Final Essay

Visual arts have been practiced by all human beings since thousands of years ago. Although there is only a limited amount of evidence and creative pieces from that long ago, it is clear that art has progressed and evolved in a significant way. It first originated from crude symbolic drawings of the stone age art era, then evolved past the bronze, iron, medieval, and renaissance art period, and finally to the art that we know of today, modern and contemporary art, which features more abstract pieces. Out of all these, the one that stands out to me the most and has the greatest influence in the style and method that I create my art pieces today, would be the modern era. Three of the most significant and innovative artists from this period

During this period, inventions like sound recording, the telephone, the car, the airplane, and photography marked the dawn of a new age. Artists greatly struggled during this time as they had to figure out how to reflect the modernity of the era using the old, trusted, traditional ways of painting that had been used by artists in the past four centuries. Photography started replacing painting as the tool for documentating, and artists had to figure out a way to keep painting relevant and fresh to the new age. They needed a more radical approach, and Picasso did just that. He founded a new way of seeing with his innovative and distorted images that stretched the possibilities of art just like the way the technology was expanding the boundaries of travel and

Picasso pushed the boundaries and was one of the very few artists who were able to completely create a totally unique, original style. He showed the world that painting did not have to represent reality, and that you could convey objects through geometric shapes. Picasso “marked the end of the Renaissance dominated era and was the beginning of modern art” (“Picasso Art Story”). His style of art is so widely used today, that we have museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan whose displayed artworks are all heavily influenced by Picasso. Andy Warhol is another great artist whose art continues to be relevant to the world we live in today. Just like Picasso, Warhol changed the art world by marking a new stage in the breakdown between high and low art forms. His iconic paintings in the early 1960’s were crucial in pioneering these developments, and further “breaking down the borders between the worlds of high art and popular culture” (“Andy Warhol’s Influence on Art