“Modernism, Post-Modernism, Duchamp & Warhol”
Modernism has been defined as a style and theory of art from the period beginning around 1890 and ending in the 1940’s. For me Modernism means works that reflect the current era. Artists during this era expressed their freedom to create works of art that leaned toward fresh and innovative and not so traditional. They now included photography and everyday household items to provoke these thoughts and ideas. I agree with the definition of post-modernism of taking both contemporary and traditional ideas and blending them together with a mix of satire and humor. For example, Matt Groening transformed Dali’s The Persistence of Memory by using the melting heads of his cartoon family The Simpsons instead of Dali’s melting clocks. Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol were two artists that changed how the world would see traditional conceptual art.
Marcel Duchamp started the readymade movement of modernism. He took every day objects, changed them slightly and put them on display as works of art. For example, he took a urinal, put a title on it and called it a fountain. That alone really opened my eyes of what art can be. The fact that I could be inspired to take a toilet seat cover, put my name on it and call it a hat is pretty awesome. His art was more controversial where it questioned the nature of art itself. He has said “Art may be good or bad, or indifferent, but whatever the adjective, we must call it art and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion”. I’m sure there were a lot of questions like “Why a urinal?” or “Is that your urinal?”. I admire his way of being playful and funny because art isn’t suppose to be so serious, well unless it’s expressing victims of war or crime.
Andy Warhol took readymade a step further. He used silkscreens and photographs of pop culture icons like Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Campbell Soup cans added colors and put them on display. Where Duchamp used somewhat “boring” items, Warhol added fun to his items to make them more visually appealing. His reasoning for this was basically because he liked Marilyn and Jackie and he had soup for lunch everyday and his art was a demonstration of how these things in his life somewhat dominated him. His approach was to make people see a reflection of his personality. I think his audience was people who were rich and eccentric like he was.
In conclusion, every art movement is like a generation. There are artists in it that were influenced to a point by the artists of the previous generation and set out to make their art different from the next generation. Like Raphael of the Old Masters era to set the stage of traditional art for Cezanne, who used those images and created a new way of seeing them (i.e. cubism), and now we have Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol using items that are popular at the time to in fact remember the time.
Marcel Duchamp started the readymade movement of modernism. He took every day objects, changed them slightly and put them on display as works of art. For example, he took a urinal, put a title on it and called it a fountain. That alone really opened my eyes of what art can be. The fact that I could be inspired to take a toilet seat cover, put my name on it and call it a hat is pretty awesome. His art was more controversial where it questioned the nature of art itself. He has said “Art may be good or bad, or indifferent, but whatever the adjective, we must call it art and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion”. I’m sure there were a lot of questions like “Why a urinal?” or “Is that your urinal?”. I admire his way of being playful and funny because art isn’t suppose to be so serious, well unless it’s expressing victims of war or crime.
Andy Warhol took readymade a step further. He used silkscreens and photographs of pop culture icons like Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Campbell Soup cans added colors and put them on display. Where Duchamp used somewhat “boring” items, Warhol added fun to his items to make them more visually appealing. His reasoning for this was basically because he liked Marilyn and Jackie and he had soup for lunch everyday and his art was a demonstration of how these things in his life somewhat dominated him. His approach was to make people see a reflection of his personality. I think his audience was people who were rich and eccentric like he was.
In conclusion, every art movement is like a generation. There are artists in it that were influenced to a point by the artists of the previous generation and set out to make their art different from the next generation. Like Raphael of the Old Masters era to set the stage of traditional art for Cezanne, who used those images and created a new way of seeing them (i.e. cubism), and now we have Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol using items that are popular at the time to in fact remember the time.
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