Frida Kahlo was an artist consciously creating her own image, along with the paintings she considered her unseen reality. Although her paintings are influenced by a surrealist iconography, Frida did not consider herself a surrealist by any means. Her paintings depict extremely personal realities, and the technique she uses comes from preexisting Mexican traditions. She experienced an accident that left her painting from bed, and vulnerable to miscarriages throughout her life. In constructing herself and coping with her past, she makes something more personal than Surrealist art.
De Stijl, was about reduction and geometric abstraction. These artists hoped to reach visual and spiritual perfection through geometric abstraction and harmonious composition. Mondrian is an active artist for this movement, and his paintings are shadeless, flat, and aim to eliminate the distinction between foreground and background. These ideals contributed to the Bauhaus school and Walter Gropius’ architecture. The glass curtain on buildings is only possible due to metal structures and thus the increasing power of mass production.
Post war art took the form of Abstract Expressionism in America. The Liver is the Cooks Comb is a vivid, biomorphic painting, it is made from the artists’ large gestures. These gestures are part of the technique of automatic painting, or painting without an end goal–just movement. Mark Rothko brought a different aspect of Abstract Expressionism in to view. Reminiscent of Matisse, Rothko’s paintings are huge blocks of color best viewed in low light–the grandness and quality of the colors makes the paintings feel like looking into the sky.