Frida and Diego

     Frida and Diego, you can see her self portrait with monkeys as you walk up to the museum. There are about 120 works of art and photos of them in this exhibition. This is the largest grouping of their works in America. There is a free standing  wall with bigger than life photos (head to toe) of the two standing together.  there is one  self portrait of Diego in a wide brim hat smoking a pipe. 

Young Man with a Fountain Pen is my favorite of the exhibition. It is one of Diego’s most accomplished pieces. Another one of his paintings is Knife and Fruit in Front of Window. You can also view some of his lithographs at the show. “The Agrarian Leader Zapata,” is my favorite lithograph. In many of his paintings you can see the real activists of the communist movement. Frida is handing out guns! Diego painted a series of sunsets. The one he painted in 1956 is quite stunning, such bright colors.

     Diego’s painting titled: Young Man with a Fountain Pen (1914). It’s a portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard, his friend. It is my favorite work from the exhibition, at the High Museum of Art. He mixed sand with his paint to create texture on the surface. It’s in a cubist style influenced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. These two artists worked closely together from 1909 -1914. Both artists were in Paris at the time and Diego moved there. Picasso and Braque viewed cubism as a type of realism. Around 1911 both artists began looking at cubism from an analytical point of view. I mention this now because Young Man with a Fountain Pen is in an analytical cubist style. Diego sought to draw out the geometrical forms of each one of the elements that composed his paintings from his analytic cubism style. Cezanne’s earlier works were an influence on cubist painters. Picasso sought out three dimensional viewpoints in his paintings. Braque was interested in volume and mass in his paintings. 

I can see in this work of art  a man, with a pen in his hand, writing on paper. His head is painted in at least four different angles; as if he’s moving his head while writing on the paper. I can see one eye looking at me, staring at me, or glaring in a warm sort of way. I see a rectangular head and ear, a triangular nose. He’s wearing a mustache, probably typical of men in Paris at the time. His mouth is turned down giving him a frown, a sad looking man.  I feel sorry for him.  It’s as if he wants to interview me. Perhaps interrogate me, if he were a detective. It looks as though he’s standing up. However critics say he is actually sitting down. Diego has mixed sand with paint to give the painting a textured effect. You don’t notice this in a picture out of a book. It’s what makes this so work amazingly different or perhaps, his style of cubism. His pallet is earth tones; giving the sand the look of fitting into the work all the more. Perhaps a pointillism style of emphasis. I feel the desire to take sand from the beach and make a silhouette  of a man on a canvas. It’s incredibly abstract, a complicated piece. The pen, paper, tie, hat mustache, and his coat are the only things I can identify in this work as physical objects.