Art Appreciation

Art Forum

I love the works of Henri Mattise..1869-1954..

My favorites of his are:

By The Sea

Figure Asleep

Icarus

The Snail

The Wine Press

Two Dancers

Harmony In Red

I like art with vivid colouring.

Other paintings that appeal to me are Abstracts. That type of art conveys varying ideas to the onlooker.

Beautiful, Becker!

I do like his experimental colours of the time - colours that were thought too bold to appreciate back then. I don't own any of his prints, but I really like his blue nude paintings as well as his dancer paintings.

His blue nude reminds me of Picasso's blue nude, or rather Picasso's blue nude reminds me of Matisse.

Is this the Icarus you are referring to?


http://www.pixpond.com/xx/Icarus.jpg

I truly love Degas, he has always been to me an artiste sublime. His work with color is amazing and only he could catch the feeling of the Ballet and its dancers.

I offer his biograghy for those who would like to get to know him better.

"...Aspects of Degas's work - mainly, his ballet paintings from the 1880S - have long been popular with a broad audience; too much so for their own good. But he has never been a "popular" artist like the wholly inferior Auguste Renoir, whose Paris-Boston retrospective in 1985 beguiled the crowds and bored everyone else. Degas was much harder to take, with his spiny intelligence (never Renoir's problem), his puzzling mixtures of categories, his unconventional cropping and, above all, his "coldness" - that icy, precise objectivity which was one of the masks of his unrelenting power of aesthetic deliberation. Besides, the long continuities of his work have not always been obvious. The figure you think he skimmed from the street like a Kodak turns out to have been there already, in Ingres or Watteau or some half-forgotten seventeenth-century draftsman who suited his purposes. Degas was the most modern of artists, but his kind of modernity, which entailed a passionate working relationship with the remote as well as the recent past, hardly exists today. How we would have bored him, with our feeble jabber of postmodernist "appropriation"!
"In his late years Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas was chatting in his studio with one of his few friends and many admirers, English painter Walter Richard Sickert. They decided to visit a café. Young Sickert got ready to summon a fiacre, a horse-drawn cab. Degas objected. "Personally, I don't like cabs. You don't see anyone. That's why I love to ride on the omnibus-you can look at people. We were created to look at one another, weren't we?"

"No passing remark could take you closer to the heart of nineteenth-century Realism: the idea of the artist as an engine for looking, a being whose destiny was to study what Balzac, in a title that declared its rebellion from the theological order of Dante's Divine Comedy, called La Comédie Humaine.

"The idea that the goal of creative effort lay outside the field of allegory and moral precept was quite new in the 1860s when Degas was coming to maturity as a painter. The highest art was still history painting, in which France had reigned supreme; but since 1855 practically the whole generation of history painters on whom this elevation depended - Paul Delaroche, Ary Scheffer, Horace Vernet and, above all, Eugéne Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - had died, and no one seemed fit to replace them. French critics and artists alike, and conservative ones in particular, felt a tremor of crisis, as others would a century later as the masters of modernism died off. After them, what could sustain the momentum of culture? "His presence among us was a guarantee, his life a safeguard," ran Ingres's obituary in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1867.

"And yet beyond the ruins of the temple, something else was stirring: a sense of the century as unique in itself, full of what Charles Baudelaire called the "heroism of modern life." Its chief bearers, in painting, were to be Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

"Born in 1834 into a rich Franco-Italian banking family with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans, Degas was never short of money and never doubted his vocation as a painter, in which his family encouraged him. He was a shy, insecure, aloof young man - if one did not know this from the testimony of his friends, one would gather it from his early self-portraits, with their veiled look of mannerist inwardness acquired from Pontormo - and, it seems, unusually devoid of narcissism: unlike almost every nineteenth-century painter one has heard of, he gave up painting his own face at thirty-one. It was the Other that fascinated him: all faces except his own.

"In time he would construct a formidable "character" to mask his shyness: Degas the solitary, the feared aphorist, the Great Bear of Paris. He never married - "I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture." Certainly he was not homosexual. The more likely guess is that he was impotent. If so, all the luckier for art: his libido and curiosity were channeled through his eyes.

"He had a reputation for misogyny, mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy about formal beauty embedded in the depilated Salon nudes of Bouguereau and Cabanel - ideal wax with little rosy nipples. "Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?" some hostess unwisely asked him. "Parce que la femme en general est laide, madame, " growled the old terror: "Because, madam, women in general are ugly."

"This was a blague. To find Degas's true feelings about women, one should consult the pastels and oil paintings of nudes that he made, at the height of his powers, in the 1880s and 1890s. Some critics still find them "clinical," because they seem to be done from a point outside the model's awareness, as though she did not know he was there and were not, actually, posing. "I want to look through the keyhole," Degas said. The bathers were "like cats licking themselves." Their bodies are radiant, worked and reworked almost to a thick crust of pastel, mat and blooming with myriad strokes within their tough winding contours. But they are also mechanisms of flesh and bone, all joints, protuberances, hollows, neither "personalities" nor pinups. (One sees why Duchamp, inventor of the mechanical bride, adored and copied Degas.) Not even Nude Woman Having Her Hair Combed, 1886-88, the most refined and classical of these nudes, seems in the least Renoiresque, although nothing could be more consummately appealing than that pink, slightly blockish body against the gold couch and the regulating white planes of peignoir and apron. It was a subject to which Degas brought special, almost fetishistic feeling, and a later version of the same theme, The Coiffure, 1896, shows what a vehicle for innovation it could be: by now the contours of the woman and her maid are roughed out with an almost Fauvist abruptness, and they emerge from a continuous orange-russet field that seems to predict Matisse's Red Studio - in fact Matisse once owned this painting, although he bought it from Degas's studio sale in 1918, long after his Red Studio was finished.

"Looking back from old age, Degas reflected that "perhaps I have thought about women as animals too much," but he had not - although he was certainly reproached for doing so. His "keyhole" bathers provoked the crisis of the Ideal Nude, whose last great exponent had been the man Degas most revered, Ingres. Yet their exquisite clarity of profile could not have been achieved without Ingres's example. In them, the great synthesis between two approaches that, thirty years before, had been considered the opposed poles of French art - Ingres's classical line, Delacroix's Romantic color - is achieved. There is no clearer instance of the way in which true innovators, such as Degas, do not "destroy" the past (as the mythology of avant-gardism insisted): they amplify it.

"In their novel Manette Salomon (1867) the Goncourts had Coriolis, an artist, reflect on "the feeling, the intuition for the contemporary, for the scene that rubs shoulders with you, for the present in which you sense the trembling of your emotions.... There must be found a line that would precisely render life, embrace from close at hand the individual, the particular - a living, human, inward line - a drawing truer than all drawing."

"Degas thinly disguised, you would think. But at the time, the Goncourts did not know Degas; they would come to meet him later. Neither, strangely enough, did Degas meet his literary parallel, Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary had made its scandalous and prosecuted debut in 1856 - although he had certainly read him. Flaubert's objectivity, his impassioned belief in "scientific" description as the instrument of social fiction, his acute sensitivity to class, his sardonic humor - all find their counterpart in Degas. And so does his attitude to the past as source and example, the springboard for invention in the present. "There must be no more archaisms, clichés," Flaubert wrote about the difficulty of prose. "Contemporary ideas must be expressed using the appropriate crude terms; everything must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne ... and always streaming with color." Read Ingres and Delacroix for Voltaire and Montaigne, and you have Degas in a nutshell.

"Nothing escaped his prehensile eye for the texture of life and the myriad gestures that reveal class and work. He made art from things that no painter had fully used before: the way a discarded dress, still warm from the now naked body, keeps some of the shape of its wearer; the unconcern of a dancer scratching her back between practice sessions (The Dance Class, 1873-76); the tension in a relationship between a man and a woman (Sulking, 1875-76) or the undercurrent of violence and domination in an affair (Interior, sometimes known as The Rape, 1868--69); a laundress's yawn, the stoned heaviness of an absinthe drinker's posture before the dull green phosphorescence of her glass, the exact port of a dandy's cane, the scrawny professional absorption of the petits rats of the ballet corps, the look in a whore's eye as she sizes up her client, the revealing clutter on a writer's desk. Even when painting themes from the Bible or from ancient history, as he often did in his early years, there were, as Henri Loyrette points out in the catalogue, "contemporary concerns beneath a thin archaeological veneer." His Scene of War in the Middle Ages, 1863-5, whose erotically charged women victims prefigure his bathers, refer to the brutality inflicted on women in New Orleans (where all his maternal family lived) by Union troops in the Civil War.

"Degas did not suddenly "become" a Realist. That was a myth propagated by his friends in the Impressionist circle at Batignolles, especially Édouard Manet, who implicitly claimed the credit for his conversion. What happened was more subtle: gradually this quintessential young bourgeois discovered what was to be seen from the eyeline of the bourgeoisie, but he raised his theater of social observation on the foundations of strict academic training in the mold of Ingres, whose precision he never lost. His eye for the instant gesture and socially revealing incident went with a lifelong habit of recycling poses and motifs, patching them in. Thus he can be very deceptive: the image that seems the freshest product of observation turns out to have been used half a dozen times before. Degas copied everything from Mantegna to Moghul miniatures, and even the work of lesser painters than himself; an artist, he said, should not be allowed to draw so much as a radish from life without the constant habit of drawing from the old masters. (By the same token, he was an avid collector of both old and new art: in his sixties he purchased two Gauguins, and when pushing eighty he remarked with some admiration of Cubism that "it seems even more difficult than painting." Allegory, in his early work, went with the desire to see freshly - and it would return in strange forms in his old age, as in the painting of a fallen jockey whose horse is clearly one of the steeds of the Apocalypse, or Russian Dancers, three women in clumping boots, locked together in a straining mass like Goya's witches. Both are present in his first real masterpiece, done in 1858 after he got back to Paris: The Bellelli Family, that marvelously observed group portrait of his neurotic aunt Laura, her lazy and distracted husband, Gennaro, and their two daughters. For although it is a tour de force of Realist observation - how much more concrete and present the Bellellis seem to us, surrounded by the furniture and other stuff of their lives, than the people on the neutral brown grounds Manet borrowed from Velázquez! - it is also an allegory, of family continuity under stress: the drawing on the wall behind Laura Bellelli is of Degas's grandfather Hilaire, and she is pregnant, so that four generations, not two, are present in the picture. And you cannot fail to associate this with Degas's own working methods, the sense of filiation and descent that would breathe through his work for the rest of his life, the past feeding into the present and then out into the future. Degas, the synthesizer of Ingres and Delacroix, would point - through the wild color-fields and direct manual touch of his later years - to a modernism that was not yet born."

- .
If I cou.d show his painitngs you would see his magesty,..

I think it helps to know something of the painter himself inorder to really understand his works.
D

D

Thanks for the biography, Delta.

He had a truly fascinating artistic vision of the world - not just wanting to capture beautifully appealing things, but painting images in all it's beautiful "ugliness." His years spend tryng to master and capture motion in a picture, is definitely intriguing. I would post his "after the bath," but I don't know how much we can get away with here. Degas's biography kind of reminds me of Leonardo Da Vinci and his "grotesques" period. The grotesques paintings are something I can't even force myself to look away from. There is something that draws me in - capturing all sides of human nature, not just the physically appealing.


Here is Degas's "blue dancers"


http://www.pixpond.com/xx/Degas_Dancers in Blue.jpg

Wow, Becker!!!!

Harmony in red is beautiful!! I can see why you like it so much!


I don't think we can get away with posting it though.


What does it mean to you?

I think Picasso is the most over rated artist in the field. He even himself laughed at the idiocy he started. People were all over his work like he had invented the dang cube. He only was more clever then the rest.

If you really study Picasso you will find underneath the stupidness he was a gifted artist. He was an inventor too. Blue period, I even went thru it myself.

Had a friend who had a Picasso hanging on his office wall, I stood in amazement as the closest I ever got to a real painting was in the museum.
He had this painting on his wall. It was Picasso cubism at its height.!!!
I was impressed but only because it was a Picasso not because it was a good piece of Art. To me that is.
D

Becker why did you buy Harmony? What appealed to you in this work?

Was it the color harmony? Or the utter disregard for censorship?

Tell us.

D

Delta,

I don't like all of Picasso's art, but I adore some. The blue period is most definitely one of my favourites, as well as his cubism. But I will admit that after viewing some of Picasso's work, I am left wondering why most of it is considered a work of genius. I will admit, some of it looks like a preschooler had some fun with crayons right after nap time.

I misunderstood too. Hee Hee, Actually I don't like Becks painting its almost primitive to me and I don't like Primitive.

Except for the fourth graders, then primitive is good.

D

I am still in the third grade. Give me time.

I never liked Picasso's work.

Hmm, I'll have to keep searching for it.

Maybe there is more than one harmony in red. If I find one that matches your description, I'll post it.

What's your favourite Degas painting, Delta?

A few years ago I had a calendar of Matisse Works. One painting for each month.

I loved it. Maybe I will look for it again for 2005. You gave me an idea.

I saw the painting you sent to me beck. I just don't happen to like it.

Now its hard to pick my favorite Degas, but Dance Class is high on the list.

Also Carraige ride where he focuses more on the landscape then on the edgey side withthe look of a cropped body on horseback.

I wish I knew how to post pictures.
I need to learn.
D

This is beautiful, Becker.

I don't know why it appeals to me yet. I'll figure it out after looking at it more.



Harmony In Red

http://www.pixpond.com/xx/matisse-red.jpg

"La plage de Sainte-Adresse, temps gris" This painting is one of the most Beautiful; WORKS OF IMPRESSIONISM EVER Do you know it?
Claude MONET 1867
I do like the impressionists. Oh my I will be up all night now, once I get started, better save some for later.

D

Show us Beck I am not familiar with that artists work.

D

Its terrific beck my kind of work. Too bad you can't move it here. Maybe Sheryl can. Ask her.

D

Ok! Just had to take a phone call. I'll post it in a few minutes.

beck I just forwarded to you instructions S gave me. Maybe I can learn Hmmm.

D

Singing Fish

http://www.pixpond.com/xx/singing fish.jpg


Very interesting! I'll have to stare at it for a while!

Stare at it? lol Oh God you would go into a coma with someof mine hee hee.

Sorry a little levity never hurt any thread.

D

Now you can stare with one eye on each one.

I know you don't like either one. Miss Politeness.http://smilies.sofrayt.com/^/9971/omelet.gif

This painitng is a semi abstract. It defines the fish easily, and you can pick up the pods grown near the water. The fish is on its tail to show it is having a good time dancing if you will. The watercolors make the painting fluid in respect to the flow of the waters somewhere. Colors are conducive to a light and airy feeling. How is that?

D

These are some of my favourites.

A copy of this one hangs behind my bed.

http://www.pixpond.com/xx/the rest.jpg


This one is dreary, melancholy. I get the impression of being trapped and hopeless.

http://www.pixpond.com/xx/old guitarist.jpg

Ihate the first one because it reflects contempt for the subject by deforming the hands. Know what I mean?

Now the second one is terrific, soul bending terrific. Who is the artist?

I love the expressive feeling it gives off. Yep I am a fool for meloncholy
The elongation of the fingures is like the elongation of his time here.

Hey I am no t suposed to critique am I?

D

It's called "the old guitarist" from Picasso's blue period.

I would love to post more of my favourite Picasso prints, but he was a great lover of the female anatomy. If you get the chance, look up "the dream." I don't have enough words to describe my love for that painting. Just beautiful!

Good night all. My computer keeps freezing on me. It needs to rest.

Talk to you on the morrow.

Beck will sleep now and dream of Picasso [Not}

Singing Fishes for me.

Sorry...S.

Paxil!!

Good Night!


Dream of many singing and dancing fishes!

Good night and I like the blue Picasso S, its the cubism I don't care for.

If you read my crtique you will see what I feel.

Dang its time to go, see you all tomorrow.
S you have a great thread here and we c are having a good time.
Tomorrow,
D

The dream? You love it? Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire!!!

Good Night, Delta.

Critiquing is fine with me!

Must crawl into bed now surrounded by Picasso's art.

You tipped me off in the "Casuistry" thread.


Andy Warhol's "masterpiece"
http://www.pixpond.com/xx/warhol.jpg

I couldn't resist!

Oh right I surely did. Ha ha,

Lata,

D

That darn painting made Warhol a millionaire. Not fair.


The public was soooo duped in that period of expressionism?

D

Definitely duped!!

Expressionism? - Oh yes! Warhol has Edvard Munch beat hands down!

ROTFLMAO Becker thats so funny.!!!!

It looks like a combination of gruesom CSI investigation of a split skull and a twist of Salvadore Dali's two sided visionism. Hee hee.

D

FUNNY??

Well, I guess an exposed breast is considered gross when being compared to a singing fish!!

Don't be hurt we just don't care for The dream. its more like a nightmare, butyou are entitled to love whatever yourlittleheart desires.

We are just teasing you......

D

Thats very funny S. Very funny. I can just see their faces. OMG


D

beck you are cracking me up, I am laughing out loud. Hilarious!!!!

D

I like Thomas Dicksee. Some of his stuff is really good, others not so good, but it's all subjective.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v460/Whidden/dicksee7.jpg

OMG its about time you cameon here Dave, I love your choice. Did you go back and see our comments and teasing each other?

D

More Thomas Dicksee. (I always think Dixie when I see his name).

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v460/Whidden/dicksee_t1.jpg

Thats beautiful Dave,Ilove the compostion and the useof dark versus light.

You know the old Masters had to make their own paints?. It wasa tedious task
and one which I find so hard to imagine.

D

Whidden!

That is some beautiful art!! Hypnotizing!

He is a surprise all the time, isn't he ? Poet lover ,Art Lover,writer of copious intriguing posts and always with a sense of humor, OMG I think I am in love, Too bad for me, as Sandy June has him with a tight rein.

D

The Scream by Edvard Munch
http://www.pixpond.com/xx/scream.jpg

I think I painted that or dreamed I did. I know I did. I know I did.

Dave you may be white trash and your head look like a mellon but your heart is staunch and brave and I don't care about the rest.

D

Talk about melon heads, that guy in the scream has one going on for sure.

I saw the scream back in 90 or 91 on a college campus in Florida, under it, it had the caption, PRESIDENT QUAYLE.

I guess the one who put in there didn't like the vice president.

Thats a gem Dave, Quayle yeh I can see it.

D

Yes, it was stolen from the Munch museum. It was stolen several years ago too, but the thief had a change of heart and returned it.

He probalyhad Nightmares and felt if he didn't return it he would be haunted for life. YUk

D

You're too funny, Delta!

Yes, it is scary and disturbing. His other paintings are even more disturbing than the scream. He was someone who was plagued by anxiety. He had some kind of a love-hate relationship with women and in most of his other paintings, women's faces are either disfigured or with no expression at all. It's disturbing, but somehow I'm drawn to expressionism, especially Munch. I appreciate artists who capture all sides of human nature: The appealing and not so appealing aspects.

The scream is not a painting of the physical likeness of a person; it's a depiction of raw human emotional fear and anxiety.

Singing Butler
http://www.pixpond.com/xx/singbutler.jpg

Is that the right name for it, Becker?

I just emailed you three of my favs so look for them.


D

http://www.pixpond.com/xx/salvador dali.jpg

http://www.pixpond.com/xx/discovery of America.jpg

These are beautiful, Delta. I've seen many Salvador Dali prints. Never the real thing though. Do you own the prints? Company has just arrived. Will post more tomorrow.

I am siigning off too.

Lata,
D

Delta,

Your Dali choices are excellent! I have seen them both before, but I've never focused on them in great detail. It looks as though in the painting of Christ on the cross, Dali is depicting both the Crucifixion and Ascension. What do you see?

Starry Night
http://www.pixpond.com/xx/starry night.jpg
After Van Gogh's descent into madness, or just a very active imagination?

I looked at a Van Gogh Calendar today. I can't decide whether or not I enjoy his work.

My intial impression is that he was pretty much in the "jar" when He painted.

Eating paint will do that to a person!

Cutting off ones ear will do it too, I would imagine.

D

Funny, Delta!

Hey, I got confused about the artist. Turns out it's a father and son team, one is thomas francis dicksee and one is frank dicksee.

so I don't know who painted what, one or the other. I saw frank and thought it was just short for francis. Anyhow, I don't care who painted the art, I just like it.

we have this one in our home, Sandy Junes mom got it for us, sadly I don't like it. I don't like the look on the guys face. It's from Dicksee. (one of em who knows which)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v460/Whidden/Dicksee20LaBElleLrg24X36.jpg

He got this one perfect. She is a looker!!!


Miranda

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v460/Whidden/Sir20Frank20Dicksee-Miranda.jpg

No he looks like he is constipated....lol

D

I think they're both nice! I like the woman's hair and dress in the first one, but I like "Miranda" much more.

He looks efeminate to me.

Definitely pretty! A classic kind of beauty!

Hey Dave I thought you lived in a trailor, how do the paintings fit?
Must be a double wide. Hee Hee

D

I m speechless, you put it right next to the Dolphins. Poor Dolphins. Better watch out or PETA will be knockin on your trailor door( Do Trailors have doors?Or do they just have sliding walls?) Hmm.

D

What are your other favourites?

I'll hunt them down and post them for you.

I will go an d find some and email to you.


D