Western Culture Art from the Renaissance to the 20th Century - Article Example

Art History A great deal of information can be learned about a culture or a period based upon the details observed in a single painting. By studying the various artists that have produced the works that fill our galleries and museums, we can gain a glimpse into another time or into our own. By comparing images across time periods, we can understand a common human condition or trace the changes that have been made across time and cultures. These are the kinds of messages one can gain when comparing the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali and Kerry James Marshall. Although each of these artists represents a different artistic period, they are all Western artists who have used the unique aspects or approaches of their particular genre to produce work investigating the nature of the human condition as it was understood in their time period, creating timeless works that reflect some aspect of each of us. Vincent Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853 and died in Auvers in 1890 of a self-inflicted bullet wound. Coming from a family who was heavily involved in the art world, Vincent was supported through much of his life by his brother Theo. “A common denominator … in most of the writers and artists Vincent admired: they dealt with the destitute and downtrodden … what moved him was the subject” (Wallace, 1969: 10). During the span of his short career, he produced at least 1700 works, 900 drawings and 800 paintings still survive. Among these are 40 self-portraits. However, he was only able to find a buyer for one painting during his lifetime (Wallace, 1969: 7). He studied art in his homeland for some time, although essentially self-taught, and consistently alienated his benefactors through a steadfast refusal to paint what was popular in favor of illustrating the plight of the peasants. His heavy use of impasto emerged during this early period, but his colors remained the darkened tones of the Dutch painters until 1885, following his father’s death and his move to Paris. His association with other artists in Paris especially opened his eyes to a new use of color. His madness began to come upon him while he was living in Arles, and he was subsequently admitted to St. Remy Hospital where he was allowed to continue painting. “At Saint-Remy he was powerfully drawn to nature under stress: huge whirling clouds, bent and gesticulating trees, hills and ravines alive and turbulent. Sometimes he combined this agitation with quiet sadness” (Wallace, 1969: 144). He is generally remembered for his vivid use of colors, particularly complementaries, and his heavy use of impasto to convey the emotion of his work as can be seen in the piece entitled “A Peasant Woman Digging in Front of her Cottage” (1885) currently on display through the Art Institute of Chicago. In this painting, one can trace both the early influences of Van Gogh’s artistic career as well as the heavy use of impasto that would characterize his later works. Using the muted tones of the Dutch palette, Van Gogh depicts exactly what the title describes, an older, relatively plump peasant woman busily at work digging in her front yard. She faces the cottage as she digs, which takes up the majority of the canvas. The focal point is the woman herself, who stands off center and emerges from the background in negative contrast to the lighter-colored thatch of her cottage roof. This is further brought out in the dark horizontal band of shadow beneath the roof that traverses the greater portion of the scene as well as a dark vertical band of shadow between one roof and another, that takes on a diagonal leading the eye back to the woman. The heavy application of paint, impasto, creates a highly textured appearance to the thatch roof of the cottage while the muted colors suggest the difficult struggles this woman overcomes on a daily basis to scrape out her meager existence from the land. This painting helps to illustrate that for Van Gogh, much of life was about the suffering, struggling and ever-hopeful attitude of the common people who were linked with the land. Perhaps one of the more unusual of the modern painters and certainly one of the most well-known is Salvador Dali (1904-1989). The Spanish painter became well-known in his lifetime for his unusual way of looking at things and his willingness to share these visions with the greater world population. “Dali’s importance for Surrealism was that he invented his own ‘psycho technique’, a method he called ‘critical paranoia’. He deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind. Dali’s images - his bent watches, his figures, halfhuman, half chest of drawers – have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters” (Harden, 2006). Typically painting images he saw in dreams or nightmares and consistently pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter, Dali had a wide range of interests that became reflected in his artwork, such as the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud or the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein, both of whose work have been associated with his paintings. “Surrealism attempts to further our understanding of the human condition by seeking ways of fusing together our perceived conscious reality with our unconscious dream state” (Nik, 2006). This is the approach Dali takes in “Visions of Eternity” (1936-37) also on display through the Art Institute of Chicago. Color symbology plays a large role in Dali’s work as can be discerned from this painting in which blue plays a predominant role. Not only is it the color of the sky, with which we relate to the only concepts of eternity our minds can grasp, but it is a color of purity and sincerity, a true searching for meaning in an empty field of few details and much meaning. For instance, we see a horizon, but we have no hints that there is anything lying beyond it. The ever-deepening blue expanse below appears at first to be water, but the presence of two kidney-shaped beans on the bottom left distract us, their light color contrasts sharply with the darkness around them, reminding us both of seeds and leading the eye to the pillar of an inexplicable freestanding arch either standing on the surface of the ground or floating in midair, it’s impossible to tell which. Framed in the doorway of the arch is the distant figure of a person, characteristically sticklike, trudging out of the frame of the canvas and reinforcing the idea that the bottom surface is solid as his shadow stretches before him out of the picture. The eye is stopped from following him by the solid white pillar that forms the other side of the arch. This figure has an empty net tossed over his shoulder but otherwise carries nothing while light shapes flutter above him against the blue sky. Sitting on top of the arch is another figure, closer to the viewing plane and dark. A hole has opened up in the center of this figure as pieces drop away, becoming the fluttery things above the other figure and the seeds in the earth. Attention is brought to this figure by the lighter colored facial area, but no face can be seen. Through this seemingly simple use of color, Dali keeps the eye forever wandering around the image, forcing the mind to consider the cyclical nature of eternity and the empty possibilities of the modern world that was coming into its own during this time period. Firmly working within the postmodern tradition, Kerry James Marshall was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. This was the year of the bus boycott in Alabama, that launched Martin Luther King as a significant leader of the civil rights movement and that saw a great deal of violence in the city streets as whites worked to keep the black people in their ‘proper’ place (Cozzens, 2006). Although the boycott was over by the time Marshall was a year old, the violence in Alabama hadn’t stopped. Violence between the races was ever-present in the news and at home in discussion among the adults while Marshall was in his formative years. In the face of this increased violence and blatant segregation in spite of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Marshall’s family decided to move to Los Angeles when he was only 8 years old, just in time to settle in before the outbreak of the famous Watts Riots of 1965. Studies conducted following the riots revealed that, although officials had been under the impression that the riot had been started by people from outside the immediate area, most of those who had participated in the riot had lived in Watts for most of their lives and were acting out in anger against the all-white community for the segregation of the neighborhood (“Los Angeles”, 2006). Marshall also freely admits that he comes from an African-American family that did not greatly encourage him to continue his education following high school, a cultural trait that he sees as being very prevalent among black families such as his (Rowell, 1998). In undertaking much of his work, Marshall says his goal has been to provide a black role model within the art world, creating paintings that weren’t afraid to claim their place in the big modern museums right alongside their mainstream counterparts. From his background and approach, then, one can see how Kerry James Marshall, in true postmodern tradition, attempts to combine several ideas together in each image he produces, from the civil rights movements and social equality to the encouragement of younger African-Americans working to achieve their own goals to a redefinition of what it means to represent black people in a work of art. In “Many Mansions” (1994) on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, Marshall brings the focus on the three black men who are carefully tending an elaborate garden with multiple-colored flowers in well-manicured beds and shiny cellophane-wrapped Easter baskets full of goodies awaiting the children who will receive them. He does this by placing the men working in the garden in white shirts, dress pants and ties rather than the standard garden clothes and negating the importance of the housing projects in the background. That they are housing projects is made clear by the sign for Stateway Gardens as well as the inclusion of its governmental identification number within the painting itself, but by placing these men in dressy clothes and illustrating the beauty and complexity of the garden, Marshall argues against the typical stereotypes of people who live in these places as lazy bums without employment. Combining these many images of the modern world and its problems with the traditional world and its values all within the context of finding those areas in which color plays little to no role, Marshall attempts to bridge the social differences that still exist in the contemporary society, celebrate the strengths of the downtrodden and brings the message of art around full circle to the concerns of artists like Van Gogh 100 years earlier. Works Cited Cozzens, Lisa. “The Montgomery Bus Boycott.” Civil Rights Movement [online]; available from http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/montbus.html; Internet; accessed July 9, 2007. Hardin, Mark. “Dada and Surrealism.” The Archive. [online] (2006); available from http://www.artchive.com/artchive/surrealism.html; Internet; accessed July 9, 2007. “Los Angeles Watts Riot of 1965.” African Americans [online]; available from http://www.africanamericans.com/WattsRiots.htm; Internet; accessed July 9, 2007. Nik. “About Surrealism.” Surrealism [online] (2006); available from http://www.surrealism.co.uk/; Internet; accessed July 9, 2007. Rowell, Charles. “An Interview with Kerry James Marshall.” Callaloo. (Vol. 21, N. 1, February 9, 1998), 263-72. Wallace, Robert. The World of Van Gogh: 1853-1890. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1969. Read More