NORTON SIMON MUSEUM

This was my first time in an real art museum. I am not a "loved- art" person, so I just decided to go for my midterm. At first, I felt really uncomfortable because there were many securities. They looked at me like "weird". After working room to room, I started to get some interest in "women" paintings. I found two most popular artists about women model are Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse. They both described women daily lives, but they were so different in the way they expressed their feeling about women.  

 These are some paintings of Edgar Degas. He was considered as a Impressionist. He described women through daily activities such as doing laundry, taking bath, making up, ect. He got more attention on making women body match with their work. He made his women model more details in the way they do their work.

            This is two Matisse's paintings. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. This upper painting is "Nude on the sofa" (1923)and the lower one is "The Black Shawl (Lorette VII) (1918). "Nude on the sofa" is a composition which is divided vertically by a line running from the floor to the end of the window along the edge of the white sheet. To the left of this line is a space of calm, while the right is a space of complex visual activity. The nude figure leaning one way is counterbalanced by the motion of energetic arabesques of the background moving in the opposite direction. The white sheet cascade over the couch, surrounding the figure, which is relatively flat yet tactile. "The Black Shawl" was his work while living in Nice. He worked endlessly on the fusion of color, space and light. The volume of pictorial space in the painting is firmly delineated by the undercorated yellow walls and the long, reclining body of Lorette, his Italian model. The thick black line of her hair, body and clothing place her solidly on the bed. Gravity is relieved only by the light floral patterns of the bedspread.