Pablo Picasso Hannah Hoch
Desmoiselles d’Avignon The Kitchen Knife Dada...
1907-08 1919-20
*The entire title is The Kitchen Knife Dada through the Large Weimar Beer Belly
Cultural Epoch of Germany.In Hoch’s “Kitchen” piece there is a strong sense of feminine evolution and revolution with ties to the comments already made in Picasso’s “Desmoiselles d’Avignon.” Hoch builds upon the themes of construction of femininity by process as symbolic, as college is an additive practice and Hoch can create meaning through this story-telling art medium. Hoch dismantles meaning by using material and mass media against itself. You can also bring every day culture from newsprint and magazine into high art through collage. From a cubist approach you could think that there are multiple ways of reading newspaper and collage and text and therefore is like the multiplicity of angles and space in cubism. The symbols of circles and wheels convey a sense of political revolution presented in dada-ist space and yet holds a double meaning like the feminine roles physically are taking their turn like a wheel that initiates forward motion. The female is holding the tool for a political revolution with that wheel. The wheels and circles also represent the circle of life and reproduction. Hoch makes this piece at a time when prostitution ran rampant and there was a nexus of sex, violence and voyeurism in
culture and appropriates feminine identity with the juxtaposition of Albert Einstein’s brain with machines running through it and a female dancer. This relationship suggests man is interested in technology not lust or female consumption, and the dancer plays with her own mind, poised, in control and as a heroine instead of a sexual object.
In Picasso’s cubist piece “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” you see 5 females who might
be staged as what is believed to be prostitutes in a brothel and what is a continued
alliance between modern art and marginalized subjects. You can realize that Picasso offers up the female for fantasy, masks her face with African masks and see their forms as fragmented figures as a sign of disjointed character, violence and victims of abuse or being broken. The style of cubism and adding multiple views of space also adds to the meaning while breaking space from its flatness. The females are being broken by shape, society, vandalized by the men who take their bodies over their brains, and being broken by reducing self-worth to be pimped out instead of attaining self-actualization. Does Picasso mean that these women are violent or impose violence upon men? By giving attention to Prostitution is Picasso addressing that women have a low influential role in an intellectual society, could be blamed for spreading disease like syphilis or is he pleading with culture to come to their rescue and put a Band-Aid on that situation? Picasso is attracted to the primitive side of humanity and thus features a debased sense of femininity regardless of his aim, he opens up the gesture for sexual invitation and removes a sense of feminine ideal or sacredness by exploiting the female in physical gesture and figurative position painting her legs open, chests out and masked, hiding her face. Yet is this marginalized highlight necessary for humanity to move forward? Does culture need to see its low points before having an upswing like Mayor Giuliani and William Bratton who applied the broken windows theory to urban decay in New York, meaning you have to monitor the vandalism in order to improve the
conditions of a rotting society while attempting to improve its state.What both pieces have in common is the idea of masking the female face in black. Hoch’s piece shows one female in the top center with a blacked-out face and Picasso shows two females on the right in “black” or African faced masks. Why do
these artists darken the faces? Perhaps Hoch finds that the female with inevitably
receive dark shadows from the voyeurs that prevail in society like those that were in Picasso’s time of culture. Yet could black lead to rehabilitation within gender? That the females can still be blamed for sin, mystique, exoticism, despair, disease and violence. Or does black mean to absorb all the light and then in turn would be the brightest of the lot, even more so than Einstein? “Black” could also mean to ignore classical proportions, a touch of the exotic and without a history for Europeans to understand. Black can also mean carbon, after a fire and therefor read as sterile. Or does black lead to value and light? With more exposure to light, the principle idea is that the subject darkens and turns black or richer in value but in terms of physicality that could be a good thing, to be the most absorbent and hold the most value. Perhaps both artists are re-addressing Plato’s story of Phaedrus? Per chance the viewer is the charioteer of the human soul driving between the two horses. One is the intellect, reason and moral impulse and the other one is passionate, with appetite and has a righteous attitude. The artists represent Plato’s idea by suggesting the male idea and the female idea both running with the charioteer trying to stop the horses from going in different ways amongst sexual appetite through female gesture and decisions males make when confronted with this state of human behavior. How to confront prostitution and the reception of females in society is like charioteering the black horse and the white horse,
the women are covered in dualities of black and white.
Pair Two:
Marcel Duchamp Kasimir Malevich
Fountain Black Square
1917 1913-15
Malevich conceived in mystic and religious views and wanted to make art that
could lead the viewer to a state of transcendence through abstract art. To him there was an order of the individual, a way to make profit and seek out a way to become a visionary leader. The black square represents Suprematism, an evolution of geometric abstraction that leads the artist’s realization that the idea or feeling is stressed or “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” over the representation of an object itself. The square is like a tool or a piece of grammar for this new language of non-objective art. Malevich wants to introduce a way of making art that is not Constructivist where man is an engineer who must produce something of value to society. The “Black Square” is a building block, or has place is an indexed code of images along with the circle to exist without things and realize concepts like a life without material experience. Duchamp’s “Fountain” is a work of art that appropriates meaning of object by re-introducing that meaning by titling the art and giving new meaning to an already identified object. Duchamp doesn’t create the object, by finds a mass produced urinal, physically rotates it and displays it in an art exhibition space with a new name, “fountain”. The title is ironic because fountain is something that you can drink from, or toss a penny into and make a wish, a source of water. Yet a urinal is a place of intimate bodily functions, yet it does also shoot water like a fountain. Duchamp was interested in putting emphasis on recognizing common objects as sculpture, and to appreciate the shape of the urinal that also references the shapes of the female and male reproductive anatomy. This action aggregates the power of art in public spaces because the object is not original. Duchamp physically rotates the object and also turns the art world with dada-ism pronouncing that the idea and concept of the art itself is equally important to
the art. Idea is as important as physical manifestation and that the context of meaning changes by the artist. Duchamp can take a toilet and make you realize that the institutional setting gives meaning as the apparatus changes meaning by active viewing. Is art what you see, or what you think or how art leads you to thinking? Both Malevich and Duchamp consider that the idea the art represents and their concepts are the works of art themselves. Idea therefore is the goal of the art with “The Fountain” and
“The Black Square”.
PART 2: Essay (25 minutes)
Choose ONE of the following
1. Using three examples, discuss the different ways in which artists treated the
erotic, or the sensual/sexual body, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. Consider not only how those treatments differ, but why they differ. (You may use the Picasso and the Hoch.) Matisse’s “Blue Nude” is a female display for spectator and pleasure of the male. Matisse uses color evocatively and descriptively and gives a sense that the world is about gratification, especially sexual gratification. Matisse hyperizes the contorted shape of the female by extending her hips and back in an un-natural way to give her body a dynamic profile. He exaggerates the curves of her hips and breasts to objectify her as a sex object. Her cognitive abilities and logical senses are not represented; she is disrobed and powerless to be seen in any way but in a erotic, sexual and sensual way. “Blue Nude” is a fauvist painting, with wild brushwork and aligned to impressionism where the color has more meaning than representing natural
appearance and that objects in nature are not seen as separated from each other by defined contours the way the nature in the background is painted. He wished to use pure color squeezed from the tube to build new pictorial values apart from creating retinal vibrations. By the female is outlined by black and is the focus between the tension between female as a metaphoric flower and part of nature versus female as rejecting purity and becoming a symbol of male fantasy exploited for parts. Matisse also gives you a sense of contraction in this piece to achieve delimited space. The pure color also adds a sense of rawness, being primitive and reads with a high vibration of color adding to a dynamo effect of a strong sense of energy and attraction to lux and beauty for this “available” female.
Picasso’s “Desmoiselles” appropriates forms of African art in hopes to convey a
primal truth of physical humanity that is savage and raw as well. Picasso paints a
female with a plasticity of form, not literal and makes his misery and view of human destitution prominent through his expression of the female. The blue tones of the background heighten melancholy, he features females on the margins of society, not queens and he distills forms into basic shapes. Picasso’s females are women who rely on sex for survival or a job. He debases the imagery of women to someone who is not sacred like the Madonna but emphasizes a woman’s role as a prostitute. She could demean herself by selling her body as object to the males and reduce herself to being stripped not only of clothes and political stability but to cast her amongst filth and embrace that through her body language that she is open to being used, stepped upon and spit out. Picasso’s rendering is not inviting, but perhaps denying prostitution of its appeal by fracturing, dismantling, vandalizing form through cubist style. The painting process acts like a physical and violent filter. Therefore the sex becomes ironic, as the allure is re-colored into a sense of rejection and sense of danger instead of beauty, lux and attraction. Picasso inverts the meaning of sex by pointing to the dualities of how sex presents itself, versus sex amongst nature and as part of creation.
Hoch’s is last in this series of the evolution of feminine display. Hoch actually
gives purpose to the female by casting her as a dancer, someone in control of her body
with learned choreography and can set her gaze and meaning for herself. Hoch also
inserts text as a way to reclaim literacy and insert new powers for artist to claim both
word/text and image as a stronger sense of pictorial literacy and understanding of
society, placing importance on narration, writing and history. Hoch also includes the
female to be received on a canvas that is also embracing the genius of Albert Einstein,
other females who are dressed, as well as pieces of collaged technology. This gives the
female relationships that don’t only involve her sex, her appearance but include an
intellectual world that she is a part of, not a shard within a fantasy. She is not primitive
but becomes modernized and Hoch reconstructs a woman who can gain freedom, and
yields a new woman. Hoch gives the most possibility to reading and interpreting
femininity because her body is not the main focus, but is the abstractions and
representations of the world that surrounds her.
Desmoiselles d’Avignon The Kitchen Knife Dada...
1907-08 1919-20
*The entire title is The Kitchen Knife Dada through the Large Weimar Beer Belly
Cultural Epoch of Germany.In Hoch’s “Kitchen” piece there is a strong sense of feminine evolution and revolution with ties to the comments already made in Picasso’s “Desmoiselles d’Avignon.” Hoch builds upon the themes of construction of femininity by process as symbolic, as college is an additive practice and Hoch can create meaning through this story-telling art medium. Hoch dismantles meaning by using material and mass media against itself. You can also bring every day culture from newsprint and magazine into high art through collage. From a cubist approach you could think that there are multiple ways of reading newspaper and collage and text and therefore is like the multiplicity of angles and space in cubism. The symbols of circles and wheels convey a sense of political revolution presented in dada-ist space and yet holds a double meaning like the feminine roles physically are taking their turn like a wheel that initiates forward motion. The female is holding the tool for a political revolution with that wheel. The wheels and circles also represent the circle of life and reproduction. Hoch makes this piece at a time when prostitution ran rampant and there was a nexus of sex, violence and voyeurism in
culture and appropriates feminine identity with the juxtaposition of Albert Einstein’s brain with machines running through it and a female dancer. This relationship suggests man is interested in technology not lust or female consumption, and the dancer plays with her own mind, poised, in control and as a heroine instead of a sexual object.
In Picasso’s cubist piece “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” you see 5 females who might
be staged as what is believed to be prostitutes in a brothel and what is a continued
alliance between modern art and marginalized subjects. You can realize that Picasso offers up the female for fantasy, masks her face with African masks and see their forms as fragmented figures as a sign of disjointed character, violence and victims of abuse or being broken. The style of cubism and adding multiple views of space also adds to the meaning while breaking space from its flatness. The females are being broken by shape, society, vandalized by the men who take their bodies over their brains, and being broken by reducing self-worth to be pimped out instead of attaining self-actualization. Does Picasso mean that these women are violent or impose violence upon men? By giving attention to Prostitution is Picasso addressing that women have a low influential role in an intellectual society, could be blamed for spreading disease like syphilis or is he pleading with culture to come to their rescue and put a Band-Aid on that situation? Picasso is attracted to the primitive side of humanity and thus features a debased sense of femininity regardless of his aim, he opens up the gesture for sexual invitation and removes a sense of feminine ideal or sacredness by exploiting the female in physical gesture and figurative position painting her legs open, chests out and masked, hiding her face. Yet is this marginalized highlight necessary for humanity to move forward? Does culture need to see its low points before having an upswing like Mayor Giuliani and William Bratton who applied the broken windows theory to urban decay in New York, meaning you have to monitor the vandalism in order to improve the
conditions of a rotting society while attempting to improve its state.What both pieces have in common is the idea of masking the female face in black. Hoch’s piece shows one female in the top center with a blacked-out face and Picasso shows two females on the right in “black” or African faced masks. Why do
these artists darken the faces? Perhaps Hoch finds that the female with inevitably
receive dark shadows from the voyeurs that prevail in society like those that were in Picasso’s time of culture. Yet could black lead to rehabilitation within gender? That the females can still be blamed for sin, mystique, exoticism, despair, disease and violence. Or does black mean to absorb all the light and then in turn would be the brightest of the lot, even more so than Einstein? “Black” could also mean to ignore classical proportions, a touch of the exotic and without a history for Europeans to understand. Black can also mean carbon, after a fire and therefor read as sterile. Or does black lead to value and light? With more exposure to light, the principle idea is that the subject darkens and turns black or richer in value but in terms of physicality that could be a good thing, to be the most absorbent and hold the most value. Perhaps both artists are re-addressing Plato’s story of Phaedrus? Per chance the viewer is the charioteer of the human soul driving between the two horses. One is the intellect, reason and moral impulse and the other one is passionate, with appetite and has a righteous attitude. The artists represent Plato’s idea by suggesting the male idea and the female idea both running with the charioteer trying to stop the horses from going in different ways amongst sexual appetite through female gesture and decisions males make when confronted with this state of human behavior. How to confront prostitution and the reception of females in society is like charioteering the black horse and the white horse,
the women are covered in dualities of black and white.
Pair Two:
Marcel Duchamp Kasimir Malevich
Fountain Black Square
1917 1913-15
Malevich conceived in mystic and religious views and wanted to make art that
could lead the viewer to a state of transcendence through abstract art. To him there was an order of the individual, a way to make profit and seek out a way to become a visionary leader. The black square represents Suprematism, an evolution of geometric abstraction that leads the artist’s realization that the idea or feeling is stressed or “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” over the representation of an object itself. The square is like a tool or a piece of grammar for this new language of non-objective art. Malevich wants to introduce a way of making art that is not Constructivist where man is an engineer who must produce something of value to society. The “Black Square” is a building block, or has place is an indexed code of images along with the circle to exist without things and realize concepts like a life without material experience. Duchamp’s “Fountain” is a work of art that appropriates meaning of object by re-introducing that meaning by titling the art and giving new meaning to an already identified object. Duchamp doesn’t create the object, by finds a mass produced urinal, physically rotates it and displays it in an art exhibition space with a new name, “fountain”. The title is ironic because fountain is something that you can drink from, or toss a penny into and make a wish, a source of water. Yet a urinal is a place of intimate bodily functions, yet it does also shoot water like a fountain. Duchamp was interested in putting emphasis on recognizing common objects as sculpture, and to appreciate the shape of the urinal that also references the shapes of the female and male reproductive anatomy. This action aggregates the power of art in public spaces because the object is not original. Duchamp physically rotates the object and also turns the art world with dada-ism pronouncing that the idea and concept of the art itself is equally important to
the art. Idea is as important as physical manifestation and that the context of meaning changes by the artist. Duchamp can take a toilet and make you realize that the institutional setting gives meaning as the apparatus changes meaning by active viewing. Is art what you see, or what you think or how art leads you to thinking? Both Malevich and Duchamp consider that the idea the art represents and their concepts are the works of art themselves. Idea therefore is the goal of the art with “The Fountain” and
“The Black Square”.
PART 2: Essay (25 minutes)
Choose ONE of the following
1. Using three examples, discuss the different ways in which artists treated the
erotic, or the sensual/sexual body, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. Consider not only how those treatments differ, but why they differ. (You may use the Picasso and the Hoch.) Matisse’s “Blue Nude” is a female display for spectator and pleasure of the male. Matisse uses color evocatively and descriptively and gives a sense that the world is about gratification, especially sexual gratification. Matisse hyperizes the contorted shape of the female by extending her hips and back in an un-natural way to give her body a dynamic profile. He exaggerates the curves of her hips and breasts to objectify her as a sex object. Her cognitive abilities and logical senses are not represented; she is disrobed and powerless to be seen in any way but in a erotic, sexual and sensual way. “Blue Nude” is a fauvist painting, with wild brushwork and aligned to impressionism where the color has more meaning than representing natural
appearance and that objects in nature are not seen as separated from each other by defined contours the way the nature in the background is painted. He wished to use pure color squeezed from the tube to build new pictorial values apart from creating retinal vibrations. By the female is outlined by black and is the focus between the tension between female as a metaphoric flower and part of nature versus female as rejecting purity and becoming a symbol of male fantasy exploited for parts. Matisse also gives you a sense of contraction in this piece to achieve delimited space. The pure color also adds a sense of rawness, being primitive and reads with a high vibration of color adding to a dynamo effect of a strong sense of energy and attraction to lux and beauty for this “available” female.
Picasso’s “Desmoiselles” appropriates forms of African art in hopes to convey a
primal truth of physical humanity that is savage and raw as well. Picasso paints a
female with a plasticity of form, not literal and makes his misery and view of human destitution prominent through his expression of the female. The blue tones of the background heighten melancholy, he features females on the margins of society, not queens and he distills forms into basic shapes. Picasso’s females are women who rely on sex for survival or a job. He debases the imagery of women to someone who is not sacred like the Madonna but emphasizes a woman’s role as a prostitute. She could demean herself by selling her body as object to the males and reduce herself to being stripped not only of clothes and political stability but to cast her amongst filth and embrace that through her body language that she is open to being used, stepped upon and spit out. Picasso’s rendering is not inviting, but perhaps denying prostitution of its appeal by fracturing, dismantling, vandalizing form through cubist style. The painting process acts like a physical and violent filter. Therefore the sex becomes ironic, as the allure is re-colored into a sense of rejection and sense of danger instead of beauty, lux and attraction. Picasso inverts the meaning of sex by pointing to the dualities of how sex presents itself, versus sex amongst nature and as part of creation.
Hoch’s is last in this series of the evolution of feminine display. Hoch actually
gives purpose to the female by casting her as a dancer, someone in control of her body
with learned choreography and can set her gaze and meaning for herself. Hoch also
inserts text as a way to reclaim literacy and insert new powers for artist to claim both
word/text and image as a stronger sense of pictorial literacy and understanding of
society, placing importance on narration, writing and history. Hoch also includes the
female to be received on a canvas that is also embracing the genius of Albert Einstein,
other females who are dressed, as well as pieces of collaged technology. This gives the
female relationships that don’t only involve her sex, her appearance but include an
intellectual world that she is a part of, not a shard within a fantasy. She is not primitive
but becomes modernized and Hoch reconstructs a woman who can gain freedom, and
yields a new woman. Hoch gives the most possibility to reading and interpreting
femininity because her body is not the main focus, but is the abstractions and
representations of the world that surrounds her.
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