3/19/09

Alright so the piece was painted by a French guy, so I researched what was going on in France around 1987, when the piece was painted.
I researched this Franco-Prussian war that went on a few years before the painting was made, and I couldn't find any connections.
I also checked out the building of the Eiffel tower, which happened in 1889. There weren't any connections with that either, so I'm thinking this wasn't some kind of political statement or anything.
I looked up gypsies in France, and found that there was actually a really strict law that said they had to register with a local authority. Places to set up tents were regulated, so the gypsy woman in the painting probably was sleeping on the ground with no protection because she couldn't get through all the steps to have a tent set up.
I looked for more of Rousseau's paintings to compare. They have mostly the same style, with kind of course brush strokes and bright colors in the front with cooler colors in the background. I guess that makes sense cause they're by the same painter. The difference, obviously, is what's being painted. I noticed that almost all of them are set in a forest with some sort of animal. In a lot of them there's a big cat, but they're pictured doing different things. Sometimes they're pouncing or eating some other animal. Other times they're just chillin out.

ANALYSIS.
obviously this isn't how i'm going to do it in my powerpoint, but for now i'm just going to write out all the essential questions and how they relate (or don't) to the painting.

What does your piece of art say about what it means to be human?
It definitely shows the woman being completely peaceful, even though there's a lion sniffing her.
Maybe it shows we don't really understand as much as we think. I mean, basically everyone considers lions ferocious and scary, but we're pretty ferocious and scary to them too, unless they're out cold. The same concept is basically mirrored here. The lion is just trying to figure the woman out--he's getting her scent. It's kind of like how we tranquilize animals to figure out stuff about them. In the same way, it's showing humans aren't that different from animals. And that's not a bad thing.
another theory could be that humans don't know what to do with power. We (arguably) have a lot more power than any other animal, and we end up killing a huge amount of them. In the painting, the lion has all the power to chomp of the woman's head, but he doesn't. He doesn't even look like he wants to. Even though lions don't have as much intelligence as people, he manages to have power over the woman and still not hurt her. Maybe because he doesn't process that he has the power? Maybe humans just abuse power because we know we have it.

In the worldview communicated by your piece, what place do humans hold?
To me, it looks like the woman and the lion are equals in this picture. The woman isn't above the lion, if anything he's got way influence than her over the situation.

Does your piece say anything about the human relationship to nature or to the divine?
Definitely. It shows that if we can just let our guard down a bit, we can get along perfectly well with nature. I'm not saying go out and hug a bear. Just don't shoot it.

Does your piece say anything about distinctions among humans based on class, race, gender religion, etc.?
It's debatable, but yeah I think so. Gypsies in this time period had to go through all this work just to have permission to set up camp somewhere. It's just because they didn't have a permanent residence, but that's their personal choice. I don't know for sure, but it seems a lot like the whole thing was made up to make life harder for gypsies, because they weren't really accepted in French culture at that time.