Month: November 2019

Adolph Frederick “Ad” Reinhardt, a New York-based abstract artist who lived from 1913 to 1967. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and part of a movement that was eventually coined Abstract Expressionism. Due to his extensive work, he had a major influence on conceptual, monochromatic, and minimal art painting. Two of these types of painting, monochromatic and minimal, came about around the 1940s and 1950s respectively as his work started to gain more and more traction in the artistic community.

This painting is amongst his monochromatic paintings that secure their place in history. It’s part of a series of paintings called The Black Paintings. To the untrained eye, it may just look like a canvas caked in black paint, however, little did I personally know, that it is composed of many different shades of black. His reasoning is that it causes the viewer to ask if there is such thing as an absolute, even in black which most viewers don’t consider a colour.

For myself, I don’t really care for it. I’m sure there is a hidden meaning behind this and most of his work, but I just don’t see it.

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Paul Klee, who lived from 1879 to 1940, was not only a prominent Swiss-born painter but a musician as well. Klee was a professor at the Bauhaus Art School in Germany and was highly impressed by the Cubist works; going as far as taking a lot of inspiration from the movement and putting it into his own works. “To him these experiments showed not so much the way to new methods of representing reality as to new possibilities of playing with form” (Gombrich 578). He reasoned that nature herself creates through the artist.

This painting, of which he called A Tiny Tale of a tiny dwarf, is an example of his view on painting. The concept of playing with form rather than methods of reality is integrated very well into this painting. It tells the story of a fairy-tale transformation of a gnome that is cohesively told using the circular format of the painting.

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Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt had lived from 1862 to 1918 and had become one of the founding members of Wiener Sezession, otherwise known as Vienna Secession in 1897. Klimt had an air of controversy around him due to his favoritism of the female body as his main subjects. His main genre of painting is closer to eroticism, sexualization of the female body, while some believe that his paintings were borderline pornographic.

This painting commissioned by the University of Vienna, titled Medicine, was amongst the paintings facing controversy. As you can imagine, the depiction of the female nude fully displayed in what’s considered a public place would cause censors to question the ideals behind Klimt’s painting. In my own opinion, I don’t see any strong evidence of eroticism in this painting. While I don’t question that the eye is pulled the nude female subject but upon closer inspection, I see that there are other nude subjects that are not only female but male. It’s a very interesting piece and offers much to the potential viewer simply due to the complexity of it.

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Rousseau, who lived from 1844 to 1910, was not at all familiar with correct draughtsmanship or the tricks of Impressionism. He painted in simple colours and compositions and showed every outline of the painting. This, while some may call awkward, has a poetic sense to it due to the simplicity of it.

As exemplified by this piece done by Rousseau, Portrait of Joseph Brummer, we see the simplicity of it. Each detail within the painting is outlined and clearly visible; even in the distance, we can still see the distinguishing outlines of the leaves on the trees. I find it fascinating in this regard due to the fact that while everything is in focus, flattening it, it still retains the sense of depth and liveliness, However, I don’t quite agree with the monotonous green present in the background. It’s still a remarkable painting, nonetheless.

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