Meret Oppenheim
Meret Oppenheim is a figure renowned for her disturbingly fur-lined contribution to the Surrealist movement that defined her art career. This Swiss artist was born on October 6, 1913 in Berlin, Germany and grew up both there and in Switzerland. Uninterested in the mundane routine of high school, Oppenheim abandoned this lifestyle without graduating and moved to Paris in 1932 at the age of eighteen. Her family background of creative individuals supported her artistic goals as she enrolled in the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where she then studied irregularly. Shortly after, she became absorbed in Surrealism. This movement became an escape for the feminist desiring to avoid the traditional societal roles of a woman.
Paris provided great opportunities for the young artist and she met many famous figures of the movement. She became recognizable after modeling for Man Ray who produced a series of notable and controversial photographs that featured her in the nude. Additionally, Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti invited her to display work at the Surrealist exhibition at...
...t way, like Varley’s 1930 Vera, she remains a mystery, a forgotten artist, best known for he work as a muse, model, and wife. It is often wondered what kind of work she would have done if she had remained single mindedly focused on her art like the famous Emily Carr
After Rosa was expelled the second time her father decided to train her to become an artist. She was a very good student and mostly p ainted animals and landscapes. She often sold her works to older art students. She was know as a realist painter (Rosa Bonheur Facts).
Art could be displayed in many different forms; through photography, zines, poetry, or even a scrapbook. There are many inspirational women artists throughout history, including famous women artists such Artemisia Gentileschi and Georgia O’Keeffe. When searching for famous female artists that stood out to me, I found Frida Kahlo, and Barbara Kruger. Two very contrasting type of artists, though both extremely artistic. Both of these artists are known to be feminists, and displayed their issues through painting and photography. Frida Kahlo and Barbara Kruger’s social and historical significance will be discussed.
She was dedicated to preserve her legacy by involving in multiple field, instead of only focus on painting, her works in fashion field actually increased her larger popularity more. One of her illustrations which done for the Vogue magazine cover in 1926 (pic.1) was the most impressed one. With Sonia’s signature style, the title “VOGUE” was consisted of various geometrical color blocks, the “G” of Vogue is also the head of two walking models, who are wearing richly decorated oversized coats. The strong contrast of colors stimulated the spectators’ eyeballs, the abstract color blocks that formed the recognizable subject matter which showed Sonia’s creativity to blend her own artistic style into practical use, since most of her work does not include any subject matters. By the body gestures of the two female models depicted on the cover, we could tell how confident they are, to think deeper, it could also be considered as the artist herself to express her confidence through her work. Through the mainstream media such as magazines, or practical items like clothing and fabrics, Delaunay was exposed to popular fields and successfully gained fame due to her innovative creativity. Although she did not go through too much discrimination as being a Jewish during her stage of pursuing proper artistic skill training, Sonia was a recluse in the 1940, she left Paris and moved to Southern France in order to get rid of the German Occupation and persecution, she kept being low keyed and worked quietly for 10 years, before she regained her career in the 1950s.
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman’s photography is part of the culture and investigation of sexual and racial identity within the visual arts since the 1970’s. It has been said that, “The bulk of her work…has been constructed as a theater of femininity as it is formed and informed by mass culture…(her) pictures insist on the aporia of feminine identity tout court, represented in her pictures as a potentially limitless range of masquerades, roles, projections” (Sobieszek 229).
Throughout history art has played a major role in society. It started out with paintings and went to photography and eventually to films. Artistic interpretation depended on whom the artist was and what he or she wanted to present to the audience. When it came to portraiture, whether it was paintings or photography, the idea of mimesis was very important. However important this may have been, the portraits were mostly products of the media and fashions during that time period. Whatever was popular during the time was used such as columns or curtains in the background. The face was the main focus in the painting and there was little focus on the body. Later on during photography the body was focused on more. Even though photography was used much later after paintings were used, it allowed the artist even more artistic interpretation because of the ability to play a different role and not having to be ones self. The artists that will be focused on are Frida Kahlo and Cindy Sherman. They lived during different periods and their artistic intentions varied because of that. They also had similarities in that they thought outside of the conventional roles. These women were both self-portraiture artists and although they were considered that their interpretations did not always make their portraits self-portraits. Traditionally the artist was an outsider, but when it came to self-portraiture they became the subject and the audience became the outsider. The similarities and differences of Frida Kahlo and Cindy Sherman’s art were tied into the strength and also vulnerability they had because of their roles as women. They wanted the audience to see a background story to the portraits and not just an image of a beautiful face.
Mary Cassatt was most widely known for her impressionist pieces that depicted mother (or nanny) and child. She was faced with many struggles throughout her life and received much criticism, even after her death in 1926. She found it difficult to receive appropriate recognition for her pieces during her early career. Many were unaccepted by the Salon. Cassatt lived for many years in France after her successful career, which ended abruptly when she went blind. Her talent placed her pieces in many famous museums throughout the world and landed her name among the famous artists of her time. As well as paving the way for powerful women, like herself. She lived during a time of suffragettes searching for equality.
Feminist issues have played an important role in creating ideas for female artists to use in their work. Putting out controversial themes such as this promotes individual thought on the topic of feminism. Kruger and Höch both took it upon themselves to put out these ideas through many of their key artworks. In 1920, Höch came out with her photomontage, Das Schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl) (Fig. 1), which at the time was one of very few photomontages that Dada artists had included female figures in. (Hemus, 104). In this particular work she puts together many different images that create a certain meaning that the viewer is left to interpret. She uses a fema...
Surrealism in the 1920s was defined as a fantastic arrangement of materials that influenced Miró, due to the fact that he was one of the most original and sympathetic artists during the Surrealism periods. Miró was born into the Catalan culture in April 20,1893 in Barcelona, Spain (Munro 288). Having to be born into the Catalan culture gave Miró an opportunity to have an intense nationalist activity. In which much attention was paid not only to political expressions of the need for autonomy, but also to the re-Catalanizing of every day life (Higdon 1).
Many associate the Berlin Dada movement with Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader, Hans Richter, George Grosz, John Heartfield and Weiland Herzfelde, and very few associate the art movement with Hannah Hoch. Although Hoch was overshadowed by her male contemporaries, she did not hesitate from being an active member of the Berlin Dada creating timeless and critical artworks. She is best known for being a pioneer in photomontage, a technique that was instrumental not just for Hoch, but for many Berlin Dadaists. Her most well-known photomontages are satirical and political commentaries on Weimar’s redefinition of the social roles of women, also known as the concept of the “new woman”. If during her early years she would create artworks that attempted to portray the concept of the “new woman”, in her later years she began creating artworks that responded to this new Weimarian
Man Ray, film maker of Étoile de mer, began his career as an American painter and photographer. During his lifetime he became a prominent leader in the Dada and Surrealist society and was one of the only Americans to do this. He spent most of his career in photography; this is where he made his biggest impact on 20th century art. “The more commercial aspects of Many Ray’s photography provided him with a steady income. Famous as a portrait photographer, in the 1920s and 1930s he was also one of the foremost fashion photographers for magazines such as Harper’s Basaar, Vu and Vogue” (Foresta 2009). Man Ray was also very involved in avant-garde art. He worked with Duchamp and Katherine Dreier to co-found an organization called the Société Anonyme, which was “one of the first organizations to promote and collect avant-garde art” (Foresta 2009). After a while Ray began to feel like American’s were not appreciating his work for what it is and that never would, but Paris might.
Munch popularity is due to his extraordinary ability to convey a deep and raw emotion from the unconscious onto the canvas leaving it to the viewers to interpret, feel and reflect. He stood out from other artists of his time, as he varied away from the norms and focused on the feelings and state of the work, rather than details and perfection. Anxiety evolved as the main point of Munch art. This essay goes through Edvard Munch’s childhood focusing on the events that caused him anxiety, how the anxiety affected his relationship with women and love, and how his idea of anxiety was supported by the theories of Søren Kierkegaard. These elements act as a support of an analysis of three of his works ‘Evening on Karl Johan’, ‘Melancholy’ and ‘The woman in three stages’. This essay should be seen as a work within the subject Visual Arts as it analyses three works of Munch focusing on anxiety. The analysis will contain an analysis of the form, content and context of each of the works. Having experienced the Edvard Munch: Angst/Anxiety exhibition at AROS Museum of Art in Aarhus, Denmark, I found and developed curiosity and inspiration to this essay. I find it worthy of a study as Munch changed the view and concept of art, and provided the public with a concept of art that was not the norm around the 19th centu...
He started to explore female figures in the 1940’s but it was not till 1950 he started to do female figures exclusively. He had his work shown in the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953 which caused a sensation because they were mainly figures of his fellow abstractionists and they were painted with blatant technique and imagery. He applied his medium in such a way that it looks as though it was vomited on but to reveal a woman in what would seam as some mens most widely held sexual fears.
Green 1 Controlled Chaos: The Impact of Surrealism on the Art World The Surrealist movement that began in the 1920’s, was unlike anything the art world had ever seen before. While Surrealist painters borrowed techniques from previous “ism” movements, for example Impressionism and Cubism, the prominent painters of this movement had acquired a new, shocking style all their own. Surrealism, as an art movement, stressed the importance of expanding one’s mind in order to welcome other depictions of ‘reality’. Surrealist artists channelled their subconscious and their works reflected images of total mind liberation. Unlike the art movements before it, Surrealism came the closest to truly reflecting the human dreamlike state. While this essay will explore the purpose, techniques and lasting impact of the Surrealist art movement, it should be noted that this movement transcended the boundaries of the image arts world. The influence of Surrealism can be felt in the fields of literature, film, music and philosophy, among others. The Surrealist movement started in 1920’s Europe, with Paris as the unofficial basis for the movement. Surrealism is usually linked with the Dada movement. Dadaism attacked the conventional forms of aesthetics and it stressed how absurd and unpredictable the process of artistic creation was. They created pieces of ‘non-art’ to show, out of protest, how meaningless European culture had become (de la Croix 705). The Dada movement was declared dead around 1922 when it had become ‘too organised‘ a movement, but it planted the seeds for Surrealism (de la Croix 706). While the Dada movement provided the basis for Surrealism, Surrealism was lighter and much less violent than its predecessor. Dadaism provided a basis for Su...
Surrealism is an art movement that began with Andre Breton in the 1920’s, and is still very prevalent today. It has spawned some of the world’s most mysterious and enigmatic works of art, from ‘The Persistance of Memory’ by Salvador Dali, to Joan Miro’s ‘Throwing a Stone at a Bird.’