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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Women, Art, and Art History: Gender and Feminist Analyses

Introduction, foundational texts: gender, history, and paradigm shift.

• Sources for Women Artists from Classical Antiquity to 17th-Century Europe
• 19th-Century Western Art History: The Survey
• Women as Art Historians, Archaeologists, and Curators
• Women and Art History before 1971
• 20th-Century Dictionaries of Women Artists
• Bibliographies of Women in the Arts
• Reviews of the Emergence of Feminist Studies in Art History in the United States and the United Kingdom
• Western 1970s–1980s
• Western 1990s–2000s: Histories of Feminist Art
• International
• Interviews and Anthologies of Writings
• Italian Renaissance and Baroque
• 18th Century
• Modern Period
• Feminist Art, Theory, and Practice
• Theoretical Approaches
• Museums of Women’s Art
• Reviewing Major Collections
• Curatorial Practices
• Initiating Exhibitions: Women Artists of the Western Tradition
• Feminist Exhibitions
• Specialist Exhibitions
• Increasing the International Perspectives
• Feminism and Visual Culture
• The Hierarchy of the Arts
• Professions
• Feminism and Social History of Art
• Feminism and Semiotics
• Feminist Art History and Aby Warburg
• Feminism and Psychoanalysis
• Selected Perspectives on Period Studies
• The Magnificent Exception: Artemisia Gentileschi
• Self-Portraiture
• Orientalism
• Feminist Analyses of Masculinity and Art
• Race, Ethnicity, Black Subjectivity, and Representation
• Lesbian Subjectivity and Visual Culture
• Jewish Subjectivity, Art, and History
• The Victorians
• Modernity, Landscape, Urban Space, and the Flâneuse
• Thinking about the Modern
• The Avant-Garde

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• Art and Psychoanalysis
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Women, Art, and Art History: Gender and Feminist Analyses by Griselda Pollock LAST REVIEWED: 30 January 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 30 January 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920105-0034

Following a worldwide feminist movement in the later 20th century, women became a renewed topic for art and art history, giving rise to gender analysis of both artistic production and art historical discourse. Gender is to be understood as a system of power, named initially patriarchal and also theorized as a phallocentric symbolic order. A renewed and theoretically developed as well as activist feminist consciousness initially mandated the historical recovery of the contribution of women as artists to art’s international histories to counter the effective erasure of the history of women as artists by the modern discipline of art history. This has also led to a rediscovery of the contributions of women as art historians to the discipline itself. Gender analysis raises the repressed question of gender (and sexuality) in relation both to creativity itself and to the writing of art’s necessarily pluralized histories. Gender refers to the asymmetrical hierarchy between those distinguished both sociologically and symbolically on the basis of perceived, but not determining, differences. Although projected as natural difference between given sexes, the active and productive processes of social and ideological differentiation produces as its effects gendered difference that is claimed, ideologically, as “natural.” As an axis of power relations, gender can be shown to shape social existence of men and women and determine artistic representations. Gender is thus also understood as a symbolic dimension shaping hierarchical oppositions in representation in texts, images, buildings, and discourses about art. It is constantly being produced by the work performed by art and writing about art. Feminist analysis critiques these technologies of gender while itself also being one, albeit critically seeking transformation of social and symbolic gender. The analysis of gender ideologies in the writing of art history and in art itself, therefore, extend to art produced by all artists, irrespective of the gendered identity of the artist. Women, having been excluded by the gendering discourses of modern art history, have had to be recovered from an oblivion those discourses created while the idea of women as artist has to be reestablished in the face of a an ideology that places anything feminine in a secondary position. Women are not, however, a homogeneous category defined by gender alone. Women are agonistically differentiated by class, ethnicity, culture, religion, geopolitical location, sexuality, and ability. Gender analysis includes the interplay of several axes of differentiation and their symbolic representations without any a priori assumptions about how each artwork/artist might negotiate and rework dominant discourses of gender and other social inflections. The postcolonial critique of Western hegemony and a search for non-Western-centered models of inclusiveness that respect diversity without creating normative relativism are driving the tendency of the research into gender in and art history toward an as yet unrealized inclusiveness regarding gender and difference in general rather than the creation of separate subcategories on the basis of the gender or other qualifying characteristics of the artist. The objectives of critical art historical practices focusing on gender and related axes of power are to ensure consistent and rigorous research into all artists, irrespective of gender, for which a specific initiative focusing on women as artists in order to correct a skewed and gender-selective archive has been necessary, and to expand the paradigm of art historical research in general to ensure that the social, economic, and symbolic functions of gender, sexual, and other social and psycho-symbolic differences are consistently considered as part of the normal procedures of art historical analysis.

Without a foundational understanding of the social meaning and symbolic operation of gender, both the historical process of artistic creation and the historical representation of that history will not be grasped. Women working on art history (domain and discipline) draw on germane theoretical interventions in historical research while also using sociological studies of institutions to call for a paradigm shift in art history itself. Scott 1986 offers a key argument for gender analysis in the historical disciplines, examining different theoretical paradigms that have been introduced to approach gender as an axis in history. Kelly-Gadol 1977 is a critical reading of the major cultural shifts from late medieval culture in which Troubadour culture allowed women agency in relation to love by means of appropriating feudal relations to the Renaissance in which new concepts of the decorative courtier closed out such opportunities for women. In art history, Nochlin 1973 is the foundational text of a specifically feminist challenge to art history. Nochlin calls for a radical, paradigm shift in art history (discipline). Raising the “woman question” becomes a lever to challenge the exclusion of all social and institutional factors in the study of art’s histories. The text’s title is, however, representative of its own moment in 1971 when women art historians had to confront a discipline that presented art history (domain) almost entirely without women, having established a canon solely composed of great masters. Honoring Gabhart and Broun 1972 ’s neologism “Old Mistresses” (cited under Initiating Exhibitions: Women Artists of the Western Tradition ) to point out how language already disqualifies women from recognition as “masters.” Parker and Pollock 2013 (written in 1978 and originally published 1981) identifies the discursive habits of the discipline of art history as structurally gendered and gendering. The authors, however, also stress the ways that women artists actively negotiated their own differential situations to produce distinctive interventions in their own cultural context and to show how they negotiated the image of woman and of the artist in different contexts. Broude and Garrard 1982 lays out the case for feminist studies across all periods of art to reveal the central role of gender in historical cultures and visual practices while recognizing the distorting effects of an unacknowledged masculinist and heteronormative bias in art historical interpretation. The authors demonstrate the overall shifts in art historical method that result from awareness of gender in culture. De Lauretis 1987 uses a Foucaultian model to understand gender as an effect produced in its representations, self-representations, and feminist deconstructions, challenging a model that, privileging man/woman difference, makes lesbian subjectivities invisible. Battersby 1989 traces gender across philosophical aesthetics to reveal its foundational and continuing gender thinking. Broude and Garrard 1992 tracks the developing range of theories of gender in relation to art historical analysis registering the impact of postmodernist concepts of authorship and subjectivity while balancing such trends with an equal acknowledgement of the agency of women in contesting historically variable organizations and representations of gender relations.

Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics . London: Women’s Press, 1989.

An extended, philosophically based analysis of the gendering of the concept of genius from the ancients of the West to Simone de Beauvoir, revealing the identification of genius with the masculine body and conventionalized masculine attributes defined in opposition to the equally constructed and rhetorical figure of the feminine. Such an analysis is necessary in order to create the ground for any reconsideration of the contribution of women to art.

Broude, Norma, and Mary Garrard. “Introduction: Feminism and Art History.” In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany . Edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrad 1–18. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

Introducing their first major collection of substantive works of feminist art historical scholarship, Broude and Garrard position feminism’s impact on art history as a major reconceptualization of previous history and art historiography as patriarchal, necessitating radical revisions to the distortions created by sexual bias in the creation and interpretation of art and demanding a new definition of the cultural and social uses of art.

Broude, Norma, and Mary Garrard. “Introduction: The Expanding Discourse.” In The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History . Edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrad, 1–25. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Representing the theoretical and methodological diversity of feminist studies in art history from its second decade, Broude and Garrard both identify the effects of “postmodernist” theories of authorship, the gaze and the social construction of gender in art history, while contesting the tendency to polarize feminist scholarship between modern and postmodern, essentialist and constructivist, traditionalist and theoretical. They advocate incremental change in the discipline and argue for a continuing acknowledgement of the importance of studies of women’s authorship in art.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender.” In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction . By Teresa de Lauretis, 1–30. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Challenging predominantly masculine narratives of gender that effectively install the heterosexual contract, which may be reproduced in feminist texts, because of the fact that gender is always being produced in the play between representation and self-representation, de Lauretis sketches out methods for countering the exclusion of nonheteronormative subjectivities by suggesting that otherness and difference is always already present in the “spaces off” of dominant discourses.

Kelly-Gadol, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History . Edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, 19–50. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Kelly-Gadol stresses that the temporalities of gender relations may not only not coincide with the progressive model of historical periodization—the Renaissance as progress—but may be in conflict. Histories attentive to gender do not necessarily coincide with those that are gender-blind. Reprinted in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 19–50.

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists, and Art History . Edited by Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker 44. New York: Collier, 1973.

First published in ARTnews (January 1971), pp. 22–39, 67–71. Nochlin discouraged her colleagues from answering her question by seeking candidates for “great woman artist.” She questioned the rhetorical figure of the autonomous genius and insisted upon the role of discriminatory institutions and practices that had limited women’s, and others’, potential and access to training and recognition. Her perspective suggested that reduced discrimination would create a level playing field for women.

Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology . 3d ed. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.

Defining art history as an ideologically impregnated discourse, the authors track stereotypes of femininity (mindless, decorative, derivative, dextrous, weak) negatively invoked to sustain an unacknowledged masculinization of art and the artist. They critique the gendered hierarchy of art versus craft and assess the strategic interventions into the representation of gender difference, body, and identity of artists from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century.

Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053–1075.

DOI: 10.2307/1864376

Scott reviews working definitions of both the social construction of gender and the symbolic function of gender in representing and enacting hierarchical difference. Gender is presented not only as a historically fabricated social relation but also as an effective element in representational systems that also exceed the relations of masculine and feminine. This is a critical text of the potential for gender as a category for historical research. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Impressionism: art and modernity.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet

Porte de la Reine at Aigues-Mortes

Jean-Frédéric Bazille

La Grenouillère

The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne

Alfred Sisley

Edouard Manet

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguérite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Émile-Charles (1875–1895)

Auguste Renoir

The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise

Camille Pissarro

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery

Allée of Chestnut Trees

Young Woman Seated on a Sofa

Berthe Morisot

Two Young Girls at the Piano

Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass

Young Girl Bathing

Young Woman Knitting

The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning

Margaret Samu Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

October 2004

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon , for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” not a finished painting. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley’s 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees ( 1975.1.211 ). This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life.

In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of academic painting. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists’ paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before. Édouard Manet’s 1874 Boating ( 29.100.115 ), for example, features an expanse of the new cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese-inspired composition , the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them.

Such images of suburban and rural leisure outside of Paris were a popular subject for the Impressionists, notably Monet and Auguste Renoir . Several of them lived in the country for part or all of the year. New railway lines radiating out from the city made travel so convenient that Parisians virtually flooded into the countryside every weekend. While some of the Impressionists, such as Pissarro, focused on the daily life of local villagers in Pontoise, most preferred to depict the vacationers’ rural pastimes. The boating and bathing establishments that flourished in these regions became favorite motifs. In his 1869 La Grenouillère ( 29.100.112 ), for example, Monet’s characteristically loose painting style complements the leisure activities he portrays. Landscapes , which figure prominently in Impressionist art, were also brought up to date with innovative compositions, light effects, and use of color. Monet in particular emphasized the modernization of the landscape by including railways and factories, signs of encroaching industrialization that would have seemed inappropriate to the Barbizon artists of the previous generation.

Perhaps the prime site of modernity in the late nineteenth century was the city of Paris itself, renovated between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III. His prefect, Baron Haussmann, laid the plans, tearing down old buildings to create more open space for a cleaner, safer city. Also contributing to its new look was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which required reconstructing the parts of the city that had been destroyed. Impressionists such as Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte enthusiastically painted the renovated city, employing their new style to depict its wide boulevards, public gardens, and grand buildings. While some focused on the cityscapes, others turned their sights to the city’s inhabitants. The Paris population explosion after the Franco-Prussian War gave them a tremendous amount of material for their scenes of urban life. Characteristic of these scenes was the mixing of social classes that took place in public settings. Degas and Caillebotte focused on working people, including singers and dancers , as well as workmen. Others, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt , depicted the privileged classes. The Impressionists also painted new forms of leisure, including theatrical entertainment (such as Cassatt’s 1878 In the Loge [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), cafés, popular concerts, and dances. Taking an approach similar to Naturalist writers such as Émile Zola, the painters of urban scenes depicted fleeting yet typical moments in the lives of characters they observed. Caillebotte’s 1877 Paris Street, Rainy Day (Art Institute, Chicago) exemplifies how these artists abandoned sentimental depictions and explicit narratives, adopting instead a detached, objective view that merely suggests what is going on.

The independent collective had a fluid membership over the course of the eight exhibitions it organized between 1874 and 1886, with the number of participating artists ranging from nine to thirty. Pissarro, the eldest, was the only artist who exhibited in all eight shows, while Morisot participated in seven. Ideas for an independent exhibition had been discussed as early as 1867, but the Franco-Prussian War intervened. The painter Frédéric Bazille, who had been leading the efforts, was killed in the war. Subsequent exhibitions were headed by different artists. Philosophical and political differences among the artists led to heated disputes and fractures, causing fluctuations in the contributors. The exhibitions even included the works of more conservative artists who simply refused to submit their work to the Salon jury. Also participating in the independent exhibitions were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin , whose later styles grew out of their early work with the Impressionists.

The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as Neo-Impressionism . The young Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. The nascent Symbolist Odilon Redon also contributed, though his style was unlike that of any other participant. Because of the group’s stylistic and philosophical fragmentation, and because of the need for assured income, some of the core members such as Monet and Renoir exhibited in venues where their works were more likely to sell.

Its many facets and varied participants make the Impressionist movement difficult to define. Indeed, its life seems as fleeting as the light effects it sought to capture. Even so, Impressionism was a movement of enduring consequence, as its embrace of modernity made it the springboard for later avant-garde art in Europe.

Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Bomford, David, et al. Art in the Making: Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New Haven and London: National Gallery, 1990.

Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Moffett, Charles S., et al. The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 . San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986.

Nochlin, Linda, ed. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904: Sources and Documents . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism . Rev. and enl. ed. . New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.

Tinterow, Gary, and Henri Loyrette. Origins of Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. See on MetPublications

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• American Impressionism
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• Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.
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• Academic Painting
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• Barbizon School
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Artist or Maker

• Bazille, Jean-Frédéric
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Summary of Dada

Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Influenced by other avant-garde movements - Cubism , Futurism , Constructivism , and Expressionism - its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage . Dada's aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York, and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups. The movement dissipated with the establishment of Surrealism , but the ideas it gave rise to have become the cornerstones of various categories of modern and contemporary art.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Dada was the direct antecedent to the Conceptual Art movement , where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art.
• So intent were members of Dada on opposing all norms of bourgeois culture that the group was barely in favor of itself: "Dada is anti-Dada," they often cried. The group's founding in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich was appropriate: the Cabaret was named after the 18 th century French satirist, Voltaire, whose novella Candide mocked the idiocies of his society. As Hugo Ball , one of the founders of both the Cabaret and Dada wrote, "This is our Candide against the times."
• Artists like Hans Arp were intent on incorporating chance into the creation of works of art. This went against all norms of traditional art production whereby a work was meticulously planned and completed. The introduction of chance was a way for Dadaists to challenge artistic norms and to question the role of the artist in the artistic process.
• Dada artists are known for their use of readymades - everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the readymade forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.

Key Artists

Overview of Dada

Aiming to both to help to stop the war and to vent frustration with the nationalist and bourgeois conventions Dada artists ultimately revolutionized the artmaking of the future.

Artworks and Artists of Dada

Ici, C'est Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz)

Artist: Francis Picabia

Picabia was a French artist who embraced the many ideas of Dadaism and defined some himself. He very much enjoyed going against convention and re-defining himself to work in new ways a number of times over a career that spanned over 45 years. At first he worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz, who gave him his first one-man show in New York City. But later he criticized Stieglitz, as is evident in this "portrait" of the gallerist as a bellows camera, an automobile gear shift, a brake lever, and the word "IDEAL" above the camera in Gothic lettering. The fact that the camera is broken and the gear shift is in neutral has been thought to symbolize Stieglitz as worn out, while the contrasting decorative Gothic wording refers to the outdated art of the past. The drawing is one of a series of mechanistic portraits and imagery created by Picabia that, ironically, do not celebrate modernity or progress, but, like similar mechanistic works by Duchamp, show that such subject matter could provide an alternative to traditional artistic symbolism.

Ink, graphite, and cut-and-pasted painted and printed papers on paperboard - Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Reciting the Sound Poem "Karawane"

Artist: Hugo Ball

Ball designed this costume for his performance of the sound-poem, "Karawane," in which nonsensical syllables uttered in patterns created rhythm and emotion, but nothing resembling any known language. The resulting lack of sense was meant to reference the inability of European powers to solve their diplomatic problems through the use of rational discussion, thus leading to World War I - equating the political situation to the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel. Ball's strange costume is meant to further distance him from his audience and his everyday surroundings, making his speech even more foreign and exotic. Ball described his costume: "My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Over it I wore a huge coat cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold outside. It was fastened at the neck in such a way that I could give the impression of wing-like movement by raising and lowering my elbows. I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor's hat."

Photograph - Kunsthaus Zürich (reproduction of original photograph)

Untitled (Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance)

Artist: Hans Arp

Hans Arp made a series of collages based on chance, where he would stand above a sheet of paper, dropping squares of contrasting colored paper on the larger sheet's surface, and then gluing the squares wherever they fell onto the page. The resulting arrangement could then provoke a more visceral reaction, like the fortune telling from I-Ching coins that interested Arp, and perhaps provide a further creative spur. Apparently, this technique arose when Arp became frustrated by attempts to compose more formal geometric arrangements. Arp's chance collages have come to represent Dada's aim to be "anti-art" and their interest in accident as a way to challenge traditional art production techniques. The lack of artistic control represented in this work would also become a defining element of Surrealism as that group tried to find paths into the unconscious whereby intellectual control on creativity was undermined.

Cut-and-pasted colored paper - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp was the first artist to use a readymade and his choice of a urinal was guaranteed to challenge and offend even his fellow artists. There is little manipulation of the urinal by the artist other than to turn it upside-down and to sign it with a fictitious name. By removing the urinal from its everyday environment and placing it in an art context, Duchamp was questioning basic definitions of art as well as the role of the artist in creating it. With the title, Fountain , Duchamp made a tongue in cheek reference to both the purpose of the urinal as well to famous fountains designed by Renaissance and Baroque artists. In its path-breaking boldness the work has become iconic of the irreverence of the Dada movement towards both traditional artistic values and production techniques. Its influence on later 20 th -century artists such as Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, and others is incalculable.

Urinal - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

This work is a classic example of Dada irreverence towards traditional art. Duchamp transformed a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa (1517) painting, which had only recently been returned to the Louvre after it was stolen in 1911. While it was already a well-known work of art, the publicity from the theft ensured that it became one of the most revered and famous works of art: art with a capital A. On the postcard, Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee onto Mona Lisa's face and labeled it L.H.O.O.Q. If the letters are pronounced as they would be by a native French speaker, it would sound as if one were saying "Elle a chaud au cul," which loosely translates as "She has a hot ass." Again, Duchamp managed to offend everyone while also posing questions that challenged artistic values, artistic creativity, and the overall canon.

Collotype - Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany

Artist: Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch is known for her collages and photomontages composed from newspaper and magazine clippings as well as sewing and craft designs often pulled from publications she contributed to at the Ullstein Press. As part of Club Dada in Berlin, Hoch unabashedly critiqued German culture by literally slicing apart its imagery and reassembling it into vivid, disjointed, emotional depictions of modern life. The title of this work, refers to the decadence, corruption, and sexism of pre-war German culture. Larger and more political than her typical montages, this fragmentary anti-art work highlights the polarities of Weimer politics by juxtaposing images of establishment people with intellectuals, radicals, entertainers, and artists. Recognizable faces include Marx and Lenin, Pola Negri, and Kathe Kollwitz. The map of Europe that identifies the countries in which women had already achieved the right to vote suggests that the newly enfranchised women of Germany would soon "cut" through the male "beer-belly" culture. Her inclusion of commercially produced designs in her montages broke down distinctions between modern art and crafts, and between the public sphere and domesticity.

Cut paper collage - National Gallery, State Museum of Berlin

The Spirit of our Time

Artist: Raoul Hausmann

This assemblage represents Hausmann's disillusion with the German government and their inability to make the changes needed to create a better nation. It is an ironic sculptural illustration of Hausmann's belief that the average member of (corrupt) society "has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued to the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty". Thus Hausmann's use of a hat maker's dummy to represent a blockhead who can only experience that which can be measured with the mechanical tools attached to its head - a ruler, a tape measure, a pocket watch, a jewelry box containing a typewriter wheel, brass knobs from a camera, a leaky telescopic beaker of the sort used by soldiers during the war, and an old purse. Thus, there is no ability for critical thinking or subtlety. With its blank eyes, the dummy is a narrow-minded, blind automaton.

Chinese Nightingale

Artist: Max Ernst

Ernst's use of photomontage was less political and more poetic than those of other German Dadaists, creating images based on random associations of juxtaposed images. He described his technique as the "systematic exploitation of the chance or artificially provoked confrontation of two or more mutually alien realities on an obviously inappropriate level - and the poetic spark that jumps across when these realities approach each other". Between 1919 and 1920, Ernst made a series of collages that combined illustrations of war machinery with those of human limbs and various accessories to create strange hybrid creatures. Thus the fear generated by weaponry was combined with benign elements and often lyrical titles. This catharsis no doubt had a personal resonance for Ernst who was injured in the war by the recoil of a gun. In The Chinese Nightingale , for example, the arms and fan of an oriental dancer act as the limbs and headdress of a creature whose body is an English bomb. An eye has been added above the bracket on the side of the bomb to create the effect of a bizarre bird. Thus Ernst's whimsy defuses the fear associated with bombs. The title was taken from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Merzpicture 46A. The Skittle Picture

Artist: Kurt Schwitters

This is an early example of assemblage in which two and three dimensional objects are combined. The word "Merz," which Schwitters used to describe his art practice as well as his individual pieces, is a nonsensical word, like Dada, that Schwitters culled from the word "commerz", the meaning of which he described as follows: "In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me.... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz". In his Merzpictures , which have been called "psychological collages," he arranged found objects - usually detritus - in simple compositions that transformed trash into beautiful works of art. Whether the materials were string, a ticket stub, or a chess piece, Schwitters considered them to be equal with any traditional art material. Merz, however, is not ideological, dogmatic, hostile, or political as is much of Dada art.

Assemblage of wood, oil, metal, board on board, with artist's frame - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artist: Man Ray

Man Ray was an American artist who spent most of his working years in France. He termed his experiments rayographs , which are photographs made by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing them to light. The random objects leave behind a shadowy imprint that dissociates them from their original context. These works, with their often strange combination of objects and ghostly appearance, reflected the Dada interest in chance and the nonsensical. As other Dada artists liberated painting and sculpture from its traditional role as a representational art, Ray did the same for photography - in his hands it was no longer a mirror of nature. Ray's discovery of the rayograph was itself based on chance: after he had forgotten to expose an image and was waiting for an image to appear in the dark room, he placed some objects on the photo paper. Upon seeing them, Tzara called them "pure Dada creations" and they were an instant hit among like-minded artists. While Man Ray did not invent the photogram, his were the most famous.

Beginnings of Dada

Switzerland was neutral during WWI with limited censorship and it was in Zürich that Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings founded the Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 in the backroom of a tavern on Spiegelgasse in a seedy section of the city. In order to attract other artists and intellectuals, Ball put out a press release that read, "Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group of young artists and writers has formed with the object of becoming a center for artistic entertainment. In principle, the Cabaret will be run by artists, guests artists will come and give musical performances and readings at the daily meetings. Young artists of Zürich, whatever their tendencies, are invited to come along with suggestions and contributions of all kinds." Those who were present from the beginning in addition to Ball and Hennings were Hans Arp , Tristan Tzara , Marcel Janco , and Richard Huelsenbeck .

In July of that year, the first Dada evening was held at which Ball read the first manifesto. There is little agreement on how the word Dada was invented, but one of the most common origin stories is that Richard Huelsenbeck found the name by plunging a knife at random into a dictionary. The term "dada" is a colloquial French term for a hobbyhorse, yet it also echoes the first words of a child, and these suggestions of childishness and absurdity appealed to the group, who were keen to put a distance between themselves and the sobriety of conventional society. They also appreciated that the word might mean the same (or nothing) in all languages - as the group was avowedly internationalist.

The aim of Dada art and activities was both to help to stop the war and to vent frustration with the nationalist and bourgeois conventions that had led to it. Their anti-authoritarian stance made for a protean movement as they opposed any form of group leadership or guiding ideology.

The Spread of Dada

The artists in Zürich published a Dada magazine and held art exhibits that helped spread their anti-war, anti-art message. In 1917, after Ball left for Bern to pursue journalism, Tzara founded Galerie Dada on Bahnhofstrasse where further Dada evenings were held along with art exhibits. Tzara became the leader of the movement and began an unrelenting campaign to spread Dada ideas, showering French and Italian writers and artists with letters. The group published an art and literature review entitled Dada starting in July 1917 with five editions from Zürich and two final ones from Paris. Their art was focused on performance and printed matter.

Once the war ended in 1918, many of the artists returned to their home countries, helping to further spread the movement. The end of Dada in Zürich followed the Dada 4-5 event in April 1919 that by design turned into a riot, something that Tzara thought furthered the aims of Dada by undermining conventional art practices through audience involvement in art production. The riot, which began as a Dada event, was one of the most significant. It attracted over 1000 people and began with a conservative speech about the value of abstract art that was meant to anger the crowd. This was followed by discordant music and then several readings that encouraged crowd participation until the crowd lost control and began to destroy several of the props. Tzara described it thus: "the tumult is unchained hurricane frenzy siren whistles bombardment song the battle starts out sharply, half the audience applaud the protestors hold the hall . . . chairs pulled out projectiles crash bang expected effect atrocious and instinctive . . . Dada has succeeded in establishing the circuit of absolute unconsciousness in the audience which forgot the frontiers of education of prejudices, experienced the commotion of the New. Final victory of Dada." For Tzara the key to the success of a riot was audience involvement so that attendees were not just onlookers of art, but became involved in its production. This was a total negation of traditional art.

Soon after this, Tzara traveled to Paris, where he met André Breton and began formulating the theories that Breton would eventually put together in Surrealism . Dadaists did not self-consciously declare micro-regional movements; the spread of Dada throughout various European cities and into New York can be attributed to a few key artists, and each city in turn influenced the aesthetics of their respective Dada groups.

In 1917, Huelsenbeck returned from Zürich to found Club Dada in Berlin, which was active from 1918 to 1923, and included attendees such as Johannes Baader , George Grosz , Hannah Höch , and Raoul Hausmann . Closer to a war zone, the Berlin Dadaists came out publicly against the Weimar Republic and their art was more political: satirical paintings and collages that featured wartime imagery, government figures, and political cartoon clippings recontextualized into biting commentaries. In February of 1918, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin and several journals, including Club Dada and Der Dada , were published that year along with a manifesto in April. The photomontage technique was developed in Berlin during this period. In 1920 Hausmann and Huelsenbeck give a lecture tour in Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Prague. The "Erste Internationale Dada-Messe" was held in June.

Kurt Schwitters, excluded from the Berlin group likely because of his links to Der Sturm gallery and the Expressionist style, both of which were seen as antithetical to Dada because of their Romanticism and focus on aesthetics, formed his own Dada group in Hannover in 1919, though he was its only practitioner. His Merz , as he termed his art, was less politically oriented than that of the Club Dada; his works instead examine modernist preoccupations with shape and color.

Another Dada group was formed in Cologne in 1918 by Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld. Importantly, Hans Arp joined the next year and made breakthroughs in his collage experiments. Their exhibits focused on anti-bourgeois and nonsensical art. In 1920, one such exhibit was closed down by the police. By 1922, German Dada was winding down. In that year, Ernst left Cologne for Paris, thus dissolving that group. Others became interested in other movements. A "Congress of the Constructivists", for example, was held in Weimar in October of 1922, which was attended by a number of the German Dadaists and in 1924, Breton published the Surrealist manifesto after which many of the remaining Dadaists joined that movement. Schwitter's Merz publication continued sporadically for several years.

After hearing of the Dada movement in Zürich, a number of Parisian artists including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon , Paul Eluard , and others become interested. In 1919 Tzara left Zürich for Paris and Arp arrived there from Cologne the next year; a "Dada festival" took place in May 1920 after many of the originators of the movement had converged there. There were several demonstrations, exhibitions, and performances organized along with manifestos and journals published, including Dada and Le Cannibale .

Picabia and Breton withdrew from the movement in 1921 and Picabia published a special issue of 391 in which he claimed that Paris Dada had become the thing it originally fought against: a mediocre established movement. He wrote: "The Dada spirit really only existed between 1913 and 1918 . . . In wishing to prolong it, Dada became closed . . . Dada, you see, was not serious... and if certain people take it seriously now, it's because it is dead! . . . One must be a nomad, pass through ideas like one passes through countries and cities." Paris Dada published a counter-attack under the direction of Tzara. Two final Dada stage performances are held in Paris in 1923 before the group collapsed into internal infighting and ceded to Surrealism.

Marcel Duchamp provided a crucial creative link between the Zürich Dadaists and Parisian proto-Surrealists, like Breton. The Swiss group considered Marcel Duchamp's readymades to be Dada artworks, and they appreciated Duchamp's humor and refusal to define art.

Like Zürich during the war, New York City was a refuge for writers and artists. Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia arrived in the city only days apart in June of 1915 and soon after met Man Ray . Duchamp served as a critical interlocutor, bringing the notion of anti-art to the group where it took a decidedly mechanistic turn. One of his most important pieces, The Large Glass or Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even , was begun in New York in 1915 and is considered to be a major milestone for its depiction of a strange, erotic drama using mechanical forms.

By 1916 Duchamp, Picabia, and Man Ray were joined by the American artist Beatrice Wood and the writers Henri-Pierre Roche and Mina Loy. Much of their anti-art activity took place in Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and at the studio of Walter and Louise Arensberg. Their publications, such as The Blind Man , Rongwrong , and New York Dada challenged conventional museum art with more humor and less bitterness than European groups. It was during this period that Duchamp began exhibiting readymades (found objects) such as a bottle rack, and got involved with the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917 he submitted Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists show.

Picabia's travels helped tie New York, Zürich and Paris groups together during the Dadaist period. From 1917 through 1924 he also published the Dada periodical 391 , which was modeled on Stieglitz's 291 periodical. Picabia's 391 was first published in Barcelona, then in various cities including New York, Zürich, and Paris, depending on his own place of residence and with help from fellow artists and friends in the various cities. The periodical was mainly literary, however, with Picabia being the prime contributor. The 1918 Dada Manifesto had declared: "Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed. Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless, and impossible to justify." He broke away from Dada in 1921 as mentioned above. In addition to the special issue of 391 in which he attacked Paris Dada in 1921, in the final issue of 391 in 1924 Picabia accuses Surrealism of being a fabricated movement, writing that "artificial eggs don't make chickens."

Dada: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Dada artworks present intriguing overlaps and paradoxes in that they seek to demystify artwork in the populist sense but nevertheless remain cryptic enough to allow the viewer to interpret works in a variety of ways. Some Dadaists portrayed people and scenes representationally in order to analyze form and movement. Others, like Kurt Schwitters and Man Ray , practiced abstraction to express the metaphysical essence of their subject matter. Both modes sought to deconstruct daily experience in challenging and rebellious ways. The key to understanding Dada works lies in reconciling the seemingly silly, slapdash styles with the profound anti-bourgeois message. Tzara especially fought the assumption that Dada was a statement; yet Tzara and his fellow artists became increasingly agitated by politics and sought to incite a similar fury in Dada audiences.

Irreverence

Irreverence was a crucial component of Dada art, whether it was a lack of respect for bourgeois convention, government authorities, conventional production methods, or the artistic canon. Each group varied slightly in their focus, with the Berlin group being the most anti-government and the New York group being the most anti-art. Of all the groups, the Hannover group was likely the most conservative.

Readymades and Assemblage

A readymade was simply an object that already existed and was commandeered by Dada artists as a work of art, often in the process combined with another readymade, as in Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel , thus creating an assemblage . The pieces were often chosen and assembled by chance or accident to challenge bourgeois notions about art and artistic creativity. Indeed, it is difficult to completely separate conceptually the Dada interest in chance with their focus on readymades and assemblage. Several of the readymades and assemblages were bizarre, a quality that made it easy for the group to merge eventually with Surrealism. Other artists who worked with readymades and assemblages include Ernst, Man Ray, and Hausmann.

Chance was a key concept underpinning most of Dada art from the abstract and beautiful compositions of Schwitters to the large assemblages of Duchamp. Chance was used to embrace the random and the accidental as a way to release creativity from rational control, with Arp being one of the earliest and best-known practitioners. Schwitters, for example, gathered random bits of detritus from a variety of locales, while Duchamp welcomed accidents such as the crack that occurred while he was making The Large Glass . In addition to loss of rational control, Dada lack of concern with preparatory work and the embrace of artworks that were marred fit well with the Dada irreverence for traditional art methods.

Wit and Humor

Tied closely to Dada irreverence was their interest in humor, typically in the form of irony. In fact, the embrace of the readymade is key to Dada's use of irony as it shows an awareness that nothing has intrinsic value. Irony also gave the artists flexibility and expressed their embrace of the craziness of the world thus preventing them from taking their work too seriously or from getting caught up in excessive enthusiasm or dreams of utopia. Their humor is an unequivocal YES to everything as art.

Later Developments - After Dada

As detailed above, after the disbanding of the various Dada groups, many of the artists joined other art movements - in particular Surrealism . In fact, Dada's tradition of irrationality and chance led directly to the Surrealist love for fantasy and expression of the imaginary. Several artists were members of both groups, including Picabia, Arp, and Ernst since their works acted as a catalyst in ushering in an art based on a relaxation of conscious control over art production. Though Duchamp was not a Surrealist, he helped to curate exhibitions in New York that showcased both Dada and Surrealist works.

Dada, the direct antecedent to the Conceptual Art movement , is now considered a watershed moment in 20 th -century art. Postmodernism as we know it would not exist without Dada. Almost every underlying postmodern theory in visual and written art as well as in music and drama was invented or at least utilized by Dada artists: art as performance, the overlapping of art with everyday life, the use of popular culture, audience participation, the interest in non-Western forms of art, the embrace of the absurd, and the use of chance.

A large number of artistic movements since Dada can trace their influence to the anti-establishment group. Other than the obvious examples of Surrealism , Neo-Dada , and Conceptual art , these would include Pop art , Fluxus , the Situationist International , Performance art , Feminist art , and Minimalism . Dada also had a profound influence on graphic design and the field of advertising with their use of collage.

Useful Resources on Dada

• Dalí and The Surrealists - Master Marketers Top 10 marketing stunts by Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, and Salvador Dalí.

• Dada: Zürich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris Our Pick By Dorothea Dietrich, Brigid Doherty, Sabine Kriebel, Leah Dickerman
• The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Second Edition (Paperbacks in Art History) Our Pick By Robert Motherwell
• Dada: Art and Anti-Art (World of Art) By Hans Richter
• Dada & Surrealism (Art and Ideas) By Matthew Gale
• The DADA Reader: A Critical Anthology By Dawn Ades
• International Dada Archive Project by The University of Iowa Libraries
• From Dada to Surrealism - Review By Phillippe Dagen / The Guardian Weekly (UK) / July 19, 2011
• No Nonsense about Dada - Review of MoMA Exhibition Our Pick By Clare Hurley / World Socialist Web Site / September 18, 2006
• Our Art Belongs to Dada Our Pick By Martin Filler / Departures / March/April 2006
• Dada's Big Mama By Leah Ollman / Los Angeles Times / June 22, 1997

Similar Art

The City Rises (1910)

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)

Theater Piece No. 1 (1952)

Related artists.

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Before you begin conducting research, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions:

1. What’s my topic? Review your assignment closely and choose an appropriate topic. Is this topic about a single artist or an art movement? Is it a study of one work or a body of works? How long is the paper—will you need a basic overview, or detailed analysis? Guiding questions such as these can help you determine what the best approach to your research will be. If you aren’t sure where to start, you can ask your professor for guidance, and you can always contact an Arts Librarian using their contact information on this page.

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35 The Art of Social Movement

Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology and a Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His areas of research include social theory, trauma and memory and he has taught undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars on these topics. Recent books include The Assassination of Theo van Gogh and The Trauma of Political Assassination.

• Published: 03 November 2014
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The arts are an established part of social movement repertoire. Artistic representations are important to internal movement dynamics and in communicating movement ideas to the wider world. Art practices form the core of the symbolic and expressive aspects of social movements. When created within movement contexts, art reveals truth as the movement sees it. At the same time and through the same process, artistic representations and expressions make the movement visible to itself. Movement art is thus part of the coming-to-be of a social movement. The art created within a social movement objectifies the ideas and emotions which motivate and guide that movement, providing a mirror for the movement to know itself. The same processes of objectification and representation make it possible to transmit protest traditions over time and space. Objectified and materialized, the art of social movements re-create protest traditions and become which become ready-made resources for other movements.

The arts, most particularly music, are an established part of social movement repertoire ( Eyerman and Jamison 1998 ; Roscigno and Danaher 2004 ; Reed 2005 ; Roy 2010 ; Rosenthal and Flacks 2012 ). Artistic representations are important to internal movement dynamics such as recruitment, mobilizing solidarity, and forming collective identity. They are also important in communicating movement ideas to the wider world and creating a reservoir of cultural resources for future reference. Social movements can be considered expressive public performances that are meaningful and which provoke meaningful response. Charles Tilly (1999) calls social movements “repeated public displays.” One can identify at least three audiences for such displays, the internal dynamics of the movement itself, those it opposes and, finally, the general public of bystanders and potential supporters ( Eyerman 2006 ).

A social movement emerges when groups of disparate and ever-changing individuals sense they are united and moving in the same direction. People and organizations move in and out of social movements, but this sense of collective engagement, continuous over time and place, is what makes a movement. To achieve this, collective identity and solidarity must be forged, a process which necessarily involves marking off those inside from those outside. The arts play a significant role in such boundary drawing, as well as in the construction and maintenance of internal cohesiveness. In addition, the arts can be a tool in opening public debate around the issues that movements consider important. Music, as activist-performers from Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie to Billy Bragg knew so well, draws and fuses a crowd. In skillful hands, music is also a tool in popular education. One can covey a political message in a very amenable way and, at the same time, draw the bonds and boundaries of community. Films, most particularly documentaries, and theater can be used in a similar way ( Adams 2002 ; Andits 2013 ). Through artistic representation movements identify and communicate who they, what they are for, and what they are against. Needless to say, the content of this message will vary across the political spectrum, but the forms remain quite similar.

Internal Movement Dynamics

Artistic expression and representation are important recruitment tools, helping to draw sympathizers into a movement. Music and collective singing are obvious examples. With the simple transformation of popular hymns, the Swedish-American labor organizer Joe Hill (Joel Hagglund), helped to recruit many into the International Workers of the World (IWW) in the early part of the twentieth century. More than 100 years later, singer-activists Joan Baez and Billy Bragg “dreamed” of Joe Hill at rallies and concerts, as they engaged their audiences with memories of past protest: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me.” Making use of popular melodies for political purpose is a common tactic. While Hill parodied religious musical traditions, others in the American civil rights movement transformed the tunes of a commercial popular culture into mobilizing manifestos. Broadening our notion of “art” to include advertisements and graphic design, more contemporary movements such as ACT UP and Occupy Wall Street, use the visual forms common in the commercial world in a subversive way. Artfully conceived posters and stickers have been a staple of movement expression, communication, and recruitment at least since the 1960s. The evolving digital media will make this even more accessible and instantaneous.

Another aspect of internal movement dynamics where the arts make a significant contribution are in collective bonding, forging group solidarity and strength. Movements bind individuals together in common projects through collective identification and forms of social interaction, such as public demonstration and other collective rituals. There is no better mechanism for this than collective singing and visual displays of solidarity through dress and other symbolic forms ( Doerr et al., this volume ). Think of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, where the wearing of brightly colored clothing signified solidarity within a movement and projected this outward. The American Civil Rights Movement is perhaps best known for its transformation of traditional practices for political purpose, but similar processes were at work in South Africa as opposition forces built their struggle against the apartheid regime. Building on traditions rooted in religious celebration and the slave experience, African Americans created a powerful force for civil rights and inclusion in the dominant society. Similarly, South African oppositional movements transformed long-standing cultural traditions, including voice and dance, into expressions of protest which eventually led to fundamental political change. Within these movements and many others, forms of cultural expression became sources of solidarity and empowerment.

Collective singing and music more generally can provide courage and resilience in trying situations, such as being confronted by violent opposition or imprisonment. This was the case in both the American and South African struggles against racism. College students reacted similarly during various building occupations in the United States and elsewhere, reviving musical practices inherited from earlier protest traditions. Labor struggles around the world involved similar practices, where music and other forms of cultural expression provided solace and solidarity in the face of great opposition.

Hearing a piece of music or viewing an image can invoke a sense of identification even in the absence of others. The strains of a national anthem or of a recognized protest song can stir emotional response and memory. This latter example points to another aspect of artistic representation in the internal dynamics of social movements, namely the forming of collective identity. Artistic representations carry the potential of collective representation, becoming the means through which individuals come to recognize themselves as part of a group. This is perhaps most apparent in music and especially in collective singing, where form and content meld easily together. Singing together binds individual and group. At the same time, a common message, the text of a song, can convey a common vision and purpose. Such practices create group solidarity. When done in public, collective singing becomes a demonstration of collective identity where participants exemplify who they are and what they stand for.

Movement Art as Communication

The last observation points to the second role of the arts in social movement: communicating ideas and emotions to those outside the movement, including potential supporters and the public at large. Social movements demonstrate who they are and what they stand for through public display. Tilly’s (2003) well-known WUNC, the necessity of displaying worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment, applies to movements generally, as they publically perform their collectivity. Clothing as Tarlo (1996) has shown, and other symbols, such as flags and banners, along with distinctive music and dance, are an important part of this. Tarlo reveals how Gandhi’s independence movement developed material objects, bits of clothing, and the traditional tools of their manufacture to convey opposition. Gandhi’s famous spinning wheel now appears on the Indian national flag, while the cloth cap he donned still carries its symbolic weight. Movements make use of visual, textual, and sonic sources in order to be seen and heard. Social movement scholars have long recognized this but have only recently begun to develop analytic tools and research methodologies to take them more seriously into account ( Doerr 2014 ).

Beyond symbols and invented traditions, more formal art works play a part in displaying and evoking collective feeling. Artists and art works of all sorts were a central part of the global movement against America’s war in Vietnam. In 1965, as the antiwar movement slowly escalated at pace with direct military engagement, the American artist Carolee Schneemann filmed newspaper photographs to create powerful images of the pain and suffering of war in a work entitled “Viet Flakes”: ( Israel 2013 ). She was one of hundreds of artists who actively participated in the social movements of the time. Even as such works were displayed in formal gallery or museum settings, the political meaning could be ascertained, at least during the highpoints of protest. This can also be true of seemingly abstract or non-representational artworks, such as Wally Hedrick’s “black works,” which were layers of black paint on canvas. One such painting bore the title “Vietnam.” When it was viewed in 1968, its meaning must have been very suggestive to those who viewed it, perhaps even more so than the representational protest art of the period.

Artists helped to give a visual coherence to the protest. During periods of intense protest, established art institutions can become movement spaces, whether intended or not. Perhaps the most well known piece of political art, Picasso’s “Guernica,” became an important symbol not only for anti-fascist movements even when displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The painting was a major source inspiration for American artists seeking points of reference for political art. The hegemony of modernism and abstract art in the United States in the 1950s helped to turn the art world and artists against political art. When searching for reference in constructing such art during the Vietnam War, American artists turned to Guernica, if not Picasso himself, for a model ( Israel 2013 ).

In addition to creating art works with a political content, artists have often lent their names, performances, and even money to support and help identify movement causes. Artists have been important in lending credence to political protest through signing petitions, publicizing manifestos, and donating their work. This has been true even of works with no obvious political content. Popular musicians were important public figures in the American civil rights movement, the Chinese protests in 1989, and in the Arab Spring revolts. The documentary “The Square” (2013) about the wave of protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square reveals the power of music as well as the danger facing musician-activists. Movements often turn to popular artists, as well as art, to legitimate their cause. On the other side, the global waves of feminism and of women’s movements generated empowering art works and stimulated artistic as well as political movements. Viewing these works today recalls the visions and evokes some of the power of those movements. In this way, art works can become transmitters of protest traditions, even when the movements that inspired them may have ended in terms of public protest. An example is the wave of protests in the Ukraine in early 2014 which eventually led to the fall of the seated government and then dissipated. Calling this an “unfinished revolution,” the New York Times (30 April 2014: C1) reporting on an exhibition at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, stated “the demonstrations have ended, for now, but Ukrainians continue to turn to culture to assert and define themselves in a time of upheaval, just as their counterparts have in recent years after uprisings from Cairo to Rio de Janeiro.” If the notion of cycles of protest has any validity, one can argue that artworks of all sorts provide lasting retainers of the ideas and values that past or passing social movements expressed.

In addition to visual images and music (both recorded and performed), literature, theater and film are also important carriers of protest traditions. Part of the collective memory of protest, these aesthetic forms embed and disperse movement ideas and practices. Poets and playwrights inspired rebellious national liberation movements around the globe over the past centuries. This was clearly the case in Ireland, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic where the poet and playwright Vaclav Havel became its first president in 1993. This was equally true in Africa, Asia, and South America. While perhaps not as directly inspirational, commercial films and documentaries, intended or not, serve as carriers of protest traditions. The documentary “Berkeley in the Sixties,” which chronicles the rise and transformation of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1960s, provides a rousing introduction to social movements to younger generations of students. Street murals and other forms of outsider art can have a similar function. The murals painted on the side of university buildings in Mexico City recall social struggles of previous eras, and while they may have become part of the taken-for-granted urban landscape, they still serve as reminders of protest traditions. Social movements carve themselves out of past traditions, reinventing repertoires in new contexts. Here again the arts continue to play an important role.

Representing the Other

In their performances, social movements articulate what they stand for by representing who and what they are against. The arts are important here. A well-known song that emerged out of the organizing struggles of American coal miners in the 1930s asked “Which side are you on?” The lyrics made clear that there were only two sides from which to chose, one was for or against the union. On the other side stood “the thug” and behind him, the mine owner. The song, written by the wife of an organizer, became a staple in the American protest music tradition and was sung at rallies and demonstrations although the 1960s, where the named other was altered to fit the new situation. Activists have employed street theater to identify and name the other they opposed. During the Vietnam War protests in the United States, the San Francisco Mime Troupe acted out their skits in parks and on streets across the country, portraying villains, from the chemical companies that produced napalm to political and military leaders. Using techniques developed by Brecht they created a “guerrilla theater” that was mobile and effective. One of the most powerful uses of Brecht’s theater of pedagogical protest techniques was “The Laramie Project” (2000), a traveling theater production about the murder of a gay man in Laramie, Wyoming. While not street theater, the actors speak directly to the audience, making clear the distinction between “we” and “they” at the same time and the social distance between actor and audience is disrupted. The project remains a powerful force in articulating some of the concerns of the LGBT movements. Novels, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) which helped fuel the Abolitionist movement, have also been important in naming those a movement opposes. In its popular melodramatic way, Stowe’s novel not only created heroes and villains for its contemporary audience, its title character (Uncle Tom) provided the civil rights movement with a rallying counter-figure. No black activist in the 1960s wanted to be an “Uncle Tom.”

More directly connected to public protests in the naming of the “other,” movement artists create highly visible and clearly identifiable “others” to mobilize against. While the commonplace use of placards and chanted slogans might not qualify as art, the guerilla notion associated with the San Fransisco Mime Troupe has been adopted by artist/activists around the world. The Guerilla Girls, self-named “feminist masked avengers” working in the agitprop tradition, create interactive street art, such as a pink painted wall declaring: “I’m not a feminist, but if I were, this is what I would complain about….,” with a large blank space for viewers to fill in. Here the audience names those it opposes. Graffiti and other forms of street art were very prominent in the Arab Spring protests that shook the Middle East and North Africa in 2013, where caricatures of dictators were sprayed onto walls along with mobilizing slogans. The concept and practice of “guerilla art” has now passed into the social movement lexicon and one might even call it a movement in itself.

Movement Against the Arts

It seems fitting to discuss movements against the arts in the context of the art of movements. Authoritarian regimes and their related movements have very often viewed artists and the arts with suspicion. Nazism is a well-known example, where claims to artistic freedom and autonomy were met with the severest forms of repression. The infamous “degenerate” art exhibition in Munich in 1937 ordered by Adolf Hitler to display all that was wrong with artistic modernism was only part of a wider attempt to purge German culture of what were considered to be polluting tendencies. Certain forms of music, literature, film, and theater were deemed equally threatening to “purity” and national health. To such regimes, control of the arts is considered essential to control of the population. This has been equally true of dictatorial regimes in Greece, Spain, and Latin America. It is also true in Moslem countries, where religious based regimes and movements have made art and artists targets of sanction and repression. The fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran against the author Salman Rushdie was both a life-threatening sanction and a mobilizing tool. Visual representations of the author were important in mobilizing those who had most likely read or even heard of the book. The same can be said of the more recent Muhammad cartoons, where the enemy was more collective than individual, though threats to individuals were also made. Any claims to free expression, from artists to intellectuals and journalists, are threatening to authoritarian regimes, especially as they are newly forming or unstable. There is an underside to such repression however, as it often unites as it forces underground such individuals. Authoritarian attempts at social control help to create subcultures which may actually spur artistic unity as well as development. Franco’s regime in Spain can be credited with catalyzing the emergence of a socially reflective film industry after his death, similar developments have occurred in Iran, both amongst exiles living abroad and within the country itself.

The Art of Social Movement

When connected to social movements, art practices form the core of the symbolic and expressive aspects of social movements. Eyerman and Jamison (1991 , 1998 ) use the term “cognitive praxis” to call attention to such knowledge bearing and knowledge producing practices. For them, movement art is truth-bearing; revealing something about the world as it is and as it might be. When created within movement contexts, art reveals truth as the movement sees it. The music of social movements, for example, tells the story of the movement as much as it is meant to mobilize activists and recruit new participants. At the same time and through the same process, artistic representations and expressions make the movement visible to itself. Movement art in other words, is part of the coming-to-be of a social movement. The art created within a social movement objectifies the ideas and emotions which motivate and guide that movement, providing a mirror for the movement to know itself. The same processes of objectification and representation make it possible to transmit protest traditions over time and space. Objectified and materialized, the art of social movements re-creates protest traditions which become ready-made resources for other movements. Such traditions are more than mere resources to be mobilized, for they embody a way of knowing and being-in-the world. As such, they are more than tools in a protest tool kit; to adopt them is to become them. At the same time, movement art provides a glimpse of how the world ought to be or might have been. Even at its most angry and critical, the protest art of social movements contains a utopian moment, articulating and exemplifying how the world might be, should the aims of the movement be achieved.

As a form of communication, movement art addresses its audience on an equal plane, as an audience capable of understanding, of being reasoned with, and moved. In this sense movement art exemplifies a central ideal of movements, to recruit as many to their cause as possible. This is not to imply that all social movements are democratic, but merely that they are necessarily open to new participants in ways different from other forms of collective behavior. Unlike formal organizations, social movements do not have members, they have participants and supporters who must be constantly recruited and incorporated, fused with knowledge and power. Movement art is central to that purpose.

Adams, Jacqueline ( 2002 ). “ Art in Social Movements: Shantytown Women’s Protests in Pinochet’s Chile. ” Sociological Forum. 17(1): 21–56.

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Art Deco: A Research Guide

Art Deco was an international decorative style than ran from 1919 to 1939. Known initially as "le style moderne" or "Jazz Moderne," the style received its current name in 1968, during a period of scholarly reappraisal. Art Deco developed first in France, and attracted international notice through a government-sponsored exposition held in 1925. The exciting array of works on display included a wide range of avant-garde, luxurious, and lighthearted artistic modes.

After 1925, designs increasingly reflected the rapid artistic and technological innovations of the period between two world wars, incorporating chic elegance, eclectic historical and national imagery, and Machine Age forms into an effervescent decorative vision. Art Deco originated in a time of intense aesthetic experimentation; art movements such as the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Cubism, De Stijl, Futurism, Orphism, and Surrealism helped define the style's inherent modernism.

Art Deco design exemplified opulent consumption, crass commercialism, and the acceleration of contemporary life summed up in the Futurist credo "Speed is beauty." Art Deco's greatest achievement, however, came in its mature phase, when designers liberated the machine from long-standing artistic contempt.

The Art & Architecture Collection has excellent holdings of primary resource materials on Art Deco, including pattern books, design manuals, and catalogues from the original Paris Exposition of 1925. Many secondary resource materials are also available in the Library collections, from monographs on art, architecture, and design to survey histories of the period.

Using the Library's Catalog

When searching the Library's catalog , be aware that it uses subject heading terms from The Library of Congress Subject Headings . As a result, there is a direct subject heading for Art Deco architecture:

Art Deco (architecture)

To search Art Deco as a narrower term try:

Decoration and Ornament -- Art Deco

Also, geographic subdivisions can be used, as in:

Art Deco -- France

One can also research Art Deco exhibitions:

Art Deco -- catalogues Art Deco -- collectors and collecting Art Deco -- exhibitions Art Deco -- bibliography

Related headings of use may be:

France -- Social life and customs -- 20th century New York -- Social life and customs -- 20th century

Survey Histories

These titles provide overviews to the time period and offer social contexts for the development of the Art Deco style.

General Reference

Margulies, Phillip, ed. The Roaring Twenties . San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. A chronological record with emphasis on United States history.

Streissguth, Thomas. The Roaring Twenties . New York: Facts on File, 2007. The format of this book allows quick access to factual data, and makes connections between U.S. and European developments.

France—Social History

Scarlett, Frank and Townley, Marjorie. Arts Decoratifs 1925: A Personal Recollection of the Paris Exhibition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975. A first-hand look at the Exposition that defined Art Deco. Appraises the various pavilions and designer displays, looks at national arts presentations, and gives a vivid sense of what was happening in Paris at that time.

Zeldin, Theodore. France, 1848-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973-77. A solid survey of the social, economic, and political developments before, during, and after the Art Deco decades. Particularly good text on the effects of the first World War.

New York—Social History

Cable, Mary. Top Drawer: American High Society from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties . New York: Atheneum, 1984. A glimpse into the café society that spurred jazz and modern art. Upper class Americans imbibed the latest developments from Europe, including le style moderne.

Olson, James Stuart. Historical Dictionary of the 1920s: from World War I to the New Deal, 1919-1933. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Another useful chronological examination of an important time period.

Wilson, Richard Guy, Dianne H. Pilgrim, Dickran Tashjian. The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941 . New York: Brooklyn Museum in association with Abrams, 1986. Explains the emergence of Machine Art in America, a sub-genre of the Art Deco style.

Selected Historical Titles

Primary source material from the Art Deco era includes: pattern books, plate books, periodicals and catalogues from exhibitions and shows. Illustrations from many of these publications were richly rendered in the pochoir technique. A form of printmaking, pochoir artists used a pain-staking hand-applied process involving gouache watercolor and stencil plates.

The following are a sample of the various plate books to be found in the Art and Architecture Collection:

• Benedictus, Edouard. Relais, 1930: quinze planches donnant quarante-deux motifs décoratifs, enluminure d'art de J. Saudé, préliminaires de Y. Rambosson . Paris: Vincent, 1930. This book of illustrations shows the types of imagery that were popular motifs for the style.
• Camus, Jacques . Idées 1: douze planches . Paris: [A. Calavas, 1922?]. A groundbreaking pattern book that shows the style's early development.
• Saudé, J. Traité. Traité d'enluminure d'art au pochoir, par Jean Saudé; précéde de notes par M. Antoine Bourdelle, Lucien Descaves ... et Sem [pseud.] Aquarelles de Beauzée-Reynaud, Benedictus [e. a.]. Paris: Éditions de l'Ibis, 1925. This is the treatise on the pochoir technique, with useful technical explanations and illustrations and a gallery of illustrations showing varying aspects of stencil and paint application.
• Seguy, E. A. Suggestions pour etoffes et tapis: 60 motifs en coleur . Paris: C. Massin, 1927. One of numerous pattern books by a master of the pochoir technique.
• Sonia Delaunay; ses peintures, ses objets, ses tissues simultanes, ses modes . Paris: Librarie des Arts decoratifs, 192-. This designer's illustrations use Cubist shorthand for the human figure, and show how Art Deco utilized geometrical abstraction so people could look at objects in a new way.

Reference Resources by Topic

Art deco style.

Arwas, Victor. Art Deco . London: Academy Editions, 1992. Useful survey text appraises the style and offers significant artistic examples.

Battersby, Martin. The Decorative Twenties . London: Herbert, 1988. A more cautious account of the Art Deco era with emphasis on artistic influences.

Duncan, Alastair. The Encyclopedia of Art Deco New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988. Alphabetical arrangement of relevant topics.

Encyclopédie des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes au XXème siècle: twelve volumes documenting the Paris exhibition of 1925. New York: Garland, 1977. A reprint summary of the original Exposition catalogues with commentary.

Hillier, Bevis. Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Seminal text by the British art historian who coined the term "Art Deco."

Hillier, Bevis and Stephen Escritt. Art Deco Style . London: Phaidon, 1977. An art historical reappraisal based on an exhibition.

Maurice Pillard-Verneuil: Artiste Decorateur de l'Art Nouveau, 1869-1942 . Paris: Somogy Editions d'Art, 2000. A catalogue of an important designer who worked in both Art Nouveau and Art Deco modes.

Schleuning, Sarah. Moderne: fashioning the French interior . Miami Beach; New York: Wolfsonian-Florida International University; Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Based on an important exhibition of Deco interior design through significant publications.

Wood, Ghislaine. Essential Art Deco . London: V&A Publications, 2003. Concise summary of the style, its effect on art and design, and legacy.

Art Deco Architecture

Bayer, Patricia. Art Deco Architecture: design, decoration, and detail from the twenties and thirties . London: Thames & Hudson, 1992. Covers all the major points about the style's architectural applications.

Breeze, Carla. American Art Deco: architecture and regionalism . New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. This survey shows how the style spread through the United States, taking various forms, e.g. Pueblo Deco.

Robinson, Cervin and Rosemarie Haag Bletter. Skyscraper Style: Art Deco, New York . New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Academic study puts Deco skyscrapers in their proper architectural context. Emphasis on the innovations in these buildings.

Art Deco Fashion

Battersby, Martin. Art Deco Fashion: French designers 1908-1925 . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974. This well-illustrated text describes the innovations in dress that led into the Art Deco era.

Costantino, Maria. > Fashions of a decade: the 1930s . New York: Facts on File, 1992. Covers all aspects of clothing and dress during this decade, including fads and garment changes, the influence of Hollywood, etc.

Herald, Jacqueline. Fashions of a decade: the 1920s . New York: Facts on File, 1991. Records the visual changes, fads, and stylistic trends of the decade.

Lussier, Suzanne. Art Deco Fashion . London: V&A, 2003. A concise survey of dress with authoritative information on social influences and impact.

Samuels, Charlotte. Art Deco Textiles . London: V&A, 2003. This work illustrates the rich designs created for textiles in the 1920s and 1930s.

Art Deco New York

Breeze, Carla. New York Deco . New York: Rizzoli, 1993. Another concise guide to Deco buildings by type of usage, e.g. commercial, residential, public, ecclesiastical, etc.

Lowe, David Garrard. Art Deco New York . New York: Watson-Guptill, 2004. An invaluable resource to the city's social history, monuments, and urban spirit.

Messier, Norbert. The Art Deco Skyscraper in New York . New York: P. Lang, 1986. A practical architectural history of the great age of Deco towers.

Stravitz, David. The Chrysler Building: creating a New York icon day by day . New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. A revealing chronicle of the rise of one of Art Deco's major monuments.

Periodicals

Apollo . London: Apollo, 1925-.

Art et Décoration . Paris: Éditions Albert Lévy, 1897-1935.

Gazette des Beaux Arts Paris, 1859-1959.

Gazette du bon ton: arts, modes & frivolité . Paris, 1912-1925.

L'Art Décoratif: revue de la vie artistique, ancienne et moderne . Paris, 1898.

Locating Journal Articles

Periodical Indexes

Articles written on Art Deco can be found in the following relevant online indexes, found on the Library's Selected Electronic Resources file under the heading "Art & Architecture":

• Art Index Retrospective
• Art Full Text
• ARTbibliographies Modern *
• Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA)
• Design and Applied Art Index *

If a journal is located in one of these indexes, the next step requires searching the journal's title in the catalog to see if the Library owns this periodical, and then finding the classmark whereby the item can be requested.

* represents indices that feature a higher proportion of articles related to clothing history

Visual Electronic Resources

The Library's website www.nypl.org provides access to the Digital Gallery , where thousands of Art Deco-related images can be found. The Digital Gallery is also the online resource of the Picture Collection , containing over 30,000 images from that collection. The Picture Collection possesses more than a million physical images on file in folders, and is located at the Mid-Manhattan Library on 5th Avenue and 40th Street. A limited amount of historical Deco images can be found by searching the scholarly image database ARTstor, which compiles artworks and illustrations from museum and other cultural collections.

Selected Internet Resources

Internet resources on Art Deco can be problematic, since a majority of these sites are commercial in nature. The following are useful:

• Decopix: The Art Deco Resource A general Art Deco website, good for architecture
• New York Architecture Contains good images of key Deco buildings
• Erte A website about the designer Erte, who worked in the Deco mode
• Retropolis Geared towards the decorative arts and art deco
• Art Deco Society of New York The official website of the Art Deco Society of New York, with information on exhibitions, events, lectures, publications and Deco-related activities

• MJC Library & Learning Center
• Research Guides

Art Research Basics

• Getting Started
• Welcome to Art Research Basics

Understand Your Assignment

Create some research questions to guide your inquiry.

• Know Your Sources
• Find Your Sources
• Cite Your Sources

James Baldwin on Art

Brainstorm Search Terms

Below are some basic search terms that work well in our databases. A research librarian can also help you identify additional terms supporting your specific assignment.

Art history

Baroque art

Medieval art

Photography, 

art - Combine this subject term with names of specific artistic movements, geographic regions, time periods, etc. (for example: African American Art  or Art, Africa)

names of specific artists

The content of your paper is dictated by your professor's assignment prompt. Read it carefully, as following the guidelines laid out by your professor is crucial to your success. If the assignment prompt confuses you, consider attending your professor's office hour or emailing them for clarification.  MJC research librarians are happy to help you understand the guidelines laid out in your assignment.

Check out these useful links providing guidance and tips for students tasked with writing about art. These links are meant to serve as a supplement to your professor's assignment prompt and the material in this guide.

• Writing about Paintings From the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University, this handout provides specific information on how to analyze paintings.
• Writing about Photography From the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University, this handout is part of their amazing Visual Rhetoric/Visual Literacy Series. It focuses on how to write about photography.
• Guidelines for Analysis of Art Writing a formal analysis of a work of art is one of the fundamental skills learned in art appreciation class. This handout guides students through the process.

Research questions will keep you focused and on task. Sometimes your professor will include specific questions they want addressed within the prompt.  A research librarian can also help you develop questions based on the parameters of the assignment.

Below are some generic questions that can help you get started on researching an artistic movement or era :.

Why is this movement important to art history?

What characteristics are common to works in this movement?

What is the history of this movement? When, why and how did it begin?

Who are the important artists of the movement? What are the important works?

What subsequent movements/artists has this movement and its artists inspired?

Based on my research, what do I think about this movement's significance to American art history?

Here are some useful questions focusing on a specific work of art :

Who is the artist? Provide biographical information about him/her.

What is the medium of the work of art? Can you provide a physical description?

Can you describe the different artistic elements present in the work (line, shape, light, color, texture, space, time, motion, etc.)

What is the affect of these various elements?

In what country/culture was this work created? When?

What other art was being created in this culture at this time?

To what artistic movement does this work of art belong? Describe it.

In what ways is the chosen work of art representative of the movement? In what ways is it unique?

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Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY-NC 4.0 Licenses .

New Collections: Felix Gonzalez-Torres letters to María Martínez-Cañas

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current .

“It was a real pleasure to meet you. I miss Miami Beach, miss the light, the ocean, the blue skies & all the palm trees.” So opens a circa 1988–89 postcard from Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) to fellow artist María Martínez-Cañas (b. 1960). Accompanying the postcard in this collection is a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper and a snapshot picturing three cats cuddling on a seat cushion that has fallen from its perch to a white tile floor. Dating from 1988–1992, this three-item collection is the first donation made in response to the call for submissions to the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Correspondence Archive , a unique partnership between the Archives and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation that was launched in 2020.

Gonzalez-Torres had an ongoing practice of sending correspondence to a range of people, including friends, individuals from the art world (such as collectors and curators) with whom he both intimately and casually engaged, and family. The first donation to the Correspondence Archive comes from not only an artist peer, but one who, like Gonzalez-Torres, was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico. The families of both Gonzalez-Torres and Martínez-Cañas eventually settled in Miami, and the artists shared a love of the city’s topography and culture. Gonzalez-Torres writes in the letter on notebook paper that is part of this collection, “Extraño la luz de Miami Beach, el olor a platano maduro frito, y el azul de la playa.” [“I miss the light of Miami Beach, the smell of fried ripe plantain, and the blue of the beach.”] The practice of listing is prevalent throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s letters, as well as his artwork. The artists’ correspondence thus presents an opportunity to engage with the idea of multiple simultaneous possibilities, which was intrinsic to Gonzalez-Torres’s thinking.

Other facets of Gonzalez-Torres’s character and practice emerge in this collection, including his thoughtful regard for fellow artists and his participation in the New York-based art collective Group Material (which the artist considered separate from his practice). On the reverse of the snapshot of cats, for example, he notifies Martínez-Cañas that Group Material is going on sabbatical. From 1987 to 1994 Gonzalez-Torres was a core member of the group, which often invited contributions from contemporaries, such as Martínez-Cañas. She had apparently sent some slides for Group Material’s consideration (the specific project is unspecified), and Gonzalez-Torres was kindly returning them so they could be reused. This gesture evokes a pre-digital world and the once common practice of distributing 35mm slides as work samples. It also prompts us to imagine how Martínez-Cañas’s art might have been incorporated into one of Group Material’s politically charged installations.

Though his life was cut short by AIDS-related causes, Gonzalez-Torres remains a powerful presence in the contemporary art world, where his work continues to be shown widely. As well as attesting to the wide network of friends, family, and colleagues he maintained in his lifetime, Gonzalez-Torres’s correspondence material is relevant in how it may add perspective to the artist’s work. This inaugural gift from Martínez-Cañas suggests a future where Gonzalez-Torres’s presence is equally ensured in the Archives.

Josh T. Franco is the head of collecting at the Archives of American Art.

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ART 595 A: Master of Fine Arts Research Project

AI has already figured out how to deceive humans

• A new research paper found that various AI systems have learned the art of deception. 
• Deception is the "systematic inducement of false beliefs."
• This poses several risks for society, from fraud to election tampering.

AI can boost productivity by helping us code, write, and synthesize vast amounts of data. It can now also deceive us.

A range of AI systems have learned techniques to systematically induce "false beliefs in others to accomplish some outcome other than the truth," according to a new research paper .

The paper focused on two types of AI systems: special-use systems like Meta's CICERO, which are designed to complete a specific task, and general-purpose systems like OpenAI's GPT-4 , which are trained to perform a diverse range of tasks.

While these systems are trained to be honest, they often learn deceptive tricks through their training because they can be more effective than taking the high road.

"Generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI's training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals," the paper's first author Peter S. Park, an AI existential safety postdoctoral fellow at MIT, said in a news release .

Meta's CICERO is "an expert liar"

AI systems trained to "win games that have a social element" are especially likely to deceive.

Meta's CICERO, for example, was developed to play the game Diplomacy — a classic strategy game that requires players to build and break alliances.

Related stories

Meta said it trained CICERO to be "largely honest and helpful to its speaking partners," but the study found that CICERO "turned out to be an expert liar." It made commitments it never intended to keep, betrayed allies, and told outright lies.

GPT-4 can convince you it has impaired vision

Even general-purpose systems like GPT-4 can manipulate humans.

In a study cited by the paper, GPT-4 manipulated a TaskRabbit worker by pretending to have a vision impairment.

In the study, GPT-4 was tasked with hiring a human to solve a CAPTCHA test. The model also received hints from a human evaluator every time it got stuck, but it was never prompted to lie. When the human it was tasked to hire questioned its identity, GPT-4 came up with the excuse of having vision impairment to explain why it needed help.

The tactic worked. The human responded to GPT-4 by immediately solving the test.

Research also shows that course-correcting deceptive models isn't easy.

In a study from January co-authored by Anthropic, the maker of Claude, researchers found that once AI models learn the tricks of deception, it's hard for safety training techniques to reverse them.

They concluded that not only can a model learn to exhibit deceptive behavior, once it does, standard safety training techniques could "fail to remove such deception" and "create a false impression of safety."

The dangers deceptive AI models pose are "increasingly serious"

The paper calls for policymakers to advocate for stronger AI regulation since deceptive AI systems can pose significant risks to democracy.

As the 2024 presidential election nears , AI can be easily manipulated to spread fake news, generate divisive social media posts, and impersonate candidates through robocalls and deepfake videos, the paper noted. It also makes it easier for terrorist groups to spread propaganda and recruit new members.

The paper's potential solutions include subjecting deceptive models to more "robust risk-assessment requirements," implementing laws that require AI systems and their outputs to be clearly distinguished from humans and their outputs, and investing in tools to mitigate deception.

"We as a society need as much time as we can get to prepare for the more advanced deception of future AI products and open-source models," Park told Cell Press. "As the deceptive capabilities of AI systems become more advanced, the dangers they pose to society will become increasingly serious."

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• Active workplace design: current gaps and future pathways
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9384-5456 Mohammad Javad Koohsari 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• Andrew T Kaczynski 4 ,
• Akitomo Yasunaga 5 ,
• Tomoya Hanibuchi 6 ,
• Tomoki Nakaya 7 ,
• Gavin R McCormack 8 ,
• Koichiro Oka 2
• 1 School of Advanced Science and Technology , Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology , Nomi , Japan
• 2 Faculty of Sport Sciences , Waseda University , Tokorozawa , Japan
• 3 School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences , Deakin University , Geelong , Victoria , Australia
• 4 Arnold School of Public Health , University of South Carolina , Columbia , South Carolina , USA
• 5 Faculty of Health Sciences , Aomori University of Health and Welfare , Aomori , Japan
• 6 Graduate School of Letters , Kyoto University , Kyoto , Japan
• 7 Graduate School of Environmental Studies , Tohoku University , Sendai , Japan
• 8 Department of Community Health Sciences , University of Calgary , Calgary , Alberta , Canada
• Correspondence to Dr Mohammad Javad Koohsari, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, Japan; koohsari{at}jaist.ac.jp

https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2024-108146

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• Public health
• Sedentary Behavior
• Health promotion

Introduction

Insufficient physical activity and excessive sitting time among office-based workers have been linked to various health risks and economic consequences. While health promotion interventions are important, the role of workplace design in encouraging active behaviours is increasingly recognised. However, significant gaps exist in knowledge about how workplace design influences these behaviours. This paper identifies the need to investigate the interactive effects of workplace norms and culture and the role of building layouts on workers’ behaviours, as well as the need for more accurate behavioural measures. Bridging these gaps is crucial for designing workplace interventions and promoting active, healthy and productive work environments.

Workplace design: encouraging movement in workplace settings

Existing gaps and future directions, interactive effects of workplace social environments.

Workplace social environments such as norms and culture can significantly influence sedentary behaviours among office-based workers 4 and can affect how workplace design influences workers’ behaviour. Most previous studies have tested the effects of workplace design on employees’ active and sedentary behaviours within Western contexts, 5 leaving a gap in how these relationships vary in other geographical settings with unique workplace norms and cultures. For instance, in a workplace where extended sitting is a cultural norm, employees may still predominantly engage in sedentary behaviour, regardless of having activity-promoting features in their workplace. Conversely, an activity-promoting environment might help mitigate norms towards sitting or even produce multiplicative positive effects in contexts where activity in the workplace is already customary. Conducting studies across varied geographical settings is necessary to identify similarities and differences in the impact of workplace norms and design on workers’ active and sedentary behaviours. Cross-cultural studies can shed light on the generalisability of findings and help develop customised interventions that address specific norms and cultural challenges. Future research can also employ mixed methods to gain a more thorough understanding of the complex interplay between workplace design, norms and culture, and employees’ behaviour. Additionally, the rise of home and hybrid working arrangements indicates that office social norms could extend to home work environments. For example, a culture of regular stretch breaks in the office might encourage similar practices at home, influencing physical activity behaviours remotely. Understanding the detailed relationship between workplace design, norms and employee behaviour is critical for developing targeted contextually relevant interventions that promote active workplace environments.

Precision in tracking workplace behaviours

Accurately measuring employees’ active and sitting behaviours and identifying the ‘locations’ where these behaviours occur is essential to understand their relationships with workplace design attributes. Global positioning systems (GPS) have been commonly used in combination with accelerometer devices to measure and spatially track people’s active and sedentary behaviour in outdoor environments, such as neighbourhoods and cities. 6 Nevertheless, GPS signals have limited accuracy or can be disrupted within indoor environments, resulting in less precise location data.

An indoor positioning system (IPS) can address the limitations of GPS in indoor environments. 7 IPS is a wayfinding technology that uses existing low-cost WiFi and Bluetooth to provide precise locations of individuals inside buildings. The IPS can be integrated with activity-tracking wearable devices, such as accelerometers, pedometers and heart rate monitors, as well as traditional methods like behavioural mapping. This integration allows for the collection of employees’ location data, movement patterns, activity intensities and other biometric data within workplaces. Additionally, the synergy between IPS and wearable devices effectively differentiates between occupational and leisure physical activities in workplaces. This distinction is key to better understanding the health paradox of the different health effects of these two types of physical activities. 8 Furthermore, with the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been a unique opportunity to employ geospatial AI (GeoAI) in workplace environments and health research. GeoAI techniques aim to integrate innovations in spatial sciences with AI, particularly deep learning. 9 The joint application of IPS and GeoAI would enable precise location data of individuals within the workplace while using the power of spatial analysis. GeoAI can analyse workers’ movement patterns derived from IPS in combination with geospatial layers such as spatial layouts, access to common places, and light conditions. For instance, a GeoAI trained by tracking data on people’s movements in various indoor environments would predict people’s movements and derive estimates of the amount of sedentary behaviour of employed people only from planned indoor layout. This analysis allows for identifying hotspots or areas within the workplace where active and sedentary behaviour is prevalent.

Beyond individual design elements: exploring the influence of building layout on workplace behaviour

Most previous studies have primarily examined individual design elements but fail to consider how the overall spatial layout influences movement and behaviour. Building layout encompasses the spatial arrangement of building elements such as walls, doors, windows, and access ways, and plays a fundamental role in defining the functionality of interior spaces. Once a building layout has been established, making substantial alterations to it becomes challenging or, in some cases, impossible. Therefore, designing (and, if feasible, retrofitting) building interiors to promote health is imperative, but it is still unclear which workplace layouts are most supportive of workers’ active behaviours.

The urban design theory of space syntax has the potential to partially address this gap in knowledge. Space syntax uses a set of graph-based estimators to quantify spatial layouts. 10 It offers a framework to investigate the impact of building layout factors, such as workstation arrangement, common area location, and space accessibility, on workers’ movement patterns and behaviours. It goes beyond isolated design elements and considers the spatial configuration as a whole ( figure 1 ). Additionally, more research on ‘how’ people use and perceive their workspaces could complement the space syntax evaluations of building design.

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Space syntax examines building layouts as a whole, using the graph theory: (A)a schematic workplace layout, (B)space syntax axial lines (i.e., longest and fewest lines traversing all spaces) of the layout, and (C)the connectivity of all spaces based on the graph theory.

Conclusions

Future research should investigate the interactive effects of workplace norms and culture on behaviour and conduct cross-cultural studies to identify similarities and differences. Innovative measurement methods can also be employed to accurately measure behaviours and locations where those behaviours occur within workplaces. Additionally, exploring the influence of spatial layout, and using the urban design theory of space syntax, can offer valuable insights into the design of work environments that facilitate workers’ engagement in active behaviours.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

• Sugiyama T ,
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Contributors MJK conceived the idea and wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the writing and assisted with the analysis and interpretation. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript and agree with the order of the presentation of authors.

Funding MJK is supported by the JSPS KAKENHI (grant 23K09701). KO is supported by the JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research program (grant 20H04113).

Competing interests None declared. In particular, none of the authors has a financial interest in the Space Syntax Limited company.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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