Buying Paintings for Relatives

I have found that people buying paintings for relatives usually have a very specific thing in mind when they set out shopping.  It is very rewarding to find just the right painting for a space that really needs it.  Sometimes color is the only consideration.

Content is also very appropriate to consider.  If you are buying a painting for someone that has very distinct tastes, it is important to keep that in the forefront of your mind.  The painting of a rooster might be great for one relative but not for another.

Size constraints need to be taken into account when buying paintings for relatives.  If your Aunt Eloise lives in a small apartment, buying a painting for her that takes up an entire wall is not a good idea.  It is a good idea to take a look at the place the painting will go before purchasing one.

Color can be a big factor in the buying of a painting.  If the color clashes with your relative’s decor, they will probably not be very excited about hanging it.  If the color is just right, it will hang on their wall for a very long time.

Religious themed paintings are difficult to buy for friends, but easy to buy for relatives.  More than likely, you know what religion your relatives adhere to and what symbols are most relevant to it.  Jewish symbolism is lost on a Christian family and vice verse.

Choosing to buy paintings for relatives based on the artist’s previous work is also a good method of finding great art.  If your relative already has purchased art from an artist that they like and that they hang prominently in their home, then it is a safe bet to buy another piece from the same artist.

Sometimes buying a nice painting for a relative has a point of inspiration, like a vacation.  If your mom and dad just visited Paris, a nice painting of Paris might be a great choice.  It is good to know what landmarks they enjoyed most and find an artistic representation of it.

I have some relatives that I’ve bought paintings for that were interested in the Middle Ages.  I found some very nice reproductions of the work that was popular in that time period.  Buying reproductions is acceptable if the painting is prohibitive in cost.

There is an aunt that I adore that is always buying painting for relatives.  Her heart is in the right place, but she has a hard time picking paintings that are appropriate for the recipient.  She bought her daughter a lovely painting that was Baroque and completely did not fit the feel of her home.

Landscape paintings done in the Romantic style look so nice in my uncle’s home.  I bought him a reproduction of a Monet that he hung in his study.  I enjoy watching him study that painting.

My little sister has requested that anyone buying her a painting should stay away from Van Gog.  She has equal dislike for Cezanne and Gauguin.  I’m not sure why she feels so strongly about Modern and Contemporary art.

I happen to like cubist paintings by Kandinsky.  My husband bought me a reproduction of a Kandinsky that I keep in my den.  I can look into it and see so many different things.  The painting comes to life and I feel so many emotions when I look into it.

Buying Paintings Expressionsim

When speaking on buying paintings of the Expressionist movement, it is always a good idea to review what elements make Expressionism unique, and to gain an understanding of some of the artists representative of this particular artistic movement.  The agreed upon intention of Expressionist artwork is not reproduce a subject accurately, but to instead portray the inner state of the artist, with a tendency to distort reality for an emotional effect.  The movement is closely associated with its’ beginnings in Germany, and has a few different but overlapping schools of thought within.

The term Expressionism was first used to describe the movement in the magazine produced in 1911 called “Der Storm”, and was usually linked to paintings and graphic work that challenged academic traditions at the time.  The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche later helped to define the area of modern expressionism better by clarifying the movement’s links to ancient art before any more modern interpretation had, and applied his own unique philosophy to the movement.  He has been quoted stating that disordered and ordered elements are present in all works of art, but that the basic traits of Expressionism lay in the mainly disordered aspects.

The Expressionist point of view was usually conveyed through the use of bold colors, distorted forms, and a lack of perspective.  Generally, a piece of expressionistic art is one that is expressive of intense emotion, and much of this kind of artwork occurs during times of social upheaval.  Though it can be argued that an artist is expressive by nature, and that all artwork is truly expressionist, there are many who consider the movement particularly communicative of emotion.  Later on, artists like Kandinsky changed 20th century Expressionist work through the formation of Abstract Expressionism.

The art historian Antonin Matějček was elemental in coining the term as the opposite to the Impressionist movement as well, and though Expressionism seems well defined as an artistic movement, there have never been a group of artists that called themselves Expressionists.  The movement was primarily German and Austrian, and many of the different groups of thought were based around Germany at the time.  Another artistic movement that heavily influenced Expressionism was Fauvism.  This kind of artwork is characterized by primitive, less naturalistic forms, and includes the works of famed painters Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse.

With this influence firmly in place, Expressionism grew into striking compositions that focused on representing emotional reactions through powerful use of color and dynamic approaches with subject matter, and seemed to counter the qualities centered on by the French Impressionism of the time.  Where French Impressionism was to seek rendering the visual appearance of objects, Expressionism became an opposing movement seeking to capture emotions and subjective interpretation, and it was not important to reproduce a visually pleasing interpretation of the matter that the painting represented.

Expressionism has crossed over into many differing fields of artistic vision, with sculpture and film making being primary examples today, and have influenced many people throughout the course of its’ existence as a movement in art.  These visions have combined over time to create the comprehensive idea of what Expressionism has become, and many people have found this type of art very appealing and eye-catching.  Throughout this century, much Expressionistic artwork has come to be representative of what art can come to be, and many people have been influenced by this very emotional artwork.

Buying Paintings Cubism

What started out as a rather avant-garde art movement has become one of the greatest examples of artistic forms breaking that mold of convention, revolutionizing European painting and sculpture up to the present century, and was first developed between 1908 and 1912 during a collaboration between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso with influences from the works of Paul Cezanne and Tribal art.  Though the movement itself was not long-lived, it began an immense creative explosion that has had long lasting repercussions, and focused on the underlying concept that the essence of an object can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously.

The movement had run its’ course by the end of World War I, and influenced similar ideal qualities in the Precision ism, Futurism, and Expressionistic movements.  In the paintings representative of Cubist artworks, objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form, and the artist depicts the subject in a multitude of viewpoints instead of one particular perspective.  Surfaces seemingly intersecting at random angles to produce no real sense of depth, with background and object interpenetrating with one another, and creating the shallow space characteristic of Cubism.

French art critic Louis Nacelles first used the term cubism, and it was after viewing a piece of artwork produced by Braque, the term was in wide use though the creators kept from using the term for quite some time.  The Cubist movement expanded from France during this time, and became such a popular movement so quickly that critics began referring to a Cubist school of artists influenced by Braque and Picasso, many of those artists to Cubism into different directions while the originators went through several distinct phases before 1920.

As Braque and Picasso worked to further to advance their concepts along, they went through a few distinct phases in Cubism, and which culminated in both Analytic and Synthetic Cubism.  With Analytic Cubism, a style was created that incorporated densely patterned near-monochrome surfaces of incomplete directional lines and modeled forms that play against each other, the first phases of which came before the full artistic swing of Cubism.  Some art historians have also pegged a smaller “Hermetic” phase within this Analytical state, and in which the work produced is characterized by being monochromatic and hard to decipher.

In the case with Synthetic Cubism, which began in 1912 as the second primary phase to Cubism, these works are composed of distinct superimposed parts.  These parts, painted or pasted on the canvas, were characterized by brighter colors.  Unlike the points of Analytical Cubism, which fragmented objects into composing parts, Synthetic Cubism attempted to bring many different objects to create new forms.  This phase of Cubism also contributed to creating the collage and paper colle, Picasso used collage complete a piece of work, and later influenced Braque to first incorporate paper colle into his work.

Similar to collage in practice, but very much a different style, paper cello consists of pasting materials to a canvas with the pasted shapes representing objects themselves.  Braque had previously used lettering, but the works of the two artists began to take this idea to new extremes at this point.  Letters that had previously hinted at objects became objects as well, newspaper scraps began the exercise, but from wood prints to advertisements were all elements incorporated later as well.  Using mixed media and other combinations of techniques to create new works, and Picasso began utilizing pointillism and dot patterns to suggest planes and space.

By the end of the movement, with help from Picasso and Braque, Cubism had influenced more than just visual art.  The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was inspired by Cubism in some examples of his music that reassembled pieces of rhythm from ragtime music with the melodies from his own country’s influence.  In literature, Cubism influenced poets and their poetry with elements parallel with Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, and this poetry frequently overlaps other movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism.