Thomas Hart Benton was a muralist and an American painter. He had focus on the Regionalist movement art along with Grant and John Curry. Thomas Benton has had a great impact on the color, the resonant ideas and exuberance. Benton identified different diverse ideas of contradiction: the rituals and the urban, freedom, oppression, the poor, rich labor and entertainment (Marling, 1982). As Mural developed the ideas, he span two epochs on the excess of “Jazz Age” and bitter side of depression in the country. This was expressed in the art work that he presented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The painting was done 1930 to 1931 which was paced on the New School board room from social research in the city of New York. This painting attracted attention and was bought by Equitable Life then later to Metropolitan Museum as an exhibit. Benton developed 10 panels of which a lot of them were 7.5 feet in height and 9 feet in width. The painting was in egg tempera having an oil glaze, strong attractive colors, wide modulation and a very much gleaming surfaces (Benton, 1983). The painting had an aluminum frame, with complexity in mounding and curves in the right angles that showed the vignettes in the panel and addition of emphatic strength (Dennis,1998). The paining showed changes in activities in the production of corn that was juxtaposed with clearing of the land for the activities. The clearing utilized a saw with lance teeth. Like the doubled edged sword. Thomas Benton was a lover
William H. Johnson was a successful painter who was born on March 18, 1901 in Florence, South Carolina. Johnson began exploring his level of creativity as a child, and it only amplified from there because he discovered that he wanted to be an artist. After making this discovery he attended the National Academy of Design in New York which is where he met his mentor Charles Webster Hawthorne who had a strong influential impact on Johnson. Once Johnson graduated he moved to Paris where he was exposed to different artists, various artistic abilities, and evolutionary creations. Throughout Johnson’s time in Paris he grew as an artist, and adapted a “folk” style where he used lively colors and flat figures. Johnson used the “folk” style to express the experience of most African-Americans during the years of the 1930s and 1940s.
Fourth, as interpreted by Ray (2006), the shape and posture of the bodies express protest while the flaming buildings and crumbled walls reflect destructive power of civil war. The newspaper background is the means by how the painted knew the massacre. Both Berger (1980) and Chipp (1988) cited by Ray (2006), believe that the broken sword in the painting mean defeats of the people.
My analysis of how successful and how did this artwork affect the society and culture as its target
It is almost a reflection of the man’s trident. That same pitchfork shape also appears in the window of the house that sits in between both figure’s heads. Repetition can also be seen in the dotted pattern of the woman’s outfit, which also appears in the material of the curtain that hangs in the house’s window. The echo of verticals in this painting is also strong. The faces and bodies of the figures seem to be stretched, and narrowed. The pitchfork’s slender prongs and the green stripes on the man’s shirt also add to the elongation of their frame. The copious amounts of vertical wood boards that make up the house and the barn, keep the viewer’s eye moving up and down the picture plane. Wood’s use of verticality in this painting is overwhelming.
The intersection of social movements and Art is one that can be observed throughout the civil right movements of America in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The sixties in America saw a substantial cultural and social change through activism against the Vietnam war, women’s right and against the segregation of the African - American communities. Art became a prominent method of activism to advocate the civil rights movement. It was a way to express self-identity as well as the struggle that people went through and by means of visual imagery a way to show political ideals and forms of resistance. To examine how a specific movement can have a profound effects on the visual art, this essay will focus on the black art movement of the 1960s and
The St. Louis Art Museum has many intriguing pieces of artwork, but my eyes seemed to navigate towards Thomas Cole’s pieces. Research has shown that Thomas Cole was best known for his landscape art, but through the portal of America’s wilderness and it’s association of God. Nature, human life, and mortality were the key viewpoints
who was shot by assassins because they thought he was a drug smuggler. This work of art was made in 1998 in Saint Louis, Missouri for Esequiel Hernandez. This painting was not a copy, it was originally made. The art was made after similar works. The technique used was lithograph (water color) and crayon on paper. The painting was a pretty nice size, more on the bigger side.
The medium used for this work of art is oil. In this technique the oil acts as a binder and causes a quick drying layer that can built upon. The formal elements of a painting include line, color, space, light, texture and pattern. The line appears to be an implied line in which the work creates directional movements from top to bottom. But also forces the viewer to see how the figures stand out and there importance in the painting. The color shows a subtle spectrum with a detailed background from the skies to the mountains to the artist table canvas. The light is somewhat even throughout the painting showing emphasis on every figure holding something in their hands; and more so the final product of the artist that are being captured on the canvas. The visual texture of the painting appears to be smooth and the pattern is decorative and somewhat vibrant. The principle of unity and variety are evident in this painting, the design itself shows a sense of community of important figures throughout African American history. I was drawn to this piece because it embodied the heritage of African American art through history. This painting by Hale Woodruff displays many of the significant contributions that African Americans made to the world of Art. Not necessarily “picture art” but all realms of life art: cooking, liberal arts, politics, labor, law and many more through his vibrant
Prior to my research on Winslow Homer, I had no knowledge of who he was as an artist. After reading about Homer and his life, I learned that he was one of the greatest American painters of the 19th century and had a big impact on the art world. I chose to do my paper on Winslow Homer because I saw a few of his paintings of boats floating in the ocean and was blown away by the strokes he produced. I expected him to be a rural European artist that mainly did landscapes, and while there is some truth behind my assumption, I learned a lot about him that I didn’t expect.
The young, soon to be famous painter, Grant Wood was born on the day of February 13, 1891 in the town of Anamosa, Iowa. In his young life he was in Iowa his father passed away in the year 1901. After the death of his Father when he was ten, His family moved to Cedar Rapids.
The purpose that the artist want portraying is small rural American family during the 1930s, when farming was seen as the culture or the mid-western Americans. The painting could represent that the mid-westerner lived simpler lives.
What I see when I look at this large piece of work is the different painted scenes telling the accounts of Missouri’s history and along with a few images depicting popular folklore of the state above each door leading into the lounge. Benton brilliantly divided the mural into three different intervals along each wall, each representing a distinct time period between the years of 1730 to 1930s. Each
In order to discuss pop art I have chosen to examine the work and to some extent lives of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol who were two of the main forces behind the American movement. I intend to reflect the attitudes of the public and artists in America at this time, while examining the growing popularity of pop art from its rocky, abstract expressionist start in the 1950s through the height of consumer culture in the 60s and 70s to the present day.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri in 1889 into a family of prominent politicians committed to political republicanism and populism. His father was a congressman, and his great-uncle, for whom he was named, was an important US senator. Benton later recalled that, "Politics was the core of our family life." Through his art, in particular his murals, Benton sought to continue his family's support of nineteenth-century political republicanism, upholding the producers of society, and scornful of big business and big banks. Expected to follow his family's well-trodden path, instead, with his mother's encouragement he chose to study art. Starting at age seventeen he worked as a cartoonist for a local paper. Escaping the confines of small
the painting is a synthesis of numerous sketches made by the painter a year earlier in Collioure,