Themes of Art

Identifying “Aboutness”

Prof. J. Schiek — Art 100 — North Idaho College, Spring 2024

“Just as a work of art can hold many meanings,
and inspire multiple interpretations, so it may
reflect more than one theme.” (Getlein, 55)
Themes of Art
Identifying “Aboutness”

• The textbook identifies eight fundamental themes embodied in the arts.

• Themes, as portrayed by the textbook, are not a hard line by which to categorize art:
“Themes are not intended to reduce art to set of neat categories. Rather, they provide a
framework for exploring how complex a form of expression it can be.”

• So, in essence, themes are more of a starting line than a guideline; a place to begin and
extrapolate outward from there.

• In the following slides, we’ll discuss what these 8 major themes are, how they apply to
certain specific works as presented in the text, and perhaps apply them to other pieces with
which you might be familiar.

• Along the way, we will work on broadening your vocabulary of thematic language and
context.
Insurance Policy
The Eight Themes Listed

• The Sacred Realm

• Politics and the Social Order
• Stories and Histories
• Picturing the Here and Now
• Reflection of Self (Or, Reflecting The Human Experience)
• Invention and Fantasy
• The Natural World
• Art about Art and Its Institutions
Chapter 3
Key Terms

• Iconography (also from Chapter 2) • Commercial Art/Illustration

• Iconoclasm • Landscape Painting
• Presentism • Earthworks
• Enlightenment • Homage
• Social Reform
• Frida Kahlo
• Hieronymus Bosch
The Sacred Realm
The Invisible Made Visible

• Where do we go when we die?

• For that matter, where and in what form
did we exist before we were born?

• Is there a life before life and then again

after death? Or, are we locked in a
ceaseless, cyclical dance from oblivion
to oblivion?

• By and large, where science and

observable phenomena are uncertain,
we are left to answer these questions
for ourselves, as best we can, from
what evidence we can find around us.
“From earliest times, art has played an important role in
our relationship with the sacred, helping us to envision
it, to honor it and communicate with it.” (Getlein, 56)
The Sacred Realm
Art as Evidence

• Chapter 3 begins by talking about

the spacial reflection of the sacred in
art through the architectural
expressions of churches, mosques,
synagogues, temples and other
structures dedicated to the worship
of gods, or higher power(s).

• Thinking globally, what other sorts of

structures can you think of—perhaps
even some we’ve already discussed
—that exist to align basic humanity
with this/these high power(s)?
Il Duomo, with Florence Baptistry and Campanile

Chichen Itza, Mexico

The Pyramids at Giza, Egypt

“Religious images may serve to focus the
thoughts of the faithful by giving concrete
form to abstract ideas.” (Getlein, 57)
Iconography
The Proliferation of Religious Imagery

Iconic image of Saint

• As discussed previously, religious Sebastian, who is
imagery was used heavily in centuries almost always
depicted with arrows
past as a way of educating the illiterate piercing his body.
in the stories and lessons of the Bible. Though a bit
gruesome, these sorts
• Additionally, within Christianity, the use of details are
distinctive and
of icons, or avatar images of venerated generally easy to
saints, gave the prayerful an object remember, so even an
illiterate parishioner
upon which to focus their supplication. who had heard the
story could identify St.
Sebastian at a glance,
• Icons are still very much in use and all that his story
amongst believers of the Catholic, represents.

Anglican and Orthodox faiths.

 John the Baptist is another notable
example from Catholicism/Greek
Orthodoxy. He is usually very
identifiable by his deeply tanned skin,
wild hair, and presence of the cruciform
staff.

Understanding these distinctions

allows us to identify these saints and
figures in larger, more narrative works
of religious art.
 Here we have both John the
Baptist and St. Sebastian in the
same image, where both are
paying tribute to the Christ child
in Mary’s lap.

The Madonna Between St. John the Baptist

and St. Sebastian, Pietro Perugino, 1493
As your book points out,
these two pieces of
religious art were made
at right around the same
time. Though
geographically separated
by a distance of 4,000
miles, their thematic
parallels as depictions of
sacred persons and
events couldn’t be closer.

Left: Rathnasambhava,
the Transcendent Buddha
of the South, Tibet, 13th
Century (specific artist
unknown)

Right: Madonna
Enthroned, Cimabue,
1280-1290 CE
Iconoclasm
Iconographic Cataclysm

• February 26, 2001, the Taliban issued an

edict that ALL statues in Afghanistan be
destroyed.

• This included statues of any size or age, even

those currently housed in museums and
other religiously neutral public spaces.

• Notable among the destroyed were two

Buddhas, carved directly into a cliff face and
dating as far back as the 3rd century CE.

• This sort of destruction of artistic or religious

images/structures is called iconoclasm.

• “Iconoclasm” is a term derived from Greek

for “image breaking” (Geitlein, 58)
 On September 8, 2021, this statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was
removed from its plinth in Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate States of America
ultimately lost the American Civil War and were forced to concede President
Abraham Lincoln’s abolition of slavery.

So…Is this an act of iconoclasm? Why or why not?

In protest of Cambridge University’s
seeming support of Israel as a
Jewish state, an activist slashed this
historic painting of Balfour, who
sympathized with Israel in his own
time and place (more than a century
ago).

Should controversial figures of the

past be held accountable to the
changing standards of the present?

And, more to the point, is this

iconoclasm? Why or why not?
Politics and The Social Order
“In many early societies, earthly order and
cosmic order were viewed as interrelated
and mutually dependent.” (Getlein, 59)
As Above, So Below
Immortalizing Mortals through Art & Architecture

• Per the textbook, the Great Pyramids at Giza are an

indicator of the cosmic importance of the Pharaohs, and the
relative importance they had to their people to command
such architectural marvels be built as a sort of vehicle to
their afterlife.

• Similarly, in Ancient Rome, an official likeness of a newly

enthroned emperor would be quickly passed throughout the
empire so that sculptors in faraway countries and outposts
could create statuary for the people living in those places.

• Prior to its adoption of Christianity by Emperor Constantine

in 312 CE, the Romans practiced a form of emperor
worship, in which their political leaders were venerated as
gods, particularly after they died. In such a structure, the
religious and the political are very much one and the same.

• In the centuries that have elapsed since the Pharaohs, and

divine emperors of Rome, have we successfully divorced
religion from our politics?
Other Perspectives
“I’m not saying it was aliens, but…”

• Where archaeology perhaps fails to identify the purpose of

ancient art objects and other artifacts, they often get thrown
under the broad umbrella of “religious purposes.”

• Further, we (generalizing here) also tend to view past/ancient

cultures as being inferior to our own, often superimposing
our own accepted modes and mores over the past and then
criticizing it for its small mindedness, shortsightedness
(Presentism).

• Sometimes, we even go so far as to soothe our incredulity by

robbing past cultures of the credit for their creations, instead
insisting that it was the work of aliens, or some superior
(albeit extinct) subspecies of human.

• Meeting the past where it lies and understanding that all art
and culture is the product of its own time, no matter how
brutal, sexist, racist, disgusting we may find it, and thinking
critically along many lines of inquiry (religion, politics, culture,
necessity, utility, even local ecology) are important to a clear
image of those times and the people who lived them.
Enlightenment
The Age of Equality

• As we’ve seen, from the ancient art/architecture of the

Great Pyramids through the statued depictions of Roman
Emperors like Marcus Aurelius, the arts and artists were
heavily directed by ruling religious and political powers.

• The long, often violent transition into the modern age,

however, brought along profound change.

• “Instead of exclusively serving those in power, the artist

was now a citizen among other citizens and free to make
art that took sides in the debates of the day.” (Getlein, 61)

• Depicted at right is Liberty Leading the People (Eugene

Delacroix, 1830), which, unlike other similar figurative
imagery of the past, was painted of the artist’s own
volition. What do we see when we look at it?

• Specifically, Liberty Leading the People is a visual

statement about democracy, and the potential freedom/
equality afforded to a government made for and lead by
the people.
 Representation of
Common, or poor Armed,
the Bourgeoisie, an
looking people, radicalized
implication that the
armed to the teeth. children. The
artist sees this not
The feather in his Satchel is an
as class warfare,
cap speaks to his indication that
but a populist
revolutionary this boy is a
uprising against
leanings. Liberty, in her student.
royalist oppression.
yellow dress,
is a deliberate
callback to
goddesses of
Greek/Roman
antiquity

A man lies half naked

and dead in his night Dead
shirt, possibly a citizen soldiers/
pulled from his bed in authority
the night by royalist figures
forces.
Guernica, by Pablo Picasso, oil on canvas, 1937
Dimensions: 11’ 5.5” x 25’ 5.75”
Guernica
A Condemnation of Fascism & Violence

• Picasso’s Guernica is an abstracted depiction of an

actual event from the Spanish Civil War in which General
Franco and his forces toppled the liberal government of
the Spanish Republic.

• Commissioned to create a mural for the Spanish

Pavillion at the 1937 World’s Fair, Picasso vacillated on
the task and ultimately created this enormous work as
an act of protest after news of the Nationalists’ actions
reached him at his studio in Paris.

• Guernica is 100% grayscale (black, white and shades of

gray), with no colors used, whatsoever.

• Picasso refused to allow Guernica to remain in Spain

while Franco was in power, so until Franco’s death in
1975, it was housed at the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA) in New York City. Afterward, it was moved to
ultimately moved to Madrid (Picasso’s hometown),
although the actual city of Guernica did put in a bid for
its residing at its namesake.
Guernica
Can the Loser’s Write the History Books?

• What is perhaps most interesting about

Guernica is that it represents the losing side in
a nation’s “civil” conflict.

• Franco and the Nationalist forces won the

Spanish Civil War, and the former remained in
power until his death, some 38 years after this
painting was made.

• And yet, despite its critical message about

Franco and what he represented, the painting
still exists, meaning it was not subject to the
kind of cultural erasure brought on by forceful
or dominant regimes.

• Are all wars fought on the battlefield? Or, is it

possible for art to conduct battles of its own
inside the human heart and mind?
Stories &
Histories
 “Artists have often turned to stories for subject
matter, especially stories whose roots reach deep
into their culture’s collective memory.” (Getlein, 63)
William Hogarth
Art as Agent for Social Reform

• William Hogarth (1697-1764) was an 18th century artist

artist/engraver who sought to change social perceptions
of “undesirable” types with his illustrative engraving
work.

• His series, A Harlot’s Progress, charts the life of one

Mary Hackabout through six depictions of events from
her tragic life, leading ultimately to her untimely death
after spending some time in prison.

• Mary Hackabout was a fictional character, but certainly a

composite of a great number of women who were lured
into prostitution (as antidote to destitution) and paid for
the privilege with their very lives.

• Recognizing that inequity, Hogarth’s work gave Mary’s

story both platform, and the inherent beauty of skilled,
figurative artwork to inform a class blinded populace of
the sorts of tragedies they were creating through their
A Harlot’s Progress, William Hogarth, engraving, 1732
willful ambivalence to the struggles of impoverished
One of six pieces depicting events in the largely non-fiction life of fictional
women. character, Mary Hackabout.
 Itinerant preacher, his
Mary has just arrived in “Ask not for whom the
back to Mary, offering Depiction of famous
Pots about to topple, a Cheapside, and we can bell tolls, it tolls for
ad hoc moral instruction rake, Colonel Francis
visual metaphor for see she is still dressed thee.” Or, perhaps an
to a group of young Charteris and his pimp,
what is about to happen nicely in good clothes alarm bell that should
girls. John Gourlay, clearly
to Mary/Moll in taking and new bonnet. be ringing, but isn’t?
interested in the arrival
up with Elizabeth
In a more prosaic of a fresh, new
Needham, a notorious
sense, the Bell is an innocent.
madame of the time
period (female pimp) indication that this is
the Bell Inn, Cheapside,
London.

Dead goose, as in:

“Your goose is cooked,”
or other aviary epithets
to similar effect.

The tag around the

goose’s neck reads:
“For my lofing cofen in
Tems Street in London,”
or, “For my loving
cousin in Thames Street
in London.”
Picturing The
Here and Now
 “The social order, the world of the sacred, history and the great
stories of the past—all these are very grand and important themes.
But art does not always have to reach so high. Sometimes it is
enough just to look around us and notice what our life is like here,
now, in this place, at this time.” (Geitlein, 65)
Here & Now/There & Then
Art that Becomes History

• We’ve looked at art as representation of the sacred

realm, but it can obviously also depict the mortal,
terrestrial realm that surrounds us.

• The here and now is very much linked to what we

spoke of previously with art as depiction of historical
record, in that the here and now will, sooner or later,
become the there and then.

• As seen in your book, this model, depicting the

counting of livestock from the tomb of Meketre is a
stunning example of art imitating life, and through its
preservation, informing us—all these millennia later—
of what everyday life looked like in Ancient Egypt.

• Can you imagine being buried with a Lego diorama

or playset that models your own life? What might you
want it to include so that future generations get the
right idea about you? What might you not include?
Lost Civilizations
Preservation through Colonial Record

• Another example cited in your book is Friar Bernardino de

Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, which combines Spanish and
Aztec to create a written record of Native Latin American
culture and crafts.

• Without fully opening the colonialism can of worms, the

corrosive/cataclysmic effect that European settlement had on
the indigenous peoples and cultures of the American
continents, the Florentine Codex represents a surprisingly
forward minded approach in that one culture is using its
advancements of writing/printmaking to chronicle the
practices of another.

• While the Codex and other works/pieces like it would in due

time become history, they were in their own time a snapshot
of a living culture before it was either changed or lost forever.

• If you’ve heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty, that it is

impossible to study a system without changing it, do you
believe that to be true? Can an artist depict a people or
phenomenon—in any medium—without at least slightly
altering the object of that study?
Robert Rauschenberg
(1925-2008)

• The wide range of Rauschenberg’s work makes him difficult

to categorize.

• He worked extensively in set and costume design, as well

as graphic design, and even working with a social canvas
through the creation of “happenings.”

• Rauschenberg was known for adding aspects of 3D to his

paintings through the incorporation of found objects.

• One of his “paintings” is actually a bed, complete with quilt,

mounted vertically to the wall and splashed with paint.

• More than anything, Rauschenberg’s works are about

breaking down boundaries between media and
encompassing reality.

• Bringing the painter’s medium to everyday objects, and

everyday objects into the painter’s realm of the canvas,
Rauschenberg found inventive ways to explore to overlap
between these seemingly distinct spaces of the physical
and the imaginary.
Looks kind of like the love child of James Caan and Paul McCartney.
 Many of Rauschenburg’s works were designed to explore the intersection of the 2D
picture plain of traditional painting, and the 3D world more in line with sculpture or even
architecture.
 Hope, by Shepard Fairey, poster
print, 2007-2008

Designed by Fairey in a single day,

his Hope poster went on to
become one of the most iconic
images of the early 2000s, and a
key piece of material for Barrack
Obama’s presidential campaign in
2008.
Reflection of Self
“Surely one of the most common of human wishes
is to talk, if only we could, for even a brief moment,
with someone who is no longer there.” (Getlein, 69)
A Moment in Time
Art as Telepathy/Immortality

• Literature probably offers us the purest example of

form in its ability to express complex ideas and
emotions in durable form that exist long after the
original author or authors have passed on.

• If there’s a doubt, consider the prevalence of modern

day religions and their associated texts (the Bible, the
Quran, the Baghavad Gita, etc) and how those have
persisted through hundreds, perhaps thousands of
years.

• Similarly, art communicates by depiction as we’ve

already seen through the themes of Stories and
Histories, and The Here and Now.

• More than just notable events, however, art can—and

perhaps more than anything, does—communicate the
more personal and innate aspects of the human
individual. So long as that expression survives, so too
an aspect of the individual who made it lives on.
Talking Skulls
A Message Through The Ages

• By Getlein’s interpretation, Talking Skull represents

an expression of the universal human desire to
reach beyond the boundary of death whilst living.

• Perhaps not everyone has wished they could have

had one last day, one final conversation with a lost
loved one, but the desire is, by and large, a
distinctly human one.

• The emotive nature of the sculpture’s pose (a

reflection of the sculptor’s tremendous skill and
facility with bronze), the nakedness of the figure,
the intense gaze and open mouth get the viewer
closer to alignment with the boy’s thoughts as he
interacts with the impassive skull.
Talking Skull, Meta Warrick Fuller, bronze, 1937
• If you could speak with someone from the past (no
longer living), distant or recent, whom would you
choose?
Frida Kahlo
Biography through Portraiture

• Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a Mexican

painter who became famous for her series
of portraits (particularly self portraits) and
marriage to painter/muralist/activist,
Diego Rivera.

• Kahlo began to paint, aged 18, while in

convalescence after being horribly injured
in a streetcar accident in Mexico City.

• Her self portraits are notable for their

unflinching honesty (unibrow, anyone?),
but also for their often fantastical
depictions of Frida’s suffering in her long
recovery.
 And on the right, we have
Frida in modern dress, an
iconoclast in the societal
sense; someone who tears
down social norms as
opposed to upholding them.

The Two Fridas

Oil on canvas, 1939

Completed shortly after her

divorce from Diego Rivera
(they would remarry the
following year), The Two
Fridas shows the two distinct
personalities of the artist.

On the left, we have a

brokenhearted Frida dressed
in traditional Tehuana garb.
Hearts, stints and bleeding
veins would be somewhat
regular fixtures of Frida’s self
portraiture, a call back to the
many surgeries and
treatments she underwent
following the streetcar
accident in 1925.
 Self Portrait with Portrait of Dr.
Farill, oil on canvas, 1951

Note the reappearance of the

Painted in the latter part of her
heart imagery, this time
life, this piece depicts Frida with
doubling as her painting palette.
her spinal surgeon, Dr. Farill,
who had completed seven
The heart is hugely symbolic in
surgeries on her spine in that
almost any context or medium,
same year, 1951.
but what do you think of its
presentation here? Is this a
case of painting from the heart,
a sort of visual pun? Or do you
Popular interpretation of this think there’s more to it than
image labels it as an ex vote, or that?
ratablo (Latin American prayer
imagery) for Dr. Farill, to whom
Frida felt no small degree of
gratitude for saving her life.
Everyday Appearances
Extraordinary Depiction

• Ostensibly a quiet, candid portraiture of a woman

holding a small set of scales, Johannes Vermeer’s
Woman Holding a Balance, is actually a depiction of the
Last Judgement from the biblical book of Revelation.

• Scales are often used as a symbol for justice, or a

means of weighing the good against the evil prior to
assignment to one’s fate in the afterlife.

• The ancient Egyptians depict scales used to measure

the weight of ones heart against the weight of a feather.
So long as the feather remains heavier, the soul may
pass on to paradise with Osiris, whereas those whose
hearts are heavier are fed to Ammit, the devourer of the
dead.

• In the background of this image, we see another

painting on the wall. In it, we see Christ descending
from the sky (The Second Coming), with the multitudes
below awaiting judgement.
Woman Holding a Balance, Johannes Vermeer, oil on canvas, ca. 1664
Note the mirror on the wall, And, of course, the
a symbol for perhaps vanity mentioned image of Christ
or self knowledge. Were the descending from the
woman to look up, she heavens in the Day of
would see her reflection and Judgement.
know at least an aspect of
herself.

Many speculate as to
whether the woman in this
image is pregnant, or
whether this sort of
voluminous fabric shape
was part of fashion customs
of the time.

The jewelry could also be a

symbol for vanity, but note
that none of it is being worn
by the subject, as in the
Last Judgement, all such
finery and artifice would be
stripped away to reveal the
bare individual beneath.
Invention
&
Fantasy
 “Renaissance theorists likened painting to poetry.
With words, a poet could conjure an imaginary
world and fill it with people and events.” (Getlein, 71)
Hieronymus Bosch
The Garden of Earthly Delights

• The Garden of Earthly Delights, (ca. 1505-10)

is the central panel of a triptych, painted by
Renaissance artist, Hieronymus Bosch (also
the name of the central character in the
Detective Bosch books by Michael Connelly)

• It is a depiction of a false paradise, in that

however gratifying or attractive its elements,
they ultimately lead a soul to destruction.

• Notice though, how Bosch populates his

panel with fantastical creatures and
architecture. Unlike other observation based
or referential paintings, Bosch has drawn
heavily—if not exclusively—from the fruit of
his own imagination.
Il Carceri
The Imagined Prison of Piranesi

• While some would consider the human imagination to

be boundless, Giovanni Battista Piranesi appears to
have used that boundlessness to impose bounds in
his illustrative series of etchings, Il Carceri (Italian for
The Prison)

• Across 16 etchings and “capricious inventions,”

Piranesi evokes a bewildering underground space
with “ambiguous spaces, stairways to nowhere, and
soaring dark vaults.” (Getlein, 72)

• Getlein asserts that Piranesi’s work here “anticipates”

the Romantic movement, with its irrational contrast
the the rational Enlightenment movement by way of
monsters and melodrama.

• As an aside, Piranesi is also the title of a recent novel The Sawhorse, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, etching, 1761
by Susannah Smith, and follows a character of the
same name lost in a trans dimensional labyrinth of
interlocking, and sea locked tunnels & cathedrals.
The Dream
Mining the Subconscious

• Henri Rousseau was a Parisian painter in the

late 19th and early 20th centuries who is
perhaps best known for his indifference to
formal art traditions.

• Rousseau loved to paint jungles, but, because

he never left France, his depictions of jungle
flora and fauna could only be made from
reference to secondhand resources, such as
illustrated books, magazines, and curated
botanical exhibits.

• This sort of painting also anticipates in its own

way, the illustrative commercial art of the 20th The Dream, Henri Rousseau, oil on canvas, 1910
century as perpetrated by such notable (From page 73 in your book)
illustrators as J.C. Leyendecker, N.C. Wyeth,
Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell.
 Maxfield Parrish

J.C. Leyendecker
Norman Rockwell
The
Natural
World
“As humans, we make our own
environment.” (Getlein, 74)
Landscape Painting
Place as subject as opposed to setting

• Getlein points out that in the 19th century, many painters set to
the task of painting the American landscape.

• Thomas Cole is a notable, early example of American landscape

painting.

• His work, The Oxbow, depicts a duality between an idyllic, sunlit

land and the passing darkness and torrential power of a
thunderstorm.

• Cole worked up the painting in his studio from a field sketch, to

which he added a number of imagined elements to solidify and
enhance the composition.

• Given the wide swaths of land which even today are sparsely
populated, one wonders if 19th century landscape painting was
not in itself an artistic effort to present the appeal of these
American spaces for westward expansion?

• Might this also be a commentary that, while the thunderstorm is The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a
not a desirable place to abide, it leaves in its wake a land Thunderstorm) Thomas Cole, oil on canvas, 1836
cultivated for human habitation, as contrasted to the brambly
wilderness on the other side of the river?
Wang Jian
Imagined yet believable spaces

• According to Getlein, and in contrast to the infinitely more

recent take-up of American landscape painting, “Landscape
is the most important and honored subject in the Chinese
painting tradition…”

• Perhaps counterintuitively, however, it’s purpose was not to

accurately record a place, but rather to construct imaginary
spaces for the viewer to wander through in their mind’s eye;
a sort of precursor to augmented and virtual reality.

• Taking the vantage point of the image into account: In

Cole’s painting, we have a readily observable, boots on the
ground position overlooking the scene. Conversely, in Jian’s
drawing, we are removed from the scene, floating in space
in line and sort of above it, as perhaps a bird might see.

• What advantages do you see to either approach? Is

landscape painting at its best when it gives us a more
documentary perspective? Or, should we be able to wander
imaginatively via a more removed, omniscient view?

White Clouds over Xiao and Xiang, Wang Jian,

hanging scroll, ink on colored paper, 1668
Shaping Spaces
Nature as Medium

• At right is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an

earthwork that still exists (albeit, greatly
diminished) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah.

• Smithson was drawn to the idea of the artist acting

as a sort of “geological force,” in imposing an
imagined and deliberate structure on the otherwise
impassive landscape.

• Works of this scale can be largely invisible when

viewed up close. One must examine the whole
thing and extrapolate the whole from multiple
observations.

• However, rising just a little ways above it, the entire Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water/
feature becomes immediately apparent, and we algae, 1970
know from the deliberate spiral shape that this is a
human imposition, or perhaps superimposition on
nature.
 Crop Circles

Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset, England. Nazca Lines, Nazca, Peru

This earthwork is nearly 55 meters in length, and predates aerial transportation by centuries.
Bigger Picture
Earthwork Intentions and Perspectives

• Large scale earthworks make it difficult

for us to appreciate them without the
benefit of flight, or aerial photography.

• With that difficulty of perspective from

closeup on the ground, who or what
then would you say is the intended
audience for such works?

• Might these suit or be a better fit for art

about the sacred realm?

• Can you think of any other large scale

structures that are best appreciated
from above, or from a great distance?
Smaller scale earthwork sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, who we’ll discuss at a
later date.
Art About
Art & Its
Institutions
“Artists learn to make art by
looking at art.” (Getlein, 77)
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

Pablo Picasso
Art about Art
Art Goes Meta

• At once a deliberate imitation or homage to an earlier work

by Hokusai, Wall’s photograph pulls on the ubiquity and
familiarity of the Hokusai image to draw parallel to a more
modern depiction of the same or similar events.

• Some works of art, like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or Grant

Wood’s American Gothic become so entrenched in the
collective cultural consciousness, that they become ready
material for this sort of homage, or in some cases, direct
parody.

• What is markedly different about Hall’s work than that of the

more documentary practitioners of photography is that the
image at right has been carefully composed and
constructed as any painting. The finished product is actually
a digitally reconstructed from multiple exposures.

• What is the value of this kind of imitation/homage? How A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), Jeff Wall, photograph, 1993
much is its success based in the success of its source
image? How does this visual allusion compare with the
practices of deconstruction we talked about in Chapter 2?
 Ejiri in Suruga Province, Hokusai, polychrome woodblock
Jeff Wall’s carefully crafted photograph…
print, 1831
 Obvious parody/homage, featuring Kermit the Frog & Miss
American Gothic, Grant Wood, oil on canvas, 1930 Piggy. Note the role reversal from the original. To suit the
dynamics of the Muppets’ relationship, Miss Piggy is cast in
the imposing place of the austere looking farmer from Wood’s
original.
Freedom From Want, Norman Rockwell, c.1943 Three Panel Crimes, Instagram, by Yours, Truly, c.2019
Summary
Recap

• Geitlein identifies eight specific themes found in art, each of which we discussed in detail.
• The Sacred Realm
• Politics and the Social Order
• Stories and Histories
• Picturing the Here and Now
• Reflecting the Human Experience
• Invention and Fantasy
• The Natural World
• Art About Art and its Institutions
Homework
Short Writing Assignment #2

• Choose a piece of artwork you enjoy.

• It may come from your book, from another art book, a museum you’ve visited, online, etc.
• Looking at the chosen piece of artwork, do your best to identify which of the eight themes, as presented in the
book and in class, that it exhibits.

• It is possible, even likely that your chosen image may reflect more than one theme. Do your best to identify all of
the themes that it embodies.

• On a single page, explain why this work is an example of the themes you’ve identified within it (please include an
image of the artwork as well, if possible).

• Example: Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman Holding A Balance” is a thematic example of the sacred realm as it uses
subtle symbols to relate a message about the Second Coming of Christ and the Day of Judgement from the
biblical book of Revelation. Furthermore, as Vermeer painted the figure of the woman as she would have appeared
in his own time, it is also an example of picturing the here and now, and by extension, stories and histories. It’s
the most amazing painting I’ve ever seen and one of these days I’m going to get it tattooed on my back.”
Many hours (and paychecks)
later…