Academic literature on the topic 'Still-life painting, American'

Still life as an independent painting genre in Chinese fine art was formed in the second half of the XX century under the strong influence, first of all, of Western European and Russian, and then American art. This relatively short period of time includes several periods at once, in which one or another influence dominated. However, it was the integration of the ideas and principles of foreign art schools that allowed Chinese masters to develop those features of the artistic and figurative language that determined the features of the genre of still life in the space of modern art. The object of the article is the process of development of Chinese still life in the second half of the twentieth century, the subject is a set of expressive and artistic means used by Chinese artists to create a still life under the influence of foreign artistic trends. This article aims to determine the place and features of the genre of still life in the works of Chinese painters of the second half of the XX century, as well as to characterize the conformity of this genre to the trends of Russian and Soviet, as well as European art. The study concluded that this genre received rapid development in the second half of the XX century, which occurred under continuous foreign artistic influence. The occupation of a strong position in the space of Chinese art by still life and the formation of its original character with national specifics occurred at the end of the twentieth century.

The arrival of dozens of plants and animals from America after the Europeans’ encounter with this continent attracted attention from the most diverse fields of knowledge. Doctors and botanists, for example, devoted hundreds of pages to these exotic species. But the world of the arts was not alien to their arrival and throughout the Modern Age, paintings from all over Europe were populated with sunflowers, turkeys or macaws. A good example of this can be found in the collections of the Prado Museum, where American flora and fauna found a place not only in still-life painting, but also in works of an allegorical, mythological or religious nature, acquiring in each of them interesting connotations that we will analyse throughout this paper. La llegada de decenas de plantas y animales procedentes de América tras el encuentro de los europeos con este continente atrajo la atención desde los más diversos campos del saber. Médicos o botánicos, por ejemplo, dedicaron cientos de páginas a estas exóticas especies. Pero el mundo de las artes no fue en absoluto ajeno a su llegada y a lo largo de la edad moderna, cuadros de toda Europa fueron poblándose de girasoles, pavos o guacamayos. Un buen ejemplo de ello lo encontramos en las colecciones del Museo del Prado, donde la flora y la fauna americanas encontraron un hueco no solo en bodegones, sino también en obras de carácter alegórico, mitológico o religioso, adquiriendo en cada una de ellas interesantes connotaciones que analizaremos a lo largo de este artículo.

The arrival of dozens of plants and animals from America after the Europeans’ encounter with this continent attracted attention from the most diverse fields of knowledge. Doctors and botanists, for example, devoted hundreds of pages to these exotic species. But the world of the arts was not alien to their arrival and throughout the Modern Age, paintings from all over Europe were populated with sunflowers, turkeys or macaws. A good example of this can be found in the collections of the Prado Museum, where American flora and fauna found a place not only in still-life painting, but also in works of an allegorical, mythological or religious nature, acquiring in each of them interesting connotations that we will analyse throughout this paper. La llegada de decenas de plantas y animales procedentes de América tras el encuentro de los europeos con este continente atrajo la atención desde los más diversos campos del saber. Médicos o botánicos, por ejemplo, dedicaron cientos de páginas a estas exóticas especies. Pero el mundo de las artes no fue en absoluto ajeno a su llegada y a lo largo de la edad moderna, cuadros de toda Europa fueron poblándose de girasoles, pavos o guacamayos. Un buen ejemplo de ello lo encontramos en las colecciones del Museo del Prado, donde la flora y la fauna americanas encontraron un hueco no solo en bodegones, sino también en obras de carácter alegórico, mitológico o religioso, adquiriendo en cada una de ellas interesantes connotaciones que analizaremos a lo largo de este artículo.

Igor Rončević has been painting for a very long time with the consciousness that his painterly signature can be constructed from a series of disparate fragments, and so his collage paintings are composed of elements or stylistic details thanks to which his canvas has become a place where ambivalent worlds meet - an ntersection of their paths. Rončević is therefore, a painter of ludic individualism, but, at the same time, painter with wide erudition and above all, a curious pirit, who, in a unique way - in different clusters of itations - applies and joins together experiences from he entire history of art. In his works we have for some ime observed the meetings of some of at first sight rreconcilable contrasts - the experiences of Pop art, European and American abstraction, experiences of gestural and lyrical provenance, different traces and tyles of figuration... All this heterogeneous material has been relativized in his interpretation, often even in blasphemous combinations; in a conspicuously easy and organic way, these combinations merge into a unique whole consisting of forms and meanings which are difficult to decipher. Analysis of Rončević’s paintings reveals the absence of a specific rational system that accumulates the building blocks of a painting - a mental landscape - but not the absence of a peculiar talent for creating compositional balance in a painting.The basic building block in the cycle Dulčić’s fragments is the line - stripes, that is linear, ribbon-like shapes, curved lines which meander on the surface of the canvas, and in the painted area, lines freely applied with a finger in fresh paint. The basic ludic element is colour, and the cartography of the canvas is a road with innumerable directions. The painter, treating the surface of the canvas as a field of total action, creates networks of interlacing multicoloured verticals, lively blue, blue-green and brown hues, coloured without an apparent system or principle, and also of varying width but, despite the seemingly limited starting points of his painting, he creates situations rich in interesting shifts and intriguing pictorial and colouristic happenings. The painter’s main preoccupation is the interaction of ‘neon’ colours (obviously a reference to the twentieth-century’s ‘neon’ enthusiasts), which has been achieved with a simple composition consisting of a knot of interwoven ribbons of intense colours which belong to a different chromatic register in each painting. Streams of complementary or contrasting colours, which spread out across the painted field like the tributaries of a river, subject to confluence, adopting features of the neighbouring colour, sharing the light and darkness of a ‘neon’. Although the impression implies the opposite, the application of colours, their touching and eventual interaction are strictly controlled by the skill of a great colourist. Dulčić’s fragments display Rončević’s fascinating power of unexpected associative perception. The painter now reaches for the excess of colour remaining on his palette from the work on previous paintings. He applies the colour to the canvas with a spatula in a relief impasto, and he revives the dried background with a lazure glaze of a chosen colour. On a saturated but still obviously ‘neon’ grid, the painter - evenly, like a collage detail - applies islands of open colour on the surface of the painting, which he finally paints with a brush, applying vertical white lines over the colour. These shapes of an associative and metaphorical nature are an integral part of the semantic scaffolding of composition but, without particular declarative frameworks and associative attributes, we can never precisely say what they actually represent although they are reminiscent of many things, such as seeds, bacteria, cellular microcosm, unstable primitive forms of life, the macrocosm of the universe, the structures of crystals, technical graphs, calligraphy, secret codes... The linear clarity of the drawing makes motifs concrete and palpable, possessing volume, in fact, possessing bulging physicality. In new paintings, the personal sign of the artist, which arrived in the painting from the activity of the conscious and the unconscious, has been replaced with small shapes, most similar to an oval, which look like separate pieces attached to the surface of the painting and which are reminiscent of specific painterly and artistic tendencies. Their monochrome surfaces are filled with verticals which are particles of the rational or, to put it better, from the constructivist stylistic repertoire, reminiscent, for example, of Daniel Buren’s verticals. Two divergent components - the abstract and the rational - stylistically and typologically separate, but chronologically parallel - pour into an evocative encounter which reveals a nostalgia towards two-dimensional painting. Experiences of posters and graphic design, gestural abstraction, abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction and everything else that can be observed in this cycle of paintings are a homage to global modern painting, while the islands on the paintings pay tribute to the constructivist section of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The contents of Rončević’s paintings are also reminiscent of the rhythmicality of human figures in Dulčić’s representations of the events on Stradun, town squares, beaches, dances... In addition, to Rončević, as a Mediterranean man - in his formative years - Dulčić was an important painter and, if we persist in searching for formal similarities in their ‘handwritings’, we will find them in the hedonism of painterly matter and the sensuality of colour, luxuriant layers, the saturation of impasto painting, gestural vitality, but mostly in the Mediterranean sensibility, the Mediterranean sonority of colour, their solarity, the southern light and virtuosity of their metiérs. Like Dulčić, Rončević is also re-confirmed as a painter of impulses, of lush, luscious and extremely personalized matter, of layers of pigments, of vehement and moveable gestures, of fluid pictorialism…* * *Let us also say in conclusion that Rončević does not want to state, establish or interpret anything but to incessantly reveal possibilities, their fundamental interchangeability and arbitrariness, and following that, a general insecurity. With the skill of an experienced master painter, he also questions relationships with eclecticism and the aesthetics of kitsch; for example, he explores how far a painter can go into ornamentalization, decorativeness and coquetry without falling into the trap of kitsch but to maintain regularly the classy independence of a multilayered artifact and to question the very stamina of painting. He persistently reveals loyalty to the traditional medium of painting, the virtuosity of his métier and a strong individual stamp, strengthening his own position as a peculiar and outstandingly cultivated painter, but he also exhibits the inventiveness which makes him both different and recognizable in a series of similar painting adventures.

The end of the XIXth — beginning of the XXth centuries is a special period in the history of world art culture, characterized by the emergence of such trends as modernism, post-impressionism, avant-gardism, abstractionism, cubism, surrealism and many others. The motto of XXth-century art was "Art into Life". Often new trends became a response to the demand of the mass consumer. One of them was the art of performance. Appearing as a rejection of traditional practices of painting, sculpture and theater, performance organically incorporated wellknown and new approaches and technologies that caused an alternative way of working with space and time. It should be noted that historiography focuses on materials that explore the origins of performance and installation on a global scale. The most significant are the works by American, Western European and Polish authors. At the same time, the historiographic review showed a lack of a large scientific heritage of Russian artists in the field of performance: the process of forming modern art criticism, which would reflect the later history of performance than the first half of the XXth century, is still out of the researchers' sight.

After a five-month sojourn in Rome, the author Henry James departed with “an acquired passion for the place.” The year was 1873, and he wrote eloquently of his ardor, expressing appreciation for the beauty in the “solemn vistas” of the Vatican, the “gorgeous” Gesù church, and the “wondrous” Villa Madama. Such were the impressions of a Bostonian who spent much of his adult life in Europe. By contrast, in June of 1885, the young Boston architect Herbert Langford Warren wrote to his brother about how he was “glad to be out of Italy.” He had just concluded a four-month tour there. He had also visited England and France, and he was convinced that the architecture and sculpture of those countries were superior to what he had seen in Italy, although he admired Italian Renaissance painting. When still in Rome, he told his brother how disagreeable he found the “Renaissance architecture in Italy contemporary with Michael Angelo and later under Palladio and Vignola,” preferring the work of English architects Inigo Jones and Wren. Warren appreciated some aspects of the Italian buildings of the 15th and early 16th centuries, but he considered the grandeur and opulence of later Renaissance architecture especially distasteful.

From the Publisher: Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, TheForest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuringboth real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisansliving and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as ThomasCole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are wellknown,while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths orgo their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For AlexanderNemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, thefoliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions ofthe people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs,The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

On several occasions during the late 1860s, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe exhorted readers to adorn their homes with chromolithographs, color prints which reproduced original oil-paintings or, less often, depicted images created specifically for the print medium. In her 1869 domestic advice manual, The American Woman's Home, co-authored with her sister Catharine Beecher, Stowe described chromolithographs (or “chromos,” as they were commonly called) as essential components of a properly embellished home interior. In proposing a hypothetical budget devoted to parlor furnishings, the authors recommended that almost one-fourth of the total be allocated to lithographic reproductions of “really admirable pictures” by some of “America's best artists.” Stowe's advocacy of chromos also appeared in the promotional publications of L. Prang & Company, one of the country's largest publishers of these images. The short-lived quarterly Prang's Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art (published in five issues from January 1868 to April 1869) printed a letter in which Stowe thanked Louis Prang for sending her several free chromolithographs. After praising the “beautiful objects,” Stowe concluded her note with the kind of testimonial Prang no doubt had been seeking when he sent her the complimentary items: “Be assured I shall neglect no opportunity of proving my sympathy with your so charming and beautiful mission, and bringing it to everyone's notice, so far as I can.” And, though it is impossible to know what exact role Stowe's promotions played in the overall sale of chromos, it is clear that she aligned herself with a hot commodity: from 1840 to 1900, chromolithographs in America sold by the millions.

From the Publisher: Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are well-known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?

Abstract The respect for the fact, whether object or place, that characterizes so much American art might easily be mistaken for the famous—or infamous— American materialism. But Emerson, like the medieval thinkers, saw the fact as the “end or last issue of spirit,” and one may speculate, therefore, on the reasons why conceptual realism in America should resemble the late Gothic painting of Jan van Eyck. Originating with Copley, this conceptual mode was inherited by the luminist landscape painters and by a still-life tradition extending almost without interruption or change from Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825) at the beginning of the century to William Michael Harnett (1848–92) at the end. Much American art of the late eighteenth century and of the nineteenth century can in fact be seen as still life, whether a portrait by Copley or a landscape by Lane.

Abstract Fai,field Porter’s was one of the most unusual careers in the American art of his time, for it was a career haunted by a sense of belatedness. The advantages he enjoyed in his early life-an elite education in the best schools, European travel, a family that supported his vocation, and a wide acquaintanceship with men of talent and accomplishment in many fields-had the paradoxical effect of postponing the development of his own artistic gifts. When he first emerged as a painter whose work commanded attention and criticism in the 19Sos, he was a generation older than most of the painters he exhibited with at the TI’bor de Nagy Gallery in New York and the poets who then formed the principle circle of his admirers. Beyond that circle, he still found himself an odd man out on the art scene as a painter who was too traditional for the modernists and too modern for the traditionalists. It would be another twenty years before he began to receive the critical and public acclaim that were his due. Even as late as the 1970s, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art characterized his work as “too tame” to be of interest to the museum. It wasn’t until 1984, nearly a decade after hz’s death, that he began to attain the status of an American classic with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “Fai, field Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction.” By that time, I had been writing about and praising Porter’s paintings for nearly a quarter of a century, mainly in the New York Times.

The Central and Northern Plains are home to many of the peoples popularly considered quintessential Native Americans. First brought to the widespread attention of Europeans and Euro-Americans as the ‘noble savages’ of nineteenth-century romantic paintings and travel accounts, they were later stereotyped in dime novels and Hollywood movies as an inconvenient—and ultimately removed—barrier to white expansion and settlement. Only relatively recently has that image given way to the more rounded, if still over-romanticized, one seen in films like Dances with Wolves. However, the extrapolation of Plains equestrian groups as a generalization for all Native Americans is not the reason to focus on them here. rather, it is because of the great wealth of evidence—ethnographic, historical, and archaeological—that relates to the impacts on them of the horse. Those impacts affected village-based farming communities along the Missouri river and its tributaries as well as the mobile societies of the open grasslands. Using evidence from both, I look at how having horses affected the ways in which people hunted bison, moved themselves and their goods, and structured their use of the landscape, as well as at how changing patterns of warfare and trade influenced the broader organization of society. These topics also relate to several broader issues. One is the relationship between the horse and two other agents of change: the spread of firearms and the involvement of Native peoples in trading furs and bison robes to Europeans. Another concerns the different responses to the horse by those who used it to enhance a mobile hunting way of life and those who sought to integrate it within an economy and social system in which horticulture and permanent settlements were paramount. A third relates to the ecological constraints on people’s ability to keep horses on the Plains: what were they? What was done to mitigate them? And how did they affect the region’s history between the initial acquisition of horses in the early 1700s and the loss of independence that followed the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 and culminated with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890?