Piet Mondrian And Francis Bacon Paintings

By Darren Hartley


The most recognized Piet Mondrian paintings are abstract paintings of colored squares, rectangles and thick black lines. Piet Mondrian was a famous abstract painter, born in the Netherlands in 1872. Piet did not start out painting squares and rectangles. He only started so during the tail end of the Impressionism movement.

The first Piet Mondrian paintings were consistent with the time period, taking a cue from the Post Impressionistic works of Van Gogh. Piet also took inspirations from Braque and Picasso, although he subsequently formed a very distinct style, all his own. There are several instances of a definite Post-impressionist and emotive use of color in his early paintings.

It was to help humanity that Piet Mondrian paintings were aimed at. This help was extended through the provision of aesthetic beauty and breaking away from a representational form of painting. The early Piet Mondrian paintings were representational paintings. Slowly, they evolved into cubism, then to pure abstraction and non-representation. Finally they flourished into pure creative freedom, felt in the post-WWI war atmosphere of Paris.

The first truly original work among the Francis Bacon paintings was the Crucifixion, a small spectral painting clearly indebted to the biomorphs of Picasso. In 1944, Francis Bacon riveted the attention of both public and critics with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. With its hot orange background and stone-colored monsters of vaguely human descent, the painting left a lasting and disquieting impression on its viewers.

Francis Bacon paintings turned traditional paintings of people inside out, with grotesquely distorted faces and twisted body parts. Some of the most famous of these paintings were inspirations from the old master artworks, including Head VI, based on the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by the Spanish artist, Diego Velazquez.

Created in 1949, Head VI was one of the Francis Bacon paintings that stood apart in exhibitions, with its sensuous purple cape. It was a variation on Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a theme exploited by Francis with obsessive intensity throughout the following decade. This dependency was manifested though the use of reproductions, which had the positive effect of encouraging Francis to take an extravagant license to his art.




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