When I watch a piece of art, I'm not able to go beyond a "looks nice" or "not for me", no matter how hard I try. I would have never given this piece any kind of attention if I walked by it in a museum. You manage to give so much context and attention to the details, it really broadens my horizon and lets me think of art in another way. Thank you!
It's the lost 'shocking' painting of the 20th century that refuses to sit easily on the gallery wall. It's also about ambivalence, and the anxiety as an artist that that ambivalence can generate, among all the other wonderful points you folks make.
Excellent analysis ... it all makes sense ... I still just have trouble with the work intimately connecting with all the theory. Meaning, it's in a no man's land (no woman's land?) between abstraction and figure. Which is fine, just hard for me 'to get' on the visceral response level.
Yes, I can get behind the notion that this painting is almost sarcastic in nature. A grotesque response to the contemporary ideals of what women "should" be.
You want to know why, because this image of the woman represents the great mother of the Erich Neumann. For 5000 years in Western Culture, woman repressed by patriarchal systems. And this is the return of the "mother nature". But how it returns? Of course in a decomposed way, just like the post-modern culture and art itself. Her bodily parts is mixed and colors are blended heavily which represents we can't see the woman properly because of our western culture which governed by a single male god.
Her face... 😂 I'm sad for how strongly I relate to the views he's expressing here. We live at a time where (hyper-)sexualized images of women are ubiquitous. It feels so intrusive and aggressive sometimes... I can only imagine what this canvas would look like if he'd lived to see today.
I hate the amount of misogyny and objectification of women in art =(. I love art so much, but before I never noticed this, but after studying more, it is so horrible how people have treated other people. Sigh.
