Everyone’s been to a museum and just stood in awe in front of a work of art they didn’t understand… Don’t lie. You know you’ve been there.
As much as we can attempt to piece together the different narratives and esthetics of modern art, it’s easy to get lost. At times we spend what seems like forever staring at pieces that others have deemed as masterpieces. We’re confused because we’re not entirely sure of whether we’re being ripped off or we’re just plain dumb. The truth is neither. To understand the richness of modern art, it’s of the utmost important to understand the concepts behind it and why they became relevant. Here are some paintings that you may have left your head spinning because you couldn’t grasp them at first glance.
Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43), Piet Mondrian
Although he started his career mostly as a figurative painter, Mondrian’s taste for philosophy and writing led him to deviate his work into the realm of abstraction. Obsessed with the possibility of abstracting everything to its most fundamental aspects, he wanted to reveal an essential order of the world through the simplest pictorial vocabulary. He reduced painting to its most basic elements: lines, the three primary colors, black, and white. In Broadway Boogie Woogie, the artist sought not only to represent the universal elements of visuality, but also translate a jazzy syncopated tempo into lines of color. Taking the language of music into a visual syntax, Mondrian extended the visual into an aural dimension, while also commenting on the vibrance of New York City and its fast-paced lifestyle.
Four Darks in Red (1958), Mark Rothko
A pillar of abstract expressionism, the Russian born artist started his color landscapes series after going deep into philosophy and mythology. Discovering the emotion in myth and the catharsis of tragedy through the Greeks and Nietzsche, Rothko composed his color landscapes with the purpose of evoking the spiritual through plain colors. Through the red and dark-brownish palette of Four Darks in Red, he sought to conjure a connection between artist and viewer, trying to awaken a transcendental emotion such as those he found imbued in ancient folklore.
Mural (1943), Jackson Pollock
According to legend, Pollock painted the mural for Penny Guggenheim in just a fortnight. This, however, is nothing but a myth, as it is a multilayered painting, and it wouldn’t be physically possible to paint over layers without giving them the proper time to dry. Through a frenetic flow of swirls and spirals, it captures a raging pattern of intimacy within a large scale. The colors and patterns of the painting remind us of Picasso, Siqueiros, and Native American sand art. The electric furious rhythm of this artwork would later lead the artist to invent what we called “action painting”, a style that disregarded all previous technical conventions on this art, turning the canvas into a stage for bodily expression.
White Paintings (1951), Robert Rauschenberg
Rauschenberg is well known for his combination: art that mixes painting with collage, exploring the limits of the medium by blending expressive painting with the most bizarre materials and images from the popular media. Throughout his years at Black Mountain College, much of his work focused on studying the materiality of his medium and modernity itself. White Paintings is a triptych of three apparently blank canvases coated in white, and they intended to serve as a sort of mirror to the experience of the room they’re in. Created by taking into account how they would be experienced by the viewer, these paintings shift constantly according to their viewers and the setting they’re in. Therefore, Rauschenberg manages to convey his idea of how much an environment can affect art.
Painting (1946) , Francis Bacon
Bacon’s vicious art has been lauded as the perfect representation of the traumatized spirit of post-war Europe. His paintings present a parade of tormented subjects, almost always in isolation, imbued in gory colors and violent distortions. Out of these, Painting is one of the most nightmarish of them all, presenting a gruesome sort of butcher shop. It reeks of blood and meat. The ghoul-like image, however, wasn’t deliberate according to the artist’s testimony. Bacon claimed he was only trying to draw a bird in a field and advancing on the painting, this same bird became the carcass that stretches itself into the background. Submerged in a somber and desolate aura, Bacon’s painting reveals a wounded world covered in an atmosphere of despair.
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