Hey Blog! This is my conclusion of my Paris work, in which I will tell you all about the two exhibitions I attended for my Arts Award. As this part of the award contains a section where feedback is required, sending comments in to me would be very nice!
For my Arts Award, I chose to attend two exhibitions, the first being Arts et la Prehistoire, at the Musée de l’homme in Paris, and the second Picasso et la Prehistoire, also at the same museum. Here, I am sharing the analysis I have done on these two. I’m very glad that they also allowed a sneaky trip to Paris – as you have seen in my previous posts!
The first exhibition I attended was entitled ‘Arts et la Prehistoire’, and was at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. I chose to attend this exhibition because it was said to show a lot of different types of prehistoric art, and do its best to explain the many interpretations of these artworks. It would be impossible to bring the real static art (fixed art, on the wall such as cave paintings/carvings) to the galleries, but instead the exhibition creators used videos and other images to demonstrate the variety.
The artists who made these artworks were prehistoric people; we do not know their names as they left no writing, only art. However, we do know they taught one another, as we can see there were different ‘schools’ of art, i.e. common features run through the different artworks, for example in details of manes on horses, some have broad streaks of colour with no texture, some have lots of little lines to show fine, delicate detail. I saw all sorts of art, both portable, such as a few of the famous ‘Venus’ figurines (not all of them, mainly the ones found in or near France), and representations of static art, by means of videos and photographs of the famous cave paintings at Lascaux and Delacroix.
All artwork showed clearly. I liked the use of videos and shadow, there was a huge amount of famous art from all prehistoric periods, ranging from incisions on mammoth bone to [videos of] magnificent pigmented frescos. I liked the layout, with portable art, then static art, then an explanatory section, and finally interactive. The interactive part was a screen where you could make your own ‘cave art’ on a screen and it would slide over to the ‘cave wall’ with everybody’s art on.
I liked the idea that people had animation, or a version of it, in the prehistoric periods, with thaumatropes. The example in the exhibition was of a bison which would have a nodding head when the optical illusion was put in motion by twisting the disc on a string. Also, the interpretation of certain objects and wall panels included many different ways of understanding the art, which is good because it reminds you to keep an open mind to new ideas about the art.
All pieces of work furthered my understanding and showed me there are many different prehistoric styles of creating animals, which is to be expected as the art was created for so many thousands of years! I think the ancient artists were masters of the moving form, which is something I want to get better with over the course of my Arts Award too. It showed me what I need to practice before my final artwork, so it looks as I envisage.
I really, really enjoyed it as it included so much art that I hadn’t seen or even heard of before, and a lot of new information, which is rare.
For my second exhibition to attend, I decided to go to the ‘Picasso et la Prehistoire’ exhibition, also at the Musée de l’homme in Paris. This exhibition was running at the same time, in the same museum as the other, and was focused on how another artist used prehistory to inspire their own art – just like I am trying to do with my Arts Award!
As the name says, this exhibition focused on Picasso, so almost all of the art was by him: paintings, sculptures and a few drawings. There were also a few photographs by an artist called Brassaï, and objects from Picasso’s own nature collection, stones and sticks and the like.
I found it a bit confusing really. I like stylized art, but with Picasso’s, I couldn’t see what it was meant to be! All the pieces, particularly the ‘gathered objects’ that served as inspiration in his studio, were laid out very well. I particularly liked the plaster-cast of Picasso’s hand, as seen in the picture, it fits mine quite well. One of the most interesting artworks was a drawing of what seemed at first a man with a Star Carr deer-skull mask. However, the caption at the bottom said it had “the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a bird, the ears of a wolf, the back of a bear, and the tail of a horse”. Aside from being one of the few pieces in the gallery that I could actually understand what it was meant to look like, I have a book (The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper) in which one of the characters has a mask with that face – a link between artworks, and literature!
It reminded me to look for inspiration in nature, and to make it so that I and other people can understand what it represents.
I didn’t enjoy this exhibition as much as the other one, it didn’t contain as much information and I don’t find Picasso’s art clear. I didn’t understand some of his pieces, as they didn’t show a picture of what they were called. They looked (to my untrained eye) mostly like a bunch of things he found in and around his house that were stuck together with paint and plaster-of-Paris and transformed by association with the artist, so I expect his art is far more about concept rather than realistic representation! Most of the time I couldn’t see a picture through the slightly confusing array of images. However, the layout and setting were good.
I hope you enjoyed the multitudes of posts here about my trip to Paris. You can see how much we could see in just three short days, and it’s such a big city we could spend years there and not see everything! On that note, I hope to go back sometime, so I’m sure I’ll have more holiday notes on Home Ed in a Shed very soon.