BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 113
C U LT U R E & A RT S
By Richard Holledge
Former Arts Editor of The
Times, and a longtime fan of
Portsmouth FC.
moved by his beguiling Woman with a
Parasol. Van Gogh? Of course, those
bright colours but you really ought
to check out his (somewhat gloomy)
early work of peasant life in his native
Netherlands.’
Modern and Post-Modern.
H
mmm.
Pause.
Re昀氀ective nod of the head.
Hmmm.
And that’s it really. That’s how to bluff
your way in art.
Make an impression.
If you are asked a direct question,
however, you need to understand that
the history of art is cluttered with
one ism after another; Romanticism,
Futurism, Classicism, Cubism, not
forgetting Vorticism. Realism anyone?
But let’s start with the Impressionists,
those eager tyros who upset the
cultural establishment in the mid-19th
century. Not for them stuffy realism,
they experimented with colour and
form, using bold brushstrokes and
often, quelle horreur, knocking off a
painting in a single day.
Modern art isn’t that modern. Some
argue this ism was galvanised by
Gustave Courbet when he painted
The Origin of the World in 1866, an
X-rated vision of female genitalia
which is too bracing to be shown on
X. Modern lasted until the 1960s when
it became passé and became PostModern, starring Andy Soup Cans
Warhol and Roy Whaam Lichtenstein
with works which are brash, bright
and cartoonish.
Adoration of the Magi, Sandro Botticelli,
1475–1476
Jack the Dipper
Woman with a Parasol, Claude Monet, 1875
The names are all too familiar; Manet,
Renoir, Degas Toulouse-Lautrec,
Monet, but you’re a bluffer so keep an
aside or two to impress. ‘Yes Monet,
lilies, lovely, but I’ve always been
Pre-Post-Modern; the Abstract
Expressionists. A splashing time was
had by all in the 1940s and 50s,
ew more than Jackson Pollock who
dripped paint straight on to vast
canvases to create riotous abstractions.
Extra kudos for knowing his wife
Lee Krasner was a hugely effective
pioneer of the movement. As was
Joan Mitchell, not be confused with
Joni who painted some of her fellow
113
BOISDALELIFE.COM
ISSUE 24
musicians and the covers for her
albums.
What’s the Pointillism?
It’s not enough to know painters
used oil and water, you need to
understand some technical terms.
Take Pointillism, made popular
by Georges Seurat who used tiny
dots of pure colours, which trick
the eye into seeing the images as a
whole, but brighter and more sharply
de昀椀ned. When former Disney boss
Michael Eisner was trying win over
Portsmouth FC fans he played an
animated version of Seurat’s A Sunday
Afternoon to emphasise that he
planned to bring steady growth to the
club. Point by point.
It’s surreal thing
Out of World War One erupted a
band of artists who were angry,
disillusioned and eager to shock.
Leading lights included Andre Breton,
Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel and
Max Ernst whose paintings feature
grotesque apparitions such as the
昀氀amboyant female in a garish orange
cape of feathers with the head of an
owl and the body of a woman naked
from the breasts down.
They did shock but they had fun
