Norman Rockwell was one of America’s greatest illustrators of this century who made many significant contributions to the field of graphic design with his works that promoted patriotic unity, conveyed the national scene, and often time just evoked or inspired emotions in his audiences. Ironically this painter was regarded as an illustrator in the eyes of other freelance artists due to his occupational limitations, and his supervisor’s restrictions characteristic of the Saturday Evening Post where he did most of his work from 1916 to 1963. Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894 and since his childhood years had always aspired to be an artist. Instead of finishing high school Rockwell left high school to attend classes at the National Academy of Design and later on the Art Students League in New York. Here Rockwell was recognized as an above average illustrator with good potential. Rockwell then after developing his skills and contributing many illustrations to children’s magazines, managed to muster up the courage to show his work to a bigger periodical, the Saturday Evening Post. Happy with the quality of Rockwell’s work the Post gave Rockwell a job creating illustrations and cover art for its periodicals. This would be his arena, revealing his works to thousands of people, for over forty years. During this period Rockwell painted portraits of various celebrities and persona. Rockwell was a "people painter" and predominantly worked with the depiction of emotions inspired by his models. Rockwell always took particular care in picking and choosing his models as he was very pragmatic and wanted them to exhibit characteristics that met with his peculiar standards. During his time with the Post, Rockwell often made illustrations that effectively conveyed events taking place on the national scene. During different periods in American history Rockwell used his special skill in detail to capture and portray illustrations that accurately reflected the emotions felt in the hearts of Americans at the time. Rockwell made several illustrations exhibiting events like the Great Depression and World War I. In fact during the second World War Rockwell was motivated by President Roosevelt himself to create one of his greatest projects, The Four Freedoms Paintings, illustrating each of America’s fundamental freedoms and revealing the reason behind the United States’ participation in the war. This Four Freedoms Project is one that reflects Rockwell’s great generosity and kindness as a person. Rockwell agreed to
Thomas Hart Benton was born in the familiar, small town of Neosho, Missouri. He was named after his granduncle, the famed and prominent pre-American Civil War senator. First Thomas Hart Benton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then lived in beautiful Paris for three years. When he came back he moved to New York City after 1912 he turned away from his usual style, modernism, and gradually developed a rugged naturalism that affirmed traditional rural values. By the 1930’s Benton was riding a tide of popular acclaim along with his fellow regionalist Grant Wood, who was responsible for American Gothic, and John Steuart Curry, who was responsible for The Tragic Prelude. The mural, America Today (1930-1931, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S., New York City), Thomas Hart Benton’s masterpiece, presented an optimistic portrayal of a vital country filled with earthy, muscular figures.
Raymond Johnson, most famous for his collages in the days of early Pop art was simply never a household name. Instead, the movie How to Draw a Bunny proclaims he was "New York's most famous unknown artist.” The movie explains this and so much more as the people “closet” to Raymond reflect how disconnected and different he was from society in his lifetime. The movie captures this and so much more as the director thouroughly investigates the enigma of what Raymond was and his mysterious death that baffled both friends and the public by interviewing people th...
I believe that the Norman Rockwell painting induces his audience to become visible to themselves as white in a politically progressive way by displaying nostalgic concepts that his audience can identify with as they relate to the white boy more than the black man.
Norman Rockwell is best known for his depictions of dail life of a rural America. Rockwell’s goals in art revolved around his desire to create an ideal America. He said “ I paint life as I would like it to be.”
Jackson Pollock was an American abstract artist born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. He was the youngest of his five brothers. Even though he was born on a farm, he never milked a cow and he was terrified of horses because he grew up in California. He dropped out of high school at the age of seventeen and proceeded to move to New York City with his older brother, Charles, and studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Thomas Benton was already a great artist at the time in which Pollock studied with him. Benton acted like the father figure in Pollock’s life to replace the original that wasn’t there. Benton was known for his large murals that appear on ceilings or walls. “Jack was a rebellious sort at all times,” recalls his classmate and friend, artist Harold Lehman. He grew his hair long and helped pen a manifesto denouncing athletics, even though “he had a muscular build and the school wanted to put him on the football team,” says former teacher Doug Lemon. Pollock always was upset with himself in his studies because he had troubles drawing things like they were supposed to look. From 1938 to 1942, Jackson joined a Mexican workshop of people with a painter named David Siqueiros. This workshop painted the murals for the WPA Federal Art Projects. This new group of people started experimenting with new types of paint and new ways of applying it to large canvas. People say that this time period was when Jackson was stimulated with ideas from looking at the Mexican or WPA murals. Looking at paintings from Picasso and the surrealists also inspired Jackson at this time. The type of paint they used was mixing oil colors with paint used for painting cars. Jackson noticed that the shapes and colors they created were just as beautiful as anything else was. Jackson realized that you didn’t have to be able to draw perfect to make beautiful paintings. Jackson started developing a whole new way of painting that he had never tried before and his paintings were starting to look totally different from before.
In present time, Vincent van Gogh is probably the most widely known and highly appreciated person of postimpressionism. During his brief lifetime, Vincent’s work went almost unknown to this world. His work now hangs in countless museums throughout the world and is considered priceless. His work became an important bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries.
Norman Rockwell’s paintings illustrate what life was like throughout the mid-1990’s. Every painting of his conveys a distinct tone and feeling. He tells a story with each painting. These stories range from major events to individual life stories, usually from the vantage point of children. He uses children and young people in many of his pieces to create these intense emotions the viewer experiences. One specific piece I found the most significant to the time period is ‘The Problem We All Live With’ (1964).
Hailed as the founding father of the Pop Art movement in the late 1950's and early 1960's, Andy Warhol, through his endeavors, brought forward society's obsession with mass culture and allowed it to become the subject of his art. He produced works that defied and challenged the popular notion of what art should be by disputing the "traditional conventions pertaining to the uniqueness, authenticity, and authorship" of art (Faerna 28). However, it is an injustice to say that Warhol's goals primarily included the desire to create such a ground-breaking and salient style of American art or to entertain the public by making his own artistic contributions. Rather, Andy Warhol's interests were more entwined in his own self-interest and greed. Although a fraction of Andy Warhol's inspiration resided in his ambition to create a "unique" and exotic style of American art, his main motivation was purely materialistic and involved acquiring large sums of money and publicity to fuel his obsession with wealth and fame.
Art is defined as the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. Jackson Pollock does an amazing job creating art. Pollock’s works are not as big as some of the other artists like Monet’s paintings but his works are still large enough to engulf the viewer.
Arguably the most recognizable illustrator of the 20th century, Norman Rockwell created the images and set of tone of Americana idealism. These illustrations graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post for five decades, reaching 4 million homes and viewers . For Rockwell’s work had enormous widespread appeal due to its sentimental, untroubled reflection of American culture represented in stunning technical realism and humours depictions of children, young love and the mishaps of everyday life. Rockwell’s work during WWII is some of his most recognizable and played a significant contribution to propaganda for enlistment, war bonds and over all war efforts . His work from this period includes the famous Rosie the Riveter, the Four Freedoms
He thought he kept the universe alone,” to most people the thoughts of being alone are very frightening. It is human nature to search for companionship. In the poem “The Most of It,” Robert Frost uses a wealth of strong imagery to tell a story of a person who has lost his loved one to death and has to suffer the feeling of loneliness and emptiness created by it. Frost uses the setting of a lake surrounded by a forest to convey a feeling of peace and of being alone to the reader. A man is sitting on the edge of the lake, crying out for someone, his echo being his only company. After time, a buck swam across the lake and appeared on the shore and abruptly runs into the brush, away from sight. Although the man only caught a glimpse of the deer for a short moment, it was long enough for him to feel that he was no longer alone, but had something there, even though it was not tangible. The clues given to the reader that someone has passed on are the words “wake” and three lines down, the word “morning.” A wake can be many things; one is that it is a vigil that is held in honor of a person who has recently died.
Pablo Picasso, a man with no inspirational limits, which has been portrayed throughout his art pieces. He was not only an amazing influential artist, Picasso was also a peace advocate. He brought new techniques and styles to the world of modern art. Political views and his desire for peace were shown throughout many of his now very famous pieces of artwork. Pablo Picasso influenced the world by changing the ways of art, and showing us that paintings can have a deeper meaning which can impact the lives of many.
I selected Andy Warhol because I have long admired his crazy, quirky, unconventional style of producing works of art from normal, everyday subjects ranging from inanimate, normally unnoticed objects to pop culture celebrity icons. I first heard of him in 1986 when his show Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes aired on MTV. The show featured Andy interviewing what he thought was the next up-and-coming musical sensations about to get their "fifteen minutes of fame."
Cubism (a name suggested by Henri Matisse in 1909) is a non-objective approach to painting developed originally in France by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1906. The early, "pre-Cubist" period (to 1906) is characterized by emphasizing the process of construction, of creating a pictorial rhythm, and converting the represented forms into the essential geometric shapes: the cube, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone. Between 1909 and 1911, the analysis of human forms and still lifes (hence the name -- Analytical Cubism) led to the creation of a new stylistic system which allowed the artists to transpose the three-dimensional subjects into the flat images on the surface of the canvas. An object, seen from various points of view, could be reconstructed using particular separate "views" which overlapped and intersected. The result of such a reconstruction was a summation of separate temporal moments on the canvas. Picasso called this reorganized form the "sum of destructions," that is, the sum of the fragmentations. Since color supposedly interferred in purely intellectual perception of the form, the Cubist palette was restricted to a narrow, almost monochromatic scale, dominated by grays and browns. A new phase in the development of the style, called Synthetic Cubism, began around 1912. In the center of the painters' attention was now the construction, not the analysis of the represented object -- in other words, creation instead of recreation. Color regained its decorative function and was no longer restricted to the naturalistic description of the form. Compositions were still static and centered, but they lost their depth and became almost abstract, although the subject was still visible in synthetic, simplified forms. The construction requirements brought about the introduction of new textures and new materials (cf. paper collages). Cubism lasted till 1920s and had a profound effect on the art of the avant-garde. Russian painters were introduced to Cubism through the works bought and displayed by wealthy patrons like Shchukin and Morozov. As they did with many other movements, the Russians interpreted and transformed Cubism in their own unique way. In particular, the Russian Cubists carried even further the abstract potential of the style. Some of the most outstanding Cubist works came from the brush of Malevich, Popova, and Udal'tsova.
My understanding of action painting coming into this class was nonexistent. I had heard the name Jackson Pollock before and had seen some of his different paintings, but I hadn’t heard the term ‘action painting’ before. It wasn’t until this last week that we reached the portion in the book that even mentions Jackson Pollock or action painting. Despite how new the term is to me, and how little I had really looked at any of Pollock’s work, it’s honestly a fascinating style of art.