What’s Modern Art?
New types of transportation, together with the railroad, the steam engine, and the subway, modified the way people lived, worked, and traveled, increasing their worldview and access to new ideas. As city centers prospered, workers flocked to cities for industrial jobs and city populations boomed. Before the 19th century, artists were most often commissioned to make artwork by wealthy patrons or institutions just like the church.
From Germany Kandinsky went to France, where he lived for the rest of his life. There he was also poor — so destitute, actually, that he couldn’t buy massive canvases. Hence most of his works from the French interval are small. He didn’t even all the time have oils.
This temper makes itself felt all over the place, SharonMundy.com politically, socially, and philosophically. We’re residing in what the Greeks referred to as the correct moment for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the basic principle and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is actually not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within who’s changing.
Realizing that there are other ways to approach and criticize artwork is important when trying to grasp abstraction. It is simple to understand a Van Gogh or a Rembrandt, because the mastery of method is visible. However, in order to appreciate abstraction, our focus should not be on how realistically the artist has painted something or somebody but quite on how profitable a bit is in evoking emotion.