Old Bottles 
1995
Oil and acrylic on canvas 
 245 x 325 cm

Adapted from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1327842/David-Salle:

"Salle is known for regenerating big, gestural, expressionist painting after years of pared-down minimalism and conceptual art. Salle is known for mixing modes of representation and appropriated ready-made motifs in a single canvas, suggesting but defying any legible narrative. Employing the postmodern technique of pastiche, where the close display of disparate images and styles tends to reduce everything to equivalent signs, Salle’s paintings function as metaphors for the dizzying onslaught of media culture.

Salle grew up in Wichita, Kan., and from 1973 to 1975 attended the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he studied with John Baldessari (see video below) In 1976 he moved to New York City, where he found work in a publishing house and began to collect images from its archive. His earliest work involved the strategy of overlaying images, and this quickly became his signature style.

Salle’s paintings reflect what is essentially a collage aesthetic, whereby he takes images out of their original context and recontextualizes them into complex ensembles. Like Robert Rauschenberg before him, Salle denies any hierarchy of subject matter by including both “high” and “low” imagery in a single canvas: famous art masterpieces with cartoon figures, high-end designed objects and ornamental motifs with reproductions of newspaper photos, for example. In addition to mixing high and low imagery, Salle also mixes differing styles, including contour line drawings, modeled motifs, found objects, grisaille, crudely rendered images, and highly polished forms."

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, previous Artist Spotlight information, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:

1. Explain how Salle's former career supported the eventual development of  his painting style.
2. Salle says that he doesn't plan his work....how can he get away with that? How does he approach his paintings so that they are still successful, even without planning?
3. Related to question #3 - how is your work process similar to and/or different from Salle's?

Are you curious about John Baldessari? The answer should be YES, so watch this:

Modern Times
1993
Lithograph 30" x 22"






















"Modern Times tells a story about the complexity of Indian life today with the medicine plant and pictograph which can be important to a modern Indian even [though] dressed in a suit with a briefcase-he may wear a headdress to dance on the weekend . . . . 'Apples' also means to Indian people that some have turned against the old ways and are white on the inside and red on the outside."

Smith calls herself a cultural art worker.  Elaborating on her Native American worldview, Smith's work addresses today's tribal politics, human rights, and environmental issues with a keen sense of humor.

WATCH THIS and take notes:

LOOK AT THIS IMAGE CAREFULLY and note its content and qualities.

ACTIVITY: Since you have already read and answered questions about Quick-to-see-Smith's work, take this opportunity to: Consider, list, and explain some specific techniques/approaches that you have noticed in her work and that you might consider incorporating into your "Neo-Pop" painting project.

Marilyn
1962
Oil and spray enamel on canvas
7' 9" x 6' 1/4"

Gallery label text from MoMA: 
"Screen icon and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe (1926–62) was a favorite subject of many pop artists, and she figures prominently in more than fifteen works in the Museum's collection. Here, in a tribute to the actress created soon after her death, Rosenquist inverted, fragmented, and partially obscured her image with a superimposed portion of her name. He also included a segment of the brand name "Coca–Cola," rendered upside–down in its trademark script. In pairing Monroe with this famous logo, Rosenquist was suggesting that she is as iconic an example of American popular culture as the ubiquitous soft drink."

Look carefully at these 10 Paintings by James Rosenquist.

READ THIS article and take notes
Image below: F-111, as described in the reading and in this audio/video

Installation view of James Rosenquist: F-111 (1964-65) at MoMA. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 23 sections. 10 x 86’ (304.8 x 2621.3 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P.Bliss Bequest, both by exchange. © 2012 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar

Excerpt from http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/02/14/f-111-1965:
"A special installation recently opened at MoMA of James Rosenquist’s F-111, an 86-foot-long painting that the artist designed to extend around all four walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery, at 4 East 77 Street in Manhattan. Rosenquist began the painting in 1964, at a decidedly tense and tumultuous moment in this country, as the Vietnam War steadily escalated abroad and anti-war activism gained momentum at home. The subject, the F-111 fighter-bomber plane, was in development at the time as part of a military initiative that ended up costing $75 million; funded by American tax dollars, it was meant to be the most technologically advanced weapon in the U.S. Air Force’s arsenal. Rosenquist painted the body of the plane to span the work’s 23 panels, interspersed with spliced-in images of commercial products and references to war—fragments of what he has called “the flak of consumer society.” Through this expanse of colliding visual motifs, F-111 points to what the artist has described as “the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising.”

In your sketchbook, document this Artist Spotlight by #, name/dates, image (sketched or printed), and credit line info.

Since you have already learned about Barbara Kruger through the Scholastic magazine reading/assignment, there will be no further questions. Please keep those notes for reference and review.

If you are still curious about Barbara Kruger's work, here is some information about an installation at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Untitled (We don't need another hero)
1987
Photographic silkscreen/vinyl
90" x 117"
Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, New York

Jolie Madame, 1972
National Gallery Australia, Canberra
​Courtesy Louis K. Meisel Gallery/New York, © Audrey Flack 

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
​
1. What is Photorealism? How did Close's later work maintain an element of Photorealism while also moving away from it?
2. Can you find a similarity between Cézanne's focus on still life and Close's focus on portraiture?
3. Limitations encourage creativity. What limitations (both inherited and self-imposed) have affected the creative development of Close's work? 

Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (see detail)
c. 1625.
Oil on canvas.
1.84m by 1.416m
The Detroit Institute of Arts

Caravaggios's earlier version of the same subject












​
Judith Slaying Holofernes
c. 1598-1599
Oil on canvas
1.44m by 1.92m
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica,
Barberini, Rome.

READ AT LEAST THE FIRST PAGE - The Life and Art of Artemisia Gentileschi 
NOTE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PAINTINGS - Info. on Caravaggio's version

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
1. Recount the story that has been illustrated in this painting. 
2. Compare and contrast Caravaggio's original version with that of Gentileschi. To what do you attribute the similarities/differences? 
3. Women weren't given much consideration as artists in this time period...consider how our knowledge (or lack thereof) of Gentileschi relates to our overall knowledge of art history in general.

Crucifixion of St. Peter
Oil on canvas
1601
Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome

FYI - Caravaggio's full name is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

In the Christian tradition, Peter is regarded as the first bishop of Rome. He was a chosen follower of Jesus Christ and a casualty of the Roman persecution of Christians. Crucifixion was a common form of punishment for slaves and non-Roman citizens in the time of Jesus Christ. When sentenced to death in the year 64, Peter refused to be crucified upwards as Jesus was, requesting an upside-down death instead. 

READ THIS and take good notes.

WATCH THIS and take good notes:

La Grande Odalisque from the series Les Femmes du Maroc
2008
Color photograph
71 x 86 in. 
VMFA, Richmond

"Lalla Essaydi’s photography explores the charged issue of veiling and revealing that surrounds Islamic women. The women in the series Les Femmes du Maroc are enveloped in Islamic calligraphy, inscribed in henna on their skin, robes, and surrounding interiors. The text entraps them yet recalls a form of decoration often applied in celebration or for good luck. As an evocative response to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), Essaydi’s image replaces a Western male perspective on “the Orient” with that of a Muslim female."
— John B. Ravenal, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

READ AND TAKE NOTES:

• ESSAYDI'S ARTIST STATEMENT
• Orientalism in 19th Century Art

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Oil on canvas,
36" x 63" (91 x 162 cm), (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:
1. Explain the 3 properties of art as you see them in Essadyi's work.
2. What is Orientalism? What inaccuracies have been presented in what Essaydi calls the "Orientalist lens of the West"?
3. How do Essaydi's images "conceal" AND "reveal"?

#1 Tile from a Squinch
Timurid period (1370–1507), 
Present–day Uzbekistan, Samarqand
Stonepaste; carved and glazed approx. 11" x  8"
Metropolitan Museum of Art




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​From http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/20.120.189: Often called muqarnas, or "stalactite," in Arabic, these architectural elements were used to fill squinches to provide a satisfactory transition between a square room and its domed ceiling. Muqarnas, however, were also employed as simple decorative devices to enrich the appearance of soffits, cornices, capitals of columns, and interiors of domes.

#2 Tile from a mihrab
1322–23 a.d.
Iran
Fritware, underglaze painted approx. 27" x 26"
Metropolitan Museum of Art











From http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/453211: This tile once formed part of a mihrab, or niche, facing Mecca, toward which prayer is directed in mosques. The inscription at its top includes a Qur'anic reference to the mihrab’s function, and provides the date of the tile’s manufacture in the fourteenth century. This surrounds the modeled vine and tendril motif executed with touches of black and turquoise. We must imagine that the interior walls of the building containing this mihrab were once covered in similar tiles, as was common during the Ilkhanid period in Iran.

Watch this video - take notes!

AFTER CAREFULLY REVIEWING THE RESOURCES ASSIGNED ABOVE: Answer the following questions completely and with specificity to the provided resources, personal reflection, and additional research as needed:

1. a) What is the purpose of a squinch tile? b) What is a mihrab and why is it important in Islamic culture?
2. What role do patterns play in the Islamic religion? Where do the patterns come from and how are they intended to make those viewing them feel?
3. Looking at art has often been compared to a "religious experience." Explain your take on this statement as it relates to abstract art (as in the case of Jackson Pollock) and the principle of PATTERN.