Art In Love
artnluv.blogspot.com
This gallery is run by Wendy, a beginning art history student.
This gallery contains different types of work including oil and acrylic paintings, marble and bronze sculptures, and mixed media.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Exhibition Introduction
Love In Art
Artists presented:
Pablo Picasso
Louise Bourgeois
Roy Lichtestein
Gustav Klimt
Max Backmann
Mr. Brainwash
Jasper Johns
Vaeta Zitman
Auguste Rodin
Kim Anderson
The connection between the works displayed at this gallery have been chosen because they portray the theme of love. I chose these works because they evoked a feeling of love. I did try to show different forms of what I consider to be love and chose art from different times and through different mediums. I wanted to show how different artists express the theme of love in drastically different ways, but they all give the viewer the same or similar sense of love.
Pablo Picasso
Artist: Pablo Picasso
Title: The Dream
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 130 x 97 cm
Date: 1932
Biography info:
Statement on the work:
Background info on the work:
Connects to theme and why I chose it:
Louise Bourgeois
Artist: Louise Bourgeois
Title: Giant Spider
Media: Bronze, Stainless Steel and Marble
Dimensions: 365 x 351 x 403 in
Date: 1999
Biography info:
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris Paris New
York
Statement on the work: “My childhood has never lost its
magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.”
Background info on the work:
Bourgeois’ works became larger and more referential to what
became the dominant theme of her work: her childhood. The spider is
representing motherhood. Spiders are very maternal, they protect their young,
and Bourgeois sees them as affectionate to their offspring.
Connects to theme and why I chose it:
I chose this sculpture because it is very different from the
others I have chosen to display. Not everyone will look at a spider and automatically
think of “love” but the artist does, an upon knowing that spiders are
representing motherhood in her work, the viewer can understand why work is
included. The love between a mother and a child is immeasurable and that is why
I wanted to include this sculpture.
Roy Lichtenstein
Artist: Roy Lichtenstein
Title: We Rose Up Slowly
Media: Oil and Magna on canvas, 2 panels
Dimensions: 68 x 92 in
Date: 1964
Biography info:
Roy Lichtenstein born in New York Ohio State University Ohio
State New
York for six years and then another three years at Rutgers University
in New Jersey
Statement on the work:
Starting with a scene from a science fiction comic book,
Lichtenstein made a small sketch of the composition. Then he used a machine to
project the sketch to the size he wanted and traced it onto his canvas. To
simulate photoengraver's dots, Lichtenstein laid a metal screen on the canvas,
spread oil paint over the screen with a roller and rubbed the paint through the
holes with a toothbrush. Undotted parts of the picture were masked with paper.
Lichtenstein then painted in the letters and black outlines. The finished
picture shows how Lichtenstein altered the cartoon by centering the face and
balloon, adding a red helmet and turning the comic strip's question into a joke
about his own art.
Background info on the work:
His works have been controversial in the art community.
Earlier in the same year that this work was made, Life magazine published an
article on Lichtenstein by he title “Is he the worst artist in America
Connects to theme and why I
chose it:
I chose this art work because I
like the comic book look the artist chose. It portrays a couple intimately
close and about to kiss. The couple seems to have a lot of passion and love for
each other. The words “as if we didn’t belong to the outside world any longer” shows
that the couple is so wrapped up in their love that everything else does not
matter.
Gustav Klimt
Artist: Gustav Klimt
Title: The Kiss
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 180 x 180 cm
Date: 1908
Biography info:
Gustav Klimt was an
Austrian painter that lived from July 14, 1862 to February 6, 1918. His primary
subject of his paintings, murals, sketches and other works was the female body.
Statement on the work:
A perfect square, the canvas depicts
a couple embracing their bodies entwined in elaborate robes decorated in a
style influenced by both linear constructs of the contemporary Art Nouveau
style and the organic forms of the earlier Arts and Crafts movement.
Background info on the work:
“The Kiss” was created during Klimt’s “Golden Phase”. During
this period he used gold leaf. In this work the female is the protagonist,
rather than merely the object of desire.
I chose this
work because there is an overall sense of tenderness and love between the
couple embracing. The man carefully angles her face so he can kiss her. This
shows that the couple love each other
Max Beckmann
Artist: Max Beckmann
Title: Odysseus and Calypso
Media: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 150 x 115.5 cm
Date: 1943
Biography info:
Max Beckmann is a German painter that lived from 1884 to
1950. He decided he would be a painter at the early age of fifteen. By 1906
Beckmann was an accomplished painter. In 19010 he became the youngest member
ever to elected to the executive board of the Secession by his colleagues. He
created more than eight hundred paintings and produced hundreds of prints and
drawings during 1905 and 1950. During this time he was also persecuted by the
Nazis so he had to leave his homeland and work in isolation to avoid the war.
He served as a medical volunteer for a year and was discharged in 1915 after a
breakdown. When he started painting again in 1917 his style had changed
radically. Nazis began ridding Germany of Modern art, which they believed to be
socially and morally corrupt. By 1937, almost six hundred of Beckmann’s works
had been confiscated. After the war, he moved to the U.S.
Statement on the work:
I am
painting portraits, still lifes, landscapes, visions of towns rising up out of
the sea, beautiful women, and grotesque monsters. People bathing and female
nudes; in short a life — a life that simply exists. Without thoughts or ideas.
Filled with colors and forms from nature and from out of myself. — As beautiful
as possible.
Background info on the work:
The painting depicts Odysseus
and Calypso laying down intimately in bed with the company of a parrot and a
cat. The portrait of the cat is actually of Beckmann’s own cat “Pip”, who is
also the subject of some of his other works.
Connects to theme and why I
chose it:
I chose this painting because it portrays a couple that is in love.
The woman seems to be very passionate and lovingly caressing the male. And even
if someone does not know the story of Odysseus and Calypso the painting still
speaks of love. The fact that they let the parrot and the cat stay nearby also
speaks about their love for their pets.
Mr. Brainwash
Artist: Mr. Brainwash
Title: Love is the answer (Einstein)
Media: Mixed Media
Dimensions: 36 x 45.5 in
Date: 2012
Biography info:
Mr. Brainwash, born Thierry Guetta, is French and lives in Los Angeles
Statement on the work:
Eighteen color hand finished screen
print on archival art paper
Background info on the work:
The message that love is the answer in life is evoked
through the use of well-known Campbell
Connects to theme and why I
chose it:
This art piece is great in the
way that it includes many different aspects of life from canned soups to
Einstein. Einstein is depicted holding a sign that says “LOVE IS THE ANSWER”. I
chose this piece because overall I take it to state that love is the answer to
life and is what will get you through anything.
Jasper Johns
Artist: Jasper Johns
Title: Three Flags
Media: Encaustic on canvas
Dimensions: 30 7/8 x 45 1/2 x 5 in
Biography information:
Media: Encaustic on canvas
Dimensions: 30 7/8 x 45 1/2 x 5 in
Biography information:
Jasper Johns was born on May 15, 1930 in South Carolina University
of South Carolina U.S. military during 1952-1953 during the Korean
War, where he was stationed in Sendai ,
Japan New York
Statement on the work:
"It all began with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this
design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So
I want on to similar things like the targets things the mind already knows.
That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I’ve always thought of
a painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear… …A
picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator."
Background info on the work:
The flag of the United States of America
Connects to theme and why I
chose it:
I choose this art work because it represents love for one’s country.
The flag of the United
States U.S.
Vaeta Zitman
Artist: Vaeta Zitman
Title: Dear Carmen
Media: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 80 x 54 in
Date: 2007
Title: Dear Carmen
Media: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 80 x 54 in
Date: 2007
Biography information:
Vaeta Zitman is from Venezuela
Statement on the work:
My intention is to represent
“plenty”, a rural, Latin and tropical abundance.
The subject matter are women with voluptuous bodies, huge afros and generous hands.
Big women with mestizo features, elongated eyes and hazel skins.
The ambiance is created by warm colors and round volumes that take shape in flowers,
ripe fruits and, cloths and backgrounds in patterns that evoke the Creole surroundings
of hot climate.
The composition does not display formal perspective, everything happens almost in the
same plane where the female form takes over most of the format.
This work does not present a specific reality nor realistic figures although my reference
is the real beauty I find in common women.
The subject matter are women with voluptuous bodies, huge afros and generous hands.
Big women with mestizo features, elongated eyes and hazel skins.
The ambiance is created by warm colors and round volumes that take shape in flowers,
ripe fruits and, cloths and backgrounds in patterns that evoke the Creole surroundings
of hot climate.
The composition does not display formal perspective, everything happens almost in the
same plane where the female form takes over most of the format.
This work does not present a specific reality nor realistic figures although my reference
is the real beauty I find in common women.
Background info on the work:
The theme of her work is the female figure. Her current
series is titled “Plenty”, in which she portrays women in an abundant state of
being, they are big, voluptuous, generous and of serene presence.
Connects to theme and why I
chose it:
I chose this painting because it because it shows a woman in her
undergarments just laying down as if she is comfortably thinking or missing
someone. I feel this depicts the theme of love because the woman is missing
someone she loves, most likely her lover since she is shown in her
undergarments.
Auguste Rodin
Artist: Auguste Rodin
Title: The Kiss
Media:
Marble Sculpture
Dimensions:
181.5 x 112.5 x 117 cm
Date: 1882
Biography info:
Francois-Auguste-Rene
Rodin was a French sculptor. He was born on November 12, 1840 and passed on
November 17, 1917. Many of his works were criticized for not following the
traditional themes of mythology and allegory and instead focused on the human
body and a person’s character and physicality. His reputation grew and by 1900,
Rodin was a famed artist.
Statement on the work:
The sculpture was originally titled Francesca da Rimini. The sculpture is based on the 13th-century Italian noblewoman who falls in love with her husband’s younger brother and after the discovery of the betrayal, her husband kills them both.
The sculpture was originally titled Francesca da Rimini. The sculpture is based on the 13th-century Italian noblewoman who falls in love with her husband’s younger brother and after the discovery of the betrayal, her husband kills them both.
Background info on the work:
The Kiss, like many of Rodin’s best-known individual sculptures, including The Thinker, the embracing couple was originally a part of a group of reliefs in his bronze portal The Gates of Hell. In 1888, the French government ordered the first large-scale marble version of The Kiss for an exhibition. Two other large scale sculptures and a large number of smaller bronze casts have been done of The Kiss.
The Kiss, like many of Rodin’s best-known individual sculptures, including The Thinker, the embracing couple was originally a part of a group of reliefs in his bronze portal The Gates of Hell. In 1888, the French government ordered the first large-scale marble version of The Kiss for an exhibition. Two other large scale sculptures and a large number of smaller bronze casts have been done of The Kiss.
Connects to theme and why I
chose it:
I chose this sculpture because it portrays a couple in love embracing depicting the moment just before they kiss. The Kiss shows that love is a strong emotion that is hard to ignore even when it is wrong to fall in love with a particular person.
I chose this sculpture because it portrays a couple in love embracing depicting the moment just before they kiss. The Kiss shows that love is a strong emotion that is hard to ignore even when it is wrong to fall in love with a particular person.
Kim Anderson
Artist: Kim Anderson
Title: The First Kiss
Media: Poster
Dimensions: 40.6 x 50.8 cm
Date: January 9, 1999
Biography info:
Kim Anderson was born in Germany Germany
Statement on the work:
To the child, Love is both real and a pretense: a necessity sometimes, a
role at other times; instinctive, yet learned behavior. I see my little girl
offering her hand to be kissed, in a very la-di-da manner. She is trying on the
gallantries of love, just as she tries on the petulance of childhood. How
quickly they master the social codes of love, hugs, and kisses, and hearts - as
quickly as they learn to manipulate the heartstrings by refusing such tokens.
All around children, there are cultural signals, prompts to express and receive
love: in fairy tales, it is the ultimate reward for being discovered as who you
really are, the beauty under the cinders, the prince beneath the frog. In
advertisements, every product sold with the promise that its purchase will
bring or enhance true love.
At the same time that these diaphanous romantic feelings are being planted,
there is the hot, urgent need of the child to be listened to, have needs
attended to, right away. "Mommy I need a pair of scissors ANTZ is coming
out on videotape. I'm hungry I pooped in my pants change me no stupid daddy not
that kind of crayon the other kind!" All demands are on the same plane of
importance, and worthy of tears. The child does not prioritize but asks only to
be obeyed, pronto - with all die respect to the "magic words" please
and thank you, those road-bump nuisance placed by parents, who are slow-witted
and don't understand that they are your servants. It's frustrating sometimes
that they won't acknowledge it; they do so much for you as it is, why won't
they just come clean and admit they are you abject slaves? And in return you
love them, distractedly, wholeheartedly, ambivalently ("I hate you Mommy!
I'll never kiss you again for the rest of my life!") and in the best
possible way, organically, like a heliotrope plant.
So your first love as a child is for your parents. They thermodynamic model
seems to be: love in, love out. If the parents' love has been expressed
cleanly, without mixed messages or scary anger or abandonment (it almost never
is, the psychologists tell us), the child will grow up into a serene,
unconflicted adult; and if there are complications (there almost always are),
the child will probably grow up to have "unresolved issues." But some
confusion is inevitable: before you even reach kindergarten, you may very well
have conceived the idea of marrying one of your parents later on (and why not?
- he/she is so conveniently present, so attractively devoted to your needs);
and you may have experienced jealous annoyance at their displays of affection
to each other. As my four-year-old daughter Lily said to me this morning, when
I had the nerve to kiss her mother in front of her, "That was the longest,
rudest kiss I ever saw!"
My daughter went through a quandary around the time she turned three. Who
should she marry? she began to fret. I was an early candidate, I am happy to
say. She enjoyed slow-dancing with me to Ella Fitzgerald and got a dreamy look
in her eyes when I held her aloft in my arms. But she accepted (all too
sanguinely, it seemed to me) the information that she could not marry her daddy
because it just wasn't done.
So her attention turned to other suitors. Her principal beam was the boy
next door, Dominick. This kid is a lout. He barely speaks except to grunt, he
is fixated on trucks, he regularly gets into trouble at play school for
fighting. I tell you frankly, he is beneath my daughter in intelligence and
deportment. Yet she professes to love him and plans to marry him. She tells me
he will not always be so wild, he will make a good man when he grows up. He
seems to possess that masculine je ne said quoi, that essence of
machismo that even four-year-old girls are attuned to. I try to interest her in
the more intellectual boys in her circle, but she pays them no mind. I will say
this for young Dominick: he does seem to behave better around Lily, and, in his
own way, appears fond of her. Still, I wonder how to protect her from the pain
of unrequited love.
The other day, Lily wanted to go to the neighborhood park because she
thought Dominick might be there. "He loves the park, almost as much as he
loves me," she said confidently. When we finally caught up with him, he
seemed, from my vantage point, to ignore her - tearing back and forth on his
bike, while she pretend he was chasing her. When she got tired of running from
his approach, she sat on a bench and watch him. She was in no way put off by
his self-absorption; rather she seemed able to weave his mere presence into her
ongoing fantasy that he is crazy about her.
When she first began asking "Who should I marry?" I was not the only
one to tell the question might be a little premature. Our assurances did
nothing to quell her sense of urgency. Obviously she had reached a development
stage in her own mind when the act of deciding about something big - the choice
of a life partner - had to be undertaken, at least in practice. I knew where
some of the romantic suspense was coming from. She had chronically watched five
different versions of Cinderella on tape from Betty Boop to Brandy, then
had graduated to obsessions with The Sound of Music, Funny Face, Gigi, and My
Fair Lady. One day, she remarked, like a precocious narratologist, "You
know, they're all the same story." It was true: in each variation, a lowly
girl had been plucked from the chorus, so to speak, to marry the top man.
A few other candidates for Lily's hand had to be evaluated. Lily's
great-uncle Reuben regularly proposed that they run away and get married, but
he was over seventy and has a hearing aid; and besides, there was Aunt
Florence, his wife of forty-five years, to consider. Then her pediatrician,
Doctor Monti, expressed interest, but he was always so busy. No, it would have
to be Dominick. Now that dilemma was settled, Lily began mulling over her
wedding gown, tiara, pumps, jewels, boa, tutu. Wedding announcements would have
to be sent out, ribbon bows tied, handwriting of name practice. She began to
tell everyone who came to visit; "I have a boyfriend name Dominick and
we're going to get married."
Did this mean that she was infatuated with Dominick? On the contrary, during
this time she had little contact with the actual boy, nor did she seem to want
more. Meanwhile, I witnessed her daily eruption of intense feelings for another
love object altogether: her cat, Newman. She could not get enough of catching
him, snuggling with him, holding him captive by the paws, tying kerchiefs on
his head, strapping blankets to his body, tormenting him in every possible
fashion, and sobbing when he ran away. Here, I thought, was the real thing:
love without the romantic gauze, but with the cruelty and appetite of
attraction that one sees in film noir. She would kill for him - or kill him!
How often my wife and I have had to intervene to protect the creature, removing
from his neck harnesses and cravats that could have easily turned into nooses.
Yet he always comes back to her, like the poor sap Glenn Ford used to play in
those films noir, for more punishment. He craves her attention; and she, in
turn, related to him fearlessly, accepting whatever scratches may come her way.
Lily loves Newman in a deep, passionate manner. It is like a cross between
her instinctual, inadvertent love for her parents and her elective affinity for
the little boyfriend next door. Thought the Abyssinian has been with her all
her life, her feelings have increasingly focused on and matured toward him: she
talks to him regularly as though he were her child, her honey, her one and
only. The problem is that Newman is twenty years old - ancient by cat
standards. Already he is arthritic, cataract, and worrisomely skinny. He sleeps
for much of the day, curled up in a ball, until Lily comes around to prod him
into motion. As parents, we can try to protect our child from viciousness and
harm, but not from the consequences of tender attachment. We shudder to think
of what will happen when he dies. Then she will really know the sorrow that is
so often inextricable from first love.
Essay by Phillip Lopate
Background info on the work:
The romantic appeal of The First Kiss is universal,
hand-printed in black and white and the hand-colored rose.
Connects to theme and why I chose it:
This image connects
to the theme of love because it shows the tenderness of the first kiss. This
photograph takes me back to childhood and then reminds me of my first kiss and
when I first fell in love. It may also show how by imitating their parents
children might be portraying how they feel they should act when they get older.
Overall it is a sense of love.
In Conclusion:
Through this project I learned that
the task of choosing and organizing an exhibition of works by various artists
is very difficult. It was fun to search different works under a specific theme,
but because of this, I spent a great deal of time just browsing through art. It
was difficult to not include some beautiful works because I could not find all
the information about the piece, but I could not include it with out all its
pertaining information. As a result of
this process, I feel that the job of a curator is very difficult. They have the
arduous task of choosing between a vast number of works and artists. Being able
to present all of the works information is of great importance and might be
difficult to shorten the information on the artist because there is so much
information of importance.
When choosing a theme, one thinks
of the varying depictions one can present to the viewers. Connecting work by
different artists under the same theme shows how everyone has a different view
on life. The artists have all had very different experiences in their lives and
their work is very different even if it can be branched under the same theme.
The theme of love is here expressed by portraying: children, flags, pets,
couples, and even spiders. Even if every artist displayed here were to make a
work specifically in the theme of love, all the works would be completely
different from the other because of the experiences of the artist and the way
he/she chooses to define love.
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