My Trip to the MoMa

This painting was made by Roy Lichtenstein, it is an American oil painting on canvas. It inspired me and caught my eye because to me it portrays a form of sex appeal. The way the girl is holding the beach ball and having her mouth open like that makes the photo look like it was intended to be sexual. Roy pirated this picture from an advertisement he saw in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania and recreated it as painting version of the techniques of comic book artist.

This portrait is a Frida Kahlo painting titled My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) the painting was illustrated in 1936 with oil and tempera on zinc. Learning about Frida Kahlo in class has made me extremely interested in her life and  story. Learning about her life and struggles has opened my eyes and although she went through a lot she always remained brave and strong.  In this family tree, Frida depicted herself as a fetus in her utero as a baby in her childhood home. Frida embraced her Mexican culture in what she wore and in her art. She explains her European and Jewish cultures as well. She continued to explain how her father was German born and Jewish and how her mother was Mexican. Frida took great pride in representing each of her cultures proudly.

This painting caught my eye immediately. This is a Francis Picabia  painting called "The Spanish Night," it was illustrated in 1922. The picture shows a silhouette of a nude woman covered with abstract targets and she and the male are covered in bullet holes. This painting has a very strong look to it and Picabia has a very interesting features in this painting he used not only oil paint, but also enamel paint which gave the painting a form of shine and it helped the picture stand out. To me this picture represent woman being targeted for many things like, nude photos, what they wear, how they talk and maybe even how they think.  I would like to think that this painting has a message behind it, which is why the painting has such a strong illustration.

                                                                         Selfie:

Spanish Night, 2017

Exploring The Metroplitan Museum of Art

During my spring break, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Robert Lehman Wing had a special exhibition called Seurat’s Circus Slideshow. Some themes presented in his exhibition demonstrated nighttime circus scenes and performers where the audience gets to a taste from artists such as Daumier in the mid-19^th century to Picasso. In Robert Lehman’s regular gallery, which was a floor above, demonstrated remarkable art pieces in which the majority had a religious theme. Another major part of his exhibition illuminated women as the central subject of the art piece, most of which were nude. In the gallery there was also a piece where a female artist let herself be painted by other artists including herself. Two pieces of art that I found very interesting, and later had to connect, was Georges Seurat Study of “Models” in 1886-87 which was displayed in the special exhibition; and also Suzanne Valadon piece the Reclining Nude made in 1928.

            In the first piece I chose, Georges Seurat Study of “Models,” he drew the lady using conte crayon on paper. As shown in the above painting on the left, the lady seemed to be a little stiff and in an upright position with her head slightly tilted, her hands properly held together, one top of the other, with her weight being on top of her back foot for balance to maintain that position. It was one of the most “naturalistic” and “reminiscent” pieces of work due to the fact that Seurat’s study for the central figure was aiming for a stuff, frontal pose that was similar to the trombonist in Circus Sideshow and the “mannequin-like parkgoers” parading which is in the background. The artist addressed identity through the model in this art piece giving a demonstration of how some of the people who were presently there at the time were seen. If that was the case, I was a bit confused on why she had to be nude, if all the artist wanted to display was the position in which people were shown.

            As for the second piece of art, Suzanne Valadon’s Reclining Nude, was lined by oil on canvas and signed by the artist herself in the upper right in 1928. As mentioned in her label, Suzanne posed as a model for other artists before she began painting herself in 1893. She favored still lifes and portraits that she was best well-known for her paintings of female nudes. Paintings of female nudes was a subject rarely chosen by female artists. Similar to other women nude paintings, her gaze played a major role in the piece of art however it also shows how she covers her body by crossing her legs and covering her breasts which evokes gestures of modesty with Greek and Roman sculpture. The identity addressed in this portrait was of the artist herself who chose to become the model and subject within her self work. This painting connects both identity and self in one. She used her own body as the subject and yet was being part of the identity of most women. If some people may point out, most of the art work in this time period demonstrate women in full or partly nude that demonstrate the “ideal” body type, which is a skinny women with a nice body and butt. This portrait demonstrates the artist true body, in which at the time having an ideal body was not a major theme or subject. She was in her natural human state. This why her portrait struck out, because of her own self being displayed to the public with no problem.

            The artists and curators are telling the gallery audience that from years ago women were the chosen ones to pose or are used as subjects the majority of the time when expressing an idea. The first project I chose was labeled “The Study of Models” while portraying a woman to be the model. The natural beauty of them in their human nature physique is what impressed most painters. Similarly to the second portrait I chose, whom the painter chose her own self as the model to represent the central piece in her work. Nudity at the time was not a major theme to address back then especially with one’s own body.as shown with Suzanne. I believe for the first one, self is involved only when using her own body as the subject whereas self-portrait was rarely addressed due to the fact that her face was blurred out. In this painting, she was only the subject. Whereas the second painting, Suzanne became both the subject and made it a self-portrait of herself in her natural state. Most women at the time did not want to be part of this nudity because of the erotic comments given by the public. 

My selfie showed my reaction when visiting the museum which was mind-blowing. One painting that really gave this reaction was Saint Christopher and the Infant Child. This piece of art was very religious and it hit me when I saw the man holding Christ as a child on his shoulders while helping him cross the water. You can see the boats and villages on hills in the background. This struck me because of the fact that I saw it more in the perspective of Saint Christopher holding the world on his shoulders since, in my religion, Christ was a part of God. 

Art Museum: Fear of drinking water in it.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 10, 2017. I didn’t necessarily find many self portraits but I found intriguing pieces that made me think of self. I went with my best friend who has a quirky personality and has his specific likes and themes with art.  He dislikes the city but somehow he was willing to go with me on a cold day. It was a first for me and for him! He is quite opposite to me when it comes to art. I was intrigued by the weird pieces, dark ones, and ones that don’t make sense to the eye. We walked around and he’d say “THIS IS YOU”, which I immediately appreciated because I didn’t feel so awkward liking this odd images. I couldn’t pick just two, so I decided to describe four. Apologies.

Rush Hour, 2010
George Condo

The first image I enjoyed was “Rush Hour” by George Condo. He used acrylic, graphite,charcoal, and pastel on canvas. This image had so many faces and distorted faces, I felt it was so unique and a bit crazy. As a writer, I connected it to characters and self as being different kinds of self. I am one person with many personalities.

This made me uncomfortable yet relieved at the same time. I think how messy it is yet how organized, made me realize how my brain is as well. I felt this image represented self in the sense that there is more than one self. In the description the artist pays homage to the masters of the past. He is inspired by many artists and combines these artists specific quirks to create an image. The descriptions mentions he uses Cubism and echos Arshile Gorky’s color-blocked washes.

Prescience, 1942
Charles Houghton Howard

Another image I found was “Prescience” by Charles Houghton Howard. It’s oil on canvas. The colors are beautiful and deep. They are not bright yet the colors are vibrant. This is the first one my best friend saw and said “THIS IS YOU”. This one felt like a puzzle. I felt like if I could rearrange the shapes it would make a face, not a proportional face but a face. In the description of the image, the artist mentioned a phrase which I think is related to self. He said “to recall shapes and relations of things which are common to all mankind”. I think the self is common, images are seen daily. We see faces or hear descriptions of people daily. After seeing this image, my best friend proceeded to say this is you because it’s dark, scary, but it has some light. And then I was called Wednesday

Addams.

Woman with a Cat, 1921
Frenand Léger

Another image I found lovely was “Woman with a Cat” by Fernand Léger. This image is definitely a self portrait of me. Even just the title itself explains what it is, but it’s not a woman with a face or that sex appeal that is immediately assumed when the woman appears.. The painting itself is modern. Its shapes and not curves, it’s robotic, having this classic feel to the image but modernizing it by color and style. The artist painted many woman and this image was part of a collection. In the description it mentions that Léger’s subject comes from European specifically French artistic tradition. I immediately connected this to the discussion we had in class about tradition. I feel that this artist broke tradition by not painting a woman all beautiful and sexual. This one was my favorite because of the cat, a book, and the woman posing in the image. (SO ME)

Gala Éluard, 1924 Max Ernst 

The last Image I’d like to include is "Gala Éluard" by Max Ernst. This is oil on canvas as well and is more of a portrait than the other images. This one in the description is saying it reveals the personal and artistic lives of members of the surrealist circle. The image is surreal and beautiful. It’s sort of feels like I am reading someone’s mind. This image is the least dark of the four and actually contains a face that looks like a face. I felt this one was more self in the sense that there is a self in it, a person in it, and it shows a reflection of a life in which the others are more weird.

I feel like the ones I chose do not necessarily concentrate on self but show  an image of self. I felt they were all different in their own way but they were all weird and modern. I was way too intrigued by surreal art and as my best friend said, “dark, scary, and some light”. He also mentioned the word “funky” but not sure what he meant by it. I think the way these artists show an image is by details.. Smallest details creating a whole bigger picture.

Selfie:

Singing in Whispers, 2017

I wanted something simple, black and white. I was inspired by the description of what I like, dark, scary, and light. I don't see scary but I see dark and light.

Check this out: Recent Art Gallery Visit

My Spring Break 2017 was one of the quickest and laziest spring breaks I've ever had. I didn't go anywhere hot, I couldn't visit my family in Massachusetts instead I just hung out with my best friend, bought food all day, spent time with my dad and my half siblings and caught up on Netflix. My recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum of art has been quite a mission but it was a success. It all started with this crazy weather that went from 65 degrees to 65 inches of snow.

Anyway, this was my first time going to the Met and I loved it. I mostly tried to get a little peek of each and every part of the museum before it closed at 5:30 pm. The first exhibition I entered was upstairs and majority modern art paintings which caught my attention; since I don't have any knowledge of art history whatsoever. I saw themes ranging from cubism by a majority of french painters and surrealism which is my favorite. My goal was to see all paintings and ceramics for another class. Since it was my first time going to an art museum all together it felt amazing to be exposed everything being displayed. I loved seeing the European paintings and sculptures as well as the contemporary exhibit.

I came to the museum on a day with a pretty decent temperature outside and only 3 hours to spare till it was time to close. My first piece of art I took a photo of automatically caught my attention because it reminded me so much of the first artist photographer that I ever learned about. Cindy Sherman. Her photographs were so powerful and spoke with words that haven't been said but were able to heard through visual messages. Although the artist isn't Cindy Sherman she did seem to embody a lot of her style in her photographs. I turned to look at the captioned information and to my surprise I saw that it was not only a self-portrait but also mentioned Cindy Sherman who had similar photography as her who would be discovered about a century later. I knew this some how had to be connected to each other but I was more shocked to know that Cindy Sherman could have been inspired by this artist first. In the description it talks about how in the photograph Hase either has tripped or thrown herself down a flight of stairs.

Elisabeth Hase "Downstairs" 1948

 Just like Sherman, Hase had also been experimenting with  staged scenarios that had been exploring feminine identity. In this photograph, I perceived it as if she had thrown herself a flight of stairs purposely in a way to make fun of the way how silly women look when they are in peril. Just like in movies that show women, they are almost always in need of help by the male hero that is going to save them. In Hase self-portrait I think she sets the stage for many more feminist photographers like Sherman to expand on. One important I also noticed about Hases' self portrait was that there was no gaze into the viewers eyes like most females in art itself just as John Berger points out about the "male gaze" in his book 'Ways of Seeing'.

Fildelma Cadmus Kirstein "Self Portrait"

The next artist I found happened to be in front of the contemporary art exhibit gallery 913. The artist happened to have a self-portrait of her and what looked like her husband next to each other. Besides the fact that the portraits literally were the first two paintings I saw upon entering the exhibit, the women in the portrait looked so intimate with a towel covering her head. The artist's name is Fildelma Cadmus Kirstein, an american painter whom I haven't heard of. In the description next to her it says first and foremost says her life and work has always been overshadowed by her brother Paul Cadmus who was also a painter, and her husband Lincoln Kirstein who was very well-known at the time being the co-founder of the New York Ballet. So automatically this women already had felt the need to be extraordinary, even more than the men near to her in order to be remembered by. In the painting itself, the description describes her gaze as bold and returning straight to the viewers eyes. She has her shoulders bare, which was probably very "taboo" at the time. She has her plush towel wrapped around her head. The bright sky blue color background sugge sky.  The description also provides that Kirstein had been sunbathing as a way of having leisure time with her husband and brother at the time in Fire Island. Kirsteins own work is a very interesting portrait that had a very good spot in the exhibit where everyone can see upon entering. She was probably a very underappreciated artist especially with having an iconic husband at the time to overshadow her talents that are now displayed in the museum.

Art Museum

During the spring break, I visited the Montclair Art Museum. I had the pleasure to see the current special exhibition "Matisse and American Art," which consist of 19 works by Henri Matisse on display, including paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, along with 44 works by American artists inspired by him, including Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, Maurice Prendergast, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, John Baldessari, Sophie Matisse, Faith Ringgold, and Helen Frankenthaler. These works are on loan from individuals and institutions across the world. This show focuses on Matisse's influence on American painters. Visiting the museum was a great experience. It was my first time visiting an Art Museum and it was very impressive.

Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere in his paintings. Rather than using modeling or shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated color. These ideas continued to be important to him throughout his career. His art was important in endorsing the value of decoration in modern art. However, although he is popularly regarded as a painter devoted to pleasure and contentment, his use of color and pattern is often deliberately disorientating and unsettling. Matisse was heavily influenced by art from other cultures. Having seen several exhibitions of Asian art, and having traveled to North Africa, he incorporated some of the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the angularity of African sculpture, and the flatness of Japanese prints into his own style. The human figure was central to Matisse's work both in sculpture and painting. Its importance for his Fauvist work reflects his feeling that the subject had been neglected in Impressionism, and it continued to be important to him. At times he fragmented the figure harshly, at other times he treated it almost as a curvilinear, decorative element. Some of his work reflects the mood and personality of his models, but more often he used them merely as vehicles for his own feelings, reducing them to ciphers in his monumental designs.

There was one specific painting which caught my attention, Spring In Central Park by William Zorach. He stated that his paintings of New York City's Central Park were "painted at home from imagination . . . in all wild colors, peopled with exotic nudes." With his wife, Marguerite, an avant-garde painter herself. Henri Matisse and Andre Derain influenced his work. 

My favorite painting was Blue Nude painted by Henri Matisse. The painting is of a woman laying nude with one leg over the other and arm bent against her head. The strokes that were used while painting this piece were somewhat sketch like and you can see the process of applying paint to the canvas through this. Some of the most noticeable places that you can see this type of application is the shading on the inner side of her left breast and the dark lines around her thighs and face. This is a feature that falls into the category of avant-garde because it goes against the smooth soft lines that the academy strived for and was much more sketch like. The painting style being more sketch like and the subject not being in perfect detail is a bit unconventional as well. Another way that this painting portrays the avant-garde style is its depiction of the female nude. Rather than displaying a very stylized and soft image of a nude woman, Matisse created a much different and rougher portrayal. Her anatomy is also different than many of the nudes that we normally see. She seems to have definite muscle and this also takes away from the softness. There is a somewhat abstract feel to this piece because of the use of color along with the faint detail in the background. Many of these features fall into primitivism as well. The sketch like strokes may seem simpler and abstract background also add a simple feel to this piece.

be(loved)

This was inspired by Marilyn Minter's chromogenic print called Black Orchid that was published in 2012.

Gallery Visit

Brooklyn Museum 2017 

Over my spring break, I decided to visit the Brooklyn Museum, for my art gallery assignment, as I was assigned to visit here for my gender, sexuality and culture class. I decided to kill two birds with one stone. This was a magical enriching experience, I have always been a great admirer of the arts, so I thoroughly enjoyed each exhibit, I went from floor to floor, marveling at each art work’s beauty. I enjoyed the ancient Egyptian art, as well as the intricate crafts and jewels from Africa.

My one favorite exhbit was the “Iggy Pop Life Class” by Jeremy Deller. These art works are not necessarily self portraits, but I was somehow drawn to the entire exhibit, as it portrayed the shifting image of how the societal male’s body has changed throughout history. A bunch of random artist’s from all walk’s of life, came to this class, where a famous rock star “Iggy Pop” was their nude subject. In Each of these still life drawing’s, through it’s shabbiness you can see details, details that are very important that showed how men’s body and the way they portrayed themselves and the way society portrayed them changed overtime. Some photos showed the men with larger, lax bodies in the past and overtime, you saw the concentration of men having muscular bodies in the more modern pieces. 

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller 2017

Iggy Pop Life Class By Jeremy Deller 2016

I also visited Marilyn Minter's Exhibit : Pretty Dirty, which was a series of bold and sensual paintings, photographs and sexual videos which directly focused on the portrayal of the sensual woman, and showed all of the emotions that somehow surrounds the way Western society views femininity and the female body. It mostly tried to debunk the stereotype that an "accepted" woman is the woman that secludes and hides under a mask of timidness. 

Marilyn Minter Green Pink Caviar (2009)

Pink Caviar was one of my favorite pieces, it was a video which was like about 8 mins long, it showed a model's lips with different slimy substances coming out, it seemed to range from alcohol to even candy , with a woman with tangled hair, it showed her sucking in these mystery substances and vomitting them out. it somehow resonated to me as the portrayal of all promiscuous women , from the porn star to the prostitute. it somehow enticed me as well as repulsed me. It looks like it belonged in a music video. it showed how the mouth is the central place of all activities, sexual and non-sexual. I stood and looked at this video twice it sort've tripped me out. it mesmerized me and made me realize that we don't realize the power of mouths, besides speech, we eat, we have sex and arouse others with the use of our mouths. I believe Marilyn Minter's goal was to show us how important the mouths are aesthetically. 

Mom Making Up 1969 

This piece shows Marilyn Minter's mom in her mirror putting on make up in a mirror, from reading the captions for the piece, it was part of a series that was only on display for about 25 years, as it apparently was very disturbing to many of her fellow classmates. Seeing the time this photo was taken , it probably came very shocking that her mother's role wasn't centralized to domesticity as the norm for those times, it gave a very idealistic vain view of this woman, one that was never portrayed, this woman embraced herself and seemed bent on not conforming to what standards society had set for her. I wish the rest of images from this series were accessible because i would love to see what so gravely disturbed her classmates, or were they just afraid of a powerful woman? 

Thoroughly i enjoyed each and every exhibit in this museum, and i plan on making it a priority to visit many more throughout my lifetime. There is nothing but great beauty and chaos in art work, the epitome of human life. 

Me and some art (2017) :)