Gericault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Gericault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 74, No. 4 (December, 1992), pp. 599-618 Intro 1-3 Para The article, “Gericult’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold”, by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer reasons that the purpose of Theodore Gericault’s paintings of severed limbs and decapitated heads was his way of criticizing 19th century policies about capital punishment. Expounds on the connection between Gericault's depiction of severed heads and limbs and the call of romantic modernists for artistic and political renewal. Gericault's contempt
The most influential artist to me in this exemplary in this pursuit for the appropriated traditions is Kehinde Wiley. In his opening speech for the New Republic gallery show he expressed that things such as his work was evolved around the working of chance . In his case, he manipulates the chance of the representation of the black demographic in traditional work. Modifying the figurative works to create the chance for relating a body that is familiar. I see contemporary painter, Kehinde Wiley as a comparable to my work in regards to the topic as well as the manipulation of the human figure. The admirable features I see in Kehinde Wiley’s work in addition to these is the fantasy elements that are incorporated. These features are best exhibited in his piece, “Bound”. The work is a bronze sculpture that stands approximately four feet tall and two-and half feet wide. The composition is inviting as it includes busts of three identical women that have African descent features that are placed on a rounded triangle base. The expressions on all of the faces are of a staring and wondering nature that have a nature of regality as their faces are turned to the right at an approximate forty five degree angle as their all have their back facing each other to form a guard of the leaves the a laid on their base. The bodies are cut organically as it rounds off from shoulder to shoulder, just enough to form the upper torso to see the corset like dress that encompass the figure. Expanding
The similarities, and differences, between Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s Anatomy of Dr. Tulp (1632) and Thomas Eakins’ The Agnew Clinic (1889) are both uncanny and unprecedented. Painted in 1630’s Amsterdam during the Dutch Baroque period, Rembrandt sought to preserve the rare occasion in which a real human body was used as an academic tool in order to prove anatomy theories. On the contrary, Eakins piece was painted in 19th century America during the realist movement to memorialize a retiring professor. However, it is their similarities that make them comparable; they were both commissioned by academic institutions, they both depict a surgery in progress, they both celebrate the careers of notable
Like many of Dix’s generation in Germany during the 1920s, he drew from the German expressionist movement in his use of distortion, directness, media and subject matter in plate 1. German expressionism involved directness, frankness and a desire to startle the viewer. Their works embraced printmaking and focused on the emotions expressed rather than reality. Dix heightens the emotions effects through his meticulous rendered, horrific images. The brilliant white bones stand out against the darker background. He experimentation with printmaking and used multiple acid baths to eat away at the image, to mimic decaying flesh. This horrifying focal point does startle the viewer through its direct disposition. Expressionists often felt the need to confront the devastating experiences of WWI, as plate 1 documents through it’s shocking yet realistic representation of the war and its effect. The common expressionist technique of distortion is utilised to exaggerate the skull and expose it as disgusting and confronting. Otto Dix’s attempt to confront the viewer through the depiction of emotions rather than reality. Dix’s incorporation of German Expressionist characteristics and techniques, the art movement of the time, in Plate 1, is a documentation of cultural art practises in the
The purpose of this assignment is to present a brief yet comprehensive formal analysis of the work in question, namely, Joos van Cleve’s Lucretia. The painting was completed ca. 1525 by the Flemish artist most likely in Antwerp, where he was highly active from about 1511 until his death in 1540. The painting is oil on panel (75.9 x 60.6 cm) and is exemplary of the early Baroque period. The work depicts at the broadest level the suicide of the early Roman historical figure, Lucretia, following her rape c. 510 BC by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last Roman king. The incident bears historical significance as it marks rising popular dissatisfaction of the Roman people with the monarchy, and the transition from the Roman Kingdom to the Roman Republic,
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.
On his reading, Nudity a la Grecque in 1799, ___________ explains the controversy of one of the most famous paintings of the Neo-classical artist, Jacques-Louis David, the Intervention of the Sabines (1799). This beautiful and controversial painting was characterized by the juxtaposition of male and female nude figures, its impact within women fashion and their power of intervention on society, as well as the David’s intent to represent on his paintings the social and political transformations in France during that time.
Rose situates us in an art gallery in Paris where an exhibition of medieval torture instruments takes place. The high number of different tools that she sees, and the many uses someone can give them, makes her think that “pain must be as great a challenge to the human imagination as pleasure” (Rose 175). This idea is reinforced after she shares her experience of a facial treatment in a dark booth of a beauty salon where she was exposed to ointments and electrodes. By associating the electrodes with what happened in Algeria and the ointments with masks dipped in acid, she concludes that the aesthetician and the torturer share the same area of expertise; pain, and that “Should that loving attention to the body turn malevolent, you have torture. (Rose 177)
Brancusi's imprint on contemporary sculptural practice ranges from the dissemination of furniture-oriented sculpture and the emerging topos of architectural folly to new paradigms for public art. At the same time many postwar artists engaging in a dialogue with his legacy have read and productively misread Brancusi's work. Through the
In Abstract Expressionism - a certain construction of the world we call “individuality” is revealed in its true, that is to say, contingent, vulgarity. And so is painting; or rather, so are paintings like Hofmann’s “The Garden” and Adolph Gottlieb’s “Black, Blue Red” - done as they were under the sign or spell of such a construction, by “individuals” believing utterly (innocently, idiotically) in its power.
While the painters after the Impressionism period were collectively called the “Post-Impressionists,” the label is quite reductive. Each artist had their own unique style, from Seurat’s pointillism to Signac’s mosaic-like divisionism, Cezanne, Émile Bernard, and others. These artists were all connected in that they were reacting to the aesthetics of Impressionism. Two of the more influential painters from this movement were Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, who aimed to connect with viewers on a deeper level by access Nature’s mystery and meaning beyond its superficial, observable level. However, each artist’s approach to achieving this goal was different. In close examination of Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Paul Gauguin) and Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables), one may clearly see the two artists’ contrasting styles on display.
The era of Mannerism is renown for its increasingly complex works of art, much like the High Renaissance before it, and the discipline of sculpture is no exception. Out of this period comes more intricate poses, forms, and emphasis on the illusion of movement which is perhaps most evident in Giambologna's "The Rape of the Sabine Women". His sculpture depicts a young man attempting to carry a struggling young woman as he stands over the contorted body of an older man, either the woman's husband or father. What is interesting about this work is not only the realistic human forms and perceived chaos of the moment, but also the lack of a dominant side from which this sculpture would be viewed. In order to achieve these features, Giabologna utilizes a combination of various textures and diagonal lines to create the complete illusion of muscle, flesh, energy, and multiple focus points.
In 1560, Arnaud du Tilh - the imposter who posed as Martin Guerre - was hanged, with his body burned after his death. Today, execution is a controversial issue, and mediaeval and early modern executions (especially public executions) are viewed through the lens of enlightenment rationalism. However, this is not how public execution was always seen. When studying history, it is important that the historian does not view history through the lens of their own time, but instead the lens of the time they are viewing. This is one of the aims of studying microhistory - to provide the lens through which to observe a place and time. This is how I shall endeavour to use the fascinating case of the faux Martin Guerre - as a lens through which to view the attitudes, methods and reasoning behind public executions, including the execution that claimed the life of Arnaud du Tilh. It was the attitudes towards and legal philosophy of the time towards crime and punishment that led to Arnaud du Tilh’s sentence, so the fundamental question that this essay seeks to answer is why Arnaud was given the sentence that he was. Execution as an institution was not an extension of the state, as it is often seen today, but was instead an extension of the community that was seen as a normal part of the ‘divine order’. Arnaud du Tilh was executed by hanging and then burned due to the specific Christian and folk beliefs and symbolism surround methods of execution, and the execution was public not as a
“Primitivism” was a cultural attitude that arose in Europe during the late 19th and 20th century in opposition to the increasingly decadent and materialistic European culture. Rather than an artistic movement, “primitivism” is a European conception of foreign civilizations and lands as “simple”, less developed, and naive. This is an important distinction to make, because “primitivism” was defined in the eyes of the Europeans who saw foreign civilizations as unsophisticated, indicating that the concept of “primitivism” is heavily biased in the view of the Europeans. Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse were two artists that were highly influenced by the concept of “primitivism,” and some similarity can be depicted in their works such as the use of female nudes, vivid colors, and artistic techniques. However, their definition and methods of achieving “primitivism” differ heavily, due to the fact that the vagueness of “primitivism” allows it to be a self-defined concept. These similarities and differences can be seen through the two works of art The Spirit of the Dead Watching by Paul Gauguin, and The Blue Nude by Henri Matisse, and the way they depict women in each of the pieces.
In this discussion, I hope to put a different spin on surrealism and the grotesque by drawing on the works of Sartre, and if we're not too dizzy from spinning when all is said and done, I shall have put together a way to investigate the grotesque in Modernist art and contemporary life. After a summary of the surrealist's use of Freud and a look at Sartre's criticism of surrealism, we will look at surrealism in Sartre's work and derive an existentialist definition of the grotesque and examine how this might reconfigure the surrealist goal of liberation. Surrealist art is almost always analyzed in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic theory because the surrealists openly announced Freud's study of the psyche as the inspiration for the practice of surrealism. Andr‚ Breton, author of the many surrealist "Manifestoes" and the self-appointed spokesman and scribe of the surrealist movement, eulogized Freud, who died in 1939, by writing that: ". .
McCann argues that Eugene Delacroix included status viatoris, representations of a state between life and death, in his works and discusses their importance to depicting a heroic death. This chapter looks at Delacroix’s works, including Liberty Leading the People from, multiple approaches, including biography, social history, and semiotics. They begin by looking at Delacroix’s biography and his connection with the revolution he painted. McCann then goes into the social history by addressing not only those who participated in the revolution and are thus depicted in the painting, but also looking at the motivation for starting revolution. He then goes on to look at the lack iconography usually associated with death on the lying figures in the foreground and the implication that within specifically marking them as “dead,” the bodies exist in a place between life and death. This semiotic, post-structuralist approach is useful when engaging with this painting because it allows for multiple interpretations and readings of heroic death in Delacroix’s work. The intersection of all three approaches provide strong evidence for McCann’s argument. They prove to be a useful combination when approaching Delacriox’s Liberty Leading the People.