Art is Relative: A Look at Four Great Artists and Their Contributions to the Art World

Art is relative to the person creating it and the person or person that is viewing it. Each individual viewing the piece will come to there own conclusion of what exactly the piece means to them. My task is to describe art in a way that is not relative. To do this I must first determine what the literal meaning of art is. 

According to Wordnet, Art is “the products of human creativity” (wordnet.princeton.edu). Three artists that come to mind after viewing this definition, three particular artists come to mind. Jean Michel Basquiat, Franz Marc, and Jackson Pollock, these three mean each spoke for there generation thorough there art.

The First Artist I would like to discuss is Jean Michel Basquiat Jean Michel Basquiat Was a product of the Graffiti movement, which started in 1970s peaked, and was revived again in the 80’s. The Graffiti movement was very short lived and Basquiat is one of the few artists people remember from that brief moment in time.

Jean Michel Basquiat is most known for his three very different art styles. The first was from 1980 to 1982 in which he painted images of skeletal figures and faces resembling masks this was a true example of Basquiat’s eerie obsession with mortality and imagery. The images quite often entailed the use of several unique lines and very vivid colors and often times they where images of the streets the Basquiat had at one time called home. 

Basquiat’s third style was from 1982 to 1985, during this phase he created a series of multi-panel paintings and individual canvases that had exposed stretcher bars (Wooden bars used to give tension to a piece of canvas for painting. The canvas is pulled across the bars and fastened tightly, providing a good work surface for the artist….albanyinstitute.org) the surfaces of these paintings where usually very dense and were usually a collection of images that appeared to be completely unrelated.