s influenced his
naturalistic style. By 1967 he had begun
casting sculptures in molds created
directly from the bodies of human models.
Since the early 1970’s Duane Hanson has
been making impressively lifelike
sculptures accomplished through a
complex process of casting from live
models, recreated fibreglass resin.
Duane Hanson. Tourists. 1988. Auto
body filler with mixed media.
Life size.

Duane Hanson. Shopper, 1970.
polyester and fibreglass, polychromed in oil,
with accessories life size
Hanson used real clothes, wigs and other
accessories, to produce illusions of everyday
life. From the beginning, he chose to
concentrate on questions of social identity.
From the 1960’s, his work focused on
representations of the working class and of the
socially marginalized.
Hanson’s sculptures
imply a sense of narrative that gives an added
life to his depictions, and confront the viewer
with immediate questions about the nature of
the human condition.

Duane Hanson. Supermarket
Shopper. 1970. Auto body filler with
mixed media. Life size.
Hanson selected working-class people
going about their business, and
transformed them into highly complex
works of art.
He gave these generic people an
identity, highlighting their societal roles.
Hanson is recognized as one of the
most accomplished hyper-real sculptors
ever.

KIENHOLZ AND THE AMERICAN
WAY OF LIFE
Edward Kienholz is well known for his installation
art. His work is an indictment of contemporary
life. He was born in Fairfield, Washington, and
grew up on a farm, learning carpentry and
mechanical skills in his youth. After he married,
the fifth time, he collaborated with his wife Nancy
on the installations.
In 1960 he started creating free-standing, large-
scale environmental installations. Kienholz
istallations confront the viewer with questions
about human existence and the inhumanity of
twentieth-century society.
Ed and Nancy Kienholz
The Soup Course at the She-
She Café, 1982

Ed Kienholz, State Hospital, 1966. Mixed
Media. Interior (left) and exterior (right).
This artwork is based on Kienholz’
experience working in a mental hospital in
the 1950s

In The Wait (1964-1965), Kienholz depicts
the themes of old age and death.
An old woman constructed with animal
bones sits in an antique chair. A glass jar
containing a faded photograph serves as
her head.
The domestic comforts surrounding her
(an old lamp, a braided rug, a lapped cat,
and a sewing basket on the floor, a
collection of old family photographs
representing her past sitting on the table
to the right) point to a life that has already
passed. The seated woman must now
await the inevitability of death.
The theme of death is juxtaposed with the
inclusion of a live bird in the cage.
Edward Kienholz
The Wait, 1964. Mixed media.

Edward Kienholz is buried
in the front seat of his
brown 1940 Packard
Coupe, a dollar bill and a
deck of cards in his
pocket, a bottle of Chianti
and the ashes of his dog
Smash in the seat beside
him.
Kienholz’s art was critical
against the Vietnam war,
the treatment of Native
Americans and of the
mentally ill, against US TV
culture, the power and big
business.

OLDENBURG:
MONUMENTALIZING THE
EVERYDAY
Claes Oldenburg was born January 28,
1929, in Stockholm. His father was a
diplomat, and the family lived in the
United States and Norway before settling
in Chicago in 1936.
From 1946 to 1950, Oldenburg studied
literature and art history at Yale
University. From 1950 to 1954, he studied
art at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In December 1953 Oldenburg became an
American citizen. In 1956, he moved to
New York.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van
Bruggen. Giant Hamburger. Undated
Mixed media

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van
Bruggen. Floor Cake, Undated
Mixed media
In 1959, the Judson Gallery exhibited a
series of Oldenburg’s artworks, ranging
from monstrous human figures to
everyday objects, made from and papier-
maché
In 1961, he opened The Store in his studio,
where he recreated the environment of
neighborhood shops. He made familiar
objects made out of plaster, reflecting
American society’s consumerism.
Most of the large-scale projects Oldenburg
made with the collaboration of Coosje van
Bruggen, whom he married in 1977.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje
van Bruggen.
Clothespin. 1976. Cor-Ten Steel
Oldenburg created a series of
large-scale public sculptures far
too large for a gallery.
From immense ice cream cones
to colossal clothespins, each one
monumentalizes the everyday in
Oldenburg’s signature tongue-in-
cheek style.

Claes Oldenburg. Knife Ship II,
1986. Steel, aluminum, wood;
painted with polyurethane
enamel.
Closed, without oars: 7 ft. 8 in.
x 10 ft. 6 in. x 40 ft. 5 in.
Extended, with oars:
26 ft. 4 in. x 31 ft. 6 in. x 82 ft.
11 in. height with large blade
raised: 31 ft. 8 in.
Width with blades extended:
82 ft. 10 in. Museum of
Contemporary Art Los Angeles

Why art matters module 2

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Why art matters module 2