I first watched Power of Art: Mark Rothko. I have seen his Color Field paintings and knew there must be artwork that he painted that were different from those, and there were. Surprisingly, our book barely touched on Rothko. Basically, we learned that he started the Color Field style and that he thinned his paint to depart from the color. However, his paintings were extraordinary. The video explains his pain and angst towards the modern world with it's pettiness and desire of consumption. He believed art should show human values, express human emotions, transcend us out of this world, help us escape. He was a troubled artist who struggled financially and mentally. He was commissioned by Seagram's, the liquor company, to create paintings for it's New York headquarters, more precisely The Four Seasons restaurant in it. He almost didn't take the job because he didn't care much for American capitalism, but decided to anyway. He was to be paid $35,000 in 1958 for his work, the equivalent of 2.5 million today. He wanted to create paintings that wouldn't invoke hunger but rather doom and despair and a feeling of being trapped. He didn't want them to enjoy themselves while dining under his paintings. He created the pictures we see today, like Orange and Yellow on page 499. After dining at the Four Seasons he determined that his work would never hang in that restaurant because he didn't want those kinds of overindulgent people to see them. He wanted his paintings to relate to the viewer. He wanted them to experience the same emotion while looking at them that he had felt painting them. His work prior to the Four Seasons murals were his Subway Paintings. I really like them alot. They are full of emotion and despair. The figures almost look scared and unsure, which is how he saw the people in the world. He took his own life in 1970 but left an incredible legacy and through his art a chance for us to open our minds and transcend to a different place.
The next video I watched was Andy Warhol: Images of Images. I think everyone, whether an art-lover or not, knows Andy Warhol...partly due to his use of iconic imagery and partly due to his eccentricity. He is most famous for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy ,as we learned from his profile in our book. He wanted to show us how much we rely on mass-production and label recognition and did this through repetition of well-known movie stars and commercial products such as Coca-Cola and Campbell's soup. He chose to reproduce the reproduced items with the media silkscreen, which is itself a reproduction. He would allow the silkscreen process to manipulate the original image and allowed the flaws to remain, just as in mass-production. He became as famous as the people and consumerist objects he was replicating...a media sensation...just like what had happened to our society. That was brilliant. Great video and an even greater artist. Both the book and the video quoted his statement that if you wanted to know Andy Warhol just look at the surface of his work...there's nothing behind it. He created images of images of images, and according to him, nothing more.
I thought I had never heard of Isamu Noguchi until I started watching the video and saw one of his sculptures. It is the Red Cube on page 116. I really loved it's minimalist and modern style. I loved that it was outdoors among skyscrapers. I loved the color choice. It was interesting to see the many different types of sculpture he does. He said in 1933 he had a revelation that the Earth was a sculpture and started creating sculptures that recreated the landscape of Earth and using the elements of Earth as his sculptures, which he called garden sculptures. They were amazing. They were earthworks with mixed media of rocks and water and trees. Beautifully put together to honor the Japanese gardens he had visited on his travels. All of his sculptures are outside. he either carved them and placed them there or he created them from the environment. His carved sculptures are very minimalist and modern. Some he left as sculptures and some he made into fountains with designs cut into a large shaped rock right where the water would hit to create another aspect of the sculpture. I loved the simplicity, not over-dramatic, just what is needed, as in Minimalism. He, like so many of the artists in our readings, was aware of space, both the object itself and it's surroundings. He was accepted to the Guggenheim Art school in Paris but when he returned to America he was broke and creating Abstract sculptures that were ahead of their time and not selling. That is what led him to his garden sculptures and thus began his career. He was commissioned to update Bayfront Park in Miami, 26 acres, and after much fight with the council over funding even got them to tear down a perfectly good library and other buildings because they weren't aesthetic to his design! That is dedication to the arts...and especially his.
I knew of David Hockney as a painter but not as a photographer so I wanted to learn more. I have seen his California paintings and his use of bright vibrant colors. I knew of his realistic yet Pop style in his paintings that were also Expressionistic because he painted them subjectively rather than objectively. He made parts of Los Angelos that most found drab and gloomy look perfect and beautiful. I was very taken by his photograph collages. He uses many different pictures of many view points of the same object and puts them altogether in a sort of Cubism style, but without losing the original image. There is no confusion in his final work, we are just able to see the whole image taken through a camera lens, which you couldn't do by simply standing in front of the subject and taking a picture. He is very aware of space and movement and wanted to show that through still images...and how do you do that? With many different photos put together to create one. he was able to take the limited amount of space offered through a camera lens and restore it to it's whole glory. I called it Pop even though there really is no use of commercial labels or comics, but because of the bright colors and settings he used. He has overcome what many artists have tried to accomplish...to show space and perspective in the natural sense on a one-dimensional plane. What an interesting artist and a great video.
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