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Picasso to Pollock

11/8/2014

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What is

 

The white shoes are juxtaposed with a silver platter. It is an actual pair of 

shoes, a left shoe and aright shoe whose position is inverted making the 

display upside-down. Its heels are topped with meat décor that you might 

find on fancy chicken drumsticks. Oppenheim’s “Nursemaid My 

Nursemaid” symbolizes feminine containment and shows the elimination 

the females’ ability to be a hero by referring her to a cow. First, the title 

“Nursemaid/ My Nurse,” demotes, play-cates and undermines the female’s 

intellectual freedoms into being cornered position of male property. By 

dismantling her orientation and flipping her around is one way her freedom 

is stripped. Showing the underside of the shoe in some cultures is 

considered rude because it is the dirty party that touches the filth of the 

ground. In the artwork it’s evident that the dirt is on the ball of the shoe in a 

black tar hue against the light brown material. The pair of shoes cannot 

function upside-down, also handicapping her symbolically and undermining 

her ability to be in her place and in command. Its almost as if she is being 

subject to some one else’s control and being acted upon without say. 

Being wrapped up in string feels like she female is in punishment or is at 

risk from being lost from itself, like tying her together can keep herself 

under control. “Nursemaid/ My Nurse,” symbolizes female as a product to 

be consumed like milk as the female is automatically identified as a 

servant or slave who milks by the white color. There is no evidence of the 

female being asked if it is her intention to be a milkmaid. There is evidence 

of binding, tying, enslavement as the shoes are tied up together nearly five 

times around. The real offense and degradation is the ironic play of serving 

the upside-down pair of shoes on a silver platter. Think to yourself and ask 

yourself, do ladies ever serve each other symbols of slavery and accept? 

Afraid not.  Are females objects or should females be objectified especially 

if some females become great world leaders. To this day you might ask 

yourself how does art influence great leadership in growing up female? 

Does putting her down or punishing the symbols of feminism become 

effective or hurtful? There were days when females were worshipped as 

the Madonna and the pelvic bone had sacred meaning and its triangular 

shape became a shape to represent female worship.  However, males 

have sold females into white slavery before and it could happen again as 

the Nursemaid/ My Nursemaid clearly represents. Nonsensical to put it 

mildly, unbeautiful to put it gently.

 William De Kooning’s “Woman I” is a colorful painting of an adult female 

sitting on a chair. The painting is very child-like in its idea of painting that 

freedom to express painting with strokes of judgment free action. Meaning, 

De Kooning doesn’t follow rules of Renoir, Rembrandt or Da Vinci. De 

Kooning is what are punk rock and rebellion and the Grateful Dead at The 

Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to what are Mozart and Chopin playing at 

Buckingham Palace. It’s an animated work. The action lines and strokes of 

color are representational of the artist’s mood and the experience of 

making the painting is evident in the finished work. The symbol of feminists 

is the central focus. She is centrally composed and takes up 75% of the 

canvas and as a soloist appears isolated from company. Her body is 

foreshortened, being in the sitting position of the chair and her arms are 

folded across her lap. Her skin is white, blue, pinks, lavenders, and 

garishly outlined in blacks and browns. The frame of her build is strong, as 

if De Kooning painting her with the concept of an understructure, her 

skeletal frame is solid especially with broad shoulders and primitive. She is 

topless however, also appearing like a milkmaid.  Luckily her bottom half is 

robed in bright red and orange dress against a sloppily made background 

of rejected wisdom and organization. The colors are blotchy and fatigued 

not meticulous. Because the female is topless she is exposed either for her 

maturity, her symbols of motherhood and making milk, or is sexually made 

into a temptress. The similarity to Oppenheim’s “Nursemaid My 

Nursemaid” and De Kooning is the representation of female servitude and 

the action lines of crisscrossing over herself. Oppenheim worked with 

string to crisscross and De Kooning created wispy lines or string x-ing 

effects over the surface and through out the composition.  One is sculpture 

and the other painting yet both utilize angles of perspective and perception 

to achieved space, depth, unity and yet are on the verge of being taken 

down. The Woman I is nearly violent in facial expression with dinosaur 

teeth huge eyes filled with white and black paint and doesn’t express 

subservience but domineering power. Neither of the artworks appears 

fairytale like, but is threatening to feminine charms and beauty. 

Jackson Pollock’s “Number One” is a stylized abstraction in a rectangle. Pollock came 

like an artist into a space and produced imagery that suits that time during the 

1950s. His abstractions in painting are on the wall as a form of protection remaining 

staticly dynamic. Static because he action strokes reveal changes in culture, 

displacement of direct representation to painting as mobility and the movement of 

the artist to be meaningful. Static as in atmospheric electricity. Equilibrium is also 

enclosed in the painting as there is balance made by color, arrangement of drippy 

lines and cosmic circulation. The work protects artists from the innocent levels of 

finger-painting through mastery level because it makes a statement about freedom 

of expression and movement as an artist.  This stylized work makes meaningful 

cultural direction, as a painter does not need to paint in straight lines. Pollock’s 

painting in the row of history gives the illusion of moving but is trapped in cyclical 

patterns. His wrist and arm and back might be exaggerated in action compared to 

Watteau but he is coordinating hand eye coordination in method with the artists 

who came before his time as well.  It is okay to be messy and problematic if 

problematic means to create newness and offer a new taste to an old world. Pollock 

in a way is a refreshing compliment to painting. Barnett Newman’s “Onement I,” is 

about straightness and refinement with hazy accuracy. There is not a circle, nor a 

figure, yet an inline of uber simplicity. It is a playful attempt to warm the palette of 

humanity by painting love in rich hues of brown melting texture and wealth to 

pacify the visual reception into a careful thought. Instead of excess line like Pollock, 

Newman goes for minimal abstraction. I see the warmth of animal or primitive love 

by taking painting to a baseline of red on brown. The way a cardiologist traces or 

graphs a heartbeat is what I see in Newman. Newman strides vertically as if there is 

an elevator to the heartbeat that ascends vertically up to the utmost feeling of love. 

Pollock and Newmen both attempt to illuminate the canvas with abstract lines that 

are not easily translatable but offer an opening for your imagination to interpret 

their emotional context. In that case both painters represent art as freedom and 

subvert the expectation of perfection. 

Miro and Dali isolate objects in their magical realism and surreal paintings. Each of 

the objects in view is painted by itself within the composition. Meaning, each object 

has its own atmosphere, space, and separate vortex to itself in relation to the other 

objects in the work. That would mean a multitude of verisimilitudes or multiple 

truths occurring simultaneously like the figure with a white circle head to the 

balloon to the triangle to the environment. Yet the order or directionality of the 

movement within the piece is free. Is the triangle influencing the figure or is the 

figure controlling the balloon that then might warp afterward into the triangle or 

occupy the same horizon as the triangle eventually? There is a harmonious flow 

between the objects in the Dali and the Miro. Without columns or force, the gentle 

easy allows the viewer an invitation to seek meaning within the relatability of the 

multiple purposes of the objects. In Dali you wonder does a clock melt on a tree limb 

and is it because of an emotion or question what kind of character would place 

clocks in a desert, and what temperature would it take to melt a clock along the edge 

of a table. The painting of Dali is complex because it’s painted with a cool color 

palette yet temperature wise, it indicates high heat. The air seems arid and dry, but 

then hypocritically something like the metal clock suggests melting and wetness. 

Dali is ironic. Mire plays with cools and hot colors with compliments of green and 

red and somehow creates a neutral temperature because they don’t compete with 

each other.  While Dali creates space with a horizon line, Mire doesn’t use one, Miro 

emphasizes invisible ground and light without shadow. Each of the works is 

whimsical, has room to breathe, and invites you to look all the way around the 

volumes of objects in the invented imaginative world inside the frame of the canvas.

3.  According to Clement Greenberg, the history of modern art was essentially a 

history of painting’s drive toward self-referentiality or self-reflexiveness.   What 

did he mean by painting as a self-reflexive enterprise, how did he explain that 

drive towards self-referentiality or self-reflexiveness, and what are the strengths 

and weaknesses of his account?

To me, Greenberg meant self-referentiality and self-reflexiveness meant to keep in 

touch with yourself and design a piece of yourself through art. The danger of not 

creating self-portraits and ideas from within is losing you to the outside. Your 

thoughts are just thoughts until your communicating them. In art the methods of 

straight color, motion through brush stroke, rules of composition, arrangement of 

gallery installation, appropriation in da-da-ism etc. are functional ways to utilize a 

new technique that is not anchored to a time capsule. In other words the artists 

update the materials and techniques to be current with the present or even the 

future. It would be unrealistic to continuously create with a single process like oil 

painting on canvas. Thereby stencils and graffiti, stickers and pixels or toilets are 

mediums of courage that artists feel are necessary to represent modern ideas.   

Frederick Douglas wrote an autobiography to free him. He thought to gain wisdom 

by cleverly convincing a white to teach him how to read and write would not only 

give himself the rights to his life but to be education would yield a creative and 

righteous freedom. Art and learning self-referentiality or self-actualization is also 

freedom, like Free Speech. With knowledge he wrote himself to freedom. In Modern 

Art from fauvism surrealism to abstraction, the artists are pushing through 

imaginative or cognitive and cerebral experiences to make a statement or raise a 

question or propose solutions to society. The ideas of artists are being expressed 

through the laws and rules or creative breakthroughs of art. Color, composition and 

the translation of feeling and experiences are conveyed through the mediums. 

Therefore the isolation of object in magical realism is a mirror to the feeling of says 

separate identities and multiple senses occurring in a single reality. Dali shared a 

dream unrealistic dream space to comment about subconscious and his ideas of a 

secret, beautiful world within almost a pre-cognition to autism.
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