Crash course in art history & movements

I've always wanted to have a better understanding or art, various movements and history but not known where to start. - Well, if I had been at all serious about learning I'm sure I would have found out.

It is a pretty inaccessible subject for a beginner though (not that I have really gone to great lengths to get beginners material).

But now I find myself doing a paper that I heavily suspect understanding art history and movements might make the whole bloody thing a lot easier. But it has to be a crash course because I need most of my time to study the content provided... I just want more background, and wide understanding as opposed to an in depth understanding. ....and that way I can later pursue areas of interest.

Anyone know of good resources? Online or lightweight books I can borrow from a library are good too.

Art History for Dummies By Jesse Bryant Wilder... maybe?

online here

http://www.google.co.nz/search?tbs=bks:1&tbo=1&q=art+history+for+dummies

just spend some time on a website like this and google and wiki some of the names at the same time as you put them in their historical context

http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/

a few fundamental things to note are that :
Until the first decade of the 20th century, art, whether drawing, painting, or sculpture, was always essentially pictorial, and was based on themes and compositions representing real world ideas...

modern does not mean now. its a distinct period when art started to get more abstract

post modern is too complicated to understand but basically means anything goes.

movements are only defined afterwards eg post modernism was post 1945 and yet only got widely talked about from the 1980's

Or god, not a whole lot of real world in that.

or one could argue god is - being a man made invention - 100% all real world

A short history of Western art: Lots of quite nice Greek and Roman stuff. Jesus makes a cameo appearance. Same but different for a bit. Catholic guilt comes along, responsible for some quite nice Churches. People notice the ruins. <insert some Dutchmen here>. British invent the industrial revolution. French revolution. Everyone kills everyone else.

Art History 101 paper at Auckland Uni?

You're forgetting Gothic.

If only you had an iPad Smiley

shame on you Kris_b

shame on you sir

It's odd to think about, but art really is one of the few things I am happy to remain essentially entirely ignorant about.

For me, I truly love experiencing different forms of art without preconceptions, frames of reference, or often even the correct terms, as it lets me enjoy (or not) the art in and of itself, without any shitty restrictions that an education will give.

It sounds uber pretentious, but I think this tends to result in my loving or hating stuff on a purely visceral level whereby it speaks straight to the soul and bypasses the mind entirely, in a way that very little else in life does...

heh, not particularly useful to the OP, now that I have read it in full, but hey, it's Monday and it's me

I wish I could revert to that TtheHF!

Personally I think the best place to start would be looking into how our recent (current?) idea of art emerged in France just a few hundred years ago. That period was the 'origin' of defining what we call art (and not-art).

http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/academies.html

(BTW that link just mentions what I was talking about, it is common knowledge enough that quoting from anywhere would be fine... Other parts of that link I would not vouch for.)

I wouldnt think its necessary to remain uneducated about art merely to retain you're viseceral response to it.

Clearly he would prefer a bawdy maedieval feast than a visit to the art gallery!

I agree but I think it is more than it would be otherwise. People who are educated about art will have their base opinions at least partially swayed by stuff they know, whereas I get to remain the easily delighted dullard

Talking about art, come see some awesome paintings and sculptures and shit this weekend involving artists making pieces of art (ART I TELL YOU!) based on neuroscience research at the UoA

http://doyoumind.tumblr.com/

http://www.fmhs.auckland.ac.nz/faculty/cbr/events/doyoumind.aspx

Pffft art and science should never mix.

Da Vinci disagrees

He kept the two qite separate though, you didn't see helicopters floating round in background of the Madonna on the Rocks or Vitruvian Man measuring up Mona Lisa.

I'm pretty sure everything he did was based on mathematical considerations though, if not direct science bizzo. Certain I've read that somewhere, though I'm quietly hoping against hope that it wasn't a Dan Brown novel <:

If the Mona Lisa had helicopters in the background I think it would have been exactly twice as awesome.

And if it included his tank design it would have been three times as awesome.

more art and science

I might be giving a talk about my work at SEAM in Oct http://www.criticalpath.org.au/SEAM.html

It's a program that is bringing together scientists, artists, and philosophers

Incorporating perspective added the mathematical element to all the renaissance artists, but that had been around for a while prior to da Vinci so it wasn't as though it was something he invented. Perspective was perfected in the early renaissance by one of the other ninja turtles from memory.

Perhaps, but not *really* for the better part of a millenium and a half. Post-Classical and pre-Renaissance art is fuxxed mathematically, hence my mentioning him in particular ^_^

Ahh, nice edit <:

Actually I probably shouldn't use the word perfected, but the early renaissance was when it came on in leaps and bounds.

2/29 replies have so far adressed the OP.

Forum internettery in full and total effect.

That is pretty damn good tbh.

ps. I tried to help

Nah thanks, it's interesting reading

The paper I'm doing is called Art & Mathematics and we'll be exploring if and how they connect and after much research arguing about it... sort of.

Funny though, today's class turned out to be a brief art history lesson!! Will still explore that site and "flip" though the for dummies book. It's fucking post modernism that's the total mind fuck though...

That is exactly it though. If you understand that post-modernism is supposed to be a total mind fuck then you are understanding it in the 'right' way

I bought a great book overseas that is small enough to fit in my handbag if I'm off to galleries etc and want a better (albeit brief) understanding of what I'm looking at might help?

sorry link fail been a while since I've been on biggie x
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Isms-Understanding-Art-Stephen-Little/dp/0713670118

If you go to the galleries elro, you can download podcasts which explains what your looking at when you start from a certain point. I had one for the Louvre that started from the Mona Lisa, and the Musee d'Orsay that starts from the impressionist period up top.