ART HISTORY Looking at Visual Culture is looking at ourselves. It is a record of our existence and our thoughts. Understanding its relevance helps us to deal with the problems we too are faced with. If you want to find solutions to certain problems then looking at how others overcame these difficulties offers a key to unlock our own solutions too.
Our workshop participants are currently examining how new ideas came about at the turn of the century where artists reflected upheaval in the world about to come into being in the form of the First World War.
Looking at the spiritual roots of Art Movements from The Renaissance, the Victorians to Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Jungian Psychology and The Blue Rider Group amongst other concept makers helps us to see new ideas that break down barriers that enable us to embrace change in challenging times.
Der Blaue Reiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Rider ... Take a look at links on wikipedia for a fascinating history of a group of artists that included people like Kandinsky and Franz Marc. A group with the noblest of aims and intentions that was dispersed by the calamities of war.
"Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." Wassily Kandinsky
The Secret of Marcel Duchamp A short introduction to an artist who greatly influences aesthetic thinking today
Emile Nolde
"There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed."
These are the words of Emile Nolde who was a controversial artist, for a time both a member of the Danish Nazi Party and also ironically an unwilling exhibitor in the famous Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. Over a thousand works by him were removed from museums at this time Nolde is a man of contradictions. Deeply religious and yet a fervent supporter of the Third Reich. Briefly involved with the primativist and expressionist orientated Art Movement Die Brucke (The Bridge) which lasted from1905 to 1913. Nolde himself was only a member for three years. He was prohibited to paint by Hitler's Regime and so he turned to watercolours which he could conceal more easily without the giveaway smell of oil paint. He called these his "unpainted paintings".
"I had an infinite number of visions at this time, for wherever I turned my eyes nature, the sky, the clouds were alive, in each stone and in the branches of each tree, everywhere, my figures stirred and lived their still or wildly animated life, and they aroused my enthusiasm as well as tormented me with demands that I paint them."
