Modernism:
Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. He did not exceed academically, but he showed extreme drawing talent at a very young age. By the age of 13, his skill level was far better than his father’s, who was a professional artist and art teacher and taught Pablo basic painting and drawing. He was accepted into a prestigious art school at 14 years old, but its one-dimensional teaching style and strict rules did not comply with Pablo’s desire to explore the world and experiment new things. He began skipping class to wander the streets and observe life outside the walls of his school. At 16 he attended another art school, but was again frustrated by the school’s teaching methods and skipped class to roam and sketch the fascinating street life. By 20 years old, Picasso moved to Paris and acquired his own studio, where he practiced experimenting in new styles and discovered his famous styles of surrealism and cubism. He struggled with depression for many years, which also affected his artwork. In 1918, he married Olga Khoklova, a Russian ballerina. The two separated in 1935, but remained married until 1954 when Olga died. Much of his work focused on his love interests, of which he had many. He remarried Jacqueline Roque in 1961, and they stayed married until Pablo died in 1973.He is well-known for being the originator of Cubism during the early 20th century. As he settled in Paris, his early works followed Modernism and French art nouveau. His 1907’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was a break away from traditional artistic technique and gained controversy among Picasso’s colleagues. As his friend and fellow artist Georges Braque quoted, “It made me feel as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire”. The painting did earn eventual recognition during the 1920s. With the approach of World War I, Picasso eased back into Realism. His most known works during the “Classical Period” were Three Women at the Spring, Two Women Running at the Beach/The Race, and The Pipes of Pan.
It was in 1927 that Picasso graduated to Surrealism. In response to the Germans’ bombing on the town of Guernica, he completed a painting of the same name in 1937. It was met with acclaim and remains one of the most powerful anti-war paintings in history.
One of the most famous and most celebrated paintings of the 20th century is Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ painted in 1907 in oils. This painting is Picasso’s memory of a brothel in Barcelona. The painting was initially not taken in well by Picasso’s friends, Derain and Matisse, so it was more than a decade later that it was exhibited. The public’s reaction to this new controversial piece with five nudes was negative and people were extremely offended. However, when taking a closer look into the piece, we see that Picasso’s Cubist style has made the piece interesting and different, and indeed challenged the art world at the time.
‘Guernica’ is another of Picasso’s most famous works, painted in 1937 in oils as well. The piece was a commission by the Spanish Republic for exhibition in the Paris World’s Fair. It depicts the historical event of the Nazi’s bombing Spain and till today, serves as a historical symbol of the brutalities of war. As we can once again see, the painting is done in Picasso’s Cubist style and incorporates newspaper articles from the time to help narrate the story portrayed.
Postmodernism:
Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois. Judy’s father, Arthur Cohen, was a rabbis and her mother, May Cohen, a former dancer and medical secretary. Arthur was strongly liberal in his views towards women and worker’s rights, which largely influenced Judy’s artwork. At the age of 14, Judy witnessed her father die of peritonitis. May did not allow her children to go to his funeral or talk about his death at all, which caused Judy to experience ulcers from unresolved grief over 7 years later. However, she found joy in her artwork. Having wanted to create art since the age of 5, Judy attended the Art Institute of Chicago as a child and then received a bachelor’s degree in art from the the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1962. In her early career, Judy worked as a painting teacher at many universities in California. In 1970, she founded the first feminist art program at California State University, Fresno as well as changed her last name. After a gallery owner nicknamed her “Judy Chicago,” Judy decided to make this her legal name. Her name no longer originated from a father or husband, but from herself. After inspired by the Feminism movement and rebellion against the male domination in the 1960s, Judy Chicago aspired to reflect the women’s lives, give prominence to women’s roles as artists, and attempted to amend the conditions under which contemporary art was created and accepted. To question the dominance of men in Western oeuvre and why it pose the most leverage to modernism, Chicago seek to counteract women’s conventional underrepresentation in visual arts by concentrating to embrace explicitly female content into her artworks.The Dinner Party (1979), one of her prominent artwork, laud the accomplishments of women throughout the history with the use of an array of needle and fiber techniques. Collaboration is a major aspect of Chicago’s installation works. Not only she uses art form such as needlework, ceramic decoration and glass art in her installation works, but also often includes alongside traditional high art media like painting as well, therefore breaks down the boundaries of ‘high’ art counterparts and substantiate the significance of crafts-based art forms. Chicago has continued to be ardent in her engagement to the power of art as a channel for intellectual renewal and social turnaround to women’s right to be engaged in the highest level of art production, which used to be male dominated field. Judy Chicago is most commonly known for her installation entitled ‘The Dinner Party’, created between 1975 and 1979. This installation is a large triangular set up that is as shown in the photograph and celebrates women and their achievements. Each side of the equilateral triangle set up is 48 feet long. The set up includes a range of media such as ceramics, painting and needlework. The set up consists of 39 table settings, each of which celebrates a goddess, historical person or important female figure. The tiles on which the triangular set up is placed upon has the names of 999 additional inspirational women
Another famous project Chicago has done is ‘The Birth Project’, done between 1980 and 1985. For this project, Chicago collaborated with more than 150 needle workers to combine painting and stitching to demonstrate the numerous different aspect of the birth process.
One object portrayed in 4 different media:
