Art You Hate: Which famous artist DON'T you get? Which artists whose work you utterly hate?

I try to keep an open mind about art. I don't get Mondrian. What can I tell ya.

Ah! The mystery of De Stijl! A very practical and vague name for an art movement. I kind of like it when it comes in stained glass and furniture form.

But I can see why it's minimalist tendencies can be considered ungettable.

The one great painting I absolutely don't like is The Scream.

tsar, I don't dislike it. It just seems cold, distant, and uncommunicative to me. I clearly don't get it.

On the other hand, Edgar, I love dat scream. Saw it in person when I was in Norway. I could feel it.

I understand your dilemma with Mondrian. It can be seen as far too practical an aesthetic. Something created just for modern interior design rather then contemplation and the understanding of beauty.

The Scream is such a great visceral painting. Great depiction of anxiety and frustration.

Me? I can't either stand or get many of the misogynistic works of De Kooning:
http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/modern_art/woman/objectView.aspx?&OID=210004085&collID=21&vw=0
http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=33413

I didn't appreciate The Scream until I read the history behind it.



I'm not a fan of Picasso.

Thinking ...
Which famous artist or artwork/s do I really hate?

I'll have to go away & have a bit of a think about that, tsar. (it's usually the other way around: which ones do you really like? ... which is easy to respond to.)

So back later.

In the meantime it'll be interesting to see what others come up with & the reasons for their choices ....

Take your time MsOlga. I look forward to reading your answer tomorrow morning or later.

tsar, Despite his reputation as a misogynist (thanks to his paintings), De Kooning doesn't bother me. (I'm not a fan either.) He's saying something in his work, even if I don't agree with it. On the other hand, Pollack and Mondrian are cut from the same cloth, IMO. Although Mondrian is all angles and straight lines with limited color and Pollack is the opposite, the works of both seem empty to me.

Francis Bacon's paintings of men wrestling, his screaming popes, the bloody animal carcasses ....

It is not so much that I hate these paintings, more that I am sometimes repelled by his images.

Bacon is somewhat paradoxical choice, because I admire his creative & technical abilities hugely.

But on a bad day, some of these violent, tortured, twisted images, the futility & despair, the relentless darkness ... just depress the hell out of me ....

Which his the point, I know ... the futility of our existences .

So I do "get" him, but, you know .... the unrelenting bleakness can really get to you.

(whimper>

Hate is probably too strong a word - but I'm not fond of Michelangelo's paintings or sculptures (except the Pieta) - too muscular. I don't like Cezanne - I understand his significance but just think the paintings are boring. Ditto Matisse. I'll have a think - I'm sure there are more.

His depictions of women's breasts were a bit baffling, too, MonaLeeza.
I suspect he wasn't too familiar with them at all.

Andy Warhol.....he created a market amongst hippies and fools and lectured to the gullible.

The guy who does all those Elvises and toreadors on black velevet. Thomas Kincaid pretty much sucks too.

I agree, MJ, about Kincaid...I wasn't even considering him among "famous artists" until you brought him up.

Like de Kooning a lot - and I really hate those boring pastel florals and pond pieces...a legion of guys, like a couple Mona Leeza mentioned, made careers with that... yuck.

Pollack is the worst, though.

I think Kinkaid goes without even saying so I agree to place him over here on a "shelf of the damned" along with Louise Nevelson.

I too never really cared for Pollock . Mostly because he used what was ever available and his work , so celebrqted for its freedom, merely showed lack of any kind of ideas to me.

I never cared for GAuguin, his work has always been an excess opf green. Same thing with Bacon, his work was always an excess pf red.

There are several more Im sure, I just got up.

Theres only two works by Helen Frankenthaler that I like and both of them DO NOT show her work on an unprimed canvas.

I've never really like Jean Dubuffet, Rococo, or the Romantic Landscape school of painting.

I was having a hard time thinking of something until I read this -- then I remembered my absolute hatred for this painting, as an art major (I saw it in person in England, still hated it):



(Fragonard, "The Swing.")

Oh my, yes. It is perfectly awful.