Eldon M Thomas Post 3

     I recently went on a trip to the Newark Museum with my Development of Modern Art Class. It was a Sunday and I was not enthused by this at all. We went to see the Angels and Tomboys Exhibit which was a series of paintings from the late nineteenth century of children ranging from toddlers to teens. Most of the paintings were decent but only one or two stood out for me. In this essay I will compare this painting to a Modernist painting from my class studies.
     The painting Kept In, by Edward Lamson Henry was the painting that I caught my eye. Most of the other paintings were mostly portraits of patrons' children or the offspring of the artists themselves. This one on the other hand was of a young African American girl who was left in a classroom while her classmates played outside. This painting was inspired by the artist's time as a clerk on a Union transport ship during the American Civil War. It plays on the theme of isolation and race.
     The Modernist painting that I chose that also deals with the subject of isolation is Pablo Picasso's Family of Saltimbanque. This painting was done during the artist's rose period and depicts circus performers and the isolation they feel. Like Henry's painting, this also deals with the subject of race in that the performers are Gypsies. Gypsies were often mistreated in Europe and disliked even to this day and often lived a nomadic life. These two paintings stood out to me because of the subject matter and the race issue.
     Both of these paintings depict the isolation that people of color face in societies where race superiority and ethnocentrism are present. In Henry's painting we find an African girl in a school setting at a time after the end of America's chattel slavery. During that time, African slaves were not allowed to read and write. This little girl is in a school and she is kept in the class by herself, isolated accompanied only by her daydreams.
     Picasso's painting depicts Gypsy circus performers. Like African Americans at the turn of the 19th century, they were disliked by most Europeans. Like African Americans, they are disliked even to this day. Like African Americans in America's South they faced persecution and death even up to the World War II era where they were victims of Hitler's Final Solution. Like Henry's painting, these people are also isolated and sad. Unlike Henry's painting though, they have each other. Both of these paintings depict children with sad little faces.
     Both Henry and Picasso's paintings have little girls in them. In Henry's painting, the little girl is the subject matter while Picasso doesn't show his little girl's face. The boy's face is shown but the girl has her back to the audience. Henry's little girl is staring off canvas to the outside of the room with a sense of longing to play outside with her classmates. Both of these paintings treat gender in different ways.
     Henry's painting was done around the time of the Impressionist movement in Europe while Picasso's was done around the time of Post-Impressionism and Symbolism. Picasso's work would be considered Modernist because of the way he treats his subjects and their environment. Rather than paint his performers in a circus, he paints them in a barren landscape with barley any hint of time or space.
     To conclude I say that both paintings represent different approaches to subject matter. Both paintings break from the norm of only painting people of a particular ethnic background and depict the isolation the subjects faced.

Pablo Picasso. Family of Saltimbanque. 1905.

Edward Lamson Henry. Kept In. 1889.

Works Cited

Hunter, Sam., Jacobus, John., and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. 3rd Ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print.
Henry, Edward Lamson. Kept In. Oil on canvas. 1889.  Newark Museum

Two Art Pioneers-Post 3

In artist William Chase’s painting Idle Hour he depicts his family with two of his daughters appearing as part of a natural world in harmony with their surroundings.  He characterizes his daughters as innocent by their dazzling white dresses as they relax on the dunes of Shinnecock, Long Island.    Chase utilizes the Impressionist technique of painting outdoors called en plein air and brilliant colors to convey a mood of joyful abandonment.  Chase defines the summer season as a time of feminine idleness and a fleeting period that connected to the transience and carefree aspects of girlhood.  Chase's painting displayed above is also part of a 2012 Modern Art Exhibition at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey titled, Angels and Tomboys Girlhood in 19th Century American Art.

In artist Pablo Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring painting, he probably used the traditional Three Graces to create the subject.  Picasso’s painting was a response to World War I, when French art society decided to reassure and reestablish its roots with a grand tradition and a kind of solid, reassuring, sculptural vision of the human figure rooted in classicism.  Depicting a method of Picasso’s more radical artwork, the women in the painting have a tubular nature in the arms and large abstract rhythms displaying his strong Cubist abstraction and sculptural realism.  Picasso chose to give his neo-Classical and monumental figures a primitive Mediterranean feel, which has originality in his artworks.  The three women appear to have strong chiseled profiles and exaggerated statuesque contours reminiscent of late or provincial Hellenistic styles of artwork.  The strange rotundity of the bodies is not only juxtaposed by the heavily hewed faces but by the deep gouged-in lines to denote the folds of the dresses. The accentuated width of these folds and the dramatic use of color to create them - silvery in quality, against the bright blue -add to this sense of heightened relief, contrasting with the brown ochre backdrop of the rocks.   Instead of Picasso creating a rhythm to counteract the strong perpendicular lines of the chair, he uses folds to counteract in reverse, creating a heavy, angular tension.

William Chase’s painting Idle Hour and Pablo Picasso’s painting Three Women at the Spring are similar in their themes with both artworks containing female subjects situated in natural environments.  Chase’s painting displays female subjects outdoors in nature, while Picasso’s female subjects are in an earth-element environment of stone and clay objects.  Both artists use strong earth tone colors in their background to bring out their feminine and innocent qualities in their female subjects.  The earth tone colors also help bring out the feminine flair of the subject’s garments.  Chase uses earth tones in the landscape as he placed the female subjects on a backdrop of brownish-green grass to bring out their free flowing dazzling white dresses. Picasso uses earth tones to accent the fleshy upper body of the women in his painting with their silvery colored dresses, and two of the women have their dress straps hanging down their arms to expose an important nurturing characteristic of a woman, the breast.  Also, Chase and Picasso’s subjects are painted enjoying a moment in time as the female subjects in Idle Hour are enjoying the sunshine and outdoors at the ocean, and the women in Three Women at the Spring are gathered intimately in conversation.  The difference between the two artists is that Chase is from the 19^th Century and Picasso is from the 20^th Century although they are both modern artists with their own style of painting.

Chase was an exponent of the Impressionist painting movement.  He painted with relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, used open composition and put emphasis on accuracy in depiction of light in its changing qualities to accentuate the effects of the passage of time.  He also used common ordinary subject matter, and usually the subjects would be himself, his wife Alice and their children or a combination of both.  Picasso is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement of France which utilized three-dimensional form technique in art, and invented the constructed sculpture technique.  He also co-invented the collage a technique of art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole and known for other styles that he helped develop and explore. 

William Chase was an American painter and Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter.  However, both artists studied art in Europe and under the instruction of French artists.  Although Chase studied at the National Academy of Design in New York under an instructor named Lemuel Wilmarth a student of the famous French artist Jean-Leon  Gerome and Picasso spent most of his adult life in France, their methods of painting have their roots in the French art movements.  Chase’s French roots can be found in his en plein air technique of outdoors painting, and Picasso in his Cubist artworks.

The female gender subjects in Chase and Picasso’s paintings throw aside the traditions of Impressionist art, which was the foundation of Modern Art.  In Chase and Picasso’s artwork, the female subjects are not catching the male gaze or painted as sex objects.  Instead, they are depicted in their natural feminine state enjoying a domestic moment in time.  Even the earth tones used by both artists in their painting bring out natural qualities of the feminine gender bodies and actions.  Chase uses his earth tones to bring out female subjects enjoying their natural world environment outdoors, and Picasso uses earth tones to situate his women in a natural earth element environment enjoying intimate conversation.  These forms of feminist depiction would not have been considered conventional during the Impressionist movement where male artists and male subjects were considered the norm in art.  Still Chase and Picasso are famous and respected artists in art’s history and present day.

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79762

http://www.pablopicasso.org/three-women-at-the-spring.jsp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Merritt_Chase

Hunter, Sam. Modern Art. The Vendome Press, New York. 2004.

Newark Museum, NJ.  Private Tour. Angels and Tomboys Girlhood in 19^th-Century American Art. Sept. 12, 2012-Jan. 6, 2013.

Personal

In the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a middle-aged woman born in 1889 sits down on a bench. She offers a subtle nod to another woman sitting by her side— this woman is born and bred in the 1990s. When the future looks to the past, we impose our reinterpretations on what we have understood in the past. But for a spectator from the past to observe artwork of the future, the context is so transformed almost beyond recognition that banality is difficult to reach. We tie strings from past to present so art becomes personal— what is the point of life if it is not personal.

Seymour Joseph Guy, an English contemporary artist, finished one of his well-known works Making A Train in 1867. The horizontal format of this oil-on-canvas is ideal because Guy catches an instance much like a camera captures a memory. A young girl is enjoying a private moment of imagination and contemplation— could she be imaging a train of a wedding dress? Or a train of a woman fighter’s torn dress? Or is she making believe that she is the character in the off-kilter poster on her wall?

As with most paintings of young female children during the 19th century, artists commonly resorted to themes of innocence and fertility. The misconception that women are born— to truly exist only— to become child-bearing mothers often conflicted with the moral precept that a girl should forever be pure and naïve. As the girl is enjoying her moment of solitude, it is not accidental that she is framed by moonlight. Guy purposely juxtaposed the girl with the  shadeless lamp to minimize the moon’s luminance. In doing so, the presence of the moonlight is subtly introduced to the young girl. From Northern European folklore to contemporary superstition, the Moon is often heralded as a symbol of femininity, fertility, and renewal.

Now if the woman of late 19th century were to view a Futurist painting by Duchamp, the jarring disconnect will wrest feelings of emotional turmoil and fearful curiosity. After all, Parisian Futurists yearned for expression of how fast life moves— Futurists painted violent disarray within beautiful concinnity. In the early 20th century, Duchamp did several studies of nude bodies and nude bodies in movement. One of the many examples is Sad Young Man in a Train, an oil-on-canvas study of an active young man. To express the young man’s sadness, with the help of the vertical format— the lines and shapes are heavy in a sense that the whole composition feels as if it is a balloon tied to a cement block. Towards the top of the painting, the vertical lines are interrupted by short horizontal lines. Whereas, the lines at the bottom that contour the man’s legs are extensive. Although Futurists siphoned the violence and inspirational turmoil from political and social complications, they sought to create the composition in a nuanced manner. The movement of the young man is visible to the spectator even without loud diagonal lines or swooping swashes of color. 

Art is personal. Art is as much a boon as it is a curse. The young girl in Making A Train basks in her youthfulness all the while she transforms from young girl to mature woman. What that transformation entails is up to the spectator— is she doomed to be tangled in patriarchy’s web or will she break those confinements? The sad young man that rides the train in Duchamp’s head— although he is slowed down by society’s moral shortcomings, he still sways to and fro against his will to the train’s force. Although the two paintings reveal the characteristics of two societies, the denominator lies in what we constantly ponder upon: What am I doing here?

Girls and Women in Art: Stifled Potential and Consumer Goods

      Angels and Tomboys, a collection of art objects currently on exhibition at the Newark Museum, showcases works that illustrate the roles and experiences of young girls in the 19th century.  From androgynous images such as Ammi Phillip's "Girl in a Pink Dress" (1832) that demonstrate the tendency to minimize gender in childhood portraits to paintings like Cecilia Beaux's "Dorothea in the Woods" (1897) that illustrate the transitioning of adolescence into adulthood, Angels and Tomboys reflects a cultural vision of feminine childhood, puberty, and movement into maturity.  Some works reveal a glimpse of girlhood untrammeled by societal expectations, when girls could fly kites and jump fences. Other images celebrate the innocence, purity, virginal qualities young women were expected to cultivate. Although included in the exhibit are pieces portraying young girls pictured in school and engaging in activities traditionally associated with their male counterparts, Angels and Tomboys features images that highlight pubescent moments preparing girls for the roles they will be expected to fulfill in years to come.  Uncomfortably dressed in corsetted gowns and frilly adornments, adolescent girls were taught that they were valued for their physical appeal and discomfort was worth it if it meant being attractive to the opposite sex.

Eastman Johnson, The Party Dress, 1872.

     Eastman Johnson's "The Party Dress" (1872) pictures a young woman being fitted for a dress or being assisted in tying up the complexities of her garment.  Two young women are central to the composition and the setting appears to be the intimate confines of their home.  One girl stares dreamily out of a window positioned before her while her companion tends to the finishing of her outerwear. The cumbersome layers of her long dress and jacket tightly bound to her torso represent the departure from the freedom she might of experienced during her childhood while being able to attend school or play wildly in fields.  Restricted by the rigidity of her garment and the social expectations associated with her gender, the young girl gazing out the window will leave behind the independence of her childhood and shortly enter into roles of wife and mother.

Hannah Hoch, Beautiful Girl, 1920.

     Issues of gender continued to be expressed in the visual arts following the 19th century.  Denied access to formal training in the fine arts for most of history and relegated to art forms considered lesser in value, women have had to struggle to exist in the art world as professionals and are far more likely to be sexualized objects of art.  Articulated brilliantly in the Guerilla Girls' piece "Do Women Have To Be Naked Get Into The Met Museum?" (1989) begs the observer to rethink the the hierarchies that exist in the professional world according to gender and question the persisting notions of women lacking agency, being easily manipulated, and solely existing for the sensual pleasure of men.  Gender and the female aesthetic was examined earlier by artists like Hannah Hoch, a German Dadaist who explored the post war culture of industrialization and consumerism with her photomontages.  A modernist departing from traditional modes of art production and experimenting with new modalities of developing visual art, Hannah Hoch addresses in her work the use of womens bodies and stereotypes borrowed from an emerging consumer culture constantly bombarded with advertising imagery. Not unlike Eastman Johnson's The Party Dress (1872) that captures the preparatory phase of a girl being groomed into the proper female role, Beautiful Girl (1920) examines the new role of women and their bodies in popular culture and a capitalist economy.
     Disallusioned by the war and critical of contemporary European culture, Hannah Hoch and the Dadaists borrowed aesthetics from cultures considered less refined in the pretentious view of traditional fine art schools, purposely put forms together that did not make sense, and hoped to prompt the observer to question current institutionalized hypocrisies and social absurdities.  Beautiful Girl (1920) is comprised of appropriated images juxtaposed to make an entirely different form.  BMW logos are repetitively placed throughout the composition and a popular woman's hairdo is positioned over a light bulb with the body of a bathing suit clad women.  An ominous figure with eerie cat-like eyes peers over the car emblems and the machine-woman hybrid.  A woman's body is pictured here with the BMW pattern because female bodies are at the same time used to sell goods and women are considered likely gullible consumers. Hannah Hoch positions these images in a way that instigates the notion that cars and womens bodies are objects similarly exploited in the pursuit of capital.  Machine-like in appearance, the woman's body is a part of a complex system of enticement used in advertising to convince individuals they must consume in order to attain contentment. 
     Eastman Johnson's The Party Dress (1872) projects an melancholy energy that many independent thinking young girls might have experienced in the 19th century when they were leaving the openness of childhood and entering the adult world that expected absolute conformity to gender roles. Hannah Hoch's Beautiful Girl (1920) studies a consumer culture that places women alongside objects to instigate desire in the consumer.  Both works explore ways women have been oppressed in European and American culture.  While The Party Dress (1872) suggests that a girl's potential and enjoyment of life is stifled when she grows into womanhood, Beautiful Girl (1920) reveals that advertising adopts the traditional manner of objectifying woman in visual arts.




Angles & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art.”  Newark Museum. 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102. 23 Nov. 2012.

Eisenman, Stephen M. Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History. 4th ed. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2011. Print.

Bridging The Gap Between Old and New Post 3

  The paintings in the exhibit Angels and Tomboys at the Newark Museum made me have a deeper appreciation of classic works of art of the 19th century even more while the artists that we are studying in class right now make me appreciate the historical, societal and economic innovations throughout the 20th century that influenced artistic and literary movements like Dada. Our docent explained in great detail the subjects of the different paintings and the history behind them. In most of the paintings in the earlier portion of the tour the young women were holding pansies or pansies were in their lap. Our docent explained that the pansies were a symbol of fertility and in some instances the Holy Trinity, when there were three petals. She also explained the importance of androgyny in the exhibit because some of the subjects that we thought were young women or little girls were actually young men or little boys. She explained that this was the case because in most of the paintings the scene is outside in nature and during that time young girls and women were not painted outside.

All of the artists in the exhibition were interesting but the one that stood out the most for me was John Singer Sargent 1856-1925. We discussed one of his paintings in class when we were studying chapter 14 in Eisenman, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw 1892-3, and our docent at the museum discussed his portrait of Katherine Chase Pratt 1890 According to Eisenman sitting for a portrait established social class and socioeconomic status (304) our docent reitterated that on the tour. Most of the subjects came from well to do aristcratic families, Katherine Chase Pratt came from the wealthy Pratt family of Massachusetts that founded the Pratt Institute in New York and Lady Agnew was Scotland Royalty, the Agnew family occupied Lochnaw Castle until the end of the 19th century right around the time the Singer portrait was done (Scotland). 

Singer focused on gender in paintings like Cassatt and Eakins but like some of the other artists in the exhibition focused on flowers as well in these two paintings. Unlike the other paintings in the exhibition the flowers are not in the laps of the women they are behind them and their hands are in their laps. Both women were in their late teens when they sat for these paitings so in their era they would have been at the marrying age maybe that is why the flowers are behind them because they will lose their sexual innocence once they are married.In both paintings the background is darker and the light is the foreground, this is Singer's homeage to the classics(Singer). Lady Agnew has an alluring look where as Katherine is seen in profile. The brushstrokes are very visible in Katherine and barely visible in Lady Agnew. 

  

Francis Picabia's approach to painting "aligns him to the Symbolist-Synthesist concepts of the late 19th century where art is not considered a copy of nature but rather the artist's emotional experience of it as seen in a synthesis of form and color with subjective expression"( Picabia). This is a similartiy between Singer and Picabia because their works were all about subjective expression. Another similar characteristic especially with my choice of paintings is gender. In Octophone I 1922 Picabia uses imagery and rejects the value of art. In Octophone I Picabia has painted a large target in black and white and their is a silhouette of a nude female accented with the color orange. The nude silhouette seems to refer back to more traditional art forms.

Unlike the work of Cassat and Eakins when dealing with the issue of gender the female nude silhouette in Picabia's paiting is the focal point and the viewer is supposed to focus on the female. I don't know if this was painted for the male gaze but it appears to be the case. If you look at the painting long enough which I did you get the effect of a stereogram. The orange accent looks like an androgynous figure with its buttocks in the air, knees bended and head tilted up slightly. I could not find any research to support that but felt that I might be in the ball park since my research revealed that Salvador Dali did use stereograms in some of his paintings. Stereograms had been produced for years at the time Octophone I was painted because they were first produced by Charles Wheatstone in 1838(hermes-press).   

  

    Works Cited

 

"Angles & Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art.”  Newark Museum. 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102. 23 Nov. 2012.

 

Eisenman, Stephen M. Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History. 4th ed. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2011. Print.

 

www.hermes-press.com/stereogram1.htm

 

http://www.johnsingersargent.org/

http://www.picabia.com/biograph/bio_ev_p4.htm

 

http://www.scotland.org.uk/castles/lochnaw-castle

 

 

 

Links

Newark Museum

 

John Singer Sargent

 

Francis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Viewing Gender

          During the 19^th century, females were starting to be portrayed more as people rather than objects. Artists were starting to portray them as they were really seen during those times. The exhibition, Angles and Tomboys, at the NewarkMuseum, displays this shift in how females were portrayed during these times. One can experience the beauty, innocents, roles and characteristics of young females during the 19^th century and can see the contrast between females today.

            One painting that displays the female role in society was William Henry Lippincott’s, Infantry in Arms. The scene takes place in a Victorian dinning room, where a young girl is running to her mother in fear of her younger brother. The infant boy, is in the arms of a servant or nanny and is holding a wooden sword and wearing a paper hat. This plainly shows the role of the two siblings. The infant boy is playing solider, preparing for his future as an aggressive male. The young girl, who is dressed in white and running to her mother, represents the passiveness and innocents that females were seen to have. This is how males and females were viewed since the beginning of time.

            In contrast to Lippincott’s, Infantry in Arms, Picasso’s Cubistic paintings take a drastic turn in how women were seen. In his Picasso’s painting, Three Women, he paints his figures in blocky, geometric shapes. To someone who is unfamiliar to Cubism, they may think that Picasso did not care about his figure and their forms. But in fact, Picasso had a “…passion for the human form.” (Hunter) and was aware of what he was doing. He repainted the canvas until he thought that the expressionistic energy was somewhat controlled and consistent. Not only that, but this was also Picasso’s first painting that he tried to “…utilize the Cézannian technique” (Hunter) of brushstrokes and color to bring forth and push back certain elements in his figures.

            In Three Women, Picasso displays his figures nude. Like artist before him, Picasso was trying to display the beauty of the women’s bodies but in a way that was very uncommon (before cubism). He was showing the beauty of the female body within simple geometric shapes. Everything was broken down and purposely done that way to simply the female form. Like Lippincott, Picasso displays his female figures the way that men usually see them- as objects and figures that men fantasies about. But unlike Lippincott, Picasso is seeing his figures (and paintings) in a whole new perspective. A perspective in which, simplifies its subjects in shapes.

            In conclusion, Lippincott and Picasso painted genders in their roles and context that society (in there time) placed them in. Lippincott clearly foreshadows the roles of the infant boy and the young girl while Picasso approaches his work in a very different way. He breaks his subjects up while showing the beauty of the female form. Though their works are very different from one another, they share that common theme of placing genders in their stereotypical roles.  

Work Citied:

Hunter, Sam, John Jacobs, and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. New York: Prentice Hall PTR, 2004. Print

Infantry in Arms

Three Women

"Uniting Contrasts; Exploring the Works of Ammi Phillips & Piet Mondrian"- Princess Hickmond

The early nineteenth century was an inventive period in art history. Progressive creative and social movements occurred in reaction to the war, technological advancements, science, and the social injustices of the time.  This is shown in the work of artists like Piet Mondrian who detracts from earlier conventions of art making and begin creating unique, revolutionary works. However, some painters were still painting portraits that showcase the lifestyles of men and women during this era.  For example, artists like Ammi Phillips employ symbolism in their paintings to depict the philosophy of women and children during the early nineteenth century. This work will compare the formal and conceptual aspects of Mondrian’s painting Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue and Phillips’ Girl in Pink and how each painting documents the livelihood of men and women living during the early nineteenth century.

As previously stated, several artistic movements were generated during the early nineteenth century. Dutch De Stijl, in particular, was one of the most transcendent and influential artistic efforts of this era.  Like Russian Constructivists, these post World War II artists and designers wanted to create a universal, revolutionary visual language through an abstract, simple, and reductive approach to color and geometry.  This intellectual vocabulary allowed for them to create a transcendent style; in fact, they used these elements to convey the idea of structured balance and harmony throughout their works in hopes to inspire balance and harmony in the lives of the audience.  Architecture like Schroder House and Gerrit Rietveld’s Chair are three-dimensional examples of how the attributes practiced by Mondrian and his contemporaries.  The formal quality of each work follows the narrative they are trying to communicate. However, there are artists that didn’t negate from the traditional conventions of this time period.

Concurrently, artists like Phillips were still depicting their daily lives and conditions at this time through symbolic paintings and portraiture. For example, some artists chose to represent childhood, more specifically, the stages of girlhood; as a result, these paintings reflect how children were generally perceived and how gender roles and subservience were introduced early on. These artists weren’t concerned with creating a logical, objective visual language. Instead, they were primarily focused own presenting their subjective interpretation of existence dyring the nineteenth century. For instance, boys and girls were dressed androgynously until boys were breached at the age of five. Consequently, artists present young boys and girls of this era in similar garb and frequently use symbolic objects such as whips and flowers to differentiate the genders.  Also, boys were presented outside while girls were being depicted in interior, domestic realms; this is a direct reference to the women’s preconceived role as a housewife and mother. Nonetheless, there are a few paintings like Erastus Salisbury‘s painting, Mrs. Paul Smith Palmer and her Twins, where it’s still difficult to comprehend which child male and which is female.  Like the artists’ objectives, the formal qualities of their works also differ.


Unlike Phillips' work Girl In Pink, Mondrian’s forms in Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue were functional, structured, and non-representational. Phillips' work Girl in Pink uses her work to present the girl, her function, and how she relates to girls and women of this time, through symbolism. He uses strictly geometric forms to create dynamic asymmetrical balance.  He also reduces his color palette to primary colors, grey, and black that poses the challenge of unifying these pure, conflicting colors while maintaining a harmonious equilibrium. Phillips' work Girl in Pink uses representational objects such as a strawberry on her lap and the pearls to signify the girl’s fertility and femininity. These symbols are helpful when associating this painting with her other work Boy in Red where he’s holding a hammer to indicate his strength and masculinity; these works are prime examples of how the artists utilize symbolism in order to present the difference between genders, the prevailing gender roles, and references the era when it took place through their clothing.  In addition, Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue is abstract and avant-garde seeing that it departs from principles utilized by artists like Phillips. He reduces image to the barest necessities which makes it void of elaborative detail or any elements that would reference to a specific era; this timeless, modern quality of his work is one of numerous grounds for why we still reference the painting in contemporary design. Nonetheless, Girl in Pink is a generic, stylized, and more intuitive. For example, there’s no sense three-dimensionality, inaccurate proportion, and the facial structure is more of a universal, symbolic expression versus depicting a specific person.  Though the works contrast visually, the conceptual fragment of their works are comparable.

Both created their works with their target audience, European men, in mind. The dogmatic abstraction of Dutch De Stijl’s visual vocabulary was rendered with the elite male in mind. Phillips' work addresses the male prospector by subliminally noting her fertility, which in turns, alludes to her eventual role as a mother and house wife. This subservient portrayal of women and girls wasn’t the only way that women and girls portrayed at the time. However, this is how most male European artists chose to depict them. Phillips and Mondrian also both depict the philosophy of certain men and women of the time. As previously stated, Dutch De Stijl was reaction to the chaos and advancement that was occurring at the time. They believed that as artist, they were socially responsible and should make works that help combat the conditions at the time. Consequently, they used their principle to communicate harmony and balance and attempted to propel their notions of these values in the lives of their viewers. Like Mondrian, Phillips' work imparts the principles and philosophies of certain people during the nineteenth century.  Girl in Pink directly notes the how children were reared, the manner in which they were trained for their preconceived function in society and/or the domestic realm, and how artists approached their subject manner intuitively through figurative imagery.

"Uniting Contrasts; Exploring the Works of Ammi Phillips & Piet Mondrian"

Phillips and Mondrian are two of the countless artists that utilized this liberated, eclectic period during the early nineteenth century. These two represent only two of the various movements that lead to the simple, reductive, abstract, minimalist, and most importantly, functional visual language that makes up modernism and the inventive methods ascertained by the teachers and pupils at Bauhaus.  Though artists of opposing movement may seem too distinctive to present a relationship between their work and the artistic movements their associated with. Nevertheless, there’s always a connection that can be made between the two. Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue and Girl in Pink differ formally but the conceptual aspects are very similar in regards to presenting one’s beliefs and/or reacting to the societal circumstances; as a result, both act as historical sources that allow viewers, especially artists and designers, to refer back to in order to learn about the historical, social, and artistic context of life during the early nineteenth century. These works are still prominent today and are still revered in institutions like the Newark Museum.

Princess A. Hickmond

Work Cited

Hunter, Jane. How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print.

Hunter, Sam, John M. Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. [Upper Saddle River, N.J.]: Prentice Hall, 2004. Print.

Margolin, Victor. The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997. Print.