In many ways, this painting screams grief and despair. It is all angles and desolation and emotional distance, stark contrast of colors and furious slashes of highlights that don’t quite fit where they’re meant to. It’s wrong and painful and yet… you can tell it’s meant to be therapy. It is a benediction, a begging for life to feel normal again, a tiny glimmer of hope in the darkness of deepest depression.
Tag: 20th century
Saturday
A few simple lines, a simple form, and yet… it’s so evocative that our minds are tricked into seeing things that aren’t there.
Friday
This is straight up one of my favorite pieces. It has a richness of tone, color, composition and yet a simplicity about it. I enjoy the way it invokes a sense of dreamy, almost surreal wonder.
Thursday
Whenever we talk about some of my favorite pieces of art, I have to stomp on my urge to just drag people straight to this painting and go, “THIS IS EVERYTHING I LOVE ABOUT ART AFTER IMPRESSIONISM ENDS.” It is slashes of color; it is expressionism and indistinct, yet it is coherent. It is bold and succinct. It is poignant and direct and to the point. It has no problem telling you exactly what it is and why it’s here and that you are just a fly on the wall. This is a particular kind of unapologetic art for art’s sake, and I love it so much it makes my little heart burst.
Wednesday
This is simple, beautiful, and pure. There is no ulterior motive or sentiment: it just is.
Thursday
THIS PAINTING. This painting, you guys. This is the one painting that I always come to when I need to stop, take stock, and unwind, unravel, and put my sanity back together into a cohesive piece. This is a miracle in paint. From afar, it doesn’t look real. The closer you get, the more insanely realistic it becomes. By the time you’re within a few feet, you could swear you can hear the waves cresting and you’re going to get splashed with water. It’s some crazy mind trickery, but oh… oh, what wonderful trickery. It is, without a doubt, in my top twenty pieces of art ever – but it has such stiff competition.
Tuesday
The muted colors of this painting really hammer home the truth of the pollution levels of London in the early 20th century. This isn’t just some allegorical reference to global warming: this is the muted palette of an impressionist who thrived on bright, inviting colors. So sit on that and stew on it for a minute or two.
Sunday
Beckmann uses a very distinct style of intense dark-lining and heavy shadowing that gives many of his works a foreboding feel to them, despite their kaledescopic color qualities. This is one such work; the shadows feel out of place, the lighting not quite right, everything is just slightly surrealistically off-putting, yet, there isn’t anything quite wrong about it.
Saturday
In a lot of ways, this is similar to elements of broader reaches of “African” art, but when you begin comparing it more closely, the comparisons become more caricatures than anything else. This is more expressionism than imitation; allowing for the expression of the artist’s worldview rather than imitating the viewpoints around him. It’s also bordering on cubism, but we’ll digress on the allusions to Picasso.
Friday
What I enjoy the most about this sculpture is the unstudied, unaffected aspects of it. The nudity is very natural, the curves very real. It’s only when you reach the facial features that you suddenly realize that the sculptor has gotten a little careless and his model’s face has become something more simplistic and expressionist than realistic.