In today’s lecture, the art discussed was from both before and after World War 2. In the first part of class, we were introduced to Piet Mondrian who was influential abstract artist of the period. When looking at his composition with red white and blue the reduction was abundantly clear. The painting is reduced to only vertical and horizontal lines while also sticking to just black, white and primary colors. Additionally this limited color palette is expressed only in solid color, no shading. This leads to there being no foreground or background, just on flat plane. The one flat plane has a very interesting effect as the color red typically would feel closer to the viewer but in this situation i did not have that experience. I also found the evolution of Mondrian’s paintings of trees to be facinating. The evolution that we looked at was just four years from 1908 – 1912, but there was still very dramatic changes. Over the three images the impact of cubism on him is very clear and we also notice the way that the tree seemingly flattens. Similar to his composition with red white and blue, there is no foreground or background in his latest iteration of the tree.
Another highlight of the class was Arshile Gorky’s The Liver is the Cocks Comb. I found this painting to be hard to look away from. I also resonated with one of the other student’s comments that this painting reminded them of loony toons. I think the way that some of the figures are reduced is in a manner that has similarities to a cartoon character. I also found it to be very engaging that this painting is so clearly violent while the actual subject matter is still relatively unclear.