Modern and Postmodern Ideas Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Modern and Postmodern Ideas - Essay Example The essay "Modern and Postmodern Ideas" investigates the artists of the modern and postmodern era. Modern and postmodern artists have worked to depict the range of human emotions. There are a lot of artists such as Picasso that focuses on the emotions themselves. Picasso’s works, characteristic of the modern abstractionists, focused on presenting graphic images of emotions without relying on true representations of objects. In his paintings â€Å"Figures on Beach†, â€Å"Weeping Woman† and â€Å"Girl Before a Mirror†, Picasso presents each figure as an abstract collection of geometrical shapes arranged in such a way as to denote the specific emotions and feelings his figures are experiencing. His use of color goes a long way toward conveying the emotions he wished to express just as the relative hardness or softness of his lines worked to establish the relative sharp or dull nature of the feelings. Another aspect of his art that infuses all three of these paintings is the concept of portraying motion or action through the representation of more than one viewpoint at a time. In â€Å"Figures on Beach†, this concept of movement is shown in the various placements of the eyes and nostrils of the figures and the seemingly random placement of the woman’s breasts. The confusion of straight body parts that allows arms and legs to almost become interchangeable also reflects the idea that these people are not remaining in stationary positions but are instead allowing their arms and legs to become tangled as part of their embrace.