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Last posts

Pop art remains popular

Mónica Boixeda Venetian

Can you imagine Leonardo Da Vinci visiting an exhibition of Pop Art? The evolution of art is really incredible. We have gone from singular works of art to consumer products and the uniqueness of the work to its reproduction in series.

French Painters and the Realist Style of Painting

Mónica Boixeda Venetian

Before, they were known as romantic and they sought refuge in the idealization of nature and introspection, painting single men lost in the mountains or in the sea. The solitude and the transcendental were their favourite subjects. After the French Revolution (1848), their ideas were directed elsewhere: the painters and the writers found beauty in the details of everyday things. Thus, art left the political issues to focus on the social reality, making it crude or banal, but very realistic. Whatever gained value, even a funeral. The changes taking place in French society in the middle of the nineteenth century explain these new concerns: the bourgeoisie is the queen and poverty dominates everything. One of the most striking paintings was “The Burial at Ornans” (1851) by Gustave Courbet (see photo above). Here, the vision of reality is very objective; the horizontal lines of the landscape and the crowd dominate the painting and they break with the verticality of the cross and the depth of the hole in the foreground. The people are sorted by type of audience: the religious on the left, the men in the middle and the women on the right. The dog symbolizes the progression of the human being. The colours want to be as faithful to real life as they can and the atmosphere too, everything is very realistic. The painting by Jean-François Millet, “The Angelus” (1859-1860) is probably one of the best known. Salvador Dalí loved that painting, and he made many variants, two of which are in his home in Port Lligat in Catalonia Spain. Honoré Daumier is also an important artist of... read more

Cubism: fragmented reality

Mónica Boixeda Parisian

Who does not know of or seen Les Demoiselles d´Avignon? When the master Pablo Picasso painted it in 1907, it was considered the most emblematic work of a new artistic avant-garde movement: Cubism. Paul Cézanne was the father of Cubism, which is characterised by his geometric vision of the reality and the influence of primitivism. It is a landscape that becomes a jumble of squares and triangles, minimizing the details to be seen in several views of the same subject. There are no more Renaissance classic rules of the perspective: there is a decomposition of the space and there is no concern for detail, the palette of colours loses in sheen and its filled with brown, grey and beige tones; the collage technique appeared; their favourite subjects are the nudes, the objects and the urban scenes. “Les Demoiselles d´Avignon” is a good example to illustrate and understand the keys of Cubism. This is a group of five prostitutes of the Avinyó Street in Barcelona (in the Gothic quarter), represented among the curtains of a brothel. Some seem to have an African mask instead of a sweet face, because Picasso and other artists of the twentieth century were passionate about primitivism. The bodies have no feminine forms, but are more masculine, heavy and geometric. The theme of the nude is a classic, because it suggests women in the bathroom and it is, precisely, in the “The Turkish Bath” by Dominique Ingres, in which Picasso was inspired. But he gave a revolutionary performance. It is only in 1916 when this painting was exhibited at the Salon Table d´Antin. In 1939, the... read more