Woman Descending A Staircase

The contrast between the light cream background and the maroon blouse have successfully drawn in viewers attention. The contrasting colours have made the overall artwork standout. The viewers eyes are snatched towards the vibrant red then it is directed to Kramer’s peaceful expression. Her expression is identified as the focal point of the painting. It encapsulates the meaning of stillness expressing the relaxation and tranquilness. Greensmith had chosen to use a variety of different colour tones to help sculpt and emphasis Kramer’s features. The use of darker shades towards her left side creates a shadow, indicating her angled sitting position.

The woman portrayed in the painting is the famous movie star Marilyn Monroe. The photograph that Warhol used for this piece is a publicity still from the 1953 movie Niagra.(Museum of Modern Art) Marilyn Monroe has always been known, and always will be known as our nations most famous sex symbol. Her personal life was even more interesting and exciting to the public than her films. She was married several times, and the mysterious events surrounding her death were rumored to be the result of an affair with President John F. Kennedy. Warhol chose the year of Monroe's death, declared a suicide, to create this piece. Her troubled personal life and untimely death only made Warhol's painting more powerful. He displays Monroe at her best. She is young and beautiful with styled hair and a made up face-yet inside she was empty. By glorifying her, Warhol shows her vulnerability. She was an icon to millions, yet the constant demands from fans and the media drove her into the downward spiral which ultimately ended her life.

Nude Descending Staircase, no.2 is by Marcel Duchamp who is best known as a painter and mixed media artist associated with Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, although he himself avoided any alliances. His work is characterised by its humour and the variety and unconventionality of its media. He was passionate in his belief that ideas should be given more value than worldly things, a revolutionary notion that would resonate with a later generation.

This self-portrait, Birthday by Dorothea Tanning is amongst her first works. Kimmelman referred to the painting saying, “Birthday is one of Dorothea Tanning’s earliest works, and is considered her first mature painting” (Kimmelman 1). She painted her self-portrait while she was in New York. It caught the eye of her future husband, Max Ernst and sparked his initial attention to her. In fact, Max Ernst suggested the name “Birthday” for this piece. The unique aspects that Dorothea Tanning incorporates into this painting such as, the unconscious as a reality, and relationships with the unnatural, inspired her later works. They also flag her as a surrealist, “being a surrealist and having a fixation on the mind, Tanning is able to use her preoccupation with eroticism to create exciting, dramatic imagery to display passages from one reality to another” (Grimberg 59). Her fixation on the mind, is evident in this painting when she creates a relationship between viewers and the woman in the self-portrait.

The portrait is displayed horizontally with a gold trimmed frame. The subject is a female that looks to be in her early 20’s sitting upright on a large brown chair. If the viewer travels up the painting the first indication of the woman’s class is her satin, blue dress. The saturated blue shines and falls in the light like water. Paired with the dress are her exceptionally detailed endings to her sleeves. The lace is even painted as though it is translucent, allowing a little of the blue dress to show through the sleeve. Flowers throughout history have symbolized innocence of a woman and her virginity. The repeating theme of flowers, in the sleeve cuffs and ribbon) in the woman’s attired suggests her purity or innocent nature. Another very details section of the painting includes the corset/torso details. The sewing suggests texture in the torso with small beading in between. Towards the top of the chest in the center, the female seems to bear an extravagant, ribbon piece with a tear drop bead in the center. The light pink

Frida Kahlo is a world-renowned Mexican painter known for her shocking self-portaits filled with painful imagery. Her artwork was seen by many as surrealist and socialist, but she refused the labels put on herself. Until today, her works have been able to exude the same playful and wild feel as before (Fisher n.p). Her legacy as a painter has attracted prominent people like Madonna who has confessed her admiration for the painter. Not only that but fashion designers are frequently inspired by her iconic Tijuana dresses while her paintings have been priced at more than three million dollars (Bauer 115).

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.

Girl before a Mirror, an oil on canvas painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, shows two sides of a girl; one which is illustrated with a dark tone and one with a vibrant colorful tone. This painting is bright; colors are at full intensity and are arranged next to their complements, producing a visual relationship between shape and form. Forms are used to draw the viewer’s eye across the canvas where circular shapes, repeating throughout the work, are compensated by the pattern of diagonal lines of the background. The viewer observes the girl’s profile and full frontal image, looking into a mirror and noticing a different image of herself. In order to achieve this effect, Picasso uses a range of formal elements that highlight the

With Hamlet’s references to melting his skin off and comparisons to Greek characters, one might assume that the man was crazy well before he ever spoke to the ghost of his father. The utter gloom and hate that permeates throughout the land of Denmark causes more than one character to go insane in Shakespeare’s novel, Hamlet. Several revenge plots, misunderstandings, over-the-top actions, and manipulated thoughts lead the various characters in the story to descend into different levels of madness. The main protagonist, Hamlet Jr., seems to suffer the most from the situation that unfolds, but he is not the only personification of crazy that appears throughout the book. Ophelia eventually goes mad due to Hamlet’s strange actions, Laertes falls

To describe the artwork “Woman in a Purple Coat” by Henri Matisse, the viewer has to be open to expression. In the artwork there is a woman, wearing purple pointy shoes, green pants with white faded stripes, a V-shape white shirt with grey lines, a long purple coat with white stripes and four black strips at the front to button the coat, a pearl necklace and another yellow long necklace. She is sitting with confidence with open arms on a vibrant two tone one side yellow and other side green couch. Sitting on the couch in a corner with a yellow flower arrangement on a pink and white vase with some fruit on a table next to her on the right. There is a magazine laying on the floor on top of a gray rug with black stripes above a black square marble floor. It looks as if she was reading intensely before being interrupted. She has her right foot behind her left, confidently waiting to be interviewed. The walls contrast with each other giving light and darkness to the portrait. On one side the wall is black with gray flowers outlined in red. On the other side the wall is green with black curvy streaks with white outline joined together by a grey corner behind the women wearing dark lipstick confidently sitting on the couch.

On September 4, 2016, I visited the Matisse in His Time exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. This exhibit is home to a plethora of pieces by many different European artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. While it is focused on Matisse and his extensive works, containing more than 50 of his pieces, there are many portraits and sculptures by other influential artists from that time period including Renoir, Picasso, and Georges Braque. Three of the most appealing works that I encountered in this exhibit are Maurice de Vlaminck’s Portrait of Père Bouju, Pablo Picasso’s Reclining Woman on a Blue Divan, and Henri Matisse’s sculpture series Henriette I, Henriette II, and Henriette III.

The broken windows phenomenon suggests that if it appears “no one cares,” disorder and crime will thrive (Miller, Hess & Orthmann, 2014). In this case involving the Anonymous Community I would definitely believe as an officer that the theory applies here. It’s unfortunate that such history is deteriorating away, but after so many years of nothing being restored that will happen. As buildings begin to fall apart delinquents tend to believe it is okay to illegally occupy these buildings and continue to destroy them since no one is taking care of them. I’m sure in rough communities many officers see this kind of vandalism all the time, but without proper communication with citizens and outsourced funding not much can be done to stop it. As in

I remember viewing Portrait of Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann by Otto Dix during an eleventh grade field trip to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and being completely entranced by the painting—unable to look away from it. At the time, I was not fully aware of the world of art and did not have the vocabulary and knowledge to articulate my interest in this particular painting. Now, after returning to the painting three years later, the experience is quite different. Being recently exposed to a fairly wide range of art last semester has allowed me to experience the painting under a more knowledgeable light. During this most recent viewing of the painting I paid more notice to the painter’s decisions regarding the paint application, the textures, the colouration, the lines, the composition, etc. The core of this different experience during this viewing is due to a newfound consciousness of artistic choice.

The first artist in the exposition is Hannah Alpha. Born in Egypt, she’s a McGill alumni who uses the minimalism style of painting, which is the art of using simplistic design to create maximum impact. The paintings grab your attention due to their abstractness. However they fail to portray the artist’s meaning. Her collection, called “La danse cosmique” (The cosmic dance), is her search to “attain a state of supreme

When the two men meet, Matisse’s career was beginning to take off. On March 19th, 1906, his second one-man show opened at a Private Gallery where he exhibited fifty-five paintings, along with a number of sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and lithographs. The paintings ranged in date from 1897 to the current year, so the exhibition served as a retrospective that gave a clear idea of his art development. For the 1906 Salon exhibition, Matisse only showed a single painting, Le Bonheur de vivre (Fig. 5), which was the largest- and most daring- canvas he had ever done. Matisse’s creation of The women with the hat (Fig. 3) had unexpectedly shocked people, but with le Bonheur de vivre. Matisse appear to have purposely set out this painting to create a shocking effect. That Matisse wanted his painting to be a kind of manifesto. Leo Stein bought the painting and declared it to be “the most important painting done in our time.” And was hung up high in Gertrude and Leo’s studio. Leo’s high opinion of Le Bonheur de vivre must have vexed Picasso.