Victor Horta, Belgium, Art Nouveau, Stairway, Tassel House depicts a beautiful sense of transitioning from the modern world to postmodern art. The curvature and the design is common to art nouveau. All of these features appeared strikingly original for its time. It think what most strikes me about this piece is the use of lighting and color. How the yellows blend into the orange reds at the bottom on the walls. The gold curves painted on the bottom half of the wall and the curves all along the bottom of the floor. He “integrates” all of these elements to unify his masterpiece and changed the direction of interior design.

I absolutely love Gustave Klimt’s The Kiss, his use of Gold, (creating his own Gold style) and how the two lovers passionately engage in a kiss—there is a feeling of intimacy and longing to be together. Though the woman’s expression seems blank, the way her head lays upon her shoulder, it seems as though she is embracing the moment, and her arm is wrapped around them. The moment for these two is pure bliss. He has interesting use of patterns on the gold. He wears black and white rectangles while she has a circular pattern on her side of their “cocoon” as they move closer to the edge, which also gives a sense of uneasiness. Overall, the effect is a passionate one. I love it, absolutely beautiful.

Unfortunately, I dis-like the more modern looking poster works, like that of Henri Toulouse Lautrec, Jane Avril, France. Lautrec suffered from disease that left him handicap and short. He was very interested, despite these ailments, in the night life in France, at various café’s, dance halls, and brothels. He designed posters to advertise the entertainment to the middle class. Jane Avril depicts a woman wearing a highdress and dancing on stage and in the foreground a bass player strums his music. It is obvious that we are audience looking at this woman, who may presumably be a prostitute. He grabs his audience by making them the viewer and her—the subject that is viewed. I think overall this is an interesting tactic, but I think that the print itself in unattractive. It is modeled after anti-naturalistic Japanese woodblock prints, which in my opinion lack serious color and vivid imagery.

I don’t care too much for Picasso. I think the idea of Cubism is cool, at least the analytical part of it. I like the idea of taking a piece of art and looking at it from all angles and then creating a representation of from various points of view. I think that Georges Braque, however, does this in a more tasteful fashion than Picasso, in Violin and Palette. It’s monochromatic scale even gives it an interesting sense of connectedness through all of the confusion within the painting.