Cubism, Woman's Head, Spain, Pablo Picasso, 1909
The richness of this head could never wear you out. It is like a mountain range, a landscape. It is transformed every time you move your own head, walk around it, bend closer, taking in the rough surface with the marks of Picasso's touch, the warm softness of the plaster that contrasts with the sharp contours. In this sculpture Picasso tested the planes of cubism as a sculptural. The idea of cubism was the innovative method of making a pictorial image. The way the woman's face has been distorted and fragmented is a development of Cubist ideas. Picasso builds up his image from projecting geometric shapes that seem to focus attention on the face in exaggerating the shapes and bumps that make up the structure of the head and by eliminating other surfaces. The shape of her sculpted head is faceted into smaller units; her hair is a series of crescent blobs while her contemplative face is a more sharply chiseled flat planes. The head's slight tilt and the neck's sweeping curves give the allusion of movement as if she were about to look over her shoulder. It is flattened onto the canvas so that the different sides of each shape can viewed at different fractions. Some of the lines that are visually suggested here go from the front position of the sculpture to the forehead.
Fauvism, Odalisque With Gray Trousers, France, Henri Matisse, 1927
An outbreak of primary colors dominates this dazzling painting of the interior. The entire surface is harmonized into a vibrant, unified patter of pure color, which has been skillfully integrated into the structural composition, saturating the room with richly pattern fabrics and oriental rugs surrounded by oriental accoutrements. Matisse uses color as mean of expression rather than the description and has deliberately flouted the conventional rules of drawing and perspective.
Modern, Pelvis With Moon, USA, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1943
This painting is decrypted as a pelvis barely touching the landscape; its shapes unfold across the silvery night sky linking the moon in the canvas's upper reaches with the foreground.
Movement, Garden of the Parsonage, Flanders, Camille Pissarro, 1899
In this work Pissarro depicts the home and grounds of a local clergyman in a coastal village, his existence gives a formation of serenity to the piece. The painting portrays a quiet rural environment untouched by urban pollution and industry. The tranquil landscape symbolizes the rural peacefulness of the countryside. The eye is led from the path in the foreground past the bushes, trees and house to the distant fields and mountains. This composition imparts a quiet, contemplative mood. Although very different in its coloration the subject recalls the tranquil and gentle landscapes and genre scenes of the mid-nineteenth century. The brushstrokes are short and relatively small and the colors are considerably lightened to a bright yet soft palette of greens and blues. vibrant and the hatching strokes have been used to enliven the paintings surface. The solidity achieved here despite a more delicate execution and a wider range of color shows how the observation of nature tempered Pissarro's boldness. His use of line asymmetrical line in the piece varies from the right side edge through the valley. The shape of the mountains blends with the greens in the field exemplifying some form of in doubt dept.
