Portrait Fantasy of Ona Munson
The artist is named Eugene Berman, an American but born in 1899. Eugene fled the Russian revolution in 1918. His work is characterized by lonely landscapes featuring sculptural and architectural elements, often ruins, rendered in a neo-classical rather than contemporary manner. Berman left for New York where he worked briefly and then lived in Los Angeles in the 1940s. In America he worked as a stage designer for ballet and opera. Then moved to Rome where he continued to paint until his death in 1972. The painting consists of oil paints, a lot of dark colors like dark blue, green, dark green with yellow, some red with a hint of white and sky blue. It has a classical line which both expressive and analytic. The subject matter is a woman that I believed is named Ona Munson and that she looks as she’s displeased with the environment that surrounds her. Looking like a bartender that is frustrated with fire around her head. She has this look of annoyance on her face as she pulls her dress off her shoulders to attract men to buy a drink. The bar, as seen through her eyes, has rotten wooden boards, broken pieces of wood, a man’s cape looking old with some holes, but the counter has wood that is in good condition. The painting is balanced slightly because the bottom half is dark colors with red on the cape and the top half has light colors but with the same color red around the woman’s hair. The sky blue background looks like her escape from her life. Or this can all be seen through Berman’s eyes. He saw a woman that was pique with her current status. Berman used the 4 traditional roles by painting this woman and revealing how she really feels and the hidden truth about how she sees the world around her. The value shifts from dark to light starting from the bottom. Some of the key concepts are Ona’s face, that lets the viewer know that something is wrong. The dark blue and red cape that seem to belong to a man and what seems like fire...