CENTRO DE IDIOMAS

CIDI 125 – Licenciatura en Artes Visuales

Prof. Francisca Siebert
FINAL TEST (20%)
GRADE __________
NAME:

I) Research on art controversies and choose one remarkable situation. Write a 200-
word essay about it: explain the situation, present the different points of view
involved in that controversy and elaborate your opinion. Underline vocabulary
from the semester and color key words related to arts. At the end of your essay,
provide the link of the webpage from which you took the information.

Can we talk about the naked female figure across the painting history?
As we know, the female figure was using on art since prehistory in paintings and sculptures for show them
as symbols of fertility and nobody had any troubles for do the females with sharp curves and don’t finding
the ‘perfection'. Later in medieval and modern era the people was more conservative and see paintings of
naked females wasn’t well seeing and the paintings itself was rare to see, so most of the times people see
portraits of females with clothes and trying to do some specific poses for look more serious.
But in 1863, Édouard Manet do a painting called “The Luncheon on the Grass” where a couple of dressed
males was sitting on the grass with a naked female (maybe a prostitute) in a park, this made mixed feelings
between the people in Salons des Refusés since the woman was naked and her gaze was outside the canvas,
more precisely to the viewers. And as this woman wasn’t a goddess or a divine figure (because he explain
that she was a normal woman) and that they understand that it can be just a normal situation where the
males accept her nudity, but not in a sexual way. So in many times this painting was rejected by the ‘experts’
of art.
Well, as Manet reject the traditional methods of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and try to realistic paintings,
he became part of the impressionist painters as Cesanne who start to do paintings of naked females too,
using all types of bodies, who later inspired another artist (mostly painters) that experiment with the
painting of naked female figures again in Montparnase where one can find artists of all the world until the
second World War. And that’s a thing the I like, experiment with materials, figures, colors and paint
whatever I wish or want where nobody tell me how I must do one painting on any artwork.
Sources:
https://mymodernmet.com/edouard-manet-the-luncheon-on-the-grass/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP4cFPcN0UM
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/courtauld-impressionists-from-manet-to-
cezanne
http://www.galleryintell.com/artex/luncheon-on-the-grass-edouard-manet/

Content: ______/6 Vocabulary: ______/6 Language use: ______/5 Length: _____/2 Instructions ____/1
II) Watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9RrO0dtu5M). Write 2
paragraphs of 150 words each. In the first paragraph write a summary of the
video. In the second paragraph write your opinion about it and give another
example related to art and culture.

The video explain how the European modern art movement start. And this start was simpler than we
though, because it was inspired art make in Africa or Asia in the 19th century. Well mostly in Africa since the
European empires was still expanded their territories and takes some of the sculptures or masks created to
exhibit them on museums or personal collections. Henri Matisse was a collector and friend of Picasso, both
visited an Ethnographic Museum in Paris, the masks and stuff there had simple figures and a small palette
of colors (mostly brown, red and yellow, with black or white details if is necessary), so Picasso take that
bases and apply them on one of his last painting called ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’, this painting broke with
the notions of art of that time thanks to the abstraction and simplicity of the piece that give ir new
meanings, even if at the start it was rejected for both viewers and friends of him. That made that other
artist get inspired and created pieces of art that as simples and had a small palette of colors as Modigliani
and Brancusi.

From my point of view this isn’t a strangeness for me since I study another movements that was based on
artist that don’t want follow the current rules of art. For example in Chile in 1923 a group of artists called
Montparnasse born because they travel to Paris to study there for a while, they had an unique idea about
what art is and the techniques that they can use on their paintings, but, in Paris they meet a lot of famous
artists around the world in just one place of the city, so they can do studies based on the paintings that they
saw there. All of them change their styles of paint bodies and dead nature using more rough brushstrokes
and simples palettes of colors, for example Enriqueta Petit only uses browns and yellows (sometimes a bit
of blue) on her paintings of nude females and that females had curvy bodies since she don’t like the type of
bodies that everyone was painting.

Content: ______/6 Vocabulary: ______/6 Language use: ______/5 Length: _____/2 Instructions ____/1