Video Reviews of Art Movements

Explain why you selected each of the FOUR videos you choose from the selected listed above.

-          I selected the following videos because I seemed more interested and I wanted to learn more. I chose the video Matisse and Picasso because I knew about each of the painters but I wanted to know why they would be featured together. I chose the video Dada and Surrealism because I have always been intrigued with Surrealism so any video that had that word in it must be interesting. For the video, Expressionism, I chose it because I had a feeling that Edvard Munch would be featured in there so it was worth a shot to check out. I wanted to pick a style of art that I didn’t know really anything about, so I chose the video The Impact of Cubism and I was excited to see what that it had in store for me.
 

For each video list / discuss the key concepts you learned.

-          While watching the video Matisse and Picasso, I was very surprised while I was viewing it. I learned that both men had a very unusual relationship. At one point in the video the narrator says that Picasso is Matisse’s brother in anguish. Both these men reflected each other because their muses were women; these women were sleeping or naked. Their style of painting is what kept them different.
-          In the Dada and Surrealism video I learned that there were six major artists that led this revolution in art. Kurt Schwitters started out as a still life artist but after making collages he never looked back, this new way opened his mind to use all types of media. Hanna Höch was part of the Dada movement and her artwork, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, was more like a history lesson then it was art. George Grosz was always mad and had a bitter sense of humor when he poked fun of his enemies in his painting, Pillar of Society. Joan Miró made a parody painting of a 17^th century Dutch painting; he wanted it to take on a whole new meaning of its own. Salvador Dali was a master of psychological suspense and I learned that he had this weird obsession with crutches that he used in many of his paintings. The last artist that I learned about in this video was Man Ray. I found out that he published a picture of a sewing machine and a umbrella.
-          In the video Expressionism it focuses on the life and works of five different artists. Edvard Munch had horrible experiences as a child that stayed with him all his life and then he ended up having a mental breakdown because of it. Franz Marc thought that animals were more beautiful than people so in his painting, The Tiger, he wanted to focus on the animal and its features. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was another artist that had mental problems and he as well had a nervous breakdown because of it. Max Beckmann had one style of painting but after the First World War, that style had changed. And the last artist of the video I learned about was Georg Baselitz, he was an artist that added brutality and anxiety into his paintings, and I that intrigued me.
-          In the video The Impact of Cubism I learned it focused on the life and works of six different artists. The first artist was Juan Gris, who wanted to take abstract shapes and planes and end it with a situation we know from everyday life. The second artist was Marcel Duchamp, he made the painting Sad Young Man on a Train, he said that it was a self-portrait, but some people questioned that. Next was Robert Delaunay who depicted the Eiffel Tower in different ways. The next artist in the video was Sonia Delaunay, who wore a dress that matched her painting, Electric Prisms. Another artist was Kazmir Malevich that made the painting, An Englishman in Moscow, when I looked at this painting in the video I got lost viewing it and that was his intention, for the viewer to feel like the Englishman felt…lost. The last artist was Umberto Boccini who made a very complex painting visually, The Departure, and the viewer does not know where to look first when seeing it.

  How do the videos relate to the readings in the text?

-          The videos relate to the readings in the text because the text talks about all of the modern types of art. Even though the text just touches on the types of art it still gets to the point when talking about the concepts. With the video being added after reading the text you can get a better understanding of the concepts.

What is your opinion of the films? How do they add depth to understanding of the readings and art concepts?

-          Even though the videos were very long, these videos had to be to talk about the important figures of each movement. After watching these videos I was better able to understand the readings because the videos added the detail I needed for the concepts.