History sticks to your feet

- May 19 -

Pop Art

I have always been fascinated but Andy Warhol, but turned off by how well known he is and his most famous works.

However, after learning more details about him in Art History, I have a deeper appreciation for the work he made, his ideas, his processes, and the evolution of Pop Art.

Andy Warhol, Oxidation painting, 1978, copper metallic paint and Urine on canvas

(close-up)

I have always been fascinated by decay and chemical reactions, as well as the color palette of shiny coppers and crusty turquoise. Thus, I instantly fell in love with this painting. I also liked the human quality that these had that Warhol’s other works conscientious lack. Yet despite the direct human interaction, it still feels somewhat separate from us because of its chemical reaction.

It reminded me of a photographer I absolutely love, David Maisel.

He took these photographs of found copper canisters containing the remains of asylum patient. Time has eroded and oxidized the outsides into beautiful colors and crystallized patterns.

http://davidmaisel.com/works/lod.asp

Although the reading annoyed me to an extent, it proved the point home that Warhol has truly put on this facade and his fame give him the power to give other people fame. He repeats images to devalue them and in turn, by him just touching them, he brings value and meaning back in. He turns things to diamond dust.

Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes, 1980

Action Painting and the Abstract Expressionists

I’m going to start with the most powerful Abstract Expressionist paintings that I’ve seen in person.

 Jackson Pollock,   Number 1, 1950 Lavender Mist, c. 1950

As I wandered around the National Gallery with my father who is completely unaffected by the art world, I saw the huge Lavender Mist from across the room. A group of kinder gardeners were sitting around it as a woman tried to win over their appreciation for Jackson Pollock. I stood humbled by the size and the layers of the painting. It truly felt like a piece of him. This was no crafty splatter paint project. This was a whiskey drinking, Marlboro smoking, man’s guts on the canvas. It was thick with time, and begged me to touch it. It is a piece that is only powerful when seen in person. When you can see how the tar mixes with the latex and how shards of sand and glass lick the surface. How it is no Mellow Mushroom bathroom floor.

Franz Kline, Orange Outline, 1955

Will Taylor has always brought up Franz Kline when we are creating abstract compositions. I never really was captivated by the glossy pictures he showed us of his work. However, when I was in the Raleigh Museum of Art I stumbled upon this piece. Suddenly my boredom with Kline’s geometric, black and white shapes vanished. I could see the layers and layers of time. The vibrant paint underneath, whispering from the application of white on top, aggravating the thick, expressive black lines. Although small, this painting had a presence of its own. I could see his touch on the surface.

No. 1 (Black Form Paintings) - Mark Rothko (1960s)

In the National Gallery I walked up to the very highest floor and was enslaved by these paintings. They were in a room rich with skylights and you could hear the whisper of music throughout the space. However, the paintings were what commanded the space. Their presence loomed over me. But it was a warm and complex looming. It wasn’t dark and scary, it was almost spiritual. After only seeing Rothko’s colorful work I was absorbed into the black. The subtle way some blacks sat more blue, and some gleamed red like sharpie ink. Some were matte and others glossy. They weren’t just black either. They suggested work. They whispered that they contained more color underneath, color that you could no longer unlock. Just as Rothko’s content. No image could describe this feeling.

Rauschenberg, Brace, c. 1962

In the VA department, especially in Pam Griffin’s class Rauchenberg is God. We have had projects where we were essentially asked to paint a Rauchenberg painting. So my feelings toward him have always been a little resentful. However, when I saw his work for the first time in person in the National gallery my thoughts changed. They were larger than I expected and suggested much more work and time and labor. I had always thought he used paper images as the black and white photos in his paintings, but in fact they are screen prints. This to be is the hands of Pop and Abstract Expressionism holding, taking images and repeating them without touch, and then adding action, expressive marks, content, meaning back in. Breathing life into the lifeless.

The power of art video made me appreciate Rothko even more. Seeing his struggles to preserve meaning a truth in art and rejecting the material world spoke to me. Although I found the actor who played him a bit cheesy and distracting, the shots without him speaking were powerful and beautiful. They seemed very intimate and showed an accurate depiction of an artist alone in their studio. Simon Schama always speaks so passionately about art work and makes us feel the passion one way or the other.

Surrealism

The world’s favorite mustache. (poor Velazquez, his mustache is way bigger than yours.) And the world’s most famous surrealist, Salvador Dali.

SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

Salvador Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Waking Up, 1944

In the arousal of sleep a woman lays open to attack horizontally across the plane. Hovering above her open body is an arch of predators. Despite their curling rage as they leap for the attack, they are formed in a graceful arch, quite more peaceful than a direct, angular diagonal. This arch contradicts their motive, ensuring the dream state. An elephant upon stick legs passes blindly behind the violent scene of attack. Seemingly determined and detached from the action. The sky is blushing with the morning, another sign against the violence. It seems as soon as the prick touches the ivory nude, reality will blow the smoke away from the surreal scene.

René Magritte, The Key of Dreams, 1930

André Masson. Automatic Drawing. (1924)

Duchamp, Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2, 1912,

“Nudes do not descend staircases.”

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,

A gold of lemon, root and rind,

She sifts in sunlight down the stairs

With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister

A constant thresh of thigh on thigh—

Her lips imprint the swinging air

That parts to let her parts go by.

One woman waterfall, she wears

Her slow descent like a long cape

And pausing, on the final stair,

Collects her motions into shape.

X.J. Kennedy

- April 21 -

Van Gogh and Gauguin

Before Van Gogh and Gauguin color was translated literally on the canvas. How dare you use yellow for the grass and red for the sky.

Van Gogh talks about color as means of expression, as a power, “I am know going to be the arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I even to orange tones, chromes and pale citron-yellow. Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest intensest blue that I can contrive…I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.”

Van Gogh, Sunflowers, c. 1888

The flowers seem to melt in the vibrant background of the same color and wash out their vibrancy. They droop and curl over and some have lost their peddles. They seem in dialogue with one another rather then with their surroundings. Every hue has a lick of yellow that makes the mood sickly, unlike the kind of yellow of the sun. Their rejection of the sun is mimicked through the color. Not only are they constrained by color but also by the frame. They remain within the frame but read as though they are gazing off the plane by their crumbling, twisting gestures, visual arrows, and the accents of the pure white and black. They search left, right, down, and straight ahead, but not one gazes up to their nourishing sun.

Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, c. 1885

Gauguin uses color as a vehicle for expression as well. However he doesn’t seem to set a mood as powerful as Van Gogh seems to set.

Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going, 1897

This piece certainly feels tranquilly and exotic through his use of tranquil blues in the back ground and warm, vibrant yellows in the foreground. However, I think that separates him the most from Van Gogh is the brush strokes. Van Gogh’s strokes are more expressive and create a mood that is more powerful than any of Gauguin’s.

Or it very well could be that crazy people are just better painters.

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes (and Photography)

Photography, in my opinion, is one of the most challenging art forms we have today.

It is so simple, so accessible, easy to learn and even automatically have technical precision, but it is capturing emotion, feeling, an atmosphere, that makes one see the “truth” differently.

The First Photograph c. 1826, Joseph Niepce

First portrait, 1839, Robert Cornelius, self-portrait

First color photograph, 1861

1975, first digital photograph

Barthes talks about a photograph never fully being distinguished from what it represents. This to me is the challenge. We have this contraption at our fingertips, we have an endless supply of images to capture permanently in light, but its never that easy. Because things are so accessible it is the challenge to take the referent and make it into something that doesn’t only read on surface level. What good is it to document a leaf? We see leaves around us all day everyday. But it is the way you frame the leaf, the parts you leave out, the parts you zoom in, the amount of light you let leak in that creates a evocative statement. That changes how we view that leaf. That makes us see the world differently.

Photography is not only a way of making us see our world differently, but also a proof of existence. It offers a looking glass into the past. “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore, what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” Barthes talks about the way we look at photographs and the conclusions we make. When we see a photograph from the 1900’s for example, we know that everyone captured in that moment in time is now dead. Photographs become our only view of reality in those settings. We see the faces they where, the clothing, the objects, the setting and we create a view of their world based on that. That view could be close to accurate, or it could very well be distorted by the filter of the photographer’s eye.

Some of my favorite photographs:

1930s-1940s photos in color in the Library of Congress

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/72157603671370361/

James Cooper

Found photograph by the Polaroid Kid

Night-blooming Cereus, c. 1988 Sally Mann

Corey Arnold

Alexa Meade paints people to look like expressionist portraits, and, takes their portrait. They also become still lives in galleries.

Rachel de Joode

Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Griselda Pollock.

Cassatt, Little girl in a blue arm chair, c. 1878

This is one of my favorite pieces by Mary Cassatt. A moment that is caught only by a mother. A moment reflective of both childhood and womanhood. A child stuck in a grown-ups world, swallowed by the ocean of blue chairs, awkwardly plopped trying to filled the space. The little girl is slouched with legs spread, a pose criminal for a grown woman of the time. It shows to me the world that woman painters see, and how different it is than the men’s world. It almost makes me glad that the woman couldn’t paint what the men could, their subject matter in some cases seems more true. Sometimes when one is restricted the most powerful work is secreted.

Cassett, Five o’ clock tea, c. 1880

Certainly a woman puts the paint on the canvas differently than a man. Woman encounter different experience, overcome different obstacles, and simply have different bodies than those of men.

However, during the Impressionist era woman not only faced these differences from men, but they also were restricted in many other ways.

Manet can easily have access to paint a fellow painter nude for his Olympia, but as for her paintings she would never be able to paint one like the masterpiece she modeled for.

Woman of the time simply didn’t have access to the same things men did. And thus their subject matter was radically different. A man could paint a bird’s eye view of Paris, while Morisot painted what she saw— the balcony bars hiding Paris.

Morisot, View from the Balcony, c. 1872

Monet, Garden of the Princess c. 1867

However, woman weren’t truly kept prisoners, they were let out. But the problem that persists, as Pollock acknowledges, “they are the spaces of bourgeois recreation, display, and those social rituals which constituted polite society….”

“Modernity is still with us, ever more acutely as our cities become in the exacerbated world of postmodernity, more and more a place of strangers and spectacle, while women are ever more vulnerable to violent assault while out in public and are denied the right to move around our cities safely. The spaces of femininity still regulate women’s lives —from running the gauntlet of intrusive looks by men on the streets to surviving deadly sexual assaults. In rape trials, women on the street are assumed to be ‘asking for it’. The configuration which shaped the work of Cassatt and Morisot still defines our world.”

-Pollock, pg. 89

- April 5 -

Constructivism

“The optimistic, non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics and painting. The artists did not believe in abstract ideas, rather they tried to link art with concrete and tangible ideas.”

Dedicated for social purposes, “art for art’s sake.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Artipop Poster by Mayakovsky

Poetry

“The rain sobbed all over the sidewalks;

the scoundrel, condensed into puddles,

all wet, licks the cobblestone-beaten corpse of streets.

And on this gray eyelashes—

yes!—

tears flow from eyes—

yes!—

on his icicle eyelashes

from the sagging eyes of drainpipes.

The snout of the rain drooled on all the pedestrians,

but flabby athlete after athlete flashed by in carriages:

stuffed to the eyeballs,

they burst,

grease dribbled through the cracks,

and together with chewed-over rolls

and the cud of old ground meat

it flowed down in a turbid river from the carriages.”

—From “Sleeping on the Wing”

Ilya Bolotowsky

  born in St. Petersburg, Russia on July 1, 1907. (My birthday!)

Untitled Ilya Bolotowsky, silk screen print, 20th century

Ella Bergmann-Michel

Botanik - Construction 3 B132 Ella Bergmann-Michel, Ink and Graphite with chalk c. 1922

Thin, perfect lines and arrows jut this way and that mechanically instructing the eye throughout the piece. A teetering high-contrast form vertically stands in the center. A perfect circle of dust radiates out of the center sending tentacles vertically up through space. Like soldiers they stiffen out suddenly, forming a brilliant white commanding arrow that instructs us off the page again. Despite the chaos of arrows pointing every which direction, the composition seems balanced. The focal point is in high contrast, while circles begin to fuzz into the background around it and thin hollow shapes reenforce the teetering figure in the focal point. The piece speaks to me as a mechanical dancer, drifting up, up, up, and out. 

THEN

NOW

Shepard Fairey

- March 29 -

Manet

Self Portrait with a Palette Edouard Manet c. 1879

Olympia Edouard Manet c. 1863

Olympia Yasumasa Morimura c. 1990

What inspires me about Manet’s Olympia is how he did not intend for his pieces to be picked up with such controversy and scandal, but he merely painted what he saw. Not only did he paint what he saw, but by answering Baudelaire’s call, he shattered people’s illusions. “To the wealthy collectors of art and women, who regarded both as possessions, Olympia stripped them of their illusions. Her body is ripe for the taking, but everything else, including the meaning behind that enigmatic almost-smile, she’s keeping for herself,” Mary Elizabeth Williams comments in her essay “Manet’s “Olympia”.” And despite all the fuss and facing of rejection, Manet continued to paint what he saw and how he saw it, with bold brush strokes and surprising contrasts. 

I love the way Mary Elizabeth Williams ends her beautiful rambling with “To worship a goddess is easy, but to love a human — especially one who offers no hint of reciprocation — is far more work, and infinitely more thrilling. Manet brought the hidden world of the everyday into the light and made it remarkable. For all that’s reserved about Olympia’s demeanor, the passion of her creator is there in every stroke and every line. She may withhold her heart, but we, helpless, are under her spell forever.” It is true, as artists it is easy to paint a portrait of a Brittany Spears and get praised for the recognition of the image and possible beautiful rendering of that famous image, but to take a person off of the street and make that image potent and full of integrity and emotion, that is much more beautiful.

Constantine Guys

“The Painter of Modern Life” by Charles Baudelaire c. 1863

Portrait of the author

Favorite quotes from the work:

“Rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life.”

“A child sees everything in a state of newness, he is always drunk.”

“The boisterous sun beating a tattoo on his window pane.”

At first I was puzzled by his analogy of the sun as a tattoo, because I thought of permeance. But after discussing this in class, it was brought to my attention of the origin of the word, as a sound. The perpetual beating of the tattoo machine mimics the perpetual beating of the sun on Guys’ window pane. The gnawing at him to get up and capture the world as it moves, as it stands that moment in his time.

Baudelaire comments on the hierarchy of artists in this piece. How there is a closed circle of vision and vocabulary. I see this a lot as being an artist. We have ways of interpreting, seeing, and talking about pieces that other people outside art school are unaware of or may not understand. Sometimes this is can be an issue, we are trying to make pieces commenting on the world as people of the world, but we use methods and terminology that the rest of the world is unfamiliar too. We must be aware of our audience, but still appreciate the knowledge we gain from art school and art practice.

This goes well into Baudelaire’s idea of genius. “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s (or woman’s!) physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” We must balance childhood and adulthood, be aware, yet not aware, be able to adapt but stand our ground, be the center but hidden. As artists we need to be aware of our place as people of the universe, in the present time, but yet be able to tap into higher knowledge and knowledge of the past. 

Although this article is dated, because many have now fulfilled Baudelaire’s wish for artists to capture the world as it is happening, it still brings up things we need to be aware of today as artists. Sometimes we get too caught up in the hierarchy of art, what is art, and how is “supposed to be made.” We need to keep pushing the envelope, and yet not go too far, we need to keep in mind we are creating the image of our generation for our grandchildren to reflect on. 

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Happy Accidents of the Swing, 1767, French Rococo

Rococo:

a style that originated in France in the 18th century, marked by elaborate decorativeness, light colors, and organic forms. 

Jean-Honore’ Fragonard embodies French Rococo in his scandalous painting of the swing. Through his symbolism he depicts a woman swinging from one man to another. Her shoe carelessly flings off to show her loss of virginity. As her leg dangles in the air her pink, fleshy dress ripples and gives the “rake” on the left a straight shot up her skirt. This play of scandal, sexuality, and royalty embody the period of French Rococo.

The Wardrobe Jean-Honore’ Fragonard c. 18th century 

In response to this flirty, playful, and scandalous movement came Neoclassicism. 

This period was a return to a classical emphasis on sobriety and restraint in both form and content. 

Napoleon Crossing the Alps David Bonaparte c. 1902

This attempt to be sterile with seriousness backfired. The thrust of the horse upward and the perfectly captured and composed, almost mocking face of Napoleon suggests a masculine sexuality. A overly showy, strong, and big kind of air. Basically, overly decorative and sexual just like Rococo.