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Louise Bourgeois and Constantine Brancusi were both two artists that had very abstract pieces of art. Though the two artists had very different pieces of work they also shared a lot in common. Bourgeois and Constantine both had very visually dramatic styles of art that focused on sexuality and reproduction in forms of the human body. In this paper I will be talking about both artists backgrounds and works as well as what they share in similiarity and the underlying message of their work. Louise Bourgeiois was born in Paris in 1911 and lived in New York until her death in 2010. Much of her artwork was inspired from her early childhood that she spent in France. The human body was Burgoeiois primary form of art, as she made multipe sculptures …show more content…
I believe that the pieces were a lot more powerful rather than straightforward. At first glance I believe that Constantin Bracusi’s art was a bit more simple in comparison to Burgoeioi’s more complex looking pieces. However both artists had very powerful rather than straightforward pieces that had underlying meanings. Burgoeiois did explain that her piece “Cumul” did derive from the Freudian concept of a trauamatized childhood. Knowing her background with both her parents and childhood growing up it is safe to say that it had a profround effect on her growing up. She did also confirm that all of her artwork is inspired from pieces of her childhood. Based off of what we know it is safe to say that her artwork has underlying messages. Many of the overlapping female and male body parts symbolize her childhood and the overlapping gender roles and female and male figures that she had in her own life. Similiar to Burgoeiois, Constantin Brancusi has underlying meanings in his artwork as well. His piece “The Kiss” is meant to show the love of two people and how they become blinded from the outside world. “Mile Pogany” was a sculpture that was greatly ridiculed when first presented because of how the woman is made to be portrayed. Though i’m not too clear on the meaning on this I think Brancusi was trying to show how this woman’s personality was. He made her head to be shaped out to be an egg and took out her
Mary Hellmann is an artist that enjoys being in the spotlight.Hellmann participates in several pieces of art that are abstract and expressionist. Every line and every square in her art has a story and they play a part in the artist’s mind.Hellmann’s art is based on real life images, but she alters them to meet with her desires of that place or of that memory.With her titles, color, scale and music metaphor, she is able to express emotion and iconography.
... masculine compared to soft paintings of Vigee Le Brun. Adelaide’s works were so good and beautiful and many thought that her lover did her works that is due to discrimination of women and belief that women cannot be as good of an artists as men. She brought attention to this issue and it worked to be a positive advertisement for her.
In her poems Christina Rossetti references the loss of innocence stemming from premarital sexual encounters. In both the poems “An Apple Gathering” and “Cousin Kate”, Rossetti tells stories of women who lost their purity before marriage, and therefore deemed outcasts of society. These acts of dalliance exhibit how the loss of innocence can affect a Victorian woman’s life. Each poem begins with the introduction of the women who pursued physical relationships, followed by their abandonment by men, and thus, living their lives as outcasts.
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
Prior to the 20th century, female artists were the minority members of the art world (Montfort). They lacked formal training and therefore were not taken seriously. If they did paint, it was generally assumed they had a relative who was a relatively well known male painter. Women usually worked with still lifes and miniatures which were the “lowest” in the hierarchy of genres, bible scenes, history, and mythological paintings being at the top (Montfort). To be able to paint the more respected genres, one had to have experience studying anatomy and drawing the male nude, both activities considered t...
Women in pictorial history have often been used as objects; figures that passively exist for visual consumption or as catalyst for male protagonists. Anne Hollander in her book Fabric of Vision takes the idea of women as objects to a new level in her chapter “Women as Dress”. Hollander presents the reader with an argument that beginning in the mid 19th century artists created women that ceased to exist outside of their elegantly dressed state. These women, Hollander argues, have no body, only dress. This concept, while persuasive, is lacking footing which I will attempt to provide in the following essay. In order to do this, the work of James Tissot (b. 1836 d. 1902) will further cement the idea of “women as dress” while the work of Berthe
Art historians have sought for a century to understand the motivation that drove Mary Cassatt against critical opinion and away from her early subject matter toward her series of Mothers and their Children that occupied her for what is now considered to be the prime of her artistic career. The series somewhat resembles the familiar images of Madonna of Child in visual organization, yet the level of intimacy shared by her subjects, while comparable in its level of intensity is set apart by the total absorption of her subjects in their own shared moment, completely independent and entirely unaware of the viewer’s presence. This was a controversial and highly progressive step at a time when the majority of art was painted by men, assumed a male viewership, and treated female subjects primarily as erotic objects of the male gaze. Completed in 1880, Mother about to Wash her Sleepy Child is one of the early paintings in the series, and is typical in its structure as well as its highly intimate subject matter.
The contrasts between depth and surface, figure and landscape, promiscuity and modesty, beauty and vulgarity all present themselves in de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle. Although the figure is a seemingly normal woman out for an afternoon with her bike, she becomes so much more through the artist’s use of color, contrast, and composition. The exotic nature of woman presents itself in her direct stare and slick buxom breasts in spite of a nearly indiscernible figure. It is understood that, on the whole, de Kooning did not paint with a purpose in mind, but rather as an opportunity to create an experience, however, that does not go to say that there isn’t some meaning that can come of this work. Even Willem de Kooning once said that art is not everything that is in it, but what you can take out of it (Hess p.144).
It seeks a balance through process: masculinity with femininity; organic form with geometric shape; two dimensions with three dimensionalities. Balance comes when there is a cohesion of parts in complete harmony. To maintain balance, it is essential to engage the qualities of the antitheses. The work embodies a feminine sensitivity through the bright vibrant colors, softer tones, and the organic nature of the abstraction – the forms are created with industrial tools traditionally associated with conditions of masculinity. The juxtapositions of the organic, fluid nature of the paint, with the imposed geometric shapes produces a resonance and harmonic integration. Although original to a set of ideas responsive to feminist discourse, the polemic of the work is rendered through a medium-atic investigation, producing a transcendent
The collage consists of a group of photographs of Breton and other key surrealists such as Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dal and Max Ernst. These figures, with their eyes closed, became representative of the surrealist’s fascination with accessing the unconscious through the dream-like state. But it is the painting in the middle of the collage that forms the initial focus of our attention. The image presents a nude woman, who, modestly covering her breasts, appears to be concealing herself from the viewer. Anne Marsh suggests that Magritte’s collage is perhaps the most literal rendition of the sexually driven male gaze.
This essay focuses on the way Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” articulates the tension between the spirit and the empirical world. Hawthorne challenges the empirical world Rappaccini, both malevolent for his experimentation with human nature and sympathetic for his love for his daughter, represents, by raising an aesthetic question Rappaccini implicitly asks. Hawthorne never conclusively answers this question in his quest to preserve spiritual beauty in an empirical world, offering the most disturbing possibility of all: could art and the artist prove as fatal to the human spirit as empiricism?
I look to other artists for inspiration and affirmation in regards to my work. I am certainly not the first artist to portray ideas of the body and its fragility. Hannah Wilke, whose work dealt with ideas of beauty and vulnerability, is perhaps one of more influential artists for me. While her work greatly differs from mine, I believe that fundamentally she was asking similar questions of society through her work as I am. When I first saw her work, I felt f...
She was born in 1887 near the small town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Throughout her early life she received art training at many different institutes, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Students League of New York, the University of Virginia, and Columbia University’s Teachers College, New York. She also became an art teacher and taught at many
This essay will compare and contrast two works of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that raise the question of the role in gender in art. The first is Edgar Degas’s, A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers painted in 1865, an oil on canvas. The second is Berthe Morisot’s, Young Woman Seated on a Sofa painted around 1879, also an oil on canvas. Both of these artworks have similarities in subject matter and composition; they both contain a seated woman and flowers. Their differences, however, make the two paintings seem like they are hardly about the same subject at all. The differences between Degas’s A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers and Morisot’s Young Woman Seated on a Sofa are indicative of not just how different Impressionists portrayed the same subject different ways, but more importantly, how the artist’s gender affects the portrayal of woman in their paintings, that male artists had a tendency to show woman in ways that suggested decoration, instead of actual entities in the world they occupied.
The purpose of the present paper is to discuss a very interesting piece of art, Fra Filippo Lippi's “Portrait of a woman with a man at a Casement”. I will begin by the analysis of the formal qualities of the painting such as the composition, the color, line, texture, proportion, balance, contrast and rhythm. I will then discuss how the work fits a certain stylistic category. I will demonstrate that the painting reflects the social and cultural trends of the period in which it was created.