RELATIONSHIPS
CONTEXTUAL STUDY
XENIA KONTEATI
Introduction
Since the beginning of time, themes of relationships have dominated the stories we
tell. The first and most well known Bible story is about the relationship between
Adam and Eve. My opinion is that relationships are very important in our life. In our
everyday life we meet people that we might in the future create a relationship with;
maybe that is a friendship or maybe something more, maybe nothing at all. But no
human being can live without any relationship. He can not realize the meaning of life,
the meaning of being alive. There are different kinds of relationships. Relationships in
a more personal and private level such as between the couple, between friends,
between the members of a family. But also relationships between nations;
multinational relationships are those which are able to keep peace in the world. What
happens if these relationships break? The answer is one single, catastrophic word:
War.
My final pieces are all inspired by Kiefer’s work. His works are characterized by a
dull, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats.
Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting
"Margarethe". In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is
prevalent and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated
I have chosen to create three final pieces, two of them are dresses which I personally
have sewed. I have been inspired by Kiefer, whose pieces symbolized the souls of
dead people died during wars. My third piece is inspired by ‘Nureberg’ of Kiefer. The
technique of collage is obvious in Kiefer’s pieces such as ‘Shebirat Ha Kelim’ , and
others mainly covering the same theme- fatalism- and using the same materials –small
dresses- .
Collage
Collage is an artistic technique in which pieces of paper, cloth, and other objects are
pasted onto a flat surface—indeed, the word “collage” comes from the French verb
“coller” which means to glue or to paste.
Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China
around 200 BC. The use of collage, however, remained very limited until the 10th
century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on
surfaces, when writing their poems.
The technique of collage appeared in medieval Europe during the 13th century. Gold
leaf panels started to be applied in Gothic cathedrals around the 15th and 16th
centuries. Gemstones and other precious metals were applied to religious images,
icons, and also, to coats of arms.
In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia
(i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl
Spitzweg).
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Despite the pre-twentieth-century use of collage-like application techniques, some art
authorities argue that collage, properly speaking, did not emerge until after 1900, in
conjunction with the early stages of modernism.
Collage in the modernist sense began with Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo
Picasso. According to some sources, Picasso was the first to use the collage technique
in oil paintings. Braque took up the concept of collage itself before Picasso, applying
it to charcoal drawings. Picasso adopted collage immediately after (and was perhaps
indeed the first to use collage in paintings, as opposed to drawings). Collage was often
called the art form of the twentieth century, but this was never fully realized.
The pieces I have created in my sketchbook, are mainly based on the technique of
collage, inspired by both artists Kiefer, through his pieces with the dresses and
Schwitters through the photographs of war.
Artists who influenced me
Over the last three decades, Anselm Kiefer has become internationally celebrated for
imposing, operatic works dealing with the historical, mythological and literary themes
that animate post-war German culture. The earliest works date from 1969, and include
two depicting a tiny figure - Kiefer himself - in a landscape making the siege Heil
salute. This image is emblematic of what turns out to be a recurrent motif: his
ambivalent relationship to the German past; the jarring, somewhat goofy sense of
humor with which he confronts WWII taboos; and the use of barren landscapes to
stage his dramas of Germany past and present. The title of one of the works, Heroic
Symbols, comes from a 1943 National Socialist propaganda piece about the fine arts,
lending to the piece's bitter irony.
One of the most powerful pieces that inspired me, in which the emotional content is
less varnished, is the 1970 watercolor Winter Landscape (Image 1). A disembodied
female head, superimposed against a grey sky, bleeds from a neck wound, staining the
snow. Kiefer allows the off-white of the paper to indicate the earth through sparingly
applied pigment. This understatement is characteristic of many of the works on paper,
in contrast to his often extensively worked paintings.
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Image 1: Winter Landscape
Several beautiful paintings from 1974-75 incorporate watercolor, gouache and
ballpoint pen; their rich blues and browns are based on his trip to Norway's North
Cape. These works explore the Norse myths that are a vital part of his vocabulary and
inspiration.
Image 2: Margarete
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Two smaller works from the same period, principally in watercolor, combine darker
themes with lush visual presentations. Your Golden Hair, Margarete (Image 2 which I
replicated) (1980) quotes Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan's poem Death Fugue,
which is set in a concentration camp. Kiefer has sometimes depicted the German
heroine's locks as straw adhered to the canvas, as in image 3; in this work, they appear
in watercolor as sheaves of wheat in a field.
Image 3: Nuremberg
His almost primordial sense of texture, too, is represented here. Some works contain
collaged lead and shellac on paper; in others, he uses woodblock printing to cover
large expanses of paper or canvas, sometimes with repeated images, which he then
paints over with acrylic.
After seeing Kiefer’s Shebirat Ha Kelim (Image 4) I was inspired to create my own
works based on the original paintings of Kiefer. The worse-for-the wear objects used
by Kiefer eerily underscore the conspicuous absence of humans giving the works a
dark sense of fatalism.
Image 4: Shebirat Ha Kelim
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Another artist who was part in my study was Francisco Goya. Goya along with El
Greco and Velasquez is one of the three great pillars of classical Spanish art, to which
Picasso has to be added in our modern era. Between the death of Velasquez in 1660
and the thunder bolt of Picasso's Guernica, it was Goya who dominated Spanish art.
Goya addressed many different genres and styles. His paintings range from realistic
views of beautifully dressed personages at the Spanish court to the horrific dark
images of the Napoleonic Wars. He was the court painter to Charles IV. He is widely
known for his portraits of Spanish nobility, including boys, but he also painted many
accomplished scenes of peasants and ordinary street life. His paintings provide many
insights of how boys dressed in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries--the point at
which specialized children's clothes were emerging in Europe.
Goya was born into a Spain undergoing deep-seated changes. The Spain of his birth
was a decaying world empire that had become after the turn of the century a
Napoleonic fiefdom. He lived to see a reborn kingdom struggling, with difficulty, to
become a modern European state. Parallel changes were affecting the world of
European art.
The War degenerated into one of the most brutal and horrific conflicts of the
Napoleonic era. Goya captured the darker side of mankind in his dark, brooding
images of the Peninsular Campaign. There was no attempt to glorify war as was the
normal practice in European painting. The scenes are singularly disturbing, sometimes
macabre in their depiction of battlefield horror, and represent an outraged conscience
in the face of death and destruction. The prints were not published until 1863, 35
years after Goya's death.They were also not the detailed realistic images of his earlier
paintings. French novelist Andrι Malraux maintains that "modern art begins" with
Goya. Many artists painted scenes from the Napoleonic era, normally expansive
panoramic scenes of major battles. Goya' s brooding images of war stand in sharp
contrast to David's heroic French images. It was Goya who truly captured the ferocity
of the War.
Despite a career that extended over half a century, Goya is most admired today for the
satirical, melancholic, and sometimes even horrific canvasses of his later years. He is
also known for his subversive humour of his prints (such as the Caprichos, 1799, and
Disasters of War (Image 5), and the dramatic realism of his Third of May 1808.
Image 5: From Disasters of
War
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The third artist who was a major influence in my whole project was Kathe Kollwitz.
Kollwitz is regarded as one of the most important German artists of the twentieth
century, and as a remarkable woman who created timeless art works against the
backdrop of a life of great sorrow, hardship and heartache.
Kathe was born in 1867 in Konigsberg, East Prussia. In 1881 she married Dr Karl
Kollwitz and they settled in a working class area of north Berlin. In 1896 her second
son, Peter, was born.
In 1914 her son Peter was killed in Flanders. The loss of Peter contributed to her
socialist and pacifist political sympathies. In 1919 she worked on a commemorative
woodcut dedicated to Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary socialist murdered in 1919.
Kathe believed that art should reflect the social conditions of the time and during the
1920s she produced a series of works reflecting her concern with the themes of war,
poverty, working class life and the lives of ordinary women.
After studying the historical past of Kathe, I concluded that the close relationship she
had with her son, and the event of the tragic loss of Peter in Flanders, lead to artistic
outbreak. I replicated one of her major pieces (Image 6) in my sketchbook using black
ink.
Image 6
Finally, the last artist who influenced me was Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius
Schwitters. He is generally acknowledged as the twentieth century's greatest master of
collage.He was a German painter who was born in Hanover. Schwitters worked in
several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound,
painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as
installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures. His work in
this period became increasingly Modernist in spirit, with far less overtly political
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context and a cleaner style, in keeping with contemporary work. He lived during the
Nazis period and he was also exiled from Germany because of his pieces. His Merz
pictures were included in the Nazi exhibition titled "entartete Kunst" in Munich,
making his return impossible.
Image 7 : Schwitters’ collage
The main nexus between these four artists is the inspiration of their work which
drawn from war and its consequences. However, every artist is expressed by different
means and technique. Kiefer and Schwitters use the technique of collage. On the other
hand, Kollowitz used mainly ink and engraved on wood and Goya drew a whole
series with ink and other pieces with acrylics and oil.
Conclusion
Every relationship needs a balance, an equality in order to survive. Each person has
his own personal experiences from relationships. The specific artist lived wars, lost
loved persons and suffered because of the catastrophic relationship of the nations.
Kiefer and Schwitters witnessed the total chaos of humanity during the Nazis.
Kollwitz had also her personal experiences drawn in pieces creating a superb work
representing not only her feelings but also of every human being losing a be loving
person.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.
2.
3.
4.
http://www.spanisharts.com/prado/goya.htm
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/schwitters.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTkollwitz.htm
Anselm Kiefer (Hardcover) by Daniel Arasse (Author)
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