The Stone Breakers, 1849 - Gustave Courbet

Wassily Kandinsky, “Sky Blue”

Death And The Mask – James Ensor

In this work, Ensor imparts life-like qualities to the skull of death in the center,
with its chilling grin, and to the mask of the people. The mask is trying to cover
up the spiritual hollowness of the decadence of the times. The light and bright
palette suggest the whimsy and absurdity of his time. The raw colors and savage
texture are the symbols to strip down to the layers of the human psyche which is
plumbing its depth.

André Derain
The Turning Road, L'Estaque

The painting done by Andre Derain speaks clearly of the movement it dwells in for the following
very many reasons. The identity of a Fauve painting was predominantly through the use of
bright colors which is very vivid in this particular piece. The colors are not only vibrant and
attractive but also are used in complementary pairs of colors from the color wheel. The colors
incorporated are oranges with blues and reds with greens. This color contradiction is highlighted
all throughout the painting with the orange tree trunks and multi-colored leaves with colors from
blue-green-red. The painting the Turning road is a landscape so the forms of the structure are
differentiated with the use of color as there is no outlining and fine strokes. Infact Andre Derain
has used broken brush strokes that are swift and flat daubs of color as his painterly style of
expressing his emotions behind the painting. The piece when viewed from a distance with
squinted eyes would appear like a collage of colorful shapes put together in one frame.The
painting has figures in lower half of it but just like the figures in Henri Matisse’s Joy of Life, they
are elongated and disproportionate. the facial features are not present and the only way one
can see or notice the difference between the gender’s would be through the way their clothes
take shape on the bodies. Every figure in the painting is headed towards the big blue path which
is the river. The way the trees curve with the path emphasize the meaning behind the title.
Overall the depth in the painting doesn’t differ too much within the foreground and the
background and the shadows in the painting are created by drastic color variations unlike
naturalistic form of shadow representation.

2. Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle
Wheel (1913)
“In 1913, I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and
watch it turn,” said Marcel Duchamp about his famous work Bicycle
Wheel. Bicycle Wheel is the first of Duchamp’s readymade objects.
Readymades were individual objects that Duchamp repositioned or signed
and called art. He called Bicycle Wheel an “assisted readymade,” made by
combining more than one utilitarian item to form a work of art.

Buildings in construction in a suburb can be seen with chimneys in the upper

part, but most of the space is occupied by men and horses, melted together in a
dynamic effort.[3] Boccioni thus emphasizes some of the most typical elements of
futurism, the exaltation of human work and the importance of the modern town,
built around modern necessities.[4] The painting portrays the construction of a new
city with developments and technology. Suburbs, and the urban environment in
general, formed the basis of many of Boccioni's paintings, from the capture of the
staccato sounds of construction in The Street-Pavers to the riot of sound and
colour offered to the observer of street scenes, as typified by The Street Enters
the House.
The Treachery of Images - Rene Magritte
Postwar explorations in surrealism were strongly influenced by structuralist language theories and the concept
of the gap between language and meaning. The Treachery of Images is depicting simple imagery of the pipe
and contrasting statement "This is not a pipe", so it displays thesis of the difference between signifier and
signified object to the spectator. Particularly this René Magritte painting was the introduction to Pop art and
inspired its development. Relation between Magritte and contemporary art was further examined trough the
homonymous publication of Michel Foucault and also shown within the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary
Art: The Treachery of Images in 2006-2007 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“The Bastille” (1954; M. 111), Marc Chagall

In realist art circles, objectivity is the name of the game. Say that an artist’s subject is a
bowl of fruit, for example. Some would want a painter to depict the fruit in the most
accurate way possible, with every blemish and curve perfectly rendered.
But what about the artists who don’t wish to objectively remove their emotions from the
work? Does subjectivity disqualify an artwork from galleries and museums? I’ll
let Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” a pioneering work of
the Expressionism movement, answer that question for you.
What do we mean when we say “Expressionism”? While Impressionism and the works
of Impressionist artists like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir sought to depict
light, motion, and color as accurately as they could in a two-dimensional medium,
Expressionism is a lot less concerned about reality.