This personal reflection essay explores how studying art transforms one's perception of the world. The paper addresses three questions: how art education shifts one's worldview toward deeper, more symbolic observation; a comparative analysis of Picasso's "Three Musicians" (Synthetic Cubism) and Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" (pointillism/impressionism); and a personal defense of cubism as the preferred art movement over impressionism. The author argues that the best art captures the chaos and irrationality underlying human experience, and that Picasso's willingness to break from representational reality makes his work more truthful than Seurat's meticulous but restrained social commentary.
After progressing through this course, I see the world with a radically different perspective than when I began my art studies. I now look much more deeply at the things around me and with a different set of eyes and mind. I no longer see art as something that has a definitive form or an exact composition. Rather, art can be relative, possessing elements that do not have to directly reflect surface reality. Through the principles of art, as well as the significance of symbols and themes, art opens up the vistas of the human mind and the subconscious that we would otherwise ignore. It helps us not just to "smell the roses," so to speak, but to see them in new colors and perspectives we would not otherwise have encountered.
This truly gets at what art is. Whether it is 20,000-year-old French cave art or the most contemporary work found in a modern museum, art and abstraction are uniquely human activities. Art is a reflection of the human soul put on canvas. We dwell on what endures and lives beyond us. Reality is not just what we see, but a mystical something we cannot readily grasp. Art gives us the tools to seize this underlying reality and bring it to the surface — to appreciate it properly, whether we are standing in a cathedral or an exhibit hall. For many of us, art museums serve as temples, and we adorn them with the sacred to find meaning in an otherwise chaotic world.
I prefer the Synthetic Cubist painting by Picasso — the Three Musicians — over Seurat's work, largely due to the clown-like character of the landscape the artist created. Cubism appeals to me because of its abstraction of reality: breaking the world down and analyzing its component parts. Analytic Cubism is comparatively simpler — a less sophisticated dissection of objects into planes. Synthetic Cubism, as seen in Three Musicians, pushes several objects together for analysis rather than pulling them apart. It is less pure in a sense, because it appears to involve fewer shifts of focus and less shading, creating the perception of a flatter space.
With its otherworldly appearance and appeal, Picasso's paintings are surreal, mystical, and magical all at once. The entire painting feels like a transpersonal journey into an altered world of perception — one that only Picasso fully understood and that he deliberately refused to explain to the viewer. An additional appeal of this painting is its use of the clown, a figure that recurs throughout much of Picasso's work. The clown's form lends itself naturally to a cubist treatment, particularly to the stylistic variety of cubism, since its costume and exaggerated features can be readily broken down into geometric planes.
While the painting appears cheerful on the surface, it also exudes an unmistakable negative energy. His work is clearly designed to shock, and it succeeds. It attracts and repels simultaneously. It is almost as if he reached back to the primitive, primeval fire of pre-Roman Spain and linked those ancient energies to modernism in a shocking collision. He seems to love and hate the world at the same time. In this way, the painting more accurately portrays the insanity of modern life than any more restrained work could.
"Seurat's meticulous dots satirize bourgeois urban life"
"Cubism best captures the disorder underlying human experience"
"Impressionism too subtle to reveal deeper human truths"
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