Visual Expressions In Society Final Presentation Part I: Sel ✓ Solved

Visual Expressions in Society Final Presentation Part I: Sel

Visual Expressions in Society Final Presentation Part I: Select six objects from any art collection in New York City (e.g., MoMA, Whitney, Met, Frick) and create a virtual tour organized around a clear theme. The six objects may be in any medium, period, or culture but must relate to the chosen theme. Choose objects that together tell a cohesive narrative through their visual and contextual relationships. Part II: Prepare an in-class visual analysis presentation (PowerPoint) that examines each of the six objects, exploring their formal and narrative content and explaining how they relate to one another and to the overall theme. Support observations with concrete visual evidence as in a formal analysis paper.

Paper For Above Instructions

Title of Virtual Tour: "Modernist Breaks: Fragmentation, Movement, and Materiality"

This virtual tour selects six works from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) collection in New York City to trace a cohesive narrative about how modern artists break classical representation through fragmentation, the portrayal of movement, and exploration of materiality. The six works are: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889); Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907); Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912); Claude Monet, Water Lilies (early 20th c.); Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31 (1950); and Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans (1962). Each object is treated as a node in a chain showing shifts in pictorial logic from expressive nightscape to fully abstract material field and back to conceptual repetition (MoMA, n.d.-a; MoMA, n.d.-b; MoMA, n.d.-c; MoMA, n.d.-d; MoMA, n.d.-e; MoMA, n.d.-f).

Curatorial Rationale and Cohesive Narrative

The central argument of the tour is that modern art repeatedly 'breaks' inherited pictorial conventions to foreground either the subjective experience of perception, the kinetics of the body, or the physical properties of paint and reproduced imagery. Van Gogh's Starry Night anchors the tour as an expressive reconfiguration of landscape that foregrounds brushwork and night vision (MoMA, n.d.-a). Picasso and Duchamp present successive conceptual ruptures: Picasso by fracturing the figure into planes and multiple perspectives (Cubist fragmentation) and Duchamp by depicting sequential movement in a single image (fusing figure and time) (MoMA, n.d.-b; MoMA, n.d.-c). Monet anticipates abstraction by dissolving form into light and reflection, bridging Impressionism and later abstraction (MoMA, n.d.-d). Pollock and Warhol then represent divergent endpoints of modern material inquiry: Pollock by making paint action and surface the subject itself, Warhol by returning to flattened, mechanical repetition with conceptual implications about mass culture (MoMA, n.d.-e; MoMA, n.d.-f).

Object-by-Object Visual Analysis

1. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)

Formal features: swirling impasto, rhythmic line, exaggerated color contrasts, compressed spatial depth (MoMA, n.d.-a). The composition uses amplified brushstrokes and directional rhythm to externalize subjective vision. This piece acts as the tour’s emotional and perceptual opening: it demonstrates how paint and gesture can transform optical reality into a psychological landscape (Gombrich, 1960). In the tour narrative, van Gogh’s emphasis on mark and expressed perception sets up a continuum toward later formal experiments.

2. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Formal features: angular planes, collapsed perspective, mask-like faces, aggressive cropping (MoMA, n.d.-b). Picasso's radical reconfiguration of the figure fragments the body into geometric facets, challenging Renaissance perspectival unity (Panofsky, 1955). The tour uses this work to illustrate the first systematic rupture of figure-making in modern art—fragmentation as both formal strategy and cultural critique.

3. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)

Formal features: repeated overlapping forms, blurred contours, a staccato rhythm suggesting motion (MoMA, n.d.-c). Duchamp literalizes movement by serializing phases of motion within one plane, aligning painting with cinematic time. In the narrative arc, Duchamp links the cubist fragmentation of form to an investigation of temporality and sequence.

4. Claude Monet, Water Lilies (early 20th c.)

Formal features: flattened depth, reflected light, atmospheric color harmonies, near-abstraction (MoMA, n.d.-d). Monet dissolves descriptive form into optical effect, demonstrating that painting can prioritize sensation and surface patterning over narrative description (Baxandall, 1972). In the tour, Monet serves as the antecedent of abstraction: a soft break from representation toward fields of color and texture.

5. Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31 (1950)

Formal features: all-over drip technique, gestural line, lack of central focus, emphasis on material action (MoMA, n.d.-e). Pollock foregrounds process and paint's physicality, transforming canvas into a record of performative movement. This work is presented as the culmination of material experimentation where medium itself becomes message (Stokstad & Cothren, 2018).

6. Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)

Formal features: serial repetition, flattened color fields, mechanical reproduction aesthetic (MoMA, n.d.-f). Warhol’s work returns to recognizable imagery but reframes it through mass-produced sameness, interrogating authorship and commodification (Berger, 1972). In the tour’s conclusion, Warhol reframes the break: instead of dissolving representation, he recontextualizes it within consumer culture.

Inter-object Relationships and Thematic Cohesion

The six works form a visual argument: expressive mark-making (van Gogh) → structural fragmentation (Picasso) → temporal sequencing (Duchamp) → perceptual dissolution (Monet) → material action (Pollock) → cultural repetition (Warhol). Together they show how modern artists rethought image-making in relation to perception, the body, time, and materiality (Nochlin, 1971). Comparative readings—e.g., contrasting Picasso’s planar fragmentation with Duchamp’s temporal fragmentation—will be highlighted in the presentation using side-by-side slides and zoomed-in crop details to provide the concrete visual evidence required for formal analysis (Panofsky, 1955; Gombrich, 1960).

In-Class Presentation Strategy (Part II)

The in-class PowerPoint will follow the tour sequence: opening slide with title and curatorial statement, followed by one slide per artwork containing a high-resolution image, annotated close-ups, bullet points for formal features, and a short interpretive statement linking the work to the tour theme. Transitional slides will map the argument trajectory, and a comparative grid slide will juxtapose compositional elements (line, color, space, surface) across two or three works for concrete visual comparison. Each object’s slide will reference the museum object page and one theoretical source (e.g., Panofsky for iconographic method) to demonstrate evidence-based analysis (Panofsky, 1955; Stokstad & Cothren, 2018).

Conclusion

This virtual tour and accompanying in-class visual analysis present a focused thematic reading of six MoMA objects to show how modern art's major strategies—fragmentation, movement, and material emphasis—recast representation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The tour is designed to be both narratively cohesive and visually demonstrative, providing classmates with clear formal evidence and interpretive pathways for each object and their interrelations (Gombrich, 1960; Berger, 1972).

References

  • Gombrich, E. H. (1960). The Story of Art. Phaidon.
  • Panofsky, E. (1955). Meaning in the Visual Arts. University of Chicago Press.
  • Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books.
  • Baxandall, M. (1972). Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford University Press.
  • Stokstad, M., & Cothren, M. W. (2018). Art History (6th ed.). Pearson.
  • Nochlin, L. (1971). "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" ArtNews.
  • Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (n.d.-a). Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night. The Museum of Modern Art collection entry.
  • Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (n.d.-b). Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The Museum of Modern Art collection entry.
  • Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (n.d.-c). Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. The Museum of Modern Art collection entry.
  • Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (n.d.-d). Claude Monet, Water Lilies. The Museum of Modern Art collection entry.
  • Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (n.d.-e). Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950. The Museum of Modern Art collection entry.
  • Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). (n.d.-f). Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans. The Museum of Modern Art collection entry.

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