Art
Frans Hals: the Everlasting Avant-Gardist
Frans Hals, a painter who met a humble end in the late 17th century, only to be rediscovered in the 19th century, now draws almost half a million tickets in advance sales at Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. With his nearly 200 works, Hals is a portrait maestro. That’s it. Van Gogh thought so too. His technique is simple, but with playful brushstrokes on a palette of a few colors – art on a modest scale. But what sets him apart from other artists of his time, is his deep understanding of the specific Dutch environment he portrayed. His success lies in the warmth he depicted in various ways. It’s a warmth that resonates with the realities of the modern world. His signature expressions are smiles and laughter. People in his paintings smile, some subtly, while others burst into hearty laughter. Yet, these simple gestures are vibrant, radiating instant energy. Even the wealthy characters, those thirsty for glory, weighed down by their powerful clothing, crack a smile. Frans Hals: A Modern Figure of his time But who exactly was Frans Hals, really? Do we even know what he looked like? Apparently, throughout his work, he was found […]
Art
Influence of pop art in American Culture
Pop Art originated in England with the “Independent Group” in the 1950s, based on industrial iconography, science fiction, light posters and some works by Francis Bacon. At the same time, it was accepted in the United States, settling precisely in New York as art proper to the society of the time which, with a great promotional montage, imposed it as a historical mandate, as the individual’s need to reaffirm its objectivity in this new mass society. Pop art in the United States captures an important part of the urban consumerist sphere, the product of a society in expansion within the “American Dream” and the “American Way of Life”, promoted by the media in constant development in the reproduction and dissemination of advertising images. Pop artists, in reality, document what they see around them, with its lights and shadows. It is, no more and no less, the plastic manifestation of a culture that is characterized by various factors such as dizzying consumption, technology, leisure, consumption, fashions, democracy… Everything manufactured, packaged and ready to be sold. As I opened fire, Roy Lichtenstein It gave rise to a particular culture whose content can be easily perceived, which some critics of the time describe […]
Art Art Article
Digital Art: from concept to reality
Is digital art really a threat to the supremacy of the traditional Institution of Art? This is a question that emerges in front of the vertiginous growth of the universe of Digital Art in the last fifty years. Some “nuances of fear” may arise in front of the feat that means that being such a novel language, it is breaking in such a scandalous way the standards that conventional art took centuries to achieve. Our modernity is a maelstrom, yes, and art is not on the fringes of this. If we want to understand the rise of digital art, we will have to dig into the solutions that modern human beings have been giving to their infinite creativity and ambition, which exceeds a tangible world, increasingly finite. Technological development has meant the ideal tool for the expansion of humanity in its most diverse forms. Consequently, art as an indigenous expression of human beings has found a considerable variety of lines of work in the digital space. Not without its discrepancies, like everything that questions and destabilizes pre-established models, digital art has undoubtedly added value and has become a fundamental element in the knowledge economy. We will try to explain the […]
Art Art Article
Minimal Art
When we think of Minimalism, a concept emerges attached to the term itself: simplicity. We are talking about a philosophy of life, style and artistic movement transversal to several disciplines. Despite their differences, these have in common the desire to get rid of everything “bombastic”. Like all ideology, minimalism is also subject to human subjectivity, which in this article leaves us faced with the challenge of interpreting an art without contradicting its own principles, that is, explaining Minimal Art in a simple way. Exploring the context, we will begin to understand that for many of the artists of the 20th century, the traditional art and technique of Western painting and sculpture were over-exploited. This led contemporary artists to search for new languages, many of them totally isolated from the paradigms of classical beauty and harmony, even from the purpose of art itself. Then, the Historical Artistic Avant-Garde arose, within which historians consider Minimalism the last movement of modernity. Directly imbued with the Dutch neoplasticism of the twenties, Russian constructivism, geometric abstraction and modern reductivism, Minimalism consolidated itself as a movement, theoretically based on their respective manifestos, in the sixties of the twentieth century. New York City was the scene where […]
Art Art Article
Van Gogh and Japan
Japonisme is a concept used to describe the study of Japanese art and its influence on European artists. It was present in several currents, including art nouveau and post-impressionism. But this phenomenon is more closely related to Impressionism, as artists such as Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were inspired by the themes, perspective and composition of Japanese prints. Objects such as lanterns, screens and lacquerware were popular with the city’s designers. Artists such as Monet, Degas and others collected Japanese prints, to later incorporate the Japonisme into their own artworks. By the hand of Samuel Bing (1838-1905) a great collector and dealer who possessed a great culture (which led him to become very passionate about Japanese art) this ‘Japonisme’ had arrived in Paris. Bing, born in Hamburg, moved to Paris in 1871, and in 1895, together with his Japanese partner Hayashi Tadamasa, founded the gallery L’Art Nouveau, which was to become one of the great centers of Parisian intellectual life. He also founded a club where members wore kimonos and ate with chopsticks, known as the Jing-lar. In 1875 Bing himself had travelled to Japan, where he bought numerous prints and other valuable objects which, on his arrival in Paris, […]
Art Art Article
Cubism
Cubism is the innovative artistic movement that emerged in France in the 20th century, between 1907 and 1908. Its creators were the famous Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It includes the visual arts, design and literature. The year 1907 is taken as the starting date with Picasso’s painting Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon). It was an extremely novel style of art for its time It seemed that the masses were not yet ready to leave behind the admiration for the trends of the Impressionist movement to which many artists remained attached, while Picasso and Braque were working hard to develop their philosophy through Cubism. Those works were at first confusing. The identifying mark of this artistic trend is the use of geometric figures, breaking with the scheme of aesthetic models that preferred perfection in figures and forms. It is an essential trend from which the rest of the European avant-garde movements of the 20th century emerged. It is the definitive separation from traditional painting. Girl with a Mandolin 1910, by Pablo Picasso, source Wikipedia Still, Both Picasso and Braque decided to ignore the opinions of their many detractors, resulting in subsequent art movements that took many aspects of […]