Visual Art

Visual Art

Throughout time, the representation of a particular subject matter in art has changed to encompass the values of the time and place or challenge them through art. An artist is influenced by society’s ideologies’ and thus either represents these ideologies’ or challenges them within their artwork, as well as being influenced by the events of that time. Modernist artist Pablo Picasso and contemporary performance artist Orlan are two artists in particular who truly embrace the time and place they live and create artworks representing the world around them. Picasso’s artwork ‘Le Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907) and Orlan’s artwork The Reincarnation of St Orlan (1990) are strong examples of the artist’s influence by time and place.
Pablo Picasso was a modernist artist of the cubist period, and his painting ‘Le Demoiselles d’Avignon’ in 1907 deconstructed the female figure into a fragmented form. His theme of the female figure being used for its beauty to create sexuality has been painted as an image of five females who represent prostitutes from Avignon Street. One of the women stands to the left pulling back a curtain, while the other four pose themselves as if they are on display for the male viewers, demonstrating their beauty and sexual lure. Two of the central figures assume a classical Venus pose (a reference to classically idealised beauty), though their forms are simplified and slightly distorted revealing only the most basic shape of the female form. Picasso has painted two of the women with crude ‘masks’ which appear shocking to the viewer and their beauty is “divested of all accretions of culture – without appeal to privacy, tenderness, gallantry, or that appreciation of beauty which presupposes detachment and distance” (Steinburg). Here, Picasso has chosen to represent ‘real’ women who have natural beauty, not idealised figures and has represented them in a way which leaves only the most simplified female figure. This is done in an effort to again...

Similar Essays