On Picasso, Dali, and van Goghs Sunflowers - Essay Example

On Picasso, Dali, and van Gogh’s Sunflowers Perhaps the most well known personality connected to twentieth-century art is ‘Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso’ (Wikipedia). “No other artist is more associated with the term Modern Art than Pablo Picasso”, according to his biography at Artelino. He’s most remembered for being one of the co-founders of the Cubist movement. In the words of Thomas Hoving, “Yet Cubism and Modern art werent either scientific or intellectual; they were visual and came from the eye and mind of one of the greatest geniuses in art history.” Before he invented Cubism, he himself moved through a series of artistic styles, notably realism, caricature, the Blue Period and the Rose Period. “In late 1906, Picasso started to paint in a truly revolutionary manner. Inspired by Cézannes flattened depiction of space, and working alongside his friend Georges Braque, he began to express space in strongly geometrical terms. These initial efforts at developing this almost sculptural sense of space in painting are the beginnings of Cubism.” (Artchive) The Blue Period roughly lasted from 1901 to 1904. One of the most noted works of this period was La Vie (1903), in the Cleveland Museum of Art, “which was created in memory of a great childhood friend, the Spanish poet Casagemas, who had committed suicide. The painting started as a self-portrait, but Picassos features became those of his lost friend. The composition is stilted, the space compressed, the gestures stiff, and the tones predominantly blue.” (Hoving) Two other works of great prominence from this period are The Blind Man’s Meal (1903) in the Metropolitan and the haunting and lyrical Woman with a Crow (1903) in the Toledo Museum of Art. The Rose Period is said to begin roughly in 1904, “when Picassos palette brightened, the paintings dominated by pinks and beiges, light blues, and roses. His subjects are saltimbanques (circus people), harlequins, and clowns, all of whom seem to be mute and strangely inactive.” (Hoving) The Family of Saltimbanques (1905), in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., is an important work from this period. He soon hit upon the cartoon-like works of Primitive painter Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau, the ancient Iberian sculptures, African art, and the sculptures of Paul Gauguin, and was captivated by them. “Slowly, he incorporated the simplified forms he found in these sources into a striking portrait of Gertrude Stein, finished in 1906 and given by her in her will to the Metropolitan Museum. She has a severe masklike face made up of emphatically hewn forms compressed inside a restricted space.” (Hoving) This painting is one of the precursors of Cubism, in that it shows the tendency to depict what he sees differently from how he sees it. “In 1907, after numerous studies and variations Picasso painted his first Cubist picture - Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Impressed with African sculptures at an ethnographic museum he tried to combine the angular structures of the “primitive art” and his new ideas about cubism. The critics immediately dubbed this stage in his work the African Period, seeing in it only an imitation of African ethnic art.” (Moffat) Soon, Picasso and Braque had developed cubism into a dramatically new form of pictorial expression. “Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table (1909) marks the beginning of Picasso’s “Analytical” Cubism: he gives up a central perspective and splits forms up into facet-like stereo-metric shapes. The famous portraits of Fernande, Woman with Pears, and of the art dealers Vollard and Kahnweiller are fulfilled in the analytical cubist style.” (Moffat) Analytic Cubism roughly lasts till 1911, with Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), Factory in Horta de Sant Joan (1909), Portrait of Fernarde (1909), and Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910) being some of the noted works of this period. “In 1912, Picasso took the conceptual representation of Cubism to its logical conclusion by pasting an actual piece of oilcloth onto the canvas. This was a key watershed in Modern Art. By incorporating the real world into the canvas, Picasso and Braque opened up a centurys worth of exploration in the meaning of Art.” (Artchive) Still-Life with Chair Caning (1911-1912), Bottle of Pernod (Table in a Cafe) (1912) and Violin and Guitar (1913) are some of the important works of Synthetic Cubism of Picasso. When the World War came, it changed the life, mood, state of mind, and art of Picasso. His pictures became more somber and realistic. Three Musicians (1921), though coming after his Cubist period, is regarded as his Cubist masterpiece. In this picture, he for the first time used a group of people as subject for a Cubist painting. After Cubism, he returned to more traditional patterns, and this period is thus known as the Classicist Period. “That time the Picassos pictures were very far from cubism, they had clear and intelligible shapes, light tones, correct faces.” (Picasso.net) Some pictures of this period worth mentioning are Portrait of Olga in the Armchair (1917), The Bathers (1918), Women Running on the Beach (1922), and Portrait of Paul Picasso as a Child (1923). This was followed by a period where he came under the influence of Surrealism, and his pictures became fantastic and visionary. “His Woman with Flower (1932) is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse, distorted and deformed in the manner of Surrealism.” (Moffat) Other works include Bather Opening a Cabin (1928) and Figures on a Beach (1931). “In 1937 the artist created his landmark painting Guernica, a protest against the barbaric air raid against a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Picassos Guernica is a huge mural on canvas in black, white and grey which was created for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris Worlds Fair in 1937. In Guernica, Picasso used symbolic forms - that are repeatedly found in his works following Guernica - like a dying horse or a weeping woman.” (Artelino) After the war, he continued experimenting with various themes till his death at the age of 92, when he left an unfathomable ensemble of around twenty thousand works. The first name that springs to mind when talking about the surrealist movement is that of ‘Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol’. (Wikipedia) Encyclopaedia Britannica describes him as “Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery.” He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but was expelled for indiscipline in 1923 when he kept on pursuing his own interest in Cubism and Futurism. By the late twenties, he developed his personal style based on the unconscious. He described his style as “paranoiac-critical, a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations’”. (Artchive) “He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland.” (Britannica) Some of his works of this time include The Lugubrious Game (1929), Persistance of Memory (1931), and Surrealist Objects: Gauges of Instantaneous Memory (1932). “Dalí devoured influences from many styles of art, ranging from the most academically classic to the most cutting-edge avant garde His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez. He used both classical and modernist techniques, sometimes in separate works, and sometimes combined.” (Wikipedia) He got alienated from the Surrealist movement because of his political ideas and his support of Franco, but he continued the enjoy the reputation of being a Surrealist in front of the public. After 1936, he “returned to a classical manner of painting, switching haphazardly between Italian, Spanish and pompier styles”. (Artchive) “In the period from 1950 to 1970 Dalí painted many works with religious themes, though he continued to explore erotic subjects, to represent childhood memories, and to use themes centring on his wife, Gala. Notwithstanding their technical accomplishments, these later paintings are not as highly regarded as the artist’s earlier works.” (Britannica) Among the most famous paintings of all time is van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888). “The sunflowers are mine in a way”, said the eccentric artist. The dazzling yellow of the sunflowers staring out of the canvas has continued to amaze the discerning viewer for centuries hence. The sunflowers appear as a theme or influence in many of van Gogh’s works, but the most famous piece of work on sunflowers is his Sunflowers II. They are described by Harding as the depiction of “starkly vivid flowers in a simple vase”. Van gogh Gallery on their website say, “Upon looking at these paintings one begins to notice aspects that seem to flow from one piece to another. The colors are vibrant and express emotions typically associated with the life of sunflowers: bright yellows of the full bloom to arid browns of wilting and death; all of the stages woven through these polar opposites are presented. Perhaps this very technique is what draws one into the painting; the fulfillment of seeing all angles of the spectrum of life and in turn reaching a deeper understanding of how all living things are tied together.” References Artchive.com, viewed 28 Apr. 10 Artelino, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, Artelino, viewed 28 Apr. 10, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Salvador Dali, viewed 28 Apr. 10, Harding, Elizabeth, Analysis of the Sunflowers, e-Zine articles, viewed 28 Apr. 10, Hoving, Thomas, Art for Dummies, Dummies.com, viewed 28 Apr. 10 Moffat, Charles, The Most Famous Artist of the Twentieth Century, Art History Archive, viewed 28 Apr. 10, Picasso.net, Biography, Pablo Picasso, viewed 28 Apr. 10, Van Gogh Gallery, Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers, van Gogh Gallery, viewed 28 Apr. 10, < http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/sunflowerindex.html> Wikipedia, viewed 28 Apr. 10, Read More