Today in class we finished discussing Gauguin and Munch, two post-impressionist painters. Gauguin’s approach to art hinges on the corruptness of society, and the purity of what he considered less civilized or industrialized cultures. To this end, he intentionally abandoned his professional artistic training in favor of circling the globe via French colonies. Color still takes center stage in these paintings, but the subject matter speaks to a very personal expression of Gauguin’s own experiences in the places he visited. The painting, ‘Where do we come from?…’ captures both the realistic figures and environment he would have seen on his travels, but also how he felt about civilization and the burden of knowledge. It’s a painting filled with abstraction and the exotic. Abstraction, reduction, and simplification become key values as art moves into Fauvism and Expressionism in the early 20th Century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fauvism is directly influenced by the impressionists due to a retrospective gallery of van Gogh and Gauguin that took place in France. With Impressionism fresh on the minds of French artists, color remained central to the Fauvist style. Andre Derain’s painting of mountains is filled with arbitrary color choices and many patches of blank canvas. Rather than color or art as a personal expression, painting focused on color for the enjoyment of color. Henri Matisse wanted his paintings to feel like a good old armchair, comfortable and pleasant–he accomplished this though color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Germany, German Expressionism had two influential movements of painters. The Bridge was intended as an intentional opposition to the existing powers of art, and much like Fauvism, it used arbitrary colors. Kirchner’s painting Street, Dresden, is made to be unnerving, nauseating, and uncomfortable. In both color and form, the painting is a psychological exploration into what bothers us visually. Der Blaue Reiter, the other main movement, was short lived but memorable. Franz Marc shared (and exceeded) Gauguin’s disdain for civilization, and he extended this hatred to humanity in general. In his later works, there are no human figures, only animal, for he believed that the purity of animals contains a life force that corrupted humanity lacks. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today in class we finished discussing Gauguin and Munch, two post-impressionist painters. Gauguin’s approach to art hinges on the corruptness of society, and the purity of what he considered less civilized or industrialized cultures. To this end, he intentionally abandoned his professional artistic training in favor of circling the globe via French colonies. Color still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18928,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18928"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2554"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2556,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions\/2556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}