So I’m taking this class called 1922 A Year of Lit and Art and I had my midterm Friday — I got an A. But a large part of the test was identifying different schools of painting and artists and it was pretty cool. Luckily my Mum is a painter, and she has tonnes of books on artists and famous paintings that I perused all through my childhood, so a lot of these weren’t things I hadn’t seen before, and it helped a lot on the test.
Not all of the paintings in the class were done in 1922, but the schools formed in that general era. We looked at the Fauvres, Dada, Cubism, Futurism, Der Blaue Reiters, Surrealism, De Stilj and more. So I wanted to put some of the paintings here for you to look at and see what you all think about them.
The Fauves — the wild beasts — were French painters who really were into color. Henri Matisse is one of the best known. This is Portrait of Madame Matisse — The Green Line, one of his best known paintings of the period. This was early in the movement, he later moved to the coast of France and his paintings became less wild and more sedate. Still, the use of color is intense in both paintings, the one below is Woman Before A Fish Bowl.
Then we looked at Cubism, lead largely by Pablo Picasso. A lot of people are familiar with his works, and how they use fragmented images and multiple perspectives in a single canvas. The painting that started the Cubist movement was Les Demoiselles D’Avignon which was painted in 1907. The women who are the subjects of the painting are thought to be prostitutes. Notice how he doesn’t beautify them as much as objectify them.
Next we are going to the Futurists, who were all about movement. One of the best examples of this style of art is below, Giacomo Balla’s Flight of the Sparrows from 1913.
One of the painters I like the best is Piet Mondrian, who used blocks of color in seemingly simple ways, but influenced a lot of art that followed. I have posted Composition II In Red, Blue and Yellow from 1930. He did a whole lot of this kind of block color paintings and there are clothes, accessories and posters done in his style. He is representative of the Dutch school De Stilj — the style.
Kashmir Malevich was a Suprematist, and he worked with the very basic abstract shapes of things in his paintings. Basically they are all blocks of color, but used differently that Mondrian in that they are more stark and less warm. He was also very prolific and the paintings are bold, and not as simple as they look.
Wassily Kandinsky was instrumental in the Blue Rider school from Germany. He and the other members of the school were kind of horse crazy and painted horses as subjects a lot, hence the name of the school.
We covered a lot more than these, but this will give you a taste of what I’m doing in that class and I think it’s pretty cool.
So what do you think?
