The Meaning, Importance, and Scope of

Humanities
• Humanities comes from Latin “Humanus” which
means human, cultured, and refined.
• Human has qualities: rationality, kindness, and
tenderness (although they have different connotations
in different historical eras).
• Current day connotation: Humanities is a loosely
defined a group of cultural subject areas.
• Humanities refers not to a group of scientific or technical
subjects.
• Hence, humanities refers to the arts: visual, music, dance,
theater or drama, and literature.
• These are branches of learning concerned with human
thought, feelings, and relations. (Sanchez, Abad, & Jao;
2008)
Arts: Their Nature and Meaning
• Arts constitute one of the oldest and most important
means of expressions developed by man ( Zulueta, 2003).
Example: The greek epics “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey”
dated back even before the beginning of recorded history.
• Art has been created by people at all times; it lives
because it is liked and enjoyed.
• Art implies an intellectual involvement with what is to be
appreciated, be it painting, musical composition,
sculpture, drama, or a novel.
Example: when all elements are put together in a
harmonious pattern of relationships.
• Art is a product of man’s need to express himself and is
not limited to the revelation of emotions alone.
• Art is the product of man’s need to express himself and is
not limited to the revelation of emotions alone.
The personal and social values of the artist are also
manifested through the arts.
• Sometimes, we use the word “art” as an opposite to the
word “craft”.
We call making something beautiful rather than useful as
“art”, and making something useful more than beautiful
as “craft”.
This difference is not really that important today because
useful things can be beautiful and vice versa.
Importance of the Arts
• Daily living is surrounded with beautiful things.
• Moral, educational, social, cultural, and religious
purposes.
• Also a powerful medium in mass communication.
• Arts afford man moments of relaxation and spiritual
happiness, which is a reflection of an internal happiness.
• Imagination is more satisfied through the recreation of
themes, characters, motifs, and events.
• Through the arts, man has an orderly control of his
passions which in real life can move man to disorderly or
immoral acts if unregulated.
• Arts are powerful means to reform man, to change his
deviant behavior into social order and overcome his
feelings of loneliness, uncertainty, and restlessness.
According to Sanchez, Abad, and Jao (2002), art subjects can
be presented in the following manner:
1. Realism.
•The attempt is to portray the subject as it is.
•Even when the artist chooses a subject from nature,
changes, and arranges the details, he tries to be objective as
possible.
•The artist’s function is to describe accurately and honestly
as possible what is observed through the senses.
• Presentation and organization seems so natural in
realism. For example are the works of Fernando Amorsolo
like the pictures below:
• In literature, realism has for its goal the faithful
rendering of the objective reality of human life.
• PRESUMPTION: since reality is the objective of all art,
realism has certainly existed since literature started.
2. Abstraction.
• This is used when the artist becomes so interested in
one phase of a scene or a situation that he does not
show the subject at all as an objective reality, but only
his idea, or his feeling about it.
• To abstract means to move away.
• Abstract art moves away from showing things as they
really are.
• The painter or artist paints the picture not as it really
looked.
• The picture is not just like life. It is not “realistic”.
• In sculpture, abstract sculpture is common.
• The artists ignored the real-life object. They feel that the
texture and shape of a sculpture were more important to
them than the exact form.
Abstract subjects can be presented as follows:
a. Distortion.
•This is manifested when the subject is presented in a
misshapen condition, or the regular shape is twisted out.
b. Elongation.
•It refers to that which is being lengthened, a protraction, or
an extension.
c. Mangling.
•This may not be a commonly used way of presenting an
abstract subject, but, there are few artists who show
subject or subjects which are cut, lacerated, mutilated or
hacked with repeated blows. For example:
d. Cubism.
•It stresses abstract form through the use of a cone,
cyclinder, or sphere at the expense of other pictorial
elements.
•Cubists show basic geometrical shapes.
•Famous cubists were George Braque of France and Pablo
Picasso of Spain.
Works of Picasso:

Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907)

A Girl Before the Mirror
George Braque:
Works of George Braque:
Little Harbor
in
Normandy
Musical
Instruments
Portuguese
e. Abstract Expressionism.
•This style of painting that originated in New York City
after the World War II and gained international vogue.
•This is characterized by the use of large canvases and a
deliberate lack of refinement in the application of the
paint.
•Strong color, heavy impasto, uneven brush strokes, and
rough textures are other typical characteristics.
•In other words, abstract expressionism departs
completely from subject matter, from studied precision,
and from any kind of preconceived design.
• Jackson Pollock was one of the abstract expressionist
painters of the New York School.
• Jackson Pollock was an American Abstract Expressionist ar
tist working in New York for the majority of his life. He cre
ated large-scale abstract works and was inspired by the sc
ale of mural artworks. He is most well-known for his "drip
" paintings.
• This is one of three wall-size paintings that Pollock
realized in swift succession in the summer and autumn of
1950. In 1947, Pollock began laying canvas on the floor
and pouring, dribbling, and flicking enamel paint onto the
surface, sometimes straight from the can, or with sticks
and stiffened brushes. The density of interlacing liquid
threads of paint is balanced and offset by puddles of
muted colors and by allover spattering. The pictorial
result of this tension is a landmark in the history of
Abstract Expressionism.
3. Symbolism.
•A symbol is a visible sign of something invisible such as an
idea or a quality. It can also be an emblem like a lion to
represent courage, a lamb to represent meekness.
•These well-known symbols arise from conventional usage
association, and general relationship. The conventional type
of symbol is not absent from works of art.
For example, in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
•The last two lines are symbolical for it clearly shows the
strong desire of the author to see God when he dies.
•The giant-sized painting by Juan Luna entitled the
“Spolarium”.
• The Spolarium won the first gold medal in Madrid
Exposition of Fine Arts in 1884.
• This painting is now a National Cultural Treasure after this
was donated by the Spanish Government to the Filipino
people on the centenary of Juan Luna’s birthday in 1956.
• The Spolarium means the spoils of war, spoils of tyrants
and the king.
• Vertical lines represent the strength and stability of the
oppressor while the horizontal lines are seen as the dead
people.
• Luna used heavy and strong brush strokes to express his
anger over the abuses and cruelties during that time
suffered by his countrymen.
Lion Monument, Lucerne
•The Lion Monument in Lucerne is a giant dying lion carved
out of a wall of sandstone rock above a pond at the east en
d of the medieval town. It was designed as a memorial for t
he mercenary soldiers from central Switzerland who lost th
eir lives while serving the French king Louis XVI during the
French Revolution.
• When the revolutionary masses attacked the royal
Tuileries castle in Paris on August 10, 1792 the Swiss
mercenary troops tried to defend the royal family and
make sure the royals could escape(http://lucerne.all-
about-switzerland.info/lucerne-lion-monument-pictures-
history.html)
• The latin inscription HELVETIORUM FIDEI AC VIRTUTI
means "To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss".
• The lion is dedicated to the memory of the heroic fight
and final defeat of the Swiss Guards in 1792 at Paris.
• The lion is always considered a symbol of courage and
strength which served the artist to demonstrate a tragic
event, a fight to death.
• The heart pierced by a lance, the lion still holds its
protecting paw over the shield with the lily coat of arms,
emblem of the Bourbon kings.
4. Fauvism.
•This was the first important art movement of the 1900’s.
•The fauves flourished as a group only from about 1903 to
1907, but their style greatly influenced many later artists.
•Henry Matisse led the movement, and other important
fauves included Andre Derain, Raoul Drify, George Rouault-
who are all from France.
•Its founder is Andre Derain.
•The fauves did not attempt to express ethical,
philosophical, nor psychological themes.
• Most of them tried to paint pictures of comfort, joy, and
pleasure.
• They used extremely bright colors.
Madame by Matisse:
The Roofs of Collioure', 1905 (oil on canvas)-Matisse:
4. Dadaism.

•Dada, nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished prim

arily in Zürich, Switzerland; New York City; Berlin, Cologne,
and Hannover, Germany; and Paris in the early 20th centur
y.
• Several explanations have been given by various members
of the movement as to how it received its name.
According to the most widely accepted account, the name
was adopted at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich,
during one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of
young artists and war resisters that included Jean Arp,
Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and
Emmy Hennings.
• When a paper knife inserted into a French-German
dictionary pointed to the French word dada (“hobby-
horse”), it was seized upon by the group as appropriate
for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities,
which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values
and despair over World War I. Dada did not constitute an
actual artistic style, but its proponents favoured group
collaboration, spontaneity, and chance. In the desire to
reject traditional modes of artistic creation, many
Dadaists worked in collage, photomontage, and found-
object construction, rather than in painting and sculpture.
• The best Dadaist was the French artist Marcel Duchamp.
6. Futurism.
•Developed in Italy in the same time as cubism appeared in
France.
•Futurist painters wanted their works to capture the speed
and force of modern industrial society.
•Their paintings glorified the mechanical energy of modern
life.
•Subjects included automobiles, motorcycles, and railroad
trains-subjects that express the explosive vitality of a
modern city.
• Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in
1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.[1]
Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist
Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5
February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then
reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20
February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters
Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino
Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism).
Sutton Place at Twilight
By Klaus Burgle (1959)
7. Surrealism.
•This movement in art and literature was founded in Paris
in 1924 by the French poet Andre Breton.
•Like Dadaism, from which it arose, it uses art as a weapon
against the evils and restrictions that surrealists see in
society. Unlike Dadaism, it tries to reveal a new and higher
reality than that of daily life.
•Surrealism is an invented word meaning super realism.
•This movement was influenced by the Freudian
psychology which emphasizes the activities of the
subconscious state of the mind.
• The surrealists declare that a magical world-more
beautiful than the real one-can be created in art and
literature.
• Much of the beauty sought by surrealism is violent and
cruel.
• In its broadest philosophical sense, surrealism is one of
the poles toward which art and thought in all periods may
be drawn- the world of dreams and fantasy.
• There are, however, surrealist artistic works which are not
cruel and violent. They are informative and symbolical.
I and the Village
By Marc Chagall
8. Expressionism.
•Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in
poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the
beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present
the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it
radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or
ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or
emotional experience rather than physical
reality.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism).
• Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style
before the First World War. It remained popular during
the Weimar Republic,particularly in Berlin. The style
extended to a wide range of the arts, including
expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre,
dance, film and music.
• The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a general
sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco
are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice
the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The
Expressionist emphasis on individual perspective has
been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other
artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.
• The emotional expressions in expressionistic paintings
could be described as involving pathos, morbidity,
violence or chaos, and tragedy. Sometimes they portray
defeat.
The Scream, 1893
Raven of
Sorrows
Sources of Art Subjects
• The artist is free to choose the art subject. This depends
on how he feels and thinks about the environment he li
ves in.
• The works of art, particularly, visual art, include landsca
pes, seascapes, and cityscapes. Artists have always been
fascinated with the beauty of their physical environmen
t.
• Today, contemporary painters seem to be more fascinated
to scenes in cities. Squatters along the railroads, traffic
jams, and high-rise buildings have caught their interests.
• After Yolanda, some artists in the field of photography got
so interested with the scenes of the aftermath of the
supertyphoon including the countless dead bodies,
damaged properties, and the relentless looting of stores
by the hungry survivors.
• Also, still-life is another composition which some artists
love to paint. Inanimate objects like fruits, vegetables, and
kitchen utensils chosen to illustrate their beauty when
touched by the painters.
• The vigor and grace of animals in motion have captivated
painters’ imagination as well as of that of the sculptor.
• The carabaos, cows, and horses of the rural areas are
favourite sources for Filipino artists.
• The sarimanok from the Maranaws which is mounted on
a pole and given a place of prominence during festivities
is shaped like a rooster with a long tail and is made to
look like a fern.
• This sarimanok is a legendary bird that figured
prominently in the story Indarapatra and Sulayman.
• Legends and lives of the saints have also been favorite
subjects of artists.
• Church rituals and religious activities have been of great
importance in the arts. Music sung during the Mass in the
form of prayers and words of responses are beautiful.
The Functions of Art
• To find meaning in art, it must have a utilitarian purpose a
nd be capable of serving the purpose for which it was desi
gned (Zulueta, 2005).
• It can be inferred that all arts have functions for man sinc
e they satisfy a particular need for them.
• Architecture is directly and almost entirely functional bec
ause buildings are always built for some special purpose.
• It is very obvious that a building construction is in accord
of the principles of functionalism.
• While dancing is very ancient, it has evolved, and modern
dance music includes the ballet and tunes for social and
folk dances.
• Today, these dance music-waltz, minuet, fox trot,
mazurka, rhumba, tango, and cha-cha- set the social
mood of the occasion.
• Also dance music includes marches and game songs.
• A march serves the function as a dance for it marks the
time for people walking in a procession or marching in a
parade, a wedding, or a funeral.
• One important personal function of music is that it as a
way of expressing our emotions. Most of the time, when
we listen to our favorite music, we feel that our
experiences reflect exactly what we feel which helps us
release the tensions and emotions in us.
• The therapeutic value of music may influence the healing
process and speed up the recovery of patients, whether in
hospitals or at home. Hence, music sessions are found to
be effective in treating mentally disturbed patients.
Art & Its Social Funtion
•Art tends to influence the collective behavior of people for
a cause.
•Collective behavior is important for it is an indicator of a
change.
• Fashion of the 80’s
• Fashion of the 90’s
• Fashion of 21st cent.
• Hence, in collective behavior it is common to see a new or
der come into being, social reforms are instituted, and the
outworn social structures are discarded.
• Social behavior is influenced by many works of art as mani
fested in the way we think, feel, move or decide.
• Advertisements which announce, describe, and present so
mething in media greatly influence the social behavior of t
he individual.
Art and Its Physical Function
•Many works of arts are intended to make our lives comfort
able. The problem of the artist is how to design a functional
object adoptable to a particular use which at the same time
conforms with the taste of the user.
•Whenever art has a function, this function influences and
often determines the form. The fact is, if an object is made f
or a certain function, it should be made in such a way that it
can perform its function.
Cars:
Sculpture and Its Function
•Sculpture is the art of carving, molding, welding, or produc
ing works of art in three dimensions, as in relief, or in intagli
o.
•It is considered more functional than painting and literatur
e.
• Religion has made a great functional use of sculpture for t
he ages.
• In commemoration of important people like the national h
eroes.
• A very common function of sculpture is seen in the coins.
• In the Medieval and Renaissance churches, sculpture was f
requently used for instructional purposes. The panels of th
e “Gates of Paradise” illustrate records from the Old Testa
ment.
• Artistic work is never a mechanical reproduction of a pictu
re through a camera, but a translation of the most relevant
characteristics of the original model.
• It involves the process of selection, interpretation, arrange
ment, and execution.
• It involves personal assimilation through mind, feeling, and
technique of the artist.
• Photography is a mechanical technique while art is a huma
n activity.
• Photography represents objects as they are, while art tran
sforms the objects and gives life and meaning.
• Art tends not to imitate but to express nature with clarity
and meaning. When arts become too separated from natu
re, their meaning is lost. If they are too close to nature, th
ey cease to be human and meaningful too.
• Art, therefore, is not a mere copy of nature but a creative
activity. Anything man conceives in his mind or makes with
his hands is a creation. Buildings, poems, or statues are no
t produced by nature; man creates them and brought the
m to existence.
Comparison of Photography and Painting:
Classification of Art Subject:
1. Representational or Objective
•Here, the art subject is observable in nature or simply natu
ralistic as what can be observed in painting, sculpture, grap
hic arts and theatre. However, some paintings and sculptur
es do not clearly manifest such subjects like in the case of a
bstract representations, although some of them can still pro
ve to be representational.
2. Non-representational or Non-Objective
•The art subject is not readily available to the senses. Mayb
e, the subject is hidden or only the artist knows the subject.
This is usually the case of art subjects of music, architecture
, or even literature.
• There is so much enjoyment and pleasure which can be de
rived from the arts.
• The forms and psychological effects of arts are referred to
as Aesthetics.
• Thus, we can say that the different arts have aesthetic valu
e.
What Arts Have in Common:
•All forms of arts are concerned with emotions and feelings.

An Artist:
•An artist is a person who exhibits exceptional skills in desig
n, drawing, painting, etc. or one who works in one of the pe
rforming arts, like an actor or a musician.
Characteristics of an Artist:
•An artist is more sensitive and more creative.
•He possesses an unusual degree of knack for interpreting i
deas in artistic form through the use of words, pigments, no
tes, or any of the other materials used by artists.
•His process of creation differs from that of an amateur.
Two kinds of Artists:
•Creator
•Performer

•A musician and dramatist are mostly the ones who perfor

m on stage, while a painter creates his paintings.
•Thus, music, theater and dance are all perform arts while p
ainting, sculpture and architecture are creative arts.
• Whether performing or creative, these arts can be Time Ar
ts or Space Arts.