Jean-Michel Basquiat was, and still is, an artist whose paintings opened people’s minds and influenced others. While I was watching this documentary, I didn’t really understand the meaning behind his work. I thought it was just him randomly painting these meaningless pieces that looked like something a five-year old did. Also, I was shocked by how rude he could be to others. However, I found that the more I continued to watch, the more I began to understand what he was trying to do. First, even though Basquiat had his moments where he could be a little rude, I started to understand that he was just his own person. As stated in the documentary, he didn’t like when people tried to direct him or tell him what they wanted in his work. In this way,
he was preserving his individuality and not letting people control him. This is a very important trait for everyone to have. Even though he may have gone about it in a harsh manner, it is not hard to see his purpose for acting this way. Artistically, I personally don’t like Basquiat’s style of painting, but I loved how his pieces had a symbolic meaning. In viewing these works, the definition of looking versus seeing made more sense. Any regular person would look at Basquiat’s artwork would automatically think, “This is art?! This looks like a child’s drawing.” What some fail to see is how Basquiat utilizes this technique to symbolize the things that were going on at that time and to tell the viewer about himself. Some things he touched on in his paintings were police brutality, poverty, and others. I also liked how he utilized color to bring about emotion in the viewer. The few paintings I saw had really bright and bold colors.
Jean Piaget became fascinated with the reasons behind why children cannot correctly answer questions that require logical thinking. Piaget was the first psychologist to conduct an organized study of the intellectual advancement in children. Before Piaget’s study, many believed children were merely less efficient thinkers than adults. Due to his study, however, Piaget proved children think in remarkably different ways than adults. Children are born with a very primitive mental complex that is genetically inherited and learned on which all the following knowledge and learning is based (McLeod, 2015).
Basquiat was a creative, self-taught artist who thought outside of the box when it came to painting. Most of the pieces he made were a collaboration of different ideas and constructed them together into a collage. During the 1980’s, Basquiat’s art used the human figure to portray Minimalism and Conceptualism. His target market that was in many of his pieces was on suggestive dichotomies that focused on the lower class versus the higher class. Even though Basquiat's work was remarkable, he was criticized and faced some challenges during his journey because of the symbols and words that were used in his paintings.
The color variation of this piece embraces a bit of pop art, which indicates the huge influence that Andy Warhol had on Basquiat at the time. A Lot of the clippings are bold but their color schemes are different such as the President Kennedy picture contrast with the superhero clippings contrast within dark red and light red with Kennedy’s picture. The mood of the painting expresses sadness and despair, but eagerness for hope.
Though people can look into color and composition, others can still even look into the source of the art itself. Cole goes deeper, delving into the source of the art, looking in particular into the idea of cultural appropriation and the view a person can give others. Though it is good for people to be exposed to different opinions of a group or an object, sometimes people can find it difficult to tell the difference between the reality and the art itself. Sometimes art can be so powerful that its message stays and impacts its audience to the point where the viewer’s image of the subject of the art changes entirely. Cole brings up an important question about art, however. Art has become some kind of media for spreading awareness and even wisdom at times, but in reality, “there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images” (973). Cole might even be implying that Nussbaum’s advertisement can sometimes be the point of some media, and that sometimes the different genres of art can just be to make someone with a particular interest happy. One more point that Cole makes is that “[a]rt is always difficult, but it is especially difficult when it comes to telling other people’s stories.” (974) Truthfully, awareness and other like-concepts are difficult to keep going when a person or a group is not directly involved.
Jacques Cartier is a well-known British explorer who was born on the French seaport of Saint- Malo, there was not a lot documented on Cartier’s’ early life before he made his great discoveries. He is one of the most highly respected sailor, and navigator of his time his voyages left a mark on the world. Jacques Cartier went on three main voyages in all of these voyages he discovered something new that benefited the world around him during his time of living. Jacques Cartier left his mark on the world when he was alive, but what did Cartier’s voyages discoveries do that benefit the world we live in today?
Throughout the 1980’s, the graffiti scene was very familiar with the name “Basquiat.” Jean-Michel Basquiat is an American graffiti artist who was born in Brooklyn, New York. His artwork is mostly defined as neo-expressionism with a bit of primitivism. His medium was usually a combination of oils, acrylics and spray cans. One could look at Basquiat’s pieces and say they are as if a child scribbled on a canvas, but to me, there is more than that. I admire Basquiat not for what he is, but for what he is not. I believe it requires a lot of bravery to showcase your art that is less than perfect as in the social standards for fine art. Basquiat did just that and was still well respected for it. I feel as if he conquered in keeping his childhood creativity
René Magritte Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte was a master not only of the obvious, but of the obscure as well. In his artwork, Magritte toyed with everyday objects, human habits and emotions, placing them in foreign contexts and questioning their familiar meanings. He suggested new interpretations of old things in his deceivingly simple paintings, making the commonplace profound and the rational irrational. He painted his canvasses in the same manner as he lived his life -- in strange modesty and under constant analysis. Magritte was born in 1898 in the small town of Lessines, a cosmopolitan area of Belgium that was greatly influenced by the French.
Philosophy has been around for a very long time, and there are many famous philosophers that have created theories that we now use today. During the early 1900’s a very famous philosopher was born that we know as Jean Paul Sartre. He was born in 1905, a year the wars broke out. Jean was the only child as the parents of Jean Babtiste Sartre and Anne Marie Schweitzer. His father was a very well known officer in the Navy. His father died while he was still a child. He then went and grew up with his grandfather. He started studying at the École Normale Supérieure in1924 and then graduated in 1929. During his schooling he received his doctorate in Philosophy. A couple years later he became a Professor of Philosophy at Le Havre in 1931. He then taught at the Lycée Pasteur located in Paris from 1937 until 1939. When he was done teaching in 1939 he was drafted into the French army. In the French army he served as a meteorologist. While his time serving he was captured by the German troops in 1940. He was captured and had to serve nine months as a prisoner. His time as a prisoner he spent writing. After he was released and returned to the city, Sartre and many other writers joined with a group which was known as underground group Socialisme et Liberté. The group did not in fact last long, but Sartre decided to continue with his writing in place of participating in active resistance. Shortly after theories and writing he published two of his writings he had been working on. They are famously known as “Being and Nothingness” and “The Flies and No Exit”.
The world is a place of chaos nowadays. At every turn of a corner, there is desolation triggered from humanity's sidetracked views of what the world is about. With all this deception and superficiality, pureness in the human soul seems almost non-existent. Michel de Montaigne recognizes the essential need of this purity for the improvement of society in his Essays. Although the main topics he is focusing own are his own nature, own habits, and own opinions, he uses these personal vignettes to illustrate larger truths about man and his behaviors, his strengths and weaknesses. He subtly forces us to see the materialistic ideals that supposedly make us "happy" and dares us to see how it has tainted our minds and souls. Through his work he sets out to encourage man in the careful study of himself, in order to understand life and the world around him.
As a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu focuses on the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics of power relations in life, which opposes Western traditions. He conceptualizes the notions of habitus and field, which disclose the construction in human society, which, according to him, should not be understood as applying a set of rules. Echoing Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, Bourdieu intents to analyze the interrelationship between social structure and social practice. His arguments are around a reconciliation of both external power generated from social structure and internal power produced by subjective individuality.
John Paul Sartre is known as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He wrote many philosophical works novels and plays. Much of his work is tied into politics. The essay Existentialism is a Humanism is just one of his many works. Existentialism is a Humanism is a political essay that was written in 1945. Its purpose was to address a small public during World War II in Nazi occupied France. This essay stressed the public not to conform. Sartre introduced a great number of philosophical concepts in Existentialism. Two of these concepts are anguish and forlornness. They are simply defined, as anguish is feeling responsible for yourself as well as others and knowing that your actions affect others and forlornness is realizing that you are alone in your decisions. These two concepts are interwoven throughout the essay and throughout many of Sartre's other works. Sartre's view of anguish and forlornness in Existentialism is a Humanism addresses his view of life and man.
Most western Philosophies and monotheistic traditions base the creation of man as a design of god. God is the primary artisan that is the creator for all, and god’s conception of man is conceived before the creation of man. For Sartre this means that because god created humanity through a conception, it must mean that we are all created to that conception and are created with a purpose, or as Sartre defines human nature (Sartre, p.206-207).
The theories of Jacques Lacan give explanation and intention to the narrator’s actions throughout the novel “Surfacing”. Although Margaret Atwood may not have had any knowledge of the French psychoanalyst’s philosophies, I feel that both were making inferences on behavior and psychology and that the two undeniably synchronize with each other. I will first identify the complex philosophies of Jacques Lacan and then demonstrate how the narrator falls outside of Lacan’s view of society and how this leads to her demand for retreat from that society in order to become ‘whole’.
When most people think of Paul Cezanne, they think of two words genius and painting. For these two words he is consider by far to be the Father of modern painting. Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839. He was to die in the same town in 1906.
Modern French dramatist, Jean Anouilh, is a great tragic playwright of the twentieth century. His best known work is Antigone, a modern version of Sophocles' tragedy. Anouilh's Antigone also provides a commentary on the Nazi occupation of France. In rewriting the myth in modern times, Anouilh revives the issue of free will under the power of the state. Sophocles' tragedy is set in Greece, but Anouilh wishes to indicate the timeless, universal nature of this conflict of human law versus divine law.