I love the fact that this article connects two different aspects to creation, that of engineering and that that of art (pg 12). How do you think this affects your thoughts about what constitutes art?
What aspects of a structure like the Eiffel Tower inspires different artists?
Picasso said: “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them,” but then it says that he denied ever painting an abstract painting in his life. If so, how did Picasso define his art? Clearly, it isn’t realism, and seems to me to be abstract. Maybe it’s the emotion of the art that he considers realistic, and therefore he attributes the same to the entire piece?
The author states that prior to the painting of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Auignon, no other painting had “signalled a faster change in the history of art” (21). How can one art piece signal the change in the history of such a rapidly growing form of expression?
Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Auignon” uses sharp lines and angles to portray the women. This is a stark contrast from the soft curves that many early twentieth-century artists used to draw and paint women. Why does Picasso depict women in such a harsh manner?
-How does the mechanics of art mirror the mechanics of life? And can mechanical art evoke the same emotions as other earlier forms? (p. 49)
-How does mechanical art mimic power and how did it contrast simple rural life? (p.36)
Sarah Hussain
I understand that the Eiffel Tower was revolutionary for Paris, but how did it inspire all these art pieces? Many other pieces were built throughout time, and never have I heard of so much response from artists. What was truly different about the Eiffel Tower that could inspire so many?
What does the author mean by avant-garde? What difference does he refer to when he says that our recent culture has lost something we had in the 1890s?
On page 20, it’s mention how the paintings by Picasso and Braque “were moving rapidly towards abstraction” creating a tension between the “reality” and “the meditation of visual language”
“Picasso and Braque wanted to represent the fact that our knowledge of an object is made up of all possible views of it : top, sides, front, back. They wanted to compress this inspection, which takes time, into one moment – one synthesized view.”
How can any painting give you more information than reality? It is doomed to be a two-dimensional representation, no matter how alive the “illusion” is.
Tamar Lichter
The author discusses the incredible impact that the bird’s eye view from the Eiffel Tower had on citizens as well as artists, and likens it to the first photograph of Earth from space. Why do you think it is that after being able to perceive microscopic images, the art world has not been so inspired as it was during the beginnings of Moderinism? Are there any other variations in perspective we can hope for? Do such limits explain why we have shifted To a postmodern era of looking back and commenting on the past? Does this also suggest that science and engineering have the same responsibility to be accessible to the public, as in art, for both fields to thrive?
