NAVIGATING
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FANTASY
It is possible to simplify the stylistic variability of 20th century art into a few broad approaches: movements that focus on ideas transmitted through geometrical forms, those that center on the artist's expression of his personal emotions through the use of color, and another that emphasizes the dreams, nightmares, and visions of the artist's imagination. The latter may be called the style of Fantasy.
Many 20th century Fantasists looked back to Hieronymus Bosch as their stylistic ancestor. Bosch, a 16th century Flemish painter of great imagination, has been described as a religious heretic or an alchemist. He was neither, but his Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych is a peculiar painting. It carefully describes the Creation of Adam and Eve, the sins of man after the creation, and the torments of man in Hell.
Bosch's panels are filled with incredibly accurate detail, but the detail describes totally fanciful creatures and/or situations. Bosch's Hell panel includes delightful vignettes such as the stoking of the "Mouth of Hell" with sinners, a man guillotined on a metronome, and another being crucified on a harp. It seems that in Bosch's mind, music was literally a "tool of the devil," a rather pervasive idea among straitlaced Northern Europeans of the time!
One of the earliest 20th century Fantasists was a naive, retired custom's officer named Henri Rousseau. Rousseau gave music and painting lessons to make ends meet (he didn't have many pupils!), and used store mannequins and stuffed animals as his models since he didn't have to pay them. His work with its stilted figural forms, his obsessive but non-scientific focus on outline, and his odd combinations of elements, seem almost surrealistic.
Rousseau's fantasies resulted from his own child-like nativity and his sometimes bizarre models. However, his unusual style became an inspiration for later, intentionally shocking painters. This work is The Sleeping Gypsy .
METAPHYSICAL PAINTING
Born in Greece of Italian parents, Giorgio de Chirico was a well trained and well educated artist who invented a cerebral style called Metaphysical Painting. From his studies of Nietzsche's philosophy, De Chirico became convinced that there was another altogether different reality from that of ordinary existence. In his paintings, he tries to disrupt the logic of this existence and evoke "disquieting states of the mind."
De Chirico's non-logical, metaphysical reality is suggested in The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by strange divergent shadows, conflicting viewpoints, eerily long Renaissance- style arcades, and flat spectral figures. Typically we have the feeling that De Chirico has plunged us into another world by derationalizing realistic Renaissance imagery. Like Rousseau, this painter uses recognizable details to create an unreal, fanciful vision.
DADAISM
Rousseau and De Chirico may be seen as predecessors to Surrealism. A third predecessor is a movement called Dada. Dada was born in Zurich in 1916. Here a number of draft dodging artists and writers gathered together to proclaim their "disgust" with life. Totally revolted by the mindless carnage of World War I, the Dadaists were true nihilists who debunked "Bourgeois rationalism" (they said it was "dead"), past tradition, and even art itself. Marcel Duchamp was one of the leading lights of the movement.
Bicycle Wheel on a Kitchen Stool is an example of Duchamp's "Readymades." It might be viewed as a mockery of sculpture and of creativity.
Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a Mustache (or L.H.O.O.Q. ) attacks one of the most revered paintings of the Western European tradition. The letters L.H.O.O.Q. at the bottom of this doctored up poster translate roughly from French, "She has heat in the pants" or, to give it a more modern flavor, "When she's hot, she's hot."
Swiss artist Paul Klee exhibited at times with the Dadaists and Surrealists, but never formally joined either movement. Fascinated with children's art, Klee sought to create images that sprang directly from his imagination. Visually simple, but psychologically and symbolically complex, Klee's works such as Twittering Machine both delight and puzzle us.
SURREALISM
Joán Miró, like Dali, was a Surrealist from the Catalonian region of Spain. Unlike Dali, he pursued a more abstract approach to delving into his subconscious, using his shapes, colors, and compositions to convey the depths of his imagination. Coupling abstraction with automatism, Miró created in Nursery Decoration (Woman Haunted by the Passage of the Dragon-Fly, Bird of Bad Omen ) a violent yet playful, nightmarish premonition of world-wide war.
It was painted in 1938.
The most famous Surrealist was the Spaniard Salvador Dali. His "paranoiac method" centered on "hand colored photographs of the subconscious." Preoccupied with his hysterical outbursts as a child, with his dreams, and with "blood, excrement, and putrefaction"("the three cardinal images of life"), Dali fused incredible technical facility with totally imaginary subject matter.
The Persistence of Memory appears to be a meditation on the warping of forms and confusion of objects that occurs in our deepest dream states. Dali's inspiration, he says, was biting into a soft, smelly piece of Camembert cheese! The artist's imagery frequently includes distorted (yet organic) forms and multiple imagery (images that can be "read" in more than one way).
The Treason of Images (This is Not a Pipe ) by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte immediately suggests the essence of his work: dead-pan humor! A realistically
painted pipe is declared to be not a pipe...and indeed it is not. It is a representation, not reality. However, to Magritte even reality is not reality, for as he put it, "The world is a defiance of common sense."
Magritte's Portrait is, once again, a realistic vision of the unreal. In this case, we have an austere still life with a strange twist. An eye peers back at us from the slab of ham on our plate! The title congers up thoughts like "we are what we eat," yet the image seems almost to be a conversion attempt for vegetarianism! At the very least, Magritte has inspired us to look at reality in a new way.
The next of our Fantasists is the Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher. A favorite today with mathematicians and the general public, Escher created fascinating prints involving interlocked forms, meticulous draftsmanship, impossible spaces, and metamorphosis. Sky and Water demonstrates the artist's preoccupation with interplays between positive and negative shapes and with the idea of transformation.
House of Stairs is a spatial puzzlement. Apparently logical at first glance, this interior scene is a strange melange of stairways seen from multiple viewpoints. We have the feeling with Escher, as with De Chirico, that we have been transported into another dimension.
Escher's Eye is a shocking, nearly surreal graphic. In this close-up of his own eye, Escher has added an unexpected surprise. A death's head stares back at us, reflected in his pupil. This detail converts a magnified self-portrait into the artist's meditation on death.
The Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, created troubling autobiographical works that focused on the tragedies of her life: her bout with polio at 6, the injuries she suffered in a streetcar accident at 15, her uneasy marriage with her husband Diego Rivera, and her continual miscarriages, therapeutic abortions, and operations. Although we categorize them as Fantasy, Kahlo said "I painted my own reality."
The Two Fridas suggests the tormented life that the artist led as well as two very different aspects of her personality.
RECENT DIVERSITY
Anselm Kiefer is of a new generation of German expressive artists. The central themes of Kiefer's work derive from history and mythology, particularly as they relate to traumas of human existence. He has said, "History to me is like the burning of coal. It is like a material. History is a warehouse of energy."
Osiris and Isis is based on an Egyptian myth. It consists of a pyramidal mound built up of layers of material. The Prebles describe the painting as "a tortured surface consisting of paint, mud, earth, tar, rock and bits of ceramic and metal." Its agonized subject (Isis is sending wire like tendrils out to the scattered body parts of her dismembered husband, Osiris) and brutal technique suggest a world in danger of disintegration.
Rupert Garcia is a California artist motivated by deeply felt political and social concerns. Basing his works on photographs from periodicals, Garcia places flat, brightly painted shapes into simplified, powerful arrangements. His adamant images like Mexico, Chile, Soweto , might be seen as the outgrowth of his student days in the politically radical 1960s.
Judith Baca has been described as a community artist, an artist who fulfills her need for expression by encouraging teams of community members to produce large scale communal artworks. She has been an active leader in the California Mural Movement centered in Los Angeles. 1900 Immigrant California is part of the Great Wall of Los Angeles .
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a huge mural created by local artists and community members on a flood control wall. Over the years it has become "the longest mural in the world," with each section of the project 350 feet long! The theme that binds the sections together is the ethnic history and diversity of the city.
Judy Chicago was a central player in the Feminist Movement of the 1970s. As an artist keenly aware of women's history and their historical roles, Chicago created The Dinner Party project to honor "women of achievement" from ancient Egyptian times up to the present. The work incorporates stitchery and china painting, two media traditionally linked with women.
This seemingly innocuous work (Tilted Arc) by Richard Serra generated a storm of controversy after its erection in New York City. Created as part of the General Services Administration Art-in- Architecture program, the sculpture seemed to intentionally interrupt the visual space of the plaza in which it was located. After a long battle, the 120 foot long cor-ten steel wall was dismantled in 1989. Public art does not always please the public!
Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial also generated quantities of negative reaction when it was first planned, yet it has weathered the protests to become one of the most popular and moving of our national monuments.
This is a detail of the names of fallen soldiers carved in the black granite wall of Maya Ying Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Having passed through a non-objective, Minimalist phase in her work, Susan Rothenburg emerged as a devotee of the recognizable object. Her approach sometimes is referred to as "New Image Painting." Many of her canvases, such as Untitled (Blue) have an almost mystical, enigmatic quality about them...in part because of the subtle interplay of color and value, in part from the juxtaposition of intriguing symbols (a white hand and a horse's head).
The horse was a favored image for Rothenburg in the 1970s. "The horse was a way of not doing people, yet it was a symbol of people, a self- portrait, really" (Rothenburg).
The story of Keith Haring is a remarkable one. Haring began his "artistic" career making chalk drawings on empty walls earmarked for advertising in New York subway stations. His shorthand signs and personal symbols were so popular with the public and critics that Haring is now considered a major "fine artist" in the United States.
With Haring we see art being reintegrated into the greater society in a way that is rare in the twentieth century. Perhaps we are witnessing a return to the time when art and life seemed irreversibly wedded, when the aesthetic dimension was omnipresent in human existence.