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Michele Altebrando Gene Gort MDA 390 29 April 2014

The Changes in Realism Through Looking at Portraits Different techniques of perspectives and multiple methods of representing realism have an impressive history. Renaissance artists introduced the use of the linear perspective system that allowed a new way to organize images to make them appear more realistic. Different art movements throughout the times have created new ways of seeing and changes to representational styles. Every art movement is a reaction to the one before it. From Renaissance paintings all the way to digital art today, artists have gone through a series of techniques, styles, and new ways of looking to change perspective and constructions of realism. Also, portrait painting in general goes back a very long time in art history. Looking at particular portraits made throughout different art eras like the Renaissance, Cubism, Pop Art, and Photorealism, will all show the differences in styles throughout time. The portraits made during the Renaissance era were either commissioned by rich patrons to get pieces done of themselves or were commissioned by churches to be made of religious figures. Giotto di Bondone was an Italian painter from the PreRenaissance movement. He was one of the first artists to break away from traditions and to start creating pieces that were more realistic. The styles before him, for example,

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Byzantine Art, was typically very flat with a more symbolic approach. The figures were not as naturalistic and even appeared to be abstract. Giotto’s style was somewhat different than the earlier styles and created a transition into the Renaissance. Giotto shows a view from the Early Renaissance throughout his painting. He was more daring and started a new and more realistic way of painting that moved toward a clear sense of space (Artble). The altarpiece Virgin and Child Enthroned (figure 1), by Giotto was made in 1305. Giotto shows the knees of the Madonna coming towards the viewer; he did this by using light to emphasize the notion of the shape of the knee. The shadow and highlights help to show that space in which the drapery falls, which helps it look more realistic. This technique is known as chiaroscuro. The angels are placed behind and in front of one another, surrounding the Madonna. This is important because they are not stacked on top of one another which creates more naturalism. The sense of space in the painting was very proportional because the angels are side by side, and the diagonals create a more in depth look. Diagonals help lead the viewer’s eye through the painting. Giotto’s paintings worked as a kind of transition into the Renaissance paintings. The Madonna in Giotto’s painting has more volume, more femininity, better sense of space and good use of diagonals. The art world was able to shift from the more classical styles into modern art because of innovative artists of the times. Modern Art started around the time the Impressionism era began. These artists would violate the “rules” set from the movement before them and create paintings in a new style. This new style was to leave evidence of brush strokes and leave some of the intense formal qualities be-

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hind. These paintings were meant to have a feeling, instead of the priority of how realistic they looked. To reiterate, there is always a reaction to every art movement. Impressionism is what allowed Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism to occur. All of these movements had their own styles and modified their priorities of true realism and perspectives. Realism is not always the prime concern. Some art is all about feelings and emotions and some art is all about the disconnection and objectiveness (“Art Periods”). To proceed from Renaissance paintings into the new avant grade styles, it is crucial to discuss Pablo Picasso. His works challenged new ways of looking. He did not follow anything that any other artists of the time have done before. The Westerners had a set of values and qualities that make up the “Western Tradition.” Picasso would play with these qualities and push the set values of the Western World. Picasso knew he had a big audience and that people would have strong reactions to his work. Even if someone did not know who Picasso was, they could easily be affected by his art work because everyone around them would be. Sometimes, art work, a piece of music, or literature can not be fully appreciated at the time it was written or created. The public might not have been able to grasp how much Picasso sincerely was affecting the art world. There are even new discoveries made today from some of Picasso’s pieces. Other artists may have been afraid to go where Picasso went during this time. Yet with his strong attitudes, radical and daring views, he was not afraid to go against the mainstream opinions of the world (Gardner).

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Most of Pablo Picasso’s works are known for their new techniques. Throughout his career, Picasso changed the art world and the Western Culture forever. Picasso became one of the first artist to use elements from African American art in his paintings and this was something the Western World has never seen before. The act of using someone else’s culture outside of their own for inspiration was known as primitive art. Picasso used this approach even though it conflicted with the ideal Western Culture ideology. The Western World believed themselves to be superior from basically all of the other cultures (Stokstad 1021). Pablo Picasso worked with many other fellow modern artists throughout his career. He, along with Georges Braque, are accredited for Cubism. Braque and Picasso had a very close working relationship. In the words of Braque, “We were like two mountain climbers roped together” (Stokstad 1024). Some of their pieces are even hard to distinguish from each other. Their paintings from 1909 through early 1912 became what to be known as Analytical Cubism. Analytical Cubism is described as “the way artists broke objects into parts as if to analyze them” (Stokstad 1025). The components of the objects within in a painting are broken up and rearranged throughout the composition. The way a viewer looks at these works mimics the actual process of perception. In the words of Picasso, there is no such thing as complete and total abstraction in art because “you have to start somewhere” (Stokstad 1025). One of Picasso’s paintings titled, Ma Jolie, (figure 2) made in 1911 is a great example of analytical cubism. This painting, translated to My Pretty One is in fact a portrait. Picasso has constructed and abstracted the figure in such a way that challenges

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the viewer to see the actual subject of a woman. The noticeable commodities of this painting are the woman’s shoulders, parts of her head, a hand, a foot, and the certain curve to her body. The tension of order and disorder is also present in this painting. The order within the painting is the harsh straight vertical and horizontal lines. The obvious disorder is the textured colors, and the random patterning of the subject’s body. Easily interpreted as a chaotic and random composition, Ma Jolie is in fact a very sophisticated and organized piece. In simplest terms, “The aesthetic satisfaction of such a work depends on the way chaos seem to resolve itself into order” (Stokstad 1017). The art movements constantly shift from trying to achieve that perfect realism and then having a declination to that. Artists would either accept the new techniques or reject them. The technological development of photography made it easy for transitions to occur. There has always been a language created through oil paintings and it had many historical references and cultural lessons. Oil Paintings were not only a medium, but a style in themselves. More significantly, color photography altered the reproductions of objects that paintings were just not accomplish. Photography contributed to the publicity within the world of art and the imagery it represented. Publicity is described as always being about the future buyer. The publicity is about the social relations between the people, not purely just about the objects (Berger 140-142). The Pop Art movement used the notion of glamour as a function that created publicity to still be relevant. Glamour can only exist with personal and widespread envy and the power it held was the supposed happiness the public would receive. This was Andy Warhol’s strategy when he created these images of the representation of Marilyn Monroe (Berger 147-148).

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Like most of the pieces during the Pop Art era, Andy Warhol’s portraits were flattened by his use of vibrant colors. Marilyn Diptych (figure 3) is one of the most iconic images in history. This piece is a silkscreen painting made in 1962, right after the death of Marilyn Monroe. It contains a total of fifty repeated pictures of Marilyn, twenty-five pictures on the left and twenty-five pictures on the right. The left side is made up of bright colors whereas the right side is in black and white. This was meant to demonstrate the comparison of Marilyn Monroe’s life versus her death. The colored Marilyn shows the lively celebrity that America fell in love with. Andy Warhol is playing with the obsession of celebrity at the time in the United States. The image of her is repeated numerously to portray her presence in media so often during her lifetime. The right side shows her fading and becoming less clear. The first column of Marilyn on the right panel is clear but as it moves to the right, she almost disappears. This was meant to portray her death and how she ‘faded away.’ It is important to note that Andy Warhol used this particular picture of Marilyn to articulate this as an image of Marilyn the star and celebrity, not for the person she really was (Sturken 41). This piece also comments on the changes in technology of the time. The repetition of the one image of Marilyn represents the ability to now reproduce multiples of almost anything. The Pop Art Movement was a part of the Contemporary Art world. Modern and Post-Modern art are both predecessors of the Contemporary Art movement. With each important artist and each significant movement, the transition from Renaissance Art to Digital Art becomes easier to understand and identify.

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As time moves closer into the digital world, Chuck Close used a different method than Andy Warhol. Although still using the painting medium, Close used actual photographs he shot to create his painting. Close used the photo-realistic style by making a grid for his images to get an exact and accurate portrayal. Chuck Close’s Big Self Portrait (figure 4) was made with acrylic on canvas in 1967. His paintings were at a very large scale and were bigger than life. His method was to use a very minimal amount of black paint and by using an airbrush. He would paint one square at a time of the grid to get a close rendering to the actual photograph. Photorealism was a movement that began in the 1960s that grew from the Pop Art movement and Minimalism movement. The artists working in this style all had photography as their inspiration. This new technique created an illusionism and the work appeared to be hyper realistic. Their goal was the reproduce what the camera could record (Wainwright). This created a link between the representation of painting and photography. These portraits looked like actual photographs at first glance. Close used formal visual elements in his portrait to show texture, volume, shadows and highlights. Chuck Close’s later paintings use the same format with a more abstract approach. He still uses the grid but he paints with the effect of pixilation. This association to digital photography is ironic because it almost brings the art movement full circle. Chuck Close created a painting that was meant to look like a digital image (Sturken 220). There were many developments in the 20th and 21st century that led the way for New Media art to emerge. These were all steps into a direction away from the classic paintings. Technological advances like photography, film and video, and digital are all

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new materials that were evidently changing the art world. New Media art is more conceptual in nature than other art forms that uses media technologies and is a progression of traditional art. New Media art is more idea based rather than material based. For example, it is based on political statements, new cultural forms, and touched upon new twists to pop culture. New Media art was able to function through new technological developments like the internet, video games, surveillance cameras, computers, phones, and video art. These all functioned as a cultural shift and centered for many new media art projects (Rush). The impact of techniques of perspective had on the Renaissance era is just as significant as the impact of computers and digital media had on the realm of visual culture. The ideas of the value of a copy and its authenticity comes into play when talking about the reproductions in the art world. There is no original for digital images since any copy would be exactly the same in value and quality (Sturken 199). The digital world is not something that is seen everyday, it is far from natural. The virtual space is simulated images that construct a reality of the real world. There are multiple perspectives happening at once and that gives a sense of uncertainty since there is no measurable space (Sturken 181). A prime example of a current digital art work is Irrational Geometrics (figure 5) by the French artist, Pascal Dombis. Although started in 2008, Dombis is still working with this series today. He uses computers and algorithms to produce repetitions of simple geometric compositions. This series reflects on the paradox of control and chaos in digital writings. There is an order to the visual forms but there is also an unpredictable and

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dynamic element to the forms that are created. There are multiple technological processes that he uses. Most of them are viewed in an installation setting to confront the human viewer directly. Again, his work is a step away from realism, he created an artificial world. Dombis main motive is to create a “mental space.” It is important to realize that he uses these technologies as tools and nothing more. He could not reach the complexity he wants without them. In an interview, Pascal Dombis states that “Maybe there is also something to reinvent or to create by choosing to work with other tools than a brush or canvas…” (Dombis). Although many art movements overlap, there is a suggestion of an existing timeline. Concepts and theories of realism and perspectives are constantly adjusting and adapting to agree with the artists of that time. Visual culture and the ways of seeing are crucial to understanding these conjectures of the forever changing art world. Art is not an absolute thing, art is always proposing new questions, always improving, and always being built upon. Realism of portraits is only just one way of discussing these theories throughout the art movements. Each art movement could not exist without the one that existed before it. Artists have to be willing to go against the set rules and make crucial changes in order to refine their practice. Art is everywhere in every aspect of daily life and each art movement helps create a new way of seeing it.

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Works Cited

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"Art Periods." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Apr. 2014. Web. 26 Apr. 2014. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1973. Print. Gardner, J. (1987, Picasso's motif. Commentary, 83, 56-56. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/195859726?accountid=11308 "Giotto Di Bondone." Artble: The Home of Passionate Art Lovers. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Apr.

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"Pascal Dombis." Pascal Dombis. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2014. Rush, Michael, and Michael Rush. New Media in Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Print. Stokstad, Marilyn, Michael Watt. Cothren, and Frederick M. Asher. "Modern Art in Europe and the Americas, 1900-1950." Art History. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011. 1016-027. Print. Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford ; New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Wainwright, Lisa S. "Photo-realism (art)." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.