Art history was the topic of the day on Wednesday, April 11 in Hull Auditorium as seniors Josephine Ziluca and Colleen Mac Murtrie both presented their art history lecture research projects. Assistant Professor of Art History Erin Devine opened the 4 p.m. event.
Discussing the Art Nouveau period that lasted from 1890 to 1914 in "Objects of Beauty: Images of Women in Art Nouveau Jewelry," Mac Murtrie said the trademark style of the period was the whiplash line and plique-a-jour.
She said the whiplash line "whips out in a long swirl and consists of an arbitrarily swelling and thinning mass." Some of the more prominent artists of this style were Alphonse Mucha, a Dutch artist, and René Lalique, a Frenchman.
Mac Murtrie said prior to Art Nouveau jewelry, the jewelry was expensive, would fall apart easily and had numerous repetitive designs. This style of jewelry caused a "shift" with jewelry construction because it included cheap yet strong semi-precious jewels.
The artists of this time period also moved away from the use of technology as machines tended to produce flaws in the work and rapid production would only devalue the items. Another reason was due to William Morris' findings that machine-made products, when compared to those hand-made, broke far more easily.
Jewelry during this time had distinct characteristics, featuring young women, scenes of love, a dream-like quality, vines creeping from plants and other aspects of nature. Such traits can be seen in René Lavique's "Dragonfly."
Specializing in decorative arts and jewelry was Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of Tiffany and Company's founder Charles Lewis Tiffany. Tiffany introduced the Art Nouveau style to the United States in 1904 at the St. Louis Exhibition from which his sales of painted glass pieces greatly increased. Mac Murtrie has served as a Bishop-Wells intern at the Longwood Center for Visual Arts and as an intern at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Ziluca presented on Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss sculptor and painter. He gained much of his recognition by contributing to surrealism, saying he wanted his works "to be interesting [and] mean something to other people." Giacometti may best be expressed as an existentialist even though he was a great contributor to the fields of categorization and surrealism.
The surrealist phase of Giacometti's work focused on imagery from his life rather than the raw depictions he would highlight in his later works.
Perhaps one of Giacometti's most recognized surrealist works, "Woman with Her Throat Cut," represents the symbolism that was apparent in his work. Ziluca explained this piece as looking like "a female insect has just had her frame cut and her bodily structure is heaving for any last gasps of air." Ziluca continued, "Her throat is cut and is held down by one of her arms coming across her body. Her long neck that connects to a small geometric face is cut. With her arms having wings as hands, they are unable to help her from her death. As viewers, we can only watch her demise in progress." Zilcua said.
Giacometti worked daily to "create the way he saw others shown through his work 'Walking Man.'" The statue is a representation of people from all walks of life, acting as "a model for human strife." She explained this work as "an exploration of man's reality."
Rene Lalique's "Dragonfly" piece was a prominent display of Art Nouveau work.
