Annotated Mona Lisa Essay

I did an analysis on the irises. The subject matter is the same for both pieces. The first painting portrayed a highly realistic and very detailed iris while the second painting, by Georgia O’Keeffe, is painted to fit her unique style. The first painting is very strict in portraying realistic shadows, lights, and colors. The artist did a tremendous job with their technical skill, showing the browning holes of the green leaf and the velvety texture of the indigo petals. While analyzing this piece, though it was beautiful, it felt a bit cold as if it had no essence of a human hand behind it. One of the reasons on why I felt this way was because the extreme/ harsh contrast between the white background and the dark iris. While viewing the Georgia
O’Keeffe painting, I felt it had more life and vitality. The painting is stylized into O’Keeffe’s unique way of painting flowers. Rather than painting the entirety of the iris, O’Keeffe focused on the petals and I think this painting had a theme [something that is quite sexual in nature, to get straight to the point, it looks like female genitalia]. One of the really big differences about these two paintings was the color use and style. O’Keeffe used a variety of colors (pastels and monochromatic colors), colors like pink, black, reds, purples, grays, etc. She didn’t stick to just cold colors, she used a balance of colors. While the first painting only used cold colors like indigo, blues, and black.
Looking at the differences of these paintings helps me understand modernism.
Modernism in art is rejecting the past and it’s a “relentless quest for radical freedom of expression” (says my copy of “The Annotated Mona Lisa”). In western culture, before the scientific revolution or the Age of Enlightenment, most subjects/ themes of paintings were the daily lives of upper/middle class people, the nobility, Christianity, and landscapes. Also the paintings then stressed realism. That totally changed until the 19th century where artistic movements like fauvism, impressionism, and a whole lot of other “isms” sprung up and eventually paved the pathway to Modern Art. Already in the 19th century with artists like Manet with his infamous piece Olympia, were people touching upon ways to show sexuality in art which was kind of vulgar back then. I guess the uptightness of society, really had something to do with the people’s desire for radical freedom of expressions. Also people’s views were changing during the Modern era, especially the view on women and we have feminists like Virginia Woolf and the women’s suffrage movement to thank for that. Overall, the economy, the current events back then, people’s view on religion; feminism; how people talked about sex and sexuality [thanks to Alfred Kinsey]; technology; innovation; and new ways of expression all made
Modernism.