Week 11 -- Video Reviews

1. Explain why you selected each of the FOUR videos you choose from the selection listed above.
The videos I have chosen were: Matisse and Picasso, Expressionism, The Impact of Cubism, and Dada and Surrealism. I chose these four films because they were the ones that stood out to me the most, especially in the readings. When I was reading the chapter, they seemed to catch my eye; therefore I wanted to learn more about them, so I chose these four to watch the videos on and it really made me learn a lot more in depth instead of just reading. These were very interesting films and I really enjoyed watching them.


2. For each video list/discuss the key concepts you learned.
Matisse and Picasso:
This film documents the complicated relationship between two indomitable personae. Matisse was serene, self-indulgent father figure. Picasso was the eternal adolescent and fiery primitive. The video employs archival photos and film clips, stunning images of painting and sculptures, and firsthand recollections of the Picasso and Matisse circles, illuminating the intersecting creative journeys of both artists. Picasso and Matisse had been broken with tradition with the establishment. Gertrude Stein was the first to recognize Matisse’s greatness in 1905 as well as Picasso. Matisse and Picasso were two very different artists. Matisse is deliberate, rational, and very French in the way he organized his thoughts. Picasso was a worker, impulsive, and immerses himself in his painting. Picasso and Matisse had two very different styles of painting as well. Picasso invents his first collage in 1912. this was at the forefront of cubism. A Russian collector buys 20 of Matisse’s paintings and 50 of Picasso’s. Matisse used Paris for inspiration. In 1917, he found the light he wanted to paint by in Nice, France. This was considered to be an at o cutting loose and leaving everything behind. Picasso’s life has turned upside down in the 1920s in Paris. Matisse had a passion for decorative pattern and motifs, this set u a “domestic harem”. Picasso parodies his work in order to provoke Matisse. In 1930, Matisse arrived in New York. He was treated like a star by America and he received the Carnegie Prize, the Nobel of the art world. Picasso did not travel, but he worked in solitude in his studio. He worked at night when he was “as close as possible to the unconscious”. He did not use a pallet or an easel. Unlike Picasso, Matisse worked by the clock on a regular schedule. The painting season for Matisse brought anxiety and fear. He never really knew where his inspiration would come from. For Picasso’s paintings three-fourth of the content do not exist outside the paintings. His inspiration comes from life, women were key to his paintings. Like Picasso, Matisse also painted women as well. Picasso began to incorporate roundness and color in his paintings in the 1920s. One of Matisse’s habits was to paint during the day and rub out what he has done at night. Picasso painted over the day’s work until a final painting may have a dozen or more layers. Picasso used lines borrowed from Matisse and Matisse borrows subjects, color, or lines from Picasso. Picasso had fits of depression and sometimes has suicidal ideas. Matisse was calm, but anguished and unable to sleep. He used his anguish as a tool in painting. There was an exhibition in London for both of their paintings, but Matisse rarely appear in public and Picasso loves it. Matisse and Picasso move to south France in 1948. Picasso began to appear a new medium, which was ceramics. Picasso and Matisse studied each others painting to learn or to do the opposite. Matisse devotes four years of his later years to designing the Vence Chapel. He used light to introduce immensity into a small space. Picasso painted within the communist concept, “War and Peace”. In 1954, Matisse did and Picasso moves to Cannes.

Expressionism:
Expressionism emphasized color’s emotional properties while it demonstrated far less concern than the Fauves had with the formal and structural composition of color. The contemporary Neo-Expressionism has further developed this artistic approach. Edward Munch, who was an artists created imagery that broke radically with established norms of content and style. In 1894, “Ashes” was painted. This dealt with the recurrent theme of the problematic relationship between man and woman and the mysteries of the sexuality. “Ashes” was originally named “After the Fall”; it depicted modern Adam and Eve in the moments after their fall from grace. The forms are strongly simplified. He created a visual to his inner emotional experience. In 1892, a Berlin exhibition of Munich’s work caused an outrage so it closed. He translated his work into other media like lithography. He shared his pessimistic view of sexual relationships with Swedish dramatist August Strindberg and a German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “The Scream” was another one of Munich’s works of art. He painted portraits in a comparatively representational style. “Anxiety” was the depiction of pure emotion. He never painted a picture cycle as this one, but most of his works were related to each other some how. His works represent a consistent and pessimistic view of life. These works were categorized as “The Frieze of Life”. The work called “The Tiger” showed simplification of form and color. This work was created by Franz Marc. He belonged to an association of painters in Munich who labeled themselves “The Blue Rider” group. A Russian painter, Kandinsky led this group. Kandinsky is now seen as a part of the creation of the modern art movement. Marc’s work delivered a dream world free of man. “Tiger” may be intimidations that a terrible war is not far away. Bernhard Koehler gave him a degree of financial security. Marc’s work called “Rain” shows cubism and Cezanne. The cubist influence is even stronger in “The Tiger”. It is used as a means of heightening realism and sentiment, which can be seen in “Deer in the Forest”, which was a famous work that was painted in 1912. A year after “The Tiger” was painted, the forest became a place of menace is “The Fate of Animals”. Marc tried to envisage the apocalypse to come in his last paintings; unfortunately he was killed in World War I. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted a series of works which freatured “tarts” on the streests of a busy city. Ludwig has a sketch of “Five Women in the Street” in a museum. His representation of Berlin is busy capital mark a high point in his career. He found an artists associated called The Bridge. This associated called on the younger artists to seek a creative way of life; they wanted the young starting out artist to oppose to traditional forces. Die Brucke pictures are dominated by views of studio life as seen in “Self Portrait with Model”. His visual language became linear and tense during the Berlin years. The “Women in the Street” series seemed to contain premonitions of the approaching disaster. Kirchner sense the coming world war and his anxiety eventually led to his nervous break down. Max Beckmann started painting; he worked with the style of German impressionist artist’s like Max Liebermann. His style eventually changed dramatically from his experience in World War I. Beckmann’s famous work of art, “Actors” contained a lot of bright colors and stiff gestures in the figures. The figures were reminiscent of puppets. It was difficult to find meaning from look at what is considered to be a play and a picture. To Beckmann, the meaning was personal. The play on the stage actually became a metaphor to his own life. Georg Baselitz was a German painter as well. He usually associated his works with images that invert or undermine tradition. He will allow intimidations of brutality and anxiety into his pictures at the same times as his subject shave a sense of glamour. “The Great Friends” was one of his famous works of art. The figures in this painting appeared to be standing on a wasteland perhaps as the last survivors of a battle, which explained many things about the painting as a whole. His figures were called “new types”, which were used in many of his paintings. These “new types” can be a reference to Germany’s past. He was always drawn to the idea of the clean sweep. In “The Great Friends”, the scenery was turned upside down. Anselm Kiefer was a German artist who was born in 1945, which was at the end of World War II. Most of his work would allude to the darkly to the war. “Operation Sea Lion” was one of his famous works. This work depicts a famous naval campaign taking place in a bath rub. His technique was brutally rough. Kiefer loved textures; they usually mixed the paint with actual pieces of wood. “Interior” was another one of Kiefers works. This was a first look like a tribute to American painter Jackson Pollock. This painting suggested the gutted remains of Leonardo Davinci’s Last Supper. If the viewer did not know the history of Herman; then if would be very hard to understand Kiefer’s work, as well as traditions about painting.

The Impact of Cubism:
This was influenced by t works of Cezanne, African trial art, and the art of the Iberian Peninsula. Cubism was the most influential styles of the early 20^th century. It was offered by European artists unfamiliar. “The Breakfast Table” by Juan Gris is discussed in this video. He reveals his independence using spiritual elements and the imagination. He first starts with the abstraction and he finishes with the real object. This creates interesting juxtapositions. “The Violin” by Juan Gris was also discussed. He expands his artist’s ambition with this painting by using the techniques of the musical composition to layer elements of sound. He decided to incorporate collage which was a tribute to the Spanish tradition. Marcel Duchamp used an experimental approach to represent movement of a figure evolving in space and time. This was demonstrated in his famous work, “Sad Young Man on a Train”. The elasticity of the figure is achieved tough small, dark and oblique angles. Robert Delaunay combines several points of view in his works. He combines the nontraditional laws of perspective, elements of time and memory to reveal the Eiffel Tower as a confused, exciting statement about life. This was demonstrated in “Champ de Mars”. He explored the inner laws of light and color. In his work “Circular Forms” he used color as the subject of the painting to guide the spectator’s perception of the picture as a whole. In “Electric Prisms” by Sonia Delaunay, spiral forms were establishing direction, focus attention and symbolize Paris electric lights. There was a collaboration of verbal and visual, which showed the poet and the artist. She made art a part of her life. She demonstrated this concept in being a fashion designer and an interior decorator. She let art inform her designs. Malevich’s work, “An Englishman in Moscow”, invited the viewers to look for meaning in the painting separate from the recognizable world. This was a style of cubism, but it was not in content. He overturns conventional logic to find the inner meaning. He searched for the mystical experiences represented in religious icons to order to find the essence of abstraction. An example of this was “White Cross”, which is the purest representation of forces, emotions and imagination. “Farewells” by Umberto Boccioni was inspired by the cinema screen to paint a fractured vision of modern city life synthesized in many moods. He represented cubism as a visual phenomenon; line and color connect figures and environments to create powerful moods and settings to reveal personal values and visual complexity.

Dada and Surrealism:
The Dada movement was a reaction to World War I. It’s successor was Surrealism, which opened new avenues for artistic creation by striving to bypass the reasoning proves and tap directly into the unconscious mind. There were many different works of art that were discussed in this video to demonstrate Dada and Surrealism. Kurt Schwitters who was a German Artist realized the unlimited possibilities of collage which was in 1918. He builds a house that fills three rooms. In his art, many objects were included. He found a magazine called “Merz”. This artist included rural objects in his art. Light dances off the objects in his art. Hannah Hoch was a Dadaist. Hoch used art to attack the society she detests. Her photomontage, “Cut With the Kitchen Knife”, in 1919 contains chaotic figures. It made a monumental political statement and attacked political figures. The energy and the confusion of the modern city are represented in her photomontage of New York. “Untitled” by George Grosz, was part of the collective, mechanical concept that mankind has become. In 1926, he paints “Pillars of Society”, which is a bitter attack on his enemies. He paints a wide social range of Berlin’s subjects. Joan Miro was a Spanish Surrealist. In 1928, “Dutch Interior I” was created. This was a parody of a Dutch 17^th century patining. He paints only the abstract structures of its composition. He bypasses traditional associations of his work. “Dutch Interior II” was made up of taut, curving lines. It was a parody of a painting by Dutch painter Jan Steen. His paintings had one experience but with two different ways of looking at the world. Salvador Dali created “The Burning Giraffe”. He was a surrealist painter who probes the darkest regions of the human subconscious. His imagination conjures p a world in which nothing made sense. He includes arid, barren landscapes in his work. “La Fortune” was created by Man Ray. The individual components of the painting are true to life. The other elements diverge form reality. The familiar objects appear in an unfamiliar arrangement. Ray was considered to be the Artist of the unexpected. He dedicates a series of works to Isidore Ducasse, who was a writer. “La Fortune” is open to many interpretations, it is left up to the viewer to look at it and put their viewpoint on it.


3. How do the videos relate to the readings in the text?
The videos relate to the readings in the text by adding more depth to the text. The films give the viewers more of a visual; therefore the viewers do not have to try to picture what went on during these times or any different types of art works. With the films, the viewers are able to actually see it. I feel as if it sticks to me better rather than just reading the text.


4. What is your opinion of the films? How do they add depth to understanding of the readings and art concepts?
I thought that the films were very interesting. They really seem to add a lot more depth to the readings. It made me understand these concepts and artists a lot better. They caught my eye in the readings and I have very happy I chose these films to watch. By actually seeing visuals, rather than trying to visualize it really helps more.