Art Celebrity: Van Gogh's vision, Picasso's calculation...

The Celebrity in Art

In discussing Andy Warhol and the origins of art celebrity on Monday, we looked at art stars such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso and Pollock, exploring their individual contributions to art history and  how we remember them. Artists' works often serve as a lens through which we view the culture of their respective times. Michelangelo takes the forms of Greek sculpture and applies them to the human figure in painting, creating a colorful set of hulking figures to depict epic religious tales at the height of the Renaissance. Da Vinci becomes the embodiment of the tendency to merge visual arts and science, despite the fact that he existed in a large movement of Renaissance individuals who do just the same. Picasso and Pollock alike represent the largely male intellectual movement toward abstract expressionism, the exploration of perception as fluid and malleable.

Van Gogh's Perception

As we discussed in class, artists aligned with the abstract expressionist movement chose to view life through an alternate lens, distorting aspects of reality and challenging the meaning of the concept with respect to painting and other media. Picasso challenged such constructs through calculated alterations often seen in his cubist portraiture. Van Gogh depicted objects and scenes in life with a similar distortion, but one so consistent that it seemed almost natural to him. The contrast between Picasso's Rose Period paintings and his Cubist paintings, for example, show a clear and intentional shift in modes of representation. Like Van Gogh, contemporary artist Jessica Park displays a consistent representation of reality distant from the average still life. In describing a painting of Baxter Hall, Park points to four anomalies in the image, hollow pink discs with yellow rods through their centers: "the tiny light pillars come from the pupil of each eye." Although she explains it so simply in text, our discussion suggests that the light pillars do not come from each the pupil of each and every eye, but from hers in particular--Park, a high functioning autistic painter, has a view of the world that contrasts that of the general. Her depiction of the Potala Palace in Lhasa turns the austere, modestly colored exterior of the structure into just one shining neon piece of a cartoon landscape complete with four separate rainbows. Van Gogh's famous Starry Night shows the shapes of the buildings outside his French commune flowing into one another, a common theme in his works. Perhaps things always did swirl and flow into one another through Picasso's eyes. Impossible as it is to tell, perhaps this opaqueness of difference is an essential part of art celebrity.