Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. He immigrated from Russian to United States with his mother and sister when he was 10year old to join his father “a violently anti-religious” in Portland, Oregon. His father left Russian due to his fear that his elder sons were about to be drafted into the imperial Russian Army. In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York’s garment district. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. This was the beginning of his life as an artist. He later enrolled in the Parsons the New School for Design. Where one of his instructors was the artist and class monitor Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the American avant-garde. However, the two men never became close, due to Gorky's dominating …show more content…
." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color." Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes. His style was already evolving in the direction of his renowned later works. Despite this newfound exploration of color, Rothko turned his attention to other formal and stylistic innovations, inaugurating a period of surrealist paintings influenced by mythological fables and symbols. Rothko's work later matured from representation and mythological subjects into rectangular fields of color and light, culminating in his final works for the Rothko Chapel. Between his early style of primitivist and playful urban scenes, and his later style of transcendent color fields, was a long period of transition. This development was marked by two important events in Rothko's life: the onset of World War II, and his reading of Friedrich
During Vincent Van Gogh’s childhood years, and even before he was born, impressionism was the most common form of art. Impressionism was a very limiting type of art, with certain colors and scenes one must paint with. A few artists had grown tired of impressionism, however, and wanted to create their own genre of art. These artists, including Paul Gaugin, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Cezanne, hoped to better express themselves by painting ...
Imagine being stuck in a chair for five hours while someone transformed your face into some monster. John Matuszak had to tackle that challenge everyday of his acting job in The Goonies. John’s legacy still lives on for a few decades after his death in the role of Sloth. For him, it was nothing compared to his NFL career. John was an amazing defensive end, mostly for the Oakland Raiders. The phrase Renaissance man truly defines John Matuszak.
Visually, both Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII and Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 constitute a chaotic arrangement of colors and images with no apparent relation to one another. The randomly scattered paint, large canvas, and over-clamped figures all build a similar visual chaos in both paintings. Despite the mayhem, the two paintings differ in the inner emotions each artist wanted to express and the nature of the “chaos.” While for Kandinsky the chaos represents the smooth and melodic sentiments raised by music, for Pollock the chaos depicts the more spontaneous and impulsive emotions. The authors’ differing goals lead Kandinsky to ponder and refine his painting to capture a more universal theme and Pollock to develop his “drip” painting method
On December 2, 1859, in Paris, Georges Seurat was born. He was the third child of Ernestine Faivre of Paris and Antoine Chrysostome Seurat of Champagne (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation). Seurat had an interest in drawing at an early age. Seurat first attended school at the municipal school of Justin Lequien (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation). He was then enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he was taught by Henri Lehmann (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation). Seurat was deeply influenced by his teacher who was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Pioch). Other influences in Seurat’s life included Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya. Much of the education that he received here resulted in his curiosity of the theory of contrasts (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation). In 1879, Seurat enrolled in the military. Seurat only served a year in the military at Breton coast. After his service, he returned to Paris (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation).
Arieh Klein was a Jew born in 1927 in Zilina, Slovakia. During the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 Arieh’s parents got a phone call to escape Slovakia because the Germans were advancing. Arieh’s family moved to the village of Kaliste. The Germans, however, also arrived in Kaliste, and the Klein’s were advised to stay in a cottage with the rest of the village. However, Arieh’s father didn’t go out of fear of it being too dangerous with so many people in one place. He made a good decision because every person in that cottage was killed. A year had passed. Arieh went to the other side of the village and his leg was shot in some crossfire. He went to an abandoned house, occupied by 2 other boys, in order to bandage his wounds. The German’s then followed Arieh to the house, set it on fire, and shot the 2 other boys. Arieh escaped, barely, and went back to his parents, but his mom died of typhoid that day. Arieh then went to the hospital for his leg only to find out that it needed to be amputated. From these pictures we’re basically the same kids. We both have stuffed animals and we’re both are 3 in the pictures, but the boy on the left lost most of his family, his leg, and suffered only because he was a Jew.
After the 1940 surrender of Paris, which many Americans viewed as the fall of culture due to Paris’ status as the international mecca for the arts, it was evident that the world required a new and superior cultural hub. Throughout the 1940s American artists, with the influence of European Modern and Surrealist painters, were able to elevate New York City to the center of the art world by implementing a “new, strong, and original” artistic style that simultaneously fought fascist ideology: Abstract Expressionism (Guilbault 65). After the war, galleries throughout Europe exhibited American Abstract art, Rothko’s in particular, to prove that American art, once thought tasteless, possessed artistic depth and merit (“Mark Rothko”). Therefore, Abstract Expression had a major role in making New York City the worldwide cultural metropolis that it is today. In terms of shifts in worldview, Abstract Expressionism placed a great importance on intense emotion and spirituality in a society where religiousness was, and continues to be, replaced by other, often self-centered or materialistic, pursuits. The movement allowed and encouraged the public to explore their darkest fears and woes, which, in the wake of the Second World War and, later on, during the Cold War was likely therapeutic. Above all else, it made society recognize that art should no longer be viewed with suspicion; instead, it should be accepted as an integral element of culture
Pioch, N. (2002, Jul 16). WebMuseum: Pollock, Jackson. Retrieved 3 30, 2014, from Pollock, Jackson: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/
In the early twentieth century, the Russian born painter Wassily Kandinsky, was well known as the leader of the abstract movement. Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 4, 1866, in which he discovered his love for drawing and painting. Kandinsky was inspired by Monet which resulted in the desire for him to experiment different ways using color on canvas. Kandinsky’s love for art started when he was just a young boy. His parents were both interested in music; however, their marriage ended in divorce leaving five-year-old Kandinsky with his aunt in Odessa. With his aunt he learned to play the piano and cello in grammar school and also studied drawing with a couch. Kandinsky followed the wishes of his parents and went to law school at University of Moscow. After he realized that a career in law wasn’t for him, he decided to abandon his career and move to Munich to devote his time and effort to art (Bio.com 1).
The painting was done near the beginning of the twentieth century when science was developing at a rapid rate. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was gaining ground at the time. Malevich's painting seemed to borrow from this theory that attempted to explain relative motion. His suprematism style attempted to capture a neo-realism in painting portraying pure feeling and perception. This new style was communicated by the discarding of natural references. Malevich grew tired of painting in the traditional style with everything looking and feeling the way they are in life. His new style tried to free viewer from their traditional a priori views concerning shape and colors imposed on them by their senses. Suprematist style focuses was on depictions of movement and dynamism. Flight and anti-gravity fascinated Malevich. Much of his paintings were a top down view of the subjects arranged on a white background. The white background represents infinite space, while the subjects were reduced to geometric blocks. The message of the paintings comes out in the relative position of the blocks to the background. The infinite background of the paintings is to divorce the paintings from the finite earth. Malevich himself said that his paintings "do not belong to the earth exclusively." The paintings sought to transcend to a different level. Malevich's suprematist style sought to take people to the fourth dimension, which was pure sensation.
Kasimir Malevich, a Russian painter and designer, was born near Kiev on February 26, 1878 (Guggeheimcollection.org) and was “one of six children from Russified Poles” (Articons.co.uk). While living in Ukraine, he became absorbed into art during his teens, “largely teaching himself” the basics (Articons.co.uk). After saving his money “from his job as a railroad clerk” (Articons.co.uk), Malevich enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in 1903 and began to study art more seriously. Later he trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts and “produced portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes” in his early stages of his career (Artstudio.com).
While living in Paris, Van Gogh was first introduced to impressionist art and was inspired by the color and light. “Inspired by these artists, he brightened his own palette and
They worked with, for, and alongside the politics of the time. The equality for all that they sought would eventually take from them the freedom of their own artistic individuality. The Russian Revolution energized the artists to expand their social influence to produce statements that could inspire human aspirations. Rodchenko and El Lissitzky approached their avant-garde art practice in visually similar ways, but theoretically they varied considerably. Victor Margolin (1997) explored the two artists’ principal approaches to building their art and their commitment to the political influences of the time within his first essay in The Struggle for Utopia.
...1. Influenced by the futurists and is known to have been one of the founders of Constructivism, he left painting because of its decorative aspect and subjectivity. He was more interested in carrying on a universal language and believed that art should serve a cause. In these harsh terms he completely discarded painting, saying “Down with art if it is an escape route from a meaningless life! Not for art that reproduces the external world, prettifying it with a decorative mantle, but for a constructive art that reflects our way of life.” (The Future is our only Goal) This quote is embedded in my mind as I think of Rodchenko’s line of work and how he was against the painterly aesthetic but managed to undertake painting once again in his last years of his career. A medium that he left forgotten throughout his work describes both the start and end of his career.
"To me he seemed like a trapped man, whose only wish was to be left alone, to the peace of his own art and to the tragic destiny to which he, like most of his countrymen, has been forced to resign himself." Nicholas Nabokov on meeting Shostakovich in 1949 in New York
Cubism takes the opposite route for the same effect. Solid lines are drawn, but the painting itself is usually more abstract (as with Picasso). At times it can be difficult to discern what some paintings are supposed to represent. Bright, vivid colors infuse the pieces with more passion. The contrast between those not well defined objects and the punch of emotion gives cubism its personality and vitality.