Essay On James Ensor's Mask Confronting Death

In the left hand side of James Ensor’s ‘Masks Confronting Death’, there is a faint image of a face that has been painted over: a feature that I had not noticed the first time I saw the painting. However, as I was living in Connecticut I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City multiple times, and each time I was able to examine this piece in further detail. I had a similar experience when observing Claude Monet’s ‘Poplars’ in the Fitzwilliam Museum. In the central third of the oil painting is a brush hair, coated in green paint and attached within the painting. My great, great grandfather – George Bain – was a well-known artist and one of his paintings has a fine hair from one of his paintbrushes. This evidence of an artist’s life and how they physically intervene with an artwork is an element of History of Art that I want to explore further in order to see how this relates to the political, social and cultural influences of their era.

My personal investigation, based around the concept of human presence, for A Level is allowing me to combine intense research into Ana Mendieta with my own creative response. My essay will culminate with other art histories and feminist theory to develop a title around the human presence within art.

I have been pursuing …show more content…
I attended a day of lectures based around Classical Studies, to aid my A Level in Classical Civilization and I was particularly fascinated by the variety and function within Greek sculpture and how this influenced artists within the classical era as well as more modern time periods. To further my understanding I read Plato’s ‘The Republic’ and J.J. Pollitt’s ‘The Ancient View of Greek Art’ and discovered the classical view of mimetic art and how it was thought to be inferior to the original