Fu Baoshi’s paintings mesmerize us with their awesome depictions of precipitous heights, pouring waterfalls, and lush foliage. But peeking out amidst these tour de forces of nature, almost hidden amidst them, are minute figures of people, mere ants immersed among giants. My question is, what are the functions of these people in Fu Baoshi’s paintings? If the focus of the painting is nature why include them at all? If the intention is to illustrate on the relationship between nature and people why create such an imbalance between the two?

There are also several painters in the Western tradition, especially among the Romantics, who are famous for their paintings of people dwarfed by nature and the scenery around them. A notable example is Thomas Cole. How does Fu’s representation compare against Cole’s? Are their similarities beyond the size of their figure? Differences? These are some of the questions I hope to explore through my paper.

Much of the conversation surrounding R.B. Kitaj’s work focuses on the interaction between his Jewish heritage and his love for Cezanne’s artistic style. According to critics, these two interests seem to conflict with each other and place Kitaj’s work in a peculiar place of vulnerability. My question is: To what extent must we examine the theological themes behind Kitaj’s paintings? Are his paintings incomplete without an understanding of his complex beliefs or can we appreciate them for their form alone just like Cezanne paintings?

I think this question will lead me to investigate Cezanne’s subjects and whether they have a deeper, perhaps philosophical meaning. I will also look into which specific aspects Kitaj drew from Cezanne’s work and determine whether Kitaj’s works sacrifice aesthetics for the philosophical substance.

Below are two works: “Whistler vs. Ruskin” and “The Wedding”

Kollwitz’s art attempts to depict the impact of war (specifically WWI) on everyday people – their suffering and confusion and sadness. She, as a woman, had the ability to illustrate intimacy, female bodies, and maternal/familial emotions more accurately and believably than most male artists throughout history, past and present. She was a master draftsman of the human figure and in my essay I’m thinking that I would like to explore why she turned from painting toward drawing, etching, and lithography to better depict people’s emotions. Why was she better able to capture the atmosphere of the scene or person in more restrained art forms, characterized by line rather than brushstrokes and black and white rather than color? Perhaps the piece of Kollwitz that I love the most is that she was the voice for her people and illustrated their strife so accurately that we can sense what they were feeling and relate to their lives.

The Thing Itself (2013)

Enrique Chagoya’s artwork never ceases to fascinate me. It mashes together pop art and religious iconography, segments of advertisements and peculiar, pithy slogans. Each piece is loaded with thematic content, almost overwhelmingly so, as it builds up its fragments to make some larger claim about the hot button issues of our time–colonialism, cultural imperialism, borders & migration. I recently learned that Chagoya is the Professor of Art at Stanford University. I wondering how specifically his background as an academic informs his work? His art feels much more scholarly and rigorous than pieces I’ve encountered from other artists this semester; his works read like journal articles, rich with bibliographic entries.

In researching Dumas, elements of her method and process have really surprised me.  While many critics refer to her works as “intimate” or “immediate,” for me, especially in tightly cropped portraits, I see the thin, watery material as a barrier on the surface, separating the subject from the viewer. She clearly expresses both emotion and feeling, but through a confused veil of strange colors and watery surface.  In a similar vein, her actual process is fascinating.  Dumas tends to work from photographs, rather than an actual person.  To move from an image that precisely depicts a face, to a canvas or paper on which she improvises and confuses the specific features, is a surprising move.  I’m also intrigued by this because of her focus on psychology (she studied both art and psychology in the Netherlands).  Can one paint a psychological portrait from a photograph of the person? Does she not need to interact with and understand the individual?

Additionally, her work is rarely biographical, but she comes from an interesting background. She is a white woman from South Africa, she is a native Afrikaans speaker, but she has now lived and worked in Amsterdam since leaving South Africa.  How does her background, and her relationship to it, continue to impact her work?

Gwen John does not seem to be a radical painter. Her colors are subdued, her subjects conservative. The subjects of her portraits brim with restrained interiority, distant and inaccessible. Her oeuvre of portraits consists entirely of women, whom she paints again and again in search of a perfect likeness. My question is: in what ways is John’s portraiture, seemingly conservative in comparison to other artists working out of Paris in the early 20th century, actually deeply subversive?

For my final paper, I am researching Kara Walker. Walker’s most famous genre of art are her silhouettes that depict fantastical scenes from the Antebellum south. In these silhouettes, Walker relies on stereotypes in order to differentiate between the white and black characters in her scenes. Furthermore, she does not conform to the normal way in which Black artists have told the story of slavery and its aftermath. In other words, she does not always portray slaves/black people in a positive light and masters/white people in a negative light. Because of this she has been denounced by many older black female artists. Most famously Betye Saar accused Walker of “selling us down the river” to white art viewers/curators who, because of Walker, can continue to consume and uphold racist stereotypes under the guise of empowering Black artists. My question is: Is Kara Walker catering to the largely white art world’s “bestial fantasies” about black people or is she causing the art world to question/upend its stereotypes about black people?

For my final project, I am interrogating the work of painter and printmaker Masami Teroaka. In particular, I am interested in asking questions about his stylistic shift from traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques to oil painting in the Roman Catholic style. I wonder how the same artist framing similar subjects in two different contexts changes the way in which viewers perceive the message, and which, if either, is more effective in communicating the artists desires? Two examples that I will be using in my research are the 2001 print Sarah and the Octopus / Seventh Heaven, and the 2015 oil St. Catherine and the Giant Octopus, 2015. Some related questions include: Why did Teroaka make this stylistic shift, and was it based on his early experiences as a working artist? What does the change in context mean to the artist? How does it change the experience of the viewer?

In choosing to research Self for my final project, I knew I would have to somehow interact with the mediation of black bodies to their viewers within the art world. When researching for my final essay on Self, I seek to discern the answer to the question of what exactly her art does for its audiences and where its place is within the art world? Because she is young and there is now a push to decolonize what we label to be art worthy of presence in a museum, her place in this dialogue is interesting to me especially because of the way she chooses to portray black women in a way that embraces and pulls upon their stereotypes instead of pushing them away.

In researching Kerry James Marshall for the final essay, I have been very intrigued by his reinterpretation of canonical works from art history. I would like to further investigate the following question: how does Kerry James Marshall impart his own meaning onto canonical works, such as Barnett Newman’s series of paintings, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966-1970) and Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1515)?

Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV (1969)

Kerry James Marshall, Draw Me (2012)

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1515)

Kerry James Marshall, Garden of Delights (2013)