Woke up at 7am to finish my final art history paper about Man Ray's Indestructible Object--giant metronome with giant swinging eye of Lee Miller attached (Reina Sofía museum). Then dashed off in the metro, to avoid the dreary rain, to my flamenco performance. Our teacher had bought for us shawls and colorful earrings. We practiced our steps and at 9:45am the audience started trickling in. I was so happy to see Consuelo had come! Overall the performance went quite well -- we danced with smiles on our faces and poderillo in our hearts (spanish word for pride/pomp/attitude...) Javier showed us all up with his improv duet with our teacher. Not fair, he's a professional dancer and has really snazzy skirt-pants too haha! But it was really fun to see them dance, and I enjoyed the whole show very much. Consuelo apparently loved it too! She had never been to the student performance before, but she loves watching dance, so I was so happy she came :)
Afterwards, had a final review class for health care class, basically learned the final will be synthesis-focused... then printed out my final paper about Indestructible Object (14 pages not including my title page or bibliography, all in Spanish, entonces, I am exhausted!) Then dashed home for lunch, a hearty meal of lentejas and fish and white asparagus with a perfectly ripe orange for dessert. Then walked through Retiro (taking a new route!) to Reina Sofía for a final class about la representación femenina.
Started off with the Retrato of Sonia de Klamery, Condesa de Pradere, by Anglada Camarasa from Catalunya (1913). I think it's a beautiful painting, I love the dark sylverine environment, like a rainforest, with blues and greens and purples and blacks in the background. Talked about how the woman is represented like a snake, like a seductress, there's a peacock in the background, and she herself looks almost sickly with dark circles under her eyes, ghostly white skin. Yet it's a portrait of a bourgeois lady, a countess in fact. The idea of the dematerializing, disintegrating beauty, the femme fatale, always linked with the idea of sickness, death.
Next took note of the dark, hunched over gypsy women by Nonell. Also the works of Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930) who painted very spanish-looking women, emphasizing the idea of Spain as the "exotic" of Europe, particularly the image of the Andalusian woman as seductress. The painting of the lady reading, or at least looking up from a book, depicted a face very similar to Goya's naked/clothed majas. This artist (Torres) was from Córdoba. He also did a number of advertisements, showing women smoking, dancing--women "liberated". Very similar to Mucha's style and the Parisian posters too.
Took a look at some more Goya engravings-- saw many of the same images we had seen in the cartones back in the Prado (paintings designed to be references for creation of the giant tapestries). Apparently the caprichos engravings were done at the same time as the Pinturas negras...
Next discussed Picasso and the invention of Cubism, starting off with "analytic" cubism, the early cubism which analyzes multiple planes, tends to be monochromatic (lots of greys and browns) and the works of Bracque and Picasso from this period tend to look identical. Later, Picasso would abandon Cubism but then return to it, this time introducing the ideas of collage, single plane-cubism and much more color.
There were a few paintings by the Delaunauy couple. Sonia Delaunay was Russian but married a Parisian and both worked in Paris, used lots of color... Sonia designed costumes and ads for many of the Russian ballets. I liked her designs, and her name :)
Juan Gris--spaniard also very much influenced by the idea of collage. So many guitars!
Ángeles Santos Torroella: the idea of the "new mujer" in the 1920s in painting Tertulia. These women not only read, they also talk and smoke! His giant painting The World was pretty cool too.
Profesora explained then how Surrealism was heavily influenced by both Marxism and Freudian thought. The surrealists were really into the idea of automatic writing or creating and representing the images and experiences of our dream. Miró was particularly part of the automatic school, and he'd write random words that came to mind and then connect them with artisitc strokes and dots, painting "without control" and 'without meaning'
Finally, returned to the works of Dalí to show how the themes of the class had come full circle. In Invisible Man, we see a man who has been constructed entirely from feminine symbols (water, flowers, circles) and body parts (uterus, etc) and references to Elektra complex. Dalí painted in a way that he described as searching for method in his own paranoia. There are all kinds of androgynous figures in his work, playing off these themes of man and woman as double (as we saw in Durer's Adam and Eve paintings in the Prado). In 1929 (same year as the film Un Chien Andalou, which I referred to in my essay because one of the most famous scenes is of a woman's eye being slit) Dalí painted The Great Masturbator, again depicting those themes of androgyny. The giant form is actually a self-portrait of Dalí (as if he's lying down face first) from which emerges the head of a woman -- but again, this idea of the man and woman, masculine and feminine, mixing. Interesting work of self-reflection, examining his own fears...
Afterwards, had a final review class for health care class, basically learned the final will be synthesis-focused... then printed out my final paper about Indestructible Object (14 pages not including my title page or bibliography, all in Spanish, entonces, I am exhausted!) Then dashed home for lunch, a hearty meal of lentejas and fish and white asparagus with a perfectly ripe orange for dessert. Then walked through Retiro (taking a new route!) to Reina Sofía for a final class about la representación femenina.
Started off with the Retrato of Sonia de Klamery, Condesa de Pradere, by Anglada Camarasa from Catalunya (1913). I think it's a beautiful painting, I love the dark sylverine environment, like a rainforest, with blues and greens and purples and blacks in the background. Talked about how the woman is represented like a snake, like a seductress, there's a peacock in the background, and she herself looks almost sickly with dark circles under her eyes, ghostly white skin. Yet it's a portrait of a bourgeois lady, a countess in fact. The idea of the dematerializing, disintegrating beauty, the femme fatale, always linked with the idea of sickness, death.
Next took note of the dark, hunched over gypsy women by Nonell. Also the works of Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930) who painted very spanish-looking women, emphasizing the idea of Spain as the "exotic" of Europe, particularly the image of the Andalusian woman as seductress. The painting of the lady reading, or at least looking up from a book, depicted a face very similar to Goya's naked/clothed majas. This artist (Torres) was from Córdoba. He also did a number of advertisements, showing women smoking, dancing--women "liberated". Very similar to Mucha's style and the Parisian posters too.
Took a look at some more Goya engravings-- saw many of the same images we had seen in the cartones back in the Prado (paintings designed to be references for creation of the giant tapestries). Apparently the caprichos engravings were done at the same time as the Pinturas negras...
Next discussed Picasso and the invention of Cubism, starting off with "analytic" cubism, the early cubism which analyzes multiple planes, tends to be monochromatic (lots of greys and browns) and the works of Bracque and Picasso from this period tend to look identical. Later, Picasso would abandon Cubism but then return to it, this time introducing the ideas of collage, single plane-cubism and much more color.
There were a few paintings by the Delaunauy couple. Sonia Delaunay was Russian but married a Parisian and both worked in Paris, used lots of color... Sonia designed costumes and ads for many of the Russian ballets. I liked her designs, and her name :)
Juan Gris--spaniard also very much influenced by the idea of collage. So many guitars!
Ángeles Santos Torroella: the idea of the "new mujer" in the 1920s in painting Tertulia. These women not only read, they also talk and smoke! His giant painting The World was pretty cool too.
Profesora explained then how Surrealism was heavily influenced by both Marxism and Freudian thought. The surrealists were really into the idea of automatic writing or creating and representing the images and experiences of our dream. Miró was particularly part of the automatic school, and he'd write random words that came to mind and then connect them with artisitc strokes and dots, painting "without control" and 'without meaning'
Finally, returned to the works of Dalí to show how the themes of the class had come full circle. In Invisible Man, we see a man who has been constructed entirely from feminine symbols (water, flowers, circles) and body parts (uterus, etc) and references to Elektra complex. Dalí painted in a way that he described as searching for method in his own paranoia. There are all kinds of androgynous figures in his work, playing off these themes of man and woman as double (as we saw in Durer's Adam and Eve paintings in the Prado). In 1929 (same year as the film Un Chien Andalou, which I referred to in my essay because one of the most famous scenes is of a woman's eye being slit) Dalí painted The Great Masturbator, again depicting those themes of androgyny. The giant form is actually a self-portrait of Dalí (as if he's lying down face first) from which emerges the head of a woman -- but again, this idea of the man and woman, masculine and feminine, mixing. Interesting work of self-reflection, examining his own fears...
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