introduction
"Modern art"
is a broad term which refers to art produced during the years 1870-1970. Some historians
prefer to limit "modern art" to the 20th century, but, it is more
customary to take Impressionism as the starting point, while the 1960s are
usually seen as the transition between "modern art" and its successor
"postmodernist art".
"Modern art" witnessed many of the great
international art movements, and also gave birth to entirely new forms of
creative expression, including: skyscraper
architecture (1880s); chromolithographic poster art (1880s/90s); animation art
(from the first cartoon film in 1906); collage (from 1912); performance art
(from Dada onwards); assemblages (from 1953); land art (fl.1960s). It
also raised certain forms to new heights, like: caricature art
and photography. During the final phase of the "modern" period
several types of avant-garde art
appeared, including conceptual art
(pioneered by Robert Rauschenberg 1950s) and video art (pioneered by
Wolf Vostell and Andy Warhol late-50s/60s), however, because these forms are
more closely associated with contemporary art,
we deal with them in our article on contemporary art
movements (1970 onwards).
MODERN ART MOVEMENTS
Christened by the French art critic Louis Leroy after
the title of Monet's painting Impression: Sunrise (1873), Impressionism
was a spontaneous plein-air manner of landscape painting
whose goal was the exact representation of light. The style was exemplified by
the plein air painting
of Monet, Sisley, Renoir and Camille Pissarro, although other painters were
also part of the Impressionist group, including Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne,
Frederic Bazille, Gustave Caillebotte, as well as Mary Cassatt, one of the
leading figures of the American
Impressionism movement (c.1880-1900). Introduced to Britain by
Whistler, it was taken up by his pupils Sickert and Steer and promoted by the
New English Art Club. After giving birth to some of the greatest modern
paintings of the 19th century, Impressionism was succeeded by
Seurat's Neo-Impressionism and Cezanne's Post-Impressionism.
The term given by the French art critic Felix Feneon
(1861-1944) to work by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and their followers like
Camille and Lucien Pissarro. The style was based on the optical painting
technique called Pointillism
(an offshoot of Divisionism).
Instead of mixing colours before applying them to the canvas, primary-colours
were placed directly onto the picture - arranged in groups of tiny dabs or dots
- to allow the viewer's eye to do the "mixing". The style was a later
influence on Fauvism. For more details, please see: Neo-Impressionism.
For developments in Italy, under Vittore Grubicy, please see: Italian Divisionism
(1890-1907).
Led by Stanhope Forbes, Frank Bramley and Norman
Garstin the Newlyn School
was inspired by the naturalist plein-air painting tradition of the French
Barbizon School and aimed to reproduce the realities of country life.
Derived from a Parisian shop called "La Maison de
l'Art Nouveau", owned by the avant-garde art-collector Siegfried Bing
(1838-1905), the Art Nouveau
style originated in the Arts and Crafts
Movement in Britain (notably the designs of William Morris) - being
also influenced by Celtic and Japanese designs - and was popularized by the
1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris before spreading across Europe and the
United States. A highly decorative style of design art (called
Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Liberty in Italy, Modernista
in Spain), Art Nouveau was characterized by intricate flowing patterns of
sinuous asymetrical lines, based on plant-forms. Leaf and tendril motifs are
popular Art Nouveau designs, as are female silhouettes and forms. The style
appeared in interior design, metalwork, glassware, jewellery, poster-design and
illustration, as well as painting, sculpture and poster art. It was exemplified
by the paintings and illustrations of Gustav Klimt, first President of the Vienna Secession,
as well as poster designs by Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), Arthur Rackham and
Aubrey Beardsley, and serpentine architectural motifs by Victor Horta of the Les Vingt
artists group in Brussels. It also had a strong influence on the Munich Secession
(1892) and Berlin Secession
(1898) in Germany. It was succeeded by Art Deco.
Mythology-inspired and characterized by a mystical and
magnified sensitivity with occasional erotic content, Symbolism
was a refinement of the Romantic tradition. Pioneers included Caspar David
Friedrich and Henry Fuseli, while modern exponents included Gustave Moreau, the
mural painter Puvis de Chavannes, and Odilon Redon. Influenced the Art Nouveau
movement and Les Nabis, as well as the Expressionists Edvard Munch and Franz
von Stuck.
Post-Impressionism
is an umbrella term incorporating numerous groups and styles of Post-Impressionist
painting, as exemplified by the work of painters like Paul Gauguin,
Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri Rousseau.
Cezanne adopted a rigorous classical approach to plein-air painting; Gauguin
used rich colours but preferred indoor studio painting; Van Gogh painted
outdoors but more to express his inner emotions than capture nature; while
Toulouse-Lautrec specialized in indoor genre scenes.
Following in the footsteps of Synthetism
(developed by Gauguin) and Cloisonnism
(invented by Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin) came the fin de siecle art group
called Les Nabis,
composed of young painters drawn to the decorative and spiritual content of
painting. The leader, Paul Serusier (1864-1927) and the group's leading
theorist Mauris Denis (1870-1943) were joined by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947),
Paul Ranson (1862-1909), Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867-1944), Henri Ibels
(1867-1936) and Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). Out of the Nabis came another
style of post-Impressionist painting, known as Intimism, exemplified in the
tranquil domestic genre scenes of Edouard Vuillard, his close friend Pierre
Bonnard, and Gwen John. Taken up by Nordic painters, like Hammershoi and PS
Kroyer. In Britain, Post-Impressionism was practised by the Camden Town Group,
founded in 1911 by Walter Richard Sickert, who became known for his nudes and
interiors.
Influenced by Paul Gauguin, Fauvism was an important
movement in the history of
expressionist painting, which advocated brilliant colours and wild
brushwork - hence their nickname Les Fauves (wild beasts), given them by the
critic Louis Vauxcelles after their first showing at the Salon d'Automne
in Paris in 1905. Fauvist painters included Henri Matisse, Andre Derain,
Maurice de Vlaminck Albert Marquet and Georges Braque. In Britain, Fauvism was
practised by a group of artists from Scotland known as the Scottish
Colourists. They included JD Fergusson, Samuel John Peploe, Francis
Cadell and Leslie Hunter. For more, see Fauvism.
Personnified by Vincent Van Gogh - whose hectic
brushwork and intense colours reflected his inner state rather than the scenes
he painted - Expressionism
is a style whose aim is to portray an interpretation of a scene rather than
simply replicate its true-life features. One of the first examples of the style
is German
Expressionism, which was developed in and around Munich by Der Blaue
Reiter [The Blue Rider], and in Dresden by Die Brucke [The Bridge]. After this
the movement spread worldwide, giving birth to variants - including Abstract
Expressionism - in America during the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by
Romanticism, Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, the
expressionist movement encompassed all genres, including landscape, portraiture,
genre painting and still life. Famous Expressionist painters included Wassily
Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Edvard Munch, Modigliani, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka,
Otto Dix, as well as Pablo Picasso, and Francis Bacon. For specific works,
please see: Expressionist
Paintings (1880-1950).
The Bridge
was a German Expressionist group based in Dresden in 1905. Combined elements of
traditional German art with African, Post-Impressionist and Fauvist styles. Its
leading members were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl,
Erich Heckel, and Emil Nolde. Short-lived but influential.
Based in Munich, the members of Blue Rider
included Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Alexei von Jawlensky, August Macke,
Gabriele Munter and Paul Klee. A loose association rather than a tight group,
it was named after a Kandinsky painting used on the cover of their 1912 Almanac
or Manifesto. Cut short by the First World War during which both Macke and Marc
were killed.
The so-called Ashcan School
consisted of a progressive group of early twentieth-century American painters
and illustrators (sometimes called the New York Realists) who portrayed the
urban reality of New York City life, in a gritty spontaneous unpolished style.
The Ashcan movement included Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri,
George Luks, Everett Shinn and John Sloan. Others whose work is considered to
reflect the Ashcan school include: George Wesley Bellows, Guy Pène Du Bois, the
celebrated Edward Hopper, and Alfred Maurer.
Cubism
was invented and formulated between about 1908 and 1912 in a partnership
between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who were strongly influenced by the
grid-like landscapes of Paul Cezanne and (in Picasso's case by African imagery:
witness his stunning Les Demoiselles D'Avignon). In part a reaction against the
pretty pictures of Impressionism, a style which held no intellectual interest
for Picasso, Cubism refocused attention on the essential 2-D nature of the flat
canvas, overturning conventional systems of perspective and ways of perceiving
form, in the process. The movement developed in three stages: Proto-Cubism
(Picasso's & Braque's early phase, containing the only 'cubes' to be seen);
Analytical Cubism,
an austere style which disassembled 3-D views into a series of overlapping
planes; finally, Synthetic Cubism,
a lighter more colourful style which 'built-up' images sometimes using various
'found' materials. Other important Cubist artists included Juan Gris and
Fernand Leger. Although relatively short-lived, the movement Revolutionized art
in the 20th century, and instigated a new tradition of abstract art. Cubism
benefited from strong promotional support by its spokesman, the art dealer Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler (1884-1979). For an important Cubist splinter group, see:
Section d'Or,
an offshoot of the Parisian Puteaux group.
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Orphic Cubism (Orphism) (1914-15)
Paris-based abstract art movement most often
referred to as Orphism,
whose style featured loosely painted patches of rainbow colours. The name
(Orpheus was a mythological poet and musician of ancient Greece) was coined
by French art critic Guillaume Apollinaire when describing the 'musical'
effect of the abstract paintings by the Cubist Robert Delaunay (which
comprised overlapping planes of contrasting or complementary colours) in
order to distinguish them from Cubism generally. Delaunay himself used the
term Simultanism to characterize his work. Another exponent of Orphism
was the French-Czech painter and anarchist Frank Kupka, one of the first to
create genuine abstract art, characterized by solid geometric blocks of
colour. The style was very similar to Synchromism,
a method of painting launched in Paris in 1913 by two American painters,
Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton MacDonald- Wright (1890-1973).
Photography
became more important as the era developed. In America, this was largely due
to the influential activities of Alfred Stieglitz, who founded the
Photo-Secession at his "291" gallery in New York. Edward Steichen
was another pioneer. Both men were noted for their pictorialism
(fl.1885-1915). Other photographic genres which were developed during the era
of modern art include: street
photography (1900-present), exemplified by the work of Henri
Cartier-Bresson; documentary
photography, as in the series of photos by Hans Namuth on the
action-painting of Jackson Pollock; fashion
photography (from 1880), exemplified by the shots of Man Ray,
Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Irving Penn.
Also known as papier collés or découpage, collage art was first
introduced by Georges Braque in 1912, when he attached three pieces of
wallpaper to his Synthetic Cubist drawing Fruit Dish and Glass. Collage
involves the use of objets trouvés, like bits of paper, photographs,
newspaper cuttings, fabric and other 'found' items, even 3-D objects, which
are fixed to the canvas to create a mixed-media effect. Other artists noted
for their works of collage include Picasso, Aleksandr Rodchenko and the
extraordinary loner Kurt Schwitters,
noted for his small-scale Merzbilder collages. The techniques of collage were
a strong influence on later forms of Assemblage.
Launched in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti in a manifesto which appeared on the front page of the Paris
newspaper Le Figaro, Futurism
rejected all traditional art, celebrating instead the modern world of
industry with works combining elements of Neo-Impressionism and Cubism. Other
leading members included Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, and
Gino Severini.
Rayonism
was a Russian avant-garde quasi-Cubist-style art movement led by Mikhail
Larionov and his partner Natalia Goncharova, both of whom later settled in
Paris. The subject of Rayonism (aka Rayism), was abstract landscape comprising
light or rays of light depicted by patterns of linear forms.
Founded on Utopian ideals, by the nihilist Kasimir
Malevich (1878-1935), Suprematism
expressed limitless confidence in the ability of engineers to create a new
Soviet world. The first Suprematist exhibition (Zero-Ten) took place in St
Petersburg, in December 1915, and featured thirty-five abstract works by
Malevich, including his famous Black Square hung like an icon high up across
a corner, as well as a host of other rectangles, triangles and circles, many
in vivid colours. The show later toured to Moscow and Vitebsk. In 1918,
Malevich was appointed to the Commissariat of Enlightenment and taught at the
Vitebsk art academy set up by Marc Chagall. Suprematism was a key art
movement in Russia, being closely linked with the Revolution. Other famous
Suprematist artists included Lazar Lissitsky, Ivan Vasilievich Kliun and
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Disillusioned in later life, by 1935 he was painting
realist pictures.
Constructivism
was an austere but important Russian abstract art and design movement
established by Vladimir Tatlin
(1885-1953), who was joined later by Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) and
brothers Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977). Concerned
with abstraction, space, new materials and 3-D form, Constructivist artists
developed architectural art in a direct attempt to reflect the modern
industrial world. Vladimir Tatlin himself was strongly influenced by
Picasso's 3-D constructions, some of which he saw first-hand in Picasso's
Parisian studio in 1913. In 1923 the movement outlined its ideas in a
manifesto, expressing the view that artists should focus on organizing
materials and constructing works, as if they were manufacturing a car. Later
suppressed by Stalin, the ideas of Constructivism reached the West through
Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, and were a strong influence on modern
sculptors like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. In Britain, around 1950,
the movement was recast as Constructionism, in the geometrical paintings of
Victor Pasmore and others.
The British counterpart to Italian Futurism, Vorticism
was an avant-garde art movement, influenced by Cubism and Futurism, founded
in London by the painter, illustrator and war artist Percy Wyndham Lewis
(1882-1957). The only Vorticist exhibition was held in London in 1915.
Claiming to produce "a New Living Abstraction", Vorticist works
combine Cubist fragmentation with hard-edged iconography reflecting technology
and the urban environment. Other members included Cuthbert Hamilton, William
Roberts, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders, Edward
Wadsworth, as well as the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
The group foundered after the exhibition, although Wyndham Lewis essayed a
brief revival of its ideas with Group X, in 1920.
Founded in Zurich during the First World War, Dada
was the first of the modern anti-art movements, whose members were revolted
by the butchery of the 1914 World War and devoted themselves to an artistic
style that set out to deliberately challenge all the traditional values of a
society that could have allowed such barbarity to occur. Dada-ists employed
shock-tactics and absurdity to produce totally irrational or meaningless
artworks and "performances", including sculpture and early
installations which they often constructed using various objets trouvés (found objects)
of which Marcel Duchamp's "readymades"
were a sub-category. Dada developed into an international movement and its
themes eventually formed an important part of Surrealism in Paris after the
war. Leading members of Dada included Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis
Picabia, Man Ray, John Heartfield and Schwitters. Dada inspired many later
styles and groups, including Fluxus, Neo-Dada, Nouveau Realisme and Pop-Art.
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The Bridge (Die Brucke) (1905-13)
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De Stijl
(1917-31)
De Stijl
(Dutch for "the style,") was the name of a group of artists (and
the art, design and aesthetics journal they published, which was one of the
most influential avant-garde magazines of the 1920s). Founded in the
Netherlands during World War I, by Theo van Doesburg, the older Piet
Mondrian, architect Gerrit Rietveld, and Bart Van der Leck, it advocated a
geometrical type of abstract art, (later called concrete art, by Van
Doesburg), based on universal laws of harmony that would be equally
applicable to life and art. The movement had its greatest impact on
architecture. Although Piet Mondrian seceded from the group in 1923, he
remained faithful to its themes until the end of his life by which time he
had become one of the most famous of all abstract painters. By comparison,
the more restless Van Doesburg abandoned one of the basic tenets of De Stijl
in 1924 when he substituted diagonals for verticals and horizontals in search
of greater dynamism.
Term used to describe the style of painting invented
by Piet Mondrian. It comes from the Dutch words "Nieuwe Beelding",
used by Mondrian in his articles in De Stijl magazine (1917-19), and in his
book "Neo-Plasticisme" from 1921 onwards to describe his own type
of abstract art. Essentially it means "new art", since sculpture
and certain types of painting are considered 'plastic arts'. However the
German version "Neue Gestaltung" (new forming) captures Mondrian's
meaning best. He used the name to advocate a 'new forming' in the widest
sense, as well as his own ideas and images. In his long essay
"Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art", Mondrian wrote: "The new
plastic idea ... should find its expression in the abstraction of form and
colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary
colour". Thus in a sense Neo-Plasticism
was an ideal form of painting, which used only pure colour, line and form. In
addition to insisting only on primary colours (or non-colours), it advocated
solely squares, rectangles, and straight horizontal or vertical lines.
Despite his disagreement with Van Doesburg over the latter's launch of Elementarism,
in 1924, Mondrian's theories exercised had a huge impact on later painting,
and he is now regarded as one of the greatest of all modern artists.
Founded in 1919 by the innovative modern architect
Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany, the Bauhaus Design
School was a revolutionary school of art upon which so many others
have been modelled. Its name, derived from the two German words
"bau" for building and "haus" for house, together with
its artist-community system, hints at the the idea of a fraternity working on
the construction of a new society. Highly influential in both architecture
and design, its teachers included Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee,
Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anni Albers and
Johannes Itten. Its stated goal was to bring art into contact with everyday
life, hence design was accorded as much weight as fine art. Among the leading
principles taught at The Bauhaus were the virtues of simple, clean design;
abstraction; massproduction; the ethical and practical advantages of a
well-designed environment, as well as democracy and worker participation. In
1925, The Bauhaus moved into a new building in Dessau in 1925-6, and in 1932
relocated to Berlin where it was eventually closed by the Nazis in 1933. Its
teachers then dispersed, with several moving to America: Moholy-Nagy went to
Chicago where he established the New Bauhaus in 1937, while Albers took
Bauhaus methods with him to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and
later to Yale University.
Fashionable 1920s Parisian Movement founded by
Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier)
and Amedee Ozenfant, based on theories outlined in their 1918 book Après le
Cubisme (After Cubism). Disagreeing with Cubist fragmentation, they produced
figurative art (mostly still lifes) basic forms stripped of detail and
supposedly pure in colour, form and design. Other artists loosely associated
with the movement which peaked at the International Exposition of Decorative
and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, were Fernand Leger, Juan Gris and the
Russian-Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.
An important influence on modern art painting in the
United States, Precisionism
was an American movement (also referred to as Cubist Realism) whose focus was
modern industry and urban landscapes, characterized by the realistic
depiction of objects but in a manner which also highlighted their geometric
form. An idealized, almost Romantic style, it was exemplified in works by
Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, while the urban pictures of Georgia
O'Keeffe also fall into the Precisionist genre. See also Charles Sheeler's
photographs of Ford's River Rouge Car Factory.
Rooted in the Metaphysical
Painting of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), the revolutionary
painterly ideas of Cubism, the subversive art of Dada and the psychoanalysis
ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Surrealism
was the most influential avant-garde art movement of the inter-war years. Its
goal, according to its founding father, the French writer Andre Breton - in
his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism - was to fuse the unconscious (the part of
the human mind where memories and instincts are stored) with the conscious,
to create a new "super-reality" - a surréalisme. A broad
intellectual movement, Surrealism encompassed a diverse range of styles from
abstraction to expressionism and full-blown realism, characteristically
punctuated with weird, hallucinatory or fundamentally 'unreal' imagery.
Leading surrealist artists included Salvador Dali (1904-89), Max Ernst
(1891-1976), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Andre Masson (1896-1987), Yves Tanguy
(1900-55), Joan Miro (1893-1983), Jean Arp (1886-1966), and Man Ray
(1890-1976). Their immediate impact was seen in Germany in the Magic Realism
of Franz Roh, and later in Britain, where British Surrealism was founded in
1936 by the writer Herbert Read, together with the artists David Gascoyne,
Paul Nash, and Roland Penrose. The First International Surrealist Exhibition
opened in London in 1936 and sparked enormous interest, not least because of
the talk given by the flamboyant self-publicist Salvador Dali from inside a
deep-sea diving suit. Surrealism had a huge influence on Europe, and few
European artists of the 1930s were unaffected by the movement. It continues
to have a significant influence on art, literature and cinematography.
A popular and fashionable style of decorative design
and architecture in the inter-war years (much beloved by cinema and hotel
architects), Art Deco
designs also extended to furniture, ceramics, textile fabrics, jewellery, and
glass. Showcased in 1925 at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative
and Industrial Arts held in Paris, Art Deco was essentially a reaction
against Art Nouveau: replacing the latter's flowing curvilinear shapes with
Cubist and Precisionist-inspired geometric forms. Classic examples of Art
Deco design include the New York Chrysler Building and the Empire State
Building. Art Deco also drew inspiration from the modern architectural
designs of The Bauhaus. Famous artists associated with Art Deco include the
Polish-Russian society portraitist Tamara de
Lempicka, glass artist Rene Lalique and graphic designer Adolphe
Mouron.
For half a century (1890-1940) Paris remained the
centre of world art, culminating in the dazzling works of Impressionism,
Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. The Paris School
is a term used by art historians to denote the community of artists, both
French and foreign, working in the city during the first half of the 20th
century, rather than a strictly defined style, school or movement. For many
reasons, Paris was exceptionally attractive to artists. It was free of political
repression, it was home to a number of influential 20th century
painters (eg. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault,
Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall,
Chaïm Soutine, Mikhail Larionov, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, to
name but a few), and it boasted a booming art world with galleries,
collectors and critics to support artists with talent. The twin leaders
(chefs d'école) were Picasso and Matisse.
Die Neue
Sachlichkeit - a German term, meaning "New Objectivity"
- was the name given to a group of Expressionist artists in Germany during
the 1920s, derived from their 1925 Neue Sachlichkeit show in Mannheim. It was
the third phase of the Expressionist
movement in Germany, after Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue
Reiter (The Blue Rider). Key members included Otto Dix, George Grosz,
Christian Schad and to a lesser extent Georg Schrimpf and Max Beckmann.
Although the exhibition curator, GF Hartlaub, described its paintings as
"new realism bearing a socialist flavour", the style was vividly
expressionist in its satirical portrayal of corruption and decadence in
post-war Weimar Germany.
Although influenced by Surrealism, Magic Realism was
actually part of the 'return to order' trend which occured in post-World War
I Europe in the 1920s. The name derives from a 1925 book by German art
historian and critic Franz Roh called "Nach Expressionismus: Magischer
Realismus" (After Expressionism: Magic Realism). Members included
Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Alexander Kanoldt and Adolf Ziegler.
Socialist
Realism was a form of heroic political propaganda employed by
dictator Joseph Stalin in Russia, from 1929 onwards, to buttress his program
of accelerated industrial development. Formally announced by his artistic
stooge Maxim Gorky, at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, the style or
direction involved the creation of bold optimistic imagery to evangelize the
achievements of the Soviet State and inspire workers to Stakhanovite feats of
labour. The most ubiquitous media used by Socialist Realist artists was the
poster, although painting and sculpture was also produced, typically on a
monumental scale, showing fearless individuals and groups in idealistic and
heroic poses.
A general category describing works of art which
focus on relatively low-brow subjects to do with eveyday life, as opposed to
the 'ideal' or romantic settings employed by artists up until the 19th
century. It embraces American Scene Painting and Regionalism.
Social Realism
denotes the socially-aware painters of the Depression era, such as Ben Shahn,
Reginald Marsh, Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, Jack Levine,
Jacob Lawrence and Isabel Bishop. They took their inspiration from the
traditions of the earlier New York Ashcan School. Photographers like Dorothea
Lange (1895-1965) and Walker Evans (1903-75) also contributed to the movement
with their portraits of migrant workers from the Depression.
Mexican
Murals/Muralism describes the national wall painting campaign,
conceived by the education minister Jose Vasconcelos Calderon (1882-1959).
The Mexican painters involved included Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and
David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as Alfredo Martinez (1871-1946), Roberto
Nervo (1885-1968), Amado de la Cueva (1891-1926), Ramon Alva de la Canal
(1892-1985), Pedro Nel Gomez (1899–1984), Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Fermin
Revueltas Sanchez (1901-1935), Federico Heraclio Cantu Garza (1907-89), Jorge
Gonzalez Camarena (1908-80), and Alfredo Zalce Torres (1908-2003), to name
but a few.
American Scene
Painting was a sort of patriotic reaction to avant-garde European
abstract art. Artists turned their back on European hypermodernism and looked
for truth in specifically American imagery. Regionalism
was the midwest variant of American Scene Painting, which relied on the
realistic nostalgic setting of rural and small-town America.
Coined by Adolf Hitler, the term "Entartete
Kunst" meaning degenerate art,
expresses the Nazi idea that any art which did not conform to the ideal of
well-crafted figurative images depicting heroic acts or comfortable day-to-day
living, was the product of degenerate people. Not surprisingly most modern
art was labelled degenerate, which meant that most modern artists in Germany
(from 1933 onwards) could not show or sell their works. In 1937, the Nazis
removed all modern works from German art museums. A selection was then
exhibited in Munich to demonstrate how repulsive they were, but the plan
backfired and the show attracted huge crowds. See also Nazi art
(1933-45).
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Neo-Romanticism
(1935-55)
Term denoting the intense, poetic, figurative and
semi-abstract British landscape paintings of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and
others in the late 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, that gave a modern interpretation to
the romantic, visionary works of the 18th century William Blake and the 19th
century Samuel Palmer. Early works were generally sombre, reflecting the
anxieties of approaching war. Other British Neo-Romantics included Michael
Ayrton, John Craxton, Ivon Hitchens, John Minton, John Piper, Keith Vaughan
and the wartime drawings of Henry Moore. A lesser known group, also sometimes
referred to as Neo-Romantics, were the Paris-based artists Eugène Berman,
Leonid Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew: all noted for their brooding, nostalgic
works.
Art Brut
is a phrase coined by Jean Dubuffet (1901-85), to denote artworks produced by
people outside the established art world, such as solitary artists, the
maladjusted, patients in psychiatric institutions, and fringe-dwellers of all
kinds - typically not for display or profit. In English, the term "Outsider Art"
(a phrase coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972) is sometimes used to describe
this kind of work. In Dubuffet's view, this type of culturally detached art
possessed a unique originality, unstifled by education. Dubuffet's collection
of Art Brut, eventually numbering over 5,000 items, was presented to the city
of Lausanne in 1972 and in 1976 was opened to the public.
Biomorphic/Organic
Abstraction describes a style of art which employs rounded
abstract forms derived from nature. It did not constitute a movement as such,
but rather a style of art which appeared in the work of many different
artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Joan Miro
and Yves Tanguy, as well as the British sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry
Moore. See also: Modern British
Sculpture 1930-70. The appeal of Organic Abstraction extended the
Abstract Expressionists, as well as legions of American and European
furniture designers, including Charles Eames (1907-78), his wife Ray Eames
(1912-88), Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) and the Finn Eero Saarinen (1910-61). The
style has endured beyond the 1950s, being visible in the work of modern 3-D
artists such as the designers Ron Arad, Verner Panton and Oscar Tusquets, as
well as the sculptors Linda Benglis, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Ursula von
Rydingsvard and Bill Woodrow.
The St Ives School
was a British art colony based in the Cornish fishing town of St Ives, it was
associated with the abstract artist Ben Nicholson and his wife, the great
sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who settled near the town in 1939, to be joined
shortly afterwards (until 1946) by the Russian Constructivist sculptor Naum
Gabo. Another major artist, who had been living in St Ives since 1923, when
he founded a pottery studio with fellow ceramicist Shoji Hamada, was the
British ceramics artist Bernard Howell Leach. After 1945, as other artists
arrived, St Ives developed into a centre for modern and abstract art, much of
it derived from the local landscape. The main members of the school included
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Paul Feiler, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger
Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Karl Weschke and Bryan Wynter. In 1993, Tate St Ives, a
purpose built art gallery was opened on Porthmeor Beach to display the Tate
collection of St Ives School art. Also, nearby, is the Barbara Hepworth
Museum and Sculpture Garden, which was established in 1980.
Existentialism was a popular philosophy which grew
up around the writings of Frenchmen Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, during
the 1940s and 1950s. It had a significant effect on the visual arts, where
its themes of alienation, as well as angst in the face of the human
condition, can also be seen in works of American Abstract Expressionism and
Art Informel as well as in works by the COBRA group,
the French Homme-Temoin group, the British Kitchen Sink art group, and
the American Beats group - all of whom from time to time are labelled
Existential. So, too, are many individual painters and sculptors: like the
French artists Jean Fautrier, Germaine Richier, and Francis Gruber; the Swiss
sculptor Alberto Giacometti; as well as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. For a
later artist whose work is inextricably bound up with the existential
"absurdity" of life, see the contemporary sculptor Eva Hesse
(1936-70).
Abstract
Expressionism was a major umbrella movement of American art during
the late-1940s and 1950s, which consisted of a series of differing styles.
Largely based around artists in New York, it is sometimes referred to as the New York School.
As its name implies, the general style was abstract, but, instead of
following the Cubist geometrical idiom, it followed an expressive or
emotional course. The main component styles included: the animated all-over Action-Painting
(developed by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner); Gestural
Painting (developed by Willem de Kooning); Colour Field
Painting (practised by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford
Still), and "Hard-Edge
Painting" (invented by Frank Stella), most of which were executed
on a monumental scale. Another major contribution was made by the ex-Bauhaus
painter Josef Albers with his "Homage to the Square" series.
The French term Art Informel,
meaning art without form, was the European equivalent of abstract
expressionist painting, which dominated the art world from roughly
1946 until the late 1950s. Coined by the French sculptor and writer Michel
Tapié in his 1952 book "Un Art Autre," it was one of several
buzzwords used by critics (another being "Lyrical
Abstraction") to define the formless abstract expressionist
style which arose during this period, both in America and Europe. The subject
works varied in style to a degree, but were typically characterized by the
absence of compositional structure, which represented (at least in Tapié's
mind) a fundamental break with artistic tradition. Leading Art Informel
artists included Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean Fautrier, Wols (Alfred
Otto Wolfgang Schulze), Nicolas de Stael, to name but a few.
The term Tachisme
- derived from the French word "tache" meaning "spot" -
describes a type of abstract painting popular in the late 1940s and 1950s
characterized by the use of irregular dabs or splotches of colour. Given wide
currency in Michel Tapie's book "Un autre art", Tachisme initially
developed independently of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, and
continued to be essentially a French phenomenon, although it is commonly used
as a generic label for European Abstract Expressionism. Practitioners
included Karel Appel (1921-2006), Jean Fautrier, Georges Mathieu and the
German-born but Paris-based artist Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as
WOLS. In Australia, Tachisme was embraced by the Sydney School. For more
details, see: Australian
Modern Painting (1900-60).
Somewhat confusingly, the term Tachisme was used
differently in the 1880s by the critic Felix Feneon to describe the painting
technique of Impressionists, and again in the 1900s by the artist Maurice
Denis referring to the Italian Macchiaioli
artists and the Parisian Fauve painters.
The Italian Movimento d'Arte Nucleare, launched in
1951 by the Italian artist Enrico Baj, was a politically conscious arts
movement that produced paintings and collages 'for the nuclear era.' Avoided
geometric abstract works in favour of more fluid forms, characteristic of the
Art Informel style. Baj's works included images reminiscent of atomic
mushroom clouds and devastated urbanscapes. Other members of the movement
included the painters Sergio Dangelo, Gianni Bertini, and Gianni Dova.
Several Arte Nucleare shows were held in venues across Italy, but the
movement foundered by the end of the decade.
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Assemblage (1953
onwards)
The term Assemblage art
was first coined by Jean Dubuffet in 1953 to denote a type of work constructed
from fragments of natural, preformed or 'found' objects such as household
debris, urban detritus, stuffed animals - indeed any (usually recognizable)
materials, large or small. Typically, the items are selected and combined for
their visual (sculptural) properties, as well as their expressive attributes.
Although popularly thought of as the three-dimensional counterpart of
collage, Assemblage in fact encompasses both 2-D collages and photomontages,
as well as 3-D sculpture and entire-room environments. The art form gained
wide currency following an exhibition called "The Art of
Assemblage" held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1961), where
one of the most unusual works, by Cesar Baldaccini (1921-1998), was made from
compressed automobiles. A master exponent of this genre was the New York
artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose innovative assemblages of the 1950s and the
1960s contributed immensely to the genre.
Neo-Dada art
was a term almost synonymous with early American Pop-Art, especially the
collage and assemblage work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in New
York in the late 1950s. Pop-Art also shared Dada's subversive approach, by
deliberately inflating the aesthetic significance of low-brow objects and
imagery, much to the consternation of many "serious" critics and
curators. The production-line methods of Andy Warhol's Factory, together with
his iconoclastic showmanship and notoriety echoed the antics and shock
tactics of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, 40 years previously. Another movement,
closely related to Dadaism is Fluxus,
founded by George Maciunas, which emerged in the early 1960s in Germany and
New York.
A term coined by the critic David Sylvester, which
first appeared in the December 1954 issue of the journal Encounter, in a
description of the work of four British artists (John Bratby, Derrick
Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith) known as the Beaux Arts Quartet.
It pointed to the everyday subject matter (furniture, babies nappies, kitchen
utensils, toilets) of the foursome, whose celebration of the banal in the
lives of ordinary people was their attempt to make art more relevant and
accessible, while making a clear social comment. The Kitchen Sink 'movement'
reached a highpoint in 1956, when the members of the Beaux Arts Quartet were
selected to be the British representatives at the Venice Biennale.
The term Pop-Art
describes a style of art - emerging simultaneously in both America and
Britain - that derived its inspiration, creative techniques and philosophy
from popular and commercial culture. These populist or consumerist sources
encompassed film, advertising, product-packaging, pop music and comic strips.
The British movement differed from its American counterpart by being less
brash, more romantic and more nostalgic. A Continental version of Pop,
Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism), also appeared, although this had stronger
links to the anti-art Dada movement. Pop art started in the mid-1950s and
peaked in the mid-1960s under the influence of Andy Warhol and others.
Inspired in America by the pioneering work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns, Pop also had affinities with early 20th century movements like
Surrealism. In part, it was a revolt against the closed artistic purism of
Abstract Expressionism, from which Pop artists sought to distance themselves
by using simple, easily recognized imagery, as well as modern printmaking
technology like screen printing. Famous Pop artists in the USA included: Jim
Dine (b.1935), Robert Indiana (aka John Clark) (b.1928), Jasper Johns
(b.1930), Alex Katz (b.1927), Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), Claes Oldenburg
(b.1929), Edward Ruscha (b.1937), Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), James
Rosenquist (b.1933), Andy Warhol (1928-87) and Tom Wesselmann (b.1931).
Famous British Pop artists included: Sir Peter Blake (b.1932), Patrick
Caulfield (1936-2006), Richard Hamilton (b.1922), David Hockney (b.1937),
Allen Jones (b.1937), RB Kitaj (b.1932), Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005).
See also our guide to Andy Warhol's
Pop Art of the sixties and seventies.
A refinement of Hard Edge Painting, Op-Art
was a type of non-objective art which employed black and white geometric
patterns to create a variety of optical effects on the viewer's physiology
and psychology of perception. Insofar as it created the illusion of movement,
the style is best seen as part of the wider Kinetic art
movement. For example, by bombarding the eyes in this manner, the paintings
cause them to "see" colours or shapes that are not actually there,
or to confuse background with foreground and so on. Despite its strange,
sometimes disturbing, effects, Optical Art was fully in line with traditional
canons of fine art. Remember, all traditional painting is based upon the
"illusion" of depth and perspective. Op-Art simply extended the illusionary
nature of art by interfering with the rules governing optical perception.
Famous abstract Op-artists included Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Richard
Anuszkiewicz, François Morellet and Jesús-Rafael Soto. Josef Albers' Homage
to the Square series was also a type of Optical art, as were the illusionary
drawings of M.C. Escher. See also British
Contemporary Painting (1960-2000).
Fluxus meets Dada meets Conceptualism, Nouveau Realisme
(New Realism) was a highly avant-garde French movement launched in
1960 by Yves Klein, whose manifesto, "Constitutive Declaration of New
Realism," stated its aim to be "creating new ways of perceiving the
real." Founding members included Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, Martial
Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Francois Dufrene, Raymond Hains, and
Jacques de la Villegle. Later members were Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint
Phalle and Gerard Deschamps. The group lost momentum after the death of Yves
Klein in 1962, who personally favoured the name "today's realism"
(realisme d'aujourd'hui). For more about Nouveau Realisme and its founder,
see also: Yves Klein's
Postmodernist art (1956-62).
Nouveau Realiste works were often characterized by collage,
decollage and assemblage, using real-life objects. In this manner, New
Realism reveals its links with Dada in general and the readymades of Marcel
Duchamp in particular. Another important influence was American Pop-Art, as
exemplified by the movement's use of mass-produced commercial objects and
iconography. In general, one can say that Nouveau Realistes turned their
backs on abstraction and emotionalism in favour of a cooler approach and a
return of the figure.
Post-Painterly
Abstraction is a term coined by art critic Clement
Greenberg (his title for an exhibition he curated for the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964) to describe a calmer, more restrained
type of 1960s Abstract Expressionism. Essentially, the term describes the
replacement of gestural brushwork with a new idiom based on broad areas of
unmodulated colour. Prominent exponents of 1960s Post Painterly Abstraction
include: Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth
Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. The term (and style) were gradually
overtaken and replaced by the new school of Minimalism.
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