Art Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Art

Humanities UN1121
Prof. Larrivé-Bass

CLASS PRESENTATION (Tuesday, December 21: 1:10-4:00 pm)

Please visit three exhibitions recently/currently held in New York City. During each visit,
select a work you find interesting. Your class presentation (8-10 minutes) will entail
introducing the 3 selected works to our class.

Visit 1:
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU
Exhibition: The Empire’s Physician: Prosperity, Plague, and Healing in Ancient Rome
https://galen.nyu.yourcultureconnect.com/e/home

Visit 2:
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Exhibition: Alice Neel: People come First
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/alice-neel/exhibition-galleries

Visit 3:
Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition: Surrealist Objects
https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5140

OR

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Exhibition: Surrealism Beyond Borders
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2021/surrealism-beyond-borders/visiting-
guide
Dadaism:
“The Dada movement began in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, during the First World War. It
can be seen as a reaction by artists to what they saw as the unprecedented horror and folly of the
war. They felt it called into question every aspect of the society capable of starting and then
prolonging it, including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a
new art to replace the old. In 1916 the writer Hugo Ball started a satirical nightclub in Zurich,
the Cabaret Voltaire, and a periodical of the same name. In it he wrote of publishing an
international review that would bear the name ‘“DADA” (“Dada”) Dada Dada Dada.’ This was
the first of many Dada publications. Dada became an international movement and eventually
formed the basis of Surrealism in Paris after the war. Leading artists associated with it include
 Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters. Duchamp’s questioning of
the fundamentals of Western art had a profound subsequent influence.”
Simon Wilson and Jessica Lack, Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms (London: Tate
Publishing, 2016), 84.

Surrealism:
“Surrealism was founded in Paris, in 1924, by the poet André Breton and continued Dadaism’s
exploration of everything irrational and subversive in art. Surrealism was more explicitly
preoccupied with spiritualism, Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism than Dadaism was. It
aimed to create art which was ‘automatic,’ meaning that it had emerged directly from the
unconscious without being shaped by reason, morality or aesthetic judgements. The unconscious
was central to Surrealists. To them it resembled a vast storehouse full of astonishing, hitherto
repressed artistic creativity. Heavily influenced by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, they came
to see reason as a guard barring entry to this storehouse. They adopted various techniques to
unlock the unconscious. Automatic writing (also called automatism) is perhaps the most famous
of their techniques for evading conscious control of the artistic process. They strove to undermine
most accepted truths and conventions, rejecting them as essentially uncreative. Surrealists
characterized Naturalism and Realism as fundamentally bourgeois, claiming that both artistic
movements confused truth with objects and treated both life and art as though they were old
furniture: solid, ugly and dusty. The Surrealists also explored dream imagery which Ernst and
Dali introduced into their painting with all the attention to detail of Realist painters. Miro’s
paintings, on the other hand, contain bio-morphic shapes which could be amoeba, viruses, or
thoughts glimpsed in the psyche’s uncharted synaptic spaces. It is not particularly subversive to
say that dreams often seem real and bizarre at the same time, but Surrealists sought out these
disruptive qualities in everyday life, as part of their artistic process, even opening an office in
Paris where people could report ‘surreal’ experiences.”
Stephen Little, …Isms: Understanding Art (New York: Universe Publishing, 2016), 118

As you present the three works, you should pay attention to form, materiality, function and
signification. Tell us too why you selected them.

Try to have fun with this assignment. Select art works you really like.

Please send me photographs of the works you will introduce to your classmates ahead of time:
by Sunday, December 19 at the latest. I will embed your images in the PowerPoint file shared in
class on December 21.