Wilhelm Sasnal
Abbott Handerson Thayer, My Children (Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer), 1897.
(via my-ear-trumpet)
Richard Boix, Da-Da (New York Dada Group), 1921.
Andy Warhol, Untitled (Mao Tse-Tung series), 1972.
I like to think of John Stezaker’s ‘Mask Series’ as an exploration into the unsaid or maybe the “un-thought”.
His use of a glamorised background photograph with an image overlay of a natural scene in place of facial features seems to me like the yearning for clear and natural thought clouded by the superficialities of the modern age. The false romanticism of 1940s aesthetic perfection, an age where conformity to the “correct” was highly sought after and any deviation from which was frowned upon, is contrasting with the authentic romanticism of nature and its liberating and fierce erraticism.
"The acceptance of woman as object of the desiring male gaze in the visual arts is so universal that for a woman to question or draw attention to this fact is to invite derision, to reveal herself as one who does not understand the sophisticated strategies of high culture and takes art “too literally,” and is therefore unable to respond to aesthetic discourses. This is of course maintained within a world - a cultural and academic world - which is dominated by male power and, often unconscious, patriarchal attitudes. In Utopia - that is to say, in a world in which the power structure was such that both men and women equally could be represented clothed or unclothed in a variety of poses and positions without any subconscious implications of dominance or submission - in a world of total and, so to speak, unconscious equality, the female nude would not be problematic. In our world, it is."
- Linda Nochlin (via fetishofsilence)
Charles Ray
Albrecht Dürer
Egon Schiele
Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, 1970.
So sick of mainstream media dorks whinging about someone “pushing the limits of art”. Art has no limits, peons. That’s what that whole “modernism” thing was about.
(detail)
Classicism
A term that, when applied generally, means clearness, elegance, symmetry, and repose produced by attention to traditional forms. It is sometimes synonymous with excellence or artistic quality of high distinction.
Caravaggio, The Conversation of Mary Magdalene, c. 1598.
Caravaggio, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1598.
