It touches us all!!

Isn't it beautiful!! :-)

Yo Ho Me Hearties - Savvy?

Who are these miserable film critics that write in our newspapers? Don't they know what fun is? We certainly enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean this week, which had been given the thumbs down by lots of critics.

Back for the sequel - Dead Man's Chest - Johnny, Orlando and Keira led a cast featuring Bill Nighy as Davy Jones, in a great swashbuckling, high seas pirate spoof. It didn't let us down after the originality of the first film and provided spectacle and smiles and left us anticipating the next episode!

Enter stage right - America!

I can't pretend that this is easy, in fact I'm really struggling to get my brain around a lot of the ideas that seem to permeate through this course, studying the Art of the 20th Century.

My latest escapades have taken me back to the end of World War II, and what happened in the art world up to 1968. Europe was pretty much torn apart, physically and emotionally, and the big names of art were now coming from the rich and successful society, industry, and politics of America. There emerged the Abstract Expressionists, with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman. The Modernists claimed these as continuing the legacy of Cubism in purifying their art and concentrating on their art objects themselves, rather than any content or meaning, such as Jackson Pollocks Summertime. Pollock epitomised the post-war American macho male, as a man of action with his drip and spatter paintings, and his image in jeans and T-shirt, with a hard drinking, cowboy, frontiering attitude. But contesting voices and the work of other artists such as the Minimalists, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin who worked with flourescent light fixtures, suggested interpretations of performance and theatre which involved the viewer in the artwork rather than the detached experience of the Modernists.

The purity of the mediums (i.e. painting and sculpture) became mixed in the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, who used junk and the inspiration of the street and everyday, an example of which is Odalisk. Together with the musician John Cage and others, he shared in fluxus a movement that focused on events and theatrical style activities which brought together all of the arts, literature, poetry, painting, music, sculpture and theatre. This move to an art not detached but closely involved with the everyday reached its zenith with Andy Warhol who also overturned the notion of the macho American male, allowing his own homosexuality to be identified in works such as Vote McGovern, Mao 6, and Marilyn Diptych.

American influence and money ensured the iconic names of this period came from the U.S.A., however, artists in Europe continued to produce art that reflected the conditions of the time, betraying the pain and anguish of the millions of lives affected. Existentialism which drew on the writings of Sartre, influenced a great deal of European art in its reflection of the sense of helplessness and alienation. The dictionary definition says: a modern philosophical movement stressing personal experience and responsibility and their demands on the individual who is seen as a free agent in a deterministic and seemingly meaningless universe.