Modern Art, Primitvism - Essay Sample

Primitivism was a 19th and 20th-century artistic movement developed by several famous European artists, who included Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso, among many other artists. The primitivism period of artistry was marked by these artists breaking away from the Western people's traditional art that involved native and oceanic cultures, flattened and geometric artistic forms, and many other curving conventions. Primitivism has had a huge impact on modern Western artistry. Primitivism also influenced most artists' paintings and was also essential for artists when expressing themselves. It is hard to imagine that Picasso and Kirchner can be related due to their different painting styles. However, although the two pieces of art portrayed different painting styles, they had a similar theme; a theme involving prostitute subjects, which was a major feature for Kirchner painting; Five Women in the Street has also been one of the most dominant theme in the work of Picasso; The Young Ladies of Avignon.

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As mentioned earlier, these two paintings of Picasso and Kirchner were executed differently, and this mainly resulted from the fact that both artists were from different art movements. However, the themes and the subjects that the two artists portray are the same. Whereas Kirchner's painting of five women in the street was painted in an Expressionistic manner, Pablo Picasso's painting of The Young Ladies of Avignon was a good representation of cubism art movements. This clearly shows that the two artists completely believed in different painting techniques and ideas. Therefore, it is surprising that such artists belonging to different art painting movements can develop paintings that portray the same theme.

The two paintings usually portray five prostitutes. After keenly looking at the two paintings, five naked women can be seen in each painting. Using the cubism technique of painting, Picasso chose to paint the prostitutes' bodies using natural pink colors and sharply shaped them. The reason for sharply shaping the prostitutes was Picasso's compliance with Cezanne's theory of shapes that stated that all objects in nature could be shaped using geometrical shapes. Looking keenly at the prostitutes' bodies, one can notice that their torsos are shaped like triangles while their breasts are shaped like quadrilaterals and circles. Another interesting feature to note in Picasso's painting of The Young Ladies of Avignon is how the women's eyes and noses can be viewed from different angles without even walking around the paintings. This is an unfamiliar feature for many artists and people in general, but it is a commonly utilized feature in cubism paintings that Picasso was so good at. On the other hand, Kirchner portrayed the five prostitutes in a gothic way by elongating them to look thin and fragile and wrapping their bodies with dark coats. Additionally, Kirchner painted the prostitutes' bodies so that their faces looked pale and sickly, which made the prostitutes' faces resemble masks. In terms of color, the two paintings of both artists were somehow different. Picasso's portrayal of these five prostitutes was characterized by large tones of pink and yellow color while in Kirchner’s painting had apocalyptic and feeble yellow color.

Both paintings defy the concept of beauty that had characterized many paintings in the past. Many paintings in the past applied the concept of beauty to draw the attention of the viewers. For instance, Rubens' paintings comprised of voluptuous beauties that aimed to attract and entertain the viewers. However, in both Picasso and Kirchner's paintings, the aspect of using beauty has been completely ignored. The women's paintings are in an angular shape, and they also have mask-like faces that cannot be defined as a sign of beauty. The Picasso's paintings presented in the picture have a scary look as they appear like ghosts due to their triangular and circular shapes. On the other hand, Kirchner's painting presented the prostitutes as feeble by making them elongated, pale-faced, and thin to make them look as scary as possible. Therefore, by looking at the two paintings, it is clearly not that the bodies of the subjects represented appear to be ugly compared with traditional paintings. For people to appreciate the two paintings of both Picasso and Kirchner, they will need to look at the message being passed by the artists in the paintings by looking at the paintings from different perspectives and appreciating what the artists have achieved through the subjects. Artistry is usually an important tool of communication that should not be taken for granted. Any painting communicates something unique, and that is why v viewers have to keenly observe and study a piece of artwork before making conclusions on its significance.

Although the two paintings have used the same subjects and have the same theme, they differ in that they have used different settings and surroundings. Whereas Picasso's paintings are characterized by an environment of stability that appears to be frozen in time, Kirchner's painting showed the city of dynamism, feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, fearsome, and hastiness. This conclusion of the Kirchner's representation is made because the women he has represented seem to be moving up and down the streets of Berlin.

In conclusion, although both the Young Ladies of Avignon by Picasso and Five Women in the Street by Kirchner are represented by people of different art movements and are from different settings and environments, they have the same theme and have also used the same subjects. The two paintings have defied the use of beauty concepts, which have been the characteristic of the traditional western artworks like Titian paintings.

References

Brockmeier, Jens. "Picasso's masks: Tracing the flow of cultural memory." Culture & Psychology 23, no. 2 (2017): 156-170. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354067X17695763.

Charles, W. Haxthausen. "Carl Einstein and Expressionism: The Case of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1." In The Expressionist Turn in Art History, pp. 271-304. Routledge, 2017. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:vORWz0BwG7YJ:scholar.google.com/&scioq=the+Five+Women+in+the+Street+by+Kirchner&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2016.

Pawlowska, A. (2017). Avant-gardists and primitivism. Art Inquiry, (19), 153-169. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=621176.