Apartment Tour: Desk #1

What's shiny and white and covered with books all over? My desk!

My desk is direct from the designer showrooms of IKEA. Made out of sawdust, something white, and a lot of chemicals, it took me 30 minutes to construct and about 30 hours to fill with clutter.

These 50-70 books contain all the information I need to write my first three papers for grad school. What will I write about? Let me share my rough drafts with you.

One paper will discuss the painting you see here: Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, several artists turned away from the classical subject matter that had long dominated the themes of paintings and sculptures, and turned instead to nature and emotions to provide the basis of a new artistic movement: Romanticism. Regarding this new movement, the German Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge noted, “we are witnessing a demise; we have outgrown the religions that evolved out of Catholicism, abstractions are dying out, everything is more passionate and freer than before; everybody is pushing toward landscape, searching for something certain in this uncertainty, not knowing how to begin.” Landscape painting became, for some artists, a means of understanding and expressing their place in the world during a time when traditional modes no longer seemed appropriate. One of these artists was Caspar David Friedrich, whose painting, Monk by the Sea, perfectly depicts the individual searching nature “for something certain in this uncertainty.” When we view Monk by the Sea and substitute ourselves for the figure of the searching monk, we too begin the uncertain search for something “certain.”

The next paper is about the American folk artist Edward Hicks and his farmscapes. My paper will discuss folk artist Edward Hicks’ meticulously painted farmscapes of Bucks County in eastern Pennsylvania, including the painting shown here: The Cornell Farm of 1848. These pastoral scenes, painted during the artist’s later years, showcase the idyllic beauty of the rural farm as well as the human labor required for its prosperity. Hicks is most commonly associated with a series of paintings known as "The Peaceable Kingdoms." These paintings depict the Pennsylvania landscape as a Garden of Eden complete with cohabitating lion and lamb, Native American and colonist. It has been suggested that the farmscapes represent a variation on Hicks’ well-known theme: “to a considerable extent Bucks County was the Peaceable Kingdom" complete with cohabitating farmer and hired hand, cow and horse, and civilization and wilderness. This paper will explore these farmscapes as the artist’s personal expressions of early American national and religious ideals.

If you thought reading about those two papers was excrutiating, wait until you read about this next one. You can tell this is the most tedious topic because I don't even have a picture to go along with it. It's about the theory of Alois Riegl, a German art historian, professor, and curator of the late 1800s. Using Riegl’s influential texts Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament and Late Roman Art Industry as guides, the paper will present Riegl's definition of art and craft. The books’ interest in “lesser” art remains relevant to this day. Riegl believes that every culture expresses kunstwollen – a term translated over the years as “artistic urge,” “will-to-form,” and “artistic intent.” The product of such expression is art, including painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and craft. As Eric Fernie writes in Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology, “This inclusion of the crafts in the concept of art is perhaps Riegl’s most forward-looking suggestion.” Though he includes crafts in his concept of art, does he impose a hierarchy upon art where craft is distinct from and less important than that of “higher” arts such as sculpture and painting?