Cubism: Bottle and Fish (1910-12)

Cubism was a movement developed 1909-1914 by Picasso and Braque. It is a art form that describes the fragmented image but could convey the perceptual and conceptual aspects of the artist’s practice. Technological advances like X-Rays and radio waves changed the fixed surface of matter and the public perception of reality during the early 20th century. Cubism tried to depict this new, complex viewing of life and develop a visual analysis of reality. They achieved this through using limited color and small brushstrokes influenced by Cezanne. Their work appeared collage like and was an essential step to Abstract art.

The beginning of Cubism was called Analytical Cubism, which then evolved into Synthetic Cubism. During the period of time of Analytical Cubism, which was from 1910-1912, Picasso and Braque’s works were indistinguishable. Like the  piece “Bottle and Fish” (1910-12), Analytic cubism shows the breakdown of form. The simplified colors of a monochromatic color scheme (blue, tan, brown, grey, cream, green) were used to not distract the viewer from the primary interest of the form itself. This work emphasizes the difference in texture and presents complex and multiple views of the object.. The piece is dominated by the cubes, which create the look of distortion. The name bottle and fish makes the viewer search for these two elements amidst the cube.

If you look hard enough, you can see a slight portion of a bottle on the left top corner of the painting and a few fish heads spread out between the cubes. The colors are very negative, gray and sad. I personally dislike this piece and most of Cubism. I think it is an interesting comment on the visual aspects of society’s development, but I personally think it is unpleasing to the eye.

-Kasey&Charlotte

Art & Money

Money is a large factor in the world we live today. Everyone seeks to make his or her own. Some careers guarantee monthly payments, whilst other careers are never certain. Artists unfortunately fall under the uncertainty of payments. An artist, depending on the time period, the pace at which they work, their popularity and the relevance of their exhibit, may make a lot of money or none at all. This puts the business into a crisis.

Artists generally have not chosen their careers for the inflow of income because of the uncertainty associated with the career. For some, they have chosen it because it is their passion, however in recent years, artists such as Damien Hirst have been accused of creating art for the sole purpose of acquiring more money. This puts the art business into trouble.

Damien Hirst, born in 1965, is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is the most prominent member of the Young British Artists, who were known to dominate the art world of the United Kingdom in the 1990’s. Over the years, his art has seen much controversy as it has developed into questionably artistic pieces.

Essentially, the controversy between art and money began when Charles Saatchi began to sell artworks for different prices then the artist had intended or than different galleries had done. Art began to be traded and sold for different prices as well. This made buyers and artists question the ultimate value of art and whether it even had a certain value.

The issue with Hirst lies within his artwork seemingly being made of pre-made pieces that he sells for out-of-this-world value. His works are controversial and therefore lead viewers to question whether they are as valuable as Hirst seems to think. His diamond embedded skull head named For The Love of God is valued at £50m for its platinum body and diamond-encrusted face. People questioned whether this should even be considered art or whether Hirst simply wished to make fair profit off of it.

His pieces and exhibits spawn controversy and question as to the value of art nowadays.

Andy Warhol – Marilyn Dytich

Andy Warhol, born in 1928, was an American artist and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and the advertisements that influenced consumer behavior within the 1960’s. Warhol, aside from his involvement in the pop art movement, also experimented with a variety of materials. Warhol’s most popular works include his Marilyn Monroe, which he created after her death in order to commemorate her, and his food related pop arts, mainly his Campbell Soup Can. Both subject matters relate to Warhol’s interests in celebrities and consumer behavior.

Post Marilyn Monroe’s death, Warhol decided to create artworks using images of her in order to commemorate the starlet. One of his most prominent works, Marilyn Dyptich, is a silk-screen print in which Warhol used a single picture of Marilyn to create fifty silk screens. Each was created with trial and error and used as means of representing the signification behind the work.

As can be seen on the left, the Marilyn’s are created using colour. The colours are bright, vivid and artificial. This represents the limelight Marilyn was under, always being painted with a different attitude for the public. The cartoon like aspect of the colours represents how the media created her personality and how she was never really allowed to be herself. The Marilyn’s change slightly and although this is due to the unexpected qualities of silk-screen printing, they may be used to represent how although she changed a little whilst in the limelight, her artificially created personality never altered by much.

On the right side, the Marilyn’s are in black in white. This represents Marilyn’s slow death through the use of drugs. The pictures of her fade and you get closer to the right and these mimic her fading into death. The darker shaded ones may represent the darker times in her life when the limelight and media took over and drugs became the only way she felt set apart from everything.

The mix between the colourful side and the black and white side depict Marilyn’s struggle with self-representation and media captivity. Her personality was unknown to the public as it was always artificially created. The left side represents how the public saw her in the way the media personified her, whilst the right side represents the inner struggle of being a young Hollywood starlet; the dark side of a life of luxury.

Donald Judd – Minimalism

Minimalism in visual arts began in 1963 when a number of New York based artists began to independently exhibit three-dimensional work that shocked the art goers and critics of their time.

Donald Judd, born in 1928 and died in 1994 was one of the prominent minimalist artists of his time period. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent works that defied the term “minimalism”.

One of our recent visits to the Tate Modern allowed us to see one of his great works, named Untitled, created in 1980, the piece features 10 rectangular box type shapes, stacked on top of each other hanging from a wall. The boxes are set apart several inches apart. The outside is silver metal and the inside of the rectangles are navy blue. The stacks need to follow strict principles: the gap between each of the rectangles, and the gap between the first unit and the floor, they should be equal to the height of a single unit. Since the units are all identical, their significance derives from this pre-determined geometric order rather than from any individual features. However, Judd’s attention to the sensuous qualities of his materials prevents Untitled from being cold or clinical.

Minimalism cherished mathematics and preserved its importance in their artworks. Without geometric and arithmetic sequences, the art loses its clarity and meaning and therefore becomes ineffective.

At first, looking at minimalist artworks, the viewer may tend to question what the meaning is but it is subjective and each artwork may mean something different to each viewer as well as the artist. Minimalist works have often been considered cold and clinical due to their simplicity and use of modern and substance materials.

Donald Judd has also commonly used box type shapes in many of his works. Most of which are untitled. His stacked work has also been seen in several drawings in which he represents the geometric aspect of the work on paper.

John Constable : Wivenhoe Park (1816)

Charlotte and I went this past week to an exhibition on John Constable, one the most well known British painters in the nineteenth century. Born in Suffolk, England in June of 1776, Constable was a Romantic painter known for his landscape paintings, depicting the area where he grew up in the English countryside. This area came to be known as “Constable Country” because it was seen in so many of his paintings. He was particularly popular in France, where he sold more paintings there than he did in England. He is similar and often compared to J.M.W Turner, one of Britain’s famous artists who was working around the same time. Both were inspired by Claude Lorrain and Thomas Gainsborough.

One of my favorites paintings done by Constable, is “Wivenhoe Park” (1816). This painting is a beautiful and detailed representation of his home. This painting automatically struck me as simple and peaceful. Unlike most of the modern works we have been looking at lately, like the works of the YBA’s, I found Constable’s work refreshing. It isn’t trying to shock you, or portray a suppressed aspect of society, but simply display a beautiful scene. Like a lot of his work, this piece is classic and traditional, not striking many controversial opinions. By using oil on canvas, the time and skill it took to achieve this painting is evident. As we saw in the exhibition, Constable went out and studied nature while painting a rough outline of the scene in which he wanted to create. He then took this sketch back to the studio where he created the finished piece. Studying and painting nature was something Constable did often, as he created paintings like “The Study of Poppies” which is a simple painting of a poppy.

Depth is created in “Wivenhoe Park” through the flow of the river and hills lining the water. There is dark shading on the right, possibly making the perspective of the viewer sitting underneath a tree looking out at this scene. The colors are mostly shades of green and grey, due to the natural setting of a river and field of cows. There is also a pink house in the background and a detailed wooden fence in the foreground. This was painted during the time of the Industrial Revolution, where natural scenes like this we’re beginning to be seen less and less. Constable could have painted this serene picture with the nostalgia of his childhood in the countryside, while wishing to sustain a more natural world.

-Kasey & Charlotte

Anselm Kiefer : Ages of the World

Charlotte and I recently went to an exhibition on Anselm Kiefer with our art class at the Royal Academy of Arts. Kiefer is a German artist who was born in 1945. I really enjoy his works because they incorporate many different materials to give his pieces texture. He often uses straw, dried flowers, diamonds, ash, clay, lead and many other materials. Kiefer, as a German growing up not long after the Second World War and the Holocaust, represents the horror and grief that Germans felt about their history in his art. I was baffled by some of the horror but also the beauty of his works, which are done on such a large scale.

Once piece that I particularly liked was one called “Ages of the World.” This piece had it’s own small room because it was so large. It is a big pile of canvases, rubble and dried sunflowers. What I liked about it was it’s size and how it looked as if I had just walked into Kiefer’s studio. There was dust on the floor and the piece had an unfinished look. As I walked around the whole thing, I had to fight the urge to touch the massive structure. It was unlike any other piece of work I had ever seen: it gave the ability for the viewer to be apart of the artists work and thought process. Unlike most paintings and sculptors, I could imagine Kiefer walking in and adding things to this piece right in front of my eyes. There were no ropes around, it was just a pile of this thoughts lying in front of you. To me, I felt as if Kiefer was trying to get the viewer to feel as the German people did after the war: disheveled, sad and hopeless. There is no color or vitality to the piece. The German’s had trouble, and still do, confronting their past, and this work represents a release, of all the junk in their minds. Nothing in their world made sense at that time, and this is represented in Kiefer’s works like this.

-Kasey & Charlotte

Sigmar Polke– Police Pig

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer born in 1941. Polke’s artistic career lasted a total of fifty years, which led to his experimentation of a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970’s, Polke focused on photography, until switching to painting in the 80’s, when he began producing abstract works using a variety of different materials. The last twenty years of his life, Polke focused on historic events and interpretations of them. These mainly included events related to World War II, which although he was born four years prior to the end of, he was deeply affected by due to his German nationality.

Police Pig, one of Sigmar Polke’s pieces displayed in his Tate Modern exhibit, is one that addresses historic events. Police Pig, created in 1986 is a Raster Dot piece depicting a police officer without a face and a pig wearing the police officer’s hat. The dots allow the piece to resemble a passing television screen, one that appears only for a few seconds. The piece is in black and white and shows a lot of contrast. The shadows range from black spotting to white spotting. This creates a grim and serious sense within the piece.

The subject matter of the piece is evident as it pertains to World War II. This piece reminds me of the political satire Animal Farm by George Orwell. The dystopian novel reflects events leading to the Russian Revolution. Orwell being a democratic socialist used this novel to depict Stalin’s dictatorship in the form of animals taking over human life. The novel was published in the final year of the Second World War. Polke’s piece appears to address the notion of human’s being compared to pigs. The man’s face appears to have been cut out and simply missing from the piece, whilst the pig’s features are detailed. The pig wears the police hat, seemingly as if having been put in charge over the man who kneels beside him. Polke’s cynical belief in authority spawned the ironic

humour displayed within his political and social artworks. This seemingly mirrors that of George Orwell. Ultimately this piece addresses and depicts Polke’s use of ironic humour as well as his interest in political issues related to the wars.

Young British Artists: Tracey Emin

Recently Charlotte and I, with our art class, have been looking at the works of the Young British Artists. These artists were a group formed in 1988 in London when they began exhibiting their pieces together. Leading figures in this group include Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Their works particularly intrigued Charles Saatchi, a contemporary art collector and owner of the Saatchi Gallery in London. He bought their works for huge amounts of money to display in his gallery. The Young British Artists intrigued me as well because their works were shocking and representing risky subjects in absurd, untraditional methods.

One piece I found interest in was Tracey Emin’s Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With (1963-1995). Charlotte and I have been going to galleries weekly, but this piece is unlike anything I’d ever seen. This piece is a small tent engraved with 102 names of all the people Emin has slept with. These names include her boyfriends and lovers she’s had sexual relations with, but also her relatives and close friends. Tracey Emin is playing with the connotation that people have of the term “sleeping with.” It is often directly associated with “having sex with” but Emin is reflecting on society in saying that it doesn’t have to be only a sexual. Sleeping with someone, in her terms, means simply falling asleep in the same bed as someone. Someone can sleep with their mom or dad, sibling, or best friend. You can also sleep with a lover. These are all intimate situations, just in different aspects.

Her piece is very childish, with a small tent that little kids would sleep in. This adds to the idea that Emin is mocking the public for being secretive about who they’ve slept with and thinking of everything in a sexual context. It’s contrasting that a child’s tent is full of names of her past and current lovers. It is also very fitting because there are names of her childhood friends and her relatives who she most likely slept next to when she was young.

Sex is a big theme of Tracey Emin’s and the other Young British Artists. They were interested in facing society with the aspects of life they suppress, like sex, death and drugs. Their works make people reflect on their thoughts on these subjects and the connotations they associate them with. Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Ever Slept With is an example of how the Young British Artist’s wanted to make these subjects less of big deal to society. Sleeping with and having sex with people is part of life, and being open about these things shouldn’t be shocking to people.

 

-Kasey & Charlotte

Malevich: A completely unjust comparison of his drawings to mine.

As we transitioned from Post-Impressionist works into abstract works, Kasey and I discovered we had much less to talk about when observing the pieces. Our trip to the Tate Modern was eye opening as we tried to tie together what we’d previously learned in class with the new questions we were meant to keep in mind. Both of us still unsure of what to talk about, I decided to make this post about Malevich, who I myself am not a great fan of; however found myself to be interested in seeing his drawings in the later rooms of the exhibition. I am a drawer myself, hence my interest in comparing his usage of pencil to mine (not that I am in any way comparable to him or his talent…)

My art, being in no way abstract but rather realistic, does feature shading executed in a similar way. His drawings: extremely abstract. They feature shapes, unknown objects and extreme contrast between light and dark accents. Malevich’s drawings allow the viewer to think about the meaning behind the piece and question its effect. Although his drawings often seem childish, some exceed detail most artists may find utterly impossible. They incorporate aspects of architecture and geometry as well as people, generally undetailed figures resembling mannequins.

In comparison to my art, one of the overarching similarities is the use of simplistic black and white and often size. My pieces vary in size, from being extremely large to simple notebook sized pages. Usually, if I choose to use only pencils for my drawings, these will be executed on notebook-sized papers. As for the drawings I choose to use charcoal or chalk, these are usually done on large scale. I also have a love for straight lines and clean drawings, which Malevich has depicted throughout his years as an artist. The comparisons pretty much end there however. Aside from my utter lack of talent in comparison to Malevich, his works address different audiences and have more abstract approaches.

Here are a few of his pieces I thoroughly enjoy, as well as some of my pieces I used to compare to his drawings.

 

-Charlotte

Abstract Art: Why do we keep looking at it?

Why do we keep looking at abstract art? This is the question Charlotte and I tried to answer at the Tate Modern a few weeks ago. What is it? And why is it so interesting? Abstract art is using shape, form and color to create a piece in a way that is unrecognizable to the eye. It uses visual language to depict an illusion of reality. Abstract art makes little to no sense to the viewer, so it draws you to make your own conclusions about the work. Most of the abstract art I saw at the Tate Modern I didn’t understand, therefore didn’t really like, but there were pieces I found beautiful.

There was one painting by Robert Delaunay called Endless Rhythm that I found myself looking for a long time. Delaunay and his wife Sonia both painted abstract art that focused primarily on color. They loved to experiment with how different colors acted together, which colors contrasted the most to work the best next to each other. Endless Rhythm really displays this. Unlike most of the other works which just seemed like color was thrown on (even though nothing an artist does is unintentional), this one seemed very formatted and simple, yet complex. The work consists of several circles intertwined, in a seemingly perfectly symmetrical pattern. Each circle crossed in a smooth flowing pattern, except one that interrupted the rhythm. This painting has so many elements that seem to be perfect, that go along with the rhythm your eye follows, but then you see a small flaw. For example, along with a line that intersected another, the bottom part of the bottom circle is cut off, completely throwing off the rhythm. Your eye naturally follows the circles around and down to the bottom, but then it is cut off abruptly. The colors have flaws as well. They are so contrasting, with dark blacks and bright whites, and deep reds and oranges. The small circles in the middle alternate half white and half gray, but there is one circle in the middle that doesn’t alternate and throws off the pattern. What I like so much about this painting is the flaws. At first, this painting appears so perfect, but it really isn’t, because is anything ever truly perfect? Amidst a bunch of pieces that made no sense to me, like a wooden stand with a metal plate on top that was supposed to be a fish, this one spoke to me clearly. Abstract art can be interpreted differently by everyone who sees it, I experienced this as my whole class discussed this piece. Some people resonate with some pieces, while some find it completely uninteresting. Endless Rhythm had a beautiful and complex pattern that I couldn’t stop looking at.

-Kasey & Charlotte