PANDEMIC PAINTINGS

Question 1

Duchamp, Fountain 1917

Answer 1

• An attack on the basic conventions of art
• Dada
• Readymade
• Its art for art’s sake
• Changes the function of the piece by turning it upside down and rendering it useless
• Uses a pseudonym as a way to mock fellow artists

Question 2

Egon Schiele, The Family 1918

Answer 2

• Remarkably balanced and unified composition and as such is typical of Schiele’s later style

Question 3

Munch, Self Portrait with Spanish Flu 1919

Answer 3

• Detailing his own experience contracting and surviving the illness
• Obsession with existential drama, speak to feelings of trauma and despair that were widespread amid a pandemic

Question 4

Schamberg, View of Rooftops 1917

Answer 4

• geometric
• Artists dealing with the horrors of the time, abstraction was a way to escape reality
• “Photographers discovering empty streets and how our cities look without people show a kind of sad beauty to these urban metropolises around the world,” says Rosenheim.
• The empty cityscapes being captured and shared “aren’t depicting the pandemic, but the effects of isolation and emptiness, psychologically.”