Modernism as a Freedom - Essay Example

Modernism as a freedom Introduction Modernism is a term used to describe the modernist movements in arts. The term encompasses a set the set of cultural tendencies as well as the associated cultural movements that arose originally in the wide-scale changes to the modern western societies of the western society in the period of the early 20th century and the late 19th century reaching far boundaries of the society. Generally, the term is used for the activities and the resulting outputs of those in society who felt that the traditional modes of social organization, religion, literature, architecture, and the general ways of day-to-day life were outdated. They felt that these aspects of society were getting out of phase with the new conditions in the social and political fields that existed in the emerging industrial world. Modernism was majorly shaped by the rapid growth of human settlements in form of cities resulting from the development of societies in a modern industrial aspect. The horrors associated with the World War I were also key factors in the shaping of modernism. Modernism was a freedom as the artists sought to express their beliefs of what the society should really relate and work. The movements had salient characteristics of self-consciousness. This led to experiments that approaches and forms used to draw attention to the materials used in producing the piece of work. They also incited the focus on attention of the processes that resulted in the various art works. The movements were not rebellious in nature, as they did not seek to completely abandon the societal traditions and replace them with new ones. The artists sought to incite the societies to make changes to the obsolete culture of the past through paradigmatic like the injunction “Make it new!” Avant-garde The freedom of the modernism period was expressed through the artists adopting an avant-garde meaning in the artistic works. This approach saw the pushing of the accepted status quo and norms beyond the accepted boundaries using cultural realms as the primary drivers (Weiten 2011: 143). This notion was the hallmark of modernism with many artists aligning themselves with the notion that traced a history from the pre-modernism era of Dada through the modernism period to the era of postmodern artists like language poets in the late 20th century. The primary concept that constitutes the avant-garde is having writers, composers, and generally artists whose pieces of art oppose the cultural values of the mainstream society often with a trenchant edge of social or political form. One such artist is Georges Seurat, a Frenchman born in Paris on December 2, 1859 (Gardner and Kleiner 2013: 812). A Sunday afternoon on the island of la Grande Jatte Seurat was a shy reclusive member of an avant-garde believing group who died a sudden death from meningitis at the age of 31 after making major impacts on the modernism movements through production of various great artistic works. His inspiration came from the desire to negate from Impressionism’s preoccupation of the fleeting moment with the rendering of the essentials and unchanging parts of life instead. Impressionism is an art movement with Paris as the origin. The art have characteristics of relatively small and thin brush strokes that are visible (Gardner and Kleiner 2013: 812). The art emphasizes on depictions of light that are accurate in its changing qualities and are usually based on open compositions of ordinary subject matters. The arts included movement as crucial in the elements of the perceptions and experiences of the human being in unusual angles. However, many of his approaches borrowed from the ideas of impressionists. This included a love for matters of the modern subject and urban leisure scenes and attempts to capture all colors interacting to produce the appearance of an object instead of just depicting the apparent color of the object being depicted (Hagen and Hagen 2003:456). His fascination was in a range of scientific ideas on form, color, and expression. He believed that different line directions and colors portrayed different levels of, warmness or coolness. This lead to the development of Divisionalism or chromo-luminism aspects of paintings that uses contemporary or contrasting colors in an optical mix to yield tones only achievable 5through the mixing of paints. Divisionalism separated local color into individual dots. Pointillism another aspect of the chromo-luminism includes the use of tiny paint strokes as a method of achieving surface flickering effects. He sought to express his art in ways free of the usual rules of art in the day, which produces an aspect of freedom. Seurat’s initial instincts dealt on conservative and classical styles. He thought the figures in majority of his paintings as figures of monumental classical relief, under subject matters of different pursuits of urban leisure of the working class in a fully modern state. This was a typical impressionist art. Later, he dropped the stately classicism and calm nature of early pictures and delved into pioneering stylized and more dynamic approaches that were under the influence of caricatures and other sources in form of popular posters. In the painting “a Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grand Jatte” of 1884, Seurat brings out the aspects of painting that he believed in. Seurat took two years to complete the picture taking a lot of time preparing for the painting through sketching the in the park (Weiten 2011: 143). The scale of the picture equals the dimensions of major Salon pictures with the same ambitions. Seurat used the technique of juxtaposing tiny dots of multicolored paints. This technique allows the viewer to blend optically the colors instead of the norm of the day that blended the colors on the canvas. This was achieved through the mixing and vibration of the dots in the eye that intended to produce the same sensation as light. Marilyn Monroe Andy Warhol is another artist who greatly contributed to the modernism revolution and period through his famous print known as the “Marilyn Monroe”. Andy was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on August 6, of 1928 who later became a leading icon of the artistic world of the 1960s. Warhol emerged with Neo-avant-garde in the mid fifties, a period associated with subverting of modernist values with values of the modern art of the modernist period through diverse and new practices eruption (Fichner-Rathus 2008:214). Warhol’s pop art work illustrated the inauthentic mirage existence of the Neo-avant-garde in comparison to the avant-garde of the 1910 and 20s decades (Christies.com, 2012). His use of the photographic silk screening process was decisive in aligning his method of working with paintings content. This strengthened his position as a conspicuous and specific contributor of the advancement of the art of avant-garde. Neo-avant-garde had a new take on the avant-garde form of art wanting to connect the views of “art-as-life and life-as-art”. Pop art told a melancholic story of the inability to come up with art works that were socially better. Warhol therefore adapted the avant-garde adding to the modernist values he shared. In Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, the neo-avant-garde method of silkscreen printing is used (Fallon and Warhol 2011: 46). He based the picture on a publicity still of Marilyn Monroe with her lips, eyes, and earrings highlighted using vivid colors. He famously made replicas of the same image in different colors. The modernism approach allowed his freedom in diversifying in the painting with the use of highlighting using different colors. In the modernist period of Andy Warhol the artists had to deal with machines and incorporate them int their everyday life and artwork (UK Essays, 2013). This saw many seeking to fuse life and art by an expanded mass culture approach. Warhol also shared this idea and sought to be machine like in his work through the repetition of a lot of his work. He liked the idea of people developing pieces of art that were similar to his work. This shows that Warhol reject the modernism aspect of individualism. The idea resulted in the focus of the production processes that are depersonalized that were used to attack the artist’s role. In retrospect, the rejection of the aspect seeks to provide freedom for the artists and remove restrictions imposed through the maintenance of individualism. Conclusion George Seurat was an artist who played an important role in the modernism era. His painting “ a Sunday on La Grande Jatte” was the epitome of the illustrations of his beliefs of the modernism era. He developed a style known as pointillism and divisionism that involved the separation of colors into small touches meant to blend in the viewers eyes. He served to bring a major impact to the modernism process that is the cause of the shaping of the process for the many more years to come. His impact was felt over the post modernism period and still guides the works of most artists of today. His work championed freedom in the expression of the society and not rebellion as he sought to make changes instead of completely deviate from the societal norms. Andy Warhol work the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ was a pop-art work in the period after modernism. It was stimulated by modernism with the same styles with the refusal of some beliefs of modernism. The art knows itself as a commodity and seeks to draw from social reality. The art manifests its own conditions for production and consumption in society portraying its advocacy for freedom advocated in modernism. Bibliography Christies.com. 2012. Andy Warhol and the Art of Screenprinting | Special Features | Christie's. [online] Available at: http://www.christies.com/features/andy-warhol-and-the-art-of-screenprinting-2752-1.aspx [Accessed: 20 Nov 2013]. FALLON, M., & WARHOL, A. (2011). How to analyze the works of Andy Warhol. Edina, Minn, ABDO Pub. Co. FICHNER-RATHUS, L. (2008). Foundations of art and design. Belmont, CA, Thomson/Wadsworth. GARDNER, H., & KLEINER, F. S. (2013). Gardner's art through the ages. Boston, Mass, Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. HAGEN, R., & HAGEN, R.-M. (2003). What great paintings say. Ko?ln, Taschen. UK Essays, A. 2013. Andy Warhol Art After Modernism Art Essay. [online] Available at: http://www.ukessays.com/essays/arts/andy-warhol-art-after-modernism-art-essay.php [Accessed: 20 Nov 2013]. WEITEN, W. (2011). Psychology: themes and variations. Australia, Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Read More

 

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