History of Modern Painting: Origins in 19th Century France

History of Modern painting
The term modern art has come to denote the innovating and even revolutionary
developments in Western painting and the other visual arts since the second half of the
19th century. It embraces a wide variety of movements, styles, theories, and attitudes,
the modernity of which resides in a common tendency to repudiate past conventions and
precedents in subject matter, mode of depiction, and painting technique alike. Not all
the painting of this period has made such a departure; representational work, for
example, has continued to appear, particularly in connection with official exhibiting
societies. Nevertheless, the idea that some current types of painting are more properly of
their time than are others, and for that reason
are more interesting or important, applies with particular force to the painting of the last
150 years.
By the mid-19th century, painting was no longer basically in service to either the
church or the court but rather was patronized by the upper and middle classes of an
increasingly materialistic and secularized Western society. This society was undergoing
rapid change because of the growth of science and technology, industrialization,
urbanization, and the fundamental questioning of received religious dogmas. Painters
were thus confronted with the need to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms
and conventions in an effort to create an art that would better reflect the changed social,
material, and intellectual conditions of emerging modern life. Another important, if
indirect, stimulus to change was the development from the early 19th century on of
photography and other photomechanical techniques, which freed (or deprived) painting
and drawing of their hitherto cardinal roles as the only available means of accurately
depicting the visual world. These manually executed arts were thus no longer obliged to
serve as the means of recording and disseminating information as they once had been
and were eventually freed to explore aesthetically the basic visual elements of line,
colour, tone, and composition in a nonrepresentational context. Indeed, an important
trend in modern painting has been that of abstraction--i.e., painting in which little or no
attempt is made to accurately depict the appearance or form of objects in the realm of
nature or the existing physical world. The door of the objective world was thus closed,
but the inner world of the imagination offered seemingly infinite possibilities for
exploration, as did the manipulation of pigments on a flat surface for their purely
intrinsic visual or aesthetic appeal.
The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but it is
generally agreed that it started in mid-19th-century France. The paintings of Gustav
Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the
prevailing academic traditions of Neoclassicism and Romanticism and a quest for a
more truthful naturalistic representation of the visual world. These painters'
Postimpressionist successors--notably Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas,
and Paul Gauguin--can be viewed as more clearly modern in their repudiation of
traditional subject matter and techniques and in their assumption of a more subjective
and personal vision. From about the 1890s a succession of varied styles and movements
arose that are the core of modern painting and are also one of the high points of the
history of the Western visual arts in general. These modern movements include Neo-
Impressionism, Symbolism, the Nabis, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, the
Ashcan School, Suprematism, Constructivism, Orphism, Metaphysical painting, de
Stijl, Purism, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op
Art, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism.
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Origins in the 19th century
As long ago as 1846 the qualities proper to a specifically modern art were
discussed by the French writer Charles Baudelaire in an essay on the French Salon. He
argued that colour would be foremost among these modern qualities (a prediction that
subsequent events confirmed), but he still saw the new art in the context of the
Romantic movement. Subsequent modernity came to be seen as necessitating not only a
new style but also contemporary subject matter, and in 1863 Baudelaire praised the
draftsman Constantin Guys as "le peintre de la vie moderne" ("the painter of modern
life"). In 1862, with Baudelaire's support, the French painter Édouard Manet brought
together a subject from contemporary social life and an unconventional style in
"Concert in the Tuileries Gardens" (National Gallery, London). This painting, though
rather isolated in his work of the time, was influential in establishing a new outlook.
Another literary figure whose critical writings were influential was the French novelist
Émile Zola, though Zola had limited sympathy for what he called the "new manner in
painting" of Manet; nevertheless he contributed from 1866 onward to the emergence of
the Impressionist group. The first appearance of the phrase "modern art" in the
relatively permanent form of a book title was in 1883, when it was used by the French
writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a friend of Zola's, to describe the theme of various reviews
of painters' work he had collected. Other books on the subject followed, such as the
Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore's Modern Painting (1893). It was about this time
that the term avant-garde was introduced by the critic Théodore Duret, who used it of
certain young painters. From then on, modernity was to be a recurrent concern of artists
and critics. Public acceptance of the new standpoint was slow, however. The first
museums dedicated specifically to modern art grew out of the fervour of individual
collectors—for example, the Folkwang Museum at Essen, Ger., and the Kröller-Müller
State Museum at Otterlo, Neth., both largely consisting of collections built up before
1914. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the outstanding public collection
in the field, was founded in 1929, and the Western capital that lacks a museum
explicitly devoted to modern art is rare.
The conflict between the new forces and the established academic tradition in
France came into the open in 1863. The jury of the official Salon, which had long
exercised great despotism in matters to do with painting, rejected more than 4,000
canvases--an unusually high figure. The resulting outcry prompted the emperor
Napoleon III to order that the rejected works, if the painters agreed, be shown in a
special exhibition known as the Salon des Refusés. The exhibition included works by
Manet; Johan Barthold Jongkind, an older Dutch painter who was working in a tonal
and summary style from nature; Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, who had met two
years before at the Académie Suisse; Armand Guillaumin; James McNeill Whistler; and
others. One of the greatest scandals was caused by Manet's painting "The Luncheon on
the Grass" (Louvre, Paris), which was considered an affront to decency as well as taste.
The younger painters became aware of their common aims. Claude Monet, whose
landscape style had been influenced from the outset by the atmospheric sketches of the
Channel coast of Eugène Boudin, as well as by Jongkind (whom he described to Boudin
as "quite mad"), had met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Jean-Frédéric
Bazille studying in the studio of Charles Gleyre. Abandoning academic study, they
worked together outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau, where contacts with the
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Barbizon painters Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña and Charles-François Daubigny

strengthened their direction.
The implicit acceptance of the visual scene on which the new style was based
owed something to the example of Courbet, who influenced Renoir in particular in the
next few years. The plein air ("open-air") paintings of the Barbizon painters also had an
effect, but the suggestion of an art based on the notation of pure colour was suggested
by several sources. The example of Eugène Delacroix had a deep significance for the
19th century in France, and the reliance on separate, undisguised touches of the brush in
the form that became characteristic of Impressionism is perhaps first apparent in
sketches of the sea at Dieppe painted by Delacroix in 1852. The economy of Manet's
touch in the 1860s was affected by Spanish and Dutch examples as well as by
Delacroix, but his seascapes and racecourse pictures of 1864 are also important. The full
Impressionistic style did not develop until the end of the 1860s.
Though the figurative aims of Impressionism can be regarded as the conclusion
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of 19 -century Realism, the method, which made no attempt to hide even the most basic
means of preparing a finished painting, was an original one. Brushstrokes did not
pretend to be anything but dashes of paint, thus conveying their coloured message
without any disguise or effect at individual illusion. It was in this respect and in the all-
embracing unity of colour and handling that resulted, rather than its realism, that
Impressionism founded modern painting. Other developments in the 1860s had no
immediate sequels in Impressionism. The presentation of some of Manet's figures, such
as "The Fifer" (Louvre) of 1866, as vignettes or decorative designs shading into
virtually blank backgrounds was a radical departure from the coherent pictorial
construction of Western tradition since the Renaissance; it is the first sign of the form
built outward from a central nucleus without reference to the classic frame that has
appeared repeatedly in modern art. Honoré Daumier is supposed to have said that "The
Fifer" reduced painting "to faces on playing cards," and in 1865 Courbet compared
Manet's "Olympia" (1863; Louvre) to "the Queen of Spades after a bath." The
possibility of making an image out of the bare, almost heraldic juxtaposition of flat
colours was neglected while the complex notation of Impressionism held sway, but it
came to be regarded with interest as Impressionism receded. Other unconventional
principles of design--suggested equally by Japanese prints, such as those that Manet
placed in the background of his portrait of Zola (Louvre) in 1868, and by the chance
arrangements of photography--appeared in the work of Edgar Degas, who sympathized
with the aims of the new group, associating himself with them in seven of their eight
exhibitions, which he largely helped to organize.
Other qualities that Baudelaire in 1846 had specified as the qualities of modern
art--spirituality and aspiration toward the infinite--evolved quite apart from
Impressionism. The visionary implications of Romantic painting were explored by
Gustave Moreau, whose elaborate biblical and mythological scenes, weighed down with
sumptuous detail, gave colour an imaginative and symbolic richness. His example had a
special value to the next generation. The imagination of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was
of the opposite order, preserving the large-scale clarity of mural painting, a policy that
made him appreciated when a reaction against Impressionism set in.
Another possibility of Romanticism was pursued in isolation by the Marseille
painter Adolphe Monticelli. The richness of his colour is thought to have contributed
something crucial to Cézanne's development. The counterpart of Moreau in Britain was
Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The intricate and perverse linear formulations that he
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developed from the Pre-Raphaelites greatly influenced the international Symbolist style
of the last decades of the century.
The influence of the trend in the direction of the modern in France, together with
its controversial element, was introduced to Britain by Whistler, whose concern was
narrowly aesthetic rather than analytic. The harmonies he developed were close to being
monochromatic; his use of Spanish and Japanese elements had little of the radical
originality of Manet and Degas. His influence dominated and also limited the
development of avant-garde painting in Britain for many years. John Singer Sargent,
like Whistler an American who came to live in Britain, popularized a less-
discriminating version of the Impressionistic style.
In Germany a Romantic strain coexisted with a Realistic style that remained
unaffected by the most advanced French painting. Anselm Feuerbach, one of the
Romantics, was influenced by Delacroix. In 1855 he went to Italy where the effect of
the 16th century came to predominate in his work. The landscapes of Hans von Marées
were also essentially Romantic. He had visited France but spent most of his working life
in Italy; the frescoes he executed in Naples echo Puvis de Chavannes in their style.
Realism found exponents in Wilhelm Leibl and Hans Thoma. In Italy the reaction
against the academies was centred in Florence, where a group known as the Macchiaioli
(from macchia, "patch") worked from 1855, producing landscapes, genre paintings, and
Romantic costume pieces executed in the highly visible brushstrokes that gave the
group its name.
In the United States, Thomas Eakins developed a broadly handled, powerful
Realist style that became almost Expressionistic in his later years. He had visited Paris
in 1866, and the influence of Manet can be detected in his paintings. His interest in
anatomy and perspective gave him a role analogous to that of Degas. The early
development of Winslow Homer, who was in France a year later, ran parallel to Monet's
style in the 1860s. The work of Albert Pinkham Ryder was, by contrast, introverted and
visionary. He was among the artists who adapted the Romantic vocabulary to the
symbolic purposes of modern art.
In France in the mid-1860s Monet produced a series of large-scale open-air
conversation pieces in which elements derived from Courbet and Manet were fused
with a wholly original expression of dappled light in solid paint. The approach of
Pissarro, who had arrived in Paris from the West Indies in 1855, was more delicate;
influenced by Camille Corot as well as Courbet, he recorded pure landscape motives in
a limited range of tones, though with a natural lyricism of feeling. The starting point of
Cézanne was, by contrast, vigorous to the point of violence. In 1866 he evolved a style
in which paint was applied in thick dabs with a palette knife; this combined a handling
(a technical term in painting meaning the individual's manipulation of materials in the
execution of a work; it has been likened to a person's signature in handwriting) derived
from Courbet with the gray tonality of Manet; its rough-hewn crudity has a consistency
that was essentially new. His alternative style in the 1860s, with curling brushstrokes
related to Daumier, is equally virile and was often applied to subjects of violent
eroticism. The unbridled force of Cézanne's early work gave the first sign of qualities
that were to become characteristic of modern painting. Though exceptional, it was not
unique; in Italy during the 1860s the Russian painter of historical and scriptural themes,
Nikolay Nikolayevich Ge, produced sketches with loose, expressive brushwork
sometimes resembling Cézanne's.
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Impressionism
The first steps toward a systematic Impressionist style were taken in France in
Monet's coast scenes from 1866 onward, notably the "Terrace" (1866; Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City), in which he chose a subject that allowed use of a full
palette of primary colour. The decisive development took place in 1869, when Monet
and Renoir painted together at the resort of La Grenouillère on the Seine River. The
resulting pictures suggest that Monet contributed the pattern of separate brushstrokes,
the light tonality, and the brilliance of colour; Renoir the overall iridescence, feathery
lightness of touch, and delight in the recreation of ordinary people. Working at
Louveciennes from 1869, Pissarro evolved the drier and more flexible handling of
crumbly paint that was also to be a common feature of Impressionist painting.
It was in the environs of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War that there developed
the fully formed landscape style that remains the most popular achievement of modern
painting. An exhibition held in the studio of the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix
Tournachon) in 1874 included Monet's picture "Impression: Sunrise" (Marmottan
Museum, Paris), and it was this work that, by being disparaged as mere
"impressionism," gave a name to an entire movement. The exhibition itself revealed
three main trends. The Parisian circle around Monet and Renoir had developed the
evanescent and sketchlike style the furthest. The vision of those working near Pissarro
in Pontoise and Auvers was in general more solid, being firmly rooted in country
scenes. A relatively urbane, genrelike trend was detectable in Degas's picture of Paul
Valpinçon and his family at the races called "Carriage at the Races" (1870-73; Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston) and Berthe Morisot's "The Cradle" (1873; Louvre. Manet himself
was absent, hoping for academic success; his "Gare Saint-Lazare" (1873; National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), influenced by the Impressionist palette, was
accepted at the Salon. Modeling himself on Pissarro, Cézanne sublimated the turbulent
emotions of his earlier work in pictures that were studied directly and closely from
nature; he followed the method for the rest of his life.
The experiment of an independent exhibition was repeated in 1876, though with
fewer participants. Monet now began to make studies of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Renoir
used effects of dappled light and shadow to explore genre subjects such as "Le Moulin
de la galette" (1876; Louvre). In 1877 only 18 artists exhibited. The major painters
began to go their separate ways, particularly as there were disputes about whether to
continue with the independent exhibitions. Cézanne, who did not exhibit with the
Impressionists again, was perhaps the first to realize that a critical stage had been
reached. For the first time, a style had been based on the openly individual character of
a technique rather than on the form of a particular subject or the way it was formulated.
A style that admits to painting as being only a matter of paint raises in a peculiarly acute
form the question of how far the qualities of art are intrinsic. Impressionism in the
1870s was inseparable from heightened visual experience of a sensuously satisfying
world. But the blocklike shapes in Cézanne's pictures, such as the portrait of his patron
Victor Chocquet (c. 1877; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio), suggest that for him the
relationship between the colour patches on his canvas was equally important. In the
years that followed, he systematized his technique into patterns of parallel brushstrokes
that gave a new significance to the pictorial surface. An unassuming series of still lifes
and self-portraits by Cézanne were painted in 1879-80, and these, when they became
known, profoundly impressed the younger generation, who reckoned them to be as
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monumental as the great art of the past, yet in a subtly different way that was inherent in
the actual manner of painting.
The style of the 1870s was formless from a traditional standpoint, and at the
beginning of the next decade Renoir decided that he had gone to the limit with
Impressionism and "did not know either how to paint or draw." Following a trip to Italy,
he set about acquiring a wiry, linear style that was the direct opposite of his relaxed,
freely brushed manner of earlier years.
The appearance of a new generation posed a fresh challenge. Georges Seurat was
moving away from the empirical standpoint of Impressionism toward a technique
(Pointillism) and a form that were increasingly deliberately designed. Paul Gauguin,
taking his starting point from Cézanne's style of about 1880, passed from a capricious
personal type of Impressionism to a greater use of symbols. He exhibited with the
Impressionists from 1880 onward, but it was soon evident that group shows could no
longer accommodate the growing diversity. In 1884, after the Salon jury had been
particularly harsh, the Société des Artistes Indépendants was formed. The last
Impressionist group show was held in 1886. Only Monet and Armand Guillaumin, to
whose efforts the group owed much of its eventual recognition, were now in the strict
sense Impressionists. Monet, who had exhibited only once since 1879, continued to
build on the original foundation of the style, the rendering of visual impression through
colour in paintings that studied a single motif in varying lights. For him the
formlessness and the homogeneity of Impressionism were its ultimate virtues. In his last
series of "Water Lilies," painted between 1906 and 1926, the shimmering of light
eventually lost its last descriptive content, and only the colour and curling movement of
his brush carried a general all-pervading reference to the visual world. Renoir's later
work was equally expansive; his sympathetic vision of humanity revealed its own
inherent breadth and grandeur.
Impressionism, in one aspect, continued the main direction of 19th-century
painting, and after 1880 the movement was an international one, taking on independent
national characteristics. Russia produced an exponent in Isaak Ilich Levitan, and
Scotland one in William MacTaggart. In Italy Telemarco Signorini and in the United
States such painters as Childe Hassam developed modified forms of the style. In France,
and to some extent in Germany with Max Liebermann, Impressionism provided a basis
for the styles that followed.
Symbolism
During the decades before 1900, the Symbolists were the avant-garde, and one of
quite a new kind, influencing not only the arts but also the thought and spirit of the
epoch. Maurice Denis, their theoretician, enunciated in 1890 the most famous of their
artistic principles: Remember that a picture--before being a war-horse, a nude or an
anecdote of some sort--is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a
certain order.
Such ideas inspired a group of young painters, among whom was Denis himself,
to call themselves Nabis (from the Hebrew word for "prophet"). They were in revolt
against the faithfulness to nature of Impressionism; in addition, largely because they
were in close touch with Symbolist writers, they regarded choice of subject as
important. They included Paul Ranson, who gave the style a decorative and linear
inflection; Pierre Bonnard; and Édouard Vuillard.
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Other than the Nabis, one of the chief Symbolists was Odilon Redon, who moved
from the same starting point as the Impressionists--the landscape style of the Barbizon
school--but in precisely the opposite direction. Redon's visionary charcoal drawings
(which he called his black pictures) led to successive series of lithographs that explored
the evocative, irrational, and fantastic orders of creation that Impressionism excluded.
Redon later wrote:
Nothing in art can be done by will alone. Everything is done by docile submission to the
coming of the unconscious . . . for every act of creation, the unconscious sets us a
different problem.
Redon established one of the characteristic standpoints of modern art, and his
influence on the younger Symbolists was profound. In 1888 Gauguin, already affected
by a trip to Martinique, settled at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The influential style he
developed there was based on the juxtaposition of flat areas of colours enclosed by
black contours, the total effect suggesting cloisonné enamel (a technique in which metal
strips differentiate the colour areas of the design, thereby creating an outline effect),
hence the name Cloisonnisme used to describe this style. The spirit in which Gauguin
rendered Breton scenes was mystical. He wrote: Do not copy nature too much. Art is an
abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, but think more
of creating than of the actual result.
At Pont-Aven, Gauguin was joined by Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, who
had lately begun to work in a similar way. Paul Sérusier painted under Gauguin's
direction a little sketch entitled "Bois d'amour" that appeared more independent of
appearances and bolder in its synthesis of pattern than anything that had been seen
before; it became known in Paris as "The Talisman." The liberation of Synthetism, as
the new style was called, indeed worked like a charm, and after the Café Volpini
exhibition of 1889 it spread rapidly. The movement was linked with literature and, in
particular, with drama; it inspired its own periodical, La Revue Blanche, and Le Théâtre
de l'Oeuvre (both founded in Paris in 1891); there were exhibitions twice a year at a
Paris gallery, Le Barc de Boutteville, from 1891 to 1897.
The decorative style known as Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil, spread across Europe
and the Americas in the 1890s. The pursuit of natural and organic sources for form still
further alienated art from the descriptive purpose that had been the basis of figurative
style, and an artistic movement without taint of historicism that molded the fine arts,
architecture, and craftsmanship in a single, consistent taste recovered the creative unity
that had been lost since the early 18th century. In The Netherlands the fin de siècle
("end of the century"; specifically the end of the 19th century, and a phrase that has
overtones of a rather precious sophistication and world-weariness) style and sense of
purpose appeared in the paintings of Johan Thorn Prikker and Jan Toorop. The
Viennese Gustav Klimt made bolder and more arbitrary use of pattern. In Russia the
demonic genius of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel had points of contact with the Art
Nouveau style. It even affected Seurat and his circle, who were known as the Neo-
Impressionists; the popular imagery of Seurat's later works, such as "The Circus" (1890-
91; Louvre), was expressed in sinuous rhythms not far from Art Nouveau, and the
Belgian Henry van de Velde passed from Neo-Impressionism by way of fin de siècle
decorations that were near abstraction to a place among the founders of 20th-century
architecture. A strange and beautiful blend of Symbolism with an alpine clarity of
colour close to Neo-Impressionism appeared in compositions such as "The Unnatural
Mothers" by the Italian Giovanni Segantini.
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The end of the 19th-century tradition
Until Seurat no painter had expressly founded a style on the intrinsic reactions of
colour to colour and a codified vocabulary of expressive forms. The consistent
granulation of colour in Seurat's work from 1885 onward was specific to the picture, not
to the sensation or the subject. The coherent images of space and light that he made out
of this granulation ended with him. Seurat's followers, grouped as Neo-Impressionists
under the leadership of Paul Signac, developed his technique rather than his vision.
Seurat's influence was nonetheless widespread and fertile; his system in itself supplied a
clarity that painters needed. It was Neo-Impressionism that was in the ascendant when
the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886. The emotional travail
evident in van Gogh's early work was marvelously lightened in the new aesthetic
climate. But in his hands the dashes of pure colour turned and twisted, trading invisible
and unstable lines of force. They were woven into rhythmical and convulsive patterns
reflecting the mounting intensity of his own feelings. Such patterns converted the Neo-
Impressionist style into something quite different--a forerunner of what was to be
known as Expressionism. Other painters were less radical in their approach. Pissarro
assimilated the Neo-Impressionist method to the vision of the older generation; Henri-
Edmond Cross and Maximilien Luce gave it the characteristic economy of the age that
followed. Henri Matisse's repeated experiments with it, culminating in his contact with
Signac and Cross in 1904, finally converted the pure colour of Impressionism to the
special purposes of 20th-century art.
In the meantime, the older Impressionists were producing the broadly conceived
works that crowned their artistic achievement and formed, as it seems in retrospect, the
great traditional masterpieces of modern art. Degas's lifelong absorption in the human
body as a subject led him to produce a series of bathing scenes and drawings from the
nude in which the form expanded to an amplitude that filled the picture. Fullness of
form was an effect that Renoir also achieved. Cézanne announced a determination "to
do Poussin over again from nature" and was reckoned to have fulfilled that aim with his
"Great Bathers" and the series of landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire. In the pictures of
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the style and standpoint derived from Degas, but his
graphic work reflected the aims of the Symbolist generation. The most original
contribution of Édouard Vuillard lay in the evocative patterning of the little pictures that
he painted before 1900. The art of Pierre Bonnard, on the other hand, developed
throughout his life. His subjects and his method remained, on the surface, those of the
Impressionist tradition, but they were re-created from memory and imagination;
Bonnard's pictures have the quality of a cherished private order of experience.
Developments outside France were not of comparable importance. In Britain in
the 1880s, Philip Wilson Steer painted a small group of landscapes with figures that
were among the earliest and loveliest examples of the fin de siècle style. The work of
Walter Sickert revolved around an idiosyncratic fascination with the actual touch of a
brush on canvas. His affinities remained essentially with the tonal Impressionism of the
earliest stages of the modern movement rather than with the art of colour that developed
from it, though he eventually made the transition in old age. In Germany the artists of
the Postimpressionist generation, such as Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, working with
the peculiar recklessness that is endemic to German painting, laid the technical
foundations of Expressionism. Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland developed a painterly
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Symbolist style in the 1890s. The Belgian painter James Ensor abandoned
Impressionism at the end of the 1880s for a bitter and fantastic style that was a pioneer
example of extreme expressive alienation.
The most remarkable painter of the fin de siècle outside France, however, was the
Norwegian Edvard Munch. "The Cry" (Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo), the famous picture in
which the rhythms of Art Nouveau were given a hysterical expressive force with hardly
a vestige of the Impressionist description of nature, was painted in 1893. For many
years before a breakdown interrupted his development in 1907, he worked abroad. He
was particularly influential in Germany.
In the United States, Maurice Prendergast transformed Impressionism into
pattern. In Russia the fin de siècle styles of Léon Bakst and the Mir Iskusstva ("World
of Art") group, as well as a vivid revival of folk decoration, flourished, later becoming
known internationally through their connection with the Russian ballet.
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The 20th century
By 1903 the impetus of Symbolism was expended and a new and enigmatic mood
was forming. The new attitude drew on a vein that was comic, poetic, and fantastic,
exploring an irrational quality akin to humour inherent in the creative process itself, as
well as on a reserve of ironic detachment. The new painters drew strength from
unexpected sources. The work of Henri Rousseau, a former clerk in the Paris municipal
customs service who was known as "Le Douanier" accordingly, and who had exhibited
at the Indépendants since 1886, attracted attention. The apparent innocence of his
pictures gave them a kind of imaginative grandeur that seemed beyond the reach of any
art founded on sophistication.
The art of supposedly primitive peoples had a special appeal in the early years of
the 20th century. Gauguin, who had made direct contact with it in his last years, proved
prophetic not only in the forms he adopted but in the spirit of his approach. Maurice de
Vlaminck and André Derain, who met in 1900, evolved a style together based on crude
statements of strong colours. Matisse had been moving more circumspectly in the same
direction. The apparent ferocity of the works that the three exhibited in 1905 earned
them the nickname of the Fauves ("Wild Beasts"). It appears that Matisse was
responsible for introducing Pablo Picasso to African sculpture. Picasso had already
shown signs of dissatisfaction with existing canons; his use of fin de siècle styles in his
earliest works has a quality close to irony. Primitive art, both African and Iberian,
provided him with an austerity and detachment that led after 1906 to a radical
metamorphosis of the image and style hitherto habitual in European art. In 1904 Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, at Dresden, discovered the art of the Pacific Islands as well as
African art. His first reflection of the primitive spirit was parallel to that of the Fauves
and may have depended on them, if only partially.
The idea of art, first and last, as a matter of expression (in contrast to
Impressionism) was common to Germany and France in the first decade of the 20th
century; it appears in Matisse's Notes of a Painter, published in 1908. Matisse, in fact,
hardly differentiated expression from decoration; his ideal of art as "something like a
good armchair in which to rest" explicitly excluded the distortion and disquiet that
earned the style of Kirchner and Die Brücke ("The Bridge") group, which was founded
in 1905, the label of Expressionism. The worldly subjects of Kirchner represented only
one aspect of the group; the earthy Primitivism of Emil Nolde and the emphatic
pictorial rhetoric of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff are more typical. Both Nolde and Max
Pechstein (another member of the group) traveled to the Pacific. The development of
the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, who was influenced by members of Die Brücke,
spanned the first two-thirds of the 20th century; the tempestuous emotion of his finest
pictures places them among the masterpieces of painting of the German-speaking world
in his time.
The transformation of painting after 1907 was particularly apparent in works
executed in Germany. Wassily Kandinsky had come to Munich from Moscow at the age
of 30 in 1896. His earliest mature works were painted in a jewellike, fairy-tale
Cloisonniste style. He later told how one evening in his studio he came upon "an
indescribably beautiful picture, drenched with an inner glowing . . . of which I saw
nothing but forms and colours . . ." (from R.L. Herbert [ed.], Modern Artists on Art,
1965). It was one of his own works, standing on its side, so that its content was
incomprehensible. Kandinsky's first nonfigurative watercolour was painted in 1910, and
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in the same year he wrote much of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which converted the
aesthetic doctrines of Goethe to the purposes of the new art. The series of
"Improvisations" that followed preserved reminiscences of figuration, made illegible by
the looseness of the pictorial structure; their diffuse and amorphous consistency had
little connection with the main objectives of painting at the time. In the first decade of
the 20th century, the idea of painting implied by Postimpressionism and that of a
reasoned structure analogous to the structure of nature, if not to appearances, were far
from exhausted. The influence of Kandinsky's "Improvisations" from 1911 onward,
though delayed, was nonetheless great and pointed in a direction that abstract painting
was to take 40 years later.
The Munich group Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), named after one of
Kandinsky's earlier pictures, was formed in 1911 to represent the new tendencies when
Kandinsky and Franz Marc withdrew from the heterogeneous Neue
Künstlervereinigung ("New Artists' Association"). The group soon became, in its turn, a
broadly based assembly of the international avant-garde artists of the day, although the
stylizations of Marc himself now appear commonplace. Among the early members of
the group, the Russian Alexey von Jawlensky evolved a structured form of
Expressionism that culminated in the 1930s in a series of abstractions of a head, but the
chief importance of the group was as a stage in the development of the Swiss painter
Paul Klee.
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Cubism and its consequences
Picasso's Primitivism, joined to the influence of Cézanne's "Great Bathers,"

culminated in 1907 in the enigmatic and famous picture "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"
(Museum of Modern Art, New York City). Those who saw it were astonished and
perplexed, not only by the arbitrary disruption in the right-hand part of the picture of the
continuity that had always united an image but also by the defiant unloveliness, which
made it plain that the traditional beauties of art, the appeal of the subject, and the
credibility of its imitation were now, at any rate to Picasso, finally irrelevant. "What a
loss to French art!" a Russian collector said, and Picasso himself was not sure what to
think of the picture; it was not reproduced for 15 years or publicly exhibited for 30.
Nevertheless, the effect on his associates was profound. Matisse and Georges Braque,
who, unlike Picasso, had been experimenting with Fauvism, immediately started
painting female nudes of similar stridency. Subsequently, however, Matisse turned back
toward relatively traditional forms and the flooding colour that chiefly concerned him.
Braque, on the other hand, became more and more closely associated with Picasso, and
Cubism, as the new style was labeled by one of Braque's hostile critics in the following
year, was the result of their collaboration. In the first phase, lasting into 1909, the focus
of their work was the accentuation and disruption of planes. In the next two years
Braque went to paint at Cézanne's old sites, and the inspiration of Cézanne's style at this
stage is indubitable. In the second phase, from 1910 to 1912, the irrelevance of the
subject, in any integral form, became evident. It was no longer necessary to travel in
search of a motif; any still life would do as well. The essence of the picture was in the
treatment. If Analytical Cubism, as this phase is generally labeled, analyzed anything, it
was the nature of the treatment. The great Cubist pictures were meditations on the
intrinsic character of the detached Cézannesque facets and contours, out of which the
almost-illegible images were built. Indeed, the objects were not so much depicted as
denoted by linear signs, a spiral for the scrolled head of a violin or the trademark from a
label for a bottle, which were superimposed on the shifting, half-contradictory flux of
shapes. The element of paradox is essential; even when it approaches monumental
grandeur, Cubism has a quality that eludes solemn exposition. Subtle and elegant
geometric puns build up into massive demonstrations of pictorial structure,
demonstrations that its complex parallels and conjunctions build nothing so firmly and
so memorably as the picture itself. This proof that figurative art creates an independent
reality is the central proposition of modern art, and it has had a profound effect not only
on painting and sculpture, as well as on the arts of design that depend on them, but also
on the intellectual climate of the age.
The experimental investigation of what reality meant in artistic terms then took a
daring turn that was unparalleled since pictorial illusion had been isolated five centuries
earlier. The Cubists proceeded to embody real material from the actual world within the
picture. They included first stenciled lettering, then pasted paper, and later solid objects;
the reality of art as they saw it absorbed them all. This assemblage of material, called
collage, led in 1912 to the third phase of the movement, Synthetic Cubism, which
continued until 1914. The textured and patterned planes were composed into forms
more like pictorial objects in themselves than recognizable figurations. In the later work
of Picasso and Braque, it is again possible to construe their pictorial code as referring
plainly to the objective world--in the case of Braque, to still life chosen with an
appreciation of household things and, with Picasso, to emotive yet enigmatic human
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subjects as well. The message of Cubism remained the same: meaning had been shown
to reside in the structure of the style, the basic geometry implied in the
Postimpressionist handling of life. The message spread rapidly.
The first theoretical work on the movement, On Cubism, by the French painters
Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, was published in 1912. It was argued that geometric
and mathematical principles of general validity could be deduced from the style. An
exhibition in the same year represented all Cubism's adherents except the two creators.
The exhibition was called the Section d'Or ("Golden Section"), after a mathematical
division of a line into two sections with a certain proportion to each other. Among the
exhibitors were the Spaniard Juan Gris and the Frenchman Fernand Léger, who in their
subsequent work were both concerned with combining the basic scheme of Synthetic
Cubism with the renewed sense of a coherent subject. Cubism stimulated parallel
tendencies in The Netherlands, Italy, and Russia. In The Netherlands, Piet Mondrian, on
the basis of Cézanne and the Dutch painters of the fin de siècle, had reached a very
simple, symbolic style analogous to the Dutch landscape. He first saw Cubist paintings
in 1910 and moved to Paris two years later. The subsequent resolution of his sense of
natural conflict into increasingly bare rectangular designs balancing vertical against
horizontal and white against areas of primary colour is one of the achievements of
modern art. In 1917 the de Stijl movement formed in The Netherlands around him, with
lasting consequences for the architecture, design, and typography of the century.
In Italy in 1909 a program for all the arts was issued by the poet Filippo
Marinetti, who called his exercise the Futurist manifesto. He rejected the art of the past
and exalted energy, strength, movement, and the power of the modern machine. In
painting, his ideas were taken up by Carlo Carrà. Umberto Boccioni, the most talented
of the group, pursued its ideas not only in painting but also in sculpture. The most
memorable serial images of movement were those of Giacomo Balla; they reveal that,
under its vivid fragmentation, the vision of Futurism was not far from the photographic.
Its imperative mood and disruptive tactics nonetheless had their effect, finding an echo
in Britain in the Vorticist circle around Wyndham Lewis. Lewis' analytical intelligence
and the toughness of his artistic temper marked equally his near-abstract early works
and the incisive classical portraits he painted later. Among his early associates, David
Bomberg developed from the Cubist idiom in 1912-13 images of a striking clarity and
force; and William Roberts combined a Cubist formulation with social commentary
analogous to that of the 18th-century painter William Hogarth.
In Russia, where Western developments were well known, the avant-garde, with
its own roots in primitive art, had already evolved a simplified Expressionistic style.
Kazimir Malevich produced formalized images of peasants at work that anticipated the
later style of Léger. The striplike and often abstract formulations of Mikhail Larionov
and Natalya Gontcharova, to which they gave the name of Rayonism, date from 1911.
In 1912 Malevich exhibited his first "Cubo-Futurist" works, in which the figures were
reduced to dynamic coloured blocks, and in 1913 he followed these with a black square
on a white background. This increasing tendency to abstraction reached its culmination
in 1915 with the arrival of what he called Suprematism, in which simple geometric
elements provided the whole dynamic force. The Russian movement, complicated by its
own politics, was both accelerated and eventually broken by the Revolution, which gave
it, for a time, a social function that the avant-garde has hardly achieved elsewhere. The
Russian artists dispersed after 1922, however, and their legacy, the tradition of
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Constructivism, was transmitted to western Europe by El Lissitzky, Antoine Pevsner,

and the latter's brother, Naum Gabo.
Prismatic colour, the element in Cézanne that the Cubists had neglected in
dismantling his style, was taken up by Robert Delaunay. Delaunay's variety of Cubism
was named Orphism, after Orpheus, the poet and musician of ancient Greek myth. The
essential discovery of Orphism was proclaimed as a realization that "colour is both form
and subject." After an exquisite series of "Windows," Delaunay freed himself from
representation and based his designs on the effects of simultaneous colour contrast.
These dictated the concentric patterns of his "Discs" and "Cosmic Circular Forms,"
which occupied him and his wife, Sonia, thenceforward. The Czech Frantisek Kupka
painted his first totally abstract work at about the same time. Even the simplest of his
subsequent works never quite lost the rhythms of the fin de siècle style. Delaunay
realized that a new order of painting was beginning, but his immediate influence was
strongest abroad. Two American followers, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan
Russell, exhibited as "Synchromists" in 1913. The Munich group Der Blaue Reiter was
in touch with Delaunay, who exhibited with them, and the subsequent development of
Klee was founded on his conversion to Delaunay's ideal of colour.
Fantasy and the irrational
The identity of a work of art as a thing in itself, independent of representation,

was on the way to general recognition when the outbreak of war in 1914 interrupted
artistic life throughout most of Europe. The activities of a group of painters, writers, and
musicians who sought refuge in Zürich reflected the disorientation and disillusion of the
time. Dada, as the movement was called, owed much to the iconoclasm of the Cubists
and to the polemical tactics of the Futurists. Nonetheless its attack on art was
fundamentally artistic; one wing of the avant-garde has owed allegiance to the Dadaist
tradition ever since. As well as the need continually to attack the limits of the fine arts,
it was felt important to "épater ["shock"] les bourgeois." The Dadaists enlarged the field
open to artists in three ways. They questioned the idea that some subjects were simply
not relevant to painting, a question that had been hovering over art for some time, by the
simple expedient of arguing that anything and everything was fair game. The repetitive
and amorphous trends of Impressionism had in fact already given grounds for such a
supposition. The next step was to make a reluctant public accept that any object was a
work of art if an artist chose to proclaim it one. In 1914 Marcel Duchamp, the exhibitor
of serial images of movement in the Section d'Or, produced a bottle rack bought in a
Paris store. Better and more épatant still, he submitted a urinal to a New York exhibition
under a pseudonym in 1917. Duchamp did not paint again, and this is perhaps the single
Dadaist gesture that time has failed to reconcile with art. It was also the Dadaists who
posed the question, if art (as Redon had realized) is not within the reach of will, how is
it different from chance? Jean Arp made collages and then reliefs from random shapes
obtained "according to the laws of chance." Of all modern artists, he examined most
closely the side of art akin to humour. Similarly, the Dadaists explored such elements as
incongruity and dissociation, a process that led the way to Surrealism. Finally and
almost incidentally, they asked, if the presentation of movement is proper to art, why
not movement itself? Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, with animated drawings and
film, made the first works in a kinetic tradition that even by the late 1980s showed no
sign of abating.
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The painter who, more than any other, focused on incongruity--a feature that in
painting involves the reinstatement of the subject, rather than its treatment, at the centre
of art--was Giorgio De Chirico, an Italian born in Greece. De Chirico, rooted in the
Mediterranean world, created from 1910 onward unforgettable images of its dereliction.
In the immediate postwar years, he pioneered a style of emblematic, half-abstract still
life called pittura metafisica ("metaphysical painting"), but by 1924, when the
Surrealists began to work a similar vein of fantasy, De Chirico had changed; and in later
life he disavowed his early achievement. Metaphysical painting had one unexpected
sequel, the serene realism of Giorgio Morandi. Meanwhile, Kurt Schwitters in Germany
developed the mediums of collage and assemblage in the new spirit. Francis Picabia,
who was associated with Duchamp in the United States during the war, joined forces
with the Swiss Dadaists in 1918; his contribution was an epigrammatic elegance of
style. The German Max Ernst was the most resourceful pictorial technician of the
movement and a continually fertile inventor.
It was in 1917 that the term Surrealism was coined, when the poet Guillaume
Apollinaire described the style of the ballet Parade, for which Picasso had painted the
sets, as: a sort of sur-realism in which I see a point of departure for a series of
manifestations of that New Spirit which . . . promises to transform arts and manners
from top to bottom with universal joy.
The manifesto of the Surrealist movement, which was composed by the poet
André Breton, did not appear until 1924, however. Surrealism meant different things in
different people's hands, but a common feature was absorption in the fantastic and
irrational. The questions posed by Dada also preoccupied Surrealists, but for them the
problem of the involuntary, fortuitous element in art, for example, was clearly open to
psychological solution. The Surrealists demanded "pure psychic automatism"; the
automatic drawings that the French artist André Masson made from 1925 onward and,
on a more mechanical level, the frottage ("rubbing") devices of Ernst, which added to
painting the evocative effect of fortuitously dappled textures, introduced an element that
flourished even more fully 20 years later. Another discovery made in the wake of Dada
was similarly delayed in its full impact: Parade had been the culmination of a series of
musical compositions by Erik Satie that were based on ironic quotations of popular
material. In the early 1920s the Americans Stuart Davis and Man Ray made paintings
out of the designs on commercial packaging, foreshadowing the Pop Art of the 1950s.
The greatest achievement of Surrealist painting, however, was the invention of a
new genre: fantastic realism--the prosaic, indeed quasi-photographic, rendering of the
forms of fantasy and dream. The invention was the work, after De Chirico, of the
Frenchman Yves Tanguy and the Spaniard Salvador Dalí. In the pictorial world of Dalí,
everyday things undergo a transformation that can be almost disturbing; in that of
Tanguy, forms are more suggestive than related to actual objects. A different aspect of
this dream realism, one that is particularly disturbing, was shown by the Belgian René
Magritte.
In the years after 1918, a mood of classical consolidation affected some painters.
In Germany a "New Objectivity" (Die Neue Sachlichkeit) was imposed on
Expressionism; the eventual synthesis appeared in the brutal paintings of Max
Beckmann. In France the Italian-born Amedeo Modigliani, affected by the simplicity of
the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi, arrived at a delicate linear realism, the
last of the great Postimpressionist styles.
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The Expressionist tradition was developed to an extreme of agonized distortion

by Chaim Soutine. Another Russian-born member of the school of Paris, Marc Chagall,
who had been influenced both by Cubism and the Russian avant-garde, discovered in
the 1920s an individual and inconsequent vein of pictorial fancy. The sombre and
devotional art of the Frenchman Georges Rouault bore the marks of his training with
Gustave Moreau and as a stained-glass maker. Its crude force had been developed in the
context of Fauvism, but the vision was one of refined introspection. The vigour and
freedom of Fauvism was developed in the opposite direction in the decorative, extrovert
style of another French painter, Raoul Dufy. The classicizing trend of the 1920s had a
remarkable sequel in the work of the mural painters of Mexico. One such, Diego Rivera,
had learned the formal lessons of Cubism in Paris; José Clemente Orozco was more
dependent on the folk art of his country. Their frescoes combined grandeur with a
legibility and social awareness rare in modern art.
The greatest imaginative achievements between World Wars I and II were,
however, again those of Picasso. In the years immediately following World War I he
had painted a series of solidly modeled yet oddly ironic figure pictures. Then his mood
changed, and in 1925 "The Three Dancers" (Tate Gallery, London) reintroduced an
anarchic and convulsive quality. The ambiguities and transformations of his art, both in
painting and sculpture, have an emotional character that is entirely his own, but the
enlargement of the artistic language greatly influenced others. The metamorphosis of
natural shape into abstracted forms that nevertheless curve and bulge with their own
life, a metamorphosis initiated by Picasso, became the international style of the early
1930s. The Spaniard Joan Miró gave it his own clarity and gaiety. Biomorphic
abstraction, in essence the method of Tanguy, extended the resources of Surrealism, and
the Chilean Roberto Matta Echaurren, who began painting in 1938, used it with
dramatic effect. A poetic version of the style, rooted in an emotional response to
landscape, was evolved in England by Graham Sutherland. In the later 1930s, with
"Guernica" (1937; Prado, Madrid) and other pictures, Picasso responded to specific
events. Around 1940, two painters in the United States, Arshile Gorky and Willem de
Kooning, gave the biomorphic style a new character: relaxed, diffuse, and clear.
The development of abstract painting between the wars was comparatively slow.
Klee (in 1921) and Kandinsky (in 1922) gravitated to the Bauhaus, the school in
Germany whose work at Weimar and later at Dessau deeply influenced architecture and
design as well as basic teaching. Oskar Schlemmer, whose simplified manner paralleled
the Italian metaphysical painters, and Lyonel Feininger, an American-born painter
working in a style developed from Cubism, were already teaching there. Kandinsky was
concerned with refining the geometric ingredient of his work. Klee developed the poetic
and fantastic elements of his art with an inconsequent fertility. The systematic purity of
the Bauhaus approach survived longest in the work of Josef Albers, who moved to the
United States in 1933. In 1940 Mondrian moved to New York City, and his last
dynamic pictures reflect the new environment. Mondrian's work was appreciated by
only a small circle, although a similar strength of purpose with a delicate responsiveness
to a broader range of forms appeared in the work of the British painter Ben Nicholson.
In the 1930s some paintings were executed by artists who formed themselves into
groups, such as Abstraction-Création in Paris, Unit One in London, and the Association
of American Abstract Artists in New York City. The work of these groups attained
wider recognition only after World War II.
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After 1945
The postwar work of Braque developed a few basic themes. The space and
content of "The Studio" series of five paintings were formulated in vertical phases of
varying sombreness; a mysterious bird that featured in this series was a symbol
expressive of aspiration. Nicolas de Stael, a friend of Braque who was born in St.
Petersburg, reached in 1950 a style in which lozenges of solid paint were built into
structures of echo and correspondence. Colour in itself provided the substance, and de
Stael's influence was considerable. The painterly and basically traditional vein of
abstraction pursued in Paris by such painters as Alfred Manessier remained at root
decorative. In Italy, traditional trends in sculpture are reflected in the brilliant
accomplished modeling of Giacomo Manzù; Marino Marini, devoting himself almost
entirely to the single theme of horse and rider, gave a bald realistic style an oddly
apocalyptic force.
The Expressionist tradition was revived in the new spirit by the "Cobra" group of
painters from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam who came together in Paris in
1948. In the work of Asger Jorn and Karel Appel, the image springs as if by chance
from the free extempore play of brushstrokes. Surrealism proved remarkably durable.
Among its adherents, the American Joseph Cornell had been evolving from the
techniques of collage and assemblage a personal and evocative form of image; the Pole
Hans Bellmer and the German Richard Lindner, working in Paris and New York,
respectively, explored private and obsessive themes; they were recognized as among the
most individual talents of their generation. In general, the most idiosyncratic and
anarchic qualities of art were being developed as a new tradition, while geometric
abstraction was seen to be the natural basis for the arts that are public and communal in
purpose. Victor Pasmore in Britain, for instance, abandoned his earlier
Postimpressionist standpoint to start afresh with constructional and graphic symbols
deriving from Klee and Mondrian.
The presence of a number of the pioneer Surrealists in the United States during
World War II affected later developments there. Surrealism's element of psychic
automatism, particularly the spontaneous calligraphy of Masson, was particularly
influential. The possibilities had, in fact, been implicit in modern painting for at least
two decades; in Paris in the 1920s Jean Fautrier was already basing pictures on
spontaneous and informal gestures with paint. In the United States in the 1940s,
however, fresh impetus came from the impulsive play of colour in the work of the
influential teacher Hans Hofmann. The movement that became known as Abstract
Expressionism represented a decisive departure from its European sources, not only
because the homogeneous consistency of a painted surface in itself took on a new
meaning in the expansive U.S. conditions but at least equally because of the exceptional
personality of Jackson Pollock. The style Pollock adopted in 1947 reflected an original
involvement in the act of painting that transcended deliberation or control. The
influential critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in 1952: At a certain moment the canvas
began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act--
rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or "express" an object,
actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. (The
Tradition of the New)
In contrast to Pollock's work, that executed at the time by Willem de Kooning,
though equally sweeping and ungovernable, showed a recurrent figurative reference; his
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series of alarming variations on the theme "Woman" began in 1950. Another Abstract
Expressionist, Franz Kline, claimed, in executing his shapes like huge black and white
ideograms, to be in some sense depicting figurative images. Rosenberg dubbed the
group "action painters." In the course of the 1950s their influence was felt in almost
every country. The climate of artistic opinion that spread outward from New York made
possible flamboyant gesture paintings such as those of the French-born Georges
Mathieu.
The idea of painting as a homogeneous allover fabric led at the same time to
other quite separate developments. Prompted by the primitive and psychotic imagery
that he called l'art brut ("raw art"), Jean Dubuffet embarked on an extraordinarily
resourceful series of experiments in translating the raw material of the world into
pictures. The energy that fills the works of the American painter Mark Tobey is by
comparison gentle and lyrical and much influenced by East Asian art. Dubuffet's
example inspired the abstract "matter" painting that developed in several countries
around 1950. At its best, as in the work of the Catalan Antonio Tapies, this style
conveys a strong sense of natural substance.
New forms
In painting generally a new directness was strikingly combined with a new

simplicity. Beginning at the age of 80, in the five years before his death in 1954, Henri
Matisse made a series of large gouaches découpées in which the increasingly abstract
images were created solely by the juxtaposition of sharply cut patches of brilliant
colour. Their influence was widespread and by no means confined to painters, such as
the American Ellsworth Kelly, who developed the vibrant interaction of hard-edge
colour areas. Even from other starting points, painters were reaching similar
conclusions. The very simple yet resonant colour combinations of the New York painter
Mark Rothko or the grand severity of another American, Barnett Newman, furnish
examples.
Abstract painting was revealing far wider potentialities than had been apparent
between World Wars I and II, but figurative styles showed a new freedom as well. The
Swiss Alberto Giacometti, who had worked as a Surrealist, evolved in both sculpture
and painting his sensation of the visual impact of figures in space. Francis Bacon in
Britain uncovered unexpected and startling connotations in the apparition of a human
likeness on canvas.
Painting in the 1960s not only sought originality; it took up a deliberately
extreme position that may have seemed almost to pass the bounds of art. Paintings
might be extremely large. Alternatively, they might be extreme in some other respect,
such as the canvases of the Frenchman Yves Klein, which showed only a plain,
arresting blue colour, or the black pictures of the American Ad Reinhardt, with
variations so slight as to be hardly perceptible. The element of apparent chance in action
painting explained the way the stains of colour in the work of the American painter
Morris Louis appeared to flow and soak across the canvas as if of their own accord.
The tradition of Dada and its skepticism regarding what had once been the
received definition of art prompted continual experiment with the techniques of
assemblage. Robert Rauschenberg in the United States sought to place his subtly
calculated "combine paintings" (collections of contrasting objects joined to make an
ensemble) in the gap between reality and art, contrasting the significance of paint with
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the borrowed imagery and objects juxtaposed with it. Jasper Johns, an associate of
Rauschenburg's, worked with preexisting designs such as targets and the U.S. flag,
giving them an ironic look when subjected to incorporation in his works. In the
borrowed imagery and popular quotations, on which much painting was based in the
years that followed, the irony was intensified to the point of ceasing to be irony at all.
Roy Lichtenstein took strip cartoons and other banal (even banally artistic) imagery as
the motifs for pictures. Another American, Claes Oldenburg, began by reconstructing
common things out of the random pictorial substance of Abstract Expressionism; his
later reconstructions of the rigid furniture of everyday life are tailored out of limp
plastic sheeting.
There is nothing random about the typical art of the 1960s. On the contrary, it
was planned exactly and normally carried out by an efficient, almost mechanical-
seeming system. Hard-edge painting developed into a wide range of planar styles
having in common only their exploitation of optical reactions and the element of shock
that is the visual concomitant of sharp contrast. The spread of this idiom was
particularly influenced by the Hungarian-born Victor Vasarely, who worked in France;
its most personal development was in the largely monochromatic work of Bridget Riley
in Britain. Again, the initial tendency was to exclude such sensations from the aesthetic
canon, but in the event a whole region of visual meaning, void for uncertainty since
abstraction began, was reclaimed for painting. Optical art, or Op Art, emphasizes
movement, whether potential, actual, or relative, and such effects have been ingeniously
investigated by the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel ("Group for Visual Research"),
founded in Paris in 1960, and the Zero group in Düsseldorf, Ger. In the reliefs of the
Venezuelan Jesús Raphael Soto, shifting vision is given a delicate order.
Other developments have proved more fertile. In the hands of the American
painters Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, painting discovered new shapes, both within
the rectangular canvas and beyond it. The new value given to the painted plane did not
benefit painting only. The British painter Richard Smith deployed it in three dimensions
in painted constructions that re-create impressions of commercial packaging in terms of
the spatial imagination of the arts.
The extreme in this reduction of means and sophistication of aesthetics was
perhaps reached when a group of sculptors in the United States and England turned to
investigate the possibilities of minimal and primary forms, normally the simplest
geometric solids, alone or arranged in baldly repetitive series. Here, it is the spectator
(as perhaps in a sense it always is) who brings the interpretation and supplies the art.
The proposition had the apparent preposterousness expected of avant-garde art, yet it
seemed likely, in its turn, to shed light on problems that are very much older. It is
characteristic of sculpture and painting in the 20th century to deal more and more
consciously and directly with the ultimate definition of art. The perennial compulsion to
reverse previously accepted definitions has threatened ever more directly the
recognizable identity of art. At the end of the 1960s the tendency to emphasize the
systems and attitudes of art rather than its product led to a move in several countries to
deny the validity of the art object. Instead artists prepared written specifications for
ideal, imaginary art, the fulfillment of which was superfluous, or self-sufficient
programs for performances paradoxically analogous to some aspect of the more familiar
artistic acts. Conceptual art has opened the way to activities notable in their defiance of
conventional expectations. The designs of earth art or earthworks are fulfilled by
moving large amounts of soil, preferably in inaccessible places, perhaps in token of the
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potency of traditional art to impose its shape on the world. Activities of this order may
appear to belong as much to theory as to artistic creation itself; in the 1970s these
distinctions, with other familiar cornerstones of artistic thought, were held to have lost
their validity.
In the 1970s, critical and public interest centred on the reductive constructions of
Minimalism and the nihilistic questioning of conceptual art. The late 1970s and early
1980s, however, witnessed a resurgence of excitement in painting and a return to
figurative representation. A new movement called Neo-Expressionism arose in New
York City and in the art capitals of western Europe, especially in West Germany,
combining the heavy paint surfaces and dynamic brushstrokes of Abstract
Expressionism with the emotional tone of early 20th-century German Expressionism.
The new movement's subject matter ranged from basically literal, though self-
consciously primitive, treatments of the human figure to a range of imaginary subjects
indicative of modern urban life, particularly its glamour, alienation, and menace. A
notable characteristic of Neo-Expressionism was the newly prominent role played in its
commercial acceptance by gallery owners and art dealers who adroitly publicized the
movement's artists. Indeed, Neo-Expressionism's sudden success was an indication of
the growing commercialization of the avant-garde and its unhesitating acceptance by
wealthy, influential collectors and progressive-minded museum curators. Some critics
voiced doubts over what they saw as the reflexive pursuit of artistic novelty under the
influence of commercial pressures, and some even asserted that critical and public
acclaim had to some extent become divorced from the goals of finding and patronizing
painters whose works had lasting artistic significance.
Abstract art - also called NONOBJECTIVE ART, OR

NONREPRESENTATIONAL ART, painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the
portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part. All art consists largely of
elements that can be called abstract--elements of form, colour, line, tone, and texture.
Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe,
illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization--and exposition
dominated over expressive function.
Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by so vast
a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote
also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual
perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied
classicism's emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of
imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many
painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities
implied in the coalescence of these attitudes. Maurice Denis's statement of 1890, "It
should be remembered that a picture--before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote
of some sort--is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain
order," summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Postimpressionist artists of his
time.
All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20 th century, including
Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, in some way emphasized the gap
between art and natural appearances.
There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even
if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn
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from the visible world. During the four or five years preceding World War I, such artists
as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin turned
to fundamentally abstract art. (Kandinsky is generally regarded as having been the first
modern artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects, in
1910-11.) The majority of even the progressive artists regarded the abandonment of
every degree of representation with disfavour, however. During World War I the
emergence of the de Stijl group in The Netherlands and of the Dada group in Zürich
further widened the spectrum of abstract art.
Abstract art did not flourish between World Wars I and II. Beset by totalitarian
politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as
Surrealism and socially critical Realism, it received little notice. But after World War II
an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism
emerged and had wide influence. Since the 1950s abstract art has been an accepted and
widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture.
Abstract art has puzzled and indeed confused many people, but for those who have
accepted its nonreferential language there is no doubt as to its value and achievements.
See also modern art.
Plein air painting - in its strictest sense, the practice of painting landscape
pictures out-of-doors; more loosely, the achievement of an intense impression of the
open air (French: plein air) in a landscape painting.
Until the time of the painters of the Barbizon school in mid-19 th-century France,
it was normal practice to execute rough sketches of landscape subjects in the open air
and produce finished paintings in the studio. Some of the Barbizon painters continued
this practice, and not until the late 1860s, with the work of Claude Monet, Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, the leaders of Impressionism, did painting out-
of-doors become more popular. From 1881 Monet, in his efforts to capture the true
effects of light on the colour of landscape at any given moment, began to carry several
canvases at once into the out-of-doors. On each he began a painting of the same subject
at a different time of day; on subsequent days, he continued to work on each canvas in
succession as the appropriate light appeared.
Impressionism - French IMPRESSIONNISME, a major movement, first in
painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about
1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and
techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to
accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and
colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric
Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together
independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for
a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the
1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the
Impressionist approach about 1873.
These artists became dissatisfied early in their careers with academic teaching's
emphasis on depicting a historical or mythological subject matter with literary or
anecdotal overtones. They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing
treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet's art reflected a new
aesthetic--which was to be a guiding force in Impressionist work—in which the
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importance of the traditional subject matter was downgraded and attention was shifted
to the artist's manipulation of colour, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. In Manet's
painting the subject became a vehicle for the artful composition of areas of flat colour,
and perspectival depth was minimized so that the viewer would look at the surface
patterns and relationships of the picture rather than into the illusory three-dimensional
space it created. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the innovative painters
Eugene Boudin and J.R. Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by
means of highly coloured and texturally varied methods of paint application. The
Impressionists also adopted Boudin's practice of painting entirely out-of-doors while
looking at the actual scene, instead of finishing up his painting from sketches in the
studio, as was the conventional practice.
In the late 1860s Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, and others began painting landscapes
and river scenes in which they tried to dispassionately record the colours and forms of
objects as they appeared in natural light at a given time. These artists abandoned the
traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns, and grays and instead painted in a
lighter, sunnier, more brilliant key. They began by painting the play of light upon water
and the reflected colours of its ripples, trying to reproduce the manifold and animated
effects of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they observed. In
their efforts to reproduce immediate visual impressions as registered on the retina, they
abandoned the use of grays and blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used
complementary colours instead. More importantly, they learned to build up objects out
of discrete flecks and dabs of pure harmonizing or contrasting colour, thus evoking the
broken-hued brilliance and the variations of hue produced by sunlight and its
reflections. Forms in their pictures lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized,
shimmering and vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. And finally,
traditional formal compositions were abandoned in favour of a more casual and less
contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame. The Impressionists extended
their new techniques to depict landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes
and railroad stations.
In 1874 the group held its first show, independent of the official Salon of the
French Academy, which had consistently rejected most of their works. Monet's painting
"Impression: Sunrise" (1872; Musée Marmottan, Paris) earned them the initially
derisive name "Impressionists" from the journalist Louis Leroy writing in the satirical
magazine Le Charivari in 1874. The artists themselves soon adopted the name as
descriptive of their intention to accurately convey visual "impressions." They held seven
subsequent shows, the last in 1886. During that time they continued to develop their
own personal and individual styles. All, however, affirmed in their work the principles
of freedom of technique, a personal rather than a conventional approach to subject
matter, and the truthful reproduction of nature.
By the mid-1880s the Impressionist group had begun to dissolve as each painter
increasingly pursued his own aesthetic interests and principles. In its short existence,
however, it had accomplished a revolution in the history of art, providing a technical
starting point for the Postimpressionist artists Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul
Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat and freeing all subsequent Western
painting from traditional techniques and approaches to subject matter.
In music, Claude Debussy has always been considered the principal
Impressionist. Even though Debussy was influenced by the general aesthetic attitudes of
Impressionist painters, he made no attempts to compose with musical techniques that
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were closely analogous to techniques of painting. Furthermore, the characteristics of

Debussy's music are so variable from the first through the last of his compositions that
even a general sense of Impressionism might best be restricted to most of his music
composed between about 1892 to 1903 and to certain specific later compositions
strongly resembling those works in style. Some of these Impressionist works would be
the opera Pelléas et Mélisande (first performed in 1902), the orchestral piece "Nuages"
("Clouds," from Nocturnes, completed in 1899), and the piano piece "Voiles" ("Sails,"
from Douze Préludes, Book I, 1910). Other composers considered Impressionistic
include Maurice Ravel, Frederick Delius, Ottorino Respighi, Karol Szymanowski, and
Charles Griffes.
Musical Impressionism is often thought to refer to subtle fragility, amorphous
passivity, and vague mood music. A more accurate characterization of Impressionist
music would include restraint and understatement, a static quality, and a provocatively
colourful effect resulting from composers' fascination with pure sound as a beautiful
and mysterious end in itself. Technically, these characteristics often result from a static
use of harmony, ambiguous tonality, a lack of sharp formal contrasts and of onward
rhythmic drive, and a blurring of the distinction between melody and accompaniment.
Although Impressionism has been considered a movement away from the excesses of
Romanticism, the sources of many of its characteristics may be found in the works of
composers who are also considered to be the Romantic precursors of Expressionism--
e.g., Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Aleksandr Scriabin.
Symbolist painting - Symbolism in painting took its direction from the poets and
literary theorists of the movement, but it also represented a reaction against the
objectivist aims of Realism and the increasingly influential movement of
Impressionism. In contrast to the relatively concrete representation these movements
sought, Symbolist painters favoured works based on fantasy and the imagination. The
Symbolist position in painting was authoritatively defined by the young critic Albert
Aurier, an enthusiastic admirer of Paul Gauguin, in an article in the Mercure de France
(1891). He elaborated on Moréas' contention that the purpose of art "is to clothe the idea
in sensuous form" and stressed the subjective, symbolical, and decorative functions of
an art that would give visual expression to the inner life. Symbolist painters turned to
the mystical and even the occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by
visual forms.
Such Postimpressionist painters as Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh as well as the
Nabis may be regarded as Symbolists in certain aspects of their art. However, the
painters who are truly representative of Symbolist aesthetic ideals include three
principal figures: Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
Moreau was a figurative painter who created scenes based on legendary or ancient
themes. His highly original style utilized brilliant, jewel-like colours to portray the
ornate, sumptuous interiors of imaginary temples and palaces in which scantily clad
figures are caught in statuesque poses. His work is characterized by exotic eroticism and
decorative splendour. Redon explored mystical, fantastic, and often macabre themes in
his paintings and graphics. His paintings stress the poetics of colour in their delicate
harmonies of hues, while his subject matter was highly personal in its mythical and
dreamlike figures. Puvis de Chavannes is now remembered primarily as a muralist.
Postimpressionism - in Western painting, movement in France that represented
both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations.
The term Postimpressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work
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of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin,
Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. 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. Impressionism was
based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive
effects of colour and light. The Postimpressionists 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 modern art in general.
After a phase of uneasy dissension among the Impressionists, Paul Cézanne
withdrew from the movement in 1878 in order "to make of Impressionism something
solid and durable like the art of the museums." In contrast to the passing show depicted
by the Impressionists, his approach imbued landscape and still life with a monumental
permanence and coherence. He abandoned the Impressionists' virtuoso depiction of
evanescent light effects in his preoccupation with the underlying structures of natural
forms and the problem of unifying surface patterns with spatial depth. His art was the
major inspiration for Cubism, which was concerned primarily with depicting the
structure of objects. In 1884, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Georges Seurat
revealed an intention similar to Cézanne's with paintings that showed more attention to
composition than those of the Impressionists and that delved into the science of colour.
Taking as a point of departure the Impressionist practice of using broken colour to
suggest shimmering light, he sought to achieve luminosity through optical formulas,
placing side by side tiny bits of contrasting colour chosen to blend from a distance into
a dominant colour. This extremely theoretical technique, called Pointillism, was adopted
by a number of contemporary painters and formed the basis of the style of painting
known as Neo-Impressionism.
The Postimpressionists often exhibited together but, unlike the Impressionists
who were a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone. Cézanne painted in
isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of
Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the
countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of
Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with
the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced "the abominable error of naturalism."
With the young painter Émile Bernard, he led a self-conscious return to the aesthetic of
primitive art, for which he believed imagination and ideas were the primary inspiration
and the representation of nature merely a vehicle for their expression. Copying the pure,
flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and
manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure colour
and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to poetically
depict the Tahitians he eventually lived among. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch
painter Vincent van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to
express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of
Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond
Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to
the natural landscape.
Less closely connected with the Impressionists were Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
and Odilon Redon. Concerned with perceptive portraiture and decorative effect,
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Toulouse-Lautrec used the vivid contrasting colours of Impressionism in flat areas

enclosed by a distinct, sinuous outline. Redon's still-life florals were somewhat
Impressionistic, but his other works are more linear and Symbolistic. In general,
Postimpressionism 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.
Cubism - highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created
principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907
and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture
plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and
chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist
painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they
presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose
several sides were seen simultaneously.
Cubism derived its name from remarks that were made by the painter Henri
Matisse and the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who derisively described Braque's 1908 work
"Houses at L'Estaque" as composed of cubes. In Braque's work, the volumes of the
houses, the cylindrical forms of the trees, and the tan-and-green colour scheme are
reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's landscapes, which deeply inspired the Cubists in their
first stage of development, until 1909. It was, however, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," a
work painted by Picasso in 1907, that forecast the new style; in this work, the forms of
five female nudes became fractured, angular shapes. As in Cézanne's art, perspective
was rendered by means of colour, the warm reddish browns advancing and the cool
blues receding.
The period from 1910 to 1912 often is referred to as that of Analytical Cubism.
Paintings executed during this period showed the breaking down, or analysis, of form.
Right-angle and straight-line construction were favoured, though occasionally some
areas of the painting appeared sculptural, as in Picasso's "Girl with a Mandolin" (1910).
Colour schemes were simplified, tending to be nearly monochromatic (hues of tan,
brown, gray, cream, green, or blue preferred) in order not to distract the viewer from the
artist's primary interest--the structure of form itself. The monochromatic colour scheme
was suited to the presentation of complex, multiple views of the object, which was now
reduced to overlapping opaque and transparent planes. These planes appear to ascend
the surface of the canvas rather than to recede in depth. Forms are generally compact
and dense in the centre of the Analytical Cubist painting, growing larger as they diffuse
toward the edges of the canvas, as in Picasso's "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard" (1909-10;
Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, Moscow). Paintings frequently combine representational
motifs with letters, the latter emphasizing the painter's concern with abstraction;
favourite motifs are musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, still
lifes, and the human face and figure.
Interest in this subject matter continued after 1912, during the phase generally
identified with Synthetic Cubism. Works of this phase emphasize the combination, or
synthesis, of forms in the picture. Colour assumes a strong role in the work; shapes,
while remaining fragmented and flat, are larger and more decorative. Smooth and rough
surfaces may be contrasted with one another; and frequently foreign materials, such as
newspapers or tobacco wrappers, are pasted on the canvas in combination with painted
areas. This technique, known as collage, further emphasizes the differences in texture
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and, at the same time, poses the question of what is reality and what is illusion in nature
and in painting.
While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating the new visual language, it
was adopted and further developed by many painters, such as Fernand Léger, Robert
and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes,
and Jean Metzinger. Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a
profound influence on 20th-century sculpture and architecture. Chief among Cubist
sculptors are Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.
The adoption of the Cubist aesthetic by the architect Le Corbusier is reflected in the
shapes of the houses he designed during the 1920s.
Expressionism - artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective
reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in
him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy
and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. 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.
Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art
from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or
spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing
tendencies of Italy and later of France.
More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a
number of German artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian ones, who became
active in the years before World War I and remained so throughout much of the
interwar period.
The roots of the German Expressionist school lay in the works of Vincent Van
Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885-1900 evolved
a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour
and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear,
horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity.
They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more
subjective outlooks or states of mind.
The second and principal wave of Expressionism began about 1905, when a
group of German artists led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner formed a loose association called
Die Brücke. The group included Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl.
These painters were in revolt against what they saw as the superficial naturalism of
academic Impressionism. They wanted to reinfuse German art with a spiritual vigour
they felt it lacked, and they sought to do this through an elemental, primitive, highly
personal and spontaneous expression. Die Brücke's original members were soon joined
by the Germans Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Müller. The Expressionists were
influenced by their predecessors of the 1890s and were also interested in African wood
carvings and the works of such Northern European medieval and Renaissance artists as
Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Albrecht Altdorfer. They were also aware of
Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and other recent movements.
The German Expressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness,
boldness, and visual intensity. They used jagged, distorted lines; crude, rapid
brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary
subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their instability and their
26
emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety,

disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in
response to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that
they discerned in modern life. Woodcuts, with their thick jagged lined and harsh tonal
contrasts, were one of the favourite media of the German Expressionists.
The works of Die Brücke artists stimulated Expressionism in other parts of
Europe. Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele of Austria adopted their tortured
brushwork and angular lines, and Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine in France each
developed painting styles marked by intense emotional expression and the violent
distortion of figural subject matter. The painter Max Beckmann, the graphic artist Käthe
Kollwitz, and the sculptors Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, all of Germany,
also worked in Expressionist modes. The artists belonging to the group known as Der
Blaue Reiter are sometimes regarded as Expressionists, although their art is generally
lyrical and abstract, less overtly emotional, more harmonious, and more concerned with
formal and pictorial problems than that of Die Brücke artists.
Expressionism was a dominant style in Germany in the years immediately
following World War I, where it suited the postwar atmosphere of cynicism, alienation,
and disillusionment. Some of the movement's later practitioners, such as George Grosz
and Otto Dix, developed a more pointed, socially critical blend of Expressionism and
realism known as the Neue Sachlichkeit. As can be seen from such labels as Abstract
Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, the spontaneous, instinctive, and highly
emotional qualities of Expressionism have been shared by several subsequent art
movements in the 20th century.
Expressionism in literature arose as a reaction against materialism, complacent
bourgeois prosperity, rapid mechanization and urbanization, and the domination of the
family within in pre-World War I European society. It was the dominant literary
movement in Germany during and immediately after World War I.
In forging a drama of social protest, Expressionist writers aimed to convey their
ideas through a new style. Their concern was with general truths rather than with
particular situations, hence they explored in their plays the predicaments of
representative symbolic types rather than of fully developed individualized characters.
Emphasis was laid not on the outer world, which is merely sketched in and barely
defined in place or time, but on the internal, on an individual's mental state; hence the
imitation of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by the ecstatic evocation of states of
mind. The leading character in an Expressionist play often pours out his woes in long
monologues couched in a concentrated, elliptical, almost telegrammatic language that
explores youth's spiritual malaise, its revolt against the older generation, and the various
political or revolutionary remedies that present themselves. The leading character's
inner development is explored through a series of loosely linked tableaux, or "stations,"
during which he revolts against traditional values and seeks a higher spiritual vision of
life.
August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind were notable forerunners of
Expressionist drama, but the first full-fledged Expressionist play was Reinhard
Johannes Sorge's Der Bettler ("The Beggar"), which was written in 1912 but not
performed until 1917. The other principal playwrights of the movement were Georg
Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Paul Kornfeld, Fritz von Unruh, Walter Hasenclever, and Reinhard
Goering, all of Germany.
27
Expressionist poetry, which arose at the same time as its dramatic counterpart,
was similarly nonreferential and sought an ecstatic, hymnlike lyricism that would have
considerable associative power. This condensed, stripped-down poetry, utilizing strings
of nouns and a few adjectives and infinitive verbs, eliminated narrative and description
to get at the essence of feeling. The principal Expressionist poets were Georg Heym,
Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, and Else Lasker-Schüler of
Germany and the Czech poet Franz Werfel. The dominant theme of Expressionist verse
was horror over urban life and apocalyptic visions of the collapse of civilization. Some
poets were pessimistic and contented themselves with satirizing bourgeois values, while
others were more concerned with political and social reform and expressed the hope for
a coming revolution. Outside Germany, playwrights who used Expressionist dramatic
techniques included the American authors Eugene O'Neill and Elmer Rice.
Strongly influenced by Expressionist stagecraft, the earliest Expressionist films
set out to convey through decor the subjective mental state of the protagonist. The most
famous of these films is Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), in which a
madman relates to a madwoman his understanding of how he came to be in the asylum.
The misshapen streets and buildings of the set are projections of his own crazy universe,
and the other characters have been abstracted through makeup and dress into visual
symbols. The film's morbid evocation of horror, menace, and anxiety and the dramatic,
shadowy lighting and bizarre sets became a stylistic model for Expressionist films by
several major German directors. Paul Wegener's second version of The Golem (1920),
F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), among other
films, present pessimistic visions of social collapse or explore the ominous duality of
human nature and its capacity for monstrous personal evil.
While some classify the composer Arnold Schoenberg as an Expressionist
because of his contribution to the Blaue Reiter almanac, musical Expressionism seems
to have found its most natural outlet in opera. Among early examples of such
Expressionist works are Paul Hindemith's operatic settings of Kokoschka's proto-
Expressionist drama, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (1919), and August Stramm's
Sancta Susanna (1922). Most outstanding of the Expressionist operas, however, are two
by Alban Berg: Wozzeck, performed in 1925, and Lulu, which was not performed in its
entirety until 1979.
The decline of Expressionism was hastened by the vagueness of its longing for a
better world, by its use of highly poetic language, and in general the intensely personal
and inaccessible nature of its mode of presentation. The partial reestablishment of
stability in Germany after 1924 and the growth of more overtly political styles of social
realism hastened the movement's decline in the late 1920s. Expressionism was
definitively killed by the advent of the Nazis to power in 1933. They branded the work
of almost all Expressionists as degenerate and forbade them to exhibit or publish and
eventually even to work. Many Expressionists went into exile in the United States and
other countries.
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Brücke, Die - English The Bridge, organization of Expressionist artists, founded

in 1905 in Germany by four architectural students of the Dresden Technical School--
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who gave the group its name, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Other members of the organization were Emil Nolde, Max
Pechstein, Otto Müller, the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet, the Finnish Symbolist Akseli
Gallén-Kallela, and the Dutch Fauve painter Kees van Dongen.
The paintings and prints by Die Brücke artists encompassed all varieties of
subject matter--the human figure, landscape, portraiture, still life--executed in a
simplified style that stressed bold outlines and strong colour planes, influenced by
Primitivism. Kirchner and Heckel were influenced by African and Pacific island art that
they saw in the Dresden ethnological museum; this Primitivism became an important
element in Die Brücke style. Manifestations of angst, or anxiety, appear in varying
degrees in the works of Die Brücke painters and generally distinguish their art from that
of the French Fauvists, who also were indebted to primitive art but who treated form
and colour in a more lyrical manner. Die Brücke art was also deeply influenced by the
expressive simplifications of late German Gothic woodcuts and by the prints of the
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
The first Die Brücke exhibition, held in 1906 in the Seifert lamp factory in
Dresden, marked the beginning of German Expressionism. From this date until 1913,
regular exhibitions were held. (By 1911, however, Die Brücke's activities had shifted to
Berlin, where several of the members were living.) The group also enlisted "honorary
members" to whom they issued annual reports and gift portfolios of original prints,
which are highly valued collector's items today.
Rifts, which had always taken place among the group's members, increased in the
years after 1911. In 1913, provoked by Kirchner's highly subjective accounts of their
activities in the Chronik der Kunstlergemeinschaft Brücke, the group disbanded.
In addition to painting deeply moving canvases of the struggles and sufferings of
humanity, Die Brücke artists contributed to the revival of the woodcut, making it a
powerful means of expression in the 20th century.
Blaue Reiter, Der - English The Blue Rider, organization of artists, formed in
December 1911 in Munich, that contributed greatly to the development of abstract art.
Its founding members, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, co-edited a volume of
essays on aesthetics entitled Der Blaue Reiter, a name that they had derived from a
painting by Kandinsky and that, in turn, became the name of the group. Neither a
movement nor a school and having no definite program, Der Blaue Reiter was a loosely
knit organization of numerous artists who exhibited their works together between 1911
and 1914.
Der Blaue Reiter artists were expressionistically oriented, as was the earlier
German organization Die Brücke; but, unlike that of Die Brücke, their expressionism
took the form of lyrical abstraction and did not exhibit as many common stylistic
characteristics. Wishing to give form to mystical feelings, they wanted to imbue their art
with deep spiritual content. Der Blaue Reiter painters were variously influenced by the
Jugendstil group, Cubist and Futurist painting styles, and nave folk art.
The first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter, held December 1911 to January 1912, at
the Moderne Galerie Tannhäuser, Munich, included among its participants the
following artists: Henri Rousseau, David and Vladimir Burlyuk, Albert Bloch, August
Macke, and founders Marc and Kandinsky. Although not officially a member of Der
Blaue Reiter, the Russian painter Alexey von Jawlensky supported its aims. The Swiss
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painter Paul Klee became associated with the group in 1912, when he joined in a
graphic-art exhibition held in Munich. Among others included in this show were André
Derain, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, Mikhail Larionov, Natalya
Goncharova, and Pablo Picasso.
The final exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter took place at the famous Galerie Der
Sturm (see Sturm, Der) in Berlin, where they were included in an exhibition called the
"First German Autumn Salon," held in 1913; at this time the German-American artist
Lyonel Feininger also became affiliated with the group. With the outbreak of World
War I, Der Blaue Reiter dispersed.
After the war, in 1924, Feininger, Kandinsky, Klee (all of whom were teaching at
the Weimar Bauhaus at the time), and Jawlensky formed a successor group, Die Blaue
Vier (The Blue Four). Members of the group were united by a desire to exhibit together,
which they did between 1925 and 1934, rather than by similarity of style.
Suprematism - Russian SUPREMATISM, first movement of pure geometrical
abstraction in painting, originated by Kazimir S. Malevich in Russia in about 1913. In
his first Suprematist work, a pencil drawing of a black square on a white field, all the
elements of objective representation that had characterized his earlier, Cubist-Futurist
style, had been eliminated. Malevich explained that "the appropriate means of
representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as
such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects." Referring to his first
Suprematist work, he identified the black square with feeling and the white background
with expressing "the void beyond this feeling."
Although his early Suprematist compositions most likely date from 1913, they
were not exhibited until 1915, the year he edited the Suprematist manifesto, with the
assistance of several writers, most notably the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In these first
Suprematist works--consisting of simple geometrical forms such as squares, circles, and
crosses--he limited his palette to black, white, red, green, and blue. By 1916-17 he was
presenting more complex shapes (fragments of circles, tiny triangles); extending his
colour range to include brown, pink, and mauve; increasing the complexity of spatial
relationships; and introducing the illusion of the three-dimensional into his painting. His
experiments culminated in the "White on White" paintings of 1917-18, in which colour
was eliminated, and the faintly outlined square barely emerged from its background.
Finally, at a one-man exhibition of his work in 1919, Malevich announced the end of
the Suprematist movement.
Suprematism had a few adherents among lesser known artists, such as Ivan
Kliun, Ivan Puni, and Olga Rosanova. While not affiliated with the movement, the
distinguished Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky showed the influence of Suprematism
in the geometrization of his forms after 1920. This geometrical style, together with other
abstract trends in Russian art, was transmitted by way of Kandinsky and the Russian
artist El Lissitzky to Germany, particularly to the Bauhaus, in the early 1920s.
Constructivism - Russian KONSTRUKTIVIZM, Russian artistic and
architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is
generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the "painting reliefs"--abstract
geometric constructions--of Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine
Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon
publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the
spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was
derived; one of the directives that it contained was "to construct" art. Because of their
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admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials
such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-
engineers.
Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander
Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic
radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the
Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where
they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and later in the
1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States.
Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl
artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian László Moholy-
Nagy, who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because
of Nazi interference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy
disseminated Constructivist principles. See also Bauhaus; Stijl, de; Suprematism.
Dada - (French: "hobby-horse"), nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished
primarily in Zürich, New York City, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover, Ger. in the
early 20th century. Several explanations have been given by various members of the
movement as to how it received its name. According to the most widely accepted
account, the name was adopted at Hugo Ball's Cabaret (Café) Voltaire, in Zürich, during
one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of young artists and war resisters that
included Jean Arp, Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Emmy
Hennings; when a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the
word dada, this word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-
aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for
bourgeois values and despair over World War I. A precursor of what was to be called
the Dada movement, and ultimately its leading member, was Marcel Duchamp, who in
1913 created his first ready-made (now lost), the "Bicycle Wheel," consisting of a wheel
mounted on the seat of a stool.
The movement in the United States was centred at "291," the New York City
gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and the studio of the Walter Arensbergs, both wealthy
patrons of the arts. There Dada-like activities, arising independently but paralleling
those in Zürich, were engaged in by such artists as Man Ray, Morton Schamberg, and
Francis Picabia. Both through their art and through such publications as The Blind Man,
Rongwrong, and New York Dada the artists attempted to demolish current aesthetic
standards. Travelling between the United States and Europe, Picabia became a link
between the Dada groups in New York City, Zürich, and Paris; his Dada periodical,
291, was published in Barcelona, New York City, Zürich, and Paris from 1917 through
1924.
In 1917 Hülsenbeck, one of the founders of the Zürich group, transmitted the
Dada movement to Berlin, where it took on a more political character. Among the
German artists involved were Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Johannes
Baader, Hülsenbeck, Otto Schmalhausen, and Wieland Herzfelde and his brother John
Heartfield (formerly Helmut Herzfelde, but Anglicized as a protest against German
patriotism). One of the chief means of expression used by these artists was the
photomontage, which consists of fragments of pasted photographs combined with
printed messages; the technique was most effectively employed by Heartfield,
particularly in his later, anti-Nazi works (e.g., "Kaiser Adolph"). Like the groups in
New York City and Zürich, the Berlin artists staged public meetings, shocking and
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enraging the audience with their antics. They, too, issued Dada publications: Club Dada,
Der Dada, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball ("Everyman His Own Football"), and Dada
Almanach. The First International Dada Fair was held in Berlin in June 1920.
Dada activities were also carried on in other German cities. In Cologne in 1919
and 1920, the chief participants were Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld. Also affiliated
with Dada was Kurt Schwitters of Hannover, who gave the name Merz to his collages,
constructions, and literary productions. Although Schwitters used Dadaistic material--
bits of rubbish--to create his works, he achieved a refined, aesthetic effect that was
uncharacteristic of Dada antiart.
In Paris Dada took on a literary emphasis under one of its founders, the poet
Tristan Tzara. Most notable among the numerous Dada pamphlets and reviews was
Littérature (published 1919-24), which contained writings by André Breton, Louis
Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. After
1922, however, Dada began to lose its force, and the energies of its participants turned
toward Surrealism.
Dada had far-reaching effects on the art of the 20th century. Its nihilistic,
antirationalistic critiques of society and its unrestrained attacks on all formal artistic
conventions found no immediate inheritors, but its preoccupation with the bizarre, the
irrational, and the fantastic bore fruit in the Surrealist movement. Dada artists'
techniques of creation involving accident and chance were later employed by the
Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. Conceptual art also is rooted in Dada, for it was
Duchamp who first asserted that the mental activity ("intellectual expression") of the
artist was of greater significance than the object created.
Metaphysical painting - style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911
and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, and Giorgio
Morandi. These painters' representational but bizarre and incongruous imagery produces
strange, disquieting effects on the viewer. Juxtaposing disparate objects set into deep
perspectives, these works strongly influenced the Surrealists in the 1920s.
Metaphysical painting originated with De Chirico. In Munich, where he spent his
youthful formative years, De Chirico was attracted to 19th-century German Romantic
painting and to the works of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich
Nietzsche. The latter's search for hidden meanings beyond surface appearances and his
descriptions of empty squares surrounded by arcaded buildings in the Italian city of
Turin made a particularly deep impression on De Chirico; his 1915 painting "Turin
Melancholy" (Carlo Frua de Angeli Collection, Milan), for example, illustrates just such
a square, with unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend an aura of
poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene. The arcades in this painting, as
well as the deep perspectival space and dark-toned sky, are pictorial devices found in
many of De Chirico's strange, evocative works. The enigmatic titles of his paintings
contribute to their dreamlike effect: "The Nostalgia of the Infinite" (Museum of Modern
Art, New York City), "The Philosopher's Conquest" (Art Institute of Chicago), and "The
Soothsayer's Recompense" (Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Many of De Chirico's paintings depict mannequins, as do the works done around
1917-21 by the former Futurist Carlo Carrà, who came under his influence. The two
artists met in 1917, in Ferrara where, together with De Chirico's younger brother—a
poet, musician, and painter known as Alberto Savinio--they formulated the rather
obscure principles of the scuola metafisica (Metaphysical school). De Chirico, however,
had already arrived at his Metaphysical style several years before the movement came
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into existence and, by 1911, had shown paintings of this nature in Paris. Other adherents
to Metaphysical painting were Filippo de Pisis and Mario Sironi. The Metaphysical
school proved short-lived, however, and came to an end around 1920 because of
dissension between De Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group. De Chirico's
work done after 1919 lost much of its mysterious power and eventually sank into a
degraded and eccentric classicism.
Surrealism - movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe
between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada
movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately
defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive
expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the
destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics
in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the
major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published
"The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and
unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy
would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality."
Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious
as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this
normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters
alike.
In the poetry of Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism
manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was
determined not by logical but by psychological--that is, unconscious--thought processes.
Its major achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist painting was
influenced not only by Dadaism but also by the fantastic and grotesque images of such
earlier painters as Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya and of closer contemporaries
such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marc Chagall. The practice of Surrealist
art strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation, stressing the
work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic investigation and revelation.
Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists
held a group show in Paris in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions,
defections, and personal attacks.
The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René
Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. The
work of these artists is too diverse to be summarized categorically as the Surrealist
approach in the visual arts. Each artist sought his own means of self-exploration. Some
single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious, freed from the
controls of the conscious mind; others, notably Miró, used Surrealism as a liberating
starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often
through formal means of great beauty. A range of possibilities falling between the two
extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its purest by the works of
Arp, the viewer is confronted with images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but
indefinite. As the viewer's mind works with the provocative image, unconscious
associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts itself in a totally open-
ended investigative process. To a greater or lesser extent, Ernst, Masson, and Miró also
followed this approach, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism.
At the other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and
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minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistically
painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an
ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework. The work aims to provoke a
sympathetic response in the viewer, forcing him to acknowledge the inherent "sense" of
the irrational and logically inexplicable. The most direct form of this approach was
taken by Magritte in simple but powerful paintings such as that portraying a normal
table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the centre of which stares
a human eye. Dalí, Roy, and Delvaux rendered similar but more complex alien worlds
that resemble compelling dreamlike scenes.
A number of specific techniques were devised by the Surrealists to evoke psychic
responses. Among these were frottage (rubbing with graphite over wood or other
grained substances) and grattage (scraping the canvas)--both developed by Ernst to
produce partial images, which were to be completed in the mind of the viewer;
automatic drawing, a spontaneous, uncensored recording of chaotic images that "erupt"
into the consciousness of the artist; and found objects.
With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major
alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely
responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.
Abstract Expressionism - broad movement in American painting that began in
the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. The
most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others included Clyfford Still,
Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert
Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt,
Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Most of these artists
worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City.
Although it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an
accurate description of the body of work created by these artists. Indeed, the movement
comprised many different painterly styles varying in both technique and quality of
expression. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several broad
characteristics. They are basically abstract--i.e., they depict forms not drawn from the
visible world. They emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression,
and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal,
with a particular emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of
paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery,
lyricism). They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that
paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with
a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display
the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and
segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field,
network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. And finally, the paintings fill
large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and
engrossing power.
The early Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky,
who painted suggestive biomorphic shapes using a free, delicately linear, and liquid
paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and strongly textured
brushwork in abstract but conventionally composed works. Another important influence
on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on American shores in the late 1930s
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and early '40s of a host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists
who were fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe. Such artists greatly stimulated the native
New York City painters and gave them a more intimate view of the vanguard of
European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally regarded as
having begun with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the
late 1940s and early '50s.
In spite of the diversity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general
approaches can be distinguished. One, Action painting, is characterized by a loose,
rapid, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes and
in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly
onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced Action painting by dripping commercial paints
on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and
suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive
brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline used powerful,
sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to create starkly monumental forms.
The middle ground within Abstract Expressionism is represented by several
varied styles, ranging from the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in
paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost
calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The third and least emotionally expressive approach was that of Rothko,
Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large areas, or fields, of flat colour and
thin, diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative effects. The
outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko, most of whose works consist of large-scale
combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to shimmer and
resonate.
Abstract Expressionism had a great impact on both the American and European
art scenes during the 1950s. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative
centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar decades. In the
course of the 1950s, the movement's younger followers increasingly followed the lead
of the colour-field painters and, by 1960, its participants had generally drifted away
from the highly charged expressiveness of the Action painters.
Neo-Expressionism - diverse art movement (chiefly of painters) that dominated
the art market in Europe and the United States during the early and mid-1980s. Neo-
Expressionism comprised a varied assemblage of young artists who had returned to
portraying the human body and other recognizable objects, in reaction to the remote,
introverted, highly intellectualized abstract art production of the 1970s. The movement
was linked to and in part generated by new and aggressive methods of salesmanship,
media promotion, and marketing on the part of dealers and galleries.
Neo-Expressionist paintings themselves, though diverse in appearance, presented
certain common traits. Among these were: a rejection of traditional standards of
composition and design; an ambivalent and often brittle emotional tone that reflected
contemporary urban life and values; a general lack of concern for pictorial idealization;
the use of vivid but jarringly banal colour harmonies; and a simultaneously tense and
playful presentation of objects in a primitivist manner that communicates a sense of
inner disturbance, tension, alienation, and ambiguity (hence the term Neo-Expressionist
to describe this approach). Among the principal artists of the movement were the
Americans Julian Schnabel and David Salle, the Italians Sandro Chia and Francesco
Clemente, and the Germans Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Neo-Expressionism was
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controversial both in the quality of its art products and in the highly commercialized
aspects of its presentation to the art-buying public.
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IMPRESSIONISM marked a significant change in art history. The artists of this

movement seriously questioned conventional art form, and dramatically changed the
direction of modern art.
They broke away from tradition by painting outdoors, using different colors, and
creating lighter palettes (as seen in Renoir's painting to the right). In the later half of the
nineteenth century, the Impressionists struggled to have their work accepted by the
Official Salons. In their quest to paint landscapes and contemporary life, the
Impressionists broke with over four centuries of tradition and departed with such
classical themes as religion and history. Because no other group of artists prior to the
Impressionists had challenged their predecessors, their struggle to gain credibility was
great. Despite scathing comments from critics, the artists continued to work diligently to
preserve their "new way" of art.
Today, the Impressionist movement is considered one of the most beloved periods
in the history of art.
History - The story of Impressionism begins in Paris, France. In 1851, the newly
crowned Emperor Napoleon the III began to crack down on Paris’ medieval image
(marked with narrow windy streets and poor sanitation). He created new reform that
encouraged growth in industry and commerce. In 1853, with the help of architect Baron
Haussman, Napoleon the III transformed the run-down city into the new showpiece of
Europe.
Together, they rebuilt Paris with 85 miles of new roads that boasted modern
buildings, restaurants, cafes, and today’s popular museum, The Louvre. The
Impressionists admired the new city for its modern appearance, and felt that it was an
atmosphere ideal for painting.
During the 1850’s, many of the future Impressionists had been influenced by
these critical changes. The artists would develop a custom of gathering at local cafes. A
favorite spot of many of the Impressionists was Café Guerbois (9-avenue de Clichy). If
Impressionism had a birthplace, it was "The Bastignolles District" of Paris, where they
met regularly to discuss current events and personal progress.
For a brief time, life for the artists was trouble-free, but France would soon enter a
deadly war. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871 would scatter the aspiring artists
throughout Europe. Some artists such as Monet fled to England, while others, including
Bazille, went off to fight in the front lines.
After the Franco-Prussian War had ended, many of the artists returned to Paris to
peruse a career in art. In France however, the Official Salons were the major
determining factor in the success of any artist. The Salons disliked the Impressionist
style. The Salon, an annual exhibition, preferred paintings done in the academic styles
of history, religion, and mythology. The jury members of the Salon often rejected the
Impressionists paintings because they portrayed contemporary Parisian life.
In protest to the Salons, the Impressionists formed their own art society called the
Salon d’ Refuses. This art society allowed for independent artists in the circle of
Impressionism to exhibit their work and receive recognition they could not get from the
Salons. Degas, Pissaro, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Berthe Morisot founded the new
society. The first exhibition took place in 1874 on the first floor of 35 Boulevard de
Capucines in Paris. Between the years 1874 and 1886, the Impressionists exhibited their
work independent of the Salon. By the last exhibition in 1886, many of the
Impressionists had gone their separate ways. In 1880, Monet and Renoir had already left
the Salon d’ Refuses, after becoming successful and financially secure.
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Impressionism officially ended in 1886, and their styles went on to influence such
artists as Van Gogh, Signac, Suerat, and Gauguin.
The goal of Impressionism was to break away from the highly finished technique
of traditional academic art. Impressionism focused on creating the fresh look of the
outdoors, something not achievable in the average studio bound production. The
Impressionists agreed on the main idea of painting en plein air to capture the perfect
reproduction of light. The painters wanted to convey a sense of modernity by giving
their paintings a sense of life and atmosphere. Instead of using their palettes to paint
history, mythology, or religion, their aim was to capture life in progress, to encompass
both the realities of daily life and the fast-paced aspects of nature. In both celebrations
of life and nature, the Impressionists put an emphasis on capturing life in a form of
continuum.
In a time when painting a smooth "finish" was needed to receive the official praise
of the Salons, the Impressionists stood out as targets for rejection and ridicule. Their
paintings appeared sketchy, unfinished, and inappropriate (as seen in Monet's The
Grand Canal to the right).
The critics cried that an exhibition of Impressionist paintings was comparable to a
house of horrors. However, the critics did not understand that the Impressionists were
trying to achieve the perfect elements of light and the distortion of subject. To achieve
this aim, the Impressionists were forced to abandon traditional technique. Working
outdoors in the open air required a more free—short hand technique, due to the constant
change of light. If the Impressionists followed the laboring process of academic art, they
would not have been able to capture the effects light had on their subjects.
The painters made their most significant break with academic tradition in their
various use of colors. Where academic paintings appeared dark toned and dower, the
Impressionist style appeared bright and airy. Due to the growing paint technology in
France, many color pigments were well preserved, and therefore the artists were able to
portray many different shades of light. They used primary colors such as red, yellow,
and blue, while complimenting their paintings with green, purple, and orange. Instead of
using black to indicate shadow or form, colors were mixed to increase overall
brightness. An accomplished Impressionist could brag how he or she totally eliminated
the "unnatural" black from their canvas. The illusion of form and outline allowed
spectators to make their own conclusions about the paintings, and this attracted many
artists to the Impressionist movement.
Aftermath - Impressionism was the one of the starting points of modern art. Its
styles and struggles paved the way for an artistic revolution. Their techniques provoked
new thoughts and ideas that subsequent artists would consider. At a time when their
ideas were rejected and misunderstood, the Impressionists emerged as innovators and
pioneers. As a result of the Impressionsts’ perseverance, the Salon slowly lost its hold
on the world of art. Such painters as Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, and Degas, paved the way
for other art movements to come. Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, invariably
benefited from the initial struggles undertaken by the Impressionists. In one sense, the
end of Impressionism was to serve as a beginning for the freest ideologies that the
painters of the twentieth century were to experience and embrace.
POST-IMPRESSIONISM was a diverse art movement that engulfed the European art
community in the latter part of the 19th century. Post-Impressionism constitutes a
continuation of the Impressionist effort to portray painting in a differential and
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unbridled manner. The paramount figures to emerge in the movement include: Paul
Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Georges Seraut, Paul Gauguin, and Pierre
Bonnard. The Post-Impressionists each developed individual styles that supported, or
eroded the fabricated principles of the Impressionist movement.
History - Post-Impressionism emerged in 1886 with the official cessation of the
Impressionist movement. Before the movement’s decline, the Impressionists had
successfully conquered a generation of skeptical critics. Although the movement lasted
less than a decade, the Impressionist school had indirectly challenged and inspired their
successors (the Post-Impressionists) to venture into new artistic expression similar to
the way they had.
In 1886, with the final decline of the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists
surfaced as the primary art movement in Paris. When they emerged however, they did
not support the Impressionists naturalistic form as the Impressionists may have wanted,
but the Post-Impressionists ironically rejected their teachings in the same way that the
Impressionist had done. The Impressionists had unknowingly passed the same
rebellious quality that had made their movement a success.
During the turn of the century, most artists continued to keep close ties. Due to
general disgust among the critics, the Post-Impressionists had to continually seek out
each other’s advice and bolster each other’s ambitions. During this time, Paris remained
the art center of the world, and people everywhere expected only the best out of Parisian
art. For the Post-Impressionists, meeting this demand only served to strengthen and
fortify their success as a significant art movement.
Although the Post-impressionist movement is considered to have traditionally
began in 1886, not until 1910 did the Post-Impressionists collectively gather at one big
exhibition. Consequently, most of the public considered their work to be trivial and
insignificant. In 1910, when the Post-Impressionists gathered in the Grafton Gallery in
London, most of the public laughed at their style. At any rate, the Post-Impressionists’
exhibition in 1910 turned out to be a tremendous success, with an average of 400
visitors a day. It was also at this exhibition that the movement officially received its
present day name. The British Journalist and art critic Roger Fry coined the lasting term
Post-Impressionist. Trying to think of the name he lost his patience and stated "Lets just
call them Post-Impressionists, at any rate, they came after the Impressionists."
The Post-Impressionists enjoyed a new artistic forum that allowed them the
freedom to plot independent ideas. Unlike the formulaic style of their predecessors, the
Post-Impressionists sought after their independence by separating from each other in
painting methods.
The Post-Impressionists strove to develop new styles tailored to meet their own
temperament. Artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cezanne distanced themselves
from other Post-Impressionist artists. They develoed their own art on an individual
level, and they did not hesitate to paint in unorthodox fashions (as seen in the work of
Van Gogh to the right).
However, while the Post-Impressionists may have overcome the necessity to copy
one another, they certainly did not become so distanced as to separate and contradict
each other in their methods.
The Post-Impressionists did have several clearly developed aims in painting. One
of them we can analyze here, where they write in respect to the Impressionists.
"You have explored nature in every direction, and all honor to you; but your
methods and principles have hindered artists from exploring and expressing that
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emotional significance which lies in things, and is the most important subject matter of
art. There is much more of that significance in the work of earlier artists who had not a
tenth part of your skill in representing appearance. We will aim at that; though by our
simplification of nature we shock and disconcert our contemporaries, whose eyes are
now accustomed to your revelations, as much as you originally disconcerted your
contemporaries by your subtleties and complications."
In this paragraph, the Post-Impressionists addressed a concern for direction in
their art movement. They clearly aimed to detach themselves from the umbrella of
Impressionism. In almost every objective, they seemed to differ from the
Impressionists.
The Post-Impressionists took more interest in the industrialized and less
salubrious areas of Paris. They tried to abandon the Impressionist style of only painting
the fashionable areas that appealed to the eyes. The morbid, the ugly, the strange, and
the unusual all had attraction to the artists for their alluring sensations and emotional
characters. They endowed their paintings with a variety of subject matters. Rather than
frequently painting nature, the Post-Impressionists attempted to reveal the
persuasiveness of color and form. They worked and experimented in private seclusion
rather than amidst the outdoors. However, just as many of the Impressionists did, the
Post-Impressionists often met at such places as Cormon’s Studio or Pere Tanguy’s paint
shop to discuss their newest paintings and the latest trends.
Several groups existed during the Post-Impressionist reign. One of the first major
groups to emerge successfully was created by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. These
two artists created Divisionism. Together, Seurat and Signac attracted interest among a
number of painters who collectively became known as the Neo Impressionists, or more
commonly, the Pointillists.
Their style was defined by tiny dots of paint, which the artist placed in a carefully
positioned manner. Suerat's manifesto painting entitled A Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grande Jatte (seen right), is a perfect example of the Pointillists' aesthetics.
When viewed from a distance the tiny dots would appear to naturally blend into a
distinct color. They based their style on the scientific writings of Eugene Chevreul. He
established that the appearance of any color could be radically altered by changing the
colors placed immediately beside them. In what was called the "Law of Simultaneous
Contrast", Chevreul noted that colors appeared to be their most intense when positioned
next to their contemporaries.
The Post-Impressionists also represented a continuation of the Symbolists’ styles.
The Nabis group attempted to re-create the principle ideas concerning the Symbolist
style, but did so in manner suitable to the Post-Impressionist aim. The Nabis group
included such followers as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis. They
had a fundamental interest in Theosophy. The group adopted a lifestyle that embraced
the beliefs of oriental mysticism, and stressed the importance of strange ritualistic
meetings. The group represented an extension of Post-Impressionism that desired to
restore the deeply rooted spiritual side of art.
Post-Impressionism also tended to lean toward individual creativity. The
Synthesists, a group created by Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, fully undertook these
principles. Their painting was plain and almost primitive. They had no desire to express
the traditional comforts of life, but rather incorporated depiction’s that were reminiscent
of such styles as Japanese print and Primitive culture. The artist Paul Gauguin defined
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this style while in Tahiti, and practiced the style vigorously until his death a few years
later.
Aftermath - Post-Impressionism categorically represented an era immersed in
individuality. The artists disassociated themselves from any aesthetic art program. What
makes their efforts equally groundbreaking with the Impressionists, is that they felt no
accountability towards traditional doctrine. They departed from any style that would
limit their creative scope. They abandoned the Impressionists narrow grasp on reality by
modifying the subject matter from light and airy painting, to dark and deep toned works.
They were the rudimentary creators of a savage era that would leave the lovely side of
art, to capture the loudest and darkest side of painting. Consequently, the work of artists
like Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent Van Gogh, would be extended into the
work of Fauvism, Cubism, and Op Art.
FAUVISM was a brief but important art movement that followed the Post-
Impressionist era. Fauvism was partly undertaken to explore new elements of art that
had not been embraced by the Impressionists or Post-Impressionists. The most
significant members of the movement included Henri Matisse, Maurice Vlamnick, and
Andre Derain. The Fauvists implemented new ideas into their canvases. Each part of
their paintings had loud colors, new primitive elements, and wild ideas. Although the
movement only lasted four years, their exploration of new artistic value would change
the direction of modern art forever.
History - Fauvism was accepted as a new art movement in 1905, after the fading
of Post-Impressionism. Most critics never appreciated Post-Impressionism for its
unsettling manifestations. In 1905, most critics considered the Fauvist style to be
equally unattractive. However, unlike the criticism endured by Post-Impressionism,
many critics slowly began to appreciate the Fauvist’s style. From this point on, critics
learned to slowly accept individual taste and freedom in rebellious artists.
Fauvism officially began with an art exhibition called the Salon d’ Automne. The
artists gathered here to exhibit their newest works. Andre Derain showed his landscape
drawings with variants of bright red and yellow. Some critics denounced Derain’s
paintings for its spontaneous and unfinished appearance. The critics were also shocked
by the work of Henri Matisse, who showed a troublesome and extremely unorthodox
painting of his wife entitled Green Strip (seen right).
The painting might not have appeared unorthodox at all, had Matisse changed one
element.The work was an average portrait, but rather than having traditional skin tone
colors, Matisse gave his wife a green nose. During this time, to contrast a human form
with a different tonal color was considered harsh, and seen as a form of eccentricity.
However, the Fauves left the Salon d’ Automne with a considerable amount of success.
For being so apparently wild in most of their paintings, the art critic Louise
Vauxelles coined the art term Fauvism, which is French for wild beasts. While many of
the art critics attending the exhibition hissed at the Fauvists, most of the public enjoyed
their work. At the time, they felt that the Fauvists’ work was the most advanced in
Parisian art.
The leader of the Fauvist movement during their four-year reign was Henri
Matisse. Matisse began his artistic experiences in 1895, when he enrolled himself in a
prominent and highly prestigious art school called the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While
there, he received some of the instrumental elements that would influence him
throughout his life. His instructor, Gustave Moreau, encouraged his students to master
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both traditional styles as well as individual styles. When asked about his former
instructor, Matisse said, "He did not set us on the right roads but off the roads. He
disturbed our complacency. With him each one acquired the technique that
corresponded to his own temperament." Matisse followed the direction of his instructor,
and began to work on paintings with bright colors. The Fauves would later adopt this
style into most of their own paintings.
As was the common practice in 1905, most artists gathered at local cafes. This
was no different in the case of the Fauves. In fact, two Fauvists, Andre Derain and
Maurice Vlamnick at one time shared an apartment and studio. The two painted
together, and shared their early experiences with one another. Derain was the more
passive of the two. His paintings were usually of lighter color, and had a less
pronounced image. More than Vlamnick, Derain looked up to Matisse for inspiration.
Vlamnick on the other hand, was a self-taught painter, who also had a flair for the
dramatic.
The Fauves enjoyed new artistic achievements from tolerance given by the
Parisian art critics. Unlike the Post-Impressionists, the critics were more willing to give
the Fauves a chance to prove their artistic excellence. Their major goal was to be
different. They wanted to break away from the mundane color thematics of the
Impressionists, and the dark color tone of the Post-Impressionists. Each aspect of their
work was carefully examined to create an emotional surge. They embraced new forums
of art by introducing African and other primitive elements into their paintings. While
the Fauves had no organized set of principles, they did have a clear artistic aim. In some
ways, like the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves developed their styles to suit their own
character.
The Fauves major goal in painting was to properly arrange the subject matter with
the correct color (as seen in Andre Derain's work to the right. He depicts a typical
landscape, but doesn't use "correct" colors).
The Fauves had a general dislike for their predecessors' use of color thematics.
The Fauves were against mixing certain colors to produce different shades of coloring.
Instead, they focused on allowing pure colors, such as red, yellow, and blue, to create an
overall effect that would blend well with the subject matter. They felt that by giving a
painting only simple and natural colors, they would better enable the painting to
produce a visual effect of vitality.
Prior to the Fauves, the work of Paul Gauguin had introduced primitive art to the
world. The Fauvist Andre Derain continued this work. Like the Post-Impressionist Paul
Gauguin, Andre Derain made an unprecedented break with tradition. Usual western art,
done in the traditional style, had subject matters such as landscapes, cities, or people.
However, the Fauves embarked on new territory by using non-western ideas, and using
them as inspiration in their painting. Most of their new images also made use of loud
and bold colors.
The Fauvist style appeared to be explosive and dramatic. During the time, most
critics considered their work more of a "form of thought" than a significant piece of art.
The artists use of primitive art, and their bright use of colors shocked those who were
not use to such dramatic and lively paintings. The artists however, were attempting to
create their own art forum for new ideas, and tried their hardest to achieve their aims.
Aftermath - Most people admire Fauvism today for its completely different look,
and especially for its different uses in colors. Henri Matisse (the great leader) has
become one of the most celebrated artists of our time. In museums and art collections
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throughout the world, the work of Matisse seems almost equal to the work of such
legendary artists as Monet and Picasso. As part of their principles, the Fauves clearly
stated that they intended to abandon traditional art form as a means of escaping all
previous art movements.
For a brief time, the Fauves enjoyed a minimal amount of success. By 1909
however, many interested students began to separate themselves from the work of Henri
Matisse. They felt he had become too accustomed to painting in one style, and had lost
his flair to be called a true "Fauvist". Eventually, the movement ceased, but their styles
would continue to inspire other artists, and influence other movements. Their radical
paintings were later admired and slightly adopted by the Cubist Revolution. The work
of Henri Matisse and Maurice Vlamnick went on to inspire Expressionism, Futurism,
and Surrealism.
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EXPRESSIONISM was one of the many art movements taking place during the early
part of the twentieth century. The major goal of Expressionism was to show how
artwork (in terms of painting) could have the capacity to transcend expression. The key
artists involved were Ernst Lugwig, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Beckman and Emil
Nodle. While the German Expressionists did not necessarily provide any new
information to modern art, they did revive a growing concern among the modern artists.
History - The beginning of Expressionism took place in Germany. Most artists
came from Berlin, Cologne, and Munich. Expressionism began with a few artists and
slowly grew to attract new members. Many artists showed an appreciation for the Post-
Impressionists and the Fauvists. However, what would later inspire artists on an
individual level were the problems created by World War I. Like artists from every era,
the Expressionists expressed their concerns in their paintings.
The Expressionists were surrounded by many new Late 19th century practices.
They used many of these practices to formulate their own artistry. They cited support
from a list of contemporaries including psychiatry Freud, philosopher Nietzche, and
writer Dostoevsky. Throughout the movement, these key figures played an important
role in attracting new members. They also played an important role in supporting the
Expressionists point of view; that expression is always a part of artwork.
The average Expressionists believed that every part of man's personality and
being is in essence, a form of expression. To them, everything was an expression;
eating, sleeping, and without a doubt, painting. The Expressionists felt persuaded by art.
They believed that art was a chief means of expression between one person to another—
in this case, the artists and the spectator. Like the Cubists, Expressionists felt the most
important facet in a painting was the subject matter. Subject matter was the center of an
emotional charge to be felt by the artist and the spectator.
The Expressionists believed that as long as the emotional surge between the artist
and spectator took place, the subject matter had little importance. Expressionism
stipulated that above all, an emotional expression needed to take place. Unlike most
artists from other movements who often emphasized the subject matter, but the
Expressionists discovered that the subject matter could be abandoned all together. If the
artist used rich deep colors accompanied by large definite brushstrokes, then the
painting could altogether exist as a free entity.
While the above is a basic understanding of the Expressionists’ beliefs, it’s also
important to mention that many artists had individual styles of their own. Two distinct
groups emerged out of the Expressionist movement. They include the Die Brucke
group, and the group Der Blaue Reiter. The first group was founded in 1912 and found
inspiration in medieval German sculpture. They appreciated sculpture from Africa, as
well as oceanic sculpture. Like the Fauvists, they found inspiration in a primitive form,
but did not focus on naturalism, but primitivism. In addition, like the Fauves, they had
no "theories". They did however aim clearly to show that nature was an obsolete form to
portray, and they hoped that others would join and support their anti-nature campaign.
The second group of Expressionists called themselves Der Blaue Reiter. They
were painters mainly from Munich, Germany. The members in this group were more
spiritually inclined than the Die Brucke group; they had a close tie with theosophy. By
connecting some psychological meaning, and some color thematics, the group hoped to
combine art with the human spirit. They believed that given the right human spirit, art
can represent reality, and reality can represent art.
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In order to better analyze the Expressionists "theory", the following quote

explains a personal statement of how their art is typified.
"This is what I saw, imagined, experienced; this is how it was for me; this is how I
felt about it. I, the artist, offer you this experience because as artist I am sensitized to a
special degree and devote my life to this thin-skinned experience and to finding ways of
capturing it to you, my public. I am one, unique through a part of mankind. You are
many; most of your time, your education and your work, if not leisure too, is designed
to restrain you experience, to thicken your skin. How shall I address you? Not through
the conventions of European art, worn smooth with endless use; they no longer connect
with life and do not permit me to set down my personal apprehension of it. Strong
colors, emphatic rather than then accurate representation and especially distortion in my
delineation of figures will catch your attention but may also numb your responses by
making too strong an assault. I handle these colors daily and they don’t bother me; the
drawing that strikes you as incompetent is how I want it. Yet can you learn to read it,
respond to it, especially since I have to adapt my manner continually to changes in my
situation and myself? I want you to use my art, to counter with it the deadening weight
of urban life. Indeed my insistence on self-centered art is only justified if it helps you to
discover your true self, but, in order to reveal myself, I have had to abandon what
shared visual language there was as a link between us."
Aftermath - The Expressionists essentially had several influential figures, but
rather than continue in their group, many members decided to take the elements of
Expressionism and make them apart of their individual styles in other
movements.Abstract Expressionism would later formulate their ideas and beliefs
further. As their lasting legacy, they remind us how art is not limited to subject matter,
and how expression is important in modern painting.
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THE CUBIST ART movement will forever loom over the era of modern art. The
movement lasted approximately eighteen years, and existed around the time of Fauvism
and Expressionism. Cubism consisted of a desire to deny the work of their art
predecessors in a way that would dis-value their meanings and intentions. The
movement’s most significant members: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris
each developed certain styles that worked to achieve their purpose. The Cubist art
period represented a new and dramatic change in art history. Since the time of the
Renaissance, no other art period had been so well known by the lay-people as Cubism.
And possibly, no other movement has enjoyed their success and influence since.
History - Cubism began in 1907. The Cubists owed much of their quick success to
over 50 years of art challenges. They had obtained much of their inspiration from the
Post-Impressionism.
They particularly admired the Post-Impressionist Suerat, for his careful and
intellectual approach. The Cubists also appreciated the primitive work of Post-
Impressionist Paul Gauguin (as seen right). Gauguin had been an advocate for primitive
artwork. Paul Gauguin challenged artists to seek out abnormal and primitive objects that
could be used for inspiration. As a result of their influence, the Cubists began to
incorporate new objects into their paintings.
The Cubists also admired the work of Paul Cezanne. For the Cubists, Paul
Cezanne’s work was considered the most stylistically and thematically correct. In some
way or fashion, the Cubists eventually studied the work of Paul Cezanne, and examined
his use of structural form. However, Cubism encompassed a style unique and original to
themselves, and gave an enormous amount of new ideas for artists to draw from.
By 1907, a new collaboration between the two young artists Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque was beginning. Picasso had already obtained a reputation for living the
bohemian lifestyle. He was regarded among the public as an excellent, creative, and
individual artist. By the young age of 27, Picasso had earned a great amount of respect
as an artist. Many art collectors, including Vollard, bought many of Picasso’s Pink and
Blue periods. Georges Braque, however, was less well known at this time. But despite
his lack of exposure, Picasso admired Braque’s artistic ability, and the two painted
together on many occasions.
Throughout the history of Cubism, many changes came and went. During the
early Cubist years, Picasso and Braque painted mostly still lives in their analytical
period. Over the years the artists would entertain new ideas. Around 1911, Picasso and
Braque entered their Synthetic period. By the end of 1914, Picasso and Braque started
to fade away from Cubism, and other artists like legar, and Juan Gris began to embrace
it.
When Picasso and Braque ventured into their Cubist adventure, they were sure to
create waves that would annoy art dealers. But regardless, the artists felt that they had
discovered a new revolutionary art form. To some extent it was true. For most critics,
they either loved or hated the Cubist style. Either way, the artists had achieved their
purpose in reaching the emotions of the spectator.
Most people separate Cubism into two periods. They have become known as the
Analytical and Synthetic sides of Cubism. The Analytical side of Cubism reflected the
artist’s interests in painting and sculpture. During this phase the artists painted mostly
still life objects such as fruits and musical instruments. They also placed an enormous
emphasis on manipulating the forms of these objects. Their purpose was to let the
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painting speak for itself as an independent entity rather than an abstraction from the
artist.
After the artists (mainly Braque and Picasso) had grown tiresome of the
Analytical period, they began to develop what was later called the Synthetic period.
This period of Cubism represented the most dramatic and controversial change in the
movement. As if their geometric and cubic paintings had not been enough, the artists
began to place everyday objects such as paper onto the surface of their paintings. The
objects included pieces of paper for the most part, but also included stenciled letters.
Their main aim in this new type of painting was to reconcile representation and
abstraction.
This systematic approach of adding strips or fragments of paper was used to give
sensual and visual texture. In many ways, it allowed Braque to explain how color and
objects existed simultaneously.
Although as partners in Cubism Picasso and Braque often borrowed from each
other’s advice, the artists did have different views when painting. Picasso decided to
express his early work with a distinct solid look and a formatted objective to add
meaning to every part of his painting. For example, many of his paintings, including the
HEAD, revealed Picasso’s desire to show how each part of the painting worked in a
small way to emphasize the picture as a whole. Rather than having a specific meaning
in his paintings, Picasso tried to allow the picture to have multiple meanings. While also
trying to express pictorial truths through this kind of exact representation, he also tried
eagerly to provide a careful balance between an object and its main subject.
Braque on the other hand felt that spacing was the most important element in a
painting. Braque once stated that, "What most attracted me and what was the governing
principle of Cubism, was the materialization of this new space, which I sensed." Braque
believed every part of the painting to be equally important. So important, that the
spacing may sometimes be more significant than the subject. Braque tried to outwardly
project the objects in his paintings. He often combined methods to achieve a maximum
effect. Whenever he tried to outwardly project an object, he would also try to
simultaneously attract the spectator’s eye in another spot. His intentions were to create a
perfect balance inside the painting. For the most part Braque used colors sparingly. He
didn’t want to overuse too many colors for fear that he might distort the paintings
spacing. This is why for many years, much of Braque’s work appeared to have faded, or
lightly dimmed colors.
Braque and Picasso had a common problem in portraying artwork. The problem
existed in their painting’s balance of abstraction and subject matter. An example of
abstraction could be a color or mood, and an example of subject could be any object like
a person or a piece of fruit. At first, the artists tried to solve the problem by using simple
gray and green colors. But dissatisfied with the results, the artists would soon begin to
search for a new element.
Braque discovered a new way of attaching strips of paper to a painting, the new
process was called papier colle, or paper collage in English. This new process provided
them a way to justify their styles. The paper itself was used to represent an abstract idea.
The artists would place strips of paper onto the painting, and let the paper and painting
fuse themselves into one identity. The Cubists could therefore produce representation
and abstraction as separate, but equal entities. In this manner, color could co-exist in the
painting without interfering with the subject matter.
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The Cubists also introduced stenciled pencil letters into their works around 1911.
The letters served several purposes. First, they gave the paintings a two dimensional
character. Second, the letters helped to emphasize a theme. For example, Picasso’s Ma
Jolie (seen right), a painting about a popular song, is illustrated with letters that
correspond to portray the story of the song. The pencils were also used simply for
decoration purposes. However, the painters who used them, used them to stress the
importance of the objects around them.
Little has been said about Juan Gris, the third creator of Cubism. Juan Gris’ work
was more intellectually and logically based than either Picasso or Braque. Gris
remained loyal to his Cubist beliefs until his death in 1927. Gris’ style, as opposed to
Picasso or Braque, emphasized creating a mood in his painting. He was the most
organized member, and his work attracted new students to Cubism.
FUTURISM was an art movement that loudly and boldly proclaimed their
discontentment with society. Unlike the other early modern art movements, Futurism
came out of the heart of Italy. Some of the major artists involved included Filippo
Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla. These artists participated in one of
the loudest art movements ever to take place in modern art. They outwardly objected to
traditional conventionalism and all but waged war on the art of the19th century.
History - The birth of Futurism did not begin in France or even the United States,
but in Italy. The movement was born out of the corrupt and confused Italian
government. To say that the Futurist wanted reform in the early twentieth century does
not do them justice. The Futurists demanded change and pointed at any and all faults
they could find that would destroy the continuation of a corrupt government. In the
mind of the average Futurist, the Italian government had become misguided in their
goals and values.
The Futurist movement began with a poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In
1909, Marinetti wrote the Futurist manifesto. The manifesto was a downright rejection
of modern arts effort to portray artwork. The manifesto of 1909 served Futurism in its
goal to tame conventional mannerism.
Futurism, and its manifesto embodied a genuine concern for reason and justice.
When Futurism first found its way into the art world, the creator of the movement,
Marinetti, struggled with the idea of what to call his new movement. Some of the names
the considered were Dynamism, Electricity, and Futurism. This powerful movement
might have been called anything except "Pacifism" for radical changes were taking
place.
In 1911, the Futurists gathered at their first major showing in Milan, Italy. The
artists involved in this exhibition included Boccioni, Russolo, and Carra. Together,
these three exhibited over 50 works. When the exhibition was over, the Futurist painters
came together as artists with a common interest.
For about 10 years, the Futurist movement deeply practiced the principles they
believed in. But by 1918, the war had taken a huge toll on the Futurists. Many artists
began to practice less rebellious styles, and Futurism itself was becoming an obsolete
movement. In some regards however, a couple of artists led Futurism into the 1940’s
and 50’s. Although at some point, the movement seemed to regain its ground, the period
between 1909 and 1918 seemed to mark the most productive and worthwhile years in
Futurism.
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The Futurist painters were uncompromising artists. The artists were obsessed with
portraying art by means of pure style. Their aim in painting was to capture an accurate
reproduction of art seen through the elements of plastics.
The average Futurists tried to transfigure the objects they saw. For example, an
object like a whiskey bottle could transform itself into an illusionary abstract form. A
simple ray of light hitting the whiskey bottle could create these abstract forms. When
the light hit the bottle, the bottle would loose its rigid and defined characteristics, and
appear to take on a transfigured image of smoothness. In the same fashion, the Futurists
kept these ideas whenever painting. And its often easy to understand that the Futurist
painters were creating art that was not thought of in conventional thinking. In some
ways, the Futurists were like the Impressionists in trying to capture an appearance or
impression of an object.
Like the Impressionists, the Futurists emphasized distortion in their paintings.
They believed that their art proceeded the limits of one particularized style, and that
continuing these forms of existence one could capture the meaning of true art.
One Futurist stated that "its not our intention to present the public with the usual
art show, but rather to exhibit spontaneous paintings by the untrained, in order to prove
that the artistic sense is ornate in every man’s soul; and that art is on an individual
level." For the most part, the Futurists entertained any possibility and technique
presented to them. They believed that art can come from anywhere. They felt that the
work of children provided their movement with a sense of innocence; because children
usually paint what they feel is right for them. The Futurists also welcomed the work of
Laborers and everyone else who expressed themselves by painting.
The Futurists however, deeply disconnected themselves from all government and
parliamentary procedure. They rebelled against what they called a failing government; a
government more interested in themselves than the good of the people.
Their discontentment was visible both in their artwork and political practices.
Other than protesting their government, the Futurists were also heavily involved in the
fields of science and philosophy. They encouraged the consideration of psychologists
who were trying to reach the unique sources of mind and body. They applauded their
particular interest in the states of color and its effects with the human eye. In a part of
their art that would later encourage the Kinetic artists, Futurism portrayed color and
form together. They did this to portray rhythmic identification of geometric figures like
circles and lines.
Aftermath - The Futurist movement was a movement that spelled out success for
other movements. The Futurists work made possible the success of Cubism, Vorticism,
and German Expressionism. The triumphs for Futurism in one sense, was also a triumph
for these movements. Their influence in the art world has become a reality of failure
and triumph. While Futurism is now in our past, their ideas and concerns have always
been present in the minds of artists like them. As we look in the past, in reviewing their
principles, we find them looking in the future—surpassing our wildest expectations.
DADAISM was an art movement that followed Cubism, Expressionism, and

Fauvism. The Dadaists were mainly a group of ill-organized artists experimenting with
bizarre art and literature. The main Dada artists include Hugo Ball, Jean Arp, and
Marcel Duchamp. The artists wanted to take modern art into a direction that would
broaden the meaning of "what art was and could be".
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History - Historically, Dada began in 1916 when Hugo Ball, a German poet and
exile, founded a local café in Zurich, called the Cabaret Voltaire. The club was a haven
for young Bohemian artists, and its members boasted an atmosphere that emphasized
artistic freedom and creation. The club quickly became a free platform for self-
promotion used mainly by artists, musicians, and writers. For the most part, the club
was an institution of learning and a Mecca for artistic individuality. The club had
become so well known in the first month of its opening that people throughout Europe
came to see the club.
In fact, as the clubs popularity soared, and its memberships as well, the need for
changes became apparent. The members realized that the beginning of a common
interest was starting to occur, and that a new art movement was beginning. Hugo Ball,
who founded the Cabaret Voltaire, soon realized that he needed to find a name to call
this new movement. Unlike other movements in Modern Art, where names were often
generated from critics, the Dadaists themselves originated their name.
Allegedly, Ball discovered the word Dada while thumbing through a German
dictionary. Although the word Dada does not signify any logical meaning that describes
the movement, Ball stated that the word expressed the primitive and unruly theme
associated with the club, and that Dadaism was the perfect name for their group.
The Dadaists had one main frustration to compel them against modern art—
corruption. The young Dadaists felt that the creators of modern art had become snared
by self-indulging greed, and had lost their sense of "true" direction. Many artists felt
particularly bitter towards the Impressionists and Cubists, whom they felt had wrapped
themselves in materialism. The Dadaists felt that art and literature had been exploited
purely for money; and that artists had somehow lost the true identity of art. These social
and personal concerns troubled the Dadaists, and these sentiments were the founding
principles behind the Dada movement.
In one way or another, many artists have always had these same concerns. And
indeed, around the same time that the Cabaret Voltaire was becoming popular, another
independent branch of Dada in New York was taking place. In one sense the whole idea
of Dada was similar. Dada seemed to be a way of thinking that has existed in every
movement. Marcel Duchamp once stated, "Dada is the nonconformist spirit that has
existed in every century, every period since man is man."
If ever an art movement could be defined as spontaneous, Dada, with its flair for
the untraditionally bizarre, would fit like a glove. The Dadaists enjoyed using
unconventional methods not usually associated with art. The Dadaist used unorthodox
and even weird practices in an effort to "revive" art. While the Impressionist, Post--
Impressionists, and Fauvists portrayed art with some practical perimeters, the Dadaists
often used contradictory methods, which sometimes appeared more self-destructive to
their movement than beneficial.
For example, they would often pick pieces of paper out of a hat with one or two
words written on them, and make a poem out of it--a verbal collage that had no
coherence. This poem would certainly appear syntactically erroneous and practically all
but readable.
However, the Dadaists felt that using this type of spontaneity added something
new and livable to art and literature, something new which artists before them had never
tried. This same technique also appeared throughout the work of various artists and
painters. The idea was to create art by destroying it, but at the same time not destroying
it.
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When you view the art of the Post-Impressionist or Expressionists, it’s easy to
understand why people unfavorably regarded their painting as loud and disturbing. The
public either did not appreciate their style or their images. However, for the Dadaists,
it's hard for the public to grasp their meaning, so it becomes hard to identify their
weaknesses. In one sense, Dadaism left no room for interpretation.
The Dadaist also claimed that art was dead, and that any effort to revive that art,
including their effort, was also dead. While the movement appeared to advocate artistic
restoration, they also appeared to advocate that art was no longer meaningful. In one
sense, for an average Dadaist to be a true Dadaist, he or she had to be against their own
art.
A true Dadaists is therefor against Dadaism. As Dadaism existed to revolt against
literature, music, and art, including their own, they also worked to revive it, even though
they didn’t believe in the effort to revive art. While the movement lasted, these ideas
worked for and against them, but eventually against them.
The Dada artist Hans Ritcher had a purpose for this. Ritcher wanted to convey
that life does not stem from the ordinary, but the unordinary; that art, like life, should
not stem within orthodox, but should be unrestrained. Because of this, the Dadaist
desire to upset and shock caused many people to see them as negative and destructive.
As someone once stated, "Dadaists, while they may have appeared pessimistic and
nihilistic, were revolting against the cultural and social values of their day, not merely
in a sprit of disgust, but in a genuine attempt to rediscover the function of artists and
people in an age of increasing disillusionment."
The Dadaists never embraced regularity as part of their movement. So it’s
therefore appropriate that the Dadaists never embraced a set of rules or theory to follow
either. Living up to their name (which itself is senseless) Dada art depended solely on
the individual taste and palette of the artist. For the most part, an average Dadaists like
Jean Arp, or Hans Ritcher, aimed to use any avenues of expression, bliss, joy, love or
hated, as long as it was different and achieved their ambition of replenishing art to its
former state of purity.
Aftermath - It’s only appropriate that Dadaism came to a definite end. As Dadaism
served to destroy itself with destructive art, the end results could only mean that
Dadaism itself would be destroyed. However, unlike the approach of their predecessors,
the Dadaists catapulted art into a new period of freedom. Their ideas would lead others
to seek out new frontiers of artistic usage. The average aspiring artists no longer
obligated themselves to keep painting within a confined boundary, but surveyed the
Dada style to depict their own aesthetic palette. As it ended up, the Surrealists would
later follow in the footsteps of Dada, and eventually develop Dada’s disorientation into
a specified set of theories.
SURREALISM was an art movement that most closely coincided with Dadaism. The
Surrealists movement lasted for about two decades, and involved countless artists. At
first, the movement seemed to be only a literary movement, and an extension of
Dadaism. However, the Surrealist movement quickly entered the realm of painting.
Surrealist artwork portrays mainly abstract ideas like something that would appear in a
dream.
Surrealism was heavily involved in portraying these dream-like images or even
nightmares (as seen is Dali's work to the right).
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One of their main goals was to connect their painting with the dream stages of
sleep. They wanted the public to realize their emphasis that the mind has its own power
to create artistic meaning. The Surrealists focused on interpreting their art through
emotions rather than intellect. Some of the major people involved included Andre
Brenton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Renee Magritte. Today, many art lovers still
admire their work.
History - By 1924, the Dadaist movement had completely deteriorated. Many
artists decided to turn their attention to the Surrealist movement. Initially, the movement
had close ties with Dada art and literary circles. However, the movement quickly
became popular with others.
Something seemed to attract students and other artists to this movement.
Surrealism did have a more stable environment. Unlike the Dada movement, Surrealism
had an organized sense of direction set by Andre Brenton’s Surrealist manifesto
published shortly after the movement began. When 1925 rolled around, even more
would join. In 1925, the Surrealists had opened up their first art exhibition to the public.
Although the exhibition was quite small, the showing was enough to attract many more
new members.
Surrealism took place in mainly two countries—France and the United States.
During the 1920’s and into the early 1930’s, Paris acted as the major gathering grounds
for the Surrealists. However, during World War II when Germany occupied France,
many Surrealist activities resided in the United States. In the United States, the
Surrealists acquired a large group of interested artists that regularly came together and
conversed in local New York cafés and restaurants.
Surrealism adhered to a highly organized set of doctrines and rules. They focused
their attention on stimulating the psychological effects of dream-like images in their
artwork. They had a high regard for scientific study, with a special interest in the
subconscious.
Surrealism in some respects, is a state of mind. It represented the kind of artistic
realism that wanted to put personal intellect aside, and explore the subconscious
possibilities in art.
The Surrealists became adamant against thinking of art as an intellectual process
of interpretation. They were against studying only the surface of the work. Rather, the
Surrealists felt that exploring the subconscious was a necessary means to unlocking the
minds unhindered perception. Once this was accomplished, the mind would be able to
consider the true value of art. They stressed that unconscious feeling and interpretation
was important to seeing art for its fullest value. This belief that the subconscious is a
part of art, became so strong for the Surrealists that at times they appeared to be against
their own artistry. In other words, Surrealists placed primary importance on
subconscious interpretation.
Surrealism employed several methods to achieve these effects. Some artists used a
process called "automatism". The process involves using the subconscious to make
paintings. The artist would give up any mindful acts, and would instead allow his or her
subconscious to take control of their entire mind. The results would end up on the
canvas. The artists would simply paint whatever came to his or her mind. The process
involved no outside intellectual stimulation because the Surrealists were trying to utilize
the powers of the unconscious by being spontaneous. The artists believed that anyone,
not only the artist, could sit down with a canvas and brush, and make your own
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subconscious painting. By using their methods, you would insure that your artwork had
all the subconscious elements.
Many painters had individual styles and techniques. Salvador Dali painted
nightmarish images. He would take objects and place them in non-sequential places
throughout his painting. Dali desired to make his painting seem similar to a nightmare,
where one has no control of the episodes.
One of his most admired paintings today is The Persistence of Memory (seen
above). The images seem to captivate a super reality that’s different to everyone who
sees it. Like all Surrealist painters, Salvador Dali tried to make the subconscious the
most important element.
Another artists named Max Ernst also had his own ideas. Max Ernst invented a
system of painting called frottage. The process involves taking an object like a twig or
piece of wood, and wrapping it in paper. Then he would rub a pencil on it until an
image or pattern began to emerge.
Renee Magritte, another Surrealist painter often used familiar objects when he
painted. In his painting, he portrayed everyday images like a table or a pipe. The
purpose was to create a sense of familiarity for the spectator.
Renee Magritte also used a technique in which he placed curtains around his
painting and canvas to make the appearance of a window portraying a landscape. He
practiced creating similar objects in his paintings. That is, he drew the same object
twice, not necessarily the same, but similar. The purpose was to make the spectator
associate one with the other, usually without the spectators’ knowledge.
Aftermath - Surrealism was successful in creating a different aspect of art. For
most of the 1930’s, Surrealism dominated the art community. They enjoyed such
celebrated artists as Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, and boasted an almost two decade
long movement. After Surrealism came to a close in the late 1930’s and early 40’s,
Abstract art and Pop art would soon to hit the American scene. In 1966, the leader of
Surrealism (Salvador Dali) died, but many of his ideas continued to be admired and
shared.
THE DE STIJL movement encompassed a new addition in modern art--architecture.

This art movement used their artistic talent by designing homes, buildings, and
furniture. Unlike most architects during the time, the De Stijl movement signified a new
trend, its own name meaning "The Style".
Their architecture consisted of mainly solid geometric shapes, such as triangular
chairs, and sphere like windows. While their art must have appeared rather radical for
the time, their success as architectural artists was phenomenal. The artists maintained
close ties to intellectualism and philosophy. The De Stijl movement represented a part
of art that also used bold and primary coloring. Their movement indeed represented a
favorable style.
History - The De Stijl movement was originally founded in 1917 by an aspiring
group of young Dutch architects. The essential characters included Piet Mondrian, Theo
Van Doesburg, and Bart Van Der Leck. While away in Holland in 1914, Piet Mondrian
was forced to stay in Holland due to changes in the war. While staying in Holland,
Mondrian met Bart Van Der Leck and Theo Van Doesburg. With their newly found
friendship, the three men would soon found the De Stijl movement.
Within De Stijl exists three periods through which the movement as a whole is
defined. The three periods go as follows: the immature period from 1916 to 1921, the
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mature period from 1921 to 1925, and the period of deterioration from 1925 to 1931.
During the first immature and underdeveloped stage of De Stijl, the artists focused
mainly to display painting and sculpture. They did so with drawings and sketching of
city streets, and models for architectural design. Also during this phase, the artists
worked closely with one another on the De Stijl magazine, a self-promoting magazine
founded in 1917.
The second phase of De Stijl, also known as the mature stage, lasted from 1921 to
1925. During this phase most critics acclaim that De Stijl displayed its most lasting
work.
Most critics believe that the other periods did not have the same prestige that this
period had. By this time, due to a disagreement with the organization of De Stijl, Bart
Van Der Lick had resigned. In 1921, the movement had made some radical changes.
Theo Van Doesburg sought after the work of architect Eliezar Lissitzky, and together
collaborated on many artistic excursions, including a showing at the Le once
Rosenberg’s Galeria de l’effort Modern in Paris, France. These and other showings
were always successful, and the artists enjoyed tremendous success during this period.
The third phase of De Stijl lasted from 1925 to 1931. This represents the total
deterioration of the movement. Piet Mondrian resigned his post after a confrontation
with Theo Van Doesburg. Their style took on a less attractive appearance, and even
some of De Stijls most supportive critics wondered what direction the movement had
taken. They received criticism for their inconsistency, and were apparently considered
to have lost their values.
Although De Stijl has long since survived, the artists eventually moved on, and
most of their work finished around the 1930's.
The De Stijl artists believed that their art represented, and was, a perfect
connection between an individual and society at large.
They maintained a careful balance between research and application of their style;
for they only wanted to practice art in a logical manner, as opposed to a spontaneous
effect. They believed in the primary principles in architecture, the line, the spacing, and
the color; everything an architect should know (as seen in Mondrian's careful depiction
of lines to the right).
For the artists De Stijl was not just another art movement, but a philosophy and
religion. They maintained that art was a part of them, and they were a part of their art.
The square was to them, what the holy cross was to the early Christians.
To the artists, everything revolved around their style. Theo Van Doesburg once
stated, "The object of nature is man, the object of man is style." Their ideas were a
simple blend between form and color, each part conforming to a style. Their primary
color system included yellow, blue, and red, but was not limited to these colors, instead
each artist found a new style as he or she created, like any other movement. However,
these elementary colors did have a special kind of meaning for them. Yellow
represented the power source of the sun, blue represented the horizontal lines that are
essential in architecture, and red represented the partnership between the two.
The De Stijl movement also had a close connection with the elements of nature,
and believed that nature had a close connection with man. They believed that the
universe had a force that man could be a part of if he learned to respect and live in
harmony with the values of nature. To them, the De Stijl movement was this connection
between themselves and nature.
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Aftermath - The De Stijl movement would go on to coincide with the

Constructivism, which initially took place in Russia. From the original three members
only Mondrian remained an active artist to continue to live out his visions. The
movement lived up to modern art as it continued to change how an artist can interpret
his meaning as well as how he interprets this meaning.
Like the Expressionists, the movement displayed how expression can have
multiple meanings, and that while it may appear radical at the time, eventually it will be
a common practice. Although De Stijl did not a have powerful impact on society as
Cubism, for example, their methods and practices did open new doors for furthering
their ambitions.
CONSTRUCTIVISM was an art movement that conjoined artists and their art with
machine production and architecture. The artists did not believe in abstract ideas, rather
they tried to link art with concrete and tangible ideas.They wanted to renew the idea that
the apex of artwork does not revolve around "fine art", but rather emphasized that the
most priceless artwork can often be discovered in the nuances of "practical art".
Their basic aim was to capture the image of their day through portraying man and
mechanization into one aesthetic program. Constructivism took place in Russia. The
artists mainly consisted of young Russians trying to engage the full ideas of modern art
on their own terms. They depicted art that was mostly three dimensional, and they also
often portrayed art that could be connected to their Proletarian beliefs. Some of the
artists heavily involved in this movement include Eliezer Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and
Alexander Rodchencko.
Most of their images contain pictorials of construction, machinery, and men at
work. To them, the creative artist went along side of every day man, to complete a
portrayal of people and a way of life.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM was an art movement that took place in the United States.
The movement included the talented participation of Jackson Pollock and Willem de
Kooning. The movement devoted itself to the principles that art is most expressive
when a relationship is established between the artist and the spectator. Their most
famous method being "action art".
For the most part, Abstract Expressionism attracted the public with its simple
methods and spontaneous appearance. Today, people continue to appreciate their art for
its different appearance. Abstract Expressionism had a huge impact on the art
community, and their influence is seen in the movements that followed.
History - In the 1940’s, with most of Europe at war, Americans were left with the
responsibility of developing art. Abstract Expressionism was the first movement to
originate in the United States. During these times of apparent chaos, America met this
challenge by developing their own movement--Abstract Expressionism.
Like other art movements, Abstract Expressionism consisted of many artists. Most
artists during these times lived on the East Coast, mainly in and around New York.
During the 1930’s, New York had been a camping ground for the Surrealist
movement. By the time Jackson Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists arrived,
the New York area had become a haven for aspiring artists. They learned from each
other’s experience in the same way that the Parisian artists had learned from one
another. One of the more noticeable figures of this movement was Jackson Pollock. He
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penetrated the group as one of the most talented painters, and he soon became a role
model for others who were interested in abstract art.
As mentioned earlier, the work of Jackson Pollack runs predominately throughout
Abstract Expressionism. Although many artists contributed to this vast movement,
Pollock practiced most of the methods that the artists used. As part of their style in
painting, the artists focused mainly on keeping spacing and representation. Although
many of their paintings may appear chaotic, their paintings do in fact remain well
defined and controlled around the edges of their paintings (As seen in Jackson Pollock’s
One below).
The representation of a painting existed as a continuous organism, not merely an
object left to hang on a wall, but as a living entity that continues in motion. This
representation of a living painting represented the relationship between the artist and the
living painting.
Their ideas and methods were carried out in a simple and easy to understand
manner. Unlike other movements, the artists discontinued the use of contemporary
methods of painting, like using brushstrokes to define space as the creating instruments
for their artwork’s style. For example, the artists would sometimes place a canvas on the
floor and let the paint drip onto the canvas strait from the can. Instead of brushing the
paint on, the artists would then step around the canvas using his whole body to throw
the paint and create an abstract idea.
The artists use of spacing was also different. The idea of "shallow space" takes on
an important meaning in their style. As the artists dripped paint onto their canvases, the
development of lines and drops seem to glob together, making the different colors
appear to float on the surface. The idea was to allow people to see different things—to
see spacing and mentally interpret multiple meanings. The final product of the artwork
would then become a combination between what the artist has proposed, and what the
spectator has chosen to see.
Like spacing, the artist’s paintings had a sense of vagueness about them. Unlike
most prior movements, the Abstract Expressionists never intended on finishing their
artwork. They thought it would destroy the purpose and life of the painting. Almost all
their paintings had a sense of incompleteness. They always appeared unfinished and in
state of "happening". Instead of focusing on the final product of the painting, the artists
wanted the spectator to see the significance of his or her work while they painted.
Whatever remained after the art was finished, served only as a past reminder of what the
artist had done. The process whereby the artist is painting is often referred to as "action
painting."
Abstract Expressionism also had a close connection with psychology. They aimed
to achieve a psychological depth in their paintings. Sometimes this took the form of
various emotions like anguish and despair, and other times it included happiness and
joy. They believed that the mind could create different meanings for different people.
As said earlier, most painters never intended their paintings to be completed.
Painting to them, was a living object with a power and will of its own. They believed
that the spectator would have a choice between a conventional or pure painting, and one
that could have more meaning. They did not want to have paintings done in the
conventional sense; rather they focused on getting away from all traditional forms.
Pollock once stated, "I continue to get further away from the conventional painters
tools, such as easels, palettes, brushes…I prefer sticks, towels, and dripping fluid paint.
When I am painting, I am not aware of what I am doing. I have no fears about making
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change, destroying images, because painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come
through." The painter merely acted as a servant and mediator to achieving the
psychological effects of combining an artist and the painting with the viewer.
Aftermath - Abstract Expressionism dominated the art community for almost two
decades. While the movement had strong ties in America, little occurred throughout
Europe. The fact that Abstract Expressionism focused on making the painting a
reflection of the work done by the artist, other movements, including Minimalism,
would focus on diminishing the importance of the artist and their craftsmanship. In
some ways, Abstract Expressionism worked to re-establish art to its truest meaning—
the existence of art in relation to the artists, and its eventual impact on society.
POP ART was a movement that departed from the clichés of boldness so often
portrayed in modern art. The Pop artists disconnected themselves from the idea that art
must contain meaning in the abstract. The artists most recognized and closely associated
with Pop art include Andy Warhol, Roy Liechtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Richard
Hamilton. These artists found success both in Europe and the United States. As it
existed then, and as it exists now, Pop Art was a regeneration and renewal from the
nearly two decade reign of Abstract Art.
History - The Pop Art movement first began in England (British Pop). Their roots
began with an interest in Cubism and Dadaism. They admired the singular artworks of
Pablo Picasso’s Plate with Wafers and Stuart Davis’ Lucky Strike (seen below). They
also appreciated the work of Marcel Duchamp whose ready-mades, as he called them,
added a new sense of completion for the Pop artists. Marcel Duchamp was dismayed
that the Pop artists appreciated his work. He stated, "I threw the bottlerack and the
urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic
beauty."
Pop Art had an unusual kind of history for a modern art movement; it existed in
the United States, England, California, and even in Canada.
For the first few years of its existence, and especially in New York, Pop Art went
relatively unnoticed. Eventual, recognition of Pop Art began in the early 1950’s and
slowly developed over the next few years. Pop Art developed mostly because artists
began to re-direct their attention to the possibilities of change.
One of the first substantial artworks to come from these early years was Richard
Hamilton's Just What is it…a work combining the efforts of art and today’s culture.
Other changes would soon follow, and many artists began completing similar renditions
of how they saw Pop Art.
For the most part, the reason Pop Art was so successful for its artists in the early
years was because the world had grown tired of the repetitive forms of Abstract art.
The artists began to associate more often with one another in the 1960’s. In 1961,
the Pop artists showed their work at the Young Contemporaries Exhibition. The list of
artists included David Hockney, Peter Phillips, and Derek Boshier. On the New York
side of Pop Art, such artists as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann,
began exploring their own aesthetic program. Throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, these
artists created work that was deeply rooted in culture, both in the United States and
Europe. By 1965, when Pop artists showed their work at the Milwaukee art center, Pop
Art had become well defined and regarded.
The goal of the British Pop was to undo the work of the Abstract Expressionists;
the goal of the Pop artists elsewhere was often to capture it.
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Their styles, if one can be defined, all employed different elements, devices, and
meanings. They offered new artwork that was closely associated with the culture of the
second half of the20th century. They portrayed artwork through a variety of methods that
differed from the ordinary painting or sculpture—including commercial, comic strip,
and food sculptures. They aimed to depersonalize art, removing such elements as
people, and sometimes focusing on technology or mechanization.
In simplest terms, Pop artists embarked on a style that did not limit them, but
allowed them to explore the freest forms of their creative minds.
Pop Art can be most closely defined in two phases—British and American Pop.
The styles of British Pop and American Pop usually take on differences when compared
to individual artists. In general, the Pop Art movement dealt with technology, culture,
and humor when dealing with the major themes of their days. Where the two phases of
Pop differ, is in appreciation for their predecessors. British Pop had grown
tremendously tired of the bombardment of over two decades of Abstract Art. On the
other hand, New York Pop artists boasted that experiencing Abstract Art had opened
many doors of inspiration.
New York Pop deeply connected with tailoring the American idealism of zest and
freedom.
New York Pop included an enriching tale of humor combined with culture. Artists
displayed any form of objective subject matter, so long as it contained the elements of
freedom from the classical forms of modern painting. Artists like Andy Warhol
portrayed artwork that was free from any aestheticism whatsoever; his most famous
forms include his Campbell's Soup Cans (seen above) and Marilyn Monroe works. Pop
artists also represented a fulfillment of the American idea of mass-production.
One of their major beliefs was that all art is similar. Every television commercial,
assembly line, or person all had similarities. They dared to explore all means of modern
culture not otherwise experimented within other societies. They used any objects,
magazines, food, newspaper illustrations, clothing, furniture, cars, and cartoons as a part
of their theory. To them, nothing was "too taboo" or unknown as not to use it as a means
of art.
Aftermath - Pop Art, unlike some other art movements, left the limited spectrum
of what art could be, and delved into new art practices that allowed them to explore how
art can differ from the mundane practices of the Abstract. When Pop Art originated, its
importance was yet to be seen. At the time, people enjoyed Pop Art and its stand on
connecting humanity with culture. Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein
have enjoyed tremendous success as artists, and countless people have enjoyed their
works. Either way you consider Pop Art, the implications of their art have left an
impacted that closely resembles the nature of art and man.
KINETIC ART took place during the 1950’s and 60’s. It was a movement that
essentially represented "art in motion". Kinetic artists wanted to work with art that
would enable them to demonstrate the force and power of movement. It utilized the
many different avenues of art. Aspects such as sculpture, lighting, and superior
technology, all played a role in the artists’ creations. They unconventionally neglected
the use of subject matters, and the traditional artistry tools like the paint and brush. The
public enjoyed most of the work created by Kinetic artists, and much of their influence
can be seen in today’s post-modern movements.
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History - Kinetic Art began in the middle 1950's. The artists formed a loosely
connected group that managed to attain some support from the public in Europe and the
United States. The artists had a general idea that art could be examined through
movement. They took and adapted many ideas from their predecessors, and
concentrated them into more close knit theories. Kinetic artists derived many of their
styles from the ideas of Futurism, a previous art movement that appreciated movement
for its source of artistic value.
The Kinetic artists enjoyed the work of two men. They mostly appreciated their
position regarding kinetics. In 1920, two men named Gabo and Pevsner published the
Realist Manifesto. Together, they strongly criticized Futurism for not affirming kinetic
rhythms in sculpture. The two men declared that kinetic rhythms were the most
important part in kinetic sculpture.
Kinetic Art received some of its initial principles from Gabo and Pevsner. For
example, the men did not believe that sculpture needed to have a definite solid
appearance. A piece of artwork could take form through Kinetic Art. If you took a piece
of string, and attached a weight at one end and spun it at the other, the figure from the
spinning could make the appearance of a solidified shape. The Kinetic artists later
developed this idea.
Moholy-Nagy created a type of Kinetic sculpture called the "light machine". With
his light machine, Moholy-Nagy introduced the possibility and importance of light in
sculpture. Many Kinetic artists had the problem of powering their moving art, some
liked to show how a motor made their work move.
Calder, another great influence to Kinetic Art, opened up new doors by showing
how a power source could be fully hidden. He used the natural power source of air to
make his sculptures move. Calder therefore had no problems with having to hide a
power source for the movement to take place; since the source of power came from
nature.
When Kinetic Art emerged in the1950’s, the movement seemed to emphasize
what these men used to create sculptures. Most artists initially began with simple
moving art, but many later began new experiments with lighting and mirrors.
Many Kinetic artists tried to step away from the elements confined in
conventional painting, and tried to represent expression and art through the elemental
power of what they called motion. Although most of the Kinetic artists explored motion,
they did not always incorporate it in all of their artwork. They sought eagerly to
examine the power of all forces in motion, including light, wind, and gravity. Artists
like George Ricky and Kenneth Martin used the air as a source of power, while other
artists like Bury, used an electrical motor. In the case of Bury, he often used an electric
motor as part of the art itself, or as an element of mystery by concealing the work’s
power source. Like many other artists, he had an obsession about making his art free
from any outside stimulation.
Kinetic Art involved movement to make art disappear, and then re-appear. Artists
like Marcel Duchamp and JR Soto, often created sculpture that would give the
appearance of a three dimensional image.
For example, when round pieces of interlocking chains were quickly spun, the
object would appear to take on a different form such as a flat circle. When the pieces of
that chain moved, it created an image. When it didn’t move, the image of the chain
stayed the same. In reality, the object never leaves its constant state, but the power of
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movement creates an illusion inside the mind that it did. In this manner, the Kinetic
artists tried to make the spectator an essential figure in seeing the art.
Artists like Soto understood that idea, and tried to make an object appear
differently when the spectator stood in front of the work, and different when he stood
aside of it. Soto successfully created objects that appeared to move when they really
didn’t. His sculpture was simple and ordinary, and it effectively created a lasting
impression of a structure usually gone unnoticed.
As a pioneer in what is today known as the Moiré effect, Soto combined simple
outside objects into his work. The purpose in using these simple parts was to add
complexity to the work as a unit. When the parts were alone, they would have no
completeness or meaning. But when combined with others they would become one
united portrayal of movement. Soto essentially wanted an object (metal for example) to
appear free from the forces of nature and the complexity as an individual object. He
wanted it to be seen as more meaningful when the metal combined with other similar
parts.
Light was also an important factor to the Kinetic artists, which came in two forms.
In one sense, light acted in a pictorial value, and in another, it added structural value. As
light involved sculpture, it was used mainly to define the work spatially. Since light
visually creates space and movement both directly and indirectly, the Kinetic artists
often used light. Light has an effect that draws the spectator into the work.
Put simply, the Kinetic artist could do two things with light—shine it on an object
or away from an object. These uses of lighting added a whole new environment to the
work because light either emphasized or de-emphasized certain parts of a piece of art.
Light can emphasize a focus to one part or draw attention to another. Kinetic Art used a
variety of lighting. Light could be artificially produced (neon lights), or come naturally
from the sun.
Kinetic artists wanted people to become a part of their artwork. Picture yourself
for a moment inside a maze of mirrors, kind of like the ones you see at a local carnival.
Picture the lights on the mirrors. The objective of the maze is to keep you lost. The
effect of the lighting and the mirrors, creates a visual illusion. By being inside the maze,
you essentially become a part of it. It’s different than standing by it or looking inside of
it, you have to be in it.
In the same way, Kinetic Art wanted people not only to look with their eyes, but
also to take part of the art with their whole body. The artists wanted to place the
spectator into the art to emphasize closeness, and eliminate distance. Instead of simply
admiring the artists work, the spectator becomes an important part of it. The art and the
spectator have a partnership, and when these three elements combine; viewer, art, and
movement, the artwork becomes complete.
Aftermath - Many people still admire Kinetic artwork today, even though some of
their work may not always be considered "art" in the conventional sense. The Kinetic
artists were among the first in the modern era to step away from "conventional"
artwork. They didn’t use any of the traditional painting or sculpting tools. The artists
perfected how art could be seen through technology, light, and movement. Rather than
practice normality, the Kinetic artists transformed these simple elements on their own
terms to represent new aesthetic practices, and turn Kinetics into an art form itself.
Eventually, the well-developed style and creativity of Kinetic Art, was passed on to
other artists. Op Art, Conceptual Art, and Minimalism would each use some part of
Kinetic Art in representing their ideas.
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"Reality is more than the thing itself. I look always for its super reality. Reality
lies in how you see things." - Pablo Picasso
THE OP ART movement remains relatively short when compared to other

movements like Cubism or Surrealism. The movement officially lasted only three years,
and followed the Pop Art movement.
Op Art began with the desire to involve a correlation between seeing and
understanding. The art movement involved manipulating the eyes or creating an optical
illusion. Similar to other movements, the Op Art artists did not use conventional paint
and brush techniques. Instead, the artists used a limited color scheme, and a limited
style to draw shapes and objects. Each painting or design had its own way of alluding
the human eye. Although this movement was relatively short, the artistry they displayed
was important to all art movements and art lovers.
History - The birth of Op Art began officially with an article in Time Magazine.
In 1964, Time Magazine published an article featuring an art movement involving
optical illusions. Since the artists focused on eye manipulation, Time Magazine coined
this new movement "Op Art". For a brief time, Op Art became a household name. Their
name quickly became popular with the intellectual and social circles, and their work
was well sought after.
But where had these new artists come from, and where did they get their ideas?
The artists had great success, and this success came in part, from the work of other
movements.
Many people were involved in making Op Art what it is today. For example, the
artists during the Renaissance experimented with creating an optical illusion that would
make a flat surface painting look like a 3-dimensional image. The Mannerists also tried
to create alternate images for the human eye. They often displayed their paintings with
minor distortions of puzzle-like images to create their illusions.
After about 400 years of experimentation with optical illusions in art, the Op Art
movement decided to collectively study the importance and the effectiveness of art
portrayed in a distorted manner.
However, the Op artists received most of their inspiration from the Post-
Impressionists. The Post-Impressionists, mainly Seurat, created a style of painting
called Pointillism. The process involved painting with tiny dots rather than full
brushstrokes. When looked at from a distance, the artwork blends its own colors. In one
sense, the dots appear to fuse together to make a different color; an optical illusion. The
Op Art artists would eventually use these same principles when demonstrating the
contrasts between white and black.
Op Art explored the fallibility of the human eye. It demonstrated how the human
eye could be controlled to see certain images. In many ways, Op Art explores optical
illusions and deceptions.
The artists of the movement claimed that Op Art was a movement that
encompassed the human eye, and that it’s the most important tool for interpreting art.
One of the goals in Op Art is to try to make the brain interpret information differently.
Sometimes the Op artists would play illusionary tricks to force the brain to interpret
information that did not exist. In the same way, Op Art uses contrasting colors as white
and black to directly compromise the minds power to register information. As a result of
these methods, a simple drawing of black and white circles might appear to move when
it really didn’t.
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Op Art is not exactly conventional in too many ways. Op Art separates the artist
and the spectator from having any kind of connection. Op Art displayed a more
manufactured look. They eliminated the use of paint and brush strokes, which helped
add to the separation of the artist from his work. This way, the art would appear to be
void of emotional character. Op Art wanted to show an empty and meaningless picture
in order to capture the emotions of the spectator. Unlike most other art movements, Op
Art aimed to create a negative as well as positive impact.
Op Art was also simple in its style. Most of the Op Art images had geometric
forms or shapes. Their color scheme was made up of essentially two main colors—
black and white. The artists used the black and white colors because they had a tonal
effect that created an appearance of movement.
The artists also appreciated black and white colors because they removed all sense
of form. Sometimes artists would place a single black and squared piece of paper on top
of a single white sheet of paper. This simple artistry however, created some significant
results. The black square on the white piece of paper seemed to project itself outward.
The contrast between the black and white created this. In reality, neither the black or
white piece of paper is substantially closer than the other is, but the contrasting
appearance makes it seem closer.
Op Art also used visual fluctuations in their work that created an apparent
conflict. Op artists often used interconnecting and interweaving lines to create a moving
effect of bending and swaying. The visual effect also created conflict with the human
eye. The spectator has to forcefully strain his or her eyes to maintain a close observation
of the lines. Op Art’s style is almost always similar to these main ideas. Op artists
worked to captivate the performance of perception. In most instances, they represented
a reevaluation of the human mind.
Aftermath - Today, most people still admire Op Art. It’s fun to look at an object
and see something strange and unusual occurring. Many of today’s popular optical
illusionists began with the Op artists. Store bought books and games that Sometimes
whether we realize it or not, we continue to use the same fundamental ideas of coloring
that the Op artists did.
It seems that Op Art has represented an exploration to understanding how man
uses his eyes to interpret and absorb information. In most cases, the fundamentals of
their art represents a characteristic of humankind. They remain a part of our culture
today. The Op Art movement had a genuine premise for art that existed for everyone.
They represented a way of seeing and understanding "true" art.
THE MINIMAL MOVEMENT set out to re-capture sculpture in a state of independence.

That is, independence from the tremendous overuse of nature portrayed in sculptures.
The Minimalist painters rejected sculpture as a form of self-expression. The
movement received much criticism from the public, who found it difficult to consider
how a row of cubes, or how two rectangles sitting side by side could be considered an
artistic accomplishment.
Most people at the time felt that art should have some presence of artistic
achievement, but unlike public desire, the Minimal artists left no trace of art in their
work. They used only the simplest of design and material to portray their sculpture in a
clear and unmistakable manner.
History - The artists involved in Minimalism from 1966 to the late 1970’s include
a select few: Don Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Frank Stella. Their
62
aesthetic values came primarily from the work of Frank Stella, who started his journey
into Minimal art in 1959 when he exhibited a series of four works, all paintings that
consisted of nothing but a series of stripes. His work encouraged other artists to repeat
his simple and repetitive style, and they soon began applying these and other new
principles primarily to sculpture.
Marcel Duchamp, a Dadaist, also had some importance in the development of
Minimal Art. Duchamp proposed that the object could be contributed to a well-
organized and tasteful manipulation of sculpture. From this idea, many Minimalists
formulated the ideas of sending away for fluorescent lights or pre-manufactured boxes
outside of the studio environment.
Eventually, all these ideas came together collectively in 1966. At first, most critics
wondered how this could be considered art, and they found it hard to accept the
Minimalists. While they may have shocked and jeered the public then, by 1972 the
artists were being taken more seriously.
Leo Steinberg stated "its blankness and secrecy, its impersonal or industrial, its
simplicity and tendency to project a stark minimum of decisions, its radiance and power
and scale—these become recognizable as a kind of content—expressive,
communicative, and eloquent in their own way." Minimal art involved a pure and clear
demonstration of sculpture in its barest form. The materials they used were often simple
items like Styrofoam, firebricks, or light bulbs. They used recognizable geometric
shapes to represent form and style in their work.
One of the most important ideas in Minimalism is the idea of "order". The
Abstract Expressionists’ use of deep subject matter and emotional attraction, were now
branded by the Minimalists as being too interpretable, and having too much detail.
The Minimalist wanted to steer away from the multi-meanings of painting and
sculpture, and instead focus on allowing the spectator to see something "clear" and
"understandable". Instead of emphasizing each part of a work independently, they
aimed to control the sculpture by harmoniously combining each "part" of their work to
contribute to the "whole" finished product. They did so by placing priority on the
surface and shape of any sculpture, and carefully planning the projects’ relationship
with the environment. Much like an interior designer works to blend a particular style in
a home or office.
Most of the Minimal artists focused on constructing three-dimensional designs
that had equal parts, neutral surfacing, and repetition; each working in its own way to
develop the design.They often used industrial material such as cold steel, fluorescent
tubes, firebricks, Styrofoam, and industrial paint.
They felt that by using these products, and consolidating three-dimensional
design, they could successfully rid themselves from art illusions. They limited the
amount of interpretations in their artwork. They wanted art to be seen specifically as a
distinct object, not something that was a depiction of reality or a reflection of an idea,
but one that would stand our differently, and have a definite purpose.
Often, to avoid misunderstanding, the artists would assemble their sculpture rather
than mold or carve it. Each part of the sculpture would then be joined to the next
identical object, interconnecting and combining them like a chain. The artist would then
be able to show how their work combines to effect the whole, and also show emphasis
by a repetitious cycle of the same familiar object. Some artists felt that creating
individual parts created division in the work, and these artists, including Morris, created
projects that had one unitary part. However, they might have slightly differed in
63
opinion, they all agreed that sculpture should have "one simple idea" or subject matter,
and that each part of the sculpture should contribute to this idea.
Aftermath - Even until the 1980’s, Minimalism retained its present look, and most
artists continued to create their artwork using the same styles. For artists such as Judd,
Flavin, and Andre, their original sculptures only served to lay the foundation for their
future works.
Andre once stated, "I’ve produced a body of work that tends to generate its own
future. This is the definition of having a style, when work you’ve done becomes an
objective condition of the work you will do". However, unlike these artists, who
remained dedicated, Morris and Stella were destined to wonder into other areas. Even
while they were doing Minimal art, they started to steer away from Minimalism.
Minimalism would continue, and their styles would go on to influence the
Conceptual Art movement.
64
CONCEPTUAL ART or "information art", became a symbol for artistic freedom,

especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The movement represented a collection of free
thinking artists with ideas that extended into the written and participation forms of
modern and contemporary art. Many particular artists deserve recognition for their
work, and some of these artists involved in the movement include Robert Barry, Vito
Acconci, Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner, Chris Burden, and Jan Dibbets. The Conceptual
artists looked anywhere for ideas and information, to them, every idea was a good one.
History - The story of Conceptual Art most definitely begins with the influential
power of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a French artist who believed that every
artwork’s idea was more important than its product. His artwork paved the way for
Conceptual Art in the 1970’s. The Conceptual artists appreciated Duchamp’s artwork
for its conceptual characteristics. He was one of the first artists, through use of his
ready-mades, to become a prototype for Conceptual Art.
Conceptual Art was one of the largest and quickly undertaken movements in the
twentieth century. The artwork that they portrayed is great in numbers. Several times
throughout their reign, the Conceptual artists gathered to show their work. An
exhibition in 1960 had introduced Conceptual Art to the world, and soon after, their
work would flourish as they started to exhibit their work in new places.
Conceptual Art departed with all artistic value, especially those associated with
representing art as an objective form. Where some artists of the past have represented
art by using a specific object, Conceptual Art eliminated the need for any
representation, or any object in their art.
Unlike other art movements, who have traditionally showed their work through
exhibitions, Conceptual artists have replaced these exhibitions and galleries with works
seen in books. They no longer held to the idea that art depends on a physical presence,
but let their art take on an impersonal reality by incorporating more conceptual ideas
than concrete methods.
In the same way, the Conceptual artists also eliminated the role of art critic. They
felt that the art critics’ role had become overused, and was no longer necessary in their
type of artistic achievement. For the most part, Conceptual Art had become extremely
self-reliant, and more importantly, the artists of the movement were a reference for
themselves. They essentially eliminated any possibilities for critical interpretation.
Since there is no need for interpretation, there is no need for the art critic to be a part of
an artwork’s existence.
The Conceptual artists wanted to abolish any form of uniqueness or aura in their
work that might leave room for interpretation or varied meaning. They believed that any
ideal imposing unnecessary conditions on art is in essence, a road to tyranny. They took
the most extreme stance on art since the early days of Dadaism.
The Conceptual artists even had a close regard for language. They often used
words to express their methods of painting. To them, language functioned as a tool and
as a means of focusing the viewer’s mind on the artwork in question. For some artists,
the use of words became a technique to shock or amuse. They used their words in a
connection with the spectator. In some cases, the artists were able to have a relationship
with the spectator through thoughts and movements.
Aftermath - Conceptual Art finally ended somewhere around 1975. Today, some
conceptual activity continues, but for the most part, Conceptual Art has seen its final
days as a major art movement. During its reign, Conceptual Art created a sense of
freedom and liberation for artists trying to feel and express. They destroyed the long
65
time held emphasis that abstract art had become perfect and infallible. Conceptual Art
ends the colorful definable era of "modern art".
Today, Post Modernism, New modernism, or the Art of Identity have taken on a
whole new outlet. Today’s artists are no longer a part of a collective source, but have
delved into new trends and ideas that seem to change from year to year. Conceptual Art
helped gain this independence, and in some sense completes a source of new freedom
began by the Impressionists 100 years before them.
66

History of Modern Painting: Origins in 19th Century France

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History of Modern Painting: Origins in 19th Century France

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History of Modern painting

Origins in the 19th century

Barbizon painters Narcisse-Virgile Diaz de La Peña and Charles-François Daubigny

The end of the 19th-century tradition

The 20th century

Cubism and its consequences

Picasso's Primitivism, joined to the influence of Cézanne's "Great Bathers,"

Constructivism, was transmitted to western Europe by El Lissitzky, Antoine Pevsner,

Fantasy and the irrational

The identity of a work of art as a thing in itself, independent of representation,

The Expressionist tradition was developed to an extreme of agonized distortion

In painting generally a new directness was strikingly combined with a new

Abstract art - also called NONOBJECTIVE ART, OR

were closely analogous to techniques of painting. Furthermore, the characteristics of

Toulouse-Lautrec used the vivid contrasting colours of Impressionism in flat areas

emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety,

Brücke, Die - English The Bridge, organization of Expressionist artists, founded

IMPRESSIONISM marked a significant change in art history. The artists of this

In order to better analyze the Expressionists "theory", the following quote

DADAISM was an art movement that followed Cubism, Expressionism, and

THE DE STIJL movement encompassed a new addition in modern art--architecture.

Aftermath - The De Stijl movement would go on to coincide with the

THE OP ART movement remains relatively short when compared to other

THE MINIMAL MOVEMENT set out to re-capture sculpture in a state of independence.

CONCEPTUAL ART or "information art", became a symbol for artistic freedom,

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