“It’s rare that a single work of art can change the course of art history in such a concrete and dramatic way. In fact it could be argued that all contemporary art owes its very existence to one painting: Marcel Duchamp‘s Nude Descending a Staircase. A painting that is considered to be the most influential development in modern visual narrative and what is considered innovative in art” (Naumann, 2013). “Marcel Duchamp rejected “retinal art” meaning attractive to the eye. He focused more on the intellectual ideas of his work and interpretations that people had from viewing his art. His art engaged the imagination and intellect instead of the eyes like art around his time did. According to Duchamp; The creative act is not performed by the artist alone, the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting it and thus adds his contribution to the creative act” (Sugandhjot Kaur). He initiated art with self-conscious meaning. He employed techniques of movement that went far beyond what other cubist painters had sought to convey with their prior w...
Eric Fishl’s Scarsdale is a painting that is done on three canvases. When placed together, they appear to make one whole picture. The focal point of the painting is the woman, dressed in a white gown and veil. It appears that she is wearing a wedding dress, since the dress is white and includes a veil. To the left is a cat and to the right is a dog. The woman represents the focal point, not only because she is the largest figure in the painting, but also because everything else is slightly in darkness. Fischl’s cat and dog can only be made out if one looks at the painting carefully. Fischl also paints the woman so that she almost appears to be floating in air. One can see that she is sitting on a chair, but the dog is directly under her, and he does not really use perspective to make it clear that the woman is not floating in midair.
Duchamp’s piece was not controversial because of the simplistic nature of the piece, nor the oddity of it- it was controversial because he had not made it himself. People were very opposed to this idea because they believed that art was something made and not found. Duchamp’s “ready-made” art, which were always mass produced objects made by machines, was offensive to them and so they rejected it wholeheartedly. Unlike Fountain, Kandinski’s Little Pleasures was not rejected because of the nature of its ’creation’, it was rejected because people had never before seen art with such a lack of recognizable forms. Before Kandinski, art had always had representations of things from life, and Little Pleasures seemed almost completely arbitrary to them with no connections to the world they lived in. As such, both pieces were, at first, denied the title of “art” because society was unable to break from tradition and admire something
Pablo Picasso is well renowned as an artist who adapted his style based on the changing currents of the artistic world. He worked in a variety of styles in an effort to continually experiment with the effects and methods of painting. This experimentation led him to the realm of cubism where Picasso worked on creating forms out of various shapes. We are introduced to Picasso’s nonrepresentational art through the advent of the cubist style of painting. During his time working on this style, Picasso developed the painting Woman in the Studio. A painting created late in Picasso’s artistic career, this painting displays many of the characteristics common in cubism. The painting’s title serves as a description of the painting and explains the scenario depicted by Pablo Picasso. In analyzing this work, it is important to observe the subject matter, understand the formal elements of the painting, and attempt to evoke and comprehend the emotions represented in the painting. Woman in the Studio is a painting of cubist origin that combines the standard elements of cubism in order to produce a monochromatic depiction of a woman associated with Picasso.
Georges Seurat used the pointillism approach and the use of color to make his painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, be as lifelike as possible. Seurat worked two years on this painting, preparing it woth at least twenty drawings and forty color sketched. In these preliminary drawings he analyzed, in detail every color relationship and every aspect of pictorial space. La Grande Jatte was like an experiment that involved perspective depth, the broad landscape planes of color and light, and the way shadows were used. Everything tends to come back to the surface of the picture, to emphasize and reiterate the two dimensional plane of which it was painted on. Also important worth mentioning is the way Seurat used and created the figures in the painting.
In the wonderfully jumbled Picasso’s Studio, Faith Ringgold painted Picasso almost to the margin of his studio, crowded between a border of decoratively pieced flowered clothes and his model. Picasso- one of the 20th century most popular embodiment of the avant-garde- with a brush at hand appears ready to begin painting. While Picasso stands before the blank canvas, the model’s posture with her hands picking up her hair draws attention to her affectless face. Not only does Faith Ringgold reference Pablo Picasso’s famous Les Demoiselles de Avignon, a painting that marked a turning point in western art but she also incorporates Picasso’s cubist style in this piece. To the lower right side of the painting are numerous
As individualism continued to develop in society and culture, it also continued in the art that we have covered since the midterm exam. A later industrial revolution led to the era often called the “roaring 20s,” a period of extremes between wealth and poverty, growth and depression, new opportunities and stagnation. The development of capitalism and a creeping of commercial values in society led to an artistic hostility toward--and alienation from--a materialistic society. How artists demonstrated this individualism in their work and activities was a response to the perspectives of the ideas that grew out of technological advances that caused the world to change and develop in new ways. Artists represented their experience and
This painting by Vincent Van Gogh is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum, in the Impressionism exhibit. There are many things going on in this painting that catch the viewer’s eye. The first is the piece’s vibrant colors, light blues and browns, bright greens, and more. The brush strokes that are very visible and can easily be identified as very thick some might even say bold. The furniture, the objects, and the setting are easy to identify and are proportioned to each other. There is so much to see in this piece to attempt to explain in only a few simple sentences.
Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter and sculptor. His work is linked with Dadaism and conceptual art, a movement that examined suppositions of what art must be, and in what way it should be arranged. Duchamp has had an enormous influence on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art, impelling the development of post–World War I Western art. Alongside Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Duchamp is universally looked upon as an artist who assisted to delineate the avant-garde advances in painting and sculpture in the initial years of the twentieth century.
Modern art serves to immerse us more thoroughly in a scene by touching on more than just our sight. Artists such as Grosz, and Duchamp try to get us to feel instead of just see. It seems that this concept has come about largely as a way to regain identity after shedding the concepts of the Enlightenment. “Philosophers, writers, and artists expressed disillusionment with the rational-humanist tradition of the Enlightenment. They no longer shared the Enlightenment's confidence in either reason's capabilities or human goodness...” (Perry, pg. 457) It is interesting to follow art through history and see how the general mood of society changed with various aspects of history, and how events have a strong connection to the art of the corresponding time.
It’s interesting to note what happened to the art world after Duchamp revolutionized art into meaninglessness. Artists seem to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding to ordinary people. Everything is O.K. under art’s magic umbrella: rotting corpses with snails crawling over them, kicking little girls in the head, rape and murder recreations, women defecating. Where does it stop? What is art and what is porn? What is art and what is disgusting? Where is the line? There isn’t one anymore. The effect of Duchamp’s pranks was to point out that anything could be art. All it took was getting people to agree to call something art.
In Confronting Images, Didi-Huberman considers disadvantages he sees in the academic approach of art history, and offers an alternative method for engaging art. His approach concentrates on that which is ‘visual’ long before coming to conclusive knowledge. Drawing support from the field of psycho analytics (Lacan, Freud, and Kant and Panofsky), Didi-Huberman argues that viewers connect with art through what he might describe as an instance of receptivity, as opposed to a linear, step-by-step analytical process. He underscores the perceptive mode of engaging the imagery of a painting or other work of art, which he argues comes before any rational ‘knowing’, thinking, or discerning. In other words, Didi-Huberman believes one’s mind ‘sees’ well before realizing and processing the object being looked at, let alone before understanding it. Well before the observer can gain any useful insights by scrutinizing and decoding what she sees, she is absorbed by the work of art in an irrational and unpredictable way. What Didi-Huberman is s...
The Lascaux cave paintings is a series of caves that are decorated with ancient cave paintings, near the village of Montignac, France. The cave’s interior walls and ceilings are
One of the most unique figures in the continuum of the art world, Marcel Duchamp changed the way we look at and produce art today. Marcel Duchamp was by far, one of the most controversial figures in art. Two of the most well known and talked about pieces by him are The Fountain and The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even . Duchamp created many other pieces that caught the attention of critics, other artists, and the population in a negative way; however, these two pieces alone, brought about the greatest amount of controversy.
Paintings, like many forms of art, are very subjective—what one may find intriguing another may completely disagree. “Art is physical material that affects a physical eye and conscious brain” (Solso, 13). To glance at art, we must go through a process of interpretation in order to understand what it is we are looking at. Solso describes the neurological, perceptual, and cognitive sequence that occurs when we view art, and the often inexpressible effect that a work of art has on us. He shows that there are two aspects to viewing art: nativistic perception—the synchronicity of eye and brain that transforms electromagnetic energy into neuro-chemical codes—which is "hard-wired" into the sensory-cognitive system; and directed perception, which incorporates personal history—the entire set of our expectations and past experiences—and knowledge (Solso, preface)
"A picture can paint a thousand words." I found the one picture in my mind that does paint a thousand words and more. It was a couple of weeks ago when I saw this picture in the writing center; the writing center is part of State College. The beautiful colors caught my eye. I was so enchanted by the painting, I lost the group I was with. When I heard about the observation essay, where we have to write about a person or thing in the city that catches your eye. I knew right away that I wanted to write about the painting. I don’t know why, but I felt that the painting was describing the way I felt at that moment.