Carol Duncan
Carol Duncan's article "Virility and Domination in Early TwentiethCentury Vanguard Painting" focuses on female nudity and the artist's motive behind this. She believes the female nudes were used in the decade before World War I by a number of European artists with a similar style and content which reflected the sexual appetite of the artist. - Examples Kess Van Dongen, Reclining Nude (1904-05); Munch, Reclining Nude (1905); Kirchner, Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella (ca. 1909)H.W. Janson's (Selection on early modernism from A Basis History of Art) study of some of these works reflects his preoccupation with the artist,his style,and place in history and art in particular. Janson asserts that Fauves were a flock of young painters who came out of the morbid and decadent mood of the 1890's. Several of them developed a radical style using violent colors and bold distortions. Their work was so shocking they dubbed the name Fauves. In contrast Duncan expresses that "Fauves and the Brucke, were youth and health cultists who liked noisy colors and wanted to
As Janson puts it "Matisse (the leader) was never stirred by the same agonized discontent with the decadence of our civilization". "Whore and deity, decadent and savage, tempting and repelling, awesome and obscene, looming and crouching, masked and naked, threatening and powerless". Although there were radical off-springs advocating new changes (not fundamental, however) such as anarchists and pacifists,they represented a middle class based movement of style and form and a breakaway from the traditional forms. Proportions, organic integrity and continuity of the human body are distorted here "resembles a field of broken glass" as Janson's puts it. " . The result is a new balance between the "two - D" and "three - D". It is hard to see at times whether they are concave or convex. Duncan on the other hand dismisses all historical importance of this moment and explains "no painting of this decade better articulates the male - female dichotomy and the ambivalence men experience before it than Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". What comes out of what appears to be a destruction of classical form is a new style called Cubism. The shading effect gives them the illusion of three dimensionality. Duncan is under the assumption that the Fauves and the Bruckes formed by the chain of events, possibly a reaction to the gloom and boredom in the decay of 1890's, were revolutionaries. "By reducing the number of tins to a minimum, he makes color an independent structural element". Janson on the contrary present this work as "genius of omission" mastered by Matisse at work. "The Demoiselles unlike The Joy of Life by Matisse can no longer be read as an image of the external world.
Common topics in this essay:
African Oceanic,
Les Demoiselles,
Red Studio,
History Art,
Fauves Brucke,
Fauves Bruckes,
Janson Matisse,
Life Matisse,
Vanguard Painting,
Cubism Janson,
history art,
les demoiselles,
female nudes,
demoiselles d'avignon,
bourgeois society,
middle class,
les demoiselles d'avignon,
picasso's les demoiselles,
reclining nude,
picasso's les,
|
Acceptance Essays
