Belle Baranceanu: The Artist at Work [review] (original) (raw)

A Program of Art Education Exploring Life Issues—By Two Nudity Artworks

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2013

The purpose of this essay is to design an art education program based on post-modernist concepts to lead students to contemplate the meaning of life and build their insight about visual imagery of artworks, by looking at two nudity artworks-Edward Munch's "Puberty" and Frida Kahlo's "The Broken Column". The program will look at metaphors and the significance of life in these two artworks. Over and above exploring relative philosophical, aesthetic, historical, hermeneutic, and semiotic domains, the program will be designed in such a way that the intrinsic quality of art will be emphasized. The research method is a visual narrative approach, including image interpretation. Its purpose is to encourage students to consider how they experience life, the emotional elements of life, as well as the spiritual progression, physiological development, anxiety and suffering of life, etc.. The program will also provide students with diverse information and potential ways of thinking about and discussing the issues of life and art by using questions in a learning list. This program will be employed and executed over two hours of class time. It could become the general education teaching material or art curriculum.

LINA BO BARDI'S PICTURE GALLERY - AN ATMOSPHERE OF ART

In 1970, the Czech cinematographer, Miroslav Javurek, produced a series of photographs featuring the newly-completed Picture Gallery of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) designed by the architect, Lina Bo Bardi (1914Bardi ( -1992. The photographs were unlike the standard documentation for architectural magazines; rather than the stark emptiness that was customary, these images captured compositions of museum visitors juxtaposed against the art on display.

Genius and gender: Women artists and the female nude 1870-1920

British Art Journal (Volume XIX, 3), 2019

This article considers examples of female nudes produced by women artists between 1870 and 1920 in the light of their artistic training, with particular reference to the life-class. It also addresses other significant educational influences that affected these artists as well as factors in their personal lives that made it important for them to seek artistic expression in the female nude. In the 19th century, the female nude became the dominant vision of nudity, embodying abstract notions of ideal beauty. It has been said that mastering these portrayals was not only crucial for artistic success but also ‘central to the construction of artistic identity’, but in any event, for centuries, perfection in the depiction of the nude form was perceived as one of the pinnacles, perhaps the pinnacle, of an academic art education, and the life-class was central to achieving this goal. As social and educational change was gaining momentum, more women began to participate in the art world and in 1871 the British census recorded 1,069 professional women artists, whereas in 1841 there had been only 278. By 1871, after a reluctant start, the Royal Academy had admitted a total of 117 women to its Schools, and yet it continued to keep the doors of the life-class firmly shut to them. Ambitious women artists felt this exclusion keenly and began to demand access to the life-class – or at least to a draped nude. As Linda Nochlin, the first feminist writer to explore ‘the Question of the Nude’, pointed out: ‘To be deprived of this ultimate stage of training, meant, in effect to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art works, unless one were a very ingenious lady indeed.’ This article explores the explores the obstacles women artists had to overcome and the strategies they deployed in their attempts to do so.

About The Artist: Hugo Cataldo Barudi

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2014

He is the current President of the Organización de Profesionales del Audiovisual Paraguayo (OPRAP), which could be described as the Paraguayan Director's Guild. He is also the owner of Ficticia, a production company specializing in feature film development, film and TV production services. In this interview we talk about his digital art, painting and drawing, (the Monsters series, the Punto húmedo series, the Frida series and its reception), his last feature-length film on sexual deviance, (Semana capital, 2010), his next feature-length film on innocence in love (La chiperita, 2015), and filmmaking in contemporary Paraguay. This volume of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies features works of art from the Frida series; a series that began as strictly digital variations on the theme of iconic images of Frida Kahlo, yet quickly moved beyond that as art collectors requested prints and later painted versions. Once Cataldo began producing the painted adaptations of these digital originals, demand for the pieces exploded. In this interview Cataldo speaks a little about the sometimes ironic implications of this situation in terms of the market's treatments of pieces qualified as "originals" versus "copies." This interview took place in July 2013. More of Cataldo's selected digital art can be seen here: http://hugocataldo.blogspot.com/

The feminist street art from the western part of Mexico The art of Mónica Barajas

Quart, 2021

The decade of the 1920s in Mexico witnessed the rise of a mural movement which highlighted the need of creating a national art and the obligation of reaching a wider public. Murals were supposed to communicate post-revolutionary ideas and history to the masses. Artists used the figure of a native Indian to symbolize the reborn country. The rich linguistic legacy became an inspiration as many names and words from indigenous languages were applied into the works. The will of the muralists was to express, in a combative way, all the social and essential problems of the nation 1 . Painters were expected to reflect on three themes: extraordinary traditions and their Pre-Columbian roots; socio-political circumstances together with the Mexican Revolution, and the last one, national heroes 2 . In 1921 the artist Carmen Foncerrada pronounced the following statement:

"The Artist is Absent: Notes on Tania Bruguera," Arte al Día International 131 (Oct. 2010): 20-25.

S i es verdad que ya no existe un centro del mundo del arte internacional, Nueva York continúa siendo, cuando menos, uno de los pocos sitios selectos para lo que Pierre Bourdieu definió hace ya tiempo como una "toma de posiciones": la articulación de una postura estética con relación a un campo más vasto de producción cultural. 1 La primavera pasada fue testigo de la institucionalización de la performance y de los artistas participativos por parte de varias entidades artísticas en la ciudad misma y en sus alrededores, en un intento de conciliar la obra de arte de acción con su peor enemigo histórico: el museo. 2 Como resultado, distintas prácticas consideradas previamente opuestas se encontraron de pronto embarcadas en un diálogo, a saber: el arte de performance autobiográfico que se exhibió en The Artist Is Present (El artista está presente), la retrospectiva de Marina Abramovic en el MoMA; la "estética relacional" encarnada por la conversación entre dos obras de Tino Sehgal en la rotonda del Guggenheim, desocupada a tal efecto; y el Arte de Conducta de Tania Bruguera, basado en la provocación tanto de los espectadores como de las instituciones, en su retrospectiva como artista de generación intermedia en la Galería Neuberger de la Universidad del Estado de Nueva York en Purchase (evento que formaba parte del Primer Premio Anual Neuberger para Artistas Emergentes). 3 Si existe un nexo entre los dos artistas nombrados en primer término, éste está constituido por el énfasis en la presencia que ambos comparten-en el caso de Abramovic, la de la artista misma (la obra homónima exhibida en el MoMA mostraba a la artista sentada a una mesa que compartía con espectadores durante todo el transcurso de la muestra) y en el de Sehgal, la del espectador, que toma parte en un encuentro social coreografiado con participantes entrenados. En contraste con estos dos artistas, cuya obra es de naturaleza efímera, Bruguera ofrece una crítica incisiva, aunque algo ignorada, con respecto a la presencia en el contexto del arte de acción, una crítica que en última instancia no perdona ni siquiera sus propias estrategias. Curada por Helaine Posner, Tania Bruguera: On The Political Imaginary (Tania Bruguera: Sobre el imaginario político) podría resumirse como una interrogación radical por parte de la artista. Se advierte el primer indicio que apunta a esta intención en la elección de hacer actuar a otros participantes en reemplazo de la artista en varias de sus acciones plásticas. La carrera artística de Bruguera comenzó con Homenaje a Ana Mendieta (1985Mendieta ( -1996, una serie de reconstrucciones de las performances de su predecesora presentadas con dos décadas de anterioridad a la presentación de Siete piezas fáciles (2005), el ciclo de "reperformances" de obras de artistas de performance ortodoxos presentado por Abramovic. Desde un principio, Bruguera comprendió el potencial que representaban las performances anteriores. Ambas artistas recurrieron a otros actores para que las sustituyeran en las muestras

Modern Art and Retromediated Histories: Pleasantville and Far From Heaven

The Past in Visual Culture: Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media, 2016

In the opening scene of Mona Lisa Smile (Mike Newell, 2003), Katherine Watson {Julia Roberts) gazes at a slide of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles dftvignon (1907), backlit by the light of dusk through her train car window. She, the "bohemian from California;' is en route to Wellesley to teach for the 1953-54 academic year. Katherine's first lecture is an unmitigated disaster. She begins her art history survey class with the Altamira cave painting Wounded Bison (12,000-11,000 BCE), only to discover that her students have already memorized the textbook. Shaken but undeterred, she invents a new syllabus structured by three questions: What is art? What makes it good or bad? And who decides? To provoke debate she shows Chaim Soutine's Carcass ofBeej(1925), an image that elicits disgust from her students. Her colleagues too become increasingly alarmed by her willful disregard for the approved curriculum and issue the directive: "A little less modern art, Ms. Watson:' During her performance review they challenge her doctoral thesis that "Picasso will do for the twentieth century what Michelangelo did for the Renaissance:' With deep incredulity they ask: "So, these canvasses that they're turning out these days with paint dripped and splotched on them, they're as worthy of our attention as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel?" Undaunted, she persists with her syllabus and ferries her reluctant class to see a new Jackson Pollock, a scene shot to instill as much awe in us as it does in them (Figure 1). Eventually, by exposing her students to radical artistic experiments, Katherine starts to get through to them, modernizing their perception of art and, in the process, their views on gender, sexuality and, to a minimal extent, 12 Modern Art and Mediated Histories (Sprengler) 13 Figure I. Mona Lisa Smile, Julia Roberts, 2003 (© Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection). class.