St. Stephen Martyr

K is working on their paper sculpture project. We will be making a horse to wear in the SSM DerbyFest parade. This is a very special horse, though; it is a hat! You can actually wear a horse on your head, imagine that!

1ST GRADE

1st grade is busy weaving paper and learning about the loom, warp and weft strands. We are decorating our finished weaving with pattern.

2ND GRADE

Eric Carle books are being made -- a zoo animal is being created by each 2nd grader and the results will be bound into our own book in the style of Eric Carle.

3RD GRADE

We will be using watercolor paper and collage to create a koi pond with waterlilies in the style of Claude Monet. These are worth framing!

4TH GRADE

5TH GRADE

6TH GRADE

7TH GRADE

7th graders are creating art pieces using their names and clay. I found letter molds this summer and this new project is turning out better than expected. The children are so creative!

8TH GRADE

8th graders have each been given a one inch square of a painting that they are to enlarge to a square that is 12 inches on a side. The finished painting will be huge!

Art History Project

At the beginning of every class for 6th thru 8th grade views a painting and some notes are projected. The students will have five minutes to jot down these notes and will complete a thumbnail sketch of the painting using colored pencils.

For homework they are to write a short biography of that artist and study that painting. EVERY STUDENT IN 6TH THRU 8TH GRADE WILL HAVE A WEEKLY HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT IN ART. These grades will be averaged into their other art grades.

At the end of the 1st quarter they will have seen 8 paintings, know 8 artists and their styles and will have a test. They will need to know the title of the painting, the artist's name and the style of the painting. Bonus questions are offered. One point for every country they can name correctly.

At the end of the second quarter the students will have seen a total of 16 paintings and they will be tested again. At the end of the third quarter they will have worked on 24 paintings and will be tested on those 24.

Most of the artworks I have chosen for this project are paintings or sculptures that we have worked on in their first 5 years at SSM, so it will be a review in a lot of cases. Some artworks are being introduced to the students for the first time. Overall, I think this project will make our students more sophisticated in their knowledge of famous artworks.

WEEK 1 January 21st thru January 25th

PABLO PICASSO

THREE MUSICIANS

CUBISM

SPAIN

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain, as the son of an art and drawing teacher. He was a brilliant student. He passed the entrance examination for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts at the age of 14 in just one day. According to one of many legends about the artist's life, his father, recognizing the extraordinary talent of his son, gave him his brushes and palette and vowed to paint never again in his life.

During his lifetime, the artist went through different periods of characteristic painting styles. The Blue Period of Picasso lasted from about 1900 to 1904. It is characterized by the use of different shades of blue underlining the melancholic style of his subjects - people from the grim side of life with thin, half-starved bodies.

During Picasso's Rose Period from about 1905 to 1906, his style moved away from the Blue Period to a friendly pink tone with subjects taken from the world of the circus. The artist moved to Paris, France, the "capital of arts" in 1904. There he met all the other famous artists like Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and George Braques. He developed the Cubist style together with George Braque and Juan Gris. In Cubism, subjects are reduced to basic geometrical shapes. In a later version of Cubism, called synthetic cubism, several views of an object or a person are shown simultaneously from a different perspective in one picture. He died in 1973.

QUARTER 3: REVIEW

WEEK 2 January 28th thru February 1st

PAUL GAUGIN

TWO WOMEN ON THE BEACH

POST IMPRESSIONISM

FRANCE (Lived in TAHITI)

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France in 1848. In 1851 the family left Paris for Peru, motivated by the political climate of the period. His father died on the voyage, leaving three-year old Paul, his mother and his sister to fend for themselves. They lived for four years in Lima, Peru with Paul's uncle and his family. The imagery of Peru would later influence Paul in his art. At the age of seven, Paul and his family returned to France to live with his grandfather.

Gauguin had been interested in art since his childhood. In his free time, he began painting. By 1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he pursued a business career as a stockbroker. Driven to paint full-time, he returned to Paris in 1885, deserting his family of a wife and five children.

Like his friend Vincent Van Gogh, with whom in 1888 he spent nine weeks painting in Arles, Paul Gauguin experienced bouts of depression and at one time attempted suicide. In 1891, Gauguin, frustrated by lack of recognition at home and financially destitute, sailed to the tropics (Tahiti) to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional." (Before this he had made several attempts to find a tropical paradise where he could 'live on fish and fruit' and paint in his increasingly primitive style.)

Living in Tahiti, he painted depictions of Tahitian life. His works of this period are full of semi-religious symbolism and an exotic views of the natives of Polynesia. He died in 1903, his body being weakened by alcohol and a dissipated life. He was 54 years old.

WEEK 3 February 4th thru February 8th

MARC CHAGALL

I AND THE VILLAGE

SURREALISM

RUSSIA

Marc Chagall Biography - 1887-1985

Marc Chagall was a French painter of Russian-Jewish origin who was born in Vitebsk, Russia, one of 8 children. He is associated with the modern movements after impressionism.

It was difficult being a Jew in Russia at that time. He was required to carry a permit and led a restricted life. After gaining a reputation as an artist he moved to Paris, France.

Besides his paintings and glass-windows for Roman-Catholic cathedrals and Jewish synagogues, he created a rich treasure of prints. As color was of such great essence for his work, lithography became the artist's favorite technique.

Use of symbolism

Cow: life par excellence: milk, meat, leather, horn, power.
Tree: another life symbol.
Cock: fertility, often painted together with lovers.
Fiddler: in Chagall's town Vitebsk the fiddler made music at crosspoints of life (birth, wedding, death).
Herring (often also painted as a flying fish): commemorates Chagall's father working in a fish factory.
Candlestick: two candles symbolize the Shabbat or the Menorah (candlestick with seven candles) or the Hanukkah- candlestick, and therefore the life of pious Jews.
Windows: Chagall's Love of Freedom, and Paris through the window.
Houses of Vitebsk (often in paintings of his time in Paris): feelings for his homeland.

Exile in New York

In 1941 Chagall went into exile from Nazi occupied France to the United States. He had received an invitation by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1944 the artist's wife Bella died.

In 1947 Mark Chagall returned to France. 1950 is the beginning of a completely new era for his printmaking activities. At the age of 63, Chagall more or less learned the art of making lithographs from scratch - like an apprentice. The teacher of this gifted "apprentice" became Charles Sorlier, a professional and exceptionally talented printer.

At the end of his life, the artist had created more than one thousand prints - mainly lithographs and etchings. He died at the age of 98 on March 28, 1985 in France. His works are sought after by art lovers and museums all over the world. Chagall is considered as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

WEEK 4 February 11th thru February 15th

RAPHAEL

MADONNA AND CHILD

RENAISSANCE

ITALY

Born 1483 Died 1520

Raphael Sanzio, usually known by his first name alone was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.

Raphael was enormously productive and, despite his early death at thirty-seven, a large body of his work remains, especially in the Vatican. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, but after his death the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when his more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models.

WEEK 5 February 18th thru February 22nd

PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR

GIRL WITH THE WATERING CAN

IMPRESSIONISM

FRANCE Born 1841 Died 1919

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.

At times, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years, due, in part, to the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.

Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

The Swing (La Balan�oire), 1876, oil on canvas, Mus�e d'Orsay, Paris

In 1887, a year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen's associate, Phillip Richbourg, he donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.

In 1890 he married and Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a filmmaker of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.

Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair- bound. In the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers.

In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, on December 3.

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette), 1876, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.

On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago

A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well- known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art. Renoir died in 1919.

WEEK 6 February 25th thru February 29th

WAYNE THIEBAUD (Tee-Bo)

CAKES

POP ART

AMERICA

Born: 1920 (still living as far as I know)

Thiebaud was born to Mormon parents in Mesa, Arizona, U.S.A.. His family moved to Long Beach, California when he was six months old. One summer during his high school years he apprenticed at the Walt Disney Studio. The next summer he studied at a Los Angeles trade school. He earned a degree from Sacramento State College in 1941. From 1938 to 1949, he worked as a cartoonist and designer in California and New York and served as an artist in the United States Navy.

On a leave of absence, he spent time in New York City where he became friends with Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline and was much influenced by these abstractionists as well as pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. During this time, he began a series of very small paintings based on images of food displayed in windows, and he focused on their basic shapes.

Returning to California, he pursued this subject matter and style, isolating triangles, circles, squares, etc. He also co-founded the Artists Cooperative gallery and other cooperatives including Pond Farm, having been exposed to the concept of cooperatives in New York.

In 1962 Thiebaud's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Robert Dowd, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects," at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in America. These painters were part of a new movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the art world and changed art forever.

WEEK 7 March 3rd thru March 7th

VINCENT VAN GOGH

THE BEDROOM

POST IMPRESSIONISM

DUTCH (Lived in FRANCE)

Gogh, Vincent (b. March 30, 1853, Netherlands (Holland)--d. July 29, 1890, near Paris, France), generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt. With C�zanne and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking color, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well-known The Starry Night (1889).

He went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners in Belgium. In his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ's teaching. He suffered acute poverty and a spiritual crisis, until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From this time he worked at his new `mission' with single- minded frenzy, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and hunger, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was incredibel: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings.

Van Gogh lived in the Netherlands supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters. Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'.

In 1886 van Gogh moved to Paris, where he met the Impressionist painters. At this time his painting underwent a violent change and became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them to reproduce atmosphere, and light.

He spent his last years in an asylum for the mentally ill, but continued painting. There are some who believe his mental illness was inherited from his mother who was ill most of her life, but others believe it was the exposure to the lead in his paints and his fervor in painting day and night that increased that exposure that led to his depression and resulting suicide.

WEEK 8 March 10th thru 14th

GRANT WOOD

AMERICAN GOTHIC

REGIONALISM (American Midwest Region)

AMERICA

Grant Wood, born February 13, 1891 was an American painter, born in Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) , Wood enrolled in art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith. He again returned to Cedar Rapids to teach Junior High students after serving in the army as a camouflage painter. Later he became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic.

Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa's School of Art beginning in 1934, prompting his move to Iowa City. During that time, he supervised mural painting projects, mentored students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the University's cultural community. On February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood died at the university hospital.

Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although he is best known for his paintings, he worked in a large number of media, including ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects.

Wood's best known work is his 1930 painting American Gothic, one of the most familiar images in 20th century American art. The painting was first exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago where it can still be found today. Today, the painting is often parodied in pop culture, and remains one of the most notable examples of American Regionalism. Grant Wood died one day before his 51st birthday in 1942.

QUARTER 2: REVIEW

WEEK 1 Red Poppies -- Georgia O'Keeffe -- American Abstract

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BIRTHDATE: Nov. 15, 1887 DATE OF DEATH: March 6, 1986, age 98. Another painting by this artist: White trumpet flower, 1932.

and Cow's Skull, Red, White and Blue, 1930.

Studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. The artistic brilliance of Georgia O'Keeffe revolutionized modern art in both her time and in the present. With her paintings she vividly portrayed the power and emotion of objects of nature. She explored this theme in her magnified paintings of flowers which people find enchanting to this day, although her purpose was to convey that nature in all its beauty was as powerful as the widespread industrialization of the period.

After spending a summer in New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe, fell in love with the barren landscape and expansive skies of the desert. She would explore the subject of animal bones in her paintings of the 1930s and 1940s. Just as with the flowers, she painted the bones magnified and captured the stillness and remoteness of them, while at the same time expressing a sense of beauty that lies within the desert. Georgia O'Keeffe was married to the pioneer photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

WEEK 2 Greek Vase -- Unknown Greek ceramist

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-- Style: Greek

Thanks to its hardy nature, pottery is large in the archaeological record of Ancient Greece, and because we have so much of it (some 100,000 vases are recorded) it has a great influence on our understanding of Greek society. Little survives, for example, of ancient Greek painting except for what is found on the earthenware in everyday use, so we must trace the development of Greek art through its beginnings on another art form. Nevertheless the shards of pots discarded or buried in the first millennium BCE are still the best guide we have to the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks.

Archaic Period (600-408 BC) Greek artists were creating narrative scenes in The Black Figure Style--black figures on the natural red clay background. Detail was created by scraping away parts of the background. (You may have experimented with a resist technique like this.) Later the Black Figure Style became pass� and was replaced by its reverse--the Red Figure Style. In this style, the background around the figures is painted black, and details are brushed in, which allows for even more realism. Decorative bands appear above and below. Typical subject: a scene from a myth; a scene from The Iliad or Odyssey. Color: Black and reddish clay.

Geometric Style (600-408 BC)

(1000-7000 BC) Archaic Period

Red Figure Style ; Black Figure Style

WEEK 3 The Boating Party -- Mary Cassatt - Impressionism

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Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Pennsylvania, USA, as the daughter of a wealthy merchant. At the age of seven her family left for Paris in France. After a few years of life in Paris, the family went back to the USA. Mary, impressed by all the art she had seen in Europe, surprised her parents by the wish to become an artist. Becoming an artist in the 19th century was as difficult for a woman as becoming a doctor. Society then had a different understanding of the role of women.

Finally Mary won in 1866 and she went back to Paris. There she got to know Edgar Degas, an artist from the group of Impressionists. Edgar Degas introduced her to his friends Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and other Impressionist rebels.

Mary Cassatt's favorite subjects became children and women with children in ordinary scenes. Her paintings express a deep tenderness and her own love for children. But she never had children of her own.

She did not like the modern artists like Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso and spoke of "dreadful paintings". She had one thing in common with Edgar Degas and that was poor eyesight. When she died in 1926 at the age of 82 she was blind. Another painting by this artist: ttle Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878 The Bath, 1891

WEEK 4 Flamingo -- John James Audubon 1785-1851

Style: Naturalism or Realism

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John James Audubon is best known for THE BIRDS OF AMERICA, a book of 435 images, portraits of every bird then known in the United States - painted and reproduced in the size of life. Its creation cost Audubon eighteen years of monumental effort in finding the birds, making the book, and selling it to subscribers. Audubon also wrote thousands of pages about birds; he'd completed half of a collection of paintings of mammals when his eyesight failed in 1846.
Snowy Egret,

Explore a gallery of Audubon's work

His story is a dramatic and surprising one. Audubon was not born in America, but saw more of the North American continent than virtually anyone alive, and even in his own time he came to exemplify America - the place of wilderness and wild things.

So it is that Audubon has been called (by Lewis Mumford) "an archetypal American who astonishingly combined in equal measure the virtues of George Washington, Daniel Boone and Benjamin Franklin" and "the nearest thing American art has had to a founding father."

Audubon's life seems invented rather than lived; born to a single mother in Haiti, Audubon was raised like a little lord in France, emigrated to Pennsylvania to escape conscription in Napoleon's army, failed utterly in frontier Kentucky, was thrown in jail there and driven from his town in penniless disgrace... but he believed in himself, left his family and took a flatboat down the Mississippi, struggled on alone in Louisiana, and finally became a brilliant success, and a legend, overnight... in England. That story then ends with the family reunited, now living on their huge wooded estate in New York City, occasionally pulling in a 300-lb. sturgeon from their Hudson River landing, with a pink sunset rippling over the Palisades. It's a whacking good story - all of the above, and More! Much More! , with pictures to boot.

WEEK 5 Australian Dreamtimes -- Unknown Aborigine - -Style: Aborigine or Indigenous Art

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The 'Aboriginal Dreamtime' is that part of aboriginal culture which explains the origins and culture of the land and its people. Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on Earth - dating back - by some estimates - 65,000 years. Dreamtime is Aboriginal Religion and Culture.

The Dreamtime contains many parts: It is the story of things that have happened, how the universe came to be, how human beings were created and how the Creator intended for humans to function within the cosmos.

As with all other cultures - it speaks of Earth's Creation by Gods and Goddesses - some of whom were kind hearted - while others were cruel.

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. The shape of the land - its mountains, rocks, riverbeds, and waterholes - and its unseen vibrations echo the events that brought that place into creation. Everything in the natural world is a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created our world. As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

The Aborigines called this potency the "Dreaming" of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness of the earth. Only in extraordinary states of consciousness can one be aware of, or attuned to, the inner dreaming of the Earth. - Faces of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime by Robert Lawlor

WEEK 6 Hand Holding Flowers -- Pablo Picasso -

http://www.ssmartyr.org/Media/45/Picasso%202-14-58.bmp Bouquet with Hands Artist: Pablo Picasso Hands Holding Flowers

Style: Contemporary

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain, as the son of an art and drawing teacher. He was a brilliant student. He passed the entrance examination for the Barcelona School of Fine Arts at the age of 14 in just one day and was allowed to skip the first two classes. According to one of many legends about the artist's life, his father, recognizing the extraordinary talent of his son, gave him his brushes and palette and vowed to paint never again in his life.

No other artist is more associated with the term Modern Art than Pablo Picasso. He created thousands of paintings, prints, sculptures and ceramics during a time span of about 75 years. For many Picasso is the greatest art genius of the twentieth century. For others he is a gifted charlatan. Undisputed is the fact that he influenced and dominated the art of the twentieth century like no other modern artist.

During Picasso's Rose Period from about 1905 to 1906, his style moved away from the Blue Period to a friendly pink tone with subjects taken from the world of the circus. After several travels to Paris, the artist moved permanently to the "capital of arts" in 1904. There he met all the other famous artists like Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and George Braques. Inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne, he developed together with George Braque and Juan Gris the Cubist style. In Cubism, subjects are reduced to basic geometrical shapes. In a later version of Cubism, called synthetic cubism, several views of an object or a person are shown simultaneously from a different perspective in one picture.

WEEK 7 Tar Beach -- Faith Ringgold -- African American Folk Art / Story Quilt

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Born in 1930. Faith Ringgold, began her artistic career more than 35 years ago as a painter. Today, she is best known for her painted story quilts -- art that combines painting, quilted fabric and storytelling. She has exhibited in major museums in the USA, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Her first book, Tar Beach was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration, among numerous other honors. She has written and illustrated eleven children's books.

Faith Ringgold is married to Burdette Ringgold and has two daughters, Michele and Barbara Wallace; and three granddaughters, Faith, Theodora and Martha. She is a professor of art at the University of California in San Diego, California.

WEEK 8 King Tutankahman Death Mask - Unknown - Egyptian

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Nebkheperure Tutankahman, Egyptian , was a Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty (ruled 1333 BC�1324 BC), during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom. In historical terms, Tutankhamun is of only moderate significance, and most of his modern popularity stems from the fact that his tomb in the Valley of the Kings was discovered almost completely intact.

The splendors of Tutankhamun's tomb are among the most traveled artifacts in the world. Probably the best-known exhibition tour was the Treasures of Tutankhamun tour, which ran from 1972-1979. More than 1.6 million visitors came to see the exhibition, some lining for up to eight hours and it was the most popular exhibition ever in the London Museum. It was attended by more than eight million people in the United States.

An excerpt from the site of the American National Gallery of Art:

"...55 objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun included the boy- king's solid gold funeral mask, a gilded wood figure of the goddess Selket, lamps, jars, jewelry, furniture, and other objects for the afterlife. This exhibition established the term 'blockbuster.' A combination of the age-old fascination with ancient Egypt, the legendary allure of gold and precious stones, and the funeral trappings of the boy-king created an immense popular response. Visitors waited up to 8 hours before the building opened to view the exhibition. At times the line completely encircled the West Building."

QUARTER 1: REVIEW

WEEK 1 http://www.ssmartyr.org/Media/45/Kandinsky.pdf

WASSILY KANDINSKY -- CONCENTRIC RINGS -- ABSTRACT CONTEMPORARY

Russian painter, who explored the possibilities of abstraction making him one of the most important leaders in modern art. Born in Moscow, December 4, 1866. His early paintings were done in a naturalistic style, but in 1909, after a trip to Paris his paintings became more highly colored and loosely organized. Around 1913 he began working on paintings that came to be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to real objects of the natural world and their inspiration came from titles of music.
He was one of the leading artists of his generation. As one of the first explorers of the principles of non-representational or �pure� abstraction, Kandinsky can be considered an artist who paved the way for abstract expressionism. Kandinsky died in a suburb of Paris, on December 13, 1944.

WEEK 2 http://www.ssmartyr.org/Media/45/Monet.pdf

CLAUDE MONET -- JAPANESE BRIDGE OVER WATER LILIES -- IMPRESSIONISM

Monet, Claude (b. Nov. 14, 1840, Paris, Fr.--d. Dec. 5, 1926, Giverny, France)
French painter, leader of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the model Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was firm throughout his long career and it is appropriate that one of his pictures--Impression: Sunrise gave the group its name.

Monet's devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden . The picture is over 8 feet high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. An artist friend visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.

In 1878 he moved to Giverny about 40 miles from Paris. After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to grow wealthy. He was able to buy the house that he rented in Giverny and planted beautiful gardens, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely (he had a special studio built in the grounds of his house so he could work on the huge canvases some of which could fill a whole room they are so huge.) In his final years he was troubled by failing eyesight, but he painted until the end.

WEEK 3 http://www.ssmartyr.org/Media/45/Matisse.pdf

HENRI MATISSE -- BEASTS OF THE SEA -- FAUVISM

Matisse, Henri (b. Dec. 31, 1869, France--d. Nov. 3, 1954, Nice, France)
artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. The leader of the Fauvist movement around 1900, Matisse pursued the expressiveness of color throughout his career.

The art of our century has been dominated by two men: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They are artists of classical greatness, and their visionary journeys into new art have changed our understanding of the world. Matisse was the elder of the two, but he was a slower and more methodical man by temperament and it was Picasso who initially made the greater splash. Matisse was a born leader and taught and encouraged other painters. Matisse's artistic career was long, covering many different styles of painting from Impressionism to near Abstraction. Early on in his career Matisse was viewed as a Fauvist, and his celebration of bright colors reached its peak in 1917. He concentrated on reflecting the color of his surroundings and completed some of his most exciting paintings at this time. In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed as having cancer and was permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Venice.

Matisse's art has an astonishing force and is born in a paradise world into which Matisse draws all his viewers.

Matisse first became famous as the King of the Fauves (Wild Beasts) , an inappropriate name for this gentlemanly intellectual: there was no wildness in him, though there was much passion. He is an awesomely controlled artist, and his spirit, his mind, always had the upper hand over the "beast" of Fauvism.

WEEK 4 http://www.ssmartyr.org/Media/45/CAVEART.pdf

CAVE DWELLERS -- CAVE ART OF LASCAUX, FRANCE -- PREHISTORIC

Lascaux is the setting of a complex of caves in southwestern France famous for its cave paintings. The original caves are located near the village of Montignac. They contain some of the most well-known (Upper Paleolithic) art, dating back to somewhere between 15,000 and 13,000 BC. They consist mostly of realistic images of large animals, including aurochs, most of which are known from fossil evidence to have lived in the area at the time. They were added to UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979.

WEEK 5 http://www.ssmartyr.org/Media/45/Michelangelo.pdf

MICHELANGELO -- PIETA -- RENAISSANCE

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 � February 18, 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, archi