CPAR Lesson 4

• Subject


  What is represented in a work of art
• Not all arts have subjects. Those arts without subject are called "nonobjective"; they do not represent anything
• Subject


  • Subject is not essential to arts
  • Subject is most common in literature
  • Subject is least common in architecture
• Traditional sculpture and painting


  • Portraits
  • Single or group figures
  • Animals
  • Landscapes
  • Seascapes
• Sculpture and painting without subject

  • Henry Moore's Two Forms
  • Piet Mondrian's Composition with Blue and White
• Music


  • Music with subject is called "program music"
  • Music without subject is called "absolute music"
  • Music cannot make its subject clear, even when it is imitative
• Realism


  No art is ever like nature. Even when artist choose a subject from nature, they change, select, and arrange details to express the ideas they want to make clear
• Abstraction


  The subject is not shown at all as an objective reality, but only as the artist's idea of it or feeling about it
• Sign


  Has a literal quality and points to something in some context other than its own
• Symbol


  Combines literal quality with abstract or suggestive meaning, and expresses more than it strictly signifies
• Dreams and Subconscious


  Subjects that attempt to show the inside of the human mind as well as the appearance of the outside world, revealing thoughts and dreams not controlled by reason or conscious order
• Sources of art subjects

  • Nature
  • History, including legend, folklore, and current events
  • Greek and Roman mythology
  • Religion
  • Literature
  • Contemporary life
• Nature as subject


  • Animals
  • People and their activities
  • Landscapes
• The representation of the human figure in painting and sculpture vastly outnumbers that of any other subject in art</b>
• Landscape painting documents people's regard for nature, their feelings toward it, and their sense of relationship to it
• Picasso's painting Guernica was inspired when an unarmed Basque city was bombed by the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
• All art is conditioned by the historical period in which it is created
• The dress, the houses, the manner of living, the thoughts of the period are necessarily reflected in the work of the artist
• Rulers like to have themselves and the great deeds of their time perpetuated, consequently, statues, paintings of the great are found in each civilization
• Artists often have a double duty, in that they are supposed to give a flattering likeness of the subject and at the same time display their own skill
• Artists are sensitive to the events taking place in the world around them
• Picasso's painting Guernica


  • Inspired when an unarmed Basque city was bombed by the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
• Greek and Roman mythology has been a very important source for subjects in art
• The stream of Greek and Roman mythology's influences on Western civilization may be traced primarily to two sources: the works of Greece and Rome during the period of Greek and Roman civilization, and the arts of Europe during the Renaissance
• During the Renaissance, poets, painters, and sculptors drew largely from Greek and Roman sources for subjects
• Greek and Roman deities


  Each had their own province and was known by some symbol
• Religion has played an enormous role in inspiring works of visual art, music, architecture, and literature, through the ages
• In the Middle Ages, arts were part of the reverential age of faith in which religion permeated the totality of experience
• In modern culture, religion is separate to an immeasurably greater extent, so much so that it is hard to grasp how everything for medieval people was part of religion
• The Church was the source of education, entertainment, most social occasions, and of course faith
• Carvings on church portals and the colorful designs in stained-glass windows told people the things the Church felt they should know
• For the illiterate people of that age, the portal carvings and window pictures were a kind of text, often called "the poor man's Bible"
• During the Renaissance, the European artisans became "artist" and conscious of their role in a way that had never been true before
• With this change of attitude in the artists, art itself changed from the spontaneous expression of the universal feeling to a more studied, artificial, and individual expression
• Judeo-Christian Sources of Art

  • The Bible (Old Testament and New Testament)
  • The Apocrypha
  • Legends and lives of the saints
  • Ritual
• The countries of the Orient, especially China, Japan, and India, have all produced sacred texts of one kind or another, and these have inspired various kind of art
• The most fruitful have been the texts and traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism
• Vishnu


  One of the oldest of Hindu gods, identified as the divine hero-teacher in the Mahabharata epic
• Kuan Yin


  A seated female bodhisattva in Buddhist religious art, a follower of Buddha who has attained enlightenment but who postpones Nirvana in order to help others attain it
• Works of art may be found that take their subject directly from other works of art