100 word response to the following. Must cite properly in MLA.

Unlike the Egyptian culture that created statues of themselves as gods and pharaohs. Muslims did not worship false idols or statues so no pictures or statues or gods are present in their mosques. According to Geitlein (2010), “The Qur’an contains a stern warning against the worship of idols, and in time this led to a doctrine forbidding images of animate beings in religious contexts” (p. 410). Instead the Muslims of the Islam culture used geometry and plants to design buildings, like the Egyptian pyramids, Muslims built beautiful mosques with grand designs. Islam became a world religion, like Christians, they needed a place of worship and prayer. They also used fine textiles, sun dried brick, and ceramics to create their designs. An example would be the popular Cordoba mosque of Spain. A lot of mosques use the arch and dome technique like that of the Romans and Byzantine architecture. Arabic script also became popular and appeared inside the mosque temples. Islam used calligraphy as art and to illustrate writing. Egyptians were also big on scripting but theirs was called hieroglyphics, which not only had letters, but pictures were a big part of their writing system as well. The Egyptians didn’t technically worship false idols at all times, at some times they had statues created of themselves but there wasn’t really a religion in Egypt until the one god religion began there. Egypt gave you a visual of the life and world of Egypt, Islam leaves it more up to the imagination with no pictures of what any of the past history looked like.

References
Getlein, Mark. Living With Art. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Print.

 100 word response to the following. Must cite properly in MLA:

Realism was a mid to late 19th century movement in which artist should represent the world at it is regardless of artistic and social understandings. Realist were seeking to free art from social regulation and depicting how society shapes the lives of people (Little, page 80).

In his Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, American-born George Caleb Bingham a self taught artist and the first major painter to live and work west of the Mississippi River illustrates the realism of life for a French trapper and his son on the Missouri River hunting from a dugout canoe. The painting is simple to understand, it represents the calmness of a time to me when life was simple.

Abstract Expressionism was a movement that got its start following World War TWO. Developed in New York and often referred to as the New York School or Action Painting it is characterized to depict universal emotions. Additionally this was the first American movement to gain international recognition (Little, page 122). 

Jackson Pollock’s perfected Abstract Expressionism through his “drip technique”, a technique in which you apply paint to a canvas on the floor indirectly from a brush. Pollock the youngest of five boys in a family that moved around a lot and created an unstable upbringing that most likely led to signs of alcoholism in his mid-teens. This type of art appears to be done through anger and that is what I see when viewing Pollock’s Number 1.

I chose the two works of art because the two represent the extremes in life to me, the calm peacefulness of nature where everything has a place an purpose to the abstract where the craziness of life intersects, nothing fits together but it all fits together.  

Little, Stephen. -isms, Understanding Art. New York: Universe Pub, 2005. Print.