Window of Tahiti or Tahiti II, Henry Matisse
"Guernica" Picasso
"Sacrifice" Kollwitz
Kiefer works
The Woman Who Played the Lute, Henry Matisse
"The Spanish Soldier" Robert Capa ◎ Wang Jiannan
The French painter Matisse, a well-known artist for Chinese art lovers, has never exhibited his works in the form of solo exhibitions in Chinese mainland. Since the second half of last year, Chinese art lovers have begun to look forward to the first solo exhibition of "Matisse of Matisse" and the UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art to be held on March 26, 2022 Chinese mainland. According to the plan, the relevant works will arrive in Beijing in the near future.
However, a screenshot of a news post by RFI was recently screened on Chinese social media platforms, and for various reasons, Matisse's work may not be able to come to China for exhibition. In this regard, the UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art said yesterday that it has not yet received an official notice of the decision and is actively communicating with its French partners to await further information.
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People like Matisse's work because they feel that the bright and vivid colors in the painting are as innocent as the children's paintings that overflow the picture. Mattis, like many artists who have lived through the war, has experienced pain, but different artists have different expressions of pain.
Matisse was born in 1869 in Le Catto in the Picardy region of northern France. He lived through two world wars in his lifetime. During the war, many painters chose to use their works to express the diverse themes touched by the war, such as justice, rebellion and compassion. But looking through Matisse's work, we can't find anything that reflects the war. His work is always imbued with a tone of tranquility, cheerfulness, warmth and comfort. He once called such a subject his "responsibility." He wanted to convince people who had lived through the wars of Europe that it was still possible to live comfortably in the sun like in the picture, and that it was his responsibility—his responsibility for art, for every real, living person, and for the world. He repeatedly described the joys and joys of the world with his brush, bringing spiritual and spiritual comfort to the suffering French.
When most people think of Matisse, they immediately think of Picasso. Indeed, in the history of 20th-century Western modern art, the two names are closely related. In contrast to Matisse, Picasso not only represented war in his works, but also deeply shook the world.
On April 26, 1937, Nazi German planes suddenly flew over the small town of Guernica near Bilbao, Spain, and swept towards the bazaars and farmhouses. After nearly three hours of bombing, many civilians were killed or injured and the town was razed to the ground. Picasso, who was living in Paris at the time, happened to be commissioned by the Spanish Republic to create a work for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Exposition, and he had been conceiving themes. The brutal bombing made Picasso extremely indignant, and he immediately decided to create a large oil painting on the subject of it to express his protest against the crimes of war and his mourning for the deaths of his compatriots in the bombing. Guernica was born.
This 7.76-meter-long and 3.49-meter-high painting is now in the collection of the National Démois des Beaux-Arts Des Essées Des Beaux-Arts. Picasso's use of symbolism and simple black, white and gray colors create a low and sad atmosphere, strengthen the tragic color, and show the disaster brought by the fascist war to mankind. After the completion of "Guernica", there were nearly 20 years of traveling through the exhibition halls of many cities on both sides of the Atlantic, without the opportunity to return to Spain. Because Picasso had always hated the dictatorship of Franco in Spain during his lifetime, he left a last word: Only when Spain established a democratic government could Guernica return to his homeland. In September 1981, this overseas masterpiece was solemnly returned to Spain. In 2014, Spanish director Zola filmed the film Thirty-Three Days, which tells the whole process of Picasso's creation of Guernica. A good work whose impact is enduring, and Guernica embodies that.
Nevertheless, the theme of war is not the subject of Picasso's creation. The artist Kaissui Kollwitz, born in 1867, has associated his life's work with war. As a German, she and her family were devastated by two world wars. In 1914, her eldest son was killed in the fire of World War I. Eight years later, Kollwitz cast his deep longing for his son into a black-and-white woodcut, Sacrifice. With the love of a loving mother, she mourns, screams, and fights for all those who are insulted and hurt. Her series of anti-war works played a powerful role in awakening the people and uniting the struggle.
Kollwitz's compatriot, the artist Anselm Kiefer, was born in 1945 in Germany, where the smoke of World War II had not yet dissipated. As a new generation of Germans who have grown up with painful memories after the war, the theme of his works has always been immersed in deep reflection and reflection.
Kiefer likes to use religious scriptures, early Norse myths, ancient alchemy, Wagner's music and other German and European history and culture to reflect the reflection on the fate of mankind, the irony and lashing of the former Nazi Germany. He makes extensive use of non-traditional painting materials and media, and in the form of pioneering non-stereotyped art forms, transforms the profound thematic connotations into symbolic visual symbols through dark materials and touching textures, so as to achieve the purpose of reflecting on history and then produce shocking power.
Similarly, Chinese artists in the 20th century created a large number of excellent works in the arduous and heroic battle against foreign aggression. Among them, Li Hua's woodblock print "Roar! China" is the most widely known. Young heroes representing the collective destiny of the Chinese nation were tied to wooden stakes. Although his eyes were blindfolded, he opened his mouth and roared. One hand fumbled a dagger to the ground. Once he gets it, he will cut off all the ropes that bind him, liberate him, and throw himself into battle. The format is small, but it is sonorous and powerful, and it is loud. Like Mr. Lu Xun's "Scream", this work shows a distinct and powerful sense of national survival and distress.
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Compared with painting, photography, which was born around 1840, brought about a drastic change in the way humans viewed the world. The Frenchman Henri Bresson is known as the "father of modern photojournalism", as a world-famous humanistic photographer, he proposed a "decisive moment", believing that the photographer at a specific moment, through capture, the form, vision, composition, light, events and all other factors are perfectly combined. This extremely short visual image of a fraction of a second exists in an instant, and the photographer's mission is to synthesize and summarize the decisive objects and convey them with a powerful visual composition. Capture became the core of Bresson's photographic aesthetic theory.
The concept was best illustrated by the Hungarian-American photojournalist Robert Kappa. One of the most famous war photojournalists of the 20th century, Kappa came to the Battlefield of Vietnam in 1954 despite the persuasion of his relatives and friends. The following year, he tragically stepped on a landmine and died at the age of 41. Kappa hated war, his lens was always focused on the battlefield, and his life's photographic creations were mostly based on war. Kappa once said: "The camera alone cannot stop the war, but the pictures it takes can expose the war and prevent the war from happening." Capa's famous works such as "Spanish Soldier", "Martyrs on the Battlefield", "A Moment of Death" and so on have become immortal works of war photography.
The American writer and art critic Susan Sontag questioned and criticized the "mirror-image" relationship in On Photography and On the Suffering of Others. She cautions people who are obsessed with the world of images that they should not revel in "images that are not real but only real" and that they are "tampered with by photographs." She argues that photography "is a way of verifying experience and a way of rejecting it", "both a false presence and a sign of absence", "it is one thing to encounter pain, it is another thing to live with the painful images taken". Thus, Sontag proposed: "Photograph is a grammar of viewing and, more importantly, an ethics of viewing." ”
In her opinion, back to our real world, doesn't the current conflict show the real situation on the battlefield that Kappa is trying to capture? In the world of the Internet, there is also a fierce confrontation between various images and words. Which piece of news is true and reliable? Which frame of image is to be believed? Everything takes time to judge.
It can be seen that art and reality are both interdependent and opposing to each other. Art, as if it is the most wonderful prism in the world, reflects the warmth and coldness of human feelings, the beauty and ugliness of human nature, and the backs of people's hearts.
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Barbara Tatchman, a famous American historian, writer and the first female dean of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, published the classic work of war history in 1962, "August Gunfire", which has long become an indispensable reading for European and American strategic experts, military generals, political figures and opinion leaders to enhance their historical intellectual and strategic literacy. From the perspective of war decision-makers, Tuchman tells the world how Europe fell into the abyss of the First World War.
At the end of June 1914, the vast majority of intellectuals, financiers and business owners in All European countries did not realize that they were only a foot away from the great crisis of war that was about to break out. They are unaware of the risk of war in Europe imposed on europe by political leaders and military strategists.
"August Gunfire" reveals many thought-provoking twists and turns. Through the eloquent words, the reader seems to step into the tunnel of time, immersed in the scene of the historical storm, witnessing first-hand how a group of elite politicians of various countries who are skilled in playing the game of statecraft and the balance of power have painstakingly arranged the process of nesting military covenants, and personally experiencing the scenes of reaching various political commitments, and how all these calculations have finally backfired into gravity accelerators in the process of escalating conflicts.
What kind of political strategy and war preparedness mechanism is it that allows an avoidable war to be irretrievably detonated after an accidental event? It is not difficult for readers to discover the paradox and absurdity of history, and thus reflect on today's cruel reality.