"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Birthdays Today - Artists (Milton Avery and Piet Mondrian)

Two relatively famous artists were born today, Milton Avery and Piet Mondrian.   Mondrian is better known, for the audacity of his works, which are purely geometric abstracts:


Avery, an American, is less well-known, perhaps, perhaps because his work doesn't necessarily fall into a neat category of abstract painting; it's still representational, although obviously not realistic, and obviously more interested in planes of color than depth or perspective:



I tend to like Avery a little better, but still not too much.   Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but it seems to me that this sort of thing is both harder to accomplish and much more beautiful:



By the way, this is Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son.   A great work of art about a monumental subject.   Isn't that what art is supposed to be doing?

No comments:

Post a Comment