We Continued our last class’s discussion on Postwar Art on Wednesday, May 1st, starting the class by focusing on Frieda Kahlo’s The Two Fridas. The Two Fridas represents a response to the indignities, discrimination, and oppression Kahlo and many others faced as indigenous women. Struggling against the societal limitations on women and people of color, Kahlo exemplifies the personal rebellion of female Surrealists who sought to recapture control over their bodies and assert agency over their lives.
We continued class, looking at Neo-Plasticism, a technique representing balance of painting, along with the utilization of vertical lines and primary colors. Piet Mondrian presents a unique style to what we have seen before in this class. Mondrian’s abstract works note a modernist style, with clean, black (varying from thick to thin) lines, and geometrical squares and rectangles in his works. Mondrian utilizes primary colors and great amounts of white space, drawing particular attention to the solid colors and sleek, black lines.
We continued class looking at Gerrit Rietvelt’s Schroeder House, a modernist, white building. The Schroeder House is geometrically shaped and displays the common theme at the time of architectural reduction. The building is minimal with majority white, flat walls on the outside, with colored metal rails.
Finally, we finished class by looking at Postwar Art, where the majority of popular art shifts from Paris to states. Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb begins our studies of Postwar Art, noting the painting’s biomorphic shapes, abstract expressionism, gestural painting, and action painting. We then looked at Jackson Pollock’s Male and Female. Pollock presents two very basic archetypes: something very clearly that is feminine and masculine. Pollock uses elements like math to stereotypically refer to the masculine mind and long eyelashes and curved lines, representing the female body shape to resemble the female side. These elements ultimately give meaning to the archetypal views.