Group 2

Guide Lesson Objective: Analyze the dominating elements show in the works of artists to
illustrate strong feelings

Topic: Art Museums and Recreation (Optical, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual, Installation Arts)

INTRODUCTION.

Love of beauty is a basic human trait that goes back to our earliest days on Earth. The
Paleolithic people who created more than two thousand images of vigorous bison, graceful deer,
and other animals of the caves in southwestern France (at Lascaux and Altamira, for instance)
may have been appealing to supernatural powers to grant them good hunting and fertility or
observing some sincelost traditional rites, but at the same time they crafted images that delight
our twenty-first-century eyes, as we presume they did their own communities, even as the works
were nestled in underground spaces that required careful navigation to access. Other early
civilizations, whether Middle Eastern, East Asian, African, indigenous peoples, Greek, or
Roman, put on display their finest productions in temples or palace treasuries. During the Middle
Ages in Western Europe, artistic tradition was kept alive, chiefly in cathedrals, castles, and
monasteries.

CHAPTER I. ART MUSEUM DEVELOPMENT

The collector was the force that made the art museum possible. Usually a prince,
nobleman, high clergyman, rich merchant, or banker, he purchased or commissioned paintings,
sculptures, and other beautiful and useful objects. As his or her collection grew, connoisseurship
became his or her passion, which resulted in additions or deletions to the body of works. An
early collector was Jean de France, duc de Berry and brother of the French monarch Charles V.
At his death in 1416, he possessed a fine library, some of its bindings adorned with jewels and
precious stones. His collection also included handsomely illuminated manuscripts, antique gold
and silver coins, cameos and intaglios, rich embroideries and fabrics, sculptures, panel paintings,
and miniatures.

Early museums from the renaissance period include the following: the Medici Palace, the
Capitoline Museum, and the Cortile Garden. The Medici (Riccardi) Palace functioned as a
private museum in fifteenth-century Florence

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, private collections slowly developed into
museums. Before that time, collectors had occasionally allowed visitors to see their treasures; the
Medici, for example, did so at least as early as the sixteenth century. In Rome in 1773 Pope
Clement XIV opened the Pio-Clementine Museum; it contained the Vatican collection largely as
we know it today.
The Palace of the Louvre in Paris, opened to the public during the French Revolution, may be
regarded as the first great national art museum. While the cataclysm of revolution destroyed
some art objects, which were considered hated symbols of the aristocratic regime, the leaders
who overthrew the old order argued that the nation’s art belonged to all the people of the new
society created under the democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. The Louvre was
to be the capstone of a system of museums to serve the common man and woman of the new
Republic. The National Museum, a “Monument Dedicated to the Love and Study of the Arts,”
was opened at the Louvre on August 10, 1793, the first anniversary of the fall of the monarchy.
Its Grande Galerie exhibited 537 paintings on the walls and 184 art objects on tables in the
middle of the hall. Most of these artworks came from the royal palaces, from churches and
religious orders, and a scattering from the émigrés.

The violent and democratizing changes in European life brought about by both political and
industrial revolution were accompanied by a steady growth of public art museums, and the
nineteenth century is sometimes considered the museum’s golden age. Parallel with growing
nationalism, nearly every country in Western Europe built a comprehensive collection of
masterpiece art that extended from ancient times to the present. Great Britain established its
National Gallery in London in 1824, and in Germany it created one of the world’s greatest
museum centers. The Museum Island, as it was called contained five museums: the Altes
Museum (1830) built around the antiquities and modern painting collections of an eccentric
English connoisseur, Edward Solly; the Neues Museum (1855) with Egyptian collections,
antique ceramics, and national antiquities; the Nationalgalerie (1876) for modern German art;
and the Kaiser Friedrich Museum of Western Art (1904), now the Bode Museum. Most
impressive of all was a group of monumental buildings (1907–1930) that contained the
Pergamon Museum with its antiquity collections, Islamic, and Middle East museums. The rise of
Hitler brought several disasters to Museum Island. World War II attacks greatly damaged the
Museum Island buildings, and 1,353 paintings were lost.

A specialized form of art museum collected and exhibited modern art, as, for example, the
Luxembourg Palace (1818) in Paris, superseded by the National Museum of Modern Art (1937)
that later moved to the Centre Georges Pompidou, or Beaubourg, in 1977; the Neue Pinakothek
(1853) in Munich; the Nationalgalerie (1876) in Berlin; and the National Gallery of British Art
(established in London in 1897), known today as Tate.

The year 1870 was a landmark year for American art museums, with the establishment of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Within the
decade, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia)
Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago opened for public visitation. Other leading
encyclopedic art collections in the United States today include the Detroit Institute of Art (1885);
Brooklyn Museum (1893); in Ohio, the Toledo Art Museum (1901) and Cleveland Museum of
Art (1913); and the National Gallery of Art (1937) in Washington, D.C. By the year 2000 there
were thirty-five hundred art museums in the United States, half of which were established after
1970.

In the 1930s New York City emerged as an important center for modern art with three museums.
First was the Museum of Modern Art, familiarly known as MoMA (1929). Founded by Lizzie
Bliss, Abby Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. At about the same time, Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney, assisted by the energetic and witty Juliana Force, crowned their efforts to assist
America’s militantly modern painters by establishing the Whitney Museum of American Art
(1930). Still another aspect of modern art—this one glorifying the abstract art of Vasily
Kandinsky and others—was served with the opening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
(1939), financed by Guggenheim and directed by Hilla Rebay, Baroness von Ehrenwiesen. These
three museums have been responsible for the enthusiasm of Americans for modern art. Their
leadership continues to this day, with the Guggenheim’s museums around the world Art and
Design Museums (the Upper East Side, not far from The Met in New York City, Venice, and
Bilbao, the former designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the latter by Frank Gehry. The Venice
outpost, in fact, holds the core personal collection of twentieth-century art owned by benefactress
Peggy Guggenheim).

Beyond permanent displays and permanent collections, emergent artistic trends from galleries
have crossed over into the museum. Specifically, the Whitney has emerged as a leader in
contemporary art exhibition with its influential biennial exhibitions that reflect one of the latest
trends in contemporary art—a temporary exhibition invitational that includes new work by
American artists. This notion was introduced as an annual by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in
1932 and became a biannual in 1973.

American art museums have developed differing and sometimes conflicting philosophies about
their aims. Benjamin Ives Gilman of Boston insisted that art museums differ from science and
history museums in that their collections exist to allow their viewers to experience beauty rather
than to convey information. This aesthetic emphasis in a sense meant “art for art’s sake,” not
education. Librarian and museum director John Cotton Dana of Newark had a very different idea
—to emphasize art in the everyday activities of the community, to make immigrant and minority
groups as well as factory workers proud of their culture and their products, to show how even
everyday household wares could be well designed—in short, to define the museum as an
instrument for community betterment. One should notice that each of these museum innovators
with their differing points of view advocates for education as a basic museum purpose. Gilman,
though insistent that art objects in themselves were aesthetic rather than educational, organized
the first museum docents, offered lectures about art and artists, and generally offered programs
for the public that today are part of standard offerings for museum education departments.

CHAPTER II. POP ART

Pop art was a new visual art movement that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s, a
reaction against the nonfigurative and seemingly subjective character of Abstract Expressionism
took the form of a return to the object. The most prominent style to emerge in America in the
1960s was “Pop,” although the origins of the style are to be found in England in the 1950s. The
imagery of Pop Art drew its inspiration from commercial sources in popular culture including
pop music, movies, comics, kitsch and advertising. Pop art developed in Britain, the term “pop
art” was first used by the British critic, Lawrence Alloway, to help define work that drew from
the imagery from popular culture. Although Pop Art made its debut in London in 1956 and
continued in England throughout the 1960s, it reached its fullest development in New York.
Pop art is easily recognizable due to its vibrancy and unique characteristics that are present in
many of the most iconic works of the movement. Below are some of the defining characteristics
of of Pop art:

● Recognizable imagery: Pop art utilized images and icons from popular media and
products. This included commercial items like soup cans, road signs, photos of
celebrities, newspapers, and other items popular in the commercial world. Even brand
names and logos were incorporated.
● Bright colors: Pop art is characterized by vibrant, bright colors. Primary colors red,
yellow, and blue were prominent pigments that appeared in many famous works,
particularly in Roy Lichtenstein’s body of work.
● Irony and satire: Humor was one of the main components of Pop art. Artists use the
subject matter to make a statement about current events, poke fun at fads, and challenge
the status quo.
● Innovative techniques: Many Pop artists engaged in printmaking processes, which
enabled them to quickly reproduce images in large quantities. Andy Warhol used
silkscreen printing, a process through which ink is transferred onto paper or canvas
through a mesh screen with a stencil. Roy Lichtenstein used lithography, or printing from
a metal plate or stone, to achieve his signature visual style. Pop artists often took imagery
from other areas of mainstream culture and incorporated it into their artworks, either
altered or in its original form. This type of Appropriation art often worked hand in hand
with repetition to break down the separation between high art and low art, which made
the distinction between advertising and media from fine art.
● Mixed media and collage: Pop artists often blended materials and utilized a variety of
different types of media. Like Robert Rauschenberg, whose works anticipated the Pop art
movement, artists Tom Wesselmann and Richard Hamilton combined seemingly
disparate images into a single canvas to create a thoroughly modern form of narrative.
Similarly, Marisol is known for sculptures that use many a variety of different materials
to represent figures.

As the Pop movement matured, the images became more concrete and tightly controlled.
American artist Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) turned his attention to commercial art and
especially to the comic book as a mainstay of popular culture. In paintings such as Hopeless,
Lichtenstein excerpted an image from a comic book, a form of entertainment meant to be read
and discarded, and immortalized the image on a large canvas. Aside from that modification,
Lichtenstein remained remarkably faithful to the original comic strip image. His subject was one
of the melodramatic scenes common to popular romance comic books of the time. Lichtenstein
also used the visual vocabulary of the comic strip, with its dark black outlines and unmodulated
color areas, and retained the familiar square dimensions. Moreover, his printing technique,
benday dots, called attention to the mass-produced derivation of the image. Named after its
inventor, the newspaper printer Benjamin Day (1810–1889), the benday dot system involves the
modulation of colors through the placement and size of colored dots. Lichtenstein thus
transferred the visual shorthand language of the comic book to the realm of monumental
painting.

Andy Warhol (1928–87) was the chief example of the Pop Art lifestyle, as well as the creator of
highly individual works of art. With his flair for multimedia events and self promotion, Warhol
turned himself into a work of Pop Art and became the central figure of a controversial cult. One
of his most characteristic works, Campbell’s Soup I of 1968, illustrates his taste for commercial
images. In paintings such as Green Coca-Cola Bottles, Warhol selected an icon of mass
produced, consumer culture of the time. The reassuringly familiar curved Coke bottle especially
appealed to Warhol:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest
consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and
see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks
Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money
can get you a better Coke.

As did other Pop artists, Warhol used a visual vocabulary and a printing technique that
reinforced the image’s connections to consumer culture. The repetition and redundancy of the
Coke bottle reflect the omnipresence and dominance of this product in American society. The
clear precision of his forms and the absence of any visible reference to paint texture intensify the
confrontation with the object represented—with the object as object. Warhol’s famous assertion
“I want to be a machine” expresses his obsession with mass production and his personal
identification with the mechanical, mindless, repetitive qualities of mass consumption. The silk-
screen technique allowed Warhol to print the image endlessly (although he varied each bottle
slightly). So immersed was Warhol in a culture of mass production that he not only produced
numerous canvases of the same image but also named his studio “the Factory.”

Warhol’s iconography is wide-ranging. In addition to labels advertising products, he created

works that monumentalize commercial American icons. Warhol often produced images of
Hollywood celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Like his other paintings, these works emphasize
the commodity status of the subjects depicted. Warhol created Marilyn Diptych in the weeks
following the movie star’s suicide in August 1962, capitalizing on the media frenzy her death
prompted. Warhol selected a Hollywood publicity photo, one that provides no insight into the
real Norma Jean Baker (the actress’s name before she assumed the persona of Marilyn Monroe).
Rather, the viewer sees only a mask—the image the Hollywood myth machine generated. The
garish colors and the flat application of paint contribute to that image’s mask-like quality. The
repetition of Monroe’s face reinforces her status as a consumer product on a par with Coke
bottles, her glamorous, haunting visage seemingly confronting the viewer endlessly, as it did the
American public in the aftermath of her death. The right half of this work, with its poor
registration of pigment, suggests a sequence of film stills, a reference to the realm from which
Monroe derived her fame. Warhol’s ascendance to the rank of celebrity artist underscored his
remarkable and astute understanding of the dynamics and visual language of mass culture. He
predicted that the age of mass media would enable everyone to become famous in 15 minutes.
His own fame has lasted much longer.

CHAPTER III. OP ART

Another artistic movement that flourished during the 1960s has been called Optical, or
Op, Art. Op art was used to describe a particular style of abstract painting, in which patterns are
used to give the impression that the image is vibrating. The name was intended as a pun on Pop
Art but also helped to describe a new style of art that relies on optical effects to dazzle and
disorient the viewer. Op Art favors geometric abstraction, and the experience is exclusively
retinal. The Op artists produced kinetic effects using arrangements of color, lines, and shapes, or
some combination of these elements. In Germany Joseph Albers pioneered the art of optical
experiment in his paintings in the 1920s. Albers used a rigid framework of purely geometric
forms and drew on color theory and psychology to create cool, detached compositions that gave
the illusion of depth.

In the 1960s, Op-artists such as British painter Bridget Riley and the Hungarian-born French
artist, Victor Vaserely started to make abstract works that deliberately set out to explore ideas of
illusion, movement, understanding and seeing. Both painters began by making black-and-white
paintings then moved on to explore the relationship between different colors, drawing on
perceptual and psychological theories. Their aim was to make sure of the properties of lines and
patterns to create tension and dynamism.

What Are the Characteristics of Op Art?

● Op Art exists to fool the eye. Op compositions create a sort of visual tension in the
viewer's mind that gives works the illusion of movement. For example, concentrate on
Bridget Riley's "Dominance Portfolio, Blue" (1977) for even a few seconds and it begins
to dance and wave in front of your eyes.
● Realistically, you know that any Op Art piece is flat, static, and two-dimensional. Your
eye, however, begins sending your brain the message that what it's seeing has begun to
oscillate, flicker, throb and any other verb one can employ to mean, "Yikes! This painting
is moving!"
● Op Art is not meant to represent reality. Due to its geometrically-based nature, Op Art is,
almost without exception, non-representational. Artists do not attempt to depict anything
we know in real life. Instead, it is more like abstract art in which composition, movement,
and shape dominate.
● Op Art is not created by chance. The elements employed in a piece of Op Art are
carefully chosen to achieve maximum effect. In order for the illusion to work, each color,
line, and shape must contribute to the overall composition. It takes a great deal of
forethought to successfully create artwork in the Op Art style.
● Op Art relies on two specific techniques. The critical techniques used in Op Art are
perspective and careful juxtaposition of color. The color may be chromatic (identifiable
hues) or achromatic (black, white, or gray). Even when color is used, they tend to be very
bold and can be either complementary or high-contrast.
● Op Art typically does not include the blending of colors. The lines and shapes of this
style are very well defined. Artists do not use shading when transitioning from one color
to the next and quite often two high-contrast colors are placed next to each other. This
harsh shift is a key part of what disturbs and tricks your eye into seeing movement where
there is none.
● Op Art embraces negative space. In Op Art—as in perhaps no other artistic school—
positive and negative spaces in a composition are of equal importance. The illusion could
not be created without both, so Op artists tend to focus just as much on the negative space
as they do the positive.
 In 1965, the first major international exhibition of Op Art, “The Responsive Eye”, took place at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Both Riley and Vaserely took part. The pulsating and
illusionistic images caught the popular imagination, although some critics were dismissive,
declaring Op Art to be little more than empty trickery. Others chose to complain about the
feelings of dizziness and disorientation when confronted with the works on show. Although Op
Art fell out of favor after the 1960s, both Riley and Vaserely continued to work in the style.
Riley travelled to Egypt in 1981, where she was inspired by the colors of Egyptian art as well as
by the decorative patterns of hieroglyphics. In 1986, she won the International Prize for painting
at the Venice Biennale.

CHAPTER IV. MINIMALISM

A predominantly sculptural movement that emerged in the 1960s among artists was
Minimalism. Sculptures were called “minimal,” or “primary,” structures because they were
direct statements of solid geometric form. In contrast to the personalized process of Abstract
Expressionism, Minimalism tries to eliminate all sense of the artist’s role in the work, leaving
only the medium for viewers to contemplate. With minimalism, no attempt is made to represent
an outside reality, the artist wants the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them.
Minimalist painter Frank Stella famously said about his paintings ‘What you see is what you
see’. The impersonal character of Minimalist art is intended to convey the idea that a work of art
is a pure object having only shape and texture in relation to space. Difficult to describe other
than as three-dimensional objects, Minimalist artworks often lack identifiable subjects, colors,
surface textures, and narrative elements. By rejecting illusionism and reducing sculpture to basic
geometric forms, Minimalists emphatically stress their art’s “objecthood” and concrete
tangibility. In doing so, they reduce experience to its most fundamental level, preventing viewers
from drawing on assumptions or preconceptions when dealing with the art before them.

According to Robert Morris, one of the most influential theorists of Minimalism, in his seminal
series of essays "Notes on Sculpture 1-3" (Artforum in 1966), the minimalist painter or sculptor
is chiefly interested how the spectator perceives the relationship between the different parts of
the work and of the parts to the whole thing. The repetition often seen in Minimalist sculpture is
designed to highlight the subtle differences in this relationship.

Untitled by Donald Judd (1928–94) is a set of rectangular “boxes” derived from the solid
geometric shapes of David Smith’s Cubi series. Judd’s boxes, however, do not stand on a
pedestal. Instead, they hang from the wall. They are made of galvanized iron and painted with
green lacquer, reflecting the Minimalist preference for industrial materials. Judd has arranged the
boxes vertically, with each one placed exactly above another at regular intervals, to create a
harmonious balance. The shadows cast on the wall, which vary according to the interior lighting,
participate in the design. They break the monotony of the repeated modules by forming
trapezoids between boxes and between the lowest box and the floor. The shadows also
emphasize the vertical character of the boxes by linking them visually and creating an impression
of a nonstructural pilaster.
 CHAPTER V. CONCEPTUALISM

The Conceptual artists of the 1960s wanted to extend Minimalism so that even the
materials of art would be eliminated, leaving only the idea, or concept, of the art. Like Duchamp
and the Dadaists, for the Conceptualists the mental concept takes precedence over the object.
This is also related to the Minimalist rejection of the object as a consumer product. Although the
term itself was coined in the 1960s, Conceptual art attained official status through the 1970
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. The show’s title—Information—
reflected the emphasis of Conceptual art on language and text, rather than on imagery.

Some Conceptual works combine objects with text, and others, such as Joseph Kosuth’s (born
1945) Art as Idea as Idea of 1966, consisting only of text. The “text” in this instance is composed
of five dictionary definitions of the noun painting. Definition numbers 4 and 5, which are marked
“Obs.,” or “obsolete,” describe the term in its most painterly (“colors laid on”) and pictorial
(“vivid image”) sense. Their “obsolescence,” therefore, is consistent with the takeover by the
idea and with the presumed demise of the object. At the same time, however, Kosuth presents the
text as a photographic enlargement within a pictorial field. As a result, the text is as much an
“object” as it is the expression of an idea.

CHAPTER VI. INSTALLATION ARTS

What is an Art Museum

Examples of art museum (names and places where we can find them)

Some of the arts we can find inside that museum; and how is it relevant for us (if pwede maapil)

What is recreation

Examples of recreation and why do we need to do recreation

What is Optical art

Its distinguishing features, and examples

What is Pop art

Its distinguishing features, and examples

What is Minimalism art

Its distinguishing features, and examples

What is conceptual art

Its distinguishing features, and examples

What is installation arts

Its distinguishing features, and examples

Sa last part pwede pod ta magkuha ug like different arts from different art museums here in PH and then,
atua e distinguish if unsa n inga type sa art.

SOURCES:

Books
Adams, L. (2011). A history of western art (5th ed). McGraw-Hill.

Alexander, E. P., Alexander, M., & Decker, J. (2017). Museums in motion: An introduction to
the history and functions of museums (3rd ed). Rowman & Littlefield.

Gardner, H., & Kleiner, F. S. (2011). Gardner’s art through the ages: A global history (13th ed).
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
Hodge, A.N. (2008). The History of Art: The Essential Guide to Painting Through the Ages.
Arcturus Publishing & Foulsham

Websites

What is Pop Art? Techniques, Artists, and Examples that Shaped the Movement. (2018).
Retrieved 17 October 2021, from https://www.invaluable.com/blog/what-is-pop-art/

Why Does Op Art Feel Like It's Moving?. (2021). Retrieved 17 October 2021, from
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-op-art-182388

Minimalism: Characteristics, History of Minimal Art. (2021). Retrieved 17 October 2021, from
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/minimalism.htm