British Museum: African Art

I managed to visit the British Museum over the weekend, visiting the African Art and Picasso prints exhibitions. They were both worthy of the time, which much to recommend them.

Kandinsky (Continued)

I has taken a while, but I’ve made it to the end of Kandinsky’s Concerning the spiritual in Art, mentioned in my previous post. I’d (more or less) made it through his writing on the general aesthetic at the end of the last post. I’ll pick up Part II (About Painting) now.

Exhibition: XPO Picasso

Exhibition

We were in Bruges and ran into a Picasso exhibition. It’s a very interesting exhibition of 300+ of his pieces. Many were from Sketchbooks. One sequence, for example, was a number of drawings done about the same model. I’d speculate from the same sitting. There was quite a variation in style and approach across them, giving an idea of how Picasso approached his work.

Realism and Art

I was recently viewing the work of Jon Hul. He produces pieces of work that are so detailed that they are, in effect, indistinguishable from photographs. Given that, however, can this be considered more valuable than the photograph it was presumably copied from? The artist in question has spent years perfecting his skills to produce such an image. This level of realism, however, could have been produced in a much simpler fashion – by printing the photograph.

Kandinsky and Spirituality in Art

I have been reading a paper copy [1] of this work on my tutor’s recommendation, and it is readily available online in electronic form [2]. Although not an easy read it has definitely provided me with a lot of food for thought on aspects of art which I haven’t previously considered. Kandinsky was a prolific artist who lived and worked at the back end of the 19th and early 20th century. This work is a paper that presents his “theory of art” at a point in time. The following outlines my thoughts on the different parts of the work.

Reflection: Abstract Expressionism

So what have a learnt after my visit?

Royal Academy: Abstract Expressionism

After my previous consideration of Jackson Pollock then a major Abstract Expressionism seemed to be an opportunity that I shouldn’t skip. There is a lot of work here, much of it by Jackson Pollock – including some of his most famous pieces. This was an opportunity to really try to engage with the concepts.