Jan van Eyck was a remarkable painter. He worked in oils during the Renaissance, and created stunning photorealistic portraits centuries before photography was developmed. In the Arnolfini portrait, he captures not only the subjects standing before him, but also a reflection of the room in a convex mirror showing the full scene and accurately rendering the distortions caused by the curved glass.

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Skipping ahead a few hundred years, the artist Xu Bing created Book from the Sky as a monumental print. It is probably among the most ambitious, labor-intensive, and useless books ever to be printed in China or anywhere else. He created 4,000 unique characters on wood blocks to print this massive "book" but while those characters look like Chinese writing, they are actually completely meaningless.

A Book from the Sky is one of the required artworks for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist, AP Art History Cram Session to learn about other artists and artworks from that curriculum.

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Modernists said, “form follows function” focusing on how people will use a space, but Gehry focuses on how people will react to the space. His goal is to inspire, to make them feel. He talks about the challenge of creating feeling with inert materials. He says it is the movement that brings out a feeling.

With his design in Bilbao, Spain, rather than simply designing a building to house a collection of some of the world’s most beautiful and inspiring art, Gehry made the building itself a work of art that inspires awe and wonder.

The Guggenheim Bilbao is one of the required artworks for AP Art History. Check out my Spotify playlist, AP Art History Cram Session to learn about other artists and artworks from that curriculum.

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In 1896, Louis Sullivan wrote about skyscrapers and architectural design in “The Tall Building Artistically Considered” This was the origin of the famous phrase, “form follows function.” What Sullivan actually said was “form must ever follow function” but regardless of phrasing, the meaning remains the same - architects should first consider how a building will be used then base the design on that. 

One of his most famous designs was for the Carson Pirie Scott building downtown Chicago. Today the building is actually called the Sullivan Center in his honor, but Sullivan was such a difficult man to deal with, he was actually passed over for the third phase of it's construction. Essentially Louis Sullivan couldn't get the job of designing The Sullivan Center.

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In 1778, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun met Marie Antoinette at the Royal palace in Versailles. The queen had heard of Le Brun’s talent and asked to paint her portrait. Marie Antoinette loved the way Le Brun painted her and from that point on, she was pretty much her official royal portrait painter. Le Brun painted 30 portraits of the queen. Almost as quickly as her star rose, her fortunes changed. In 1789, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was forced to flee France in a disguise and under the cover of darkness during the early stages of the French Revolution. Le Brun didn’t have the opulent life of luxury that revolutionaries despised, but she had worked her way up to become Marie Antoinette’s favorite portraitist and the French Revolution was not the ideal time and place for friends of the monarch.

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Frank Lloyd Wright was one of America's most famous and influential architects. He famously said, "No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other." It was this emphasis on unity between the construction and the surrounding landscape that made Falling Water such a breathtaking design.

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• Frank Lloyd Wright | Falling Water (full episode)

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Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series was not his only narrative series of paintings, but it was his biggest hit. This collection of 60 painted panels tells the story of The Great Migration as millions of black families moved from the rural South to Northern cities around the time of World War 1. Lawrence was speaking to his experience and the experience of many black Americans in the period between the wars. I think this series resonates with a wide audience because it hits at the hope and the promise of the nation, the tragedy of failures to live up to its promise and ideals, but also the perseverance of hopeful people. As he said in this work, "They kept coming."

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Christo and Jeanne Claude are best known for their monumental works using fabric to transform public spaces. These massive works outside of the museum or gallery context helped to bring art to the masses. Whether people wanted to or not, they were forced to reconsider the space as the building, or the coast was covered in masses of fabric.

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• Christo and Jeanne Claude | The Floating Piers (full episode)

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Ai Weiwei is possibly the most interesting man in the world. He is not only a famous contemporary artist. He was a top rated blackjack player, a political prisoner and released a heavy metal album about his incarceration. His installation, Kui Hua Zi, consisted of 100 million hand-crafted, porcelain sunflower seeds.

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Pablo Picasso was among the most influential artists of the 20th century and Guernica is possibly his greatest work. While I am not a fan of Picasso as a person, his significance as an artist is undeniable.

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