blog #8

Alberto Gironella's piece The Black Queen, really stuck out to me in the reading for this week. The piece itself did not grab my attention so much as its comparison to Diego Velazquez's Mariana of Austria. The text says that Gironella was "fascinated by the dark and hidden history and legend of the Spanish Court." The piece in the text is one of many takes on Mariana produced by Gironella. I couldn't find that one online to post here, but i found a few others (followed by Velazquez's original below). I've seen the original at the Prado in Madrid, and it upholds the staunch, propriety of classical European painting and the embodiment of the Spanish ruling class, along with the majority of paintings in the Prado and historical sites in Madrid. Gironella's treatment of the subject really communicates his disgust toward Spanish painting, and is, in his own words, "the product of the disillusionment of the conquest and plunder." His paintings seem to strip the layers off the facade of Spanish painting and expose it's dirty secrets and the "smell of sweat and garlic."


I couldn't find any info on Gironella online :/ does anyone have any sources? I'm intrigued...

blog #7

I find it difficult to really talk about surrealist art... which I suppose has something to do with its aims. Surrealist art, with its strange dream-like images, sometimes seems like it would be incomprehensible to the viewer as separate from the artist. It is always difficult to imagine the vivid colors or eerie feeling someone describes in a personal dream; communication is a daunting enough task without adding in the subconscious and the thoughts and feelings we don't even understand about ourselves? But what better medium to picture the indescribable than art?
Though art and science are often thought of as polar opposites, they often work together and toward the same ends. Freud's revolutionary ideas on dream states and the unconscious led to a better global understanding of psychology and the self, and the spread of these ideas gives us fuel for discourse, common concepts that many people can understand and relate to, making communication through the images of the surrealists very effective. This common knowledge gives us the collective power to better understand in others what may otherwise be seen as personal and unreachable thoughts and feelings in others. The piece above The Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Salvador Dali can be dissected by its viewer because of its reference to the well known myth of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection, as well as its use of Freudian symbols, along with the viewer's own perception and emotion brought forth by the painting's artistic qualities (muted colors, symmetry of forms etc.)
It is an amazing quality of our time to be able to look so deeply into the mind of another.

(I think the first piece above, Breakfast in fur by Meret Oppenheim, does an amazing job of communicating an otherwise indescribable feeling, imagine what it would feel like to drink from that cup...)