Bride
7:00 AM |
| Marcel Duchamp, Bride, 1912 |
To me (an art history noob,if you will), modern art has always been strange to say the least. Upon seeing Marcel Duchamp's breed of "conceptual art" through his series of paintings (The Bride, The Bride and Her Bachelors, The Transition of Virgin into Bride, and Nude Descending a Staircase), I did not appreciate the art at all. I berated the work, labeling it as nothing more than a strange assortment of pipes and bottles painted onto a canvas. However, upon further inspection, I stopped seeing the mechanical parts making up the artwork; instead I saw a woman.
Although I cannot distinguish the woman
clearly, Marcel Duchamp does a wonderful job at drawing the viewer’s eyes
towards a feint outline of a woman’s figure. He accomplishes this by using multiple
diagonal pipes which lead the viewer’s eye to the center of the painting (if
the color scheme did not already). Duchamp also omitted the use of a detailed
foreground and instead used a darker palette to color the background in his
painting. His conceptual art also completely recreated the existing
boundaries of art. He used mechanical elements and created them into living
life forms.
Subtle beauty is a main theme in this painting. Upon first encounter, I saw a bunch of pipes and jars oddly assorted on a canvas with the words "Bride, Duchamp" underneath it. However, after a long period of looking at the painting, I spotted the bride and I realized that the painter was not a nut job after all. He knew what he was painting and he masterfully executed it in a way that made me think about the painting. In Renaissance art, the painting is straight forward and one can easily spot the subject of the painting (usually a man or woman) and any kind of symbolism surrounding it. In Modern art and specifically "conceptual art" require a lot more thought to determine the focus of the painting.
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