Art History

With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 19th century, new art styles and movements appeared and disappeared at an increasingly fast pace - thus reflecting the growing rate of changes in our society. Here is a short overview on important modern art movements from Impressionism to Op Art.

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE HISTORY OF ART

Art history, dating almost from the very beginning of mankind, almost from the moment when the man appeared on Earth. This began as a way of communication among cavemen, to express a feeling or idea. As the centuries passed, the art has evolved in both technical and aesthetic.

"From the Latin "ars" (ability to do something), it is understood as art, all those manifestations of human creativity, in which the artist expresses feelings and sensations that make it possible to establish a visual form of communication with the observer.

The art has successfully provided the maximum expression as human

The Egyptians made use of painting since the age of predinastía, not only for greater realism and beauty, but to realize the symbolic nature of the themes represented mainly decorating the walls of temples and burial chambers with reliefs and statues, coloring mummies and coffins, and beautifying papyrus scrolls, pots and utensils

"The Egyptians painted their low relief, which, by its limited depth, favoring identification with sculpture and pictorial art. From the III dynasty painting on the walls of tombs replaces the bas-relief."

Throughout history, art and painting in particular the various manifestations have left a variety of styles. Each of them expressed in different eras. On this page, you'll discover the different styles of painting expressed by the most renowned painters of humanity. Painting as human expression always excelled on the sculpture, crafts, poetry, etc..

With its maximum expression on the final leg of the nineteenth century, the abstraction may be classified as a confluence of movements that dominated the first part of the twentieth century, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical Painting, Expressionism, and Dadaism. All these streams, and radicalization proposed by painters like Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, reformulated the scene".

Formalism in Art

In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content. In visual art, formalism is a concept that posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. Formalism is an approach to understanding art..

Throughout the rest of the early part of the 20th Century, European structuralists continued to argue that 'real' art was expressive only of a thing's ontological, metaphysical or essential nature. But European art critics soon began using the word 'structure' to indicate a new concept of art. By the 1930s and 1940s, structuralists reasoned that the mental processes and social preconceptions an individual brings to art are more important that the essential, or 'ideal', nature of the thing. Knowledge is created only through socialization and thought, they said, and a thing can only be known as it is filtered through these mental processes. Soon, the word 'form' was used interchangeably with the word 'structure'..

INFORMALISM

After WWII some painters contemplated geometric abstraction as a load and the cold intellectualism, out of touch with the reality of poverty and despair. Spontaneity and authenticity were more meaningful to the new generation of artist. From this reaction was born a new painting style fully abstract that was the result of the artist’s emotional and physical engagement. The term was coined to classify the work of Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Jean Fautier and Alberto Burri. The informalists were not interested in having a total control over the processes of artistic work but in emphasizing spontaneity, irrationality and freedom of form. They sought out rebellious tools and paints, capable of producing things accidental and unexpected. He aimed at escaping from the prison of traditional art.

Abstract Expressionism, which arose in part out of Surrealism, dominated painting in the United States in the 1950s. It was better known in Latin America by its French name, Informalism, and it had many Latin American adherents. The name Informalism was preferred because it suggested the contrast between these intuitive abstractions and the more carefully plotted geometric shapes of such....

REALISM

in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular empirical rules, as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation. As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As Ian Watt states, modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century

During the second half of the 19th century important changes took place in the world of Art. Romanticism had opened the doors towards a free painting, open to new subject. The social changes derived from the Industrial Revolution, at once with the political revolutions, powerfully influenced on the artist, who questioned their paper in this world of transformations. The fight between academicism and rupture marked the whole century, specially the use of colour, texture and light. Realist painting did not invent anything in formal aspects. Its significance is on the subjects chosen and in the way in which those are treated. Politically it is the century of the bourgeois revolutions. The rich bourgeoisie who controlled the politic did the same with the artistic taste through the salons, in which the artists should exhibit their work in order to be known. Realism ask for the zenith of reality, the importance of daily subjects treated in an objective way, without idealization, in front of the colossal subjects of the past –religion, mythology, allegory, history -. In this sense the Romanticism had paved the way at insisting on the landscape, without myths, and in the popular. The amazing about the realist relies on the subjects, the way of confronting the reality, because the technique is the traditional. They did not idealise the images and people appear in their normal activities.

IMPRESSIONISM

was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

Impressionism It was born as an evolution of the French landscape school of the late 19th century. It is an answer to the new society and philosophy. Bourgeoisie has its own traditions and its way of entertaining and this is going to be one of the subjects of the Impressionism. Cities are the place where lazy pedestrians walk around, even during the night, with its traditional population such as cabaret singers, dancers, cafes. It is an attractive world from which the impressionists extracted their subjects. Impressionists’ paintings reflect the taste for landscape, boats, Sunday meetings. These painters gathered together around the figure of Manet, refused in the official salons. In front of the new language they defended the free brushstroke, separated into primary colours that must be mix in the eye. People reacted against this art but they counted with the backing of two emergent forces: art critics and marchands. The style has a precedent in the landscapes of the Barbizon School and the last French realism of Corot and Millet. In addition to this, they were influences by the colour and composition of the Spanish Golden Century. Japanese stamps in fashion at the time, added a new vision of the space and the use of flat colours. Finally, photography was also influential. The result is a cosy, light painting, normally of landscape, full of light and colour, with short brushstrokes that sometimes allow us to see the canvas. There are not big images because they are made under private commandment. They are far of any social compromise.

POST-IMPESSIONISM

Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. 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 Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism. The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as 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 Paul 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, Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. 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 create poetic images of the Tahitians among whom he would eventually live. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter 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. In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.

FAUVISM

style of painting that flourished in France from 1898 to 1908; it used pure, brilliant colour, applied straight from the paint tubes in an aggressive, direct manner to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas. The Fauves painted directly from nature as the Impressionists had before them, but their works were invested with a strong expressive reaction to the subjects they painted. First formally exhibited in Paris in 1905, Fauvist paintings shocked visitors to the annual Salon d'Automne; one of these visitors was the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, because of the violence of their works, dubbed the painters "Les Fauves" (Wild Beasts). The leader of the group was Henri Matisse, who had arrived at the Fauve style after careful, critical study of the masters of Postimpressionism Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. Matisse's methodical studies led him to reject traditional renderings of three-dimensional space and to seek instead a new picture space defined by movement of colour. Matisse exhibited his famous "Woman with the Hat" (Walter A. Haas Collection, San Francisco) at the 1905 exhibition; brisk strokes of colour--blues, greens, and reds--form an energetic, expressive view of the woman. As always in Matisse's Fauve style, his painting is ruled by his intuitive sense of formal order. Other members of the group included two painters from Chatou, Fr., André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, who, together with Matisse, formed the nucleus of the Fauves. Derain's Fauve paintings translate every tone of a landscape into pure colour, applied with short, forceful brushstrokes. The agitated swirls of intense colour in Vlaminck's works are indebted to the expressive power of van Gogh. Three young painters from Le Havre were also attracted to Fauvism by the strong personality of Matisse. Othon Friesz found the emotional connotations of the bright Fauve colours a relief from the mediocre Impressionism he practiced; his companion Raoul Dufy developed a rather carefree ornamental version of the bold style that suited his own personal aesthetic nature; and Georges Braque created a definite sense of rhythm and structure out of small spots of colour, foreshadowing his development of Cubism. Albert Marquet, Matisse's fellow student at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s, also participated in Fauvism, as did the Dutchman Kees van Dongen, who applied the style to depictions of the fashionable society of Paris. Other painters associated with the Fauves were Georges Rouault, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy. .

CUBISM

One of the most influential art movements (1907-1914) of the twentieth century, Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), and by the Fauves. In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone." After fauvist beginnings, Braque went with Raoul Dufy in 1908 on a trip to l'Estaque, a place often painted by Cézanne. They produced a series of landscapes with simplified forms and a limited variety of colors. The controversy surrounding their exhibition at the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Gallery brought Cubism its name. In effect, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles described the works in this way: "M. Braque scorns form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemas and cubes." The break with homogeneous form was completed the following year. Braque and Picasso's similar compositions are broken into planes with open edges, sliding into each other while denying all depth. Color is reduced to a gray-tan cameo, applied uniformly in small brushstrokes creating vibrations of light. The interpenetration of the forms lends these paintings a previously unknown aspect of continuity and density. Withdrawing before the abstract and hermetic character of this new space, Braque and Picasso brought recognizable illusionistic features back into their paintings during their stay in Céret, from 1911 to 1913. They used letters, fragments of words, musical notes, then significant material elements: sand or sawdust which create relief, and tend to make the picture more physically an object. Color returned in force in 1912, in parallel to the creation of the "papiers collés" — collages. Creating a simple geometric armature and pieces of glued paper with trompe l'oeil patterns imitating wood, marble or newsprint, then introducing "already made" elements (musical scores, tobacco packets or playing cards), the "papiers collés" definitively dissociate color and form. Picasso, then Henri Laurens would create construction pieces from ordinary materials, cut out and assembled into colored geometric planes, where empty and full spaces combine to sketch out the forms. Although the war of 1914-19 ended Picasso and Braque's collaboration, the cubist core group remained active until the 1920s, through the explorations of Braque, Matisse, Laurens, Lipchitz and Fernand Léger, whose geometric world and abstractly organized canvases with their contrasting, dynamic forms owe almost everything to the pioneering breakthroughs of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso.

FUTURISM

Came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind. Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists. He and others espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the motion in modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the cubist, the constructivist and the dadaist. Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques. The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their repetitions of lines. Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were breaking motion into small sequences, and using the wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the picture. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also additionally were creating the illusion of movement. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism. Futurists mixed activism and artistic research. They organized events that caused scandal. Everything was there to help them to glorify Italy and lead their country into the age of modernity. Certain Futurists vehemently promoted themselves to try to join forces with the Fascists, who were coming to power at the time. But Mussolini showed a preference for the Novecento Italiano, movement of artists who identified with the classical order and Italian heritage. Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Precisionism, an important development of American Modernism. Although Futurism itself is now regarded as extinct, having died out during the 1920s, powerful echoes of Marinetti's thought, still remain in modern, popular culture and art. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

EXPRESSIONISM

during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expressionis was opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe and emphasized artist's subjective emotion, which overrides fidelity to the actual appearance of things. Originating in Germany, Expressionism encompasses all art in which the artist is free to move beyond the limitations of objective subject matter and to concentrate on the feeling and impact derived from the artist’s inspiration. Expressionist sought to reveal inner, spiritual and emotional foundations of human existence, rather than the external, surface appearances depicted by the Impressionists. The Expressionist movement took inspiration from Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism in its departure from accurate subject matter. Expressionism found its roots in two groups of German painters, Die Bruecke and Der Blaue Reiter. Die Bruecke, meaning "the Bridge" was centered in Dresden and included artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The group held formation from 1905 to 1913. The group set up their studios in a working-class neighborhood on the edge of Dresden’s boundaries. Their isolation led to their shared stylistic and thematic development. Die Brucke’s art was typically violent and emotional in its imagery. They favored themes that explored the relationship difference between city and country. Finding some of their inspiration from the art of tribal cultures in Africa and the South Seas, Die Brucke favored distorted lines and enhanced forms, vibrant color, and flattened perspective. They rejected conventional gallery procedures and organized a series of traveling exhibitions in order to present their work to the public. The group fell apart due to artistic differences and the onset of World War I. Following their break up, the group’s successors called themselves the Dresdner Sezession. .

METAPHISICAL PAINTING

artists and art (movement, 1917 - 1920) Pittura Metafisica was founded in 1917 by Carlo Carrà (Italian, 1881-1966) and Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, 1888-1978), who met in Ferrara that year. They aimed to depict an alternative reality which engaged most immediately with the unconscious mind. In this style of painting, an illogical reality seemed credible. Using a sort of alternative logic, Carrà and de Chirico juxtaposed various ordinary subject -- typically including starkly rendered buildings, trains, and mannequins. The movement, as such, may be said to have dissolved by 1920 but its reverberations have continued, contributing to the more poetic aspects of Surrealism and the revival of classicism in the painting of Mario Sironi and others in the 1920s, and continuing to influence contemporary artists like Lisa Wray.

DADAISM

World War I cultural movement that appeared in visual arts, Literature, Theatre and Graphic design. It was a protest against the barbarism of the War. Dadaists believed War was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both: Art and everyday society. Dadaist works are characterized by its deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced on later movements including Surrealism. According to its proponents, Dadá was not art, it was anti-Art. For everything that art stood for, Dadá was to represent the opposite. Dadça supposed that where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dadá ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dadá offends. Interpretation of Dadá is dependent entirely on the viewer.This movement was highly influential in Modern Art. It became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself. The artists had become disillusioned by Art, Art History and History in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I. They had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Members of the movement were: Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Marx Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters. They became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world. They thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even Art. They created an Art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dadá is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dadáa was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their own world was turned upside down. They took normal objects but they put them in such a way that they were completely useless.These objects received the name of `ready made´. In paintings they tend to glue objects to the images, making of everything a kind of machine, something mechanic, no human.

SURREALISM

(1924 - 1955) A literary and art movement inspired by Freudianism, Andre Breton founded Surrealism in Paris in 1924. Breton authored the Manifesto (Manifeste du surrealisme), which advocated the expression of imagination revealed in dreams. He later wrote two other manifestoes, published in 1930 and 1934. Surrealism was the successor the Dadaist movement and attracted many Dadaist artists. Other Surrealist origins came from painters such as Paolo Uccello, William Blake, and Odilon Redon. Its origins in literature were traced to French poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire and the literary side of the movement remained primarily in France. In the visual realm, Surrealism became popular in the 1920’s and 30’s with the help of internationally renowned painter, Salvador Dali..

Also similar to the 19th century Symbolist movement, Surrealism was based on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, emphasizing imagination and subconscious imagery. Work usually contained realist imagery arranged in a nonsensical style in order to create a dreamlike state. Surrealist painting incorporated a lot of content and technique. Surrealism incorporated and celebrated the art of children and primitive art. They appreciated the innocent eye in that the untrained artist was more liberated to depict their actual imaginative ideas.

Artists used spontaneous techniques based on the “free association” concept, also called automatism, in which conscious control was surrendered to the unconscious mind. . The Surrealist movement can be divided into two groups of differing expressive methods, Automatism or “Absolute” Surrealism and Veristic Surrealism. While Automatism was focused on expressing subconscious ideas, Veristic Surrealists wanted to represent a connection between abstract and real material forms. In other words, Verists transformed objects from the real world in their paintings, while Automatists derived their imagery purely from spontaneous thought..

Surrealism paved the way for later movements such as Abstract Expressionism and the Magic Realism. Surrealism offered an alternative to geometric abstraction and kept expressive content alive in the 20th century..

ABSTRACT ART

uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. There are many different abstract styles. There are three forms of abstraction that really stands out: Cubism, Neoplasticism, and Abstract Expressionism. There are many abstract artists who painted in these styles, however there are some that are more well know in a particular field than the rest. For example, the some of the most famous cubist were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. One of the best examples of Neoplasticism is Piet Mondrian . Two of the most famous examples of Abstract Expressionism are Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock..

SUPREMATISM

considered the first systematic school of purely abstract pictorial composition in the modern movement, based on geometric figures and was the expression "of the supremacy of pure sensation in creative art". It is Russian art movement founded (1913) by Kazimir Malevich in Moscow, parallel to constructivism. The Suprematist project was above all the brainchild of the painter and theoretician Malevich. According to him, Suprematism sought "to liberate art from the ballast of the representational world." The work of the painter no longer involved representing and creating chromatic harmonies or formal compositions, but rather attaining the limits of painting. It consisted of geometrical shapes flatly painted on the pure canvas surface. The pictorial space had to be emptied of all symbolic content and all content signifying form. It had to be decongested and cleared, so as to show a new reality where thought was of prime importance. In 1915 Malevich exhibited Black Square on a White Ground. For this show he also published From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, a tract in which he described a sequence of avant-garde movements within a historical perspective. Three years later, Malevich painted White Square on a White Ground, part of his famous White on White series. Here, the abstraction of painting attained and fully revealed the abstraction of thought and embodied the movement's principles. Malevich was given a cold shoulder by the Stalinist regime, but he carried on his exploratory work by returning to figurative forms and subjects drawn from the everyday life. Suprematism changed the future of modern art, architecture, and industrial design, through its dissemination by the Bauhaus and today continues to inspire artists throughout the world.

POP ART

is a 20th century art movement that utilized the imagery and techniques of consumerism and popular culture. Pop art developed in the late1950's as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and flourished in the sixties and early seventies. Pop Art favored figural imagery and the reproduction of everyday objects, such as Campbell Soup cans, comic strips and advertisements. The movement eliminated distinctions between "good" and "bad" taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques...

Pop Art It is a passive conception of the social reality. It does not express the creativity of the popular classes but their non-creativity. The origin of the movement is in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who are considered as Neo-Dadaists. Painting becomes again something that evokes. The mere fact of taking a real object and to put it in the painting is an instinctive manipulation of reality. Given that it is a urban art the images end capsized in the painting, unite to the matter or giving a phantom appearance.These artists, the same as the Dadaists before, take elements from the reality and incorporate them to the work of art. We can find glued elements or photos mix with the painting. The language is that of the publicity, very easy to understand. One of the most famous representatives of the movement is Warhol, to whom we can add Rosenquists, with his elements taken of daily life; Tom Wesselman, who incorporates other elements so that we can find ourselves in front of installations; Roy Lichtenstein, who portrays the world as in a comic; Claes Oldenburg, who makes enormous sculptures of daily use objects; Christo, famous because his wrappings of buildings or natural elements and his installations..

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