Pop Art George Segal

George Segal, Pop Artist?

George Segal was born in the Bronx in 1924. His parents arrived from Eastern Europe and operated a butcher shop. They moved to New Jersey where they opened a chicken farm. George worked on the farm but was accepted into Stuyvesant High School in New York forcing George to move in with an aunt who lived in Brooklyn. Stuyvesant was an elite school for those proficient in math and science. George found that more than math and science he was attracted to art. George attended New York University where he secured a teaching degree in art. As soon as his works began to sell he left teaching to join the artist ranks in New York focusing on abstract expressionism.

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Amedeo Modigliani, Hero or Villain

Modigliani: Hero or Villain?

The success of an artist is usually measured by how many and for how much his or her works are sold. Many artists become famous because the works emerged at the right time. Others are connected to the branded galleries, celebrities or the wealthy. Artist failure, on the other hand, seems to be related to the simple fact that some artists are just not particularly good. This is not a universalization of success and failure factors of artists but a rudimentary analysis of the process of the consequences of engaging the art world. For Amedeo Modigliani, known as Mode to his friends, the plate was weighed down deep by genetic traits and those environmental dispositions chosen by the artist. Modigliani, for most of his life, was a failure in that he did not do well selling his paintings. At the heels of his death, his work catapulted, but too little and too late… read the entire article: Modigliani: Hero or Villain?

The Mental Issues of Artists

Posthumous Psychiatric Diagnosis of the Mental Issues of Artists

The idea of the association between creativity and mental illness actually goes back to Aristotle’s call that artists have tendencies toward melancholia. The psychiatric diagnoses provided emerge from various stories, letters, typical social and cultural behavior, and other various sources particular to the time and the artist. Hospital records may have recorded that this or that artist was confined or in a rehabilitation mode for weeks in a given hospital. Such bits and pieces of information combined and embellished by the diagnostician may insinuate certain conclusions about the behavior of the artist and hence, following the behavior identifiers flow the particular mental aberration, i.e. manic-depressive. The fundamental problem with the posthumous or retrospective approach is that other than providing an interesting narrative or story about the artist, there is the pallor of pseudoscience attempting to mask itself as real science. In effect, while retrospective or posthumous approaches are valid to understand the workings of a given phenomenon, the current methods or lack thereof in investigating the mental lives of artists who have passed hundreds or thousands of years ago do not fit into the accepted approaches… read the entire article: Posthumous Psychiatric Diagnosis of the Mental Issues of Artists: Hocus Pocus or Real Science?

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