The works of Rembrandt and Picasso could not be more different, and this major shift in style can be used to express the upheaval that occurred during the modern era. The Works of Rembrandt, a Dutch painter born in 1606, are largely confined to the work of portraiture; he would convey real world people and often himself as they appeared. Picasso, a Spanish painter born in 1881 and who did most of his work during the modern era, was a pioneer in the cubist movement and produced many surreal and often times unusual works. Picasso’s great works were often meant to highlight injustice, sorrow, and pain; his unusual style would bring the attention of the viewer to the scenes of pain and misery that were produced by injustice during his day. His most famous work, Guernica, a painting about the Spanish civil war highlighted the atrocities committed by the Nazis in Spain, and what the extreme politics of the era drove people to do against innocent civilians. Another one of his famous works, Massacre in Korea, a product of the Korean War during this era, portrays U.S. soldiers massacring communist sympathizers in Korea, all in the cubist style.
The Modern era, or at least the charged and impassioned politics of the times can be viewed in the extremes of Picasso’s paintings. The world had just experienced the bloodiest war ever, and two of the most powerful nations the world had ever seen were on the brink of destroying each other with nuclear weapons; Picasso’s unusual style was able to help highlight the truly unusual amount of fear, anger, and hatred that arose during this time. In contrast to the cerebral scenes depicted in Rembrandt’s works, Picassos works displayed the tragedies of the era. His works provide us with insight into the extremes of the day, and a social insight into the feelings of anger and fear that were spreading around the world because of extreme politics.
August Mawn, Daniel Pon, Zach Gershman, Tom Allen
ash.p2.t1.modern era blog response
ReplyDeleteby Calvin Chan, Brianna Loo, Christina Yang, and Jane Lu
Great job on answering the synthesis question! Your answer was well-thought out and easy to follow. But, maybe a way to have made the synthesis even stronger would be to explain what Picasso’s “unusual style” really was. You guys give great examples illustrating that style, but never seemed to explicitly state it. Also, WWI was indeed a bloody war, but the Modern Era was also the start of WWII, which could be argued as even bloodier. Although we both talked about Picasso’s “unusual style” and differentiation in our synthesis answers, we thought that his differentiation was his way of retaliation. Artists in this era, such as Picasso, used the simplest of objects, those that were clearly familiar to the general public (which they have discarded as useless and elementary), to form something that attracted the intention of the worldwide population. This satirically mocked the social standards of the Modern era, exposing the desire for radical advancements. The artists of the Modern era recognized the danger that the advancement-centric society possessed; they realized that by continually pursuing advancement, there may be no more room to advance and wanted to pull society back and restrain its desires. Once again, great job! Keep up the good work to the end of the year! :)