The Artist 

"Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe."

 Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein, in Montreal, Canada, in 1913. He was the youngest of seven children born to a Jewish couple who had come to America after fleeing the pogroms in Russia. America seemed to offer shelter from persecution, yet the family found life difficult in their new country. Guston's father had been a saloon keeper, but he struggled to find work; in 1919 the family moved to Los Angeles with hopes of better fortunes, but they only encountered more hardship and also met with the racism that surrounded the growth of the Klu Klux Klan in the period. Around four years later, his father committed suicide by hanging and Guston discovered the body, an experience which profoundly marked him. As he moved into adolescence, Philip retreated in the fantasy world of comics, and started to become interested in drawing, which led his mother to enrol him in a correspondence course at the Cleveland School of Cartooning, thus beginning his training as an artist.

In a career of constant struggle and evolution, Philip Guston emerged first in the 1930s as a social realist painter of murals in the 1930s. Much later he also evolved a unique and highly influential style of cartoon realism. But he made his name as an Abstract Expressionist. He avoided the muscular gestures of painters such as Pollock and Kline, and opted for a lighter touch, painting shimmering abstractions in which forms seem to hover like mists in the foreground. Philip was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City. which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from  Abstract Expressionism to Neo Expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects.

Guston was perhaps the most politically driven of all those artists who later went on to become abstract expressionists. He produced anti-fascist paintings; secured prestigious public mural commissions under the New Deal; and, unlike any of the others, his interest in mural art drew him to Mexico. The attempt to understand this shift from a politically radical art practice in his earlier years through to an abstract one by the 1950s entails a closer examination of the fortunes of the US Communist Party (CPUSA) in the period of the Popular Front, the influence it had upon young artists radicalised by the Depression, and the move from a federally sponsored mural art of the New Deal period through to the post-war consolidation of the commercial gallery system.

The Work
"BOMBARDMENT"
1937-38
OIL ON MASONITE




Philip painted Bombardment after reading newspaper reports of the atrocities carried out during the Spanish Civil War, which began on July 17, 1936, When General Francisco Franco led a military coup against the democratically elected Republican government. The emotionally charged scene, which reflects the artists recent exposure to the activist art of the Mexican mural movement, depicts the areal bombardment of a civilian population by Francos war planes. However, the traditional tondo (circle) format, typically identified with italian Renaissance painting suggest that Guston intended to create a universal icon decrying human hatred and destruction rather than a specific commentary on the war in Spain.

 My Reaction


At first glance I was immediately moved by this piece. It's as if I'm peeking into the past frozen in time.
Guston vividly displayed his vision of fear, chaos, and terror with great composition and use of positioning. I like how he put detail in everything from the brick wall on the left to the bombs exploding in the middle ground and the people in the background running for cover. It definitely feels as if I'm watching happen and time just stopped.




Work Cited

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/738  Workers Power 285 - April 2004

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-guston-philip.htm

Dennison ,Lisa. Celant, Germano, "NEW YORK NEW YORK". SHIRA EDITORE. S. p. A. Palazzo Casati Stampa via Torino 61 20123 Milano Italy 2006. Print

The Artist

Pablo Picasso

• Known as: Most famous 20th-century painter
• Born: 25 October 1881, Málaga, Andalucía, Spain
• Birthname: Pablo Ruiz Picasso
• Height: 5' 4"
• Died: 8 April 1973, Mougins, Alpes Maritimes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France     

Born October 25, 1881 in Málaga, Spain. Picasso's gargantuan full name, which honors a variety of relatives and saints, is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso. Picasso's mother was Doña Maria Picasso y Lopez and his father was Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art teacher. A serious and prematurely world-weary child, the young Pablo Picasso possessed a pair of piercing, watchful black eyes that seemed to mark him out for greatness. He remembered, "When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

The Work

"The Kiss" 1969

The Kiss was painted a day before Picasso’s 88th birthday at his home at Mougins along the Côte d'Azur, where he lived the last fifteen years of his life. In May 2008, The Kiss was sold for $17.4 million, the highest price ever paid for a post-1960 Picasso painting. The two profiles meld into a single line in a cinematic close-up; the noses crash, folding into the shape of an eight, the bulging eyes go up toward the highest point of the forehead as it bends backward, and the mouths are devouring each other.  Picasso made a single being out of two expressing the carnal fusion brought forth by the act of kissing. Never had erotic power been suggested with such realism. (p.458 Ultimate Picasso) 

The Kiss 1925

It makes demands on us. We have to disentangle what we see, gradually discovering at the top, amidst the seeming chaos of loud colours and contrasts, mouths locked in a devouring kiss; a figure at left, holding another in an embrace; an exploded backbone atop straddled legs. But what looks like a mouth or eye, soulfully intimate, is in fact a vagina about to be "eaten", and at the bottom of the picture we are provocatively confronted with an anus - balancing the composition in ribald parody of classical laws of composition. Not until late work done in the 1960s did Picasso again treat sexuality thus.

http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/picasso10.html

My Reaction

This is a great example of Picasso's use of bold expressive lines to create drama and a dynamic composition. There are three other versions of this painting before this one, all equally eye catching, but in different ways by use of colors, hand placement, composition, shading, and brush strokes. Even with all these differences in each painting, Picasso stills has a way of making you feel like you yourself want to grab and KISS somebody.

Work Cited

1. http://www.paintinglounge.com/PicassosTheKiss.html

2. http://www.leninimports.com/pablo_picasso_biography_2.html

3.  Leal, Brigitte, Piot, Christine, Bernadac, Marie- Laure. The Ultimate Picasso. Harry N. Abrams, INC. 2000. Print

4.

The Artist

Francis Bacon 1909-1992 English painter and artist From Dublin, Ireland 

We are born and we die, but in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives - Francis Bacon

 

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 28, 1909, to English parents. Raised with three siblings, Francis Bacon is a descendant of the sixteenth-century statesman and essayist of the same name.(world bio) He discovered his homosexuality at the age of fourteen and at the age of sixteen he was banished for his home for trying on his mother's lingerie. Bacon produced some of the most iconic images of wounded and traumatized humanity in post-war art. Borrowing inspiration from Surrealism, film, photography, and the Old Masters, he forged a distinctive style that made him one of the most widely recognized exponents of figurative art in the 1940s and 1950s. Bacon started off as a designer and decorator before he was introduced to art.

 

THE WORK

 

Crucifixion, Francis Bacon, 1933

Herbert Read included the first of Bacon's Crucifixion paintings in 1933, the year it was painted, in his book Art Now, as well as in the exhibition at the Mayor Gallery that coincided with the book's publication. Convinced of the importance of Bacon's work Sir Michael Sadler, a major collector of modern and contemporary art, undertook an unusual and suggestive approach to commissioning a portrait to be hung in University College, sending Bacon an X-ray of his skull on which to base a likeness. (pg10 Retrospective) Biomorphic Surrealism shaped the style of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the work that launched Bacon's reputation when it was exhibited in London in the final weeks of World War Two. The work established many of the themes that would occupy the rest of his career, namely humanity's capacity for self-destruction and its fate in an age of global war.

My Reaction

I chose this because this because Francis Bacon is a great artist and this art work was one of the first of his many art works to be recognized. This piece gave life to the versions we all know now. The classic black and white colors show his struggle between the light and dark side of his mind. Not to mention the x-ray of the head it's as if he wants us to get into his mind and feel his pain. Reading his biography definitely help me me understand him more and the pain he dealt with growing up. 

 

 

Francis and his lover George 

George committed suicide the day before Bacon's Paris retrospective at the Grand Palais in autumn of 1971 .  

 

 WORK CITED

1. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD BIOGRAPHY HTTP://WWW.NOTABLEBIOGRAPHIES.COM/BA-BE/BACON-FRANCIS.HTML 

2. ADES, DAWN. FORGE, ANDREW. "FRANCIS BACON". HARRY N. ABRAMS, INC., NEW YORK. PRINT

3. FARR, DENNIS. MARTINO,MASSIMO. FRANCIS BACON RETROSPECTIVE. HARRY N. ABRAMS, INC., NEW YORK.   PRINT