Saturday, May 10, 2014

Frida Kahlo And Degas Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Frida Kahlo paintings are best remembered for their pain and passion and their intense, vibrant colors. They are celebrated as emblematic of national and indigenous tradition by the Mexicans and for their uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form by feminists.

Categorized as Naive art or folk art, vibrant Frida Kahlo paintings feature Mexican culture and Amerindian cultural tradition prominently. They are also described as surrealist. In 1938, Frida was described as being a ribbon around a bomb by a bonafide surrealist artist.

The lifelong health problems of Frida are reflected in her works. Half of the Frida Kahlo paintings are self portraits of one sort or another. Because she is often alone and because she is one subject she knows best, Frida prefers to feature herself in her paintings. According to Frida, she was born a bitch and a painter.

While Degas paintings received the label of being impressionistic in style, Edgar Degas insist that he is either a realist or independent. The fleeting moments in the flow of modern life is what Edgar wants to capture in his work.

Because Edgar had very little energy for painting plein air landscapes, Degas paintings frequently depicted theatre and cafe scenes illuminated in artificial light. In complete adherence to his academic training, Edgar used this light in the clarification of the contours of his figures.

In recognition oh his son's artistic gifts, Edgar's father took him frequently to Paris museums as a way of encouraging his efforts at drawing. This resulted to early Degas paintings being copies of Italian renaissance paintings at the Louvre.

Edgar's training in the traditional academic style started in the studio of Louis Lamothe, with emphasis on line and insistence on the crucial importance of draftsmanship. Degas paintings were also strongly influenced by paintings and frescoes seen during long Italian trips in the late 1850s, when Edgar made many sketches and drawings of these paintings and frescoes in his personal notebooks.




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