Modern Art as Passion - Essay Example

Modern Art Art is a disciplined activity that involves not only talent and skill but also passion. It may be a painting, sculpture, drawing and architecture. Often considered a manifestation of culture, it fulfills one aspect of the innate human desire to interpret the world. Art is also an expression of creativity, of pleasure in dexterity, invention and the ingenious use of natural materials. Kurt Schwitters is a German artist born in Hanover is best known for his collages and junk sculptures. Schwitters constructed three memorable versions of Merzbau which is a gigantic conglomeration of trash and useless objects. He first constructed it in Germany, then in Norway and finally in England where he died. The project was said to be an architectural undertaking which involves two dimensions – dimension 1 consisted of a crafted architectural structure from wood, plaster and build up along multiple irregular axes and dimension 2, has an inner core which is a formless accretion of discarded random objects and fragments. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) is a Russian artist who rejected the role of being the father of constructivism. In the 1920s, he was regarded as the man who led art into industrial and technological construction in Western Europe. His art, the Corner Relief is a type of art piece which slung on ropes and cables at some distance from any wall. His works were often designated as abstracts which have been a visual essay on representation and reality, while other are just simply meaningful in a variety of ways. Andre Breton, a French writer, poet and surrealist theorist was born in Normandy who studied medicine and psychiatry. Known as the founder of surrealism, he defined the term in his work pure psychic automatism. He also wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Although he studied medicine and psychiatry, he realized that his true vocation was poetry. His early influences tended towards the path of symbolism however his experience in World War I changed Breton’s outlook and influence. Jaques Nache and Guillaume were his two main influences. Guillaume, presented new forms of poetry whilst Vache disregard for all forms of literature intrigued Breton. The Bahaus or commonly known as the Staaliches Bauhaus is a school located in Germany which operated in 1919 to 1933. It was founded by Walter Gropius, as architect, at the conservative city of Weimar. The school’s name was from a German word which means “to build”. The Bahaus was a merger between the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts. Gropius’ manifesto proclaimed “to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” There were three architect-directors during the Bahaus’ operation: Walter Gropius from 1919-1927, Hannes Meyer from 1928-1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930-1933. The school also existed in three German cities namely: Weimar from 1919-1925, Dessau from 1925-1932 and Berlin from 1932-1933. These changes resulted in a constant shift in focus, technique, instructors and even in politics. Born in Augusta, Georgia on May 15, 1930, Jasper Johns, Jr. is a contemporary US artist in painting and printmaking. He is well known for his painting Flag which was done in 1954-55. He painted it after having a dream of the American flag. Even though his subject matter often includes images and object from popular culture, his works were more described as Neo-Dadaist and not pop art. However, Jasper Johns Jr. is included in the list as one of the pop artists in the many compilations of pop art mainly because of his impressive artistry using classical iconography. Johns breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. In my study of art and as I come to know about the various artists that contributed to the amazing, dynamic and interesting world of art, the artist that caught my interest is Pablo Picasso. You might think that the choice is so predictable but on that contrary, Pablo Picasso made me learn a lot of things as an artist. I realized that there are a lot of interesting “subjects” around us that can be an inspiration to create an artwork, that painting about people, life, activity is very common, and it takes a good artist to make it exceptional giving it an X-factor. Picasso’s ability to evolve through the years only showed not only his great talent and skill but also his love and passion for art. This quality as I realized is the fire that keeps one’s “greatness” shine in whatever period. Passion was what immortalized Picasso through his works of art. As an artist I have learned that unless you are able to have passion, you won’t be able to cope up with the changes – changes in time, taste, environment, situation and many more. There are a lot of artists in the world but only a few becomes a part of history. Only a few get to be remembered after their lifetime. Passion also enables the artist to experiment. Just what like Picasso did in his studio in Barcelona when he was 16 years old. Experimentation is essential in artwork for it is through this that an artist will be able to “discover” new styles, form and direction of his artwork. Experimentation also brings learning which is very important as you grow and mature as an artist. Without it, an artist work is dull and invisible and he will not be remembered even during his lifetime. In 1907 Picasso drew The Demoiselles D’Avignon, a complete breakthrough from everything that he had done before that time. It was the early stage of Cubism and a mixture of every other “ism”: Fauvism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Futurism and Modernism. Followed by a series of large nude sketches leaning towards geometry, The Demoiselles was started in the spring of 1906 and was finished in the summer of the following year. It was the key work of this early period. The title comes from the name of a street in the red-light district of Barcelona and the painting depicts five prostitutes, their figures aggressively distorted and the faces of two of them recalling the African masks that Picasso admired and collected at this time. So radical in style was this picture—its surface resembling fractured glass—that it was not understood even by contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Spatial depth is absent and the ideal form of the female nude is restructured into facets—the essential features that distinguish Cubism. Henri Emile Benoit Matisse is a French artist most known for his use of color and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He is a leader of the Fauvists and one of the most outstanding representatives of the French School of Painting. His work Le Danse or The Dance in English is commonly known as the key point of his career and in the development of modern painting. It is a reflection of his early fascination with primitive art with all the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background. The rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. Le Danse is usually associated with the Dance of Young Girls from Igor Stravinsky’s famous musical work The Rite of Spring. His image of dancers, and of human figures in general, convey expressive form first and the particular details of anatomy only secondarily. Matisse extended this principle to other fields; his bronze sculptures, like his drawings and works in several graphic media, reveal the same expressive contours seen in his paintings. Although intellectually sophisticated, Matisse always emphasized the importance of instinct and intuition in the production of a work of art. He argued that an artist did not have complete control over color and form; instead, colors, shapes, and lines would come to dictate to the sensitive artist how they might be employed in relation to one another. He often emphasized his joy in abandoning himself to the play of the forces of color and design, and he explained the rhythmic, but distorted, forms of many of his figures in terms of the working out of a total pictorial harmony. Matisses true artistic liberation, in terms of the use of colour to render forms and organize spatial planes, came about first through the influence of Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh, whose work he studied closely from about 1899. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans was a piece by Salvador Dali, finishing it within six months before the Spanish Civil War. His work was an oil in canvass which was though to be a Civil War premonition. The artwork depicts many different parts of the same body hurting each other. He used a detailed, realistic technique to create bizarrely imaginative scenes. This is one way of Dali’s reporting his concern regarding the atrocities of such event. The Beans symbolizes offerings that sooth evil spirits. Salvador Dali is a Spanish Painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, filmmaker and writer. Born in Figueras, Catalonia on May 11, 1904, he was a leading figure in Surrealism, his enormous talent for self-publicity made him an international celebrity. One of which was during the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 when he gave a lecture dressed in a diver’s suit and the helmet got stuck almost suffocating him. Terre Labouree was made in 1923 by Joan Miro Ferra, a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramist. He was born in Barcelona, Spain. His works were seen to be an interpretation of Surrealism, like a sandbox for the unconsciousmind, a re-creation of the childlike and a manifestation of Catalan pride. Most of his subject matter is drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy which are some of the most original in the 20th century Mondrian, Piet (1872-1944), Dutch painter, who carried abstraction to its furthest limits. Through radical simplification of composition and colour, he sought to expose the basic principles that underlie all appearances. His work, Broadway Boogie Woogie shows Mondrian’s vigilant planning for variation, balance and interest. Using the differences and contrasts in rhythm of colors and lines, with both freedom and control in the opposition of the regular and the random, this particular artwork effects a stirring expression of his delight in sensation and movement. Mondrian was one of the most influential 20th-century artists. His theories of abstraction and simplification not only altered the course of painting but also exerted a profound influence on architecture, industrial design, and the graphic arts. Paul Jackson Pollock is an American painter, who was a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement. After 1947, he turned to Abstract Expressionism, developing the action-painting technique in which the artist drips paint and commercial enamels from sticks or trowels on to huge canvases stretched on the floor. By this method Pollock produced intricate interlaced patterns of color. His work, Lavander Mist is a vast expanse of heroic scale measuring nearly 10 feet. The overall tone is pale lavender made airy and active. His peeve was alive with colored scribbles, spattered lines moving in different directions, now thickening then trailing off to a slender skein. White Center is an artwork by Mark Rothko, a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker who refused to be classified as an abstract expressionist even an abstract painter. His work was oil on canvass was a post war art and was known to be sold for $72.8 million to an anonymous telephone bidder. Robert Milton Ernest Rauschenberg is an American artist who played an important role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. During the early 1950s he produced collage paintings in which freely brushed Expressionist canvases were overlaid with fragments of textile, photographs, and torn newspaper cuttings. In 1955 he made his first “combines”, three-dimensional assemblages in which paintings were combined with found images, such as photographs, and objects of popular culture—traffic signs, light bulbs, Coke bottles, radios—to create ironic or ridiculous effects. His work Canyon in 1959 was made from oil, house paint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, button, nails, cardboard, photographs, printed paper, paint tubes, wood, mirror string, pillo and bald eagle on canvass. It is now displayed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Bibliography Jaleh Mansoor. “Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Desiring House. Invisible Culture An Electroni Journal for Visual Culture. 2002. Retrieved: 14 December 2007. John Elderfield, the authority on Schwitter’s work, maintains this position in Kurt Schwitters (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985) Dorothea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p164 Richard Smith. “Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie.” Meyer Shapiro, Mondrian - On the Humanity of Abstract Painting. Retrieved: 14 December 2007. "Pablo Picasso." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 14 Dec 2007, 16:14 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 14 Dec 2007 . Read More