As a self proclaimed Artist Myself (one
with bias towards the Modern side) I enjoyed the Modern spectacle of art that
is the Tate Modern more than any other art museum I've been to before. I
couldn't help but score a picture in front of a real live Monet painting of Water
Lilies. What an extraordinary experience for any lover of art.
The two pieces of interest that I found were two different pieces with the same name and the same
artist. They come from the series of "Bust of a Woman" By Pablo
Picasso. One from 1944 and the other from 1909. These pieces in context were
not near each other. Many artists had rooms if the grand scale of their
paintings demanded it (like a whole room for Monet's Water Lilies, wow!) but
these Picasso pieces were interestingly not near each other, on completely
different floors, in line more with their respective movements rather than
relation by Artist. I very much understand this, while they are both within the
broad abstraction movement, one is a cubist piece, and the other is more in
line with other abstracted post-modern works in the iconic freaky style of Picasso we
love.
Picasso being the
character that he is, the heavily scrutinized socialite, it’s an interesting
insight into his development as a person over 35 years. Visually, they can’t
be any more different. The strokes contouring the shape of the woman in the piece
from 1909 visually creates depth within the picture. The warm monochromatic lighting
contrasts with the colorful flat piece from 1944. Dating from the end of the Nazi
occupation the abstraction of the figure is representative of the stylistic
nature of Picasso’s development during the occupation.
The Tate brought me up
close and personal with works of art I had only ever seen previously in
textbooks. It was a surreal experience in every sense of the word (especially
the artistic movement).
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