Outside the European Tradition Blog #1

Question: The human body is often highly stylized or abstracted in works of art. Fully identify two works of art in which the body has been highly stylized or abstracted. At least one of your choices must be a work from beyond the European tradition. Discuss how the stylization or abstraction of each figure is related to cultural and/or religious ideas.





The monumental moai on Easter Island in Polynesia mark burials or sacred sites. Both the faces and the bodies of the figures are stylized. The planar faces differ little throughout the line. With deep, large eyes, strong jaws, and long, straight noses, these huge statues are not individual portraits. The moai are generic images produced by the inhabitants of Easter Island. It was the belief of the Easter Islanders that spirits or gods could be housed in the huge statues. Although their true subject is still debated, most scholars agree that they portray ancestral chiefs. Thus, the monolithic statues bridge the roles of chief and god and the cosmic and natural worlds.


Pablo Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon is a pivotal work in art history, as it presented an entirely new method of representing forms in space. The bodies of the women depicted in the painting are not continuous shapes. They are broken into jagged parts that are intertwined with planes of drapery and empty space. His abstraction of their bodies creates a picture with incomprehensible space. The body of the woman on the right is so abstracted that it seems to be depicted in a combination of views. Picasso challenged the traditional method of painting what the eye sees with his new method of painting. With the advent of photography, painters were able to depart from paintings of visual realities, but Picasso took this new interest in experimentation further than changing colors to representing the human body in a new way.