Sunday, 15 June 2014

Paintings Of Mary Cassatt And Andrew Wyeth

By Darren Hartley


Mary Cassatt paintings were products of the Impressionist movement in the later part of the 1800s. They were the outcome of a study of the works of the old masters of Europe. Mary left for Paris in 1866 and began her private art lessons in the Louvre.

Despite their conservative and tasteful backgrounds, artistic Mary Cassatt paintings are declarations of modernity and demonstrations of her rejection of several traditional artistic conventions. By giving inanimate objects equal importance with her figures, Mary denies the usual compositional primacy given to human forms.

Later on, Mary Cassatt paintings became artistic experimentations with its bright colors and unflattering accuracy of its subjects. They became famous for their portraits of women in everyday domestic settings, particularly of mothers with their children. They were unconventional in their direct and honest nature, in contrast to the Madonnas and cherubs of the Renaissance.

Andrew Wyeth paintings go against the grain, except for the early watercolors in Maine, which Andrew dismissed as being part of his blue sky period. They are an epoch of art history devoted to the abstract and the visually obtuse.

Andrew has always painted for himself and this is clearly evident in his Andrew Wyeth paintings. His brilliant Garret Room, showing the sleeping old black man Tom Clark, was produced in an impulse from the memory of a four year old Andrew, feeling anticipation and trepidation, in the middle of a Christmas night, with a stocking on his bed, containing a skinny doll stuck on its neck.

Andrew Wyeth paintings were occasional endeavors of sharing with the world, the underlying emotional and spiritual impulses felt by Andrew. They showed a romantic nature to their realism. Andrew has always considered free, dreamlike and romantic associations are vital parts of the creative process. These qualities of his work guarantees their being remembered indelibly, if not fondly.




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