Featured Pairings
> Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Liseuse - 1877
> Roy Lichtenstein: The Kiss - 1962
Renoir’s La Liseuse (1877) and Lichtenstein’s The Kiss (1962) are one of the featured pairings. Each focuses on a woman, one having an independent, quiet moment in a private setting; the other in a “larger than life” embrace with a handsome airplane pilot. Both paintings are voyeuristic, with La Liseuse clearly set in reality – the details of her dress and environment carefully rendered – while The Kiss conveys wishful fantasy. The two works also share compositional tactics; the figures in the center of the canvas, held in place largely by the division of their respective backgrounds of darker and lighter sections. Finally, they share similar color relationships.
> Paul Gauguin: Maternité [II] - 1899
> Kenji Yanobe: Atom Suit: Project: Desert 1 - 1998
Both depict strange figures in unworldly settings — three wary native women in the Gauguin painting look at us skeptically from their lower vantage point in front of swirling patterns of exotic color, defining nothing recognizable.
In the Yanobe piece, two people in yellow space suits climb a steep hill composed of strange red material that rises from an equally perplexing landscape of swirling waters and arid soil in the distance.
In both, we are looking down on the scenes, which make us appear superior or dominant. Neither scene has a horizon line, which makes each slightly disorientating, a sensation that is enhanced by the patterns of the background landscapes in each and by the tilted camera position that Yanobe employs.
The meaning of both pictures is difficult to decipher. Why do two of Gauguin’s women stare at us so skeptically? What is their relationship to each other and to the mother nursing a baby? In the Yanobe, why are the men in space suits and what are they doing in this lunar-like environment?
Is it a gag, or something serious? The disjuncture between the figures in both works and their landscape settings suggest a strained relationship between the human and the natural, but without further information, little more can be said; it is a mystery that both artists clearly wanted to maintain for dramatic effect.
> Jan Brueghel the Younger: The Five Senses: Sight - 1625
> Georges Seurat: Les Poseuses - 1888
> Pablo Picasso: Quatre Baigneuses - 1921
All three paintings give a prominent role to female nudes; two of them depict nudes in studios, a third in an imaginary landscape. All three scenes vacillate between the observed and the imagined, the world of art and the physical world of the artist’s own day. All of the nudes recall classical prototypes, but only Picasso’s have Mediterranean roots. The others are more localized in 19th-century Paris and 17th-century Flanders.
All three suggest the importance of personal freedom and the centrality of artistic inspiration, evident from the unabashed nakedness of the females in each image and the central roles the females play. All three stress the significance of the act of looking, evident in the Brueghel from the number of paintings in the space, in the Seurat, from the art in the background and the models posing for the painter and by extension for us, and in the Picasso from the actual size of the work, which forces us to come close to it and examine it like one would a miniature.
All three are painted quite differently, although Seurat’s stands out as unique. Its multiple colors, meticulously set down with tiny touches of a small, tight brush, lend the image an energy and an edge that is not present in the smooth surface of Brueghel’s equally controlled image and Picasso’s restrained reverie.
While all three paintings can be read on several levels, the Seurat remains particularly enigmatic. Has he depicted a single woman undressing, posing, and redressing, or are there really three models in the studio? What is their relationship to each other and to the painter?
Why do they have no affect? Why are they posed against a work by the artist (Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte of 1884-86), which is set out of doors and filled with clothed figures enjoying a variety of leisure activities? What are the works of art on the wall on the right? And why does Seurat paint the edges of the canvas as if it were a frame and then the frame itself?
> Pierre-Auguste Renoir: La Liseuse - 1877
> Roy Lichtenstein: The Kiss - 1962
Renoir’s La Liseuse (1877) and Lichtenstein’s The Kiss (1962) are one of the featured pairings. Each focuses on a woman, one having an independent, quiet moment in a private setting; the other in a “larger than life” embrace with a handsome airplane pilot. Both paintings are voyeuristic, with La Liseuse clearly set in reality – the details of her dress and environment carefully rendered – while The Kiss conveys wishful fantasy. The two works also share compositional tactics; the figures in the center of the canvas, held in place largely by the division of their respective backgrounds of darker and lighter sections. Finally, they share similar color relationships.
> Paul Gauguin: Maternité [II] - 1899
> Kenji Yanobe: Atom Suit: Project: Desert 1 - 1998
Both depict strange figures in unworldly settings — three wary native women in the Gauguin painting look at us skeptically from their lower vantage point in front of swirling patterns of exotic color, defining nothing recognizable.
In the Yanobe piece, two people in yellow space suits climb a steep hill composed of strange red material that rises from an equally perplexing landscape of swirling waters and arid soil in the distance.
In both, we are looking down on the scenes, which make us appear superior or dominant. Neither scene has a horizon line, which makes each slightly disorientating, a sensation that is enhanced by the patterns of the background landscapes in each and by the tilted camera position that Yanobe employs.
The meaning of both pictures is difficult to decipher. Why do two of Gauguin’s women stare at us so skeptically? What is their relationship to each other and to the mother nursing a baby? In the Yanobe, why are the men in space suits and what are they doing in this lunar-like environment?
Is it a gag, or something serious? The disjuncture between the figures in both works and their landscape settings suggest a strained relationship between the human and the natural, but without further information, little more can be said; it is a mystery that both artists clearly wanted to maintain for dramatic effect.
> Jan Brueghel the Younger: The Five Senses: Sight - 1625
> Georges Seurat: Les Poseuses - 1888
> Pablo Picasso: Quatre Baigneuses - 1921
All three paintings give a prominent role to female nudes; two of them depict nudes in studios, a third in an imaginary landscape. All three scenes vacillate between the observed and the imagined, the world of art and the physical world of the artist’s own day. All of the nudes recall classical prototypes, but only Picasso’s have Mediterranean roots. The others are more localized in 19th-century Paris and 17th-century Flanders.
All three suggest the importance of personal freedom and the centrality of artistic inspiration, evident from the unabashed nakedness of the females in each image and the central roles the females play. All three stress the significance of the act of looking, evident in the Brueghel from the number of paintings in the space, in the Seurat, from the art in the background and the models posing for the painter and by extension for us, and in the Picasso from the actual size of the work, which forces us to come close to it and examine it like one would a miniature.
All three are painted quite differently, although Seurat’s stands out as unique. Its multiple colors, meticulously set down with tiny touches of a small, tight brush, lend the image an energy and an edge that is not present in the smooth surface of Brueghel’s equally controlled image and Picasso’s restrained reverie.
While all three paintings can be read on several levels, the Seurat remains particularly enigmatic. Has he depicted a single woman undressing, posing, and redressing, or are there really three models in the studio? What is their relationship to each other and to the painter?
Why do they have no affect? Why are they posed against a work by the artist (Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte of 1884-86), which is set out of doors and filled with clothed figures enjoying a variety of leisure activities? What are the works of art on the wall on the right? And why does Seurat paint the edges of the canvas as if it were a frame and then the frame itself?