Guernica

Amigo, you paint? You should post some of your work on the New Projects Going On? There's quite a few painters on here.

I like this one, by I. Dobriakova (1969). Never heard of her, just googled Russian paintings and war, since Russians were obsessed with WWII in art. Most of it was propaganda, of course, that was shoved down our throats in primary school, but this one seems sincere. And it's the other side of war, the vacant space that it leaves behind.

Oh, it's called The Memory

You can almost picture how she would walk. And look at those eyes.

I can't figure out how to post picture Remember my picture thread. I had a whole A2K team helping me.

Re: Guernica
You mean you can't figure out how to upload a picture to a Photobucket? Or Imageshack? Or Ofoto? Or YouTube? Or MSN groups? Or Flickr?

All of them have very simple step by step instructions. You zapped the Trojan viruses but you can't tackle this? I believe you not!

AMIGO, I needed a comma and a Z in that statement.
By comparison to Orozco and Goya, Guernica...."

Amigo, I have the same problem. There's a part of my brain that is turned off (probably "learned helplessness", but it's real as snot).

The Sargent painting immediately brought this to mind:

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I have been to three Picasso exhibitions in the past ten years.

Each time, after about an hour or so of looking intensely at the works, my mind spins a little and I have to sit down and look at something blank, the wall, the ceiling, the insides of my closed eyes. Then I realize something else, that it is not my brain that cannot take anymore stimulation.

Joe(It's my heart)Nation

Tai, that's a lovely poem, and Joe you will love this self poetry by Francis Bacon.

wow.

Where is that hanging?

Joe(hoping)Nation

Studied it in high school 30+ years ago, Letty, and have never forgotten it.

Also a war image from an artist who is most famous for his ethereal sunsets:

J. M. W. Turner - The Field of Waterloo

LW, I saw, on the Power of Art series last night, Turner's famous painting of the slaughter at sea of African slaves. A terribly powerful work.

Joe, I assume this Bacon image is hanging somewhere in England (in a private collection). It looks like another portrait of Miss Muriel Belcher. He painted a triptych of three images of her in 1966.

The Power of Art is what prompted me to post that painting, but the final painting of the show was one of Turner's last painting and was not shown during his lifetime: It's not anti-war but it's anti-slavery:



The Slave Ship

Yes, that's it. Thanks for showing it.

Did anyone try to respond to this? I didn't see it, if they did, so I'll go ahead and toss my two cents in...This is not any kind of sophisticated viewpoint, BTW, so you smarty art people don't get mad at me! These are just my admittedly naive, not-hep-to-the-art-world, ideas.

I know where you're coming from, Chai; until I took some art history, I thought similarly. And even now, with an understanding of what he was doing and what he represents in the history of art, his work (at least, most of his cubist work) is not, you know, something I want to look at all the time. But you have to bear in mind that artists were feeling like art that represents reality exactly as it appears to the eye had basically done all it could do. Artists since the Impressionists were striving to find new ways to express reality so that it was more than just, "Oh, hey, that painting looks exactly like real life." (because, seriously, at some point that's just-- *yawn*) So there is wave after wave of experimentation with new ways of viewing the world...then Picasso comes along with this mind-blowing twist.

Really, I think one reason it's hard to understand now is that we're so used to seeing weird, twisted takes on reality now-- cubist-type imagery is something we all see early on, we take it for granted. But imagine that no one's done anything like that, and all of a sudden someone comes up with this absolutely jarring, crazy, shocking new way of depicting things. This was how it struck me, anyway, after working my way through some art history classes; you kind of get a feel for that progression, and how this was a sudden departure in a whole new direction. And you have to give Picasso (and Georges Braque) credit for doing this. It is HARD to come up with something new!

Plus, the guy was just incredibly prolific and creative, going in new directions all the time. That, too, is really hard to do-- to keep trying to find new things instead of sticking with what you've done...well, anyway, that's my view of what makes cubism more important than just something a baby could do

cyphercat, Yes I responded to chai. Except my response to her about Picasso is a little ignorant and cocky now that I've read yours. Picasso does nothing for me except for Geurnica.

Picasso's other famous evolutionary cubist work. If you check out Braque's cubism and Picasso's earlier, more conventinal painting, this is an incredible leap. Remember, Picasso was highly influenced by African art and is already breaking the general rules of cubism toward an abstraction that shows up again in De Kooning's woman series.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

VERY nice explanation, cypher! Also, it had a lot to do with the advent of modern photography (mid-to-late 1800s). What was the point in spending weeks on a painting, laboring to capture every realistic detail, when you could just point and shoot? Artists became more interested in portraying the reality beyond the surface.

One of Picasso's "Generation I" cubism which if you compare to Braque is almost the two artists painting in tandem:

The Guitar Player: