Art Appreciation: Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Art - Impact of Art on Society

Themes
Themes are universal ideas explored and represented in artwork. One popular recurring example is identity. Identity includes the characteristics and behaviors that put an individual in a certain group. Some of the factors for identity include race, religion, culture, and language.
Photographer Cindy Sherman explored identity by photographing herself in different roles and costumes, essentially erasing her own identity and taking on the identity of other people. In doing this, she focused on the stereotypes of these female roles, addressing feminism, youth, aging, and obsession with status, ultimately questioning identity.
Kara Walker, an artist working with silhouettes, explores ideas of identity through race and gender. She portrays racism and historic scenes of slavery, getting past the romanticized notions of the past and exploring its reality. Her silhouettes simplify forms and focus on the topic at hand. She seeks to get past misconceptions and portray the true nature and identities behind tough subjects.

Fine Art vs Applied Art
Fine art is art with no purpose other than being aesthetically pleasing. This includes drawing, painting, sculpture, and other media. Applied art is art that serves a purpose. Applied arts are useful objects with artistic design applied to their creation. This includes graphic design, interior design, fashion design, decorative arts, and architecture.
Graphic design and illustration are also categorized as commercial arts, which fall under applied art. Decorative arts is the creation of jewelry, metalwork, ceramics, embroidery, carpets, furniture, and more. Sometimes applied arts are used in fine art works, so the line between fine arts and applied arts can be blurred, depending on the creator and their intent. In the 1960s, artists such as Andy Warhol began to blur the division between the two, which had been clear in previous years. Warhol used commercial art techniques to mass-produce works that were considered fine art.

Realism
The realism movement began in France in the 1850s, and it attempted to document people and ordinary life faithfully, rather than avoiding unpleasant subjects or romanticizing them. Realist artists depicted laborers and ordinary people engaged in everyday life activities, realistically documenting and preserving life and culture at that time.
This example by Gustave Courbet is called The Grain Sifters (1855). It shows a mundane scene of workers sifting grain, using dark and natural colors to portray the scene realistically. Courbet led the realism movement in France. The realism movement challenged the narratives and depictions of history paintings, which was an academic style with posed action scenes. Realism artists documented manual labor and the plight of everyday people, using dark, serious tones to show serious-looking people. Realism artists were not interested in depicting history or anything that they did not personally see or experience; they were only documenting the present-day struggles of the common man.


Emotions and Ideas
Emotions and ideas can be expressed through artwork in many ways, including the imagery, subject matter, or colors used. Frida Kahlo is a
Mexican artist who used the subject matter and imagery in her artwork to express her physical and emotional pain and frustration. Throughout her life, Kahlo experienced abuse as well as a near-fatal bus accident that caused many physical problems. She began to paint self-portraits and explore ideas related to her pain and injuries, including emotional pain from her divorce from artist Diego Rivera. In her paintings, she often depicted her physical problems as well as open wounds to portray her pain. She sometimes included imagery of roots, to symbolize growth and a feeling of being trapped. Kahlo would also depict issues of childbirth and miscarriage, to communicate her frustration over her own failed pregnancies. She would often mix reality with elements of fantasy and paint scenes relating to pain and death. She used self-portraits to communicate her emotions and ideas relating to her pain as well as to explore her identity.

Political Ideas
Artists can use their artwork to support or criticize political ideas. Political protest is an often-used theme in artwork. The imagery in artwork can show the devastation caused by political decisions and the harm they can cause to innocent people.
Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) is one of the best-known antiwar paintings in history. Picasso created this to depict the violence, chaos, and suffering of war. Picasso focused on how war affected innocent civilians, and he depicted this in his work, showing the pain and suffering inflicted by the Spanish Civil War. The imagery and title reflect the bombing of the town Guernica by German and Italian war planes. Guernica was painted in black, white, and gray, and it depicts a woman holding a dead child, a wounded horse, and a woman with her arms raised in horror, among other imagery. The woman's hand suggests the shape of an airplane. The color scheme allows the viewer to concentrate on the imagery without being distracted by other colors.
To many, this painting has become a symbol of the devastation and horrors of war.

Social Ideas
Artists will often reflect the social climate surrounding them through the subjects that they portray in their artwork. They can choose to portray marginalized populations, bringing social issues to the attention of a larger population. Romare Bearden is an African-American artist known for capturing the social and cultural climate of African-American neighborhoods in his collages. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, he began to use cut paper and magazine clippings to portray the culture and community in African-American neighborhoods and to celebrate themes such as jazz music, the rural South, blues musicians, religion, and spirituality. He focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community.
Another example of art reflecting society and culture is the social realism movement. Social realism artists sought to highlight the 'forgotten' members of society, such as the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. During the 1920s and 1930s, these artists portrayed the common worker as the backbone of society, and their artwork showed political corruption, materialism, joblessness, and poverty, among other social and political issues at the time. This example by Ben Shahn is a mural called The Meaning of Social Security, and it is an attempt to depict Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech on the upcoming social security legislation and the ambitions of the New Deal programs.

Women's Emerging Role
During the medieval era, women would work with men to create manuscript illuminations and embroideries. During the Renaissance, though, some women artists gained international reputations, thanks to shifts in culture such as humanism. Humanism emphasized the value of all people. During the baroque period, women began depicting women as strong figures, and they also began painting still-life artworks. In the 18th century, women began to be accepted as students by famous artists and two women founded the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In the 19th century, women began to gain access to formal art education and more women began to exhibit their artwork. Photography was an accessible medium for women, with no formal training or traditions to constrict their creativity. In the 20th century, particularly the 1960s onward, feminism played a role in increasing the focus on women artists as well as their presence in formal training and prominent exhibitions. In 1985, the anonymous female artist group the Guerrilla Girls spoke out about gender inequalities, especially in the art world.

Reflecting the Current Economy
Artists can use their artwork to show how the economy is affecting certain populations and bring this awareness to a wider audience. One example of this is the visual depiction of the economic ruin caused by the Dust
Bowl. In the 1930s, dust storms swept through the American West and wiped out many farms and ranches. The land was ravaged by drought and rolling clouds of dust. Farmers lost everything and had no way to make a living. The Dust Bowl, as it was called, was reflected in the artwork of the time. The artists who depicted this event attempted to show how it affected farmers and the economy.
Thomas Hart Benton's lithograph Prodigal Son from 1939 shows the desolate and wasted land as well as the farmer mourning it. The farmer is meant not to represent one single man, but all farmers who were affected by this tragic event. Benton approached the topic symbolically, showing the ruined land and home, animal carcass, and the man who will have to move on from his land.
Another artist who depicted the Dust Bowl was Alexandre Hogue. Whereas Benton saw this event as something happening to passive victims, Hogue saw it as something created by man's effect on nature. Hogue showed the slashes and furrows made in the land and the ruined green plains.


Influence on Popular Culture
Pop art served as both an art movement and a cultural movement. Pop art used images and objects from popular culture and blurred the line between 'high art' and mass-produced cultural objects. This movement elevated common items to fine art, rather than sticking to traditional art themes. Andy Warhol took mundane Campbell's soup cans and Brillo boxes, creating repeated images and objects based on them, and showing them as artwork. Many pop artists, including Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, began as commercial artists.
Warhol began to mass-produce his artwork, much like the products he was depicting were also mass-produced. In doing this, he equated artwork to a commodity that can be bought and sold, just like these products.
Warhol would use bright colors, high contrast, and multiple prints of the same image, as if you were seeing the product repeated on a store shelf. The repetition, bright colors, and contrast of pop art are still used today in advertisements, perpetuating the link between art and culture.

Technology and Art
Technology is used in conjunction with art in many different ways. Some artists use technology within their art, such as video artists. Others use computers, digital cameras, and scanners to create art, such as electronic artists or graphic designers. This art can be printed repeatedly, and multiple copies can be shown or sold. For those who do not use a form of technology to create their art, they might use it to compose a scene. A. artist can use digital photography to capture images to work on, or he or she could use computer software to compose the artwork before drawing or painting it. An artist might draw or paint from life with no assistance from technology, but then he or she may use technology to document the work and put it online on a website for others to view. Technology can also be used to keep records of work or to submit artwork to art competitions across the world.