A comparison and contrast between American and European art - Essay Example

A Comparison and Contrast between American and European Art Allentown Art Museum displays artistic creations from all over the world. The two paintings that caught my attention are "Madonna and child enthroned" by Jacopo Del Casentino and "Mr. Darlington's Still Life" by George Cope. "Madonna and child enthroned" is the only known work officially signed by Jacopo Del Casentino. The miniaturist piece was restored in 1992, and has since caused dispute about the date of the artist's work. Some historians date the painting around 1340, whereas recently it has been pushed back to 1325 by historian Miklos Boskovits. Casentino's Madonna and Child Enthroned is featured at the center panel of a miniature tabernacle triptych, which in total measures approximately 39 x 42 inches. Mary and Jesus are surrounded by four angels, as well as Saint Bernard and Saint John the Baptist. This panel measures 18 x 9 inches, and the texture is tempera on poplar wood. The painting both represents Gothic traits and traits that focus on humanism. The hierarchy of the figures in the paintings expresses religious symbolism - Mary and Jesus are above all else. Certain other qualities recall the Gothic style that was most often seen in Cimabue and Duccio's paintings. For instance, the Madonna appears larger than anything else in the triptych. Also, the divine halos surrounding the figures and the gold background of the painting are both indicative of the Gothic style. On the other hand, certain characteristics like Mary's protruding knees, drapery, and the symmetry and realistic features of the angels lend themselves to Casentino's interest in humanism. This piece is also reminiscent of Robert Campin's Merode Altarpiece without the humanistic symbolism. The similarity is that Casentino's could act as an altarpiece - the triptych fashioning portrays a continuous narrative where the baby Jesus and the crucified Jesus are shown in the collective piece. Mary also appears twice - once on the throne in the center panel, and then again on the right panel at the crucifixion, both times wearing the same drapery and red cloth shirt. The background behind the throne as well as in the other panels is very decorative and Gothic. The presence of Saint Bernard and Saint John the Baptist as well as the angels around the throne shows the significance of the enthroned Madonna and Child. The saints are drawn with prayer books in hand, and looking up at Mary and Jesus as the vantage point - the perspective draws to Jesus and the center of Mary's head. (http://yelenasarsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/jacopo-del-casentinos-madonna-and-child.html) Jacopo del Casentino, also known as Jacopo Landino, was a Florentine painter and miniaturist who lived during the fourteenth century. He was also one of the founders of the Academy of Saint Luke at Florence in 1349, which acted as a guild for painters and miniaturists like himself. Casentino specialized in small devotional altars commissioned for private worship. Along with artists such as Bernardo Daddi, Casentino helped popularize these altars throughout Italy. As with many of his contemporaries, he was influenced by the early master, Giotto (1267 - 1337), who Daddi was an apprentice of. Both Casentino and Daddi showed an influence from the Sienese style of painting in their works. It is noted that Casentino may have been in Giotto's workshop and was a pupil of another Giotto follower, Taddeo Gaddi (1300 - 1366). It has been mentioned that the later Gothic style Casentino painted in was also influenced by the Sienese painters Pietro Lorenzetti (1280 - 1348) and his brother Ambrogio (1290 - 1348). (http://yelenasarsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/jacopo-del-casentinos-madonna-and-child.html) (http://www.virtualuffizi.com/biography/Jacopo-del-Casentino.htm) George Cope (1855-1929) was an artist who stayed close to home. He began his career painting the lush Brandywine River Valley landscape in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and its wildlife and architecture. He later explored realism in highly detailed trompe l'oeil (literally translated, "fool-the-eye") and in still lifes of favorite objects from the homes of his neighbors and patrons. One of six brothers, Cope was born on his Quaker family's farm in East Bradford, near West Chester and Chadds Ford, about forty miles from Philadelphia. His mother, Lydia Eldridge Cope, was an accomplished artist; his father, Caleb, was a poet whose work was often published in the Daily Local News of West Chester. A tall, handsome, and soft-spoken young man, Cope excelled as a hunter, fisherman, and outdoorsman. Often occupied by sketching instead of studying, he quit school in 1873. At the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, Cope met German-born landscape painter Hermann Herzog (1832-1932), who became his lifelong friend and only teacher. The pair often took sketching and hiking trips in the Pennsylvania countryside. Cope's Landscape with Two Horses (1883; Chester County Historical Society) is very similar to Herzog's work in both composition and style. The brushwork is loose and feathery, the drawing firm, the composition well balanced, and the colors pure and realistic. Acting on an urge for adventure, Cope traveled to the Western frontier in 1876 and 1878. Small, precise pencil sketches are vivid souvenirs of the trips. Many of these sketches were given by local residents to the Chester County Historical Society. Philadelphia's lively art and social scene eventually attracted Cope to the city. Around 1880 he moved into a studio there to offer painting lessons and sell his own work. He focused on landscapes, sporting and hunting scenes, animal portraits, and local architectural subjects. In 1883 Cope married Theodosia Blair. After a wedding reception that he described as "splendid throughout" was held at the Mansion House in West Chester, the couple lived in a rented house on the outskirts of town. The following five years saw a steady production of paintings from Cope's West Chester studio. He began to sign his work Geo. (http://antiquesandfineart.com/articles/article.cfmrequest=516) Western art is the art of European Countries, and those parts of the world that have come to follow predominantly European cultural traditions such as the Americas. Written histories of Western art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. Parallel with these significant cultures, art of one form or another existed all over Europe, wherever there were people, leaving signs such as carvings, decorated artifacts and huge standing stones. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_art_history) Gothic art was a medieval art movement that lasted about 200 years. It began in France out of the Romanesque period in the mid-12th century, concurrent with Gothic architecture found in Cathedrals. By the late 14th century, it had evolved towards a more secular and natural style known as International Gothic, which continued until the late 15th century, where it evolved into Renaissance art. The primary Gothic art mediums were sculpture, panel painting, stained glass, fresco and illuminated manuscript. Gothic art told a narrative story through pictures, both Christian and secular. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art) Realism is a visual art style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. Realists render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects, all in verisimilitude. They tend to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms in favor of commonplace themes. Gustave Courbet is credited with coining the term, which often refers to the artistic movement, sometimes called naturalism, which began in the 1850s in France. Realism appears in art as early as 2400 BC in the city of Lothal in what is now India, and examples can be found throughout the history of art. In the broadest sense, realism in a work of art exists wherever something has been well observed and accurately depicted, even if the work as a whole does not strictly conform to the conditions of realism. For example, the proto-Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone brought a new realism to the art of painting by rendering physical space and volume far more convincingly than his Gothic predecessors. His paintings, like theirs, represented biblical scenes and the lives of the saints. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(visual_arts)) Trompe l'oeil is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three-dimensions, instead of actually being a two-dimensional painting. Although the phrase has its origin in the Baroque period, use of trompe l'oeil dates back much further. It was often employed in murals. Typical trompe l'oeil mural might depict a window, door, or hallway, intended to suggest a larger room. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe_l'oeil) Impressionism, a style of painting characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors, was practiced widely among American artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionism emerged as an artistic style in France in the 1860s. Major exhibitions of French impressionist works in Boston and New York in the 1880s introduced the style to the American public. Some of the first American artists to paint in an impressionistic mode, such as Theodore Robinson, did so in the late 1880s after visiting France and meeting with artists such as Claude Monet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Impressionism) Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic. Social Realism became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. This is not to be confused with Socialist Realism, the official USSR art form that institutionalized Joseph Stalin in 1934 and later allied Communist parties worldwide. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism) Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Synchromism is based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that by painting in color scales, their work could evoke musical sensations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchromism) American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. American scene painting is also known as Regionalism. After World War I many American artists rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and European influences such as those from the School of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt academic realism in depicting American urban and rural scenes. Much of American scene painting conveys a sense of nationalism and romanticism in depictions of everyday American life. During the 1930s, these artists documented and depicted American cities, small towns, and rural landscapes with a richness never seen before; some did so as a way to return to a simpler time away from industrialization whereas others sought to make a political statement and lent their art to revolutionary and radical causes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Regionalism) Abstract expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the USA, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, and highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic. Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionist's works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. Abstract art clearly implied expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, the unconscious and the mind. While the movement is closely associated with painting, and painters like Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and others, collagist Anne Ryan and sculpture and certain sculptors in particular were also integral to Abstract expressionism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Expressionist#Major_paintings_and_sculpture) American and European art has come a long way. American art has constantly struggled to break free from its origin that can be traced to European styles. Even though both have progressed independently, European art has always had its influence on American art. Bibliography "Jacopo Del Casentino's Madonna and Child Enthroned". Yelena's Art History Blog. 19 March 2008. 02 April 2009. "Jacopo Del Casentino - Biography". 02 April 2009. "George Cope - An Artist's Life". Gertrude Grace Sill. 02 April, 2009. "Gothic Art". 02 April 2009. "Realism (Visual Arts)". 02 April 2009. "American Scene Painting". 02 April 2009. "Abstract Expressionism". 02 April 2009. "Trompe_l'oeil". 02 April 2009. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe_l'oeil> "Synchromism". 02 April 2009. Read More