Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most famous and controversial painters known to America. According to art critic Lisa Mintz Messinger, “She [Georgia O’Keeffe] left behind a rich legacy of American images that were tied to the land. These images and her own pioneering spirit, established an illustrious reputation in America very early on in her career” (Messinger 17). O’Keeffe is best known for her large paintings of flowers, the New York skyline and scenes from New Mexico. Ever since Georgia O’Keeffe began showing her work in 1916, critics have had different opinions on what her paintings represented. One of the biggest debates regarding her paintings has been whether or not her paintings were erotic. Some of the biggest critics of her works are Robert Hughes, Lisa Mintz Messinger, Katherine Hoffman and Georgia O’Keeffe herself. All four of these people have helped shape O’Keeffe into an iconic figure of sexually charged paintings. Georgia O’Keeffe first came into the lime light after her friend Anita Pollitzer submitted some of O’Keeffe’s works to the famous Alfred Stieglitz (Hoffman 5). Even from these first charcoal drawings, critics noticed …show more content…
Although the critics have all had opinions of what her works symbolize, the press she received helped to boost O’Keeffe’s fame. The constant attention to the symbolism in O’Keeffe’s works has kept her in the lime light since the twenties. Every single person is molded and shaped by the experiences they encounter; critics are no different. Therefore, when one reads any sort of criticism, novel, etc. they should consider the time period in which it was written. All in all, the four points of view in this essay have increased my knowledge of O’Keeffe. These four people taught me to really scrutinize everything that I read and to think about not only why the author wrote it but also when the author wrote
Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. N.p., 2014. Print.
Ephron, Norah. “The Boston Photographs.” Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media. New York: Vintage, 2012. Print.
DeWitte, Debra J. et al. Gateways To Art. New York City, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2012. Print.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has one of the finest Asian art collections that has enlightened and strengthened my understanding in my personal art experience. The Museum itself is an artistic architectural structure that graces the entire block on 82nd Street in Manhattan. Entering inside, I sensed myself going back into an era, into a past where people traded ideas and learned from each other. It is a past, where I still find their works of yesteryears vividly within my grasp, to be remembered and shared as if their reflections of works were cast for the modern devoted learner.
Having a very long and distinguished career Georgia O’Keeffe is thought to be one of the
Most people may not know who Chris Ofili is, but chances are that many of them know one of his works, his painting “The Holy Virgin Mary”, displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” exhibition in 1999. The painting was extremely controversial because of Mary’s exposed breast being made of elephant dung and because of the porno cutouts surrounding Mary. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and others, saying that such works were not appropriate for public display, immediately attacked the painting, along with the entire showcase of art by different artists. These sharp criticisms were an extreme injustice, condemning the work “The Holy Virgin Mary” based on prejudiced views of what is and what is not acceptable in art, rather than viewing the painting for its true meaning. Chris Ofili did not mean for his work to be offensive, but rather, meant to honor the Virgin Mary using traditional African symbolism.
Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the most influential artists there is today. Her works are valued highly and are quite beautiful and unique. As a prominent American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe is famous for her images of gigantic flowers, city-scapes and distinctive desert scenes. All of these different phases represent times in her life. Throughout the seventy years of her creative career, Georgia O'Keeffe continually made some of the most original contributions to the art of our time.
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.
One pleasant afternoon, my classmates and I decided to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to begin on our museum assignment in world literature class. According to Houston Museum of Fine Art’s staff, MFAH considers as one of the largest museums in the nation and it contains many variety forms of art with more than several thousand years of unique history. Also, I have never been in a museum in a very long time especially as big as MFAH, and my experience about the museum was unique and pleasant. Although I have observed many great types and forms of art in the museum, there were few that interested me the most.
Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. New York:, Oxford UP, 2013.
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.
In 1886 Mary Gibbons Lawson Hood was born in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania, on August 30 to William Gibbons and Agnes Gaston Lawson (Philadelphia Modernism 38). In 1907 Mary married Albert L. Hood on March 2 at her parents’ home (Philadelphia Modernism 38). “Mary G. L. Hood attended The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts directly out of high school in 1903, but curtailed her studies to marry and raise her four children” (Tow). “Her second experience at the Academy began in 1929 when her eldest child, Agnes graduated from Swarthmore College” (Tow). Dissatisfied with the Academy’s conservative climate, Mary Hood left after a year to study with Henry McCarter and then Arthur B. Carles whose teachings encouraged an individual expression of ideas and emotions with vigorous color and abstraction (Tow). “During the summers of 1937 and 1938, she also studied with Charles W. Ward whose modernist landscapes of Bucks County would exert a strong influence in their landscapes” (Tow). “Mary Hood and Agnes Hood Miller were given a dual “Mother and Daughter” exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in December of 1941, their last exhibition in Philadelphia until now” (Tow). Later that year, Mary G. L. Hood and her family purchased a farm in Springdale, near New Hope (Philadelphia Modernism 41). “There, Hood worked in her studio every afternoon painting the beautiful flo...
Stokstad, M., & Cothren, M. W. (2008). Art History (5th ed., Vol. 2). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
The piece in this series that really caught my attention was the Female Rejection (Fig. 2) where she metaphorically rejects her role in femininity and celebrates herself as an assertive woman. The piece comes from the midst of Chicago’s use of what she calls the “central core” or blatant focal point of the work. In Female Rejection an objective vagina acts as the central core for this piece framed with (what seems to be) flower petals descending into the center, drawing and locking the eye onto the focal point of the vagina. The work not only celebrates the anatomy of a woman but masculinity that can be found in women rejecting the normative femininity that is inherently associated with women today. Judy Chicago is a wonderful female feminist artist who has begun to create a community of fellow feminist artists as to add members to the movement to strive for equality within the art world, as well as creating some pretty stellar pieces that have their own place in feminist art history. Judy Chicago is one woman to watch and it will be interesting as to how she incorporates her vaginal imagery into later works that have yet to