The History of Visual Art - Essay Example

The History of Art: Video Analysis

The Life and Art of Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz was an artist who was married to Dr. Karl Kollwitz. Dr. Karl was a socio minded man with a warm, compassionate heart, and he worked as a physician. They both lived in North Berlin, where poverty and misery were at home. Kathe Kollwitz documented in her drawings the reality of poverty and misery as it revealed itself to her.

Kathe had a small studio where she did her artistic work. She used chalk, charcoal, etching needle, and wood cover chisel tools to express herself, and color was not her medium. The contrast of black and white in its simplicity brought her nearer to the heart of things she sought out so intensely.

Kathe worked with compassion as a woman who could not turn away from the suffering of a down troubled creature. Kathe’s drawings focused on showing the gloomy part of life other than the enjoyable part. She stated that tragedy goes deeper than the mere social needs, it is life itself and what it contains that she wanted to explore in her work.

Her creative and comfort work revolved around mother and child concept and its limitless variations from birth to death, in pain and in joy. There was more pain than joy. Happy hours of the family life was when the head of the family had a job and was sober.

During the first performance of Hauptmann, The Weavers, Kathe saidthe impression the play made on her was simply anonymous. The series of drawings based on Hauptmann’s, The Weavers, established Kathe Kollwitz reputation as an artist and also as a fighter for revolution re-socialism.

Kathe stated that, drawing the fear of children’s faces, made her cry with them and she realized the heaviness of the load she carried. She had to give impression to the agony of men which was not ending and which in this life was overpowered. Kathe admitted her art was not a pure art but it was still art.

Kathe Kollwitz believed her work had a motive and she wanted it to have positive results when men are so confused and need help. During an exhibition of the academy, Kathe drew the past of a homeworker which was found so shocking by the middle classes. Coming from East Persia, Kathe loved the space and dignity of the land where she strengthened herself for the heavy demand of her arts.

The happy sunny summer of 1914 was interrupted by the war. In October 1914, Kathe lost her youngest son who fell as a volunteer in Flanders. The war structured the root of her life as a mother.

The war made everything in her rebelin case of the deaths of young strong men in their supreme. Kathe Kollwitz drew mothers who protected their kids with pillarsmade of their own bodies, mothers who saw their own children starve, mothers who waited, mothers who heard the news of their husband’s deaths. She said she was a mother who embraced her own children and she was able to do it well for which she was grateful. Kathe felt that she could not work on such drawings anymore because she was too worn away with grief and tears. For the rest of her life, she could not tear herself apart from the theme of war and death.

Ever since the death of her son, Kathe tortured herself, continually making new sketches and drafts of the mourning parents who were to stand as a life size figures in the military cemetery in Flanders where her son was buried. When the National Socialism came to power, Kathe’s work were banned from public exhibition and she was demanded to quit from the academy. She was surrounded by silence and isolation and it occurred to her that, her work had come to an end. Kathe lived to witness the 2nd World War but was no longer allowed to speak through her art.

Kathe Kollwitz stated that even though she was being forced to lay down her pencil, she knew that within the limits of her strength, she had done all that she could. Kathe wrote to her children telling them that she had lived her live to the fullest and asking them to allow her to go since her time was up. Those were the last words written by Kathe Kollwitz in her diary and her letters in April 1945.

Opinion on why Salvador Dali is a Prominent Surrealist Artists

Salvador Dali was had a wild and unique art and a public character to match. He involved himself in all facets of artistic modelling from design, sculptures, painting, fashion and movies. His bravery and turbulent attitude regarding art and politics made him different from others and permitted him to create prominent and distinguishable paintings. His uncommon style and outrageous ideas were greatly sought in his commercialized work - in photography, advertising, fashion and film.

Regionalist Artists during the Great Depression

There was a growing tendency to look away from the harsh realities of the urban society and to idealize another America. The America in whom every citizen would truly strike their claims in the Middle West. This vision of American rural area has something in common with other areas, it attracted many people and it did not exist.

It was something that you look back on with a kind of nostalgia but in terms of stress, get confused with socio-history. Depression devastated lives in the country as well as in the cities of America. While some people did better than others, there were no real areas of exemption.

Depression led to the formation of artistic group that called themselves the regionalists. The loudest spokesman was Thomas Hart Benton who caused distractions in New York itself. The depression forced the mood of isolationism in America and Benton to his own advantage hoped to focus that into an art. Benton claimed to be leading the charge of good, plain and honest American pictures, not foreign, not illicit and not citified. He began as a modernist and ironically given to his dislike of obstruction, he came under the spell of an early American obstructionist Stanton Macdonald.

Benton’s own obstruct paintings reflected rights. He turned his back on Paris and New York and returned to where he came from in Kansas City Missouri in 1935. He destroyed most of his paintings to get what he said all the modernists do not have.

He denounced New York earth world as a veritable Sodom filled with precious fairies who wears women’s underclothes. In the Hartland he found honest work with muscular risks. The fullest expression of Bento’s desire to be the voice of his people was the lounge for Missouri’s micro politicians in the Jefferson City Capital building.

The murals were Benton’s version of the history of the state based on the Missouri river winding out of frontier times down to the prisons in the year 1936. There could be nowhere else to get a good man with a sense of good rhetorical energy, vulgarity, over winning confidence. Anxiety also seemed to be written all over his portraits.

Some people disliked Benton’s image of a homestead wife wiping her babies butt, saying it is not the right image for the high deliberations of government. However they liked images portraying vernacular, character, and friendship. Despite the dislike, it is palpable that there were some positives that could be derived out of the images.

Benton’s images color had no sense of surface, ant the paintings were a dry staff conveying the message. Muscular structures made his human figures weirdly over-developed. According to Jesse Benton, Benton loved the people of Middle West and he did not like the idea of American people having to buy art from another country.

She also said that Benton wanted to deny and get away from the European influence and have an art that was purely and strongly American. He was also a physical person who loved to celebrate a working man. Benton was the heart of disapproval and argument surrounding the regionalist movement.

According to Vincent Campanella, the regionalist separated artists politically and not artistically. Grant Wood was another regionalist artist. He was well known for his painting, America Gothic in 1930, portraying a farmer and his daughter.

The Gothic windows make the home and shrine of virtue. Grant Wood focused mainly on rural concepts, working with portraits of farmers and the rural America in the Middle West. Most of Wood’s paintssolicits19thcentury Americana, solacing images of easy times which was consoling during the havoc of the Depression era.

Jason Pollock and Drip Painting Technique

Paul Jackson Pollock was a prominent painter in America and a main figure in the conceptual expressionist movement in the world of art. He was greatlyrecognized for his technique of splashing liquid house paint onto a horizontal surface. The above allowed him to see and paint his canvases from all angles.

Pollock enjoyed significant fame and obloquy. Jackson Pollock's eminence lied in developing the most complete notional technique in the biography of current art, differentiating line from color. Also, his eminence was also evidenced in redefining the class of painting and drawing, and coming up with means to express pictorial space.