“I don 't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” – Henri Matisse The use of line, form, and color placement on a canvas can dramatically impact the compositional setting of a painting. It will influence the way viewers interpret modern works of art. The modern abstract painting style from Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Matisse set in motion works of art that could be aesthetic without being representational. While comparing Study for Composition II and Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life); I will argue their experimentation and exploration pioneered into an artistic vision that changed how line, form, and color appeared in modern art. They influenced several future generations of young painter’s art styles. Kandinsky was …show more content…
By color theory, we may understand physical theories of color (that is, scientific theories), or theories of color harmony, or color practice in so far as artists tend to work out an individual approach to the use of color which become more or less systematized as the progress towards a style”. (Elliot, 494) Both Matisse and Kandinsky used many trial and error methods to form the right combinations of color in sketches as a guide before applying color schemes to their works Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) and Study for Composition …show more content…
It shows references to the sky, trees, and some of the flesh tones on the human bodies. Green is applied to the bodies, random trees and stumps. A muted yellow is chosen for some of the silhouetted bodies as well as a vibrant yellow, which dominates the foreground and middle ground landscape of the painting using broad brush strokes. A cold blue is used for the water and parts of the background. Matisse vision of colors took on its own meaning when he applied them to the canvas . Color representation was no longer used to just to determine objects within the canvas; they were now used to express the emotional feeling in the picture. Kandinsky had similar perspectives and ideas on color, theme and theories; that mirrored Matisse in painting. They shared the same view on the application and perspective for vibrant color usage throughout their compositions. Some critics associated their styles together because of this shared love for color, but definitely they belong to their perspective art movements. He believed all colors had a genuine meaning and carefully orchestrated the placement of color in each painting and reveal feelings he wanted to
During Vincent Van Gogh’s childhood years, and even before he was born, impressionism was the most common form of art. Impressionism was a very limiting type of art, with certain colors and scenes one must paint with. A few artists had grown tired of impressionism, however, and wanted to create their own genre of art. These artists, including Paul Gaugin, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Cezanne, hoped to better express themselves by painting ...
Besides bright or dim colors, and fine or rough brush strokes, artists use centralized composition to convey their interpretations in "The Acrobat's Family with a Monkey," "Amercian Gothic," "The Water-Seller," and "The Third of May,1808.”
Visually, both Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII and Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 constitute a chaotic arrangement of colors and images with no apparent relation to one another. The randomly scattered paint, large canvas, and over-clamped figures all build a similar visual chaos in both paintings. Despite the mayhem, the two paintings differ in the inner emotions each artist wanted to express and the nature of the “chaos.” While for Kandinsky the chaos represents the smooth and melodic sentiments raised by music, for Pollock the chaos depicts the more spontaneous and impulsive emotions. The authors’ differing goals lead Kandinsky to ponder and refine his painting to capture a more universal theme and Pollock to develop his “drip” painting method
The point of departure for Stella in 1958 for his new approach to abstraction was the flag paintings of Jasper Johns. Using various devices, Stella emphasized the flatness of the painting pattern, abolishing the three-dimensional image, and he was uncompromising as he refused to permit the introduction of deep recession behind the picture plane. The result was that the figure-ground relationship was almost completely eliminated as the stripes and orthogonal constituting the picture echoed the contours of the format. To achiev...
Kandinsky’s paintings often reflected the things that were going on in his own life at the
It appears to me that pictures have been over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse; and this false estimate has been sanctioned by the extravagant epithets that have been applied to painters, and "the divine," "the inspired," and so forth. Yet in reality, what are the most sublime productions of the pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature, and copies of a few of her evanescent effects, and this is the result, not of inspiration, but of long and patient study, under the instruction of much good sense…
In the beginning, Surrealism was primarily a literary movement, but it gave artists an access to new subject matter and a process for conjuring it. As Surrealist paintings began to emerge, it divi...
...technique of fluid in the brush strokes, which lead to an impression of blurry. The spots of soft color combine with the color of the figures, which shows bright light of beams through the trees. He blends colors in the background that appear to be people dancing. The lack of outlines is a traditional Impressionist technique.
Introduction Upon my first encounter with Kandinsky's painting, my eyes and indeed my mind were overcome with a sense of puzzlement, as it seemed impossible to decipher what lay beneath his passionate use of colour and distorted forms. Kandinsky hoped by freeing colour from its representational restrictions, it, like music could conjure up a series of emotions in the soul of viewer, reinforced by corresponding forms. Throughout this essay, I will follow Kandinsky's quest for a pure, abstract art and attempt to determine whether his passionate belief in this spiritual art and his theories on its effects on the soul, can truly be felt and appreciated by the average viewer, who at first glance would most likely view Kandinsky's paintings as simply abstract. Kandinsky was indeed a visionary, an artist who through his theoretical ideas of creating a new pictorial language sought to revolutionize the art of the twentieth-century. Regarded as the founder of abstract painting, he broke free from arts traditional limitations and invented the first painting for paintings sake, whereby the dissolution of the object and subsequent promotion of colour and form became means of expression in their own right.
In the early twentieth century, the Russian born painter Wassily Kandinsky, was well known as the leader of the abstract movement. Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 4, 1866, in which he discovered his love for drawing and painting. Kandinsky was inspired by Monet which resulted in the desire for him to experiment different ways using color on canvas. Kandinsky’s love for art started when he was just a young boy. His parents were both interested in music; however, their marriage ended in divorce leaving five-year-old Kandinsky with his aunt in Odessa. With his aunt he learned to play the piano and cello in grammar school and also studied drawing with a couch. Kandinsky followed the wishes of his parents and went to law school at University of Moscow. After he realized that a career in law wasn’t for him, he decided to abandon his career and move to Munich to devote his time and effort to art (Bio.com 1).
In this essay, I shall try to examine how great a role colour played in the evolution of Impressionism. Impressionism in itself can be seen as a linkage in a long chain of procedures, which led the art to the point it is today. In order to do so, colour in Impressionism needs to be placed within an art-historical context for us to see more clearly the role it has played in the evolution of modern painting. In the late eighteenth century, for example, ancient Greek and Roman examples provided the classical sources in art. At the same time, there was a revolt against the formalism of Neo-Classicism. The accepted style was characterised by appeal to reason and intellect, with a demand for a well-disciplined order and restraint in the work. The decisive Romantic movement emphasized the individual’s right in self-expression, in which imagination and emotion were given free reign and stressed colour rather than line; colour can be seen as the expression for emotion, whereas line is the expression of rationality. Their style was painterly rather than linear; colour offered a freedom that line denied. Among the Romanticists who had a strong influence on Impressionism were Joseph Mallord William Turner and Eugéne Delacroix. In Turner’s works, colour took precedence over the realistic portrayal of form; Delacroix led the way for the Impressionists to use unmixed hues. The transition between Romanticism and Impressionism was provided by a small group of artists who lived and worked at the village of Barbizon. Their naturalistic style was based entirely on their observation and painting of nature in the open air. In their natural landscape subjects, they paid careful attention to the colourful expression of light and atmosphere. For them, colour was as important as composition, and this visual approach, with its appeal to emotion, gradually displaced the more studied and forma, with its appeal to reason.
Henri Matisse was a French Artist during the Cubist and Fauvist period, which influenced his art greatly. Although he was primarily known as a painter, he was also a printmaker, sculptor, and draughtsman. His piece Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg resembles that of a print; however, it is in oil painting. Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg is believed to have been a piece in which Matisse was experimenting with new ideas and methods, as this painting appears to be very labor intensive. There are multiple parts of the painting where Matisse scraped away layers of paint and leave behind lines that parallel cross-hatching. The aspect of the painting that is different from other cubist pieces of the time are the lines that emanate from the Mlle Landsberg, thought to be a depiction of her movement while the piece was being made.
The iconography of the picture could represent art in the view of the fauvists. Fauvists wanted to be free from tradition and natural colors. They wanted to be free to explore their world of colors as they saw fit. Fauvists and expressionists did not like to be held to strict rules when it came to painting. It could be that Le Bonheur de Vivre was a state in which they where trying to reach, but in reality could get never get there. On the other hand, could it be a place where they could only reach in their dreams? Critics have struggled with the interpretation of Matisse’s painting since the first display. That may have been Matisse’s meaning after all.
Abstract Expressionist artists believed that the subconscious mind could recognise and respond to the emotions portrayed in their paintings. To aid this absorption of feeling, blocks of colour and simple forms were used extensively. `Abstract expressionism's avowed purpose is to express the self to the self.' (Page 2, David and Cecil)
Over the years many artists and art historians, such as Giorgio Vasari, Pablo Picasso, Paul Rand and Marcel Duchamp, have explored the definition of art. This essay will look at the opinions of these individuals and explore the concept of art by looking at various art movements, such as Dadaism and Cubism, which have influenced the definition of art, as we know it today. In this essay, I will also discuss the two elements of art; form and content, as well as how they are key to any discussion about what makes “good art” and “bad art”.