Van Gogh clearly showed artistic talent even as a child, but neither he or his family imagined that painting would become his career. Instead, at the age of 16, he went to work for Goupil and Company, an art gallery with which one of his uncles had long been associated with; he was dismissed in 1876. Other false starts included a job in a Dordrecht bookstore during the spring of 1877, theological studies at the University of Amsterdam, and from November 1878 to July 1879, service as a lay missionary in a coal-mining district in Belgium.

In 1880, Vincent chose art as a vocation and became dependent on his brother forcash. Indeed, for the next 10 years Theo, who had also gone to work for Goupil, sent an allowance to Vincent, encouraged him to work, and wrote regularly. Vincent’s thinking during his short career (approximately 750 paintings, 1,600 drawings, 9 lithographs, and 1 etching) was documented in more than 700 letters that he wrote to Theo and others.

Van Gogh’s early years includes all his work from 1879 through 1885. Between August 1879 and November 1885 he worked in Etten, The Hague–where he received some instruction from his cousin, Anton Mauve and in Nuenen, among other places. In Nuenen he painted The Potato Eaters, his first important picture, which underscores his lifelong interest in peasant subjects.

During the winter of 1885-86 Van Gogh studied at the academy in Antwerp, where he was forced to draw from plaster casts and to adopt academic principles that did not suit him. He moved to Paris, where he lived with Theo his brother. The Paris period (March 1886-February 1888) is extremely important because it enabled Vincent to see and to hear discussed work of virtually every major artist there. Although van Gogh admired many. During these years van Gogh’s style shifted from the darker manner characteristic of his Nuenen period to a postimpressionist style heavily influenced by divisionism. Van Gogh left Paris and moved to Arles in February 1888. His mature work and many of his most famous paintings date from the ensuing year. In October 1888, Paul Gauguin came to live and work with van Gogh. After only 2 months, however, following the first of Vincent’s attacks of dementia, he punished himself for trying to stab a close friend Gauguin in which he amputated his own earlobe, Gauguin left, having first summoned Theo from Paris. Thereafter, Vincent was hospitalized until the spring of 1890; he was voluntarily confined in the Asylum of Saint-Paul in Saint-Remy from May 1889 until May 1890. He continued to paint, however, and in June 1889 executed the Starry Night and the extraordinary Self-Portrait (Louvre).

In the three months following his release from the hospital in May 1890, at the village of Auvers-sur-Oise outside of Paris, Vincent produced many great pieces of work including the Portrait of Dr. Gachet ,Field under Thunderclouds, and the famous Crows in the Wheatfields. Although Vincent had finally begun to receive critical praise, he shot himself while he was in a mental hospital on July 27, 1890, and died two days later. His grief-stricken brother died only six months after.

Campbell’s Soup Cans, are almost identical to the models he used. While others have a looser quality and are merely starting points on which to begin. (Coplans pg 47) He accomplished the mass amounts of the same subject through many methods. Sometimes he would just paint each of the subjects by hand, one by one. Other times he would use stamp molds and silk-screening. The silk-screening process is very similar to that of an intricate and sophisticated stencil. There is a screen made of fine silk or similar material that is made impermeable to all places except that of the area wanted to be colored. This is done photomechanically, a process that makes photographs into silkscreen. The silk-screening process is fairly simple. You pour ink or paint into the silk-screen, and then you run a squeegee across it so it goes through the open pores of the screen. You repeat this procedure for each of the colors to be used. An advantage to this it that you can used them more than once. To date, silk-screening is the cheapest and most effective means of reproducing many products of it type and quality. (Coplans pg 50) (Crone pg 11) The main focus of serial imagery is redundancy. (Coplans) There are many ways in which serial painting differs from traditional painting. Some of these differences include that of theme, uniqueness, and variation. It is not important for serial paintings to be unique, the structure and composition are meant to be similar to the other members of the series. The objects of the serial paintings, like in the Campbell Soup series is show almost eternity or the feeling of never-ending. (Coplans pg 49) Some of the portraits that were done by Warhol began with Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and Elvis Presley. Then later on came Marilynn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. There was also a series of car crash pictures done around this time. The Jackie Kennedy portraits were done very shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy. They mirrored the mourning face of Jackie that was shown time and time again in the media. There were eight different images that were all taken from different newspapers at the time. The number of works in this series is still unknown. (Crone pg 29) The car crash pictures had an extreme amount of variation. They ranged from having one picture to a canvas to having up to twenty on the same canvas at one time. There are many different colored pictures in this set. The most major change from one to another is the background color. It is difficult for critics to place the origination of the meaning of this set of works. (Crone pg 29) The series involving the electric chairs has a very serious political statement. It is a symbol of misuse of governmental sovereignty; it has also been considered and open confession of a deficiency in cultural development. (Crone) About the same time as the electric chair pictures were being shown there were many other quite disturbing sets of pictures being shown. They were of race riots and many were taken directly from newspaper articles of the Nazi Germany and Castro’s revolution in

Cuba. (Crone pg 29) One of the last serial sets that Warhol created before moving on from painting was of flowers. The flowers were produced in an extreme variety of sizes and quantities. These were on display in 1964. The original flowers were taken from a women magazine. Unlike most of his earlier works, these reproductions were touched up by hand on the screen. These are also different in that they do not represent anything to Warhol. They are strictly decorative. The colors used in the painting aren’t used to symbolize anything but just to bring out color in decoration. In all there were about nine hundred of the flower painting made in Warhol’s studio, “The Factory”. These were among the very last of Warhol’s paintings, in the remainder of his life he concentrated on movie making. (Crone pg 30) During Warhol’s life his work has been controversial. He has become more recognized and famous after his death in 1987. I think that his purpose for being an artist seemed to be different from that of other artists. I’m not convinced he painted and filmed for the love of the art or so much for his purpose in doing it. I think he had a message he wanted to get across and this was the medium through which he chose to express himself.

He spent from 1899 to 1904 moving forth and back between France and Spain as France gave him so much inspiration during his time spent there. In his life he went through many phases and styles including realism, caricature, but more significantly the Blue period (1901-1904) and Rose period (1904-1906).

At the age of 22 one of the most significant period of Picasso’s life had begun, the Blue period. This period saw the diminish in his choice of colour and range of tones, to a single dark and oppressive blue. He painted everything in blue as a sign of sadness from when his best friend died. And instead of Picasso observing people ruthlessly and satirically as he had done previously before this period, he now treated his models with sympathy and dejected tenderness. He no longer painted café scenes but began to imagine mysterious, withered figures standing rigid and silent against a vague or empty background. ‘Child with a Dove’, painted at the end of 1901, is the first of the series of canvases that comprise Picasso’s Blue period.

Right after the Blue period came the Rose period, which was another significant period in Picasso’s life from 1904- 1906. He started to paint in brighter colors such as pinks and beige, which dominated the paintings along with the less significant colours being light blues and roses. His subjects were saltimbanques, harlequins and clowns who are mute and inactive. Thus he drew people doing happy things along with lots of circus scenes with circus animals. (Family of Saltimbanques 1905)

In 1905 his work took a turn as they became of large male and female figures, seen frontally or in distinct profile, somewhat like Greek Art. (La Toilette 1906) He was also captivated by the caricature like artworks of French Painter Henri Rousseau.

What paved the way for Picasso to become well known for his technique of cubism, was ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain, which was African art. He slowly incorporated simplified forms of the source into striking portraits (Gertrude Stein 1906)

This formed his crucial shift from what he saw, to what he was thinking. His first cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon produced in 1907, was the shaker of the art world. Although, he was a little scared of his painting and showing it, that he didn’t show it until 1916.

Picasso and George Braque a close friend of his, then created the style of Cubism in tandem together and Cubism then became the dominant style of at least the first half of the 20th Century. Picasso started this period of Cubism at the age of 26 and his works took on a cube shaped abstract figure. In 1912 Picasso produced ‘Still- life with Chair Caning’, which is an oval picture that is in effect, a café table in prospective surrounded by a rope frame. It was the first collage, or a work of art that incorporated pre-existing materials or objects as part of the ensemble. Elements glued to the surface contrasting with painted versions of the same material provided a sort of sophisticated double take on the part of the observer, ‘The Guitar’ 1913. This period of cubism lasted until 1915.Picasso also brought controversy to the art world whilst he lived in Paris during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, as he produced gloomy paintings in semi abstract styles, many depicting skulls. He painted them to show how stupid he thought the war was. Some of them were huge like “GuemicEC’ (twelve feet high and twenty-five feet wide) that he named after the town he lived in during the war.

In his last years he pre-occupied himself with a series of mistresses and girlfriends, which changed his style once again to express his love for each one.

Picasso’s career is in fact a patchwork of different styles and in saying so it was said that whatever Picasso had a hand in, turned out to have an unquenchable spark of utter genius.

At the age of 92 years, Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973.

Michelangelo’s artwork consisted of paintings and sculptures that showed humanity in it’s natural state. Michelangelo Buonarroti was called to Rome in 1505 by Pope Julius II to create for him a monumental tomb. We have no clear sense of what the tomb was to look like, since over the years it went through at least five conceptual revisions. The tomb was to have three levels; the bottom level was to have sculpted figures representing Victory and bond slaves. The second level was to have statues of Moses and Saint Paul as well as symbolic figures of the active and contemplative life-representative of the human striving for, and reception of, knowledge. The third level, it is assumed, was to have an effigy of the deceased pope. The tomb of Pope Julius II was never finished. What was finished of the tomb represents a twenty-year span of frustrating delays and revised schemes. Michelangelo had hardly begun work on the pope’s tomb when Julius commanded him to fresco the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to complete the work done in the previous century under Sixtus IV. The overall organization consists of four large triangles at the corner; a series of eight triangular spaces on the outer border; an intermediate series of figures; and nine central panels, all bound together with architectural motifs and nude male figures. The corner triangles depict heroic action in the Old Testament, while the other eight triangles depict the biblical ancestors of Jesus Christ. Michelangelo conceived and executed this huge work as a single unit. It’s overall meaning is a problem. The issue has engaged historians of art for generations without satisfactory resolution. The paintings that were done by Michelangelo had been painted with the brightest colors that just bloomed the whole ceiling as one entered to look. The ceiling had been completed just a little after the Pope had died. The Sistine Chapel is the best fresco ever done.

Michelangelo embodied many characteristic qualities of the Renaissance. An individualistic, highly competitive genius (sometimes to the point of eccentricity). Michelangelo was not afraid to show humanity in it’s natural state – nakedness; even in front of the Pope and the other religious leaders. Michelangelo portrayed life as it is, even with it’s troubles. Michelangelo wanted to express his own artistic ideas. The most puzzling thing about Michelangelo’s ceiling design is the great number of seemingly irrelevant nude figures that he included in his gigantic fresco. Four youths frame most of the Genesis scenes. We know from historical records that various church officials objected to the many nudes, but Pope Julius gave Michelangelo artistic freedom, and eventually ruled the chapel off limits to anyone save himself, until the painting was completed. The many nude figures are referred to as Ignudi. They are naked humans, perhaps representing the naked truth. More likely, I think they represent Michelangelo’s concept of the human potential for perfection. Michelangelo himself said, "Whoever strives for perfection is striving for something divine." In painting nude humans, he is suggesting the unfinished human; each of us is born nude with a mind and a body, in Neoplatonic thought, with the power to be our own shapers. Michelangelo has a very great personality for his time. In Rome, in 1536, Michelangelo was at work on the Last Judgment for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, which he finished in 1541. The largest fresco of the Renaissance, it depicts Judgment Day. Christ, with a clap of thunder, puts into motion the inevitable separation, with the saved ascending on the left side of the painting and the damned descending on the right into a Dantesque hell. As was his custom, Michelangelo portrayed all the figures nude, but prudish draperies were added by another artist (who was dubbed the "breeches-maker") a decade later, as the cultural climate became more conservative. Michelangelo painted his own image in the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew. Although he was also given another painting commission, the decoration of the Pauline Chapel in the 1540s, his main energies were directed toward architecture during this phase of his life. Instead of being obedient to classical Greek and Roman practices, Michelangelo used motifs-columns, pediments, and brackets-for a personal and expressive purpose. A Florentine-although born March 6, 1475, in the small village of Caprese near Arezzo-Michelangelo continued to have a deep attachment to his city, its art, and its culture throughout his long life. He spent the greater part of his adulthood in Rome, employed by the popes; characteristically, however, he left instructions that he be buried in Florence, and his body was placed there in a fine monument in the church of Santa Croce.

Michelangelo portrayed both optimism and pessimism. Sculptures was where he wanted his heart dedicated. Michelangelo gave up painting apprenticeship to take up a new career in sculpture. Michelangelo then went to Rome, where he was able to examine many newly unearthed classical statues and ruins. He soon produced his first large-scale sculpture, the over-life-size Bacchus (1496-98, Bargello, Florence). One of the few works of pagan rather than Christian subject matter made by the master, it rivaled ancient statuary, the highest mark of admiration in Renaissance Rome. At about the same time, Michelangelo also did the marble Pietà (1498-1500), still in its original place in Saint Peter’s Basilica. One of the most famous works of art, the Pietà was probably finished before Michelangelo was 25 years old, and it is the only work he ever signed. The youthful Mary is shown seated majestically, holding the dead Christ across her lap, a theme borrowed from northern European art. Instead of revealing extreme grief, Mary is restrained, and her expression is one of resignation. In this work, Michelangelo summarizes the sculptural innovations of his 15th-century predecessors such as Donatello, while ushering in the new monumentality of the High Renaissance style of the 16th century.

Michelangelo was pessimistic in his response to Strazzi. I did not see Strazzi as complementing him. Michelangelo responds in a pessimistic tone to what should have been a complement. Michelangelo said, "sleep is precious; more precious to be stone, when evil and shame are aboard; it is a blessing not to see, not to hear. Pray, do not disturb me. Speak softly". During his long lifetime, Michelangelo was an intimate of princes and popes, from Lorenzo de’ Medici to Leo X, Clement VIII, and Pius III, as well as cardinals, painters, and poets. Neither easy to get along with nor easy to understand, he expressed his view of himself and the world even more directly in his poetry than in the other arts. Much of his verse deals with art and the hardships he underwent, or with Neoplatonic philosophy and personal relationships. The great Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto wrote succinctly of this famous artist: "Michael more than mortal, divine angel." Indeed, Michelangelo was widely awarded the epithet"divine" because of his extraordinary accomplishments. Two generations of Italian painters and sculptors were impressed by his treatment of the human figure: Raphael, Annibale Carracci, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian.

In conclusion, Michelangelo (1475-1564), was arguably one of the most inspired creators in the history of art and, with Leonardo da Vinci, the most potent force in the Italian High Renaissance. As a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, he exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent Western art in general. Michelangelo was pessimistic in his poetry and an optimist in his artwork. Michelangelo’s works showed humanity in it’s natural state. Michelangelo’s sculptures were his goals. Michelangelo was very intelligent for the works that he did. Michelangelo always wanted to finish the works that he worked on before moving on to another. I think that Michelangelo was to good of a person. He educates the people of today as well as the people in his time about the true religious aspects that there is to learn. Michelangelo was a role model for the people of his time as well as for the people of today. Michelangelo was also a great poet, a pessimist, but a great one. Michelangelo is my role model. I respect him for the works that he did and the talent that he had. I want to be like Michel.

Warhol And Pop Art
Pop Art emerged in the US in the early 1960s, at first completely unacknowledged. During its beginning, Pop Art was often seen as an insult to the roles of such artists as Pollock and de Kooning, who were leading a revival of Abstract Expressionist, an abrupt and conspicuous dialectical reaction to a great wave of abstraction, at mid-century. Emerging with considerable fanfare, mainly condemnation, but by 1963-64, it suddenly began being extensively exhibited, published, and consumed as a cultural phenomenon By the early 60s, Warhol became determined to establish himself as a serious painter, as well as to gain the respect of such famous artists of the time such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he had recently come to know and admire. He began by painting a series of pictures based on crude advertisements and on images from comic strips. These first such works, such as Saturdays Popeye(1960) and Water Heater(1960), were loosely painted in a mock-expressive style that mocked the gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, and are among the first examples of what came to be known as Pop Art. Warhols works during the early 60s are among those for which he is best known for. He reproduced advertisements and cartoons, as well as such familiar household items as telephones and soup cans, often painting one image repeatedly in a grid design. Many of these works, such as his pictures of dollar bills and soup cans, as in Cambells Soup Cans 200(1962), show many ideas underlying advertising, as well as showing his interest in techniques that enabled multiplication of an image, such as silk-screen printing, techniques that dominated much of his work. Through these works Warhol gained his much desired recognition, becoming an instant celebrity, having gone from respected commercial illustrator to controversial and influential artist. Such Pop Art images as Warhols soup cans and Lichtensteins comic book panels jumped from the vast American consumer culture into the realm of high artistic and aesthetic recognition. It is not known whether Lichtenstein or Warhol was the first to displace commercial images from the media to modernist painting, but Warhol, of all the founding Pop artists, first and foremost, consistently hewed to the canons of Pop technique and iconography. These first Pop works, in their intentional exclusion of all conventional signs of personality, in their obvious rejection of innovation and their blatant vulgarity, were somewhat brutal and shocking, designed with the intention of offending an audience accustomed to thinking of art as an intimate medium for conveying emotion. Warhol further extended these concerns by using techniques that gave his images a printed appearance, using stencils, rubber stamps, and hand-cut silkscreens, along with in his choice of subject-matter. He used the shocking images of tabloids, as in 129 Die in Jet to money, in a series of screenprinted paintings representing rows of dollar bills, and to the products of consumer society, including Coca-Cola bottles and tins of Cambells Soup. Thus, the once struggling commercial illustrator transformed into one of the most recognized and influential artists of the century, considered the progenitor of American Pop Art.

Death And Disaster
In the summer of 1962, Warhols friend Henry Geldzahler laid out a copy the Daily News while the two were having lunch. On the cover, the headline was 129 Die in Jet. According to Warhol, that is what began a series of paintings depicting rather gruesome images of human death and disaster, with subjects ranging from the personal focus of individual suicide, the banality of everyday disaster, death by legal execution, to the historical death of political assassination, culminating with the most destructive instrument the world has ever known-the atom bomb. Together, these works are among the most shocking and disturbing works of art the world has ever known. In most of these works, Warhol displays death as an ever-present subject. His first silkscreened death and disaster paintings were of suicides and especially gruesome car crashes, such as in Ambulance Disaster and Saturday Disaster. the power and suffering shown in the images stunning viewers. Like the contaminated canned food shown in Tunafish Disaster, these images appear to represent a breach of faith in the products of the Industrial Revolution by showing consumes products embraced by the population that backfire and cause death. Warhol retained the images from clippings of newspapers, magazines, and photographs, altering them only slightly, as was his norm, to show the images as they were, everyday occurrences the public accepts yet forgets, forcing the viewer to take them at face value. They portray A stark, disabused, pessimistic vision of American life, produced from the knowing rearrangement of pulp materials by an artist who did not opt for the easier paths of irony or condescension. Among the most iconic Death and Disaster images in the Electric Chair.(1963) According to Warhol, his replication of this image, both within the single composition and from painting to painting, was intended to empty the image of its meaning. The electric chair is shown from the front, fully visible, showing a sign reading SILENCE, the sign exclamating the emptiness of the execution chamber. The image, the chamber empty , showing only the sign, represents death as an absence and complete silence, a complete void. This notion was characteristic of Warhol, who once said I never understood why when you died, you didnt just vanish and everything could just keep going the way it was, only you just wouldnt be there, and who often stated that he wanted a blank tombstone when he died. Many wonder why Warhol chose such imagery to focus on, and he himself gives little reason. For some of these works, in which he shows images repeated relatively unchanged, he was attempting to lessen the shock of the viewer, recognizing such events for their face value, as everyday occurrences. When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesnt really have and effect. As in the Jackies, images of the recently assassinated President Kennedys grieving widow, were repeated to reinforce the obsessive ways that our thoughts keep returning to a tragedy, and stress the flash of fame these little known(suicides) victims achieve in death. This can be said to be consistent with Warhols claim that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. In this, does he mean by tragedy? Others claim the initial context for these subjects was journalistic- as an artist trained in drawing and pictorial design, he was obviously predisposed to consider the front page of the news and other media items in visual , artistic terms-as a media junkie who continually pursued and collected printed matter, he was drawn into a network of sensationalized intimacies with the protagonists of the news. Regardless, there is a tie between these images and his celebrity portraits. Warhol took up the theme of suicide shortly after his first meditations on Marilyn Monroes death. While doing those works, he said to have realized that everything I was doing must have been death. Thus, the idea of death was not a new one for him, and thereby his choice of subject matter may not have been completely random. Throughout the Death and Disaster paintings, Warhol makes use of background color to serve various functions. Mostly, throughout the series, he avoids the use of primary colors, using mainly secondaries, such as oranges, lavenders, and pinks, the types of colors you would expect to find in a wallpaper store. His use of background color in the Death and Disaster paintings is mostly extrinsic to the content of the images. In some, such as Lavender Disaster, the background color seems to intensify the effect of alienation created by the realism of the visual content. In others, such as Atomic Bomb, the red-orange color serves a supporting role. The images Warhol selected for these paintings were gruesome, though he showed again his brilliant eye for such images so effective in shocking the viewer. With an eye for the eccentricity of an individual event, Warhols paintings capture the unpredictable choreography of death. Using a broad range of images, from car crashes, suicides, burn victims, funerals, riots, to the culmination with the atomic bomb, Warhol succeeded in giving the viewer what one expected of Warhol; to expect the unexpected.

  One of such artists was Dante Gabriel Rosetti he turned against the neo-classical traditions of the Academy and looked for different inspiration. He wrote in 1901 that “an artist, whether painter or writer, ought to be bent upon defining and expressing his own personal thoughts, and that they ought to be based upon a direct study of Nature, and harmonised with her manifestations.” In the same year he founded with some fellow artists the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood based on the same principles.   These ideas were not welcome by the public and Ecce Ancilla Domini one of Rosettis first paintings was severely abused. Rosetti was so offended by the criticism that he swore never to exhibit in public again.

 Rosettis age did not appreciate his art because they thought that the style Raphael established was the crowning of all paintings. This style was based on dark colours, artificial settings and a triangle composition. Rosetti wanted to free himself from these restrictions and this is why he turned to a style preceding that of Raphaels.

 Lippi who died twenty-two years before Raphael was born was much more determined by his age than Rosetti. Lippi was not a revolutionary artist, in his style we can recognise the influence of Masaccio, Donatello and Fra Angelico. It should be stated, however, that he was a master of his craft and made use of the tradition he learned with great ease.

 First, let us turn to Fra Filippo Lippis picture: Annunciation. The picture was painted about 1444. In it the modern viewer finds a strange approach to perspective: the setting itself is unnatural and respect for perspective is only shown in architectural setting. Even though, the architectural elements are realistic, the beams, the arches and the pillars seem to have a sole pictorial purpose. No such building exists where walls are missing and we cannot decide what is inside and what is outside. It seems that pictorial rules are subordinate to those of theology. God the Father is present at the top left corner of the picture with several angels on rock like clouds. An other uncommon feature of the painting is the angel looking in from an opening at the left side. In this figure it is possible that Lippi wanted to show us an earlier moment of the story when Gabriel was just coming to Mary. This way the freshness of the lily in the hand of the standing angel could be explained as well. It could show that Marys virginity is not in its full blossom as it will be at the time of the annunciation.

 All these strange elements are soothed by the simplicity of Mary and the lovely details of the picture: the flowers, the dove, the angels hair with the wreath. We also notice how the classicizing background pillars contrast Marys purity and give her a certain nobility. It is also interesting how the pillars guide the eye upward strengthening the same feeling.

 A completely different feeling is achieved by Rosetti, he shows us a simple, confused Mary who has just woken up. He does not try to represent the annunciation, rather, like a poet, he tries to suggest the atmosphere of the event.

 In fact, Rosetti was a poet besides being a painter and in a sonnet composed to accompany his first painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, he describes in six lines his later work Ecce Ancilla Domini, which was painted a year later. So she held through her girlhood; as it were,An angel-watered lily, that near GodGrows and is quiet. Till one dawn at home She woke in her white bed and had no fear At all – yet wept till sunshine and felt awed: Because the fullness of her time was near.

  There are other connections between these two paintings by Rosetti. In the Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Mary is doing a piece of embroidery which is already finished  in Ecce Ancilla Domini. Probably just one night interludes between the two episodes since the embroidery is still on the stand in the later work. Here, in these two paintings, just as in Lippis painting where the development of the action is portrayed in the same picture, we can find two compositions showing two closely related incidents of Marys life.

 Besides Rosettis way of painting Mary in bed. There are other elements inconsistent with the traditional approach of showing the annunciation. First the shape of the picture itself is narrow, then Gabriel has flames at his feet but he has not got wings and there is some problem with the architecture of the building, we cannot see where the wall ends and the floor starts. With this we can draw a parallel with Lippis painting where architecture was also illogical.

 This brought us to the elements that connect Rosettis painting to a traditional one like Lippis. Although the colouring is mostly white the picture is patched with some gold, red and blue, the traditional colours of Marys virginity. Also, the lily is present in both paintings, again it is related to virginity and the dove too appears, which represents the Holy Spirit.

 All these differences and similarities could be related to the problems Rosetti had to face when painting a religious picture. Probably he wanted to be realistic as much as possible and at the same time following his ambition he wanted to express his thoughts as well. This could be achieved by mixing traditional elements with innovations. One such new element was covering the figures with simple white dresses. Probably Rosetti did not dress his figures in contemporary clothes because that would have been strange to the Victorian viewer. Painting the figures in white was a solution to this problem. This way managing to be realistic and contemporary at the same time.

Dolores Huerta was bornon April 10, 1930 in a mining town in northern New Mexico.  Her father, Juan Fernandez, was a miner, field worker, union activist and State Assemblyman.  Her mother, Alicia Chavez was a businesswoman who owned a restaurant and a 70-room hotel, which often put up farm worker families for free.  In 1955, Dolores Huerta was a member of the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (“CSO”), that was started by Fred Ross, Sr.  Dolores organized and found the Agricultural Workers Association in 1960.  In 1962, she lobbied in Washington DC for an end to the “captive labor” Bracero Program.  In 1962, after the CSO turned down Cesar’s request, Cesar and Dolores resigned from the CSO.  Then they formed The National Farm Workers Association (“NFWA”) in Delano, California.  Dolores Huertais the co-founder and Secretary-Tresurer of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (“UFW”).  By 1965 Dolores and Cesar had recruited farm workers and their families throughout the San JOaquin Valley.  On September 8 of 1965, filipino member of the (“AWOC”) Agricultural Workers Organizing Commite demanded higher wags and struck Delano area grape growers.  In 1966, Dolores negotiated the first UFWOC contrct with the Schanley Wine company.  In 1973 the grape contracts expired and the grape owners signed sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters Union.  At 69 of age, Dolores Huerta still works long hours promoting “La Causa” and women’s rughts.  During thirty years Dolores Huerta remained Cesar Cavez most loyal and trusted advisor.  Then they together founded the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan, the Juan De La Cruz Farm Worker Pension Fund, the Farm Workers Credit Union.

Under the leadership of nonviolence advocate Cesar Chavez, farmworkers launched a strike against California grape growers in 1965, demanding better working conditions and fair wages.  In 1970, they undertook a national table grape boycott that eventually led to the first union contacts in farm labor history.  An important milestone was the passing of the California Labor relations Act.

The Chicano/a movement, influenced by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, grew out of alliances between farmworkers struggling to unionize in California and Tezas.  A chicano artist produced this mural on memory of Cesar Chavez and his movements in favor of the civil rights of the farmworkers in California, Texas, and Arizona.

 Both of these compositions are portraits.  Nothing is of more importance than the sitter herself. The female sitter in Modigliani’s piece, sits in an almost dizzying pose with a twist in her elongated neck (a Modigliani trademark), a stylized and mask-like head and a columnar neck.  All of  which give the sitter a blank and ashen expression.  She looks at the viewer, head-on with a most piercing air in her eyes.  In Villon’s case, his female sitter has been created solely with the use of layered colours and a very random synthetist outline technique (a similar technique the post-impressionist painter Gaugin used).  Modigliani outlines his figure moreso in black than Villon.   Mme. Fulgence’s age is understood by the strong dynamic colour quality that has been used to break her face apart.  In a way, these colourful divisions act as wrinkles.  For instance, the chunk of layered pink on her lip creates a scowl and the heavily applied white on her nose helps it to seem upright; a ’snobbish’ upturn.  Colours such as the orange, have been used to highlight her left cheek and only visible ear.  With these effects, the viewer sees Mme. Fulgence as a very proper and ‘posh’ (if you will) woman.  Bitterness is only a common linkage with the other attributes.  Modigliani’s Hastings on the other hand seems to be an intense woman of a compassionate nature.  Both of these pieces have relied heavily on the expressive and wild use of colour to create emotional expressions and unerring form.

 Both of these portraits are created using oil paints–Modigliani’s on cardboard and Villon’s on canvas.  The most important element that draws their work away from the mainstream is their heavy application of paint.  Although they both apply their colour liberally, Modigliani’s strokes are thick, jagged, and for the most part random.  His brushstrokes are also particularly long, whereas Villon’s are short and brief.  Modigliani uses monochromatic hues of red to create the prominent colour of the piece and like Villon, he has used a very vague background to express the importance of his sitter.  Colour is of equal importance in both pieces as it draws the viewer in and allows the viewer’s eyes to be brought around the piece.  Modigliani has split his background from top to bottom, using red and strokes of burnt sienna at first, then an auburn and deeper red for the bottom.  This definite split in the background creates a base so that the chair on which the sitter is seated does not get lost and mistaken for part of the background.

 The weighty application in both portraits creates a brilliant textural finish.  The expressive nature that is brought out in the quick brushstrokes is equally defined in the actual texture of the painting plain.  In Modigliani’s background, the strokes are long and applied at a rapid pace.  Whereas in Villon’s background, his strokes are shorter and seem to have more of a planned location (just as Seurat applies his paint).

 Villon has placed his subject in front of the background in an almost symmetrical manner.  This poses the idea that the two really do not have an intense relationship whatsoever. The ‘Madame’ is not quite centred to look at the viewer dead-on as Modigliani’s is, her body is shifted slightly to the left.  Modigliani’s sitter, on the other hand has been placed carefully on her foreground, off to the left.  This brings in ample space for the chair.  Having his subject seated, Modigliani says more about the subject’s surroundings.  Villon has merely placed Mme. Fulgence in front of a green background, with only the highlights of her age to carry one through the piece.  As stated before, the negative space that is prevalent in both pieces is highly effective as it does not take away from the issue at hand: the seated.

 Both artists have used the application of their colours to their advantage in creating emotion merely through its use.  Whether the colours are blended like Modigliani or choppy and difficult to ingest (for the colours are used at their most vibrant tone) as Villon’s are, both artist’s used an extreme colour palette to bring forth the ideal emotions and/or physical standing of their models.

The first thing that one thinks upon first seeing it, from far away, is that Dali just painted the same thing twice. From afar, it appears as if he simply cut the canvas down the middle and made one side brown and the other blue, but on closer inspection, one sees that the two sides, although very similar, are nothing alike.

On one side, there sits a limp body staring at the reflection of herself in the water that she sinks in. The setting sun glistens off the back of her head, but she just wallows in grim depression and boredom. The canyons trap her in the barren wasteland as she sits motionless, without movement, struggle, or life. This mysterious figure looks so vacant that it might as well be dead. Nothing is happening on this side, so one’s attention is directed to the other.

On the other side, a blue decaying hand emerges from the ground with ants crawling on it, possibly making their homes in it or finding food on it. Atop this pedestal, rests an egg with a flower sprouting from it. This display of life emerging from the dead is a symbol of hope and beauty. To the left of the hand, a very unhealthy malnourished dog feasts on fresh meat; his salvation is handed to him and he survives. Behind the dog is a chess board with a young man in the middle of it, proudly surveying the battlefield as though it were his kingdom. To his left are people on a road that leads off into the horizon. All these things symbolize new beginnings out of old life and hope from death.

The message that Salvador Dali was trying to get across is that hope and despair, failure and victory, and life and death are all equal forces, each one pulling the other in an eternal war to balance everything. It’s all a cycle, and like all cycles, it repeats itself forever and ever, and there’s no way of having one without the other.
 
 

Guemica – Pablo Picasso
 

Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” Pablo Picasso’s painting entitled “Guernica” has been a masterpiece of modern art since it’s first appearance at the World Fair’s Fair of 1937. The huge mural has become an icon of Picasso’s work and has been interpreted in several unique ways, many of which contradict Picasso’s actual intentions.

Artistically, the composition is balanced and is a characteristic of Picasso’s work; perfectly planned and flowing. The symbols of this piece despite the misconceptions of it’s many critics, including those present at the World’s Fair in the year that the painting was introduced, were clearly defined by Picasso himself.

The preliminary sketches of the work began in May of 1937, and was commissioned by the official Republican government of Spain in January of the same year. It was to be displayed in the International Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition, or as it is more popularly known, the World’s Fair. Picasso was given a large studio in which to conduct his artistic endeavors in partial payment for the work which was being done.

Picasso went through many artistic periods throughout his career as an artist, one of which was cubism. In a few ways, Guernica, somewhat broke from the traditional cubism which he had a hand in inventing. The painting makes use of a two dimensional picture plain with all of the objects on the canvas appear flat looking as is dictated by the cubism style. The picture plain is not, however, fractured like many of the previous works which were categorized under the same style.

Picasso’s reason for painting Guernica has been disputed by the many art critics of modern art, but perhaps the most accurate summary is the genius himself. Picasso explained that the work was not specifically about the bombing of Guernica, nor was it specifically about the Spanish Civil War which was the culprit in this destructive incident. It was rather a broad statement about human beings fighting amongst themselves, and the chaos which would ensue should such hateful human relationships be allowed to continue as they had in Guernica, Spain.

The organization of the piece was carefully planned in the forty-five preliminary sketches, which obviously concentrated on leading the eye thorough the composition. The objects themselves balance each other well to create a peaceful composition. Picasso makes a conscious effort to emphasize the bull, the horse and the woman in the window as each of these images are important to the symbolic aspect of the graphic depiction of the bombing of Guernica. As one looks at the overall movement in the painting, they get a sense of frozen motion unlike what is typical of the futurism style of composition. The idea that everything came to a sudden halt with no time to come to a real rest. The one piece of evidence contrary to this is the soldiers arm which lays peacefully across the ground.

The enormous 138″ x 308″ canvas was painted using only grey scale colors, which is said to be in co-ordination with the ink of the newspapers which often covered the bombings during the civil unrest in Spain. Picasso uses dominantly blacks and whites using value changes in few areas over the picture plain. He uses line extensively, with almost geometric shapes taking form and leading the eye as can be seen in many of his pre-production sketches. Texture is kept to a minimum in the specific work as it is a very two dimensional art work and as is common of the cubism style. He has made extremely good use of space as nearly the entire canvas is used, while maintaining the balance which is necessary to keep the composition aesthetically pleasing. Among the many symbolic images in the work are a bull, a horse a soldier with a broken sword and a woman looking out of a window with a very concerned look on her face. The broken sword in the soldiers hand, which can be seen at the bottom center of the composition was used to symbolize the broken spirits and the failure to resist on the part of the people. The woman is a symbol of concern for the fighting people by people who have succeeded in being able to see the whole picture.

The largest contributing factor to “Guernica’s” overall appeal is the excellent use of symbolism which encourages it’s audience to think. If ever given the opportunity I would be most interested in seeing the original of this work. I have gained a lot of respect for not only the artistic integrity of this painting, but also for Pablo Picasso as an overall intuitive and creative person.