Lautrec's The Sofa

The artist depicts an initial confusing and weirded-out thought for the viewer at first glance, but as one deeply examines the art, the subject matter begins to become more clear. The vision being shared in this non-objective painting has a context of placing one in the standing of Mr. Man by gaining height and freedom from the (white) bars that are rising on each level that represent conflict which traps one in a “cage” of misery. The unbalanced symmetry of having the left side take up more space with little action, and the right side being smaller with the action unraveling, makes the viewer break down each composite perspective. For the left side, the mysterious female muse, Moon-Face, has an unproportional face that is almost blushing with shades of light pasty orange, with the mouth wide open. The energetic mood is amplified by the tone of yellow that is splashed in the mouth, representing a loss of words or at a state of disbelief. The female’s lower half is created with tints of red that enhances the curves on her body, as if chiaroscuro connects the light and dark contrast to show outline of the breasts, stomach, and hips in

Groseclose focuses on studying the artwork’s use of lighting and the identity of the subjects, their postures, and facial expressions. Also, she interprets the painting

To describe the artwork “Woman in a Purple Coat” by Henri Matisse, the viewer has to be open to expression. In the artwork there is a woman, wearing purple pointy shoes, green pants with white faded stripes, a V-shape white shirt with grey lines, a long purple coat with white stripes and four black strips at the front to button the coat, a pearl necklace and another yellow long necklace. She is sitting with confidence with open arms on a vibrant two tone one side yellow and other side green couch. Sitting on the couch in a corner with a yellow flower arrangement on a pink and white vase with some fruit on a table next to her on the right. There is a magazine laying on the floor on top of a gray rug with black stripes above a black square marble floor. It looks as if she was reading intensely before being interrupted. She has her right foot behind her left, confidently waiting to be interviewed. The walls contrast with each other giving light and darkness to the portrait. On one side the wall is black with gray flowers outlined in red. On the other side the wall is green with black curvy streaks with white outline joined together by a grey corner behind the women wearing dark lipstick confidently sitting on the couch.

The painting has human-like figures melting in sickly yellow-green piles. These figures are hanging off railings and tables, with one large pile gathered around a waitress serving drinks. The top third of the painting shows a man preparing drinks behind the bar as two patrons yell at him. This lends the painting a very bottom-heavy apperence. Both the waitress and the bartender are painted in a subdued yellow with exhausted looks on their faces. This painting is showing the audience that this group of people have spoiled each other and become a rotting mess of lewd behavior. That people who weren’t intoxicated wouldn’t be so rude and inappropriate to each other, the figures are pulling other’s shirts and vomiting on each other. However, the wait staff contrasts this, they are shown in almost heavenly way. The bartender is shown in a warmly lit background with bottles that are serene and beautiful looking. Especially when compared to the green figures on the floor, some of which are hanging on to the railing, trying to get to the bar. This could lead the audience to believe that bar and wait staff are considered pure in a room of melting men and

He creates a certain aspect of simplicity by not using too much detail of the line but just enough of it to make it interesting and capturing the viewers attention. Some of the very tiny work can be seen specifically in the male as line lines show the outline of the lips by creating the reddish pink line going up and down. By adding slight details to character Lautrec shows a dedication to how the face and person should be just by adding slight detail to face, but also by color and positioning of the person. Even though it is a 2-D piece he brings a 3-dimensional aspect as well though it more a cut out of people he positions them slight farther apart from others to give them distance from one another. There is only a slight value though to add to the dimension of man's leg peeking out of green jacket and curtains on the

Duchamp was receiving much notoriety, both good and bad after painting “Nude Descending a Staircase”. At this time, World War I was making Paris a rather uncomfortable home for him, so he

Even though some artists, as Berger claims, tried to resist this tradition, they couldn’t overcome the cultural tradition of female objectification that has continued to the present. These artists failed to create a different view in culture because of the media and how the perception wouldn’t change in the eyes of men. One famous artist who tried to resist this awful trend was an artist name Rubens. In his portrait of his second wife, the painting named Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat, he tried to portray the same message with a different image.The image is of a women with no other clothing other than a fur coat looking shameful. The middle-aged looking women in the painting was wearing a big brown fur coat. The difference between a regular “nude”

Marcel Duchamp’s work “nude descending a staircase” was most likely scandalous because it wasn’t recognizable as anything real. When people saw this painting, it was the form of a women, in rough shapes, repeated over and over, overlapping. Although the painting claimed to be something sane, many described it as “an explosion in a shingles factory”. Because of it’s rough and confusing nature, many did not understand, and thus did not like, the painting. Another reason people didn’t like it was because of how the painting didn’t create movement normally. The movement it created was through repetition of overlapping shapes. Because of the chaos this caused, people hated it, calling it ‘repellant’.

The painting is depicting Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. She is looking at herself in the mirror. The woman in the painting has very elegant feature. She has an even complexion and beautiful eyes. One side of her face is yellow which appears to be makeup with a greenish eye shadow and bright red blush. The other side of her face is a lavender color which is the same color as her arm, hands, breasts, stomach, and legs. The lavender side of the face does not have any makeup and is very smooth and blemish free. In the mirror her reflection she has darker purple complexion with added green and red on her face. There is a shadow on her face of the side of her head and neck. Her body is covered in light green lines that are all slanted downward. In the reflection both of her eyes are round and two different shades of red. One is a bright red and the other is a deeper red and they both look out of focus.

The figures can be identified as nude woman and men in a bright, vibrant, landscape scenery. Instead of painting a typical and most recognizable scene of a contemporary park, Matisse tests the boundaries with sensuality, vibrancy and expression. Many of Matisse’s works express sensuality, the curvature of the figures bodies, their nude and strewn about positions, depict serenity and a sense of true relaxation and paradise. The line and curvature of the figures bodies takes the viewer on a journey. The curving and sweeping of the arcs of each person’s back, out stretched arms, and further twisted bodies move the viewers eye all about the canvas, covering every

Though not actually titled Woman Lamenting Lazy Husband; the painting portrays a dead man on a bed, next to a woman and a child. The painting contains elements that are Neoclassical in nature. These elements are allusions to classical art, an urban environment, and rationally decorated decorum.

Capturing moments of them getting ready for the day, being with clients or being with their lovers is what Toulouse did the best. The viewer always feels as if they the paintings are like cracks in a door or looking through key holes, nothing is disturbed. Meaning the models are not painted to seem to know that they are, it is painted just like a moment. Putting this into the appropriate will not be hard as I am not changing major parts of the paintings. Hopefully the theme will still be prevalent in the appropriated piece. The messages Toulouse tried to communicate were that he painted in a true way. He did not cover up ‘imperfections’ and

Painted women were always proper and had feminine, accentuating attire. Always shown as submissive and docile, never anything else. In “The Story of an Hour” by

It is interesting because at first glance the painting seems to be promoting the objectification of women for the sake of male pleasure. However, Gerome’s paintings of the slave market scenes were the center of many controversies because they challenged the very persisting male dominated conventions of his time. It contaminated the hypocritical thinking that in art, we could view a woman’s body solely through a pure, aesthetic angle. Male artists during the nineteenth-century typically illustrated women as objects that wanted to be seen or consumed. However, these slave market scenes forced male viewers to confront the cruel and wicked nature that follows through with the objectifying of women.

Paintings within the traditions of the ideal nude present the female body as a work of nature and Woman as an eternal creature operating outside of concrete references to society and culture. Hence the nudity speaks a mystic language that easily legitimizes the male dominance and masks their hypocrisy. When women are not painted in this fashion, their luxurious toiletries can work in similar way to reduce her threat by delegating to her the task of being decorative next to her male companions. Whether fully exposed or sumptuously wrapped, her body is there to charm and to inspire the man. Baudelaire discovers the magic of clothing as an essential feature of modernity and claims that, Woman, when forming an "invisible unity" with her dress, performs the role of a stupid idol "dazzling and bewitching" that is no difference from the ideal nude in her lack of human emotions (Baudelaire 501-02). But in Woman with White Stockings, Courbet refuses to subject his woman figure to either of the conventions. The woman in the painting is not a display of physical harmony or the pure beauty because her nudity is incomplete. The stockings and the red shoe captures a curiously erotic yet undoubtedly commonplace moment of activity, and her performance of the action confers her with subjectivity that denies the objectification necessary for an unproblematic reading of the nude. Yet her concealing is also incomplete: there is no costume of the sort that Baudelaire admires to complement the "general harmony" in Woman. On the country, the stockings are meant to be in conflicts with her body. They are not an elegant envelope that adds "sparks to the fire" (Baudelaire 501), but rather exhibit an almost vulgar quality that, in her act of dressing and undressing, simultaneously belongs to and remains away from her. The iconography leaves Courbet's temporary viewers