Sunday, October 13, 2019

Ana and Andy





Ana Mendieta and Andy Warhol work












Ana and Andy are two of the most amazing/iconic artists. They change the game in the art world, such as pushing boundaries in both their works over the years. Ana and Andy are very different people on how they make their art. Ana Mendieta was a Cuban American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. Born in Havana, Mendieta arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1961 and her themes in her art is about gaze, body, nature in her homeland of Cuba.



But with Andy Warhol who is an American artist, director, and producer and a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationships between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, photography, film, and sculpture. Both Ana and Andy are complex artist because “The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between “Masterpiece” and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition, the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale.” (Page 88 of Ways of Seeing).



Ana was an activist for women telling a story in her artwork about abuse towards women. She shows it in her self-expressive artwork and she wanted to pierce the veils of perceived difference in many spheres including gender, race, and geography and asked us to perceive our own indifference to a more unsettling thing within our midst, such as prejudice and violence. But with Andy he focuses more on commercial art. He was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art destined for galleries. But “to have a thing painted and put on a canvas is not unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you buy a painting, you buy also the look of the thing it represents.” (Page 83 of Ways of Seeing).



Andy was a gay man, and he kept much of his private life a secret, occasionally referencing his sexuality through art. This is perhaps the most evident in his drawings of male nudes from the 1950’s and later in his film Sleep (1963), which portrays the poet John Giorno nude. Ana work as an artist’s nomadic early life had a profound impact on her, and much of her work addressed her desire to return to her homeland of Cuba. These two iconic artist works have “the soul, thanks to the cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul-by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged.” (Page 87 of Ways of Seeing).



Ana liked to use blood and other organic material such as feathers, rocks, flowers, fire, and the earth reflect Mendieta's passion for religious ritual. She was especially inspired by the strain of Cuban Catholicism known as Santeria. Much of her artwork materialized as a sort of rite, orchestrated to articulate the perpetual cycles of life, death, womanhood, rebirth, and renewal. In Andy’s career as going into decline in 1968, after he was shot by Valerie Solana’s. Valuing his early paintings above all, they have ignored the activities that absorbed his attention in later years - parties, collecting, publishing, and painting commissioned portraits. Yet some have begun to think that all these ventures make up Warhol's most important legacy because they prefigure the diverse interests, activities, and interventions that occupy artists today. But in the end of the day, both artists have a tragic end to their story. But with Ana, she died by her boyfriend throwing her out the window and killing her.  Andy died by suffering gallbladder issues.



Both artists have powerful artwork that inspired upcoming artist and activist to push the envelope and to make an impact in the art world. But here are Ana and Andy famous quotes. With Ana "I decided that for the images to have magic qualities I had to work directly with nature. I had to go to the source of life, to mother earth."(Ana Mendieta quote https://www.theartstory.org/artist/mendieta-ana/).  Andy Warhol "How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene."(Andy Warhol quote https://www.theartstory.org/artist/warhol-andy/).









Word Cited

(Ways of Seeing Page 83,87, 88)


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