Where did the popular story "with a child under the arm" and other innovations of artists in art come from?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Every genius stands on a hundred other people's shoulders, as you know - and when it comes to painting, not everyone realizes that some of these shoulders are female, and once many artists turned art on one of its new paths. Here are some iconic names that an erudite person should know.

The art of self-portrait

There are two women who have radically entered the history of such a genre as self-portrait. Firstly, the court artist of Mary of Austria - sister and governor of the Spanish king - Katharina van Hemessen. This Dutch artist of the sixteenth century gave the world a “self-portrait at an easel” as a phenomenon. Yes, and before that, artists showed themselves on canvases - but usually they were secretly inscribed in the crowd. After Katarina, there was probably not a single painter who did not capture himself on canvas with a brush in his hand.

Frida Kahlo is believed by some to have literally created the psychoanalytic portrait as an art genre rather than a diagnostic method. Her colorful, at the same time gloomy and overflowing with thirst for life canvases are very often concentrated on the artist herself, but they represent her in fantastic images or speculative situations, thus revealing the inner world and the process of changing the psyche following changes in the body (as you know, Frida suffered greatly from the consequences of a difficult injury and unsuccessful surgery). Before Frida, if an artist looked into himself in a self-portrait, he was more likely thinking about his character or trying to convey his way of thinking. In general, it glided almost to the surface.

Family portrait

Everyone knows what ideal family portraits look like - when people do not stand in a row, but are arranged in a beautiful composition, and if a photo artist does, and not an ordinary volunteer, by looking at the portrait, everyone can guess the character of family members and the relationship between them. So, such an obvious presentation of a family portrait did not occur to artists for a very long time. There was no separate genre of family portrait - if it was necessary to depict several relatives together, they were arranged in a row, as in any official mass portrait, or they were inscribed in a plot not related to the history of the family with characters.

The genre was invented by another artist at the Spanish court, the Italian Sofonisba Anguissola, and at a very early age - still a teenager, depicting her relatives. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British Laura Knight contributed by portraying Lamorna Birch with her daughters in such a way that in the era of casual family photographs, every parent, it seems, should have had a portrait with a child under his arm - a classic plot!

Creators of "national" styles

In the Art Nouveau era, many thought about how to combine the achievements of painting and almost forgotten or lost folk styles, so that the very manner of drawing on canvas or paper immediately betrayed the national character of what was depicted. Each country had its own brush and pencil patriots. In Scotland, the style that we now consider Celtic by default was created by Margaret MacDonald and a group of her associates, now known as Glasgow Girls, a large circle of Scottish artists. In Russia, it was Elena Polenova and Tatyana Mavrina - almost every illustrator of folk nursery rhymes, songs and fables imitated them for a long time as a standard of Russian style.

By the way, the creators of national styles influenced not only book illustrations. MacDonald is known to have inspired Gustav Klimt and he radically revised his painting style.

Look, don't calculate

The concept of right hemispheric drawing is when it is more important to be able to follow the curves with the eye. outlines, spots of shadow and color, than to be able to build human anatomy or the structure of an object - is based on the experience of a number of self-taught artists, including the history and paintings of Ekaterina Bilokur, a Ukrainian brilliant draftsman of the early twentieth century, most of whose paintings are images of flowers from nature with all their whimsical outlines, notches, tints of color.

Catherine was self-taught and, although in adulthood, on her own initiative, she studied the history and theory of painting, she never tried to build pictures and their details, trusting direct, sensory visual perception, and not her ability (or inability) to analyze the simplest components of a complex form.

By the way, another woman became legendary thanks to her hundreds of drawings of plants from nature - Marianne North. Although botanical drawing existed before her, she developed it to extreme heights, becoming a model for the next representatives of the genre, and, in addition, helped to discover many new plants - not only because of her observation and accuracy of the drawing, but also because she got to places on her own, where scientists did not dare to send expeditions yet.

Abstractionism

There are many subgenres in abstract painting, and one of them, Orphism (when sound and pace of movement are conveyed by color and form), was invented by a married couple, in which a woman was leading - Sonia Delaunay. She also became the first artist who was able to successfully combine high art and not at all high - comfortable - fashion. Artists who, for the sake of a concept, transferred abstractionism to the production of clothes, suffered defeat in everyday life - their outfits could not be worn, because they did not understand the principles of organizing a costume. Sonya was distinguished by her practical acumen and the ability not to lose her artistic style for the sake of simplification, so that her fashion collections stand out from many other examples of the synthesis of painting and tailoring.

In addition to Orphism, the unique style of Tamara de Lempicka, the notorious Polish artist of the twentieth century, also emerged from Cubism: her paintings do not so much disintegrate into composite ones, as if they are assembled from multi-colored, coldly sparkling metal shavings. Later, many of her imitators appeared (oddly enough, often in the USSR), but the effect of a metal statue on canvas is still firmly associated with Tamara.

Artists went down in history not only for their innovation. Naked Christ, a corpse in his arms, strange angles for a little daughter. How famous artists shocked.