Saturday, February 6, 2010

Minimalism (1950)



Tony Smith
"Free Ride"
1962
Sculpture

Op Art (1950)



Bridget Riley
"Movement in Squares"
1961
Tempera on Board

Pop Art (1950)



Richard Hamilton
"Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?"
1956
Collage, 26 X 24.8

Abstract Expressionism (1950)



Jane Frank
"Crags and Crevices"
1961
Oil and spackle, 177.8 X 127

Surrealism (1900)

o A literary and art movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention.
o Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement.
o Like Dada, it was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, the most obvious influence being Freud's model of the subconscious.
o Founded in Paris in 1924 by Andre Breton with his Manifesto of Surrealism, the movement's principal aim was 'to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality'.
o Its roots can be traced back to French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Lautreamont, the latter providing the famous line that summed up the Surrealists' love of the incongruous; "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."
o The major artists of the movement were Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Renй Magritte and Joan Mirу.
o Surrealism's impact on popular culture can still be felt today, most visibly in advertising.
o Began after WWI
o Time where Europe was physically and physiologically affected by war
o Another influence on surrealisms was the theories of Sigmund Freud
o Meaning “super-reality”
o Subconscious being the mainstream for inspiration
o Generated some kind of order to the chaos of Dada
o Highly organised group of writers and artists who were inspired by the philosophies of Andre Breton
o Aimed to change the previous conventions of art
o They were a sense of ant-art
o Freud’s theories had a profound affect on the surrealists
o Influenced by Bosch and Romanticism
o Artists include: Dali, Delvaux, Ernst, Magritte, Man Ray and Joan Miro
o Artist came from various backgrounds
o Most radical surrealists proposed a state of mind that was permanently disorientated from the outside world



Salvador Dali
"The Persistence of Memory"
1931
Oil on canvas, 24.1 X 33

Dada (1900)

o Highly political
o Movement born at a time when the horror of WWI was being played out
o Angry artists – they undertook the time honoured artistic tradition of protesting against the war
o Early form of shock art
o Used to make a statement
o Portrayed images to the public to get a negative reaction e.g. Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa they found it widely encouraging
o Started in Zurich
o ONE RULE: never follow any known rules
o Intended to provoke an emotional response
o Abstract and expressionism were the main influences of Dada
o Dada self destructed when it was in danger of actually becoming “acceptable”
o An international movement among European artists and writers between 1915 and 1922
o Characterised by a spirit of anarchic revolt. Dada revelled in absurdity, and emphasised the role of the unpredictable in artistic creation.
o It began in Zurich with the French poet Tristan Tzara thrusting a penknife into the pages of a dictionary to randomly find a name for the movement.
o This act in itself displays the importance of chance in Dada art.
o Irreverence was another key feature: in one of Dada's most notorious exhibitions, organised by Max Ernst, axes were provided for visitors to smash the works on show.
o Dada artists were actually fuelled by disillusionment and moral outrage at the unprecedented carnage of World War One, and the ultimate aim of the movement was to shock people out of complacency.
o Among the leading Dadaists were Marcel Duchamp (whose Mona Lisa adorned with moustache and goatee is a Dada classic), George Grosz, Otto Dix, Hans Richter and Jean Arp. The movement had a strong influence on Pop Art, which was sometimes called neo-Dada.



Hanah Hoch
"Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany"
1919
Collage of pasted papers, 144 X 90

Friday, February 5, 2010

Expressionism (1900)

o A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect
o first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century
o intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space.
o Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him.
o He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.
o In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
o its goals to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation.
o The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning.
o The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.
o As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval art forms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.
o The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckman, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement.
o During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.



Franz Marc
"The Large Blue Horses"
1911
Oil on canvas, 102 X 160

Thursday, February 4, 2010

(1900) Futurism

o An Italian avant-garde art movement that took speed, technology and modernity as its inspiration, Futurism portrayed the dynamic character of 20th century life, glorified war and the machine age, and favoured the growth of Fascism.
o The movement was at its strongest from 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first manifesto of Futurism appeared, until the end of World War One.
o Was unique in that it was a self-invented art movement.
o The idea of Futurism came first, followed by a fanfare of publicity; it was only afterwards that artists could find a means to express it.
o Marinetti's manifesto, printed on the front page of Le Figaro, was bombastic and inflammatory in tone - "set fire to the library shelves... flood the museums" - suggesting that he was more interested in shocking the public than exploring Futurism's themes.
o Painters in the movement did have a serious intent beyond Marinetti's bombast, however.
o Their aim was to portray sensations as a "synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees", and to capture what they called the 'force lines' of objects.
o The futurists' representation of forms in motion influenced many painters, including Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay, and such movements as Cubism and Russian Constructivism.



Umberto Boccioni
"Unique Forms of Continuity in Space"
1913
Bronze Sculpture

(1900) Fauvism

o Characterised by paintings that used intensely vivid, non-naturalistic and exuberant colours.
o The style was essentially expressionist, and generally featured landscapes in which forms were distorted.
o They found their name when a critic pointed to a renaissance-like sculpture in the middle of the same gallery as the exhibition and exclaimed derisively 'Donatello au milieu des fauves!' ('Donatello among the wild beasts!'). The name caught on, and was gleefully accepted by the artists themselves.
o The movement was subjected to more mockery and abuse as it developed, but began to gain respect when major art buyers, such as Gertrude Stein, took an interest.
o The leading artists involved were Matisse, Rouault, Derain, Vlaminck, Braque and Dufy. Although short-lived (1905-8)



Henri Matisse
"Woman with a Hat"
1905
Oil on canvas, 79.4 X 59.7

Art timeline

Overview timeline of the Art Periods.

From Ancient all the way through to Pop and Op art.

(1875) Post Impressionism

o A movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations.
o The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.
o All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art.
o Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light.
o The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.
o The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone.
o Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression.
o In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.



Henri Rousseau
"The Centenary of Independence"
1892
Oil on canvas, 57 X 110

(1900) Cubism

o Led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
o Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint.
o Instead they used an analytical system in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from several different points of view simultaneously.
o The movement was conceived as 'a new way of representing the world', and assimilated outside influences, such as African art, as well as new theories on the nature of reality, such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
o Cubism is often divided into two phases - the Analytic phase (1907-12), and the Synthetic phase (1913 through the 1920s).
o The initial phase attempted to show objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them.
o The Synthetic phase featured works that were composed of fewer and simpler forms, in brighter colours.
o Other major exponents of Cubism included Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger.



Pablo Picasso
"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"
1907
Oil on canvas, 243.9 X 233.7

(1875) Impressionism

o Achieved great naturalism by analysing tone and colour and by trying to render the play of light on the surface of objects
o Complementary colour in shadows
o Painted outside
o Wasn’t accepted at first
o Vivid colours
o Concentrated on the fall of light on a object
o Time is important because of capturing light
o Painted real life images of everyday people doing everyday things in “real” time
o A French 19th century art movement that marked a momentous break from tradition in European painting.
o incorporated new scientific research into the physics of colour to achieve a more exact representation of colour and tone.
o The sudden change in the look of these paintings was brought about by a change in methodology: applying paint in small touches of pure colour rather than broader strokes
o Painting out of doors to catch a particular fleeting impression of colour and light.
o The result was to emphasise the artist's perception of the subject matter as much as the subject itself.
o Artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it.
o They paint the pictures with a lot of colour and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant.
o The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colours.
o Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro (later went over to Cubism), Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir.
o Manet influenced the development of impressionism. He painted everyday objects.
o Pissaro and Sisley painted the French countryside and river scenes.
o Degas enjoyed painting ballet dancers and horse races.
o Morisot painted women doing everyday things.
o Renoir loved to show the effect of sunlight on flowers and figures.
o Monet was interested in subtle changes in the atmosphere.
o While the term Impressionist covers much of the art of this time, there were smaller movements within it, such as Pointillism, Art Nouveau and Fauvism.



Claude Monet
"Impression: Sunrise"
1872
Oil on canvas, 48 X 63

(1800) Realism

o Was a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked.
o Typically it involved some sort of socio-political or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects.
o Daumier, Millet and Courbet


Gustave Courbet
"The Stone Breakers"
1849
Oil on canvas, 165 X 267