Piet Mondrian Visual & Performing Arts Research Paper

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The Baltimore Museum of Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art, also known as BMA, is a famous art museum of the United States. It is situated in Maryland and was founded in 1914. The museum has over 94,000 objects; out of this, nearly 1,000 works of Henri Matisse are present in the Cone Collection of the museum (Claudine 78). In addition, the museum has some of the finest and most incredible holdings of prints, photographs, and drawings. Once I got a chance to visit the museum and was amazed to see a huge collection of artworks in its different galleries. The collections of African art attracted my attention. The works of contemporary artists were also very nice. I could also see many American and European paintings there, found decorative items and sculptures of different types, and was happy to find Asian artworks and textiles from the world over. From the Baltimore Museum of Art, I have chosen The Kiss (Rodin sculpture) for my project. I believe that it is one of the best and most amazing sculptures found in the museum.
The Kiss was created in 1882 and is a marble sculpture. It was created by French sculptor Auguste Rodin. At a glimpse, it looked like an ordinary piece of work, but when I stood close and observed keenly, I found that the color was quite appealing and the way it was created was unique. The themes of the Kiss are love, relationship, and affection. A nude couple was found embracing, hugging and kissing (Penelope 238). The sculpture appeared to be a part of a group of reliefs. I saw that it has been decorated with Rodin's monumental bronze portal titled The Gates of Hell. The Kiss was primarily made for the museum of art in Paris. Given its popularity and charm, its copies were made and kept in different museums of the world. For example, one sculpture is kept in Paris and the other one is present here in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
What attracted me the most toward this sculpture was the way the couple was holding or hugging one another! This made me feel that it was a real-life couple (Rilke, Eijk, & Bierman 16). In today’s world, feelings of love and affection have come to an end. I can found people spending hours at the office every single day, and when they come back home, they do not give proper time to their partners. This eventually leads them and their partners to feel bad and may cause problems like stress, depression, and anxiety. Through the Kiss, sculptor Auguste Rodin has tried to make people understand that it is important to spend time with the people we love the most. It is understandable that we have a lot of things to do every day, but at the end of the day, materialistic things like money, fame, house, and success cannot benefit us. We always need the company of someone who adores us and praises us, and someone who is ready to face the challenges with us. The Kiss conveys the same type of message, and the way the couple is hugging is quite impressive. This makes us realize that we all need to hug the people we love and do not want to lose. One day, all our materialistic things will be gone, and in that way, we will only need someone to love us unconditionally. The sculpture of this couple was once removed from the Gates and another pair of lovers was placed in the Paris museum. They were found to be sitting on the small right-hand column.
The first methodological approach I would like to go with is Formalism. It is the study of the compositional elements of an artwork or the analysis of its color, shape, line, texture and other visual elements (Rodin Sculpts The Kiss 6). In the case of this sculpture, I can say that black color has been chosen as the visual element. Other colors that could be used for this sculpture are white, b...