Both of these works are street art installments by an anonymous artist in LA who is known as Skid Robot. This artist travels around LA to different homeless areas and spray paints imaginary homes for the homeless to bring awareness to the growing poverty level in LA and the rest of the country. I have been fortunate enough to see one of these installments while driving in Los Angeles and it makes you stop and think about the current poverty situation in our world.
THE PEASANTS OF RURAL PAINTINGS TO THE POVERTY STRICKEN OF CONTEMPORARY ART
History has been marked by different periods, each focusing on a different way of thinking. To better understand history, we look to art and how it has developed. History does not disappear; rather it changes and evolves as time goes on. Peasants became a recurring subject in art during the nineteenth century, especially when it came to artists Jean-François Millet. Robert L. Herbert believed that “the peasant was among the most important subjects for the embodiment of artists attitudes toward the urban-industrial revolution.” For the purpose of this essay, let’s look at a broader interpretation of this statement. Peasants during the 1800’s were used in paintings to show conditions and evoke change in society. This tactic has not changed much. Today, artists use certain subjects to get a reaction of the viewer and hopefully highlight an important issue in the world. The art I have chosen to analyze for the purpose of this paper
The scene “Constitutional Peasant” uses superiority, surprise, and incongruity to expose a classist society. The technique of superiority is expressed by using the technique of triviality. Triviality is creating the illusion of shared identity by emphasizing the commonplace and importance. Dennis shows the triviality
Daniel Ridgway Knight was an odd American artist who loved to paint relaxed French peasants in luscious landscapes. Ironically, he lived during a stressful time when the Industrial Revolution displaced numerous farmers and polluted the environment. He seemed to ignore the harsh truth and shut himself in his imaginary serene world. For instance, In the Premier Chagrin, translated as The First Grief, Knight paints two healthy girls conversing on a stone wall in front of gorgeous fields. At first, it appears as merely a pretty painting that is nicely contrasted to show depth and realism. Yet, with a closer look, this contrast in the colors and lines of the landscape and the figures creates tension to suggest the painter’s conflict between longing for serene freedom and feeling trapped within the stiff society.
In this selection of the book, Gitlin discusses a seventeenth-century Dutch painter by the name of Vermeer. Vermeer was known for being able to”fr[ee]ze instants, but instants that spoke of the relative constancy of the world in which his subjects lived” (Gitlin 558). People collected Vermeer’s paintings for display throughout their homes. Gitlin sees Vermeer as the seventeenth-century version of the media. In that time, the images painted were relative to the people’s era and private world. In today’s world Vermeer would be the equivalent to a celebrity photographer or movie director. If Vermeer, or any other artist of his time, were to see today’s households, they would find that the once private space inside the home is now much more dominated by images of the outside world than what would have been possible in the 1600’s.
-In the 1700’s a new middle class emerged. Mass print became a thing as well. Every day people started to purchase art works to display in their homes. It was a way for them to express their status and national patriotism. The diversity in patrons had a great impact on the arts of the 15th – 18th centuries. With new patrons and the demand for art work, artists were able to capture more than just religious scenes. They were able to create landscapes and everyday life in their work. Artists were commissioned by the new middle class to create art work that they were able to hang in their houses. For instance, artist Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting “A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrey (1765).”
Have you ever looked at a piece of art and wondered how it could be based on real life, because it was just so beautiful? Well Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was able to paint in such new and exciting ways; people were left wondering just this. Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun was a woman of many talents. In her life time she came up with new ways of painting, revolutionized fashion in France, and overcame any prejudice thinking because she was a woman. Before dying at the age of eighty-seven, she had gained the respect of women and men all across the world. Being a female artist in the eighteenth century was not easy, especially when you had to keep a career and your life together during the
Throughout Cultural Perspectives, many influential texts have been read, analyzed, and discussed. One text, Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, integrates the thoughts of quite a few authors that have been discussed this semester. Through employing a Marxist view of history—there are always the “haves” and the “have-nots”—one can see that Life in the Iron Mills exemplifies the struggles that face many “have-not” citizens throughout history. One can then see the clear connections to various authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, and Adam Smith.
One of the most significant similarities between O’Keeffe and van Gogh is in the use of their art to advocate for the enfranchisement of the forgotten and the excluded. Nowhere is this more apparent than in van Gogh’s frequent portrayal of peasants
It is fairly apparent that a number of political overtones dominate Emile Zola's novel Germinal, which is the 13th book of nonfiction within the writer's Les Rougon-Macquart, a 20-volume series of novels. The author published this work of literature in 1885, less than 50 years after Marx and Engels unveiled the Communist Manifesto which was still plenty of time for a number of the ideologies propagated in this manuscript to take hold of popular culture and political theorists alike. In fact, one could successfully make a claim that the central theme of Germinal actually revolves around the conceptions of class antagonism that is an inherent part of an exploitative, bourgeois society such as that depicted in the French coal mining town in 1860, the setting for Germinal. A thorough analysis of this literary work illustrates that there are several instances of class antagonism, which are central to the plot of this book and provide its primary theme.
A great artist once wrote, “If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced”. This artist was Vincent van Gogh, soon to be an appraised artist known all around the world for his works, such as Starry Night. He is one of the very first artists of the post-impressionist style than is now adored in every continent. However, there is much more to the man than one painting. Creating a full timeline that stretches beyond Gogh’s life, this paper will discuss the life of Vincent van Gogh and the impression he made on the world.
In this short written assignment, I will analyze two paintings - View form my window, Eragny-sur- Epte by R, Camille Pissarro and Harvest at la Crau by L. Vincent van Gogh- that have a similar theme- rural life, as I explore the color, the composition and the main painting objects of the two pantings. and state how the two paintings speak differently to my sense.
Beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was becoming the world’s hub for art innovators; a place that is widely regarded as the birthplace of modern art. Artists of all disciplines, from sculptors to musicians, made their way to this city to pursue their passions in a community of like-minded and passionate individuals. These artists came from all over the world, in a time before the world was made flat with commercial aviation. Once they arrived, they often found themselves in suboptimal living conditions, sometimes even lacking running water. Despite these obstacles, Montmartre, a hillside neighborhood on the north bank of Paris, managed to draw an impressive artistic crowd, and would eventually foster the birth of
Queen Victoria oversaw the most prosperous era in British history. However while this greatly benefited the upper and upper-middle classes, it did not do so much to improve the lives of the working class. One glance at the clothes of the people in Fildes’s painting is all it takes to see that: people in ragged, tattered
In Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fire Place, there is a great amount of value. For example, there is darkness around her nose and cheeks. This darkness symbolizes a dark cloud hanging over her, like she has shame and wretchedness sticking with her. Another example is the darkness around the edges of the painting. This darkness is like an arch around the peasant woman. By creating this distribution of value, Van Gogh creates a murky feeling. Van Gogh’s main purpose for this distribution of value was to create an overall feeling for the audience, a feeling that would have the audience sense the challenging and depressing moments of peasants and lower class. The richness of the darkness helps the audience deeply feel the emotions of the peasant. There is also a hint of lightness in this artwork. The fire she is cooking on acts as the main light in the peasants living area. The fire lights up her face and hands, as well as behind the sitting
In a society where judgement and rank define us as humans, I was intrigued by Victor Hugo’s opposing proposal on his definition of class. In researching this idea, I ran across numerous causes for the placement of class in a nineteenth century society. In trying to intertwine them all, I stumbled, thus causing me to lose my original purpose of my research. However, after countless circles in place, I finally came across the primary purpose, the commencing factor for all the underlying causes. During this time of despair and anguish there was a luminosity or rather said: industrialization. This idea of industrialization brought about revision and adversity during this time period. Leading me to suspect that perhaps the definition of class deviates from the industrialization in nineteenth century France.
The mid 1800’s in France was truly a period for challenging arising issues in the midst a great change. Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and-Jean Francois Millet’s The Gleaners, are two paintings that use the style of realism to convey a unique perspective of the reality around them. (subjects, brush stroke, background)