An enquiry into some present-day attitudes in art education and their relationship to the current alienation of artist from society
- Authors: Rodger, John Neil
- Date: 1973
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:21146 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/6574
- Description: From Introduction: "We can't teach these kids anything, man, they are so pure and unspoiled. Anything we show them or any discipline we impose upon them will only corrupt their purity. It's best if they just stay home and do their own thing”. "If your instructor says he knows what art is, watch out.” These two statements, the first by an instructor at a prominent New York art school, the second by one of America's respected critics, are the sort of talk one might expect to hear at any gathering of the avent-garde . To hear them said in and about the art school puts things in a different light. They are indicative -of the sort of thing that is preached and practised by a sufficient proportion of the art- educational force in the Western world to constitute a crisis unparalleled in the entire history of art education. Unopposed, such views must rapidly spell death for the institution. They must also, if they reached the proportions their authors appear to hope for, ensure a universal visual illiteracy unequalled in any other age. Of course statements like this, archly delivered by the very people who would suffer the most immediate loss at their implementation, are not at all true reflections of the whole state of art education in our time, or those people would simply not be in a position to make them. There are a great many people in the profession who would wholeheartedly reject such statements, and this faction is by no means confined to the older members.
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Certain aspects of eroticism in twentieth century western painting
- Authors: Marais, Estelle
- Date: 1973
- Subjects: Erotic art , Painting, Modern -- 20th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2486 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012833
- Description: In this essay eroticism will be examined as it appears in some twentieth century representational styles. The decision to concentrate on the representational styles is based on the fact that eroticism is by nature incompatible with the non-representational or non-objective movements in art. This incompatibility is rooted in the knowledge that eroticism is intrinsically and fundamentally a human experience and could therefore find expression only in an art which is concerned with human experience, i.e. experiences which refer to man, his nature and his relation to Nature. It would be oversimplified and grossly inaccurate to equate the nonrepresentational with the abstract, abstraction being an element present in all art to a greater or lesser degree. However, when abstraction has reached the stage where it can define its aims, as, in the words of Kandinsky, "widening the separation between the domain of art and the domain of Nature", (Lake & Maillard: A Dictionary of Modern Painting, p. 1) then it may also approach the realm of the non-representational. When Michel Seupher states, "I call abstract art all art that does not recall or evoke reality", (Lake & Maillard: A Dictionary of Modern Painting, p. 136) abstract and nonrepresentational art becomes fused into an inseparable unity. Erotic expression will then be incompatible with this degree of abstraction. Intro., p. 1.
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Metaphysical elements of nineteenth century romantic landscape painting
- Authors: Thomas, Christopher Kay Patric
- Date: 1973
- Subjects: Romanticism in art , Landscapes in art , Landscape painting -- 19th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2495 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013307
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Pottery craft and culture
- Authors: Randell, Gillian
- Date: 1972
- Subjects: Pottery craft
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2452 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007559
- Description: "The idea and fact of containment have been the primary significance of pottery from the beginning, and pots of all ages and peoples, even when their ostensible function was ceremonial or symbolical, have expressed by their generous swelling volumes, the potential or holding things of vital importance to man food, liquid or the furnishings of the grave." The utilitarian value of a pot is inseparable from its aesthetic quality. "There can be no fullness of complete realization or utility without beauty, refinement and charm, for the simple reason that their absence must in the long run be intolerable to both maker and consumer... The continued production of utilities without delight in making and using is bound to produce only boredom and to end in sterility." Modern pottery, whether industrial or that of the artist potter, has each in its different way tended to separate the aesthetic and the utilitarian. This is one symptom of the cultural decline of our Western tradition since the Eighteenth Century. The making of pots has persisted from earliest times to the present day through our ever changing world. Circumstances have at times obscured the essential truths of this art.
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Form and symbol in ancient Egypt
- Authors: Verwey, Erdmuthe Wilhemina
- Date: 1968
- Subjects: Signs and symbols -- Egypt
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2443 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006133
- Description: From thesis: The Egyptian civilization was regarded by the ancients as the ultimate example of' a morally regulated way of life; their judicious political economy was the admiration of the Elians and both Pythagoras and Plato accepted it as ideal, the former in a small select society and the latter on a larger scale .However a society like this,which is accepted, and acted upon as a completed one, in which everything has been considered, (especially the education of and the habituation to it, to make it second nature), does not take the nature of spirit into consideration, because it is precisely that infinite impulse which acts in contemporary life, and changes its very form. This impulse expressed itself in Egypt in a peculiar way. One would expect that a society, which appears to have been so complete, so fixed in every way, could have no characteristic of its own. Religion, one would expect would have been introduced in the same calm peaceful way, in accordance with the regular order of things. Unlike the Chinese civilisation, where every change is excluded, and the fixedness of character recurs perpetually, this calm order in Egypt was threaded with a spirit full of stirring and urgent impulses. We have here the Oriental Massiveness in combination with the African element. It is a spirit which begins to emerge from the merely natural, without freeing itself from nature. It cannot reach free consciousness of being, it only produces this as a problem: the enigma of its being. One half emerges, the other half is hidden. The buildings of the Egyptians are half below the ground while half rises into the air. The whole country is divided into a Kingdom of life and a Kingdom of death. This, however, is in reality no division, but a unity. The fundamental conception of that which the Egyptians regarded as the essence of being, rested on the fixed character of the natural world - in particular the fixed physical cycle of the Nile and the Sun. These two elements, strictly connected, formed the basis of a very simple and unchanging mode of life. Unchanging, because there is a definite physical cycle which the Nile, in connection with the sun, pursued. The sun rises, reaches its culmination, and then retrogrades. So does the Nile.
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Aspects of reality as reflected by the human form in painting
- Authors: Fourie, F T
- Date: 1966
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:21174 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/6739
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The emotive qualities of light as a prime factor in artistic expression
- Authors: Brooks, R B
- Date: 1965
- Subjects: Light in art
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MFA
- Identifier: vital:2502 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014659
- Description: What we do possess to-day as 'art' a faked music, filled with exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocted out of the form-wealth of millenia some new "style'' which is no style at all since everyone does as he pleases. A lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, the taste of the "man of the world" can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age. Everything else, everything that sticks to old ideals is for provincial consumption. This is the year 1965 - nearly fifty years since Oswald Spengler published "The decline of the West" The paragraph I have quoted by way of justification for this dissertation is in turn a justiification of the fact that Spengler is as valid today as he was in 1918.
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