Weeping Woman
Pablo Picasso was one of the most dominant and influential artists of the first half of the 20th century. He was born on 25 October 1881, in Malaga, Spain, and died on 8 April 1973, in Mougins, France. He established multiple movements including cubism. Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’ is a multilayered piece full of emotion and by far is one of his greatest works.
Picasso's insistence that we imagine ourselves in the excoriated face of this woman, into her dark eyes, was an element of his response to viewing newspaper photographs of the Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War on April 26, 1937. ‘The Weeping Woman’, 1937 came at the end of the series of paintings, prints, and drawings that Picasso made in protest. It has very personal, Spanish sources. In May 1937 Picasso's mother wrote to him from Barcelona that smoke from the burning city during the fighting made her eyes water. The Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Virgin, is a traditional image in Spanish art, often represented in lurid baroque sculptures with glass tears, like the very solid one that flows towards this woman's right ear. Picasso’s use of shape and color creates a generalization to the audience of a happy artwork, but the lifeless dull background and raw emotion of the women's face, describe much more. It makes the audience question the intention of the artist and what he was experiencing.
The Sorrows of the King
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of color and his flowing and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. He was born on 31 December 1869, in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, and died on 3 November 1954, in France.
Henri Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the 20th century and as a rival to Pablo Picasso in the significance of his innovations. The Sorrows of the King was Matisse's last self-portrait. Here Matisse depicts the themes of old age, of looking back towards earlier life ‘La vie antérieure’, the title of a poem by Baudelaire that Matisse had already illustrated and of music soothing all cares.
Matisse's Sorrow of the King is an influential piece from near the end of his life. Many critics consider this to be his most innovative period. Matisse was heavily influenced by art from other cultures. Having seen several exhibitions of Asian art, and having traveled to North Africa, he incorporated some of the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the angularity of African sculpture, and the flatness of Japanese prints into his style.
Fauve painters were the first to break with traditional methods of perception. Their spontaneous, often subjective response to nature was expressed in bold brushstrokes and high-keyed, vibrant colors used directly from the paint tube.
Matisse declared he wanted his art to be one 'of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter,' and this aspiration was an important influence on some, such as Clement Greenberg, who looked to art to provide shelter from the disorientation of the modern world.
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Essay on Matisse and Picasso.
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