50/50.
I wanted uncanny valley so I put my face on a picture of young Vincent Price.
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Definitely nailed the uncanny valley effect, I was unsure who it was for a little bit but eventually it just sort of came to me.
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Well, Halloween is over. Back to the standard Heisenberg.
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Oh yeah! Back to normal Gabriel too! Well, 20th anniversary Gabriel in honor of 47’s anniversary too.
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Back to the artists, this time it is Colour Field with another member of the New York School I was going to try and find someone who wasn’t American but it is late so I went with my (colour) field of expertise.
PH-950, 1950 - Clyfford Still
Known as one of the earliest of the Colour Field Painters and a pioneer relation of the New York School of abstract artists. Still was known for works like this, which were his attempt to create a style of art that expressed universality without having to commit to obvious visual signifiers, speaking to a point of time (a feat of “mammoth arrogance” in his words) or even the constraints of a physical canvas. As well as his very particular style of exhibiting his works and for his monumentally difficult personality.
Works in this period of untitled work (all of his works were untitled, he felt titling them would root them in an objective method of interpretation) utilised mostly yellows and blacks with layered and textured paints. Most art scholars infer that they represent a supreme battle between two forces trying to contain each other, a supreme light against an amorphous darkness.
On an unrelated not I just got done playing Alan Wake II and I can’t recommend it enough, my pick for game of the year hands down.
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Saut du Lapin - Amadeo de Souza Cardoso
Well I made it somewhat easier on myself this time when it comes to describing the life of the artist, Cardoso was a painter in what can only truly be described as a very broad and colourful rage of proto-Modernist styles. He was born in 1887 to a wealthy family of vintners in northern Portugal before he was sent off to pursue his dream of being an artist over time he knew such people as Gertrude Stein (American art collector, writer), Juan Gris (Spanish Cubist), Modigliani (Italian surrealist portrait artist), Alexander Archipenko (Ukrainian-American Cubist sculptor, Robert and Sonia Delaunay (French husbnd and wife, Oprhic Cubists), Constantin Brancusi (Modernist sculptor and Romania’s most famous artist), Otto Freundlich (German Modernist), Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni (Italian Futurists) and Teixeira de Pascoaes (Portuguese poet, nationalistic romanticism, Nobel laureate). He had a huge catalogue cut tragically short when he fell victim to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.
This work is rather more representational of a huge seismic shift in art that occurred five years before his death. Cardoso like may artists that belonged to Avant Guarde movements was picked to be in the International Exhibition of Modern Art also better known as the 1913 Armory Show.
The Armory Show and the Birth of Art
It is important to understand that prior to the Armory Show there was never an event like this in the United States before, this was the first showing of European modern art that had any sort of backing from the art world. In fact the Association of American Artists and Sculptors was born from he very people that organised this whole shebang.
It is also important to know that the American artistic landscape was dominated by two distinct styles at the time, technically three. First you had “Academic Painting” (overwrought paintings of gladiators, soldiers and Venuses basically) imported from university curricula in Europe. You also had the American Impressionists, basically the same as normal impressionists in Europe with a focus on landscapes and the genteel instead of the urban and the lower class. A rebel subsection of artists known as the Ashcan School arose combining Impressionist principles with social realist imagery but it was too little too late by then.
Essentially the Armory Show was supposed to usher in this broadening of horizons for American artists who were getting fed up with the stifling nature of art schools, indeed this much needed deterioration of the academy to artist pipeline was already underway in Europe. (Funny how the intellectualisation of art occurred outside of the actual academies of the world). The organisers picked the 69th Regimental Armory as the site of the show since they weren’t using it anymore but one problem hung in the way…
Buying modern European art was painfully expensive in America under the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909. European art of no more than 20 years was subject to sharp import duty to discourage a modern art market. The PA Tariff Act was all encompassing on a wide range of goods and services, art wasn’t singled out but it was a casualty of this act (as was the Republican Party, a lot of the modern Conservative institution that is the GOP begins here with the split Taft created when signing the act into law). However the regulations and import duty on art importation was lifted when the organisers enlisted art collector and lawyer John Quinn to argue for changes to the act before congress. Quinn was big on modern art, he left an extensive collection behind when he died most of it in a lot of American institutions including Matisse’s Blue Nude a centrepiece of the collection.
Over 1300 works of both art and sculpture both domestic and European were put on display encompassing a broad range of modern styles from Cubist, to ur-surrealist, Fauvists, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and the like.
So was the actual show a success? Yes but you wouldn’t think so from the reaction people had at the time. The art critics had the same reaction most normies have towards modern art now at best they had a sense of close-mindedness and an inability to engage with the art and at worst they were actively hostile to the art itself. Many of them laughed, there were a lot of parodies (especially of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, that painting was sold though and it now hands in Philadelphia Museum of Art) and even the president gave his (very negative) two cents. Several of the Ashcan artists had unflattering things to say (shows what they know, Modernism killed every one of their careers) as did Gutzon Borglum the sculptor behind the vaguely Fascistic tourist trap known as Mount Rushmore.
In the end this show wasn’t about art critics, it was about exposing Americans and American artists to a world beyond academic and European stylings. The legacy of the Armory Show is one of inspiration to the new generation of American artists from the Abstract Expressionists to the Colour Field artists and beyond. it redefined what art meant to many Americans.
All of those art critics are nameless and they weren’t even worth mentioning, the art they mocked sold gangbusters, several of those “demented, offensive and improper” artists made their name here like the Duchamps, and you can see their works in museums all over America today. The widely mocked Nude Descending a Stare Case now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Blue Nude in Baltimore and the Red Madras in the Barnes Foundation. Saut du Lapin is a part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s catalogue.
All of this over a picture of a fucking rabbit jumping.
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Years of Fear - Roberto Matta (1941)
Inscapes and Social Morphologies: The Political Dimensions of Roberto Matta
Born Roberto Antonio Sebastian Matta Echaurren, the artist who would later be known as Roberto Matta was born in Santiago, Chile in 1912. The son of Chilean father and a Spanish mother of Basque extraction in a well off family, Matta was extensively education in the arts by his mother and in practical manners by Jesuits.
Like most artists who had well off parents Matta begun training as an architect (usually a compromise between “getting a real job” and doing something creative., early on Matta revealed a talent at a combination of biomorphic* studies and creating spaces. His buildings had a very organic nature to them inspired by artist’s models he worked with but buildings that look like naked people didn’t fly with the various religious people who commissioned Matta for a non-denomination church. He quickly abandoned his privileged and conservative lifestyle and worked as a Merchant Marine until he got a job at the architectural firm of Le Corbusier in Paris.
During his time in Paris Matta cultivated a network of contacts from all over Europe and the Latin world initially making friends with several prominent such as Frederico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Gabrielle Mistral. Through his connections to Lorca, Matta met Surrealist painter, fascist and creep Salvador Dali who in turn introduced him to Andre Breton where he quickly became a member of the Surrealists it was here where Matta was exposed to automatism, a process where an artist allows themselves to unconsciously draw a work on a surface. Most of his automatist art was very organic in form based heavily off of bacteria, organic growth patterns and non-Euclidian geometry.
Around this time Matta was also contracted to do work on the World’s Fair pavilion for the 1937 World’s Fair where he was exposed to a variety of the sort of biomorphic art that would inform Matta’s own. None were more influential than Picasso’s Guernica, you may know Guernica not only is it a masterpiece of Surrealist Cubism but it was also highly political something most Surrealist art wasn’t but the idea of adding a political dimension to surrealist art was something that would return in the post-mature work by Matta.
For now he had to enter his mature phase which began in 1938 while he had moved to Brittany, France. This period was marked by a shift away from Automatist crayon drawings and towards a new series of oil paint works. Matta called these worlds “Inscapes” or later “Social Morphologies” his own way of illuminating a world unseen and shaped by his own unconscious view of the world, filled with highly abstracted realms, vast fields of colour and strange almost totemic figures struggling to resist mechanical forms, Years of Fear as you might have guessed from the title and year, this piece is rooted in Matta’s anxieties over WWII something he fled two years prior to painting this.
After his flight in 1939, Matta then settled in New York, his roots in modernism, his interest in automatism, the notion of an unconsciousness in art and his youth meant he quickly became a member of an inspiration to the New York School of artists (Abstract Expressionists basically: Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell (especially Motherwell who this was originally going to be about) and Rothko) amongst others) It is at this point where Matta re-examined his Inscapes rechristening them as Social Morphologies and gave them a broader political messaging on the horrors of war and the cost of technological progress as well as more defined figuration in his biomorphs.
Matta’s artistic life was smooth right up until one of his friends and fellow surrealist/AbEx painter Arshile Gorky committed suicide, Matta was blamed by most of the New York surrealists since he had an affair with Gorky’s estranged wife. Though some art historians contend this was merely an excuse, his public dismissal from the Surrealists by Andre Breton was over creative differences perhaps over the extremely overt political nature of his work or perhaps in the styling of his work it is still not really known. Either way Matta was a persona non gratta in America but it didn’t deter him if anything it made him more political.
The period over the 50s and 60s covering his travels around the world until his residence in his native Chile show that Matta was dedicated to riding the post-war wave of optimism that many had felt at the time tinged with themes relating to civil rights and science fiction his works also began having a stronger narrative styling to them. His period in Chile lasting until the overthrow of his biggest patron Salvadore Allende was marked by his attempts to prove that the arts can not only inform our way of life but serve as aspirational templates for it both his paintings and his writings were heavily rooted in the “America as a verb” style of Pan-Americanism and his personal desire to foster a Renaissance in Latin America, in 1970 he painted The First Goal of the Chilean People in celebration of Salvador Allende’s election. 1973 Augusto Piochet had it coated in 16 layers of paint and it had been lost until 2005 when it was uncovered and then restored.
The final stage of Matta’s career was defined by multi-modal expansion as he experimented with other mediums and forms of expressing his socially and personally conscientious artworks. His work took on more colour, softer forms simpler figures, a restored sense of optimism and even broader mythology inspired overtones to it, He created right up until his death in 2002 at the ripe old age of 91.
*Oh yeah Biomorph means a sort of figure that is represented in a nonfigurative and indistinct form, comes from one of Matta’s inspirations, Joan Miro. Miro would oftend display simplistic figures on abstract planes. These works are simpler than Matta’s works and lacked narrative content and political meanings bith however used them to express their inner minds eye.
Also can someone comment on here? Maybe suggest an artist I can do if you wanna take the opportunity.
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Profile picture thread? Nah, son, free modern art analysis and history by accidental kills
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Christmas ferret also I made a Halloween one in advance
I was bored so I made another one I think I will replace the old one with this one maybe
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A change to go with the season.
And before anybody tries to go off of recent discussions and jokingly tell me that this is not a Christmas hat, let me preemptively say that I already know that. 
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merry christmas, although i think my hat’s been chopped off (i’d love for Discourse to allow for zooming in/resizing when setting a profile picture, I’d rather not have to recapture the same image 10 times with different amounts of background)
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When in doubt, cut it into a square, imagine a circle in it and it will work out. 
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I’m Mister White Christmas, I’m Mister Snow…
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For the Christmas season, I’ve changed my profile pic to a nice Christmas drawing of Whisper from the IDW Sonic comics by IDW writer and artist Evan Stanley. I love her artwork, and she’s done alot of Christmas designs for the cast and is going to do a few more this year which will be lovely to see.
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Niiice.
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