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- ANCIENT BUILDINGS & ART. It remains a mystery as to how the Great Pyramids and many other ancient structures around the world were built. Even today, we do not posses the technology to recreate these massive works.
- JESUS FISH. The fish symbol was adopted by early Christians as a secret sign. It is now known colloquially as the “sign of the fish” or the “Jesus fish”.
- MAO. Mao’s mystique was closely monitored and strongly influenced by Jiang Qing, the former actress who became Mao’s third and final wife. Artists were told to honor the ‘Three Prominences’: 1) prominence to positive characters, 2) prominence to heroes and 3) prominence to the most important leaders.
- OBAMA HOPE POSTER. The Barack Obama “Hope” poster by the artist Shepard Fairey is an iconic image that has come to represent the 2008 presidential campaign and the election of the first African-American president.
- Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
- Code of Hammurabi, Babylon
- Galloping Horse by Eadweard Muybridge
- Guernica by Pablo Picasso
- 7,000 Oak Trees by Joseph Beuys
- Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramovic
- Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons
- The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles by Faith Ringgold
- The Power of Art
What better way to start off this list, then with Duchamp’s Fountain? Widely considered a turning point in modern and conceptual art, Duchamp created Fountain in 1917. He simply took a urinal off of a bathroom wall, turned it on its side, and signed it “R. Mutt”. He submitted the piece to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New Y...
The Code of Hammurabi is famous for its sculptural prowess and refinement, as well as for its role as the first and most complete set of written legal codes discovered by archaeologists and historians. The legal codes enshrined in the massive stele were set out by King Hammurabi, the ruler of ancient Babylonia from the years 1792 BC to 1750 BC. The...
Galloping Horse is a unique entry on this list in that it represents a revolution in the arts and the sciences! Muybridge was an early experimenter in the field of photography and is known for his work in capturing motion. He pioneered the use of several different cameras at the same time to capture motion in stop-motion frames, as well as the zoop...
Pablo Picasso is a revolutionary artist in many ways. His paintings established the Cubist movement and were some of the first and most well-known experimentations with abstraction. However, Guernica makes this list for a very different reason. It’s a testament to the power and influence that a painting can have on public sentiment and political wi...
7,000 Oak Trees is a key development in the realm of environmentally-focused art, and marks the beginning of a whole movement of conceptual performance or earthwork pieces that seek to address environmental health. Joseph Beuys was a mid 20th-century German artist known for his conceptual art pieces that often included an element of performance. 7,...
Marina Abramovic was one of the early innovators of feminist performance art, which pushed at the limits of bodily endurance and social norms, all in the interest of questioning the social position of women in the world. Rhythm 0 is one of her best known and most shocking works, and was performed in 1974. Abramovic stood still next to a table she’d...
Whether you hate him or love him, Jeff Koons has left a mark on the art world. In much the same way that Marcel Duchamp tested the limits of art with The Fountain, Jeff Koons has pushed the envelope throughout his entire career as an artist. Through his artwork, Jeff Koons asks if art has to be made by the artist or if it can be designed by an arti...
Faith Ringgold is a multimedia artist who’s been working since the 1970s, and she’s a powerful voice speaking on race, exploitation, and power in America. Although her paintings and performance pieces are no less masterful and moving, Ringgold’s most well-known art is her series of story quilts. Inspired by 14th and 15th century Nepali paintings on...
Hopefully each of the entries on this list piqued your interest, and led you down a rabbit hole of research and exploration. Each of the 8 pieces transcends being a simple object or event, and bleeds into the realms of politics, law, social justice, science, and philosophy. Art co-exists with all of the other forces and movements of any given socie...
Jan 20, 2023 · Some artworks throughout history have revolutionised the way we think about politics, social issues and even art itself. From cave paintings to soup cans, and princesses to soviet leaders,...
From artists who reimagined what art could look like to paintings that introduced tropes that would be revisited for centuries to come, these 10 works make remarkable statements about the societies in which they were produced and the generations of art that followed.
History painting is a painting genre that is defined by its subject matter rather than its creative approach. History paintings often represent a particular and static topic, as opposed to a specific and static subject, as in a portrait.
With 503 contributors from 201 colleges, universities, museums, and research centers, Smarthistory is the most-visited art history resource in the world. For Learning ART HISTORIES
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We understand the history of humanity through art. From prehistoric depictions of woolly mammoths to contemporary abstraction, artists have addressed their time and place in history and have expressed universal human truths for tens of thousands of years.
