Roman art , Villa Boscoreale frescos, c. Roman art , Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. Cupids playing with a lyre , Roman fresco from Herculaneum. To the north of Egypt was the Minoan civilization centered on the island of Crete. The wall paintings found in the palace of Knossos are similar to that of the Egyptians but much more free in style.
Ancient Greek art during the Greek Dark Age became far less complex, but the renewal of Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean during Archaic Greece brought about new forms of Greek art with the Orientalizing style. Ancient Greece had skilled painters, sculptors though both endeavours were regarded as mere manual labour at the time , and architects.
The Parthenon is an example of their architecture that has lasted to modern days. Greek marble sculpture is often described as the highest form of Classical art. Painting on pottery of Ancient Greece and ceramics gives a particularly informative glimpse into the way society in Ancient Greece functioned. Black-figure vase painting and Red-figure vase painting gives many surviving examples of what Greek painting was.
Some famous Greek painters on wooden panels who are mentioned in texts are Apelles , Zeuxis and Parrhasius , however no examples of Ancient Greek panel painting survive, only written descriptions by their contemporaries or later Romans. According to Pliny the Elder , the realism of his paintings was such that birds tried to eat the painted grapes.
Apelles is described as the greatest painter of Antiquity for perfect technique in drawing, brilliant color and modeling. Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. However, Roman painting does have important unique characteristics. Surviving Roman paintings include wall paintings and frescoes , many from villas in Campania , in Southern Italy at sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Although these were neither of the best period nor the highest quality, they are impressive in themselves, and give an idea of the quality that the finest ancient work must have had. A very small number of miniatures from Late Antique illustrated books also survive, and a rather larger number of copies of them from the Early Medieval period. The Capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade , c. Bonaventura Berlinghieri , St Francis of Assisi , Cathedral of the Archangel. Rogier van der Weyden , c.
Rogier van der Weyden , St Ivo c. The rise of Christianity imparted a different spirit and aim to painting styles. Byzantine art , once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditional iconography and style, and gradually evolved during the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire and the living traditions of Greek and Russian Orthodox icon -painting. Byzantine painting has a hieratic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a representation of divine revelation.
There were many frescos , but fewer of these have survived than mosaics. Byzantine art has been compared to contemporary abstraction , in its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. Some periods of Byzantine art, especially the so-called Macedonian art of around the 10th century, are more flexible in approach. Frescos of the Palaeologian Renaissance of the early 14th century survive in the Chora Church in Istanbul.
In post-Antique Catholic Europe the first distinctive artistic style to emerge that included painting was the Insular art of the British Isles, where the only surviving examples are miniatures in Illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. Carolingian and Ottonian art also survives mostly in manuscripts, although some wall-painting remain, and more are documented. The art of this period combines Insular and "barbarian" influences with a strong Byzantine influence and an aspiration to recover classical monumentality and poise.
Walls of Romanesque and Gothic churches were decorated with frescoes as well as sculpture and many of the few remaining murals have great intensity, and combine the decorative energy of Insular art with a new monumentality in the treatment of figures. Far more miniatures in Illuminated manuscripts survive from the period, showing the same characteristics, which continue into the Gothic period. Panel painting becomes more common during the Romanesque period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons. Towards the middle of the 13th century, Medieval art and Gothic painting became more realistic, with the beginnings of interest in the depiction of volume and perspective in Italy with Cimabue and then his pupil Giotto.
From Giotto on, the treatment of composition by the best painters also became much more free and innovative. They are considered to be the two great medieval masters of painting in western culture. Cimabue, within the Byzantine tradition, used a more realistic and dramatic approach to his art. His pupil, Giotto, took these innovations to a higher level which in turn set the foundations for the western painting tradition.
Both artists were pioneers in the move towards naturalism. Churches were built with more and more windows and the use of colorful stained glass become a staple in decoration. One of the most famous examples of this is found in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. By the 14th century Western societies were both richer and more cultivated and painters found new patrons in the nobility and even the bourgeoisie.
Illuminated manuscripts took on a new character and slim, fashionably dressed court women were shown in their landscapes. This style soon became known as International style and tempera panel paintings and altarpieces gained importance. Hieronymus Bosch , c. Piero della Francesca , — Lucas Cranach the Elder , c.
Pieter Bruegel , Hans Holbein the Younger , Jacopo Tintoretto , The Renaissance French for 'rebirth' , a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the midth century, heralded the study of classical sources, as well as advances in science which profoundly influenced European intellectual and artistic life. In the Low Countries , especially in modern day Flanders , a new way of painting was established in the beginning of the 15th century. In the footsteps of the developments made in the illumination of manuscripts , especially by the Limbourg Brothers , artists became fascinated by the tangible in the visible world and began representing objects in an extremely naturalistic way.
The medium of oil paint was already present in the work of Melchior Broederlam , but painters like Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin brought its use to new heights and employed it to represent the naturalism they were aiming for. With this new medium the painters of this period were capable of creating richer colors with a deep intense tonality. The illusion of glowing light with a porcelain-like finish characterized Early Netherlandish painting and was a major difference to the matte surface of tempera paint used in Italy.
The most important artist of this time was Jan van Eyck , whose work ranks among the finest made by artists who are now known as Early Netherlandish painters or Flemish Primitives since most artists were active in cities in modern day Flanders. Another important painter of this period was Rogier van der Weyden , whose compositions stressed human emotion and drama, demonstrated for instance in his Descent from the Cross , which ranks among the most famous works of the 15th century and was the most influential Netherlandish painting of Christ's crucifixion.
Other important artists from this period are Hugo van der Goes whose work was highly influential in Italy , Dieric Bouts who was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point , [37] Petrus Christus , Hans Memling and Gerard David. In Italy, the art of Classical antiquity inspired a style of painting that emphasized the ideal. Artists such as Paolo Uccello , Masaccio , Fra Angelico , Piero della Francesca , Andrea Mantegna , Filippo Lippi , Sandro Botticelli , Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo Buonarroti , and Raphael took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective , the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques.
A somewhat more naturalistic style emerged in Venice. Painters of the Venetian school , such as Giovanni Bellini , Giorgione , Titian , Tintoretto , and Veronese , were less concerned with precision in their drawing than with the richness of color and unity of effect that could be achieved by a more spontaneous approach to painting. Genre painting became a popular idiom amongst the Northern painters like Pieter Bruegel.
Renaissance painting reflects the revolution of ideas and science astronomy , geography that occurred in this period, the Reformation , and the invention of the printing press. With the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture. Easel paintings—movable pictures which could be hung easily on walls—became a popular alternative to paintings fixed to furniture, walls or other structures. Following centuries dominated by religious imagery, secular subject matter slowly returned to Western painting. Artists included visions of the world around them, or the products of their own imaginations in their paintings.
Those who could afford the expense could become patrons and commission portraits of themselves or their family. The High Renaissance gave rise to a stylized art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterized art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and the emotional intensity of El Greco.
Restless and unstable compositions, often extreme or disjunctive effects of perspective, and stylized poses are characteristic of Italian Mannerists such as Tintoretto , Pontormo, and Bronzino , and appeared later in the work of Northern Mannerists such as Hendrick Goltzius , Bartholomeus Spranger , and Joachim Wtewael. Artemisia Gentileschi , — Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , c. Antoine Watteau , c. Maurice Quentin de La Tour , c.
Painting - Wikipedia
Thomas Gainsborough , c. Baroque painting is associated with the Baroque cultural movement , a movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival; [38] [39] the existence of important Baroque painting in non-absolutist and Protestant states also, however, underscores its popularity, as the style spread throughout Western Europe.
Baroque painting is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and intense light and dark shadows. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance. During the period beginning around and continuing throughout the 17th century, painting is characterized as Baroque.
Caravaggio is an heir of the humanist painting of the High Renaissance. His realistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened a new chapter in the history of painting. Baroque painting often dramatizes scenes using light effects; this can be seen in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Le Nain , La Tour , and Jusepe de Ribera. Illusionistic church ceiling frescoes by Pietro da Cortona seemed to open to the sky. A much quieter type of Baroque emerged in the Dutch Republic , where easel paintings of everyday subjects were popular with middle-class collectors, and many painters became specialists in genre , others in landscape or seascape or still life.
Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch , and Pieter de Hooch brought great technical refinement to the painting of domestic scenes, as did Willem Claesz. Heda to still life. In contrast, Rembrandt excelled in painting every type of subject, and developed an individual painterly style in which the chiaroscuro and dark backgrounds derived from Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists lose their theatrical quality.
During the 18th century, Rococo followed as a lighter extension of Baroque, often frivolous and erotic. Rococo developed first in the decorative arts and interior design in France. Louis XV 's succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion. Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but by this point, it had begun to integrate a variety of diverse characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetric compositions.
The Rococo style spread with French artists and engraved publications. It was readily received in the Catholic parts of Germany, Bohemia , and Austria , where it was merged with the lively German Baroque traditions. German Rococo was applied with enthusiasm to churches and palaces, particularly in the south, while Frederician Rococo developed in the Kingdom of Prussia. Portraiture was an important component of painting in all countries, but especially in England, where the leaders were William Hogarth , in a blunt realist style, and Francis Hayman , Angelica Kauffman who was Swiss , Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds in more flattering styles influenced by Anthony van Dyck.
La Tour specialized in pastel painting, which became a popular medium during this period. William Hogarth helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in his Analysis of Beauty that the undulating lines and S-curves prominent in Rococo were the basis for grace and beauty in art or nature unlike the straight line or the circle in Classicism. Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors.
By , Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness of Neoclassical artists like Jacques-Louis David. John Singleton Copley Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Francisco de Goya Caspar David Friedrich c. After Rococo there arose in the late 18th century, in architecture, and then in painting severe neo-classicism , best represented by such artists as David and his heir Ingres. Ingres' work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterize Romanticism. This movement turned its attention toward landscape and nature as well as the human figure and the supremacy of natural order above mankind's will.
There is a pantheist philosophy see Spinoza and Hegel within this conception that opposes Enlightenment ideals by seeing mankind's destiny in a more tragic or pessimistic light. The idea that human beings are not above the forces of Nature is in contradiction to Ancient Greek and Renaissance ideals where mankind was above all things and owned his fate.
This thinking led romantic artists to depict the sublime , ruined churches, shipwrecks, massacres and madness. By the midth-century painters became liberated from the demands of their patronage to only depict scenes from religion, mythology, portraiture or history. The idea "art for art's sake" began to find expression in the work of painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J.
Romantic painters saw landscape painting as an important genre to express the vanity of mankind in opposition to the grandeur of nature. Until then, landscape painting wasn't considered the most important genre for painters like portraiture or history painting. But painters like J. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich managed to elevate landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Luminism was a movement in American landscape painting related to the Hudson River School. Boudin was also an important influence on the young Claude Monet , whom in he introduced to Plein air painting.
A major force in the turn towards Realism at mid-century was Gustave Courbet. They eschewed allegory and narrative in favor of individualized responses to the modern world, sometimes painted with little or no preparatory study, relying on deftness of drawing and a highly chromatic pallette. Manet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt concentrated primarily on the human subject. Both Manet and Degas reinterpreted classical figurative canons within contemporary situations; in Manet's case the re-imaginings met with hostile public reception.
Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt turned to domestic life for inspiration, with Renoir focusing on the female nude. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley used the landscape as their primary motif, the transience of light and weather playing a major role in their work. While Sisley most closely adhered to the original principals of the Impressionist perception of the landscape, Monet sought challenges in increasingly chromatic and changeable conditions, culminating in his series of monumental works of Water Lilies painted in Giverny.
Pissarro adopted some of the experiments of Post-Impressionism. The spell of Impressionism was felt throughout the world, including in the United States, where it became integral to the painting of American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam , John Twachtman , and Theodore Robinson ; and in Australia where painters of the Heidelberg School such as Arthur Streeton , Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder painted en plein air and were particularly interested in the Australian landscape and light.
It also exerted influence on painters who were not primarily Impressionistic in theory, like the portrait and landscape painter John Singer Sargent. At the same time in America at the turn of the 20th century there existed a native and nearly insular realism, as richly embodied in the figurative work of Thomas Eakins , the Ashcan School , and the landscapes and seascapes of Winslow Homer , all of whose paintings were deeply invested in the solidity of natural forms. The visionary landscape, a motive largely dependent on the ambiguity of the nocturne, found its advocates in Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Albert Blakelock.
In the late 19th century there also were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters whose works resonated with younger artists of the 20th century, especially with the Fauvists and the Surrealists. Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence.
The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism.
Henri Matisse , Fauvism. Pablo Picasso , Proto-Cubism. Georges Braque , Analytic Cubism. Henri Rousseau Primitive Surrealism. Henri Matisse 's second version of The Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions.
Les Fauves French for The Wild Beasts were earlyth-century painters, experimenting with freedom of expression through color. The name was given, humorously and not as a compliment, to the group by art critic Louis Vauxcelles. Fauvism was a short-lived and loose grouping of earlyth-century artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine ; these red leaves? Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso 's yin in the 20th century.
Matisse was seen as the leader of the movement, due to his seniority in age and prior self-establishment in the academic art world. His portrait of Mme. Matisse The Green Line , above , caused a sensation in Paris when it was first exhibited. He said he wanted to create art to delight; art as a decoration was his purpose and it can be said that his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition.
Masters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement throughout the 20th century. By Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, soon it was replaced by Cubism on the critics' radar screen as the latest new development in Contemporary Art of the time.
In Appolinaire , commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable. During the years between and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism , several movements emerged in Paris. Through his brother he met Pierre Laprade a member of the jury at the Salon d'Automne, where he exhibited three of his dreamlike works: His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism. Henri Matisse, , Woman with a Hat , Fauvism.
Jean Metzinger , c. Gustav Klimt , expressionism , — Pablo Picasso , , Dryad , Proto-Cubism. Marc Chagall , expressionism and surrealism. Marcel Duchamp , —, Cubism and Dada. Franz Marc , Der Blaue Reiter. Robert Delaunay , , Orphism. Wassily Kandinsky , birth of abstract art. Amedeo Modigliani , Portrait of Soutine , example of Expressionism.
Modern painting influenced all the visual arts, from Modernist architecture and design, to avant-garde film, theatre and modern dance and became an experimental laboratory for the expression of visual experience, from photography and concrete poetry to advertising art and fashion. Wassily Kandinsky a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, one of the most famous 20th-century artists is generally considered the first important painter of modern abstract art. As an early Modernist, in search of new modes of visual expression, and spiritual expression, he theorized as did contemporary occultists and theosophists , that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music.
They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality. His earliest abstractions were generally titled as the example in the above gallery Composition VII , making connection to the work of the composers of music. Kandinsky included many of his theories about abstract art in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Robert Delaunay was a French artist who is associated with Orphism , reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key contributions to abstract painting refer to his bold use of color, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky , Delaunay and his wife the artist Sonia Delaunay , joined The Blue Rider Der Blaue Reiter , a Munich -based group of abstract artists, in , and his art took a turn to the abstract.
Other major pioneers of early abstraction include Russian painter Kasimir Malevich , who after the Russian Revolution in , and after pressure from the Stalinist regime in returned to painting imagery and Peasants and Workers in the field , and Swiss painter Paul Klee whose masterful color experiments made him an important pioneer of abstract painting at the Bauhaus. Expressionism and Symbolism are broad rubrics that involve several important and related movements in 20th-century painting that dominated much of the avant-garde art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe.
Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Artists as interesting and diverse as Marc Chagall , whose painting I and the Village , above tells an autobiographical story that examines the relationship between the artist and his origins, with a lexicon of artistic Symbolism.
Although Alberto Giacometti is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well. Piet Mondrian , , early De Stijl.
- Romain Rolland et la Metaphore la Solitude de lHomme de Vigie (Espaces littéraires) (French Edition).
- How To Clean Your House!: Extract from Food and Household Management (Illustrated).
- Voice of Night.
- Never-ending Night?
Kasimir Malevich , Suprematism. Stanton MacDonald-Wright , Synchromism. Piet Mondrian 's art was also related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a knowledge of nature more profound than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge.
De Stijl also known as neoplasticism , was a Dutch artistic movement founded in The term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from to founded in the Netherlands. De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg propagating the group's theories.
From All-over style, Pouring Paint, to Dripping
The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism — the new plastic art or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. Indeed, according to the Tate Gallery 's online article on neoplasticism, Mondrian himself sets forth these delimitations in his essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art".
On the contrary, it 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. De Stijl movement was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms such as the "perfect straight line" in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the international style of architecture as well as clothing and interior design.
However, it did not follow the general guidelines of an "ism" Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism , nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like Bauhaus; it was a collective project, a joint enterprise. Kurt Schwitters , , painted collage , Dada. Marcel Duchamp , came to international prominence in the wake of his notorious success at the New York City Armory Show in , soon after he denounced artmaking for chess.
The Large Glass pushed the art of painting to radical new limits being part painting, part collage, part construction. Duchamp became closely associated with the Dada movement that began in neutral Zurich , Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from to The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature poetry, art manifestoes, art theory , theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti war politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.
Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the s and s. The Surrealist movement in painting became synonymous with the avant-garde and which featured artists whose works varied from the abstract to the super-realist. With works on paper like Machine Turn Quickly , above Francis Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through in Zurich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. Throughout the s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large.
A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Surrealist groups in Japan, and especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and in Mexico produced innovative and original works. Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: Evocations of time and its compelling mystery and absurdity.
The characteristics of this style — a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological — came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modernist period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality.
Max Ernst whose painting Murdering Airplane , studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane.
Two persons exhibitions
His paintings may have been inspired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud 's study of the delusions of a paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber. Freud identified Schreber's fantasy of becoming a woman as a castration complex. The central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber's hermaphroditic desires.
Ernst's inscription on the back of the painting reads: The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance one another. Egon Schiele , Symbolism and Expressionism Amedeo Modigliani Symbolism and Expressionism Stuart Davis , American Modernism Chaim Soutine , Expressionism , c. Later members included Max Pechstein , Otto Mueller and others. The group was one of the seminal ones, which in due course had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism. Wassily Kandinsky , Franz Marc , August Macke , Alexej von Jawlensky , whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancer Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff , is in the gallery above, Marianne von Werefkin , Lyonel Feininger and others founded the Der Blaue Reiter group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgement from an exhibition.
Der Blaue Reiter lacked a central artistic manifesto, but was centered around Kandinsky and Marc. The name of the movement comes from a painting by Kandinsky created in It is also claimed that the name could have derived from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality: George Grosz , , Neue Sachlichkeit. Thomas Hart Benton , Regionalism.
George Bellows , , American realism. While in America American Scene painting and the social realism and regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world. Frida Kahlo 's Symbolist works also relate strongly to Surrealism and to the Magic Realism movement in literature. The psychological drama in many of Kahlo's self portraits above underscore the vitality and relevance of her paintings to artists in the 21st century.
American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from Portraying a pitchfork -holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house of Carpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art. Art critics had favorable opinions about the painting, like Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley , they assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff.
The film Cradle Will Rock includes a dramatization of the controversy. Frida Kahlo Rivera's wife's works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain.
Jackson Pollock Action Painting On Panel
Of her paintings 55 are self-portraits , which frequently incorporate symbolic portrayals of her physical and psychological wounds. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her paintings' bright colors and dramatic symbolism. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work as well; she combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition—which were often bloody and violent—with surrealist renderings. While her paintings are not overtly Christian — she was, after all, an avowed communist — they certainly contain elements of the macabre Mexican Christian style of religious paintings.
Political activism was an important piece of David Siqueiros ' life, and frequently inspired him to set aside his artistic career. His art was deeply rooted in the Mexican Revolution , a violent and chaotic period in Mexican history in which various social and political factions fought for recognition and power. The period from the s to the s is known as the Mexican Renaissance, and Siqueiros was active in the attempt to create an art that was at once Mexican and universal.
He briefly gave up painting to focus on organizing miners in Jalisco. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , —, German Expressionism. Wassily Kandinsky Composition X , Geometric abstraction. During the s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism , including Pablo Picasso. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of Francisco Franco to overthrow the Basque Government and the Spanish Republican government.
The town was devastated, though the Biscayan assembly and the Oak of Gernika survived. Pablo Picasso painted his mural sized Guernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing. In its final form, Guernica is an immense black and white, 3. The mural presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white contrasts with the intensity of the scene depicted and invokes the immediacy of a newspaper photograph. The painting was first exhibited in Paris in , then Scandinavia , then London in and finally in at Picasso's request the painting was sent to the United States in an extended loan for safekeeping at MoMA.
The painting went on a tour of museums throughout the USA until its final return to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where it was exhibited for nearly thirty years. Finally in accord with Pablo Picasso 's wish to give the painting to the people of Spain as a gift, it was sent to Spain in Nighthawks is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art.
It is currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The scene was inspired by a diner since demolished in Greenwich Village , Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan. Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After this event there was a large feeling of gloominess over the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting.
The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others but instead is lost in their own thoughts. This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work. The Dynamic for artists in Europe during the s deteriorated rapidly as the Nazi's power in Germany and across Eastern Europe increased. The climate became so hostile for artists and art associated with Modernism and abstraction that many left for the Americas.
Degenerate art was a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany for virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely. Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in , consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art.
Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria. In New York City a new generation of young and exciting Modernist painters led by Arshile Gorky , Willem de Kooning , and others were just beginning to come of age.
Arshile Gorky 's portrait of someone who might be Willem de Kooning above is an example of the evolution of abstract expressionism from the context of figure painting, cubism and surrealism. Along with his friends de Kooning and John D. Graham Gorky created bio-morphically shaped and abstracted figurative compositions that by the s evolved into totally abstract paintings. Gorky's work seems to be a careful analysis of memory, emotion and shape, using line and color to express feeling and nature.
American Abstract expressionism got its name in from the art critic Robert Coates. It is seen as combining the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as futurism , the Bauhaus and synthetic cubism.
Abstract expressionism, action painting , and Color Field painting are synonymous with the New York School. Technically Surrealism was an important predecessor for abstract expressionism with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey , especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings. Additionally, Abstract expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic.
In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working mostly in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic " action paintings ", with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning. As seen above in the gallery Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between and that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, Woman I collection: The Museum of Modern Art , New York City, in June , repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February , when the painting was abandoned unfinished.
The art historian Meyer Schapiro saw the painting in de Kooning's studio soon afterwards and encouraged the artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II collection: During the summer of , spent at East Hampton , de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He may have finished work on Woman I by the end of June, or possibly as late as November , and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time. Another important artist is Franz Kline , as demonstrated by his painting High Street , as with Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, was labelled an "action painter" because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas.
Clyfford Still , Barnett Newman , Adolph Gottlieb , and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko 's work which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract , are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what Clement Greenberg termed the Color Field direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell gallery can be comfortably described as practitioners of action painting and Color Field painting. Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky.
Although it is true that spontaneity or of the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. An exception might be the drip paintings of Pollock. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the s is a matter of debate. American Social realism had been the mainstream in the s. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of those painters. The late s through the mids ushered in the McCarthy era.
Some people have conjectured that since the subject matter was often totally abstract, Abstract expressionism became a safe strategy for artists to pursue this style. Abstract art could be seen as apolitical. Or if the art was political, the message was largely for the insiders. However, those theorists are in the minority. As the first truly original school of painting in America, Abstract expressionism demonstrated the vitality and creativity of the country in the post-war years, as well as its ability or need to develop an aesthetic sense that was not constrained by the European standards of beauty.
Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges. The canvas as the arena became a credo of action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color Field painters. It essentially involved abstract paintings with large, flat expanses of color that expressed the sensual, and visual feelings and properties of large areas of nuanced surface.
Art critic Clement Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. The overall expanse and gestalt of the work of the early color field painters speaks of an almost religious experience, awestruck in the face of an expanding universe of sensuality, color and surface.
During the early-to-mids, Color Field painting came to refer to the styles of artists like Jules Olitski , Kenneth Noland , and Helen Frankenthaler , whose works were related to second-generation abstract expressionism, and to younger artists like Larry Zox , and Frank Stella , — all moving in a new direction. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. In Mountains and Sea , from , a seminal work of Color Field painting by Helen Frankenthaler the artist used the stain technique for the first time.
Also in Europe, Tachisme the European equivalent to Abstract expressionism took hold of the newest generation. Eventually abstract painting in America evolved into movements such as Neo-Dada , Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction , Op art , hard-edge painting , Minimal art , shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction , Neo-expressionism and the continuation of Abstract expressionism.
As a response to the tendency toward abstraction imagery emerged through various new movements, notably Pop art. This movement rejected abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age.
Although the paintings of Gerald Murphy , Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth during the s and s set the table for pop art in America. In New York City during the mids Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns created works of art that at first seemed to be continuations of Abstract expressionist painting. Actually their works and the work of Larry Rivers , were radical departures from abstract expressionism especially in the use of banal and literal imagery and the inclusion and the combining of mundane materials into their work.
The innovations of Johns' specific use of various images and objects like chairs, numbers, targets, beer cans and the American flag; Rivers paintings of subjects drawn from popular culture such as George Washington crossing the Delaware , and his inclusions of images from advertisements like the camel from Camel cigarettes , and Rauschenberg's surprising constructions using inclusions of objects and pictures taken from popular culture, hardware stores, junkyards, the city streets, and taxidermy gave rise to a radical new movement in American art.
Eventually by the movement came to be known worldwide as pop art. American pop art is exemplified by artists: Lichtenstein's most important work is arguably Whaam! The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering " Whaam! Sidney Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in the fall of an historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects exhibition of pop art, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum sent shock waves across the Western United States.
Later Leo Castelli exhibited other American artists including the bulk of the careers of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and his use of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction. There is a connection between the radical works of Duchamp, and Man Ray , the rebellious Dadaists — with a sense of humor; and pop artists like Alex Katz who became known for his parodies of portrait photography and suburban life , Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and the others. While throughout the 20th century many painters continued to practice landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, like Milton Avery , John D.
During the s through the s abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as abstract expressionism , Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction , Op art , hard-edge painting , Minimal art , shaped canvas painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction, allowing figurative imagery to continue through various new contexts like the Bay Area Figurative Movement in the s and new forms of expressionism from the s through the s.
In Italy during this time, Giorgio Morandi was the foremost still life painter, exploring a wide variety of approaches to depicting everyday bottles and kitchen implements. In particular Milton Avery through his use of color and his interest in seascape and landscape paintings connected with the Color field aspect of Abstract expressionism as manifested by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko as well as the lessons American painters took from the work of Henri Matisse.
Italian painter Giorgio Morandi was an important 20th-century early pioneer of Minimalism. Born in Bologna, Italy in , throughout his career, Morandi concentrated almost exclusively on still lives and landscapes, except for a few self-portraits. With great sensitivity to tone, color, and compositional balance, he would depict the same familiar bottles and vases again and again in paintings notable for their simplicity of execution. Morandi executed etchings, a significant body of work in its own right, and his drawings and watercolors often approach abstraction in their economy of means.
Through his simple and repetitive motifs and economical use of color, value and surface, Morandi became a prescient and important forerunner of Minimalism. He died in Bologna in His return to representation seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls during the early s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement , as many of those abstract painters like Richard Diebenkorn , David Park , Elmer Bischoff , Wayne Thiebaud , Nathan Oliveira , Joan Brown and others made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mids.
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During the s and s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as Color Field painting, post-painterly abstraction , op art , hard-edge painting , minimal art , shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction , and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction with art brut , [75] as seen in Court les rues, , by Jean Dubuffet , fluxus , neo-Dada , New Realism , allowing imagery to re-emerge through various new contexts like pop art , the Bay Area Figurative Movement a prime example is Diebenkorn's Cityscape I, Landscape No.
Although throughout the 20th century painters continued to practice Realism and use imagery, practicing landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, and unique expressivity like Milton Avery , Edward Hopper , Jean Dubuffet , Francis Bacon , Frank Auerbach , Lucian Freud , Philip Pearlstein , and others. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways. Fairfield Porter was largely self-taught, and produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, many of them affiliated with the New York School of writers, including John Ashbery , Frank O'Hara , and James Schuyler. Many of his paintings were set in or around the family summer house on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine.
Also during the s and s, there was a reaction against painting. Critics like Douglas Crimp viewed the work of artists like Ad Reinhardt , and declared the "death of painting". Artists began to practice new ways of making art. New movements gained prominence some of which are: Fluxus , Happening , Video art , Installation art Mail art , the situationists , Conceptual art , Postminimalism , Earth art , arte povera , performance art and body art among others.
Neo-Dada is also a movement that started 1n the s and s and was related to Abstract expressionism only with imagery. Featuring the emergence of combined manufactured items, with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg , whose "combines" in the s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art , and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography.
Robert Rauschenberg , Jasper Johns , Larry Rivers , John Chamberlain , Claes Oldenburg , George Segal , Jim Dine , and Edward Kienholz among others were important pioneers of both abstraction and Pop Art; creating new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion of unlikely materials as parts of their works of art.
Yves Klein , , Monochrome painting. Color Field painting clearly pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionism. Color Field painting is related to post-painterly abstraction , suprematism , abstract expressionism , hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction. During the s and s abstract painting continued to develop in America through varied styles.
Geometric abstraction , Op art, hard-edge painting , Color Field painting and minimal painting, were some interrelated directions for advanced abstract painting as well as some other new movements. Morris Louis was an important pioneer in advanced Color Field painting, his work can serve as a bridge between abstract expressionism , Color Field painting, and minimal art. Two influential teachers Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Josef Albers is best remembered for his work as a Geometric abstractionist painter and theorist.
Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in , Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically on the canvas. Albers' theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists. His own paintings form the foundation of both hard-edge painting and Op art. The works shown were wide ranging, encompassing the Minimalism of Frank Stella , the Op art of Larry Poons, the work of Alexander Liberman , alongside the masters of the Op Art movement: The exhibition focused on the perceptual aspects of art, which result both from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color relationships.
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style present in some paintings and other works of art that use optical illusions. Op art is also closely akin to geometric abstraction and hard-edge painting. Although sometimes the term used for it is perceptual abstraction. Op art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping. Color Field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric.
Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of modern art , artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image. Many Geometric abstract artists , minimalists , and Hard-edge painters elected to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format. In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the s and s that are coolly abstract , formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character.
There is a connection with post-painterly abstraction , which reacted against abstract expressionisms ' mysticism, hyper-subjectivity, and emphasis on making the act of painting itself dramatically visible — as well as the solemn acceptance of the flat rectangle as an almost ritual prerequisite for serious painting. During the s Color Field painting and Minimal art were often closely associated with each other.
In actuality by the early s both movements became decidedly diverse. Ronald Davis , Abstract Illusionism. Ronnie Landfield , , Lyrical Abstraction. Another related movement of the late s, Lyrical Abstraction the term being coined by Larry Aldrich, the founder of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum , Ridgefield Connecticut , encompassed what Aldrich said he saw in the studios of many artists at that time. Lyrical Abstraction in the late s is characterized by the paintings of Dan Christensen , Ronnie Landfield , Peter Young and others, and along with the fluxus movement and postminimalism a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in [83] sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression.
Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse. Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with color field painting and abstract expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction as exemplified by the Ronnie Landfield painting For William Blake , above especially in the freewheeling usage of paint — texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in abstract expressionism and color field painting.
However, the styles are markedly different. Setting it apart from abstract expressionism and action painting of the s and s is the approach to composition and drama. As seen in action painting there is an emphasis on brushstrokes, high compositional drama, dynamic compositional tension. While in Lyrical Abstraction there is a sense of compositional randomness, all over composition, low key and relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on process, repetition, and an all over sensibility. Richard Tuttle , , Postminimalism. Many Geometric abstract artists , minimalists, and hard-edge painters elected to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format.
In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the s and s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. During the s and s, there was a reaction against abstract painting. Some critics viewed the work of artists like Ad Reinhardt , and declared the 'death of painting'.
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However still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the s and the s characterized by monochrome painting and hard-edge painting inspired by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman , Milton Resnick , and Ellsworth Kelly. The convergence of Color Field painting, minimal art , hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction , and postminimalism blurred the distinction between movements that became more apparent in the s and s.
The neo-expressionism movement is related to earlier developments in abstract expressionism , neo-Dada , Lyrical Abstraction and postminimal painting. In the late s the abstract expressionist painter Philip Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects.
These works were inspirational to a new generation of painters interested in a revival of expressive imagery. His painting Painting, Smoking, Eating , seen above in the gallery is an example of Guston's final and conclusive return to representation. In the late s and early s, there was also a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France and Britain.
These movements were called Transavantguardia , Neue Wilde , Figuration Libre , [88] Neo-expressionism , the school of London, and in the late s the Stuckists respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism. Critical reaction was divided.
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