Modern Art By Paperstore Essay Research Paper

Modern Art By Paperstore Essay, Research Paper

Modern Art

For The PaperStore – April, 1999

Introduction

It’s been said that “Matisse was no more an abstract artist

than Picasso. No abstract painter can claim descent from their

work without acknowledging that fact. The worldly motif,

especially the human body, and in particular the female body, was

as basic to Matisse’s art as it had been to Delacroix’s or

Titian’s. His paintings vividly communicate a tension between

what he called ”the sign” and the reality it pointed to. He

had learned about this tension and its anxieties from Cezanne.

But there has never been a great figurative artist who did not

feel and exemplify it. It can be as poignant in Giotto or even

in Poussin as it is in Cezanne or Matisse. For Matisse it was of

prime importance, whereas in abstract art it tends to fall away,

because one end of the cord is no longer anchored in the world

and its objects. This is not an argument against abstraction,

but it helps explain why, in those abstract paintings that derive

from Matisse, one so rarely feels the urgency of their great

exemplar.(Hughes 70).

An individual’s personal relationship to art can be

dichotomized into two responses: either one is repelled or one is

drawn into the work. It can be a symbolic interaction such as

one experiences with Jasper John’s DEVISE, an emotional response

such has been reported with Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen

From Bibemus Quarry and Matisse’s Blue Nude or, perhaps, it is

the literal interaction of stepping on a floor sculpture by

Andre. Whatever the individual’s relationship or response, the

reaction is not based on the piece’s similarity to anything in

the traditional art world nor it’s lack of similarity to anything

in the real world. Response to the art discussed in this paper

is based on an individual level and is specific to the piece.

Paul Cezanne

“In 1877, the critic Georges Riviere described him as “a

Greek of the great period; his canvases have the calm and heroic

serenity of the paintings and terracottas of antiquity.” And

Renoir, in 1895, compared Cezanne’s paintings to “the frescoes of

Pompeii, so crude and so admirable.” The watercolor-like

freshness of so many of Cezanne’s landscapes of the 1880s and

1890s, which feel both deliberate and spontaneous, is one of the

miracles of modern art. … Academic ideas about composition and

modeling and perspective that had already been transformed into

the gloriously mannered idiom of Ingres and then sunk into the

kitsch of Bouguereau and Meissonier turned out to be miraculously

new. Doric pediments or classical shepherds were not part of

this radical classicism, but Cezanne instinctively understood

that his birthplace and lifelong home, Aix-en-Provence, made such

allusions unnecessary” (Perl 32). If it is true that nature is

more depth than line, that color is reality and spaces and solids

are merely illusion, then Cezanne is the embodiment of the

modernist thought.

Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From The Bibemus Quarry

(1897). at:

http://www.west.net/ youth/dl/yard/OM/impressions/cez2.html

The first thing one notices with this painting is the

richness of the color combinations and the effect it has in

elucidating the emotional feel of the quarry. Contrasting the

green against the red-ochre-orange of the quarry with the dark

shading of the cracks and crevices of the rocks and the shading

in the trees and then using a bland, overcast looking sky, brings

the vibrancy of the yellow/orange hues to the fore. Upon closer

inspection, there is a balance of light and dark that is mediated

by a center crevasse and poles that offset the cliffs and draws

the eye to the middle. Once that is taken in, the view expands

to include the more subtle colors of the trees and, finally,

rests at the mountain and skyline. The dark of the tree trunk

frames the right side while the dark streak on the left side of

the mountain triangulates the scene. The bushes in the

foreground “ground” the picture with the use of shading and

contrast. The orange is repeated in the tree and in the mountain

while the sky is mirrored (just a tiny bit) in the sun lit spots

on the cliff tops. It looks as though it was brushed on, that

is, no palette knife or excessive texturing. The emphasis in on

the light and dark contrast of shading in the style of someone

like Vermeer, in that it is startlingly noticeable. The painting

is not realist, nor does it appear to be impressionistic or

abstract; rather, a mixture of the three, with impressionism

being the closest to the rendition. Again, it is the color and

use of color techniques that make this painting so pleasing and

compelling.

Henri Matiss

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