Analyse d'oeuvre d'art en 2D et en 3D

Art Appreciation Paper

2D-and-3D art descriptions

Gregory Franusic

Eastern New Mexico University 

2D painting analysis (Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette):

Art limited in composition to the dimensions of depth and height is called 2D art. This includes paintings, drawings and photographs and excludes three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and architecture. 2D art is often defined by its medium and composition. Media used to create 2D art may include anything that can make a mark on a flat surface.

Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette, produced by Pierre Auguste Renoir's in 1876, is a painting that represents a genre scene. It represents a ball at the Moulin de la Galette, a dance hall located on the Butte de Montmartre, built in 1625 and still in existence today. The painting, despite its impressive dimensions (Oil on canvas 131 cm x 175 cm), was painted entirely on site. An ambitious work by Renoir which involved long preparatory studies and long breaks. Several of Renoir's friends can be identified among the characters sitting at tables around the traditional Grenadine: the painters Franc-Lamy and Norbert Goeneutte, as well as Rivière. Renoir in this work captures the joie de vivre of Parisians who came to enjoy themselves in a Guinguette located on the Montmartre hill.

        This painting, with its subject rooted in contemporary Parisian life, its innovative style but also its imposing format, a sign of Renoir's ambitious approach, is one of the masterpieces of the early Impressionism. Indeed, Renoir emerged from the academic art of the time. First of all, he doesn't paint in the studio. Thus, Renoir plants his canvas in front of the stage and paints outside. He abandons the classic rules to capture a moving scene. Renoir's approach is not only based on observation, but also on the reconstruction of a moving scene, from which he isolates, or from which he reconstitutes at his own discretion a moment that he favors. The contours of bodies and objects are softened and melted with their surroundings. This technique allows a faster work, to be able to capture what moves, to be able to capture impressions. 

In Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette, despite the large number of characters, the composition of the painting is solidly built around a large diagonal, from top right to bottom left of the canvas, which separates the background from the foreground, the space of the dance from that of the young drinkers (friends of the artist) seated on the right. This table also shows many secondary lines, both horizontal and vertical. On the one hand, the horizontal lines correspond to the alignment of the hats, the foliage of the trees, the streetlights in which all the colors of the ball are reflected. While in a second stage, the vertical lines correspond to the poles of the streetlights, the trunks of the trees, the slender silhouettes of the dancing couples, the long dresses of the women, the blue and pink stripes of the woman in front, the uprights of the chairs, the legs of the table.

In addition, the canvas gives a sensitive impression of freshness and joy, obtained through the play of light colors and the smiles on the faces. We can see harmonies of broken blue and purple, wrapped in diffuse lighting, with absinthe green and orange as complementary colors, but also contrasts between women's light toilets and men's dark clothes. The lighting, dimmed by the trees, determines on the pale pink to purplish skin. It emphasizes the study of light over the individualization of models. Shadows affect the beauty or not of the models, the rendering of the painting reconstitutes the image that our eye records despite what it knows. He records purple shadows on the skin when he knows that the skin is pink and not purple.

With Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette, Renoir offers us a precious testimony of the cheerful and frivolous Paris of his time, which he loves, whose elegant women, graceful young girls, pretty children, trees, sunshine, good humor and cheerfulness have earned the artist the title of "painter of happiness". 

Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette was purchased by the impressionist painter, friend and patron, Gustave Caillebotte. The latter was to donate his collection to the State by will, provided that it enters Luxembourg and, subsequently, the Louvre. In 1896, the painting entered the Musée du Luxembourg and in 1929 the Louvre. The painting is now in the Musée d'Orsay, on the upper level, room 32.

        Looking at the opinions of non-French speakers about this painting, I found an interesting one from Robyn Lowrie's blog, my French quest. In his opinion, he highlights more the description of the characters in the painting than the atmosphere of the celebration. Even if his description is detailed and authentic, he did not understand the first meaning of this piece of art: to transcribe the atmosphere of a traditional Parisian celebration that is still relevant today. That's why I really appreciate Renoir's work because I move within his framework when I go to the fête des Guinguettes in my neighborhood in France.

3D art analysis (Guitar):

First of all, three-dimensional art is observed in terms of its height, width and depth. It is not flat like two-dimensional art, which consists of paintings, drawings and photographs. Pottery and sculpture are examples of three-dimensional art. Three-dimensional art design is comprised of three main elements: balance, proportion and rhythm. Balance denotes visual balance, not the actual ability to stand upright. Proportion refers to the various parts of the three-dimensional object. The parts need to give the appearance of belonging together. Rhythm is the repetition of line or shape within the overall form.

Guitar is a sculpture made up by Pablo Picasso in 1914. This Spanish artist is considered as the founder of cubism. At the beginning of his career, he used to work essentially with 2D pieces of art. In his cubist period, Picasso wanted to adapt the representation of reality to the flatness of the canvas. In his paintings, drawings and collages he decomposes figures and objects to "flatten" them on the support, creating a montage that combines several points of view, several types of perceptions: simplified volumes open on their edges, decomposition of volumes into facets, cutting of the surface by successive planes, transparency of the planes, highlighting and schematization of the internal structures.

In 1912, Picasso sought to transpose this formal research into the field of sculpture. He breaks with the sculptural tradition by using the technique of assembly and construction, by choosing poor materials and by assembling heterogeneous elements within the same sculpture. The choice of hanging on the wall in some of his guitar sculptures is also unusual: the artist probably wanted to take up the hanging mode of collector guitars, while seeking to create works that straddle the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.

By the realization of this sculpture, Picasso revolutionizes the whole 3D art processes because he used a new technique of assemblage, that is a radical leap from the sculptural tradition of modeling used at this era, exclusively composed by carving and molding. Thus, he used ferrous sheet metal and wire to create it. Actually, according to MoMA, “the modern ordinariness of both of these materials is very different from traditional sculptural materials such as bronze, wood, and marble”. Moreover, until the 20th century, sculpture often portrayed the human form and was mainly an art of sculpture and solid modelling. In Guitar Picasso, Picasso breaks with these age-old traditions by examining an everyday object and introducing a new style of sculptural construction: built in sheet metal, the guitar has no solid center but is open to space.

It is a slightly smaller guitar than an ordinary guitar (76 cm x 33 cm x 20 cm). It consists of layers of thin sheet metal that have been folded or cut to various shapes. Unlike most sculptures, the guitar is suspended from the wall in height as it was in Picasso's studio in France. Although it is in 3 dimensions, most of the volume is suggested by shadows rather than by a concrete representation. Unlike a real guitar, this one is opened from the front to see the inside. Although this sculpture is made of metal, its material evokes wrapping paper or cardboard. The guitar is suspended vertically, its neck at twelve o'clock. In the center, an open cylinder represents the mouth. The base of the cylinder is fixed at the top of the guitar with small tabs deployed around the circumference. Four guitar-like wires are juxtaposed along a U-shaped hollow, representing the neck of the guitar. It would be about three-quarters of the way up where they are fixed by a horizontal bar. At the top of the neck, an inverted triangle symbolizes the head of the guitar. The body of the guitar consists of layers of sheet metal the thickness of a sheet of paper, cut and folded into different shapes. The lower layer is affixed against the wall. It's the biggest room in the world. It defines the contours of the instrument which are in the form of an hourglass on the left and a rectangle on the right. Above this layer, a slightly smaller rectangular sheet can be seen. The left and right sides are folded up like an open box. They refer to the sides of the guitar that would normally create a hollow and closed interior but which in Picasso's version, the front is open. The next layer is laid flat against the lower part of the box-shaped layer. Its right side has an hourglass shape, reflecting the curves of the left. The bottom is rounded like a real guitar. The inner edge of this curvilinear shape is cut back in an L-shaped shape framing the lower right side of the mouth. Below, a metal piece is attached to the lower end of the sculpture. It is pointed at the viewer at a 45-degree angle and casts a shadow on the wall. The choice of hanging on the wall in his guitar sculptures is also unusual: the artist probably wanted to take up the hanging mode of collector guitars, while seeking to create works that straddle the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.