Essay on "Art History"

Essay 4 pages (1299 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Art History

Certainly, after proceeding into the course, I see the world with a radically different perspective than when you began your art studies. I now look much more deeply into things around you myself and with a different set of eyes and mind. I now do not see art as something that has a definitive form or an exact composition. Rather, the art can be relative have elements that do not have to directly reflect reality on the surface. Indeed, via principles of art as well as the significance of the things that one is looking it in terms of symbols or themes. Mystically, art opens up the vistas of the human mind and the subconscious that we would otherwise ignore. It helps us to not just "smell the roses" so to speak, but to take a mind trip, so to speak, and to see them in new colors and perspectives that we would not otherwise have been able to have.

This really hits upon what art is. Whether it is 20,00 French cave art or the most modern art that one can find in a museum, art and abstraction really is a uniquely human activity. It is a reflection of the human soul put on canvas. We dwell on what endures and lives beyond. Reality is not just what we see, but a mystical something that we can not readily lay our hands on. Art gives us the mystical tools to grasp this underlying reality and bring it back to the surface to appreciate in properly whether we are in the cathedral or in the exhibit hall. After all, for most of us, the art museums are our temples and we must adorn them with the sacred to help us find meaning in the crazy world.

QUESTION #2)

I like the synthetic cubist painting by Picasso on page 300 better due to the clown like character of the landscape that the artist created. Cubism appeals to me because of its abstraction of reality, breaking it down and then analyzing its component parts. Analytic Cubism much simpler being a less sophisticated analysis of the objects/subjects by pulling them apart for analysis into planes. The Synthetic Cubism in this painting of the three musicians is more of a pushing together of the several objects together for analysis. It is less pure though because is looks like it has fewer shifts of focus and also less shading. This looks so much to me like the artist was trying to create a perception of flatter space.

With this otherworldly appearance and appeal, Picasso's paintings are very surreal, mystical and magical at the same time. If Picasso had lived around Berkeley n the 1960's, I would think he would have been taking acid and running around with Timothy Leary dropping psychedelics and listening to rock music to expand his mind. The whole painting is a transpersonal trip into an altered world of perception that only Picasso knew and understood and that he refused to explain to the person appreciating the art. The other appeal of this painting to me is that it features the clown, which is in many of his works. I can understand why he used this so much. The clown's figure can be easily broken down into a cubist format, especially stylistic cubism.

While on the surface, this seems like happy scenery, it also exudes a negative energy that is unmistakable. His work is obviously made to shock, and it certainly does that. It attracts and repels at the same time. It is almost as if he stole the primitive, primeval fire of Spain back into the pre-Roman times and link up the ancient times with modernism and mix them up in a shocking way. It almost seems as though he loves and hates the world at the same time. In this way, this vision more accurately portrays the… READ MORE

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