Art History | |

Artist: Matisse, Henri
Title: Joy of Life
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Date: 1905
Style: Fauvism
In the Joy of Life painting Matisse used flat, bold, contrasting colors. This technique of heavily outlined forms is an expression of fauvism. Each figure is simplified with strong outlines, creating linear rhythm. These outlines give the figures shadowing and depth. In the Foreground of the painting the figures are much larger than those in the background; Matisse diminished size to give the impression that the dancers are much farther away. Matisse created a sense of real perspective, as well as giving his piece direction. His piece makes you center in on the middle and the figures dancing in a circle. Each figure is painted peacefully in their own unique ways, some relaxing, others dancing, and a couple embracing each other. Matisse depicted a celebration of life, sexuality, and womanhood.
Matisse’s Joy of Life and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles are two complete different styles. Matisse’s landscape is a broad open field. His figures are un-crowded and relate to the forms of nature that surrounds them. Picasso, on the other hand, compressed the space and took Matisse’s sensual relaxed atmosphere and turned it into an assertively pornographic ambiance. Picasso chose deep tones and shattered forms, where Matisse used clear, bright pigments and graceful curves.

Artist: Pablo Picasso
Title: Les Demoiselles
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Date: 1907
Style: Cubism
The Les Demoiselles is a very disturbing painting. Picasso strayed from current and classical French influences and created cubism, which became groundbreaking in the art culture. This painting is of five prostitutes in a brothel in Barcelona. The faces are distorted; the eyes are derived from African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, as said by the critics. Form and representation is completely missing from this piece. The contortion of space in this painting almost makes it feel claustrophobic. Each woman is represented differently. The two women on the far right are painted heavily and their heads feature sharp geometric shapes. The women appear menacing and not feminine. Les Demoiselles is depicted as a two-dimensional picture plane and is flat.
In 1907, Picasso’s piece was more new and shocking. Las Demoiselles was controversial, as well as, revolutionary and created a large range of anger and disagreement. Many art historians grew skeptical about Picasso’s denial of using African tribal art influences. The painting was believed to be immoral, as it portrays each figure depicted in a bewildering and provoking manner. The fragmented women were unusual and took people out of their comfort zone of the norm that they knew about art.

Artist: Vincent van Gogh
Title: The Night Café
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Date: 1888
Style: Post-Impressionism
Van Gogh wanted to express that inside the café; one could ruin oneself, go insane or commit a crime. The painting conveys a sense of desperation and loneliness. It is being watched by the waiter, a lonely man slouched on the table top and two separate couples, which create the atmosphere of seclusion. Each figure is drawn far apart from each other, the ones sitting are slouching which gives the impression of laziness and tiresome.
The room is painted with the use of heavy complimentary colors of red and green. There are about 6 to 7 different reds in this painting. Red is a strong color, it conjures up not only love but violence, warfare, and the devil. Red is the hottest of the warm colors and indicates anger, thus one can truly go insane with such intensity in this painting. The use of hues of green means jealousy, inexperience and envy, green is also a restful color which underlines the weariness the painting portrays.
Van Gogh succeeded at expressing the terrible passions of humanity, by the use of reds and greens. His broad, swirling, vigorous brush strokes created a powerful expression of Van Gogh.

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh
Title: The Olive Trees
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1889
Style: Impressionism
Vincent Van Gogh’s Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun, has an aesthetic beauty. According to Donald Stoesz the author of Glimpses of Grace, this painting symbolizes the suffering of Jesus Christ by the use of the sun, shadows, barren ground, and the looming form of the tree leaves. The vibrant use of oranges and yellows suggest the autumn season or a late afternoon as the sun sets. Van Gogh used the concept from impressionism of broken color in order to give his work light. Drawing in color not only gives his painting light but form as well. The use of orange is a less intense color than red. It promotes optimism, laughter, lust for life, and comfort. The yellow sky and sun are of happiness, hope and joy but can be conflicting like red and mean deceit and cowardice.
However, in Van Gogh’s paintings the Olive Tree and the Night Café are similar yet one is gloomier and the other is more joyous. This is because of the color choices that Van Gogh chooses to paint these paintings. The Night Café is gloomy because of the hues of red and the figures that are drawn distant and separated. The Olive Tree is joyful because of the bright vibrant sun and the hues of oranges that bring out enjoyment to the senses.
Artist: Wassily Kandinsky
Title: Black Lines (Schwarze Linien)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: December 1913
Style: Abstract
Kandinsky created a non-objective painting that is two-dimensional. Kandinsky believed that art can be expressed visually by musical compositions. He saw that the hues were the pitch and the saturation is the volume of the sound. The painting has vibrant colors that are moving rapidly throughout the canvas. The oval shaped colors of bright blue, yellow, white, and green burst out of the canvas that is both appealing and powerful; they seem to be floating on the canvas. The colors bleed within each other; there is no sense of boundary. The painting has rhythm throughout the composition, with the repeating colors and shapes which can portray a musical symphony. The black markings of line vary in direction and density, they are thin and frantic. The way the black lines move through this painting you can feel the energy of the music
Kandinsky listened to music when he was painting, knowing this observing the work I believe that while he was creating this piece he was listening to music with loud or a lot of drums. The reason for this assumption is because as you look at the painting from left to right you have circular and oval shaped colors that are placed in the same way a drum set has there drums, with the blue as the bass drum and the green on the top left in the shape of a flat oval is the ride cymbal. As a drummer hits the drums, it is almost as though Kandinsky recorded the drummer’s movement by the use of the black lines.

Artist: Kasimir Malevich
Title: Suprematist Painting, Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1915
Style: Suprematist
Kasimir Malevich creates visual tension with the contrast of the blue triangle as it overlaps the black rectangle. Malevich created a bold black rectangle that is aligned to the right of the canvas. A blue triangle is piercing the black rectangle on its lower left side half. The white and black colors behind the blue triangle, alters the blue from a lighter to a dark hue. The half of the triangle that is surrounded by the white background seems lighter than the point of the triangle that is immersed with the black. The white surrounding the blue makes it brighter, the point of the triangle that is bounded by the black makes the blue seem darker especially as it gets closer to the point where it narrows. When comparing Malevich’s painting to Kandinsky’s, one can see that there is a clear distinction between the two abstract paintings. Malevich’s painting has greater mass than Kandinsky’s, even though in Kandinsky’s painting he has more elements and covers more space the heavy dark black rectangle in Malevich’s grounds the painting and creates the illusion of mass and weight. Malevich’s painting also has a different atmosphere, because of the solidity of the black color and how the triangle appears to be stabbing the rectangle it portrays a more intense, serious emotion as Kandinsky’s is more of fun and lively.

Artist: Juan Si Gonzalez
Title: Art is Nourishing
Medium: Cuban Bread
Date: 1993
Style: Mixed Media Installation Juan Si Gonzalez’s installation of Art is Nourishing in Miami consisted of Cuban bread, as the main medium, with cheese and red wine. Gonzalez created this by using the Cuban bread and constructing it into the words of “Art is Nourishing” nailed to a wall. He then placed wine and cheese for the viewers to consume his artwork. Every afternoon his piece would be gone and only small chunks remained, he then would re-create the piece in the morning with fresh new Cuban bread. His piece, like many others before it, created an issue, local restaurants complained that their customers where choosing to eat the bread, cheese and drink his wine, over there highly expensive cuisines. While people gathered to admire and enjoy his piece Gonzalez dressed up as a waiter and served the participants; which in an overall aspect this was contradicting because he was a waiter and is serving the art.
The use of food to create his installation first was inspired back when Gonzalez taught a group of rich women how to do contemporary art; they created an installation using fruit that was displayed in one of his galleries he was working on at the time. When Gonzalez was asked to do a piece he did not have the fund to create an elaborate piece. Therefore, he found it was cheapest and creative to buy bread and the cheapest cheese and wine for this master piece.
Juan Si Gonzalez and Paloma Dallas do not have just one medium in which they work with, depending on their project depends on the media and materials they will use. Some of the mediums that they used where their own bodies, tempera paint, television/videos, sugar, chalk, photos, audio of people, mirrors, words, hair, food and so on.
In Juan Si Gonzalez’s early works he was criticized but by his own country and people in Cuba. There was no freedom to express art or anything that has to do with expression, association and assembly. He was often thrown in jail for his act of expressing in public his art, in which at the time was inspired by the oppression in Cuba. He is now a wide renowned installation artist. However, still today a lot of his work stirs up controversy. Others may be inspired and some are offended by his work. But he creates not for the people but for him. To express his thoughts, emotions, feelings, and beliefs.
Their work reflects multiple perspectives by the diversity of his audience. Gonzalez expresses his feelings and he lets others be a part of his piece, by his emotions. He shows real people from all different backgrounds of their true stories, concerns, and beliefs. By doing this each individual who comes and takes part of his installations sees it in a different perspective. For those who have never come close in their lives of feeling oppressed, Gonzalez conveys that struggle of tyranny, to where one can look upon his work and almost instantly feel the cruelty of being demoralized. Each individual enters each piece with their own perspective and leaves that piece with multiple perspectives on life, individuals, and humanity.
Art can and does change the world and it changes it for the better. However, you cannot see it right away and sometimes you will not be able to feel it immediately, but it is changing. Art is part of our culture, our livelihood; it expands our minds to new heights, to new understandings. The artists who create the art see the world in a complete different way; they see it for what it is, the beauty, the terrifying, the sadness, and the serene. The way they see life and portray it through their art, makes the viewer inevitably become aware of it. Whether it is a feeling of oppression from Cuba, as Juan Si Gonzalez portrayed in his early works, or the thought of insanity as Van Gogh was expressing through his Night at the Café, maybe it could be of joy and the celebration of life as Matisse beautifully displayed. No matter how the artist depicted life and our world we live in, each piece of art contributes to our understanding and our process of evolution as human kind.

Works Cited
Creative Commons. Pablo Picasso His paintings, art and life. 18 June 2011
<http://www.pablopicasso.org/avignon.jsp>.
Dabrowski, Magdalena. Kandinsky: Compositions. 19 June 2011
<http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/>.
Stoesz, D (2010). Glimpses of Grace: Reflections of a Prison Chaplain. Victoria, BC: Friesen Press. p. 13.
The Personal Life of Henri Matisse. 2011. 18 June 2011 <http://www.henri- matisse.net/biography.html>. VG Gallery . The Night Café in the Place Lamartine in Arles. . 18 June 2011 <http://www.vggallery.com/painting/p_0463.htm>.