Art Papers: Art Essay Help, Art Research Paper Tips and Art Term Paper Guide

David Hockney is an English painter/photographer (the most highly publicized British artist since the Second World War) who has moved over to the United States of American (California) to live and work. He started off as a well-known painter in his earlier years but is now concentrating more on his photography work than his painting.

His phenomenal success has been based not only on the flair, wit, and versatility of his work, but also on his colourful personality, which has made him a recognizable figure even to people not particularly interested in art: a film about him entitled A Bigger Splash enjoyed considerable popularity in the commercial cinema. Read more…

Femininity, masculinity and, indeed, queer theory have, for years, been based on the essentialist binary opposites of male and female inherent in modernism. In today’s ‘Postmodernist’ world these gender definitions are increasingly under attack by feminist theory, gay studies and queer theory. Women are confronting issues of gendered oppression, men are confronting issues of sexism and homophobia, everyone is searching for ‘self’.

It is my intention in this essay to concentrate on feminist art, in particular, the art of Judy Chicago and Annie Sprinkle.

Feminist thinking today is influenced by the theories of postmodernism, in particular, that of the rejection of a social structure based on bi-polar gender stereotypes rooted in biology with a strong leaning towards patriarchy.

It must be understood that feminism is not one thing; it’s a catch-all description of a range of issues, theories and behavioural patterns. Feminism is also split into two main camps: The radical/political which claims equal rights with men on the basis that women are equal and can do anything men can do, given the chance, and a kind of spiritual/earth mother approach which claims that women are different from, and better than, men because they are life givers and in touch with the natural. Read more…

Henry Moore’s sculptures were most commonly very simple solid images. Many were of women, perhaps to celebrate their role in society and show their strength. Moore’s mother was a strong woman and it is apparent through his work that he viewed women as the crux of the family. The women depicted in his sculptures are sturdy and heavy looking which confirms this. One sculpture which displays this quality of his work is his Seated and Draped Figure crafted in bronze which depicts an exaggeratedly broad woman positioned as the name of the sculpture suggests.

Moore looked at the female figure as a landscape and it is possible to see the similarities between the rolling lines of the figures in his sculptures and the moors where he grew up. Read more…

Cubism is an early twentieth century school of painting and sculpture in which the subject matter is portrayed by geometrical forms without realistic detail. That makes it mystic and difficult to analyze and define their ambiguous meaning. During that period, Jacques Riviere is one of a few cubism critics who profoundly know and understand cubism. Especially, he is able to interpret it in words which are easily comprehensible to the other. He does not only conveys the cubists’ concepts but the mistakes of their works as well.

The essence of the cubists is to portray what objects really are instead of images which normal people see. Consequently, the images look distort from the original shape. Riviere analyzes the cubism transformation concepts in two functions including eliminating lighting and perspective. The cubists replace all these qualities by plastic values. They believe that lighting effects change the true senses of things. They reject the concept and nature of lighting and substitute to the equal and subtle distribution. The shade that normally place on some parts of object, are dispensed into a small portion to every part of object by placing it near the edge of surface, in order to divide and mark successive inclination of the parts of object. Read more…

Bertolt Brecht has been hailed as one of the pioneers of 20th century theatre. Through his didactic styles and revolutionary theories on teaching the audience instead of just entertaining them, Brecht managed to alter the general face of modern theatre and style of playwriting through many of his works such as his 1939 epic “Mother Courage and Her Children”. Using such techniques as alienation and historification, he presented his plays without any sense of dramatic lighting or effects, as well as trying to remove any sense of suspense from the audience. Brecht also promoted the use of Epic Structure, a way of narrating a play in which song, dance, and projected photos and music would assist regular speech.

Epic Structure is noted particularly in “Mother Courage and Her Children”. Each scene opens with a projected message on the stage, which is a synopsis of the coming scene. Some scenes are quite distant in terms of time setting; many years in some cases, furthering the Read more…