Art History Unstuffed
On line. At your convenience. In your own time. On your own terms.
For too long art history has been held hostage by scholars speaking to scholars and not to people. The purpose of this site is to educate and to inform and to do so with respect to the intelligence of the readers. Designed as a site for serious students of art history in need of solid substantive material, Art History Unstuffed is written for Twenty-First-century learners who prefer reading “text-bytes” and “sound-bytes” of targeted information.
Written by Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette, a published scholar who has researched and consolidated both well-respected classical sources and vetted the latest research, this site creates a middle ground between arcane scholarly jargon and informed discourse and presents a detailed account of Modern, Postmodern, Philosophy and Theory that is accessible to all readers interested in the history of the modern and contemporary periods.
Enjoy and Learn
This site is responsive to computers, cell phones and tablets and will resize for your reading convenience.
Art History Unstuffed is listed on the ACI Scholarly Blog Index.
Recent Posts
Current chapters of the topic of the season, part of an ongoing research project.
Redesigning the Face
Writing for Smithsonian Magazine, Caroline Alexander explained the importance of the work of the New Zealand reconstructive surgeon, Harold Gilles. She said, “While pioneering work in skin grafting had been done in Germany and the Soviet Union, it was Gillies who...
The War Portraits of Henry Tonks
Before the Great War there seems to have been little attention paid to the state of mind of the patient or to the psychological well being of the medical subject. Although psychology was emerging as a separate field of study, one of the major practitioners, Sigmund...
Designing the Human Face
Whether as a painting or as a photograph or even as a sculpture, portraiture is one of the main achievement of Western art. Perhaps no other culture has been so interested in the human likeness, focusing on the face, its moods, its expressions, as the revelation of a...
About the Author
Art historian and art critic, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette lives and works in Los Angeles. An art historian at Otis College of Art and Design, the widely published author covers the local art scene and is the publisher of the website Art History Unstuffed.
With an international audience, this website and its accompanying podcasts provide the 21st version of learning about art, history, philosophy, and theory.
How To Use This Site
Welcome to Art History Unstuffed, and to education in the twenty-first century
For Students
In contrast to the traditional text books, Art History Unstuffed exists on online where there is infinite space. The site can therefore go into depth and provides a fuller discussion of topics in art and theory.
For Teachers
Designed as an addition to classroom instruction, Art History Unstuffed is not a course but an extension of topics found in a survey art history class.
For Artists
Professional artist and students in studio art courses can find fast, easy access to information about famous historical artists.
For Museums
Art History Unstuffed can be a valuable resource in presenting information on modern and contemporary art for docent programs, which concentrate on training the teachers on the collections in your museum.
Podcast
Seeing to present art history to a variety of learners, Art History Unstuffed presents the Soundbytes in Modern Art podcast. These episodes are available as single units or can be found as a virtual book on iBooks, free of charge under the title: Art History Unstuffed: The Podcasts. Each episode discusses a single topic at greater length than the written posts, which are about 2500 words each. Each podcast ranges from 15 to 20 minutes and is part of a series that treats an artist or a topic over an hour of listening. The episodes are, therefore, discussions at a higher level and are geared more to graduate students and to colleagues than to the beginning student.
Episode 6: Romanticism
ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM
Romanticism was a form of modern consciousness that was expressed as art style, as an attitude of individualism, as a political stance, and as a new way of being an artist. In the nineteenth century, modern nations were beginning to take form and Romanticism became a way of fashioning a unique identity. Manifested in music, poetry and the visual arts, Romanticism varied depending upon the location. Defining Romanticism, therefore, is a complicated affair.
This podcasts seeks of outline the basic elements of Romanticism—a new emphasis on subjectivity and the individual and a resounding rejection of the rules of ancient art. Romantic art is both escapist and exotic and is concerned with events in the contemporary world. Romantic art was a court art for tyrants and a rallying cry for democratic uprisings. Finally, Romanticism served the aspirations for a new class of middle class artists, mostly men, who sought to express themselves through art.
Although Romanticism was supposedly subjective, or based in the individual sensibility of the artist, this movement was an international movement with characteristics unique to each nations. The Romantic Movement is discussed in comparative terms, assessing the differences among the movements in France, England, America and Germany.
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Episode 5: Romantic Aesthetics, Part Two
AESTHETICS AND TRE RISE OF ROMANTICISM
Emerging in the mid-eighteenth century, Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to define “art.” The formulation of aesthetics as a separate aspect of Enlightenment thinking was a project of British and German writers on the arts. One of the new concepts developed by these thinkers was the modern idea of “disinterest,” which meant that art was to be contemplated for itself on its own merits, not for its content or subject matter. With the lessening importance of the patrons, this new mode of looking put the artist and his or her at the center of the art making process.
Now on display in public salons, the artist had to have a recognizable style and a new identity for the modern artist began to take shape. By the end of the eighteenth century, Emmanuel Kant consolidated “aesthetics” into a coherent and influential book, the Critique of Judgment, which would impact the intellectual world of the Romantic artists. Due to this important discourse in aesthetics, the artist was remade into a “genius,” who was independent of the public and who made art for art’s sake.
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Episode 4: Romantic Aesthetics, Part One
THE AESTHETICS OF ROMANTICISM
Part One
With the decline of religious commissions and with the end of aristocratic patronage, the modern artist was left dependent upon the State and the new art public. In the past, it had been sufficient to define “art” as that which had been approved by a higher power, but in the nineteenth century, a new definition of art was required. Aesthetics, which provides the epistemology of art, or the ground of “art,” was a new aspect of philosophy that emerged coincidentally with the historical break in the old definition of art. This podcast will examine the social and cultural foundations of Aesthetics and the philosophical development of the definition of “modern art.”
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Videos
The complete Art History Timeline – this twenty-seven episode series of five minute videos span Western art history, from the Caves to Romanticism. Produced with the assistance of Otis College of Art and Design, these can be used by students and teachers as introductory, supplementary or review material.
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Shop
Show off your smarts. Art history unstuffed merchandise makes great gifts for you and your colleagues.
The Writing of Cubism:
The Construction of a Discourse, 1910-1914
$20.00
New Artwriting:
Creating a Culture of Cyber Criticism
$10.00
Falling Through Postmodernism.
Volume One: Blindness (Volume 1)
$30.00
Forthcoming Books
To continue to the circulation of her contributions to Heathwood Press, Dr. Willette has assembled the articles, published and not yet published, into a new book on the avant-garde. This new book will include other articles available on Academia.edu and Heathwood Press. This most recent series on the historic avant-garde was being written in response to the centennial of the Great War. After a remarkable span of five decades, the avant-garde was ended by this war in Europe. The war exiled and killed the artists, ended art movements, and scattered avant-garde art, now left to the mercies of totalitarian regimes. Now that a century has passed it is time to re-examine the avant-garde and re-write its details, reexamine the art historical assumptions, which constructed the idea of provocative art. This forthcoming book also seeks to relocate forgotten art, left behind in the rush towards the future.
Dr. Willette is currently completing an entirely new kind of book on design, a book that is multi-modal. Offering multiple modes of output, this book offers the readers several ways of receiving information, slide shows, podcasts, texts and images. The interactive book, Design and the Avant-Garde, 1920-1940, will be divided into several volumes. Volume One will focus on the interconnections between art and design at the fine-de-siècle period, leading up to the creation of “modern” design.
“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”
— Jackson Pollock