Week 12 Video Blog Review

I chose the Matisse and Picasso video because I wanted to learn more about Picasso. He is one of the most well-known artists of all time. Mention Picasso and almost everyone makes the association that he was a famous artists. I also chose this because I was intrigued by the Picasso display at the Albright Knox Museum. A painting represents the idea of things during the Cubists idealism. In 1912 he created the first college which was done in oil and was the leader of the Cubist movement. This relates to the readings because Cubism was one of the topics I discussed in the forum posting.


I watched the Dada and Surrealism video because I felt that it was a very influential period of time which reacted to WWI. I think that this period of time since there was a push to develop art that represented life yet was very vague. The artists used a lack of detail in order to create a different type of representation to the viewers. Many of the works allowed the viewer to bypass easy traditional associations and forced them to think harder about the piece. The Dada movement was also a large part of the chapter 21 material.

The Expressionism video further expanded on the ideas in the chapter of artists creating work that emphasized emotional ideas by using the element of color. Kirchner’s works are very pictorial and are designed to express sensation rather than specific objects. I think that art should stimulate emotion and that the inability to do so doesn’t allow a work to be considered art. Expressionism is also one of the topics of the chapter we read. These works were created around the time my grandmother was born which I why I found a connection with them.

Mystical North: Spanish Art from the 19th Century was another of the videos that I chose to watch. This was because it included more of Picasso’s work as well as other works of art that were provocative which it another reason for creating art. Dali is an artist that gave us the idea that dreams could be represented in works of art. He was a very controversial artist during the 1930s. This was during the time of communism and fascist ideas. One of arts main ideas is to represent history and this is what the video makes clear to the viewer.

I prefer to watch these videos because I feel that they further explain what the text cannot represent. There are many more examples of each topic in the video and I like how the narrator breaks down some of the works of art to show each of the elements and what the artist was trying to represent. There is much more information in each of the videos then in the reading in the text. The textbook author and the narrators of the videos also have two different styles of explanation which helps comprehension of the topics.