Take home Final

            The first painting I chose from the MoMA to speak on is The Persistence of Memory painted in 1931 by the Spanish painter Salvador Dali.  This art style is known as Surrealism, and was a very prominent style of art starting around the mid 1920’s, and its influence lasting until about the mid 1960’s.  It has been considered to be the most influential art movements of the 20^th century.  In this style of art one of the main aspects that makes this art style unique is the inspiration behind it, Sigmund Freud the psychologist who studied people’s subconscious was a big inspiration to the artists that started this movement.  These artists began to explore subject matter in a way that was unrealistic giving way to its name, Surrealism.  These paintings were often mentioned in the same regards as a dream considering the imagery was just as bizarre as the dreams one might have.  In the painting I chose, the artist demonstrates a lot of these ideas of surrealism beautifully.  In this painting you see a desolate setting kind of like a desert with mountains in the background along with a lake or sea.  Meanwhile in the foreground and middleground of the painting you see different images.  To the left you’ll notice a platform with clocks draped over a branch of a tree that’s on the platform, and the platform itself.  Towards the middle of the painting you’ll see what seems to be a portion of the face draped over a rock with another clock draped over the face, and out of what seems to be the nose portion of the face there seems to be a tongue sticking out almost like a snail.  This imagery is very unrealistic and is a perfect example of Surrealism at its finest.  When you look at it, it’s something that looks like it came straight out of a dream and onto the canvas.  When I look at this piece I think the artist is trying to tell us that time won’t bend for anyone, no matter how badly you may want to speed it up or slow it down depending on what is happening in your life, it just won’t.  So I think the artist used the clocks bent and adapting to whatever form they were on to tell us that he wishes time did.

            The second piece I decided to speak about from the MoMA is Pablo Picasso’s painting done in 1910 called Girl with a Mandolin.  This art style is known as Cubism, and began in the early 1900’s.  Many of the artists who painted in this style of art were influenced by many indigenous tribes’ sculptures, mainly their masks.  These painters looked at these masks that they would see from African cultures and noticed their use of geometric shapes to create these masks, and decided to explore those shapes more.  These artists would start to create images using nothing more than just many geometrical shapes in many different ways such as fragmented, abstracted, and in such ways that you thought differently about the shape itself.  In this painting by Picasso, it is using many different geometrical shapes to create the image of a woman holding a mandolin.  The reason I chose this painting is because I really felt it captured the essence of what the Cubist movement was all about.  Picasso does a wonderful job in placing his shapes to create the illusion of a woman holding a mandolin, also with the use of lighting and shading it gives you the feel that this painting is actually three dimensional and is popping out at you.  When I look at it, just from the simple use of minimal color and shading I can tell the woman’s hair color, body size, and really just gives me a new appreciation for shapes in general.  It is quite incredible how someone can fragment and utilize shapes in such an abstracted way in order to create an image so potent and strong.  I feel this is a perfect example of the Cubism art movement.