Month: September 2015 (Page 4 of 8)

The two art works I have chosen to analyze are Claude Monet’s “Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies” and “The Japanese Footbridge”. I chose these two works because I found it interesting that although they are both by the same artist and are supposed to depict the same subject there are so many contrasts between the two. It is easy to see that “Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies” painted in 1899 exhibits a short and seemingly narrow footbridge over a pond that is flourishing with water lilies. Using many shades of green and different brushstroke techniques Monet fills the background of the painting with many different kinds of trees and shrubbery, almost enclosing the area to give it a more private feel. Monet also mainly sticks to greens, yellows, whites and blues in this work. I found the painting to be very pleasing to the eye and I thought it was exhibiting a serene and beautiful landscape. On the other hand I interpreted “The Japanese Footbridge”, 1920-22, to be more of an angry and confusing painting due to its strong use of warm colors and indeterminate structure. I was first drawn to it because it was so different from Monet’s typically more calming paintings such as his water lily series. Monet’s style, more specifically his brushstroke technique seems to change drastically in the span of twenty years. In this painting Monet loses all attention to detail and rather paints with thicker strokes and in a more fluid manner. It is obvious that “The Japanese Footbridge” requires a more interactive viewing process in order to try and see the scenery in the way Monet saw it at the time. I admit that it was very hard to understand what the painting was trying to illustrate without reading the title at first first. However, once I read it the pieces slowly began to come together and I could make out some resemblances of the footbridge that Monet had painted twenty years earlier.

Ariella Caminero

I have chosen to analyze The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh and Water Lilies by Claude Monet. The Starry Night is a timeless classic made up of thick brush strokes and vibrant colors to create a wondrous well known masterpiece. Framed on a small wall at the MOMA, hundreds of different people from all over crowd around just to get the smallest glimpse of the painting. Water Lilies is a huge 3 panel piece of artwork covering an entire wall of the MOMA consisting of light colors and small thick brush strokes. At first glance, the landscapes appear to be polar opposites. However, both are extremely well known. I want to know what makes these two completely different paintings so famous. Which similar qualities do they both possess or what makes them different that people love? Although Van Gogh and Monet come from different time periods, both had such an affect on people with the work they created. I am drawn to the beauty of these paintings and I am curious as to how the artists were able to successfully reach out to their audience. In the reading Barnett says, “such things as the size of the work, the kinds of brush strokes in a painting, and the surface texture of a sculpture – is part of the meaning (52-53)”. My goal while analyzing these two famous paintings is to look deeper into all of the previously stated elements and see how they affect the meaning of what the painter was trying to portray. After the readings of Barnet and Berger I was able to question these elements while looking at the two landscapes. I wasn’t just another person at the MOMA trying to upload a “snapchat” of the work on their Iphone just because it was famous. I was able to stand there and question as to why these people were so drawn to the work and even ask why I was drawn to it.

One of the works I have chosen to analyze is Picasso’s Ma Jolie. The reason I chose this particular work was because of what happened to my perception the first time I saw it. When I first saw Ma Jolie, I thought it was just a bunch of geometric shapes and lines, with no discernible subject. The portrait was right next to Braque’s Man With a Guitar, which had a very similar style, but which at least hinted at a masculine figure. It took a comment from Eli and a literal step back to realize that Ma Jolie really did have the distinct shape of a female figure. It was almost a stereograph-like effect, in that I suddenly saw something that I couldn’t see before. It was a really cool effect, and I thought that I really wanted to write about this work.

Ma Jolie (Picasso 1914) – Can you see the woman?

I am considering Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for the second work, although this may change. I would like to see the new Cubism sculpture exhibit as well, and see if there were any pointillism or impressionist paintings I missed. I kind of want to compare Ma Jolie to a pointillism painting, because there are some elements that I feel are surprisingly similar, but I can’t recall a specific one at the moment. I went with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon because it’s one of Picasso’s earlier Cubism works, and you can definitely see similarities in style but it’s also very, very different from Ma Jolie. Also, it’s probably the most famous of the Cubism era, which makes it interesting to pit it against something less well known.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso 1907)

I haven’t really gone back to MOMA since the last post, so if you want to read my thoughts, that’ll be here. I suppose when I go again, I would be thinking more about analysis and historical/outside context, as well as meaning and perceived audiences, that sort of thing. I might go about it by imagining a mental audience in my head with art snobs from different eras. Might be fun.

-Jessica Ng

The two pieces of work which I have chosen to analyze for my paper would happen to be Leonardo daVinci’s Mona Lisa and Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. My initial reasoning for choosing these two specific pieces of art are pretty obvious, considering the blatant relationship between the two. I would say to take a look at the Mona Lisa, but it is such a well known piece of art that the image of it has been engraved upon our collective consciousness as a society. It is a famous image of that enigmatic woman, which is seen as beautiful, traditional art. L.H.O.O.Q. is the same picture with a goatee and mustache drawn on and titled with a rude, French pun. To put it simply, I find the latter work pretty funny and am interested in it; when you have to analyze something and write about it, I feel you cannot be bored with it, otherwise those who read your writing will be as bored as you were writing it.
In addition, it’s only fair to mention that comparing the two can lead to interesting ideas being drawn. The Mona Lisa is a timeless and classic work of art, whereas L.H.O.O.Q. was spawned by an art movement meant to spit in the face of traditional ideas of art, or at the very least make people question what it is that we consider to be art. An original and a mockery of it, the accepted and the revolutionary, the Mona Lisa and a postcard with a doodle on top: two pieces that are so aesthetically similar and yet so far apart in meaning.

Mary Yanez

When visiting the MoMA I felt like I looked a lot not only at the art but also at the other people viewing the art in the museum. When reading Barnet’s writing on what art is and how we described it, I kept going back and thinking about the people at the museum. It was interesting to notice what pieces of art certain people would glance at and walk past and which ones people would stare at and crowd around. I related this to the way we view art and beauty. Many people would walk past abstract pieces and then stop in front of a piece that was more socially acceptable as beautiful. While doing this I realized that we all do this and it is somewhat due to our perceptions of what art is and what we believe is beautiful. At the MoMA we first went to look for the exhibit on cubism spend a good deal of time there. It was interesting to see the progression of Picasso’s work as he began dabbling into cubic designs before diving into the cubism movement. Many of these pieces weren’t on first glance beautiful. When viewed at a distance you could see the general outline of the subject and the mind began to connect the lines and create a better picture of what the eyes were seeing. When viewed up close you could see the detailed brushwork and intricate geometric designs of the pieces. While viewing these pieces I tried to ask myself questions about both the subjects of the works and the possible messages or ideas that could surface in the artwork. As I walked around the room and viewed the progression on pieces throughout the movement I began to get a better understanding as to what I was feeling. Each piece gave a distinct emotion or feeling to the viewer. While the viewer may not fully understand what is being represented in the piece they are able to get that message. Not everything has to be clearly shown for you to get your message across to an audience. Through the rest of the museum I tried to continue asking questions to myself about both the artists and the artworks. While I wasn’t one hundred percent engaged by the two readings I was able to use parts of them to open my mind to the different forms of artwork throughout the time periods shown. These readings also helped spark questions during the Night at the Museum event as I looked at the different pieces in the galleries.

I apologize again for my late posting.

Eli McClain

Before this weekend, I have only been to the MOMA one other time. My first experience there was quite quick in which I just walked past the art looking at what was before me. If I liked it, I would stop and look at it for a few minutes. However, If i found the work unappealing I found myself just walking right passed it. This time though, after reading both Berger and Barnet and how they discuss how art should be looked at from more than one perspective, I walked around the MOMA with an open mind.

I found myself stopping at what I found to be obscure works of art such as Picasso and asking myself the questions I found in the readings. I stood there, wondered, and discussed with my partner about what the artist wanted us to see and the story we believed was behind the painting. As Berger says in Ways of Seeing “paintings are reproduced with words around them” and this is exactly what I was trying to accomplish during this visit.

The most fascinating piece of work that I saw during the visit had to be Georges-Pierre Seurat’s pointillism work. I went up as close as I can to the picture to see all of the minuscule dots and slowly backed away to see the whole it created. I was amazed at the small detail that I may not have even noticed if I just walked right by it. Even the frame was covered in dots! With just a small shape an entire image was created and a beautiful piece of artwork was made. Taking time to really look at a piece of art and from different perspectives just as Berger and Barnet wrote about really makes a difference when trying to find the deeper meaning of something.

I have been to museums before and tried to appreciate the art but always felt like I wasn’t doing it correctly or the way the artist intend for their work to be seen/felt. The biggest thing I took away from the readings was the fact that so much of art appraisal and appreciation or lack there of today is focused on the famousness of the work and not the work itself. A piece of art is not beautiful because you think it is; it is beautiful because its been used on this postcard and that magazine and was bought for that much money. This emphasis of art’s success being defined by its publicity or cost really stuck out to me.

Some of my favorite pieces in the MOMA when we went last week were ones I didn’t know and I’d never seen before. I tried to remember what I had read and think to myself as I walked through the galleries to judge whether or not I liked a piece of art based on the way I felt about it, not how I thought others felt about it. This also worked in the converse for more well known works I saw in the MOMA that were not new to me. Famous Seurat or Picasso paintings that I know well and that are considered incredibly famous based on their high number of re-printings and monetary value are ones that I took a second look at. I appraised them for myself based on my mental and emotional connection to the works. Some I found to actually appreciate more than I had in the past because I now felt my opinions of the paintings were more valid than in my prior visits. I also found that I was not as interested in some of the works I’d seen in the past because I wasn’t going to love them just because that was the social standard.

The readings gave me a deeper appreciation for my favorite painting in the MOMA: Monet’s Agapanthus. It has been my favorite of the Monet Water Lilies paintings since I was a child and first came to the MOMA. I recognize now that I loved the colors and Monet’s depiction of nature and innocence before I was old enough to know that it was an incredibly famous set of paintings. I like that I felt connected to this painting based off of how I genuinely felt about it, not a societal pressure to like it. All in all the readings helped me to better appreciate some of the pieces in the museum and gave me more confidence in my ability to critically asses the paintings that I see.

I have never been to a museum on my own time. Every time that I have gone, it has been a school or program related trip. Now that I got a chance to visit the MoMa on my own time, it was a completely different experience. No longer was I being guided to a certain section of the museum or being told what I was looking at. I would usually just cruise around the different floors and just slightly look at the different art pieces without really acknowledging what was in front of me. After reading the Berger and Barnett chapters, I gained a lot of new knowledge on some ways to analyze art and interpret it.

One concept I used while I was looking at the art pieces in the MoMa was the concept of form and content. In the reading Barnett says, “such things as the size of the work, the kinds of brush strokes in a painting, and the surface texture of a sculpture – is part of the meaning (52-53). When I was looking at the different art pieces I did not just simply focus on what the painting had, but I actually also looked at how big or small the painting was and the different techniques that were used to make it. For example, while I was looking at the painting The Poet Max Herrmann-Neisse by George Grosz, I did not just simply look at the man in the painting, but I went beyond that and noticed all the different details that the painting had. This told me that this painting was trying to express not just a man, but rather it was trying to tell us something more about the man with all the detail that was included.

Another thing I kept in mind while I was looking at all the different art pieces was that no interpretation of art is wrong. Both Berger and Barnett discuss that everybody interprets art differently and it is up to the person who views the art to interpret what is going on. Berger mentions that what we see is “the relation between things and ourselves (9)”. Therefore, he is trying to say that no matter what the artist’s intention is, the meaning of the art depends on the person viewing it and what the person can relate it to. For example, while I was looking at the art piece Retrospective Bust of a Woman by Salvador Dali I related it to the difference in gender equality and how women are seen as being less of men, so to me this painting had to do a lot with the role of women in society. To anybody else this does not have to be the case, but to me it is what it seemed like. This goes to show that art can have many different interpretations. The artist could have had a specific intention, but what the viewer actually perceives is what is important. While visiting the MoMa, I was very open minded and ready to see art through a different lens.