Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism was never an ideal label for the movement which
grew up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. It was somehow meant to
encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields
of color and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a
vigorous gestural expressionism. Yet Abstract Expressionism has become the
most accepted term for a group of artists who did hold much in common. All
were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal
themes, and most were shaped by the legacy of Surrealism, a movement that
they translated into a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and
trauma. In their success, the New York painters robbed Paris of its mantle as
leader of modern art, and set the stage for America's post-war dominance of
the international art world
Aesthetic Movement
During the mid-nineteenth century, the provocative and sensuous Aesthetic
movement threatened to dismantle Britain's fussy, overbearing, and
conservative Victorian traditions. More than a fine art movement, Aestheticism
penetrated all areas of life - from music and literature to interior design and
fashion. At its heart was the desire to create "art for art's sake" and to exalt
taste, the pursuit of beauty, and self-expression over moral expectations and
restrictive conformity. The freedom of creative expression and sensuality that
Aestheticism promoted exhilarated its adherents, but it also made them the
object of ridicule among conservative Victorians. Nonetheless, by rejecting
art's traditionally didactic obligations and focusing on self-expression, the
Aesthetic movement helped set the stage for global, twentieth-century modern
art.
Art Deco
The Art Deco style manifested across the spectrum of the visual arts: from
architecture, painting, and sculpture to the graphic and decorative arts. While
Art Deco practitioners were often paying homage to modernist influences such
as Cubism, De Stijl, and Futurism, the references were indirect; it was as
though they were taking the end results of a few decades of distilling
compositions to the most basic forms and inventing a new style that could be
visually pleasing but not intellectually threatening.
Art Nouveau
Generating enthusiasts in the decorative and graphic arts and architecture
throughout Europe and beyond, Art Nouveau appeared in a wide variety of
strands, and, consequently, it is known by various names, such as the
Glasgow Style, or, in the German-speaking world, Jugendstil. Art Nouveau
was aimed at modernizing design, seeking to escape the eclectic historical
styles that had previously been popular. Artists drew inspiration from both
organic and geometric forms, evolving elegant designs that united flowing,
natural forms resembling the stems and blossoms of plants. The emphasis on
linear contours took precedence over color, which was usually represented
with hues such as muted greens, browns, yellows, and blues. The movement
was committed to abolishing the traditional hierarchy of the arts, which viewed
the so-called liberal arts, such as painting and sculpture, as superior to craft-
based decorative arts. The style went out of fashion for the most part long
before the First World War, paving the way for the development of Art Deco in
the 1920s, but it experienced a popular revival in the 1960s, and it is now
seen as an important predecessor - if not an integral component -
of modernism.
Arts & Crafts Movement
The founders of the Arts & Crafts Movement were some of the first major
critics of the Industrial Revolution. Disenchanted with the impersonal,
mechanized direction of society in the nineteenth century, they sought to
return to a simpler, more fulfilling way of living. The movement is admired for
its use of high quality materials and for its emphasis on utility in design. The
Arts & Crafts emerged in the United Kingdom around 1860, at roughly the
same time as the closely related Aesthetic Movement, but the spread of the
Arts & Crafts across the Atlantic to the United States in the 1890s, enabled it
to last longer - at least into the 1920s. Although the movement did not adopt
its common name until 1887, in these two countries the Arts & Crafts existed
in many variations, and inspired similar contemporaneous groups of artists
and reformers in Europe and North America, including Art Nouveau, the
Wiener Werkstatte, the Prairie School, and many others. The faith in the
ability of art to reshape society exerted a powerful influence on its many
successor movements in all branches of the arts.
Bauhaus
The Bauhaus was the most influential modernist art school of the 20th
century, one whose approach to teaching, and understanding art's relationship
to society and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and the United
States long after it closed. It was shaped by the 19th and early 20th centuries
trends such as Arts and Crafts movement, which had sought to level the
distinction between fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and
manufacturing. This is reflected in the romantic medievalism of the school's
early years, in which it pictured itself as a kind of medieval crafts guild. But in
the mid 1920s the medievalism gave way to a stress on uniting art and
industrial design, and it was this which ultimately proved to be its most original
and important achievement. The school is also renowned for its faculty, which
included artists Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul
Klee and Johannes Itten, architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, and designer Marcel Breuer.
Body Art
If life is the greatest form of art, then it seems only natural for artists to use the
physical body as a medium. This is exactly what many Performance artists did
to express their distinctive views and make their voices heard in the newly
liberated social, political, and sexual climate that emerged in the 1960s. It was
a freeing time where artists felt empowered to make art ever more personal by
dropping traditional mores of art making and opted to using themselves as
living sculpture or canvas. This resulted in direct confrontation between artist
and audience, producing a startlingly intimate new way to experience art.
Color Field Painting
Color field painting is a tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from
gestural abstraction, or action painting. It was pioneered in the late 1940s
by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, who were all
independently searching for a style of abstraction that might provide a
modern, mythic art and express a yearning for transcendence and the infinite.
To achieve this they abandoned all suggestions of figuration and instead
exploited the expressive power of color by deploying it in large fields that
might envelope the viewer when seen at close quarters. Their work inspired
much Post-painterly abstraction, particularly that of Helen
Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, though for
later color field painters, matters of form tended to be more important that
mythic content.
Conceptual Art
Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual
components of art works. An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a
tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as
performances, happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through the
mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely
rejected standard ideas of art. Their chief claim - that the articulation of an
artistic idea suffices as a work of art - implied that concerns such as
aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by
which art was usually judged. So drastically simplified, it might seem to many
people that what passes for Conceptual art is not in fact "art" at all, much
as Jackson Pollock's "drip" paintings, or Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes (1964),
seemed to contradict what previously had passed for art. But it is important to
understand Conceptual art in a succession of avant-garde movements
(Cubism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, etc.) that succeeded in self-
consciously expanding the boundaries of art. Conceptualists put themselves
at the extreme end of this avant-garde tradition. In truth, it is irrelevant
whether this extremely intellectual kind of art matches one's personal views of
what art should be, because the fact remains that Conceptual artists
successfully redefine the concept of a work of art to the extent that their efforts
are widely accepted as art by collectors, gallerists, and museum curators.
Constructivism
Constructivism was the last and most influential modern art movement to
flourish in Russia in the 20th century. It evolved just as the Bolsheviks came
to power in the October Revolution of 1917, and initially it acted as a lightning
rod for the hopes and ideas of many of the most advanced Russian artists
who supported the revolution's goals. It borrowed ideas
from Cubism, Suprematism and Futurism, but at its heart was an entirely new
approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic
concern with composition, and replace it with 'construction.' Constructivism
called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped
that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in
mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society.
Ultimately, however, the movement floundered in trying to make the transition
from the artist's studio to the factory. Some continued to insist on the value of
abstract, analytical work, and the value of art per se; these artists had a major
impact on spreading Constructivism throughout Europe. Others, meanwhile,
pushed on to a new but short-lived and disappointing phase known
as Productivism, in which artists worked in industry. Russian Constructivism
was in decline by the mid 1920s, partly a victim of the Bolshevik regime's
increasing hostility to avant-garde art. But it would continue to be an
inspiration for artists in the West, sustaining a movement called International
Constructivism which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and whose legacy
endured into the 1950s.
Cubism
The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict space
since the Renaissance, and they also turned away from the realistic modeling
of figures.
Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space
flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects
from various angles. Some historians have argued that these innovations
represent a response to the changing experience of space, movement, and
time in the modern world. This first phase of the movement was called
Analytic Cubism.
In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubists explored the use of non-art
materials as abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later
historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the
artists were also acutely aware of current events, particularly WWI.
Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by putting new emphasis
on the unity between a depicted scene and the surface of the canvas. These
experiments would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who continued
to explore their use of the grid, abstract system of signs, and shallow space.
Earth Art
Earth art, also referred to as Land art or Earthworks, is largely an American
movement that uses the natural landscape to create site-specific structures,
art forms, and sculptures. The movement was an outgrowth
of Conceptualism and Minimalism: the beginnings of the environmental
movement and the rampant commoditization of American art in the late 1960s
influenced ideas and works that were, to varying degrees, divorced from the
art market. In addition to the monumentality and simplicity of Minimalist
objects, the artists were drawn to the humble everyday materials of Arte
Povera and the participatory "social sculptures" of Joseph Beuys that stressed
performance and creativity in any environment.
Expressionism
Expressionism emerged simultaneously in various cities across Germany as a
response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant
relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and
spirituality. In part a reaction against Impressionism and academic art,
Expressionism was inspired most heavily by the Symbolist currents in late
nineteenth-century art. Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James
Ensor proved particularly influential to the Expressionists, encouraging the
distortion of form and the deployment of strong colors to convey a variety of
anxieties and yearnings. The classic phase of the Expressionist movement
lasted from approximately 1905 to 1920 and spread throughout Europe. Its
example would later inform Abstract Expressionism, and its influence would
be felt throughout the remainder of the century in German art. It was also a
critical precursor to the Neo-Expressionist artists of the 1980s.
Feminist Art
The Feminist art movement emerged in the late 1960s amidst the fervor of
anti-war demonstrations and civil and queer rights movements. Hearkening
back to the utopian ideals of early twentieth-century modernist movements,
Feminist artists sought to rewrite a falsely male-dominated art history as well
as change the contemporary world around them through their art, focusing on
intervening in the established art world and the art canon's legacy, as well as
in everyday social interactions. As artist Suzanne Lacy declared, the goal of
Feminist art was to "influence cultural attitudes and transform stereotypes."
Feminist art created opportunities and spaces that previously did not exist for
women and minority artists, as well as paved the path for the Identity art and
Activist art of the 1980s.
Futurism
The most important Italian avant-garde art movement of the 20th century,
Futurism celebrated advanced technology and urban modernity. Committed to
the new, its members wished to destroy older forms of culture and to
demonstrate the beauty of modern life - the beauty of the machine, speed,
violence and change. Although the movement did foster some architecture,
most of its adherents were artists who worked in traditional media such as
painting and sculpture, and in an eclectic range of styles inspired by Post-
Impressionism. Nevertheless, they were interested in embracing popular
media and new technologies to communicate their ideas. Their enthusiasm for
modernity and the machine ultimately led them to celebrate the arrival of the
First World War. By its end the group was largely spent as an important avant-
garde, though it continued through the 1920s, and, during that time several of
its members went on to embrace Fascism, making Futurism the only twentieth
century avant-garde to have embraced far right politics.