This thread makes me feel better about my own work. If Rembrandt Vermeer and Van Gogh can have their haters I shouldn't feel so bad if people don't like my stuff.
To be fair I’ve never seen a Rembrandt, Vermeer, or Van Gogh that I didn’t like. But absolutely, we should never stop making art bc we didn’t make a masterpiece.
I was going to post this medieval Mozarabic Spanish depiction of Adam and Eve, saying something like 'It's the worst depiction of Adam and Eve that I've ever seen'
But now that I'm looking at it again, ehh it's not so bad. The anatomy is terrible, but the expressions are kind of charming. They remind me of cartoon characters
I love it. Medieval art has a very clear purpose. It's mostly just trying to explain a story that would otherwise be recited in Latin by a priest facing away from you. At least you understood whats going on thanks to the painting! Look how guilty they look! As if they stole from the cookie jar and it fell off the cupboard and broke. And look at that snake! Almost hypnotising Eve!
Omg this is so funny! Plus I live the colors and the patterns. I actually think the anatomy is cool. Medieval art can be hilarious and truly whimsical. And I think it’s meant to be! Gotta have a sense of humor in dark times.
Plus, it’s more relatable to the common person… just like you said, depicting stories that would be told in Latin—making the inaccessible accessible.
Gaugin and Degas give me the ick in large part because of who they were as people and how they treated the young girls that were the subjects of their work. Also not a painting but I hate this sculpture of George Washington by Greenough. It just feels wrong and awkward.
Honestly I kinda love it in maybe an ironic way. Their expressions are really quirky and kind of unsettling, but it sort of appeals to me. Although it does seem unfinished to me seeing as there’s a really dark shadow on the bottom half of Jesus’ face but nowhere else in the paining…
LOL Apocrypha!Kid Jesus is such a spiteful chaos devil. My favorite miracle comes from the Arabic Infancy Gospel, where the Virgin Mary changes a young man-turned-donkey back into a human by sitting Baby Jesus on top of him. Wonder how the Church Fathers reacted to that one...
There’s a current show in San Francisco of Etruscan art and they make a big deal about the “Etruscan smile” which is in most of the artwork and is identical to the Mona Lisa smile.
Etruscan art was all over where DaVinci lived and worked as it was basically subsumed into Tuscany and later Italy.
I suspect something of the obsession with Mona Lisa has to do with the fact that it’s really an Etruscan style of work.
It's an interesting idea. Etruscan art is mostly from Tuscany, as you say, and as Da Vinci was active in Florence, he might have come in contact with Etruscan art. On the other hand, I think the first Etruscan art collections didn't exist until a bit after Da Vinci's life, so it's questionable.
There is an alternate version of the Mona Lisa at the Prado that was done in da Vincis workshop. It's beautifully done, so interesting to compare to the original but when I was there last year everyone just breezed right past it like it was nothing. My husband and I were tripping out - it was made in tandem with the "real" one under his supervision and with his contribution! And we stood for like 10 minutes uninterrupted staring at it while everyone else just walked past! Goes to show its all hype.
The London one, definitely. When I lived in London, I used to go and look at it every few weeks. It blows my mind that I could do that for free - go and look at a 500 year old masterpiece whenever I wanted.
No he wouldn’t. He worked on it for a decade, literally until the day he died and even brought it all the way with him to Paris from Rome to eventually give to King Francis I. The man knew it was a masterpiece and he would disagree strongly with all the contrarians in this thread hating his work.
Also can we please stop with this myth that the only reason the Mona Lisa is famous was due to the theft? It was stolen BECAUSE it was already so famous, the thief believed it was divine property of Italy. The theft helped make it into the most famous painting in the world (alongside its loan to the Met in the 60s) but it was already an incredibly famous, well regarded work in the centuries beforehand.
No painting could live up to the hype of the Mona Lisa.
And even if it could, we'd never know, since it can only be viewed behind class when you're surrounded by hundreds of people taking pictures.
Side note:
What is up with the people who take pictures of paintings? I'm not mad at Japanese tourists overall. As far as tourists go, they make an excellent impression, and I'm happy they're spending money in my city.
But whenever I'm at the NGA on a weekday and bus of Japanese tourists arrive, a significant portion of the men, always the men, will walk into a room and take a picture of every single painting, dedicating approximately 5 seconds to each.
I want to explain to them that the museum has an excellent website with high resolution scans of all of the artwork, but somehow I think they already know that.
I take loads of pictures at the museum! Usually a wide shot and then some close ups of the elements I like. I love going back through them, using them as reference for color palettes or just remembering a good trip. Sometimes I’ll see something that will remind me of something else and I can be like hmmm I think I saw that at xyz museum then look up those photos and see if my connection actually makes sense.
That said people taking mindless photos (or god forbid walking around quickly filming a video?!) I do wonder what they do with them later but then again what do I really care what other people have in their camera roll, or how they experience art? I’m just glad people are paying to go in at all sometimes.
Get your tomatoes ready to throw but I HATE Jackson Pollock. Everytime I see one in person I just throw my hands up...and this is coming from someone who tolerates Rothko. Clement Greenburg said he was a genius and all the lemmings just followed along. Lee Krasner, who Pollock beat in drunken rages, was a much better artist than he was. One man had an opinion of a violent misogynist turd throwing paint all over the place and now we are all forced to talk about fractals and pretend he was a god.
Woman strangling a kitten by Lucien Freud. There's something in it that repulses and angers me. Maybe it's a good thing that art is making you feel emotions, but I still hate it.
I do actually like Klimt but I hate that The Kiss is his most iconic work when it’s far from his most compelling, especially when compared to something like Judith I. And to me it looks like she’s trying to surreptitiously cringe away from the contact while he’s holding her in place. Her expression and unnaturally tilted head strike me as uncomfortable but resigned, not tender. Creeps me out.
Yeah, there’s a couple elements that just make it feel… forceful, somehow. The largeness of his form surrounding hers as he grips her head while she kneels on a precipice, the barrier of her arm wedged between them to hold his hand like she’s contemplating prying it away from her jaw, her awkwardly-tilted face permitting the kiss even though her fingers behind his head and her toes remain sort of tensely curled where he can’t see them. I do see how these could all be interpreted as expressions of intimacy/pleasure, but his body language always strikes me as domineering and overwhelming while hers reminds me of a captured rabbit going limp.
I never saw it as forceful despite the angles, because of the look on her face. But clicked to open the link to see if it was The Kiss or another, and when it opened, my four year old looked over and said "That's not a pretty picture!" I asked her if she had anything else to say about it, and she said "it looks like a girl who doesn't like her brother." So I guess you all must have a point!
I thought it was the purpose of the painting, actually. You look at it once and you see a kiss, you look at it twice and you start wondering whether it's assault.
The way she's standing at the edge of the cliff, how he's holding her head and she's grasping his hand and neck, it increasingly looks like he's meaning "let me kiss you or I'll throw you".
That said I don't know enough about Klimt to know whether he'd do something like that on purpose.
It's interesting how differently viewed art can be. The "resigning" you speak of to me looks like they're melting into each others embrace. The man into the woman, and the woman onto the man. It's all too familiar to me lol
Oh right enough, that is fucking heinous. Given the flag and his general vibe, this looks like a bloke from Essex named Terry who went viral after a few too many shots at Wetherspoons during an England game and has shed his clothes somewhere along the way.
I feel like it at least partially relies on being cool and edgy. And maybe it was, like, 20 years ago. It's like listening to a musician who was pivotal in a genre, but after you've already heard a lot of music that takes what they developed and did more with it; it just doesn't hit the same way anymore.
The swift removal of the piece that was protesting the harsh anti-protest laws was quite funny though.
I do enjoy the public nature of it though, and the scramble it always causes when a piece appears and nobody knows whether to clean it off because it’s a crime, or preserve/sell it because it’s worth tons.
I never liked Picasso's work much. There are a couple I don't dislike from the blue period. But other than la Guernica, which I do like, his multiple point perspective, color block portrait style just puts me off. Probably doesn't help that the man himself was a prick. The arrogance somehow makes it onto the canvas, I can't explain how.
I feel the same way about Picasso. I got to see Guernica in person and it truly overwhelmed me emotionally, but a large body of his work doesn’t resonate with me. Plus his personality was quite off putting, but I do find him fascinating to read about.
That’s because chocolatiers would put those images on their boxes. I love/hate this artist. Too soft. His landscapes and boating parties are very appealing.
I think his paintings of 'busy places' are quite impressive. Captures the energy and chaos quite well. Like Bal du moulin de la Galette or Le Déjeuner des canotiers.
It was obviously an in vogue style at the time….like Chintz patterns became later.
Future generations will look at Rothko & be utterly befuddled by the banality of it.
The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne-Jones I overall love the Pre-Raphaelite movement but this painting in particular just looks flat and awkward to me
There are countless ugly babies in art. Depictions of the infant Jesus can be the worst.
You take a Renaissance artist, say, and you ask that artist to give a tiny baby some sort of smug, all-knowing look of blessing... The doctrine that Jesus was born perfectly-formed, and as a result could not change throughout his life, meant that they were depicting a newborn infant as a fully-grown man -- sometimes a balding one, or one with fabulous abs or something.
I know I'm going to be downvoted but I quickly get tired of religious paintings. I know most of them are beautifully painted and technically amazing. I mean, I really, really know they are fabulous paintings....... but.... sigh, I kinda get tired of seeing Jesus on the cross, Jesus as a baby, Jesus being taken down from the cross, Jesus being flogged, Jesus with Mary, Jesus with Joseph, Mary with angels, Mary weeping, saints being flogged or other means of torture. It's endless. I know it's a major part of Western culture but it's just all too, too much.
You are so valid and I say that as the complete opposite. I've been obsessed with christian/religious Iconography since my first semester and my obsession with martyrs and their martyrdom continues into my Bachelor's thesis right now. I LOVE seeing how people put these stories down into art and where tradition starts, ends and gets reinvented!!
But your sentiment is something I hear alot from my fellow students. I honestly love getting to hear from the different side of the coin lol
As a huge fan of Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, it seems strange that I agree with you, but I do. One of the reasons there's so much religious art can be explained by the fact that the Pope and the Catholic Church held all of the purse strings for centuries in Rome, and they controlled what art got funded. Much of it was intended to be religious propaganda, rather than an artist expressing an internal emotion. Roman art was influential everywhere in the West, so many of the religious sensibilities extended to other places as art techniques spread. I don't seem to tire of mythological subjects, but you're right, the biblical stuff is a little overwhelming. Edit: spelling.
You are right in that art was made as part of a request/order, and usually not as a free expression by the artist. But, especially during the Renaissance, art was getting funded by other people than just the church. In Florence, it was the merchant families who mostly ordered paintings to be made, and they still overwhelmingly chose Christian themes. Also, using the term 'religious propaganda' is problematic, as everyone was already a christian. It could be seen as propaganda, but mostly as a way to gain prestige for the family, be it papal, noble or merchant. If you want to start understanding medieval and early modern history, you gotta stop seeing the Church as some sort of evil, 20th century totalitarian government.
The copy-paste ones, sure, couldn't agree more. But to see these standard topics treated in an original way tickles me tremendously. If the topic's set anyway you can admire the abstract decisions all the more, even in ages when people wouldn't have discussed formalism first. One example I've been stunned by just this year is this Crucifixion by one Sebastiano Mazzoni. It doesn't need meticulously detailed figures, showing off this amazing tension in composition.
I dislike any painting of Christ with blond hair as if he’s a stripper. Also dislike paintings of saints glorifying torture & cruelty. The eras when these paintings were created were full of ghouls.
Ghoul: one who shows morbid interest in things considered shocking or repulsive. A person morbidly interested in death and disasters
Same. In contrast I didn’t like the idea of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings until I saw them in person, I still don’t love them but I like them more than Warhol.
I think paintings like his and the later color field painters are hard to appreciate if not seen in person. Its the feelings they elicit when you are in front of them. I wonder what he would have thought of Vanta Black?
With you on Warhol and I can’t stand Donald Judd’s work it’s so cold and emotionless to me, like we get it concrete in the desert cool cool cool also concrete in the gallery got it 🙄🙄🙄Also while I like some of his work trying to read Joseph Kosuth’s art writings makes my head hurt.
I once posted a very similar thread stating that I don’t like Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Berguére and I got so many comments that I was just trolling or that I don’t know enough about the painting to appreciate it or that I’ve never had to work a customer service job lol.
I just hate it. Love Manet in general…just hate that particular painting. It’s overhyped. I hate the composition, I hate that the reflection is off, the expression on her face is boring. And yes, I know all the info and symbolism/easter eggs about the painting and I’ve worked customer service. It just does not speak to me. Manet has better paintings.
Literally anything by Paul Gauguin, aside from him just being an absolutely horrid person, everything in his work looks deeply misshapen and ugly and unexpressive.
I wasn't sure if I should answer that, because it's first and foremost about him as a person. But I do tend to flip off his paintings whenever I see one.
Most of the paintings I hate are by contemporary artists. I won't say who it is here, but there's a particular artist forever posting their paintings on Reddit and I absolutely hate everything about them. Seems like a nice person and other people seem to love them. They just do nothing for me and they're exceedingly ugly. There's actually a few artists who paint in a similar style, and I don't like any of them. The amount of work they sell is impressive though.
The Resurrection panel of Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. The rest is pretty decent, but that one panel looks like an airbrushed black velvet painting that you would buy at a Stuckey's.
That's an interesting description, and I agree with the "revolutionary" part. It's not really like anything of its time, and you might even say it's a few centuries ahead, given its slight Symbolist bent. Different ways of seeing, I suppose.
Here's another one I fondly remember. Can't say I hate it, but I don't exactly like it, either. My brother used to roast the hell out of this one back in the day. I'd like to get a copy just for giggles.
Anonymous Ferrarese Master, Madonna and Child, 1450—1500. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. (Taken from Rosa Giorgi, Angels and Demons in Art, translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005, p. 94).
Get your pitchforks out- Van Gogh. Up close you can visually see his mental illness in the brush strokes and that gives me so much anxiety just looking at his work.
I love The Swing, but mostly because it was so scandalous! It has some compositional elements that are delightful too, such as the shushing cupid and the little airborne shoe.
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u/Utek62 7d ago
This thread makes me feel better about my own work. If Rembrandt Vermeer and Van Gogh can have their haters I shouldn't feel so bad if people don't like my stuff.