History of painting
Encyclopedia
The history of painting
reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of creativity, that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it relied primarily on representational, religious and classical
motifs, after which time more purely abstract
and conceptual
approaches gained favor.
Developments in Eastern painting historically parallel those in Western painting
, in general, a few centuries earlier. African art
, Islamic art
, Indian art
, Chinese art
, and Japanese art
each had significant influence on Western art, and, eventually, vice-versa.
Initially serving utilitarian purpose, followed by imperial, private, civic, and religious
patronage, Eastern and Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy
and the middle class
. From the Modern era, the Middle Ages
through the Renaissance
painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque
era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. Finally in the west the idea of "art for art's sake
" began to find expression in the work of the Romantic
painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable
, and J.M.W. Turner. During the 19th century the rise of the commercial art gallery
provided patronage in the 20th Century.
Recommended articles: 20th-century Western painting, Western painting
, Painting
, Outline of painting history
, Landscape art
.
s all over the world—in France, India, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia etc. Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the people that made them. Prehistoric men may have painted animals to "catch" their soul or spirit
in order to hunt them more easily or the paintings may represent an animistic vision and homage to surrounding nature
, or they may be the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings, or they could have been for the transmission of practical information.
In Paleolithic
times, the representation of humans in cave paintings was rare. Mostly, animals were painted, not only animals that were used as food but also animals that represented strength like the rhinoceros
or large Felidae
, as in the Chauvet Cave
. Signs like dots were sometimes drawn. Rare human representations include handprints and half-human / animal figures. The Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche
Departments of France contains the most important preserved cave paintings of the Paleolithic era, painted around 31,000 BC. The Altamira
cave paintings in Spain were done 14,000 to 12,000 BC and show, among others, bison
s. The hall of bulls in Lascaux
, Dordogne
, France, is one of the best known cave paintings from about 15,000 to 10,000 BC.
If there is meaning to the paintings, it remains unknown. The caves were not in an inhabited area, so they may have been used for seasonal rituals. The animals are accompanied by signs which suggest a possible magic use. Arrow-like symbols in Lascaux
are sometimes interpreted as calendar
or almanac
use. But the evidence remains inconclusive. The most important work of the Mesolithic
era were the marching warriors, a rock painting at Cingle de la Mola, Castellón
, Spain dated to about 7000 to 4000 BC. The technique used was probably spitting or blowing the pigments onto the rock. The paintings are quite naturalistic, though stylized. The figures are not three-dimensional, even though they overlap
The earliest known Indian paintings (see section below) were the rock paintings of prehistoric
times, the petroglyph
s as found in places like the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, (see above) and some of them are older than 5500 BC. Such works continued and after several millennia, in the 7th century, carved pillars of Ajanta
, Maharashtra
state present a fine example of Indian paintings, and the colors, mostly various shades of red and orange, were derived from minerals.
, in general a few centuries earlier. African art
, Islamic art
, Indian art
, Chinese art
, Korean Art
, and Japanese art
each had significant influence on Western art, and, vice-versa.
Chinese painting
is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Early pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals. It was only during the Warring States Period
(403-221 B.C.) that artists began to represent the world around them. Japanese painting
is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese art
s, encompassing a wide variety of genre and styles. The history of Japanese painting is a long history of synthesis and competition between native Japanese aesthetics
and adaptation of imported ideas. The history of Korean painting
is dated to approximately 108
C.E., when it first appears as an independent form. Between that time and the paintings and frescoes that appear on the Goryeo
dynasty tombs, there has been little research. Suffice to say that until the Joseon
dynasty the primary influence was Chinese
painting though done with Korean landscapes, facial features, Buddhist topics, and an emphasis on celestial observation in keeping with the rapid development of Korean astronomy.
, Japanese painting
, Korean painting
.
China, Japan and Korea have a strong tradition in painting which is also highly attached to the art of calligraphy
and printmaking
(so much that it is commonly seen as painting). Far east traditional painting is characterized by water based techniques, less realism, "elegant" and stylized subjects, graphical approach to depiction, the importance of white space
(or negative space
) and a preference for landscape
(instead of human figure) as a subject. Beyond ink and color on silk or paper scrolls, gold on lacquer
was also a common medium in painted East Asian artwork. Although silk was a somewhat expensive medium to paint upon in the past, the invention of paper
during the 1st century AD by the Han court eunuch Cai Lun
provided not only a cheap and widespread medium for writing, but also a cheap and widespread medium for painting (making it more accessible to the public).
The ideologies of Confucianism
, Daoism, and Buddhism
played important roles in East Asian art. Medieval Song Dynasty painters such as Lin Tinggui
and his Luohan Laundering http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/singleObject.cfm?ObjectId=1691 (housed in the Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art
) of the 12th century are excellent examples of Buddhist ideas fused into classical Chinese artwork. In the latter painting on silk (image and description provided in the link), bald-headed Buddhist Luohan are depicted in a practical setting of washing clothes by a river. However, the painting itself is visually stunning, with the Luohan portrayed in rich detail and bright, opaque colors in contrast to a hazy, brown, and bland wooded environment. Also, the tree tops are shrouded in swirling fog, providing the common "negative space" mentioned above in East Asian Art.
In Japonisme, late 19th century artists like the Impressionists, Van Gogh
, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
and Whistler admired traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e
artists like Hokusai
and Hiroshige
and their work was influenced by it.
The earliest (surviving) examples of Chinese painted artwork date to the Warring States Period (481 - 221 BC), with paintings on silk or tomb murals on rock, brick, or stone. They were often in simplistic stylized format and in more-or-less rudimentary geometric patterns. They often depicted mythological creatures, domestic scenes, labor scenes, or palatial scenes filled with officials at court. Artwork during this period and the subsequent Qin Dynasty
(221 - 207 BC) and Han Dynasty
(202 BC - 220 AD) was made not as a means in and of itself or for higher personal expression. Rather artwork was created to symbolize and honor funerary rights, representations of mythological deities or spirits of ancestors, etc. Paintings on silk of court officials and domestic scenes could be found during the Han Dynasty, along with scenes of men hunting on horseback or partaking in military parade. There was also painting on three dimensional works of art on figurines and statues, such as the original-painted colors covering the soldier and horse statues of the Terracotta Army
. During the social and cultural climate of the ancient Eastern Jin Dynasty (316 - 420 AD) based at Nanjing in the south, painting became one of the official pastimes of Confucian-taught bureaucratic officials and aristocrats
(along with music played by the guqin
zither, writing fanciful calligraphy
, and writing and reciting of poetry
). Painting became a common form of artistic self-expression, and during this period painters at court or amongst elite social circuits were judged and ranked by their peers.
The establishment of classical Chinese landscape painting is accredited largely to the Eastern Jin Dynasty artist Gu Kaizhi
(344 - 406 AD), one of the most famous artists of Chinese history. Like the elongated scroll scenes of Kaizhi, Tang Dynasty
(618 - 907 AD) Chinese artists like Wu Daozi
painted vivid and highly detailed artwork on long horizontal handscrolls (which were very popular during the Tang), such as his Eighty Seven Celestial People. Painted artwork during the Tang period pertained the effects of an idealized landscape environment, with sparse amount of objects, persons, or activity, as well as monochromatic in nature (example: the murals of Price Yide's tomb in the Qianling Mausoleum). There were also figures such as early Tang-era painter Zhan Ziqian
, who painted superb landscape paintings that were well ahead of his day in portrayal of realism. However, landscape art did not reach greater level of maturity and realism in general until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907 - 960 AD). During this time, there were exceptional landscape painters like Dong Yuan
(refer to this article for an example of his artwork), and those who painted more vivid and realistic depictions of domestic scenes, like Gu Hongzhong
and his Night Revels of Han Xizai.
During the Chinese Song Dynasty
(960 - 1279 AD), not only landscape art was improved upon, but portrait painting became more standardized and sophisticated than before (for example, refer to Emperor Huizong of Song), and reached its classical age maturity during the Ming Dynasty
(1368 - 1644 AD). During the late 13th century and first half of the 14th century, Chinese under the Mongol-controlled Yuan Dynasty
were not allowed to enter higher posts of government (reserved for Mongols or other ethnic groups from Central Asia), and the Imperial examination
was ceased for the time being. Many Confucian-educated Chinese who now lacked profession turned to the arts of painting and theatre instead, as the Yuan period became one of the most vibrant and abundant eras for Chinese artwork. An example of such would be Qian Xuan
(1235–1305 AD), who was an official of the Song Dynasty, but out of patriotism, refused to serve the Yuan court and dedicated himself to painting. Examples of superb art from this period include the rich and detailed painted murals of the Yongle Palace http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_artqa/2003-09/24/content_39769.htmhttp://www.tcc.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=245&c=55, or "Dachunyang Longevity Palace", of 1262 AD, a UNESCO
World Heritage site. Within the palace, paintings cover an area of more than 1000 square meters, and hold mostly Daoist themes. It was during the Song Dynasty that painters would also gather in social clubs or meetings to discuss their art or others' artwork, the praising of which often led to persuasions to trade and sell precious works of art. However, there were also many harsh critics of others art as well, showing the difference in style and taste amongst different painters. In 1088 AD, the polymath scientist and statesman Shen Kuo
once wrote of the artwork of one Li Cheng, who he criticized as follows:
Although high level of stylization, mystical appeal, and surreal elegance were often preferred over realism (such as in shan shui
style), beginning with the medieval Song Dynasty there were many Chinese painters then and afterwards who depicted scenes of nature that were vividly real. Later Ming Dynasty artists would take after this Song Dynasty emphasis for intricate detail and realism on objects in nature, especially in depictions of animals (such as ducks, swans, sparrows, tigers, etc.) amongst patches of brightly-colored flowers and thickets of brush and wood (a good example would be the anonymous Ming Dynasty painting Birds and Plum Blossoms http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/zoomObject.cfm?ObjectId=4693, housed in the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.). There were many renowned Ming Dynasty artists; Qiu Ying
is an excellent example of a paramount Ming era painter (famous even in his own day), utilizing in his artwork domestic scenes, bustling palatial scenes, and nature scenes of river valleys and steeped mountains shrouded in mist and swirling clouds. During the Ming Dynasty there were also different and rivaling schools of art associated with painting, such as the Wu School
and the Zhe School.
Classical Chinese painting continued on into the early modern Qing Dynasty
, with highly realistic portrait paintings like seen in the late Ming Dynasty of the early 17th century. The portraits of Kangxi Emperor
, Yongzheng Emperor
, and Qianlong Emperor
are excellent examples of realistic Chinese portrait painting. During the Qianlong reign period and the continuing 19th century, European Baroque
styles of painting had noticeable influence on Chinese portrait paintings, especially with painted visual effects of lighting and shading. Likewise, East Asian paintings and other works of art (such as porcelain
and lacquerware) were highly prized in Europe since initial contact in the 16th century.
and adaptation of imported ideas. Ukiyo-e
, "pictures of the floating world", is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints
(or woodcut
s) and painting
s produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, the theatre and pleasure quarters. It is the main artistic genre of woodblock printing in Japan
. Japanese printmaking especially from the Edo period
exerted enormous influence on Western painting
in France during the 19th century.
. The paintings varied from large frescoes of Ajanta
to the intricate Mughal
miniature paintings to the metal embellished works from the Tanjore school. The paintings from the Gandhar–Taxila
are influenced by the Persian works in the west. The eastern style of painting was mostly developed around the Nalanda
school of art. The works are mostly inspired by various scenes from Indian mythology
.
times, the petroglyph
s as found in places like the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, and some of them are older than 5500 BC. Such works continued and after several millennia, in the 7th century, carved pillars of Ajanta
, Maharashtra
state present a fine example of Indian paintings, and the colors, mostly various shades of red and orange, were derived from minerals.
Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, India are rock-cut
cave monuments dating back to the 2nd century BCE and containing paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art and universal pictorial art.
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Madhubani painting
Madhubani painting
is a style of Indian painting, practiced in the Mithila region of Bihar state, India. The origins of Madhubani painting are shrouded in antiquity.
Rajput painting
, a style of Indian painting
, evolved and flourished, during the 18th century, in the royal courts of Rajputana
, India. Each Rajput kingdom evolved a distinct style, but with certain common features. Rajput paintings depict a number of themes, events of epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Krishna's life, beautiful landscapes, and humans. Miniatures were the preferred medium of Rajput painting, but several manuscripts also contain Rajput paintings, and paintings were even done on the walls of palaces, inner chambers of the forts, havelies, particularly, the havelis of Shekhawait.
The colors extracted from certain minerals, plant sources, conch shells, and were even derived by processing precious stones, gold and silver were used. The preparation of desired colors was a lengthy process, sometimes taking weeks. Brushes used were very fine.
Mughal painting
is a particular style of Indian painting
, generally confined to illustrations on the book and done in miniatures, and which emerged, developed and took shape during the period of the Mughal Empire
16th -19th centuries).
Tanjore painting
is an important form of classical South India
n painting native to the town of Tanjore in Tamil Nadu
. The art form dates back to the early 9th century, a period dominated by the Chola
rulers, who encouraged art and literature. These paintings are known for their elegance, rich colors, and attention to detail. The themes for most of these paintings are Hindu
Gods and Goddesses and scenes from Hindu mythology
. In modern times, these paintings have become a much sought after souvenir during festive occasions in South India.
The process of making a Tanjore painting involves many stages. The first stage involves the making of the preliminary sketch of the image on the base. The base consists of a cloth pasted over a wooden base. Then chalk powder or zinc oxide
is mixed with water-soluble adhesive
and applied on the base. To make the base smoother, a mild abrasive
is sometimes used. After the drawing is made, decoration of the jewellery and the apparels in the image is done with semi-precious stones. Laces or threads are also used to decorate the jewellery. On top of this, the gold foils are pasted. Finally, dyes are used to add colors to the figures in the paintings.
During British rule in India, the crown found that Madras had some of the most talented and intellectual artistic minds in the world. As the British had also established a huge settlement in and around Madras, Georgetown was chosen to establish an institute that would cater to the artistic expectations of the royals in London. This has come to be known as the Madras School
. At first traditional artists were employed to produce exquisite varieties of furniture, metal work, and curios and their work was sent to the royal palaces of the Queen.
Unlike the Bengal School where 'copying' is the norm of teaching, the Madras School flourishes on 'creating' new styles, arguments and trends.
The Bengal School of Art was an influential style of art that flourished in India during the British Raj
in the early 20th century. It was associated with Indian nationalism
, but was also promoted and supported by many British arts administrators.
The Bengal School arose as an avant garde and nationalist movement reacting against the academic art
styles previously promoted in India, both by Indian artists such as Raja Ravi Varma
and in British art schools. Following the widespread influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West
, the British art teacher Ernest Binfield Havel
attempted to reform the teaching methods at the Calcutta School of Art by encouraging students to imitate Mughal
miniatures. This caused immense controversy, leading to a strike by students and complaints from the local press, including from nationalists who considered it to be a retrogressive move. Havel was supported by the artist Abanindranath Tagore
, a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore
. Tagore painted a number of works influenced by Mughal art, a style that he and Havel believed to be expressive of India's distinct spiritual qualities, as opposed to the "materialism" of the West. Tagore's best-known painting, Bharat Mata (Mother India), depicted a young woman, portrayed with four arms in the manner of Hindu deities, holding objects symbolic of India's national aspirations. Tagore later attempted to develop links with Japanese artists as part of an aspiration to construct a pan-Asianist model of art.
The Bengal School's influence in India declined with the spread of modernist ideas in the 1920s. In the post-independence period, Indian artists showed more adaptability as they borrowed freely from european styles and amalgamated them freely with the Indian motifs to new forms of art. While artists like Francis Newton Souza
and Tyeb Mehta
were more western in their approach, there were others like Ganesh Pyne
and Maqbool Fida Husain who developed thoroughly indigenous styles of work. Today after the process of liberalization of market in India, the artists are experiencing more exposure to the international art-scene which is helping them in emerging with newer forms of art which were hitherto not seen in India. Jitish Kallat
had shot to fame in the late 90s with his paintings which were both modern and beyond the scope of generic definition. However while artists in India in the new century are trying out new styles, themes and metaphors, it would not have been possible to get such quick recognition without the aid of the business houses which are now entering the art field like they had never before.
Amrita Sher-Gil
was an Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo
, and today considered an important women painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance
; she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India.
Today, she is amongst Nine Masters, whose work was declared as art treasures by The Archaeological Survey of India
, in 1976 and 1979, and over 100 of her paintings are now displayed at National Gallery of Modern Art
, New Delhi
.
During the colonial era, Western influences started to make an impact on Indian art. Some artists developed a style that used Western ideas of composition, perspective and realism to illustrate Indian themes. Others, like Jamini Roy
, consciously drew inspiration from folk art.
By the time of Independence in 1947, several schools of art in India provided access to modern techniques and ideas. Galleries were established to showcase these artists. Modern Indian art typically shows the influence of Western styles, but is often inspired by Indian themes and images. Major artists are beginning to gain international recognition, initially among the Indian diaspora, but also among non-Indian audiences.
The Progressive Artists' Group, established shortly after India became independent in 1947, was intended to establish new ways of expressing India in the post-colonial era. The founders were six eminent artists - K. H. Ara, S. K. Bakre, H. A. Gade, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza
and F. N. Souza
, though the group was dissolved in 1956, it was profoundly influential in changing the idiom of Indian art. Almost all India's major artists in the 1950s were associated with the group. Some of those who are well-known today are Bal Chabda, Manishi Dey
, Mukul Dey
, V. S. Gaitonde
, Ram Kumar
, Tyeb Mehta
, and Akbar Padamsee
. Other famous painters like Jahar Dasgupta
, Prokash Karmakar, John Wilkins
, Narayanan Ramachandran, and Bijon Choudhuri enriched the art culture of India. They have become the icons of modern Indian art. Art historians like Prof. Rai Anand Krishna
have also referred to those works of modern artistes that reflect Indian ethos. Geeta Vadhera has had acclaim in translating complex, Indian spiritual themes onto canvas like Sufi thought, the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Geeta.
Indian Art got a boost with the economic liberalization of the country since early 1990s. Artists from various fields now started bringing in varied styles of work. Post liberalization Indian art works not only within the confines of academic traditions but also outside it. Artists have introduced new concepts which have hitherto not been seen in Indian art. Devajyoti Ray
has introduced a the new genre of art called Pseudorealism
. Pseudorealist Art is an original art style that has been developed entirely on the Indian soil. Pseudorealism takes into account the Indian concept of abstraction and uses it to transform regular scenes of Indian life into a fantastic images.
In post-liberalization India, many artists have established themselves in the international art market like the abstract painter Natvar Bhavsar
and sculptor Anish Kapoor
whose mammoth postminimalist artworks have acquired attention for their sheer size. Many art houses and galleries have also opened in USA and Europe to showcase Indian artworks.
Early Filipino painting can be found in red slip (clay mixed with water) designs embellished on the ritual pottery of the Philippines such as the acclaimed Manunggul Jar
.Evidence of Philippine pottery-making dated as early as 6000 BC has been found in Sanga-sanga Cave, Sulu and Laurente Cave, Cagayan. It has been proven that by 5000 BC, the making of pottery was practiced throughout the country. Early Filipinos started making pottery before their Cambodian neighbors and at about the same time as the Thais as part of what appears to be a widespread Ice Age development of pottery technology.Further evidences of painting are manifested in the tattoo tradition of early Filipinos, whom the Portugese explorer referred to as Pintados or the 'Painted People' of the Visayas. Various designs referencing flora and fauna with heavenly bodies decorate their bodies in various colored pigmentation. Perhaps, some of the most elaborate painting done by early Filipinos that survive to the present day can be manifested among the arts and architecture of the Maranao
who are well known for the Nāga
Dragons and the Sarimanok
carved and painted in the beautiful Panolong of their Torogan or King's House.
Filipinos began creating paintings in the European tradition during 17th century Spanish period. The earliest of these paintings were Church frescoes, religious imagery from Biblical sources, as well as engravings, sculptures and lithographs featuring Christian icons and European nobility. Most of the paintings and sculptures between the 19th, and 20th century produced a mixture of religious, political, and landscape art works, with qualities of sweetness, dark, and light. Early modernist
painters such as Damián Domingo was associated with religious, and secular paintings. The art of Juan Luna
and Felix Hidalgo
showed a trend for political statement. Artist such as Fernando Amorsolo
used post-modernism to produce paintings that illustrated Philippine culture, nature and harmony. While other artist such as Fernando Zóbel
used realities and abstract
on his work. In early 80s other unique folk artist exist one of these is Elito Circa
as amangpintor the famous Filipino folk painter. He uses his own hair to make his paintbrushes, and signs his name with his own blood on the right side of his paintings. He developed his own styles without professional training or guidance from masters.
, a civilization with very strong traditions of architecture and sculpture
(both originally painted in bright colours) also had many mural paintings in temples and buildings, and painted illustrations on papyrus
manuscript
s. Egyptian wall painting and decorative painting is often graphic, sometimes more symbolic than realistic. Egyptian painting depicts figures in bold outline and flat silhouette
, in which symmetry is a constant characteristic. Egyptian painting
has close connection with its written language - called Egyptian hieroglyphs
. Painted symbols are found amongst the first forms of written language. The Egyptians also painted on linen
, remnants of which survive today. Ancient Egyptian paintings survived due to the extremely dry climate. The ancient Egyptians created paintings to make the afterlife
of the deceased a pleasant place. The themes included journey through the afterworld or their protective deities introducing the deceased to the gods of the underworld. Some examples of such paintings are paintings of the gods and goddesses Ra
, Horus
, Anubis
, Nut
, Osiris
and Isis
. Some tomb paintings show activities that the deceased were involved in when they were alive and wished to carry on doing for eternity. In the New Kingdom
and later, the Book of the Dead
was buried with the entombed person. It was considered important for an introduction to the afterlife.
To the north of Egypt
was the Minoan civilization
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. Around 1100 B.C., tribes from the north of Greece conquered Greece and the Greek art took a new direction.
Ancient Greece
had great painters, great sculptors (though both endeavours were regarded as mere manual labour at the time), and great 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. Zeuxis lived in 5-6 BC and was said to be the first to use sfumato
. 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. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall paintings, many from villas in Campania
, in Southern Italy. Such painting can be grouped into 4 main "styles" or periods and may contain the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape. Almost the only painted portraits surviving from the Ancient world are a large number of coffin-portraits
of bust form found in the Late Antique cemetery of Al-Fayum. 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.
, once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditional iconography
and style, and has changed relatively little through the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire
and the continuing traditions of Greek and Russian Orthodox icon
-painting. Byzantine painting has a particularly hieratic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a reflection of the divine. There were also many wall-paintings in fresco
, but fewer of these have survived than Byzantine mosaics. In general Byzantium art borders on abstraction
, in its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. However there are periods, especially in the so-called Macedonian art of around the 10th century, when Byzantine art became more flexible in approach.
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 (and quite likely the only medium in which painting was used) are miniatures in Illuminated manuscript
s such as the Book of Kells
. These are most famous for their abstract decoration, although figures, and sometimes scenes, were also depicted, especially in Evangelist portrait
s. 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 fresco
es 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 manuscript
s 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.
is said by many to be the golden age
of painting. Roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th century. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello
, Fra Angelico
, Masaccio
, Piero della Francesca
, Andrea Mantegna
, Filippo Lippi
, Giorgione
, Tintoretto
, Sandro Botticelli
, Leonardo da Vinci
, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael
, Giovanni Bellini
, and Titian
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.
Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the Renaissance such as Hans Holbein the Younger
, Albrecht Dürer
, Lucas Cranach
, Matthias Grünewald
, Hieronymous Bosch, and Pieter Brueghel
represent a different approach from their Italian colleagues, one that is more realistic and less idealized. Genre painting became a popular idiom amongst such Northern painters as Pieter Brueghel. A new verisimilitude
in depicting reality became possible with the adoption of oil painting
, whose invention was traditionally, but erroneously, credited to Jan Van Eyck
(an important transitional figure who bridges painting in the Middle Ages
with painting of the early Renaissance
). Unlike the Italians whose work drew heavily from the art of ancient Greece and Rome, the northerners retained a stylistic residue of the sculpture and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. These tendencies are also see in the art of Tudor England
, which was heavily influenced by Protestant refugees from the Low Countries
.
Renaissance painting reflects the revolution of ideas and science (astronomy
, geography
) that occur in this period, the Reformation
, and the invention of the printing press
. Dürer, considered one of the greatest of printmakers, states that painters are not mere artisan
s but thinkers
as well. With the development of easel
painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture. 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.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, panel painting
s which could be hung on walls and moved around at will, became increasingly popular for both churches and private houses, rather than fresco
wall-paintings or paintings incorporated into on permanent structures, such as altarpiece
s. 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
. Some decades later Northern Mannerism
dominated Netherlandish and German art until the arrival of the Baroque.
cultural movement
, a movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival; 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 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, painting is characterized as Baroque. Among the greatest painters of the Baroque are Caravaggio
, Rembrandt, Frans Hals
, Rubens, Velázquez
, Poussin
, and Jan Vermeer. 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
and La Tour
.
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. The 1730s represented the height of Rococo development in France exemplified by the works of Antoine Watteau
and François Boucher
. 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
.
The French masters Watteau, Boucher
and Fragonard
represent the style, as do Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
who was considered by some as the best French painter of the 18th century - the Anti-Rococo. Portrait
ure 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 Antony Van Dyck. While in France during the Rococo era Jean-Baptiste Greuze
(the favorite painter of Denis Diderot
), Maurice Quentin de La Tour
, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun were highly accomplished Portrait painters
and History painters
.
William Hogarth
helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) 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
). The beginning of the end for Rococo came in the early 1760s as figures like Voltaire
and Jacques-François Blondel
began to voice their criticism of the superficiality and degeneracy of the art. Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors.http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/sammlung6/allg/buch.xml?docname=blondel1737 By 1785, Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness of Neoclassical
artists like Jacques Louis David.
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 mid-19th 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.M.W. Turner. Romantic painters turned landscape painting into a major genre, considered until then as a minor genre or as a decorative background for figure compositions.
Some of the major painters of this period are Eugène Delacroix
, Théodore Géricault
, J. M. W. Turner
, Caspar David Friedrich
and John Constable
. Francisco de Goya's late work demonstrates the Romantic interest in the irrational, while the work of Arnold Böcklin
evokes mystery and the paintings of Aesthetic movement artist James McNeill Whistler
evoke both sophistication and decadence
. In the United States the Romantic tradition of landscape painting was known as the Hudson River School
: exponents include Thomas Cole
, Frederic Edwin Church
, Albert Bierstadt
, Thomas Moran
, and John Frederick Kensett
. Luminism
was a movement in American landscape painting related to the Hudson River School
.
The leading Barbizon School
painter Camille Corot
painted in both a romantic and a realistic
vein; his work prefigures Impressionism
, as does the paintings of Eugène Boudin
who was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was also an important influence on the young Claude Monet
, whom in 1857 he introduced to Plein air painting. A major force in the turn towards Realism
at mid-century was Gustave Courbet
. In the latter third of the century Impressionists like Édouard Manet
, Claude Monet
, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
, Camille Pissarro
, Alfred Sisley
, Berthe Morisot
, Mary Cassatt
, and Edgar Degas
worked in a more direct approach than had previously been exhibited publicly. 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
. Slightly younger Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh
, Paul Gauguin
, and Georges Seurat, along with Paul Cézanne
led art to the edge of modernism
; for Gauguin Impressionism gave way to a personal symbolism; Seurat transformed Impressionism's broken color into a scientific optical study, structured on frieze-like
compositions; Van Gogh's turbulent method of paint application, coupled with a sonorous use of color, predicted Expressionism
and Fauvism
, and Cézanne, desiring to unite classical composition with a revolutionary abstraction of natural forms, would come to be seen as a precursor of 20th century art.
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
. 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
. Among them were Gustave Moreau
, Odilon Redon
, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
, Henri Fantin-Latour
, Arnold Böcklin
, Edvard Munch
, Félicien Rops
, and Jan Toorop
, and Gustave Klimt amongst others including the Russian Symbolists
like Mikhail Vrubel
.
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
. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today; Bernard Delvaille has described René Magritte
's surrealism as "Symbolism plus Freud
".
and several other young artists revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism
. Pablo Picasso
made his first cubist
paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube
, sphere
and cone
.
The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse
and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque
, André Derain
, Raoul Dufy
and Maurice de Vlaminck
revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism
- (as seen in the gallery above). Henri Matisse
's second version of The Dance
signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism
. Pablo Picasso
made his first cubist
paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube
, sphere
and cone
. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907, (see gallery) 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. analytic Cubism (see gallery) was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, (seen above) from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger
, Juan Gris
, Albert Gleizes
, Marcel Duchamp
and countless other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage
elements, papier collé
and a large variety of merged subject matter.
Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were early 20th 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 early 20th century artists whose works emphasized painterly
qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. Fauvists made the subject of the painting easy to read, exaggerated perspectives and an interesting prescient prediction of the Fauves was expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin
to Paul Sérusier
,
"How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine
; these red leaves? Put in vermilion
."
The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse
and André Derain
— friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso's yin in the 20th century. Fauvist painters included Albert Marquet
, Charles Camoin
, Maurice de Vlaminck
, Raoul Dufy
, Othon Friesz
, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen
, and Picasso's partner in Cubism, Georges Braque
amongst others.
Fauvism, as a movement, had no concrete theories, and was short lived, beginning in 1905 and ending in 1907, they only had three exhibitions. 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 1905 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. In 1906 at the suggestion of his dealer Ambroise Vollard
, André Derain
went to London and produced a series of paintings like Charing Cross Bridge, London (above) in the Fauvist
style, paraphrasing the famous series by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet
. Masters like Henri Matisse
and Pierre Bonnard
continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement throughout the 20th century.
By 1907 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 1907 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."
Analytic cubism (see gallery) was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger
, Juan Gris
, Albert Gleizes
, Marcel Duchamp
and countless other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage
elements, papier collé
and a large variety of merged subject matter.
During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism
, several movements emerged in Paris. Giorgio De Chirico
moved to Paris in July 1911, where he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter known as Alberto Savinio
). 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: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso
and Guillaume Apollinaire
and several others. His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism
. (see gallery) During the first half of the 20th century in Europe masters like Georges Braque
, André Derain
, and Giorgio De Chirico
continued painting independent of any movement.
, several other important movements emerged; futurism
(Balla
), abstract art
(Kandinsky), Der Blaue Reiter
), Bauhaus
, (Kandinsky) and (Klee
), Orphism
, (Robert Delaunay
and František Kupka
), Synchromism
(Morgan Russell
), De Stijl
(Mondrian
), Suprematism
(Malevich), Constructivism
(Tatlin), Dadaism (Duchamp, Picabia, Arp
) and Surrealism
(De Chirico
, André Breton
, Miró
, Magritte
, Dalí
, Ernst
). 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. Van Gogh's painting exerted great influence upon 20th century Expressionism
, as can be seen in the work of the Fauves
, Die Brücke
(a group led by German painter Ernst Kirchner), and the Expressionism of Edvard Munch
, Egon Schiele
, Marc Chagall
, Amedeo Modigliani
, Chaim Soutine
and others..
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 1911, 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 1917, and after pressure from the Stalinist regime in 1924 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
. Still other important pioneers of abstract painting include the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint
, Czech painter František Kupka
as well as American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell
who, in 1912, founded Synchromism
, an art movement that closely resembles Orphism
.
Expressionism
and Symbolism
are broad rubrics that describes 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. Expressionism was painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria. Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Fauvism
, Die Brücke
, and Der Blaue Reiter
are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters.
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
. Gustav Klimt
, Egon Schiele
, Edvard Munch
, Emil Nolde
, Chaim Soutine
, James Ensor
, Oskar Kokoschka
, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
, Max Beckmann
, Franz Marc
, Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, Georges Rouault
, Amedeo Modigliani
and some of the Americans abroad like Marsden Hartley
, and Stuart Davis
, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti
is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.
's art was also related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908 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 1917. The term De Stijl
is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 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. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian
, Vilmos Huszár
, and Bart van der Leck
, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld
, Robert van 't Hoff
, and J.J.P. Oud. 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 utopia
n 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'. He writes, "... this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. 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." The Tate article further summarizes that this art allows "only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line." The Guggenheim Museum
's online article on De Stijl summarizes these traits in similar terms: "It [De Stijl] was posited on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines."
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.H.J. Schoenmaekers. 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.
, came to international prominence in the wake of his notorious success at the New York City Armory Show
in 1913, (soon after he denounced artmaking for chess
). After Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase became the international cause celebre at the 1913 Armory show in New York he created the The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
, Large Glass (see above). 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 1916 to 1920. 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. Francis Picabia
(see above), Man Ray
, Kurt Schwitters
, Tristan Tzara
, Hans Richter
, Jean Arp
, Sophie Taeuber-Arp
, along with Duchamp and many others are associated with the Dadaist movement. Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1924 André Breton
published the Surrealist Manifesto
. 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 1919 in Zurich
and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist
art. Yves Tanguy
, René Magritte
and Salvador Dalí
are particularly known for their realistic depictions of dream imagery and fantastic manifestations of the imagination. Joan Miró
's The Tilled Field of 1923-1924 verges on abstraction, this early painting of a complex of objects and figures, and arrangements of sexually active characters; was Miro's first Surrealist masterpiece. The more abstract Joan Miró
, Jean Arp
, André Masson
, and Max Ernst
were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s.
Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain
and, according to Breton, their 1936 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.
Dalí and Magritte
created some of the most widely recognized images of the movement. The 1928/1929 painting This Is Not A Pipe, by Magritte
is the subject of a Michel Foucault
1973 book, This is not a Pipe (English edition, 1991), that discusses the painting and its paradox
. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.
Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, and perception, sometimes evoking empathy from the viewer, sometimes laughter and sometimes outrage and bewilderment.
1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: in one example (see gallery above) liquid shapes become the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory
, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting. 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 1920 painting Murdering Airplane, studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. 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.
During the 1920s André Masson
's work was enormously influential in helping the newly arrived in Paris and young artist Joan Miró
find his roots in the new Surrealist painting. Miró acknowledged in letters to his dealer Pierre Matisse
the importance of Masson as an example to him in his early years in Paris.
Long after personal, political and professional tensions have fragmented the Surrealist group into thin air and ether, Magritte, Miro, Dalí and the other Surrealists continue to define a visual program in the arts. Other prominent surrealist artists include Giorgio de Chirico
, Méret Oppenheim
, Toyen
, Grégoire Michonze
, Roberto Matta
, Kay Sage
, Leonora Carrington
, Dorothea Tanning
, and Leonor Fini
among others.
which was founded the previous decade in 1905 and was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden
in 1905. Founding members of Die Brücke were Fritz Bleyl
, Erich Heckel
, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
. 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
, 1909 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. Artists Gabriele Münter
and Paul Klee
were also involved.
The name of the movement comes from a painting by Kandinsky created in 1903 (see illustration). 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: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.
In the USA during the period between World War I and World War II painters tended to go to Europe for recognition. Artists like Marsden Hartley
, Patrick Henry Bruce
, Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis
, created reputations abroad. In New York City, Albert Pinkham Ryder
and Ralph Blakelock
were influential and important figures in advanced American painting between 1900 and 1920. During the 1920s photographer Alfred Stieglitz
exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe
, Arthur Dove
, Alfred Henry Maurer
, Charles Demuth
, John Marin
and other artists including European Masters Henri Matisse
, Auguste Rodin
, Henri Rousseau
, Paul Cézanne
, and Pablo Picasso
, at his gallery the 291.
Expressionism
and Symbolism
are broad rubrics that describes 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. Expressionism was painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria. Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Fauvism
, Die Brücke
, and Der Blaue Reiter
are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters. Artists as interesting and diverse as Marc Chagall
, Gustav Klimt
, Egon Schiele
, Edvard Munch
, Emil Nolde
, Chaim Soutine
, James Ensor
, Oskar Kokoschka
, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
, Max Beckmann
, Franz Marc
, Otto Dix
, Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, Georges Rouault
, Amedeo Modigliani
and some of the Americans abroad like Marsden Hartley
, and Stuart Davis
, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti
is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings of figures as well.
, Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus
, De Stijl
, Dada, German Expressionism, Expressionism, and modernist and masterful color painters like Henri Matisse
and Pierre Bonnard
characterized the European art scene. In Germany Max Beckmann
, Otto Dix
, George Grosz
and others politicized their paintings, foreshadowing the coming of World War II. While in America American Scene painting
and the social realism
and regionalism
movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world. Artists like Ben Shahn
, Thomas Hart Benton
, Grant Wood
, George Tooker
, John Steuart Curry
, Reginald Marsh
, and others became prominent. In Latin America besides the Uruguay
an painter Joaquín Torres García
and Rufino Tamayo
from Mexico, the muralist movement
with Diego Rivera
, David Siqueiros, José Orozco, Pedro Nel Gómez
and Santiago Martinez Delgado
and the Symbolist
paintings by Frida Kahlo
began a renaissance of the arts for the region, with a use of color and historic, and political messages. 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 1930. 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. It was thus seen as part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson
's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio
, Sinclair Lewis
' 1920 Main Street
, and Carl Van Vechten
's The Tattooed Countess in literature. However, with the onset of the Great Depression
, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.
Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, "Man at the Crossroads
", in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center
. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller
discovered that the mural included a portrait of 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. Of her 143 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 1920s to the 1950s 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. He ran a political art workshop in New York City in preparation for the 1936 General Strike for Peace and May Day
parade
. The young Jackson Pollock
attended the workshop and helped build float
s for the parade. Between 1937 and 1938 he fought in the Spanish Civil War
alongside the Spanish Republican forces, in opposition to Francisco Franco
's military coup. He was exile
d twice from Mexico, once in 1932 and again in 1940, following his assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky
.
, including Pablo Picasso
. On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War
, the Basque
town of Gernika was the scene of the "Bombing of Gernika" by the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. 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, 3.5 metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8 metre (23 ft) wide mural painted in oil. 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.
Picasso painted the mural sized painting called Guernica
in protest of the bombing. The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1937, then Scandinavia
, then London in 1938 and finally in 1939 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 1981.
During the Great Depression
of the 1930s, through the years of World War II American art was characterized by Social Realism
and American Scene Painting
(as seen above) in the work of Grant Wood
, Edward Hopper
, Ben Shahn
, Thomas Hart Benton
, and several others. Nighthawks
(1942) 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 1930s 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 to describe 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 1937, 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. German artist Max Beckmann
and scores of others fled Europe for New York. 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 1940s 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.
, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse
, Pablo Picasso
, Surrealism, Joan Miró
, Cubism, Fauvism
, and early Modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann
and John D. Graham
. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian
, Fernand Léger
, Max Ernst
and the André Breton
group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim
's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors. The figurative work of Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo
, Edward Hopper
, Lucien Freud Andrew Wyeth
and others served as a kind of alternative to abstract expressionism. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is Wyeth's painting, Christina's World
, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City
. It depicts a woman lying on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at and crawling towards a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. This tempera
work, done in a realist style, is nearly always on display at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York.
Post-Second World War American painting called Abstract expressionism included artists like Jackson Pollock
, Willem de Kooning
, Arshile Gorky
, Mark Rothko
, Hans Hofmann
, Clyfford Still
, Franz Kline
, Adolph Gottlieb
, Mark Tobey
, Barnett Newman
, James Brooks
, Philip Guston
, Robert Motherwell
, Conrad Marca-Relli
, Jack Tworkov
, William Baziotes
, Richard Pousette-Dart
, Ad Reinhardt
, Hedda Sterne
, Jimmy Ernst
, Esteban Vicente
, Bradley Walker Tomlin
, and Theodoros Stamos
, among others. American Abstract expressionism got its name in 1946 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. Jackson Pollock
's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson
. Another important early m anifestation 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.
s", 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 1950 and 1953 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 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, 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: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Woman III
, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art
, Woman IV, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
, Kansas City, Missouri
. During the summer of 1952, 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 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time. The Woman series are decidedly figurative paintings
. Another important artist is Franz Kline
, as demonstrated by his painting High Street, 1950 (see gallery) 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
, (see above), 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
(see gallery) 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 1950s is a matter of debate. American Social realism
had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression
but also by the Social Realists
of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros
and Diego Rivera
. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of those painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early 1940s at galleries in New York like The Art of This Century Gallery
. The late 1940s through the mid 1950s ushered in the McCarthy era. It was after World War II and a time of political conservatism and extreme artistic censorship in the United States. 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.
Although Abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the New York School
, and the San Francisco Bay area. 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. Many other artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s including Alfred Leslie
, Sam Francis
, Joan Mitchell
, Helen Frankenthaler
, Cy Twombly
, Milton Resnick
, Michael Goldberg
, Norman Bluhm
, Ray Parker
, Nicolas Carone
, Grace Hartigan
, Friedel Dzubas
, and Robert Goodnough
among others.
During the 1950s Color Field painting initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism
, especially the work of Mark Rothko
, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell
and Adolph Gottlieb
. It essentially described 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-mid-1960s Color Field painting was the term used to describe 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. Artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko
, Hans Hofmann
, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski
, Kenneth Noland
, Helen Frankenthaler
, Larry Zox
, and others often used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. In Mountains and Sea, from 1952, (see above) a seminal work of Color Field
painting by Helen Frankenthaler
the artist used the stain technique for the first time.
In Europe there was the continuation of Surrealism, Cubism, Dada and the works of Matisse. Also in Europe, Tachisme
(the European equivalent to Abstract expressionism) took hold of the newest generation. Serge Poliakoff
, Nicolas de Staël
, Georges Mathieu
, Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet
, Yves Klein
and Pierre Soulages
among others are considered important figures in post-war European painting.
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
.
in England in 1958 to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. 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. The early works of David Hockney
and the works of Richard Hamilton
Peter Blake
and Eduardo Paolozzi
were considered seminal examples in the movement.
Pop art
in America was to a large degree initially inspired by the works of Jasper Johns
, Larry Rivers
, and Robert Rauschenberg
. Although the paintings of Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis
and Charles Demuth
during the 1920s and 1930s set the table for pop art in America. In New York City during the mid 1950s 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 1963 the movement came to be known worldwide as pop art.
American pop art is exemplified by artists: Andy Warhol
, Claes Oldenburg
, Wayne Thiebaud
, James Rosenquist
, Jim Dine
, Tom Wesselmann
and Roy Lichtenstein
among others. Pop art merges popular and mass culture with fine art, while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the mix. In October 1962 the Sidney Janis
Gallery mounted The New Realists the first major pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Sidney Janis
mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School
and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in the fall of 1962 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.
While in the downtown scene in New York City's East Village
10th Street galleries
artists were formulating an American version of Pop Art
. Claes Oldenburg
had his storefront, and the Green Gallery
on 57th Street
began to show Tom Wesselmann
and James Rosenquist
. 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 parody's 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. Graham
, Fairfield Porter
, Edward Hopper
, Balthus
, Francis Bacon, Nicolas de Staël
, Andrew Wyeth
, Lucian Freud
, Frank Auerbach
, Philip Pearlstein
, David Park, Nathan Oliveira
, David Hockney
, Malcolm Morley
, Richard Estes
, Ralph Goings
, Audrey Flack
, Chuck Close
, Susan Rothenberg
, Eric Fischl
, Vija Celmins
and Richard Diebenkorn
.
, 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 1950s and new forms of expressionism
from the 1940s through the 1960s. 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. Throughout the 20th century many painters practiced Realism
and used expressive imagery; practicing landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, and unique expressivity like still-life painter Giorgio Morandi
, Milton Avery
, John D. Graham
, Fairfield Porter
, Edward Hopper
, Andrew Wyeth
, Balthus
, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff
, Frank Auerbach
, Lucian Freud
, Philip Pearlstein
, Willem de Kooning
, Arshile Gorky
, Grace Hartigan
, Robert De Niro, Sr.
, Elaine de Kooning
and others. Along with Henri Matisse
, Pablo Picasso
, Pierre Bonnard
, Georges Braque
, and other 20th century masters.
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
, 1953 (see above) is a painting by the Irish born artist Francis Bacon and is an example of Post World War II European Expressionism
. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X
painted by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez
in 1650. The work is one of a series of variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, over a total of forty-five works. When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against the Popes, that he merely "wanted an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve
manner." The Pope in this version seethes with anger and aggression, and the dark colors give the image a grotesque and nightmarish appearance. The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent, and seem to fall through the Pope's face.
Italian painter Giorgio Morandi
was an important 20th century, early pioneer of Minimalism. Born in Bologna, Italy in 1890, 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 133 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 1964.
After World War II the term School of Paris
often referred to Tachisme
, the European equivalent of American Abstract expressionism and those artists are also related to Cobra
. Important proponents being Jean Dubuffet
, Pierre Soulages
, Nicholas de Staël, Hans Hartung
, Serge Poliakoff
, and Georges Mathieu
, among several others. During the early 1950s Dubuffet
(who was always a figurative artist), and de Staël
, abandoned abstraction, and returned to imagery via figuration and landscape. De Staël 's work was quickly recognised within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. His return to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) during the early 1950s 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 mid-1950s. Much of de Staël 's late work - in particular his thinned, and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s predicts Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction
of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël
's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop art of the 1960s.
During the 1950s and 1960s 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
, fluxus
, neo-Dada
, New Realism
, allowing imagery to re-emerge through various new contexts like pop art
, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism
. The Bay Area Figurative Movement of whom David Park, Elmer Bischoff
, Nathan Oliveira
and Richard Diebenkorn
whose painting Cityscape 1, 1963 is a typical example (see above) were influential members flourished during the 1950s and 1960s in California
. 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. Yves Klein
, Martial Raysse
, Niki de Saint Phalle
, Wolf Vostell
, David Hockney
, Alex Katz
, Malcolm Morley
, Ralph Goings
, Audrey Flack
, Richard Estes
, Chuck Close
, Susan Rothenberg
, Eric Fischl
, John Baeder
and Vija Celmins
were a few who became prominent between the 1960s and the 1980s. Fairfield Porter
(see above) 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 1960s and 1970s, 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: Postminimalism
, Earth art, video art
, installation art
, arte povera
, performance art
, body art
, fluxus
, mail art
, the situationists and conceptual art
among others.
Neo-Dada is also a movement that started 1n the 1950s and 1960s 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 1950s 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
, (see untitled combine, 1963, above), 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.
. Color Field painting is related to post-painterly abstraction
, suprematism
, abstract expressionism
, hard-edge painting
and Lyrical Abstraction
.
During the 1960s and 1970s 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 an 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, (see gallery). In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, 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.
Josef Albers
, Hans Hofmann
, Ilya Bolotowsky
, Burgoyne Diller
, Victor Vasarely
, Bridget Riley
, Richard Anuszkiewicz
, Frank Stella
, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland
, Ellsworth Kelly
, Barnett Newman
, Larry Poons
, Ronald Davis
, Larry Zox
, Al Held
and some others like Mino Argento
, are artists closely associated with Geometric abstraction, Op art, Color Field painting, and in the case of Hofmann and Newman Abstract expressionism as well.
In 1965, an exhibition called The Responsive Eye, curated by William C. Seitz, was held at the Museum of Modern Art
, in New York City. 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: Victor Vasarely
, Richard Anuszkiewicz
, Bridget Riley and others. 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 used to describe some paintings and other works of art which use optical illusion
s. 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. Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. 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. Artists like Clyfford Still
, Mark Rothko
, Hans Hofmann
, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski
, Kenneth Noland
, Helen Frankenthaler
, John Hoyland
, Larry Zox
, and others often used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. 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.
Frank Stella
, Kenneth Noland
, Ellsworth Kelly
, Barnett Newman
, Ronald Davis
, Neil Williams, Robert Mangold
, Charles Hinman, Richard Tuttle
, David Novros, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas
during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Many Geometric abstract art
ists, 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 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract
, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. The Andre Emmerich Gallery, the Leo Castelli
Gallery, the Richard Feigen Gallery, and the Park Place Gallery
were important showcases for Color Field
painting, shaped canvas
painting and Lyrical Abstraction
in New York City during the 1960s. There is a connection with post-painterly abstraction
, which reacted against abstract expressionism
s' 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 1960s Color Field painting and Minimal art were often closely associated with each other. In actuality by the early 1970s both movements became decidedly diverse.
is a European term that was borrowed by Larry Aldrich (the founder of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield Connecticut) in 1969 to describe what Aldrich said he saw in the studios of many artists at that time. It is also the name of an exhibition that originated in the Aldrich Museum and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art
and other museums throughout the United States between 1969 and 1971.
Lyrical Abstraction
in the late 1960s 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 1969) 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, conceptual art
, postminimalism
, Earth art, video
, performance art
, installation art
, along with the continuation of fluxus, abstract expressionism
, Color Field
painting, hard-edge painting
, minimal art, op art
, pop art
, photorealism
and New Realism
extended the boundaries of contemporary art
in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Lyrical Abstraction is a type of freewheeling abstract painting that emerged in the mid-1960s when abstract painters returned to various forms of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on process, gestalt and repetitive compositional strategies in general.
Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with color field painting and abstract expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction
as exemplified by the 1968 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 1940s and 1950s 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.,
, Robert Mangold
(see above), Brice Marden
, Jo Baer
, Robert Ryman
, Richard Tuttle
, Neil Williams, David Novros, Paul Mogenson, are examples of artists associated with Minimalism
and (exceptions of Martin, Baer and Marden) the use of the shaped canvas
also during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Many Geometric abstract art
ists, 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 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. The Bykert Gallery
, and the Park Place Gallery
were important showcases for Minimalism
and shaped canvas
painting in New York City during the 1960s.
During the 1960s and 1970s artists such as Robert Motherwell
, Adolph Gottlieb
, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner
, Cy Twombly
, Robert Rauschenberg
, Jasper Johns
, Richard Diebenkorn
, Josef Albers
, Elmer Bischoff
, Agnes Martin, Al Held
, Sam Francis
, Ellsworth Kelly
, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler
, Gene Davis
, Frank Stella
, Kenneth Noland
, Joan Mitchell
, Friedel Dzubas
, and younger artists like Brice Marden, Robert Mangold
, Sam Gilliam
, John Hoyland
, Sean Scully
, Pat Steir
, Elizabeth Murray
, Larry Poons
, Walter Darby Bannard
, Larry Zox
, Ronnie Landfield
, Ronald Davis
, Dan Christensen
, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner
, Archie Rand
, Susan Crile
, and dozens of others produced a wide variety of paintings.
During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against abstract painting. Some critics 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: postminimalism
, Earth art, video art
, installation art
, arte povera
, performance art
, body art
, fluxus
, happening
, mail art
, the situationists and conceptual art
among others.
However still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the 1960s and the 1970s characterized by monochrome painting
and hard-edge painting
inspired by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman
, Milton Resnick
, and Ellsworth Kelly
. Artists as diverse as Agnes Martin, Al Held, Larry Zox
, Frank Stella
, Larry Poons
, Brice Marden and others explored the power of simplification. 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 1980s and 1990s. The neo-expressionism
movement is related to earlier developments in abstract expressionism
, neo-Dada
, Lyrical Abstraction and postminimal painting.
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 1973, seen above in the gallery is an example of Guston's final and conclusive return to representation.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, 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
, Neo-expressionism
, the school of London, and in the late 80s 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. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries. This type of art continues in popularity into the 21st century, even after the art crash of the late 1980s. Anselm Kiefer
is a leading figure in European Neo-expressionism
by the 1980s, (see To the Unknown Painter 1983, in the gallery above) Kiefer's themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involves not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult
symbol
ism, theology
and mysticism
. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life.
During the late 1970s in the United States painters who began working with invigorated surfaces and who returned to imagery like Susan Rothenberg
gained in popularity, especially as seen above in paintings like Horse 2, 1979. During the 1980s American artists like Eric Fischl
, (see Bad Boy, 1981, above), David Salle
, Jean-Michel Basquiat
, Julian Schnabel
, and Keith Haring
, and Italian painters like Mimmo Paladino
, Sandro Chia
, and Enzo Cucchi
, among others defined the idea of Neo-expressionism
in America.
Neo-expressionism was a style of modern
painting that became popular in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. It developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic
art of the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour harmonies. The veteran painters Philip Guston
, Frank Auerbach
, Leon Kossoff
, Gerhard Richter
, A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz
, along with slightly younger artists like Anselm Kiefer
, Eric Fischl
, Susan Rothenberg
, Francesco Clemente
, Jean-Michel Basquiat
, Julian Schnabel
, Keith Haring
, and many others became known for working in this intense expressionist vein of painting.
Painting still holds a respected position in contemporary art
. Art is an open field no longer divided by the objective versus non-objective dichotomy. Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract. What has currency is content, exploring the boundaries of the medium, and a refusal to recapitulate the works of the past as an end goal.
. The "crisis" in painting and current art and current art criticism
today is brought about by pluralism
. There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently magnificent and important works of art continue to be made albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit.
Hard-edge painting
, geometric abstraction, appropriation
, hyperrealism, photorealism
, expressionism
, minimalism
, Lyrical Abstraction
, pop art
, op art
, abstract expressionism
, Color Field
painting, monochrome painting
, neo-expressionism
, collage
, intermedia
painting, assemblage
painting, digital painting
, postmodern painting, neo-Dada
painting, shaped canvas
painting, environmental mural painting, traditional figure
painting, landscape painting, portrait painting
, are a few continuing and current directions in painting at the beginning of the 21st century.
, the Lesser Antilles
and other island groups, indigenous native cultures produced creative works including architecture, pottery
, ceramics
, weaving
, carving, sculpture
, painting
and murals as well as other religious and utilitarian objects. Each continent of the Americas hosted societies that were unique and individually developed cultures; that produced totems, works of religious symbolism, and decorative and expressive painted works. African influence was especially strong in the art of the Caribbean and South America. The arts of the indigenous people of the Americas had an enormous impact and influence on European art and vice-versa during and after the Age of Exploration. Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, and England were all powerful and influential colonial powers in the Americas during and after the 15th century. By the 19th century cultural influence began to flow both ways across the Atlantic
so there is no religiously motivated painting (or sculpture) tradition within Muslim culture. Pictorial activity was reduced to Arabesque
, mainly abstract
, with geometrical configuration or floral and plant-like patterns. Strongly connected to architecture and calligraphy
, it can be widely seen as used for the painting of tile
s in mosques or in illuminations around the text of the Koran and other books. In fact abstract art is not an invention of modern art but it is present in pre-classical, barbarian
and non-western cultures many centuries before it and is essentially a decorative or applied art
. Notable illustrator M. C. Escher
was influenced by this geometrical and pattern based art. Art Nouveau
(Aubrey Beardsley
and the architect Antonio Gaudí) re-introduced abstract floral patterns into western art.
Note that despite the taboo of figurative visualization, some muslim countries did cultivate a rich tradition in painting, though not in its own right, but as a companion to the written word. Iranian or Persian art, widely known as Persian miniature, concentrates on the illustration of epic or romantic works of literature. Persian illustrators deliberately avoided the use of shading and perspective, though familiar with it in their pre-islamic history, in order to abide by the rule of not creating any life-like illusion of the real world. Their aim was not to depict the world as it is, but to create images of an ideal world of timeless beauty and perfect order.
In present days, painting by art students or professional artists in Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries follow the same tendencies of Western culture art.
Paintings of the Qajar period, are a combination of European influences and Safavid miniature schools of painting such as those introduced by Reza Abbasi
and classical works by Mihr 'Ali. Masters such as Kamal-ol-molk
, further pushed forward the European influence in Iran. It was during the Qajar era when "Coffee House painting" emerged. Subjects of this style were often religious in nature depicting scenes from Shia epics and the like.
and relief
. However, decorative painting in African culture is often abstract and geometrical. Another pictorial manifestation is body painting
, and face painting present for example in Maasai and Kĩkũyũ
culture in their ceremony rituals. Ceremonial cave painting
in certain villages can be found to be still in use. Note that Pablo Picasso
and other modern artists were influenced by African sculpture
and masks in their varied styles.
Contemporary African artists follow western art movements and their paintings have little difference from occidental art works.
, Matisse
, Vincent van Gogh
, Paul Gauguin
and Modigliani
became aware of, and were inspired by, African art. In a situation where the established avant garde was straining against the constraints imposed by serving the world of appearances, African Art demonstrated the power of supremely well organised forms; produced not only by responding to the faculty of sight, but also and often primarily, the faculty of imagination, emotion and mystical and religious experience. These artists saw in African art a formal
perfection and sophistication unified with phenomenal expressive power.
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of creativity, that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it relied primarily on representational, religious and classical
Classical antiquity
Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...
motifs, after which time more purely abstract
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
and conceptual
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
approaches gained favor.
Developments in Eastern painting historically parallel those in Western painting
Western painting
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...
, in general, a few centuries earlier. African art
African art
African art constitutes one of the most diverse legacies on earth. Though many casual observers tend to generalize "traditional" African art, the continent is full of people, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual special culture. The definition also includes the art of the African...
, Islamic art
Islamic art
Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...
, Indian art
Indian art
Indian Art is the visual art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC to modern times. To viewers schooled in the Western tradition, Indian art may seem overly ornate and sensuous; appreciation of its refinement comes only gradually, as a rule. Voluptuous feeling is...
, Chinese art
Chinese art
Chinese art is visual art that, whether ancient or modern, originated in or is practiced in China or by Chinese artists or performers. Early so-called "stone age art" dates back to 10,000 BC, mostly consisting of simple pottery and sculptures. This early period was followed by a series of art...
, and Japanese art
Japanese art
Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...
each had significant influence on Western art, and, eventually, vice-versa.
Initially serving utilitarian purpose, followed by imperial, private, civic, and religious
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
patronage, Eastern and Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
and the middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
. From the Modern era, the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
through the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
painters worked for the church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
era artists received private commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. Finally in the west the idea of "art for art's sake
Art for art's sake
"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...
" began to find expression in the work of the Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...
, and J.M.W. Turner. During the 19th century the rise of the commercial art gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
provided patronage in the 20th Century.
Recommended articles: 20th-century Western painting, Western painting
Western painting
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...
, Painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, Outline of painting history
Outline of painting history
Outline of painting history is a brief outline with templates and links to Wikipedia articles and subjects related to Art History and specifically the history of painting as an art form.- Ancient painting :*Art of Ancient Egypt*Knossos...
, Landscape art
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
.
Pre-history
The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintingCave painting
Cave paintings are paintings on cave walls and ceilings, and the term is used especially for those dating to prehistoric times. The earliest European cave paintings date to the Aurignacian, some 32,000 years ago. The purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known...
s all over the world—in France, India, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia etc. Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the people that made them. Prehistoric men may have painted animals to "catch" their soul or spirit
Spirit
The English word spirit has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body.The spirit of a living thing usually refers to or explains its consciousness.The notions of a person's "spirit" and "soul" often also overlap,...
in order to hunt them more easily or the paintings may represent an animistic vision and homage to surrounding nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
, or they may be the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings, or they could have been for the transmission of practical information.
In Paleolithic
Paleolithic
The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...
times, the representation of humans in cave paintings was rare. Mostly, animals were painted, not only animals that were used as food but also animals that represented strength like the rhinoceros
Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros , also known as rhino, is a group of five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. Two of these species are native to Africa and three to southern Asia....
or large Felidae
Felidae
Felidae is the biological family of the cats; a member of this family is called a felid. Felids are the strictest carnivores of the thirteen terrestrial families in the order Carnivora, although the three families of marine mammals comprising the superfamily pinnipedia are as carnivorous as the...
, as in the Chauvet Cave
Chauvet Cave
The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave is a cave in the Ardèche department of southern France that contains the earliest known cave paintings, as well as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life. It is located near the commune of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc on a limestone cliff above the former bed of the Ardèche River...
. Signs like dots were sometimes drawn. Rare human representations include handprints and half-human / animal figures. The Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche
Ardèche
Ardèche is a department in south-central France named after the Ardèche River.- History :The area has been inhabited by humans at least since the Upper Paleolithic, as attested by the famous cave paintings at Chauvet Pont d'Arc. The plateau of the Ardeche River has extensive standing stones ,...
Departments of France contains the most important preserved cave paintings of the Paleolithic era, painted around 31,000 BC. The Altamira
Altamira (cave)
Altamira is a cave in Spain famous for its Upper Paleolithic cave paintings featuring drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals and human hands....
cave paintings in Spain were done 14,000 to 12,000 BC and show, among others, bison
Bison
Members of the genus Bison are large, even-toed ungulates within the subfamily Bovinae. Two extant and four extinct species are recognized...
s. The hall of bulls in Lascaux
Lascaux
Lascaux is the setting of a complex of caves in southwestern France famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings. The original caves are located near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne. They contain some of the best-known Upper Paleolithic art. These paintings are estimated to be...
, Dordogne
Dordogne
Dordogne is a départment in south-west France. The départment is located in the region of Aquitaine, between the Loire valley and the High Pyrénées named after the great river Dordogne that runs through it...
, France, is one of the best known cave paintings from about 15,000 to 10,000 BC.
If there is meaning to the paintings, it remains unknown. The caves were not in an inhabited area, so they may have been used for seasonal rituals. The animals are accompanied by signs which suggest a possible magic use. Arrow-like symbols in Lascaux
Lascaux
Lascaux is the setting of a complex of caves in southwestern France famous for its Paleolithic cave paintings. The original caves are located near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne. They contain some of the best-known Upper Paleolithic art. These paintings are estimated to be...
are sometimes interpreted as calendar
Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not...
or almanac
Almanac
An almanac is an annual publication that includes information such as weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, and tide tables, containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar etc...
use. But the evidence remains inconclusive. The most important work of the Mesolithic
Mesolithic
The Mesolithic is an archaeological concept used to refer to certain groups of archaeological cultures defined as falling between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic....
era were the marching warriors, a rock painting at Cingle de la Mola, Castellón
Castellón (province)
Castellón or Castelló is a province in the northern part of the Valencian Community, Spain. It is bordered by the provinces of Valencia to the south, Teruel to the west, Tarragona to the north, and by the Mediterranean Sea to the east. The western side of the province is in the mountainous...
, Spain dated to about 7000 to 4000 BC. The technique used was probably spitting or blowing the pigments onto the rock. The paintings are quite naturalistic, though stylized. The figures are not three-dimensional, even though they overlap
The earliest known Indian paintings (see section below) were the rock paintings of prehistoric
Prehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
times, the petroglyph
Petroglyph
Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...
s as found in places like the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, (see above) and some of them are older than 5500 BC. Such works continued and after several millennia, in the 7th century, carved pillars of Ajanta
Ajanta
The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India are 29 rock-cut cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE. The caves include paintings and sculptures considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art as well as frescos which are reminiscent of the Sigiriya...
, Maharashtra
Maharashtra
Maharashtra is a state located in India. It is the second most populous after Uttar Pradesh and third largest state by area in India...
state present a fine example of Indian paintings, and the colors, mostly various shades of red and orange, were derived from minerals.
Eastern painting
The history of Eastern painting includes a vast range of influences from various cultures and religions. Developments in Eastern painting historically parallel those in Western paintingWestern painting
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...
, in general a few centuries earlier. African art
African art
African art constitutes one of the most diverse legacies on earth. Though many casual observers tend to generalize "traditional" African art, the continent is full of people, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual special culture. The definition also includes the art of the African...
, Islamic art
Islamic art
Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...
, Indian art
Indian art
Indian Art is the visual art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC to modern times. To viewers schooled in the Western tradition, Indian art may seem overly ornate and sensuous; appreciation of its refinement comes only gradually, as a rule. Voluptuous feeling is...
, Chinese art
Chinese art
Chinese art is visual art that, whether ancient or modern, originated in or is practiced in China or by Chinese artists or performers. Early so-called "stone age art" dates back to 10,000 BC, mostly consisting of simple pottery and sculptures. This early period was followed by a series of art...
, Korean Art
Korean art
Korean art is art originating or practiced in Korea or by Korean artists, from ancient times to today. Korea is noted for its artistic traditions in pottery, music, calligraphy, and other genres, often marked by the use of bold color, natural forms, and surface decoration.-Introduction:The earliest...
, and Japanese art
Japanese art
Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...
each had significant influence on Western art, and, vice-versa.
Chinese painting
Chinese painting
Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Early pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals...
is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Early pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals. It was only during the Warring States Period
Warring States Period
The Warring States Period , also known as the Era of Warring States, or the Warring Kingdoms period, covers the Iron Age period from about 475 BC to the reunification of China under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC...
(403-221 B.C.) that artists began to represent the world around them. Japanese painting
Japanese painting
is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese visual arts, encompassing a wide variety of genres and styles. As with the history of Japanese arts in general, the long history of Japanese painting exhibits synthesis and competition between native Japanese aesthetics and adaptation of...
is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese art
Japanese art
Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...
s, encompassing a wide variety of genre and styles. The history of Japanese painting is a long history of synthesis and competition between native Japanese aesthetics
Japanese aesthetics
The modern study of a Japanese aesthetics in the Western sense only started a little over two hundred years ago. But, by the term Japanese aesthetic, we tend to mean not this modern study, but a set of ancient ideals that include wabi , sabi , and yûgen...
and adaptation of imported ideas. The history of Korean painting
Korean painting
Korean painting includes paintings made in Korea or by overseas Koreans on all surfaces. It includes art as old as the petroglyphs through post-modern conceptual art using transient forms of light...
is dated to approximately 108
108
Year 108 was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Trebonius and Bradua...
C.E., when it first appears as an independent form. Between that time and the paintings and frescoes that appear on the Goryeo
Goryeo
The Goryeo Dynasty or Koryŏ was a Korean dynasty established in 918 by Emperor Taejo. Korea gets its name from this kingdom which came to be pronounced Korea. It united the Later Three Kingdoms in 936 and ruled most of the Korean peninsula until it was removed by the Joseon dynasty in 1392...
dynasty tombs, there has been little research. Suffice to say that until the Joseon
Joseon Dynasty
Joseon , was a Korean state founded by Taejo Yi Seong-gye that lasted for approximately five centuries. It was founded in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Goryeo at what is today the city of Kaesong. Early on, Korea was retitled and the capital was relocated to modern-day Seoul...
dynasty the primary influence was Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
painting though done with Korean landscapes, facial features, Buddhist topics, and an emphasis on celestial observation in keeping with the rapid development of Korean astronomy.
East Asian painting
See also Chinese paintingChinese painting
Chinese painting is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. The earliest paintings were not representational but ornamental; they consisted of patterns or designs rather than pictures. Early pottery was painted with spirals, zigzags, dots, or animals...
, Japanese painting
Japanese painting
is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese visual arts, encompassing a wide variety of genres and styles. As with the history of Japanese arts in general, the long history of Japanese painting exhibits synthesis and competition between native Japanese aesthetics and adaptation of...
, Korean painting
Korean painting
Korean painting includes paintings made in Korea or by overseas Koreans on all surfaces. It includes art as old as the petroglyphs through post-modern conceptual art using transient forms of light...
.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
and printmaking
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
(so much that it is commonly seen as painting). Far east traditional painting is characterized by water based techniques, less realism, "elegant" and stylized subjects, graphical approach to depiction, the importance of white space
White space (visual arts)
In page layout, illustration and sculpture, white space is often referred to as negative space. It is that portion of a page left unmarked: the space between graphics, margins, gutters, space between columns, space between lines of type or figures and objects drawn or depicted...
(or negative space
Negative space
Negative space, in art, is the space around and between the subject of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, and not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space is occasionally used to artistic effect as the "real"...
) and a preference for landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
(instead of human figure) as a subject. Beyond ink and color on silk or paper scrolls, gold on lacquer
Lacquer
In a general sense, lacquer is a somewhat imprecise term for a clear or coloured varnish that dries by solvent evaporation and often a curing process as well that produces a hard, durable finish, in any sheen level from ultra matte to high gloss and that can be further polished as required...
was also a common medium in painted East Asian artwork. Although silk was a somewhat expensive medium to paint upon in the past, the invention of paper
Paper
Paper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....
during the 1st century AD by the Han court eunuch Cai Lun
Cai Lun
Cai Lun , courtesy name Jingzhong , was a Chinese eunuch. He is traditionally regarded as the inventor of paper and the papermaking process, in forms recognizable in modern times as paper...
provided not only a cheap and widespread medium for writing, but also a cheap and widespread medium for painting (making it more accessible to the public).
The ideologies of Confucianism
Confucianism
Confucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius . Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han...
, Daoism, and Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
played important roles in East Asian art. Medieval Song Dynasty painters such as Lin Tinggui
Lin Tinggui
Lin Tinggui was a Chinese painter of the Southern Song Dynasty...
and his Luohan Laundering http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/singleObject.cfm?ObjectId=1691 (housed in the Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art
Freer Gallery of Art
The Freer Gallery of Art joins the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery to form the Smithsonian Institution's national museums of Asian art. The Freer contains art from East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, the ancient Near East, and ancient Egypt, as well as a significant collection of...
) of the 12th century are excellent examples of Buddhist ideas fused into classical Chinese artwork. In the latter painting on silk (image and description provided in the link), bald-headed Buddhist Luohan are depicted in a practical setting of washing clothes by a river. However, the painting itself is visually stunning, with the Luohan portrayed in rich detail and bright, opaque colors in contrast to a hazy, brown, and bland wooded environment. Also, the tree tops are shrouded in swirling fog, providing the common "negative space" mentioned above in East Asian Art.
In Japonisme, late 19th century artists like the Impressionists, Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...
and Whistler admired traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e
' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...
artists like Hokusai
Hokusai
was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. He was influenced by such painters as Sesshu, and other styles of Chinese painting...
and Hiroshige
Hiroshige
was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, and one of the last great artists in that tradition. He was also referred to as Andō Hiroshige and by the art name of Ichiyūsai Hiroshige ....
and their work was influenced by it.
Chinese painting
Qin Dynasty
The Qin Dynasty was the first imperial dynasty of China, lasting from 221 to 207 BC. The Qin state derived its name from its heartland of Qin, in modern-day Shaanxi. The strength of the Qin state was greatly increased by the legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the 4th century BC, during the Warring...
(221 - 207 BC) and Han Dynasty
Han Dynasty
The Han Dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin Dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms . It was founded by the rebel leader Liu Bang, known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu of Han. It was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty of the former regent Wang Mang...
(202 BC - 220 AD) was made not as a means in and of itself or for higher personal expression. Rather artwork was created to symbolize and honor funerary rights, representations of mythological deities or spirits of ancestors, etc. Paintings on silk of court officials and domestic scenes could be found during the Han Dynasty, along with scenes of men hunting on horseback or partaking in military parade. There was also painting on three dimensional works of art on figurines and statues, such as the original-painted colors covering the soldier and horse statues of the Terracotta Army
Terracotta Army
The Terracotta Army or the "Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses", is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China...
. During the social and cultural climate of the ancient Eastern Jin Dynasty (316 - 420 AD) based at Nanjing in the south, painting became one of the official pastimes of Confucian-taught bureaucratic officials and aristocrats
Aristocracy (class)
The aristocracy are people considered to be in the highest social class in a society which has or once had a political system of Aristocracy. Aristocrats possess hereditary titles granted by a monarch, which once granted them feudal or legal privileges, or deriving, as in Ancient Greece and India,...
(along with music played by the guqin
Guqin
The guqin is the modern name for a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument of the zither family...
zither, writing fanciful calligraphy
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
, and writing and reciting of poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
). Painting became a common form of artistic self-expression, and during this period painters at court or amongst elite social circuits were judged and ranked by their peers.
Gu Kaizhi
Gu Kaizhi , is a celebrated painter of ancient China. His style name was 'Changkang' . He was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu province and first painted at Nanjing in 364. In 366, he became an officer . Later he was promoted to royal officer . He was also a talented poet and calligrapher...
(344 - 406 AD), one of the most famous artists of Chinese history. Like the elongated scroll scenes of Kaizhi, Tang Dynasty
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
(618 - 907 AD) Chinese artists like Wu Daozi
Wu Daozi
Wu Daozi was a Chinese artist of the Tang Dynasty, famous for initiating new myths in his artwork.The myth follows the creation by Wu Daozi of a mural commissioned by Emperor Xuanzong of Tang China...
painted vivid and highly detailed artwork on long horizontal handscrolls (which were very popular during the Tang), such as his Eighty Seven Celestial People. Painted artwork during the Tang period pertained the effects of an idealized landscape environment, with sparse amount of objects, persons, or activity, as well as monochromatic in nature (example: the murals of Price Yide's tomb in the Qianling Mausoleum). There were also figures such as early Tang-era painter Zhan Ziqian
Zhan Ziqian
Zhan Ziqian was a famous painter of ancient China from Yangxin county , Shandong province. His birth and death dates are unknown...
, who painted superb landscape paintings that were well ahead of his day in portrayal of realism. However, landscape art did not reach greater level of maturity and realism in general until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907 - 960 AD). During this time, there were exceptional landscape painters like Dong Yuan
Dong Yuan
Dong Yuan was a Chinese painter.He was born in Zhongling . Dong Yuan was active in the Southern Tang Kingdom of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period...
(refer to this article for an example of his artwork), and those who painted more vivid and realistic depictions of domestic scenes, like Gu Hongzhong
Gu Hongzhong
Gu Hongzhong was a Chinese painter during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period of Chinese history.Little is known about Gu Hongzhong's life. He was most likely a court painter for the Southern Tang Emperor Li Yu. Gu was active from 943 to 960 C.E. His most well-known work is the Night...
and his Night Revels of Han Xizai.
Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...
(960 - 1279 AD), not only landscape art was improved upon, but portrait painting became more standardized and sophisticated than before (for example, refer to Emperor Huizong of Song), and reached its classical age maturity during the Ming Dynasty
Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
(1368 - 1644 AD). During the late 13th century and first half of the 14th century, Chinese under the Mongol-controlled Yuan Dynasty
Yuan Dynasty
The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...
were not allowed to enter higher posts of government (reserved for Mongols or other ethnic groups from Central Asia), and the Imperial examination
Imperial examination
The Imperial examination was an examination system in Imperial China designed to select the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy. This system had a huge influence on both society and culture in Imperial China and was directly responsible for the creation of a class of...
was ceased for the time being. Many Confucian-educated Chinese who now lacked profession turned to the arts of painting and theatre instead, as the Yuan period became one of the most vibrant and abundant eras for Chinese artwork. An example of such would be Qian Xuan
Qian Xuan
Qian Xuan courtesy name Shun Ju , pseudonyms Yu Tan , Xi Lan Weng , and Zha Chuan Weng was a Chinese painter from Hu Zhou Qian Xuan courtesy name Shun Ju (舜举), pseudonyms Yu Tan (玉潭, "Jade Pool"), Xi Lan Weng (习嬾翁), and Zha Chuan Weng (霅川翁) was a Chinese painter from Hu Zhou Qian Xuan courtesy...
(1235–1305 AD), who was an official of the Song Dynasty, but out of patriotism, refused to serve the Yuan court and dedicated himself to painting. Examples of superb art from this period include the rich and detailed painted murals of the Yongle Palace http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_artqa/2003-09/24/content_39769.htmhttp://www.tcc.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=245&c=55, or "Dachunyang Longevity Palace", of 1262 AD, a UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
World Heritage site. Within the palace, paintings cover an area of more than 1000 square meters, and hold mostly Daoist themes. It was during the Song Dynasty that painters would also gather in social clubs or meetings to discuss their art or others' artwork, the praising of which often led to persuasions to trade and sell precious works of art. However, there were also many harsh critics of others art as well, showing the difference in style and taste amongst different painters. In 1088 AD, the polymath scientist and statesman Shen Kuo
Shen Kuo
Shen Kuo or Shen Gua , style name Cunzhong and pseudonym Mengqi Weng , was a polymathic Chinese scientist and statesman of the Song Dynasty...
once wrote of the artwork of one Li Cheng, who he criticized as follows:
Shan shui
Shan shui refers to a style of Chinese painting that involves or depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more conventional paints. Mountains, rivers and often waterfalls are prominent in this art form.-History:...
style), beginning with the medieval Song Dynasty there were many Chinese painters then and afterwards who depicted scenes of nature that were vividly real. Later Ming Dynasty artists would take after this Song Dynasty emphasis for intricate detail and realism on objects in nature, especially in depictions of animals (such as ducks, swans, sparrows, tigers, etc.) amongst patches of brightly-colored flowers and thickets of brush and wood (a good example would be the anonymous Ming Dynasty painting Birds and Plum Blossoms http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/zoomObject.cfm?ObjectId=4693, housed in the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.). There were many renowned Ming Dynasty artists; Qiu Ying
Qiu Ying
Qiu Ying was a Chinese painter who specialized in the gongbi brush technique.Qiu Ying's courtesy name was Shifu , and his pseudonym was Shizhou . He was born to a peasant family in Taicang and studied painting under Zhou Chen in Suzhou...
is an excellent example of a paramount Ming era painter (famous even in his own day), utilizing in his artwork domestic scenes, bustling palatial scenes, and nature scenes of river valleys and steeped mountains shrouded in mist and swirling clouds. During the Ming Dynasty there were also different and rivaling schools of art associated with painting, such as the Wu School
Wu School
Wu or Wumen School is the term applied to a group of painters of the Southern School during the Ming period of Chinese history. It was not an academy or educational institution, but rather a group united largely by the artistic theories of its members...
and the Zhe School.
Classical Chinese painting continued on into the early modern Qing Dynasty
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
, with highly realistic portrait paintings like seen in the late Ming Dynasty of the early 17th century. The portraits of Kangxi Emperor
Kangxi Emperor
The Kangxi Emperor ; Manchu: elhe taifin hūwangdi ; Mongolian: Энх-Амгалан хаан, 4 May 1654 –20 December 1722) was the fourth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, the first to be born on Chinese soil south of the Pass and the second Qing emperor to rule over China proper, from 1661 to 1722.Kangxi's...
, Yongzheng Emperor
Yongzheng Emperor
The Yongzheng Emperor , born Yinzhen , was the fifth emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty and the third Qing emperor from 1722 to 1735. A hard-working ruler, Yongzheng's main goal was to create an effective government at minimal expense. Like his father, the Kangxi Emperor, Yongzheng used military...
, and Qianlong Emperor
Qianlong Emperor
The Qianlong Emperor was the sixth emperor of the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty, and the fourth Qing emperor to rule over China proper. The fourth son of the Yongzheng Emperor, he reigned officially from 11 October 1735 to 8 February 1796...
are excellent examples of realistic Chinese portrait painting. During the Qianlong reign period and the continuing 19th century, European Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
styles of painting had noticeable influence on Chinese portrait paintings, especially with painted visual effects of lighting and shading. Likewise, East Asian paintings and other works of art (such as porcelain
Porcelain
Porcelain is a ceramic material made by heating raw materials, generally including clay in the form of kaolin, in a kiln to temperatures between and...
and lacquerware) were highly prized in Europe since initial contact in the 16th century.
Japanese painting
Japanese painting (絵画) is one of the oldest and most highly refined of the Japanese arts, encompassing a wide variety on genre and styles. As with the history of Japanese arts in general, the history Japanese painting is a long history of synthesis and competition between native Japanese aestheticsAesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and adaptation of imported ideas. Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e
' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...
, "pictures of the floating world", is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper....
(or woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
s) and painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
s produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, the theatre and pleasure quarters. It is the main artistic genre of woodblock printing in Japan
Woodblock printing in Japan
Woodblock printing in Japan is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre; however, it was also used very widely for printing books in the same period. Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books, long before the advent of movable type, but was only...
. Japanese printmaking especially from the Edo period
Edo period
The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....
exerted enormous influence on Western painting
Western painting
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...
in France during the 19th century.
Indian painting
Indian paintings historically revolved around the religious deities and kings. Indian art is a collective term for several different schools of art that existed in the Indian subcontinentIndian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
. The paintings varied from large frescoes of Ajanta
Ajanta
The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India are 29 rock-cut cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE. The caves include paintings and sculptures considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art as well as frescos which are reminiscent of the Sigiriya...
to the intricate Mughal
Mughal painting
Mughal painting is a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court...
miniature paintings to the metal embellished works from the Tanjore school. The paintings from the Gandhar–Taxila
Taxila
Taxila is a Tehsil in the Rawalpindi District of Punjab province of Pakistan. It is an important archaeological site.Taxila is situated about northwest of Islamabad Capital Territory and Rawalpindi in Panjab; just off the Grand Trunk Road...
are influenced by the Persian works in the west. The eastern style of painting was mostly developed around the Nalanda
Nalanda
Nālandā is the name of an ancient center of higher learning in Bihar, India.The site of Nalanda is located in the Indian state of Bihar, about 55 miles south east of Patna, and was a Buddhist center of learning from the fifth or sixth century CE to 1197 CE. It has been called "one of the...
school of art. The works are mostly inspired by various scenes from Indian mythology
Hindu mythology
Hindu religious literature is the large body of traditional narratives related to Hinduism, notably as contained in Sanskrit literature, such as the Sanskrit epics and the Puranas. As such, it is a subset of Nepali and Indian culture...
.
History
The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of prehistoricPrehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
times, the petroglyph
Petroglyph
Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...
s as found in places like the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, and some of them are older than 5500 BC. Such works continued and after several millennia, in the 7th century, carved pillars of Ajanta
Ajanta
The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India are 29 rock-cut cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE. The caves include paintings and sculptures considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art as well as frescos which are reminiscent of the Sigiriya...
, Maharashtra
Maharashtra
Maharashtra is a state located in India. It is the second most populous after Uttar Pradesh and third largest state by area in India...
state present a fine example of Indian paintings, and the colors, mostly various shades of red and orange, were derived from minerals.
Rock cut architecture
Rock-cut architecture is the practice of creating buildings and other physical structures by carving natural rock. In India the term 'cave' is often applied, and in China 'cavern,' but one must differentiate natural caves from rock-cut architecture which is man-made and designed along the...
cave monuments dating back to the 2nd century BCE and containing paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art and universal pictorial art.
Madhubani painting
Madhubani painting
]]Madhubani painting or Mithila painting is a style of Indian painting, practiced in the Mithila region of Bihar state, India and the adjoining parts of Terai in Nepal. In the present time the main artists include Smt Bharti Dayal ' Ganga devi ' Smt Bua Devi ,late Smt Jagdamba Devi,late Smt Sita...
is a style of Indian painting, practiced in the Mithila region of Bihar state, India. The origins of Madhubani painting are shrouded in antiquity.
Rajput painting
Rajput painting
Rajput painting
Rajput painting, also known as Rajasthani Painting, is a style of Indian painting, evolved and flourished during the 18th century in the royal courts of Rajputana, India, flowing from the style of Mughal painting, itself derived from the Persian miniature. Each Rajput kingdom evolved a distinct...
, a style of Indian painting
Indian painting
Indian painting has a very long history, although the seasonally humid Indian climate was difficult for the long-term preservation of paintings and there are far fewer survivals than of other forms of Indian art. The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of pre-historic times, the...
, evolved and flourished, during the 18th century, in the royal courts of Rajputana
Rajputana
Rājputāna was the pre-1949 name of the present-day Indian state of Rājasthān, the largest state of the Republic of India in terms of area. George Thomas was the first in 1800 A.D., to term this region as Rajputana...
, India. Each Rajput kingdom evolved a distinct style, but with certain common features. Rajput paintings depict a number of themes, events of epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Krishna's life, beautiful landscapes, and humans. Miniatures were the preferred medium of Rajput painting, but several manuscripts also contain Rajput paintings, and paintings were even done on the walls of palaces, inner chambers of the forts, havelies, particularly, the havelis of Shekhawait.
The colors extracted from certain minerals, plant sources, conch shells, and were even derived by processing precious stones, gold and silver were used. The preparation of desired colors was a lengthy process, sometimes taking weeks. Brushes used were very fine.
Mughal painting
Mughal painting
Mughal painting
Mughal painting is a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court...
is a particular style of Indian painting
Indian painting
Indian painting has a very long history, although the seasonally humid Indian climate was difficult for the long-term preservation of paintings and there are far fewer survivals than of other forms of Indian art. The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of pre-historic times, the...
, generally confined to illustrations on the book and done in miniatures, and which emerged, developed and took shape during the period of the Mughal Empire
Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire , or Mogul Empire in traditional English usage, was an imperial power from the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal emperors were descendants of the Timurids...
16th -19th centuries).
Tanjore painting
Tanjore painting
Tanjore painting
Tanjore painting is an important form of classical South Indian painting native to the town of Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, India. The art form dates back to about 1600 AD, a period when the Nayakas of Tanjavur encouraged art—chiefly, classical dance and music—as well as literature, both in Telugu...
is an important form of classical South India
South India
South India is the area encompassing India's states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu as well as the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry, occupying 19.31% of India's area...
n painting native to the town of Tanjore in Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...
. The art form dates back to the early 9th century, a period dominated by the Chola
Chola Dynasty
The Chola dynasty was a Tamil dynasty which was one of the longest-ruling in some parts of southern India. The earliest datable references to this Tamil dynasty are in inscriptions from the 3rd century BC left by Asoka, of Maurya Empire; the dynasty continued to govern over varying territory until...
rulers, who encouraged art and literature. These paintings are known for their elegance, rich colors, and attention to detail. The themes for most of these paintings are Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
Gods and Goddesses and scenes from Hindu mythology
Hindu mythology
Hindu religious literature is the large body of traditional narratives related to Hinduism, notably as contained in Sanskrit literature, such as the Sanskrit epics and the Puranas. As such, it is a subset of Nepali and Indian culture...
. In modern times, these paintings have become a much sought after souvenir during festive occasions in South India.
The process of making a Tanjore painting involves many stages. The first stage involves the making of the preliminary sketch of the image on the base. The base consists of a cloth pasted over a wooden base. Then chalk powder or zinc oxide
Zinc oxide
Zinc oxide is an inorganic compound with the formula ZnO. It is a white powder that is insoluble in water. The powder is widely used as an additive into numerous materials and products including plastics, ceramics, glass, cement, rubber , lubricants, paints, ointments, adhesives, sealants,...
is mixed with water-soluble adhesive
Adhesive
An adhesive, or glue, is a mixture in a liquid or semi-liquid state that adheres or bonds items together. Adhesives may come from either natural or synthetic sources. The types of materials that can be bonded are vast but they are especially useful for bonding thin materials...
and applied on the base. To make the base smoother, a mild abrasive
Abrasive
An abrasive is a material, often a mineral, that is used to shape or finish a workpiece through rubbing which leads to part of the workpiece being worn away...
is sometimes used. After the drawing is made, decoration of the jewellery and the apparels in the image is done with semi-precious stones. Laces or threads are also used to decorate the jewellery. On top of this, the gold foils are pasted. Finally, dyes are used to add colors to the figures in the paintings.
The Madras School
During British rule in India, the crown found that Madras had some of the most talented and intellectual artistic minds in the world. As the British had also established a huge settlement in and around Madras, Georgetown was chosen to establish an institute that would cater to the artistic expectations of the royals in London. This has come to be known as the Madras School
Madras School
The Government College of Fine Arts in Chennai is the oldest art institution in India. The institution was established in 1850 by surgeon Alexander Hunter as a private art school. In 1852, after being taken over by the government, it was renamed as the Government School of Industrial Arts...
. At first traditional artists were employed to produce exquisite varieties of furniture, metal work, and curios and their work was sent to the royal palaces of the Queen.
Unlike the Bengal School where 'copying' is the norm of teaching, the Madras School flourishes on 'creating' new styles, arguments and trends.
The Bengal School
The Bengal School of Art was an influential style of art that flourished in India during the British Raj
British Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
in the early 20th century. It was associated with Indian nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
, but was also promoted and supported by many British arts administrators.
The Bengal School arose as an avant garde and nationalist movement reacting against the academic art
Academic art
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,...
styles previously promoted in India, both by Indian artists such as Raja Ravi Varma
Raja Ravi Varma
Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter from the princely state of Travancore who achieved recognition for his depiction of scenes from the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana...
and in British art schools. Following the widespread influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
, the British art teacher Ernest Binfield Havel
Ernest Binfield Havel
Ernest Binfield Havell , who published under the name E.B. Havell, was an influential English arts administrator, art historian and author of numerous books about Indian art and architecture. He was a member of the Havell family of artists and art educators...
attempted to reform the teaching methods at the Calcutta School of Art by encouraging students to imitate Mughal
Mughal painting
Mughal painting is a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court...
miniatures. This caused immense controversy, leading to a strike by students and complaints from the local press, including from nationalists who considered it to be a retrogressive move. Havel was supported by the artist Abanindranath Tagore
Abanindranath Tagore
Abanindranath Tagore was the principal artist of the Bengal school and the first major exponent of swadeshi values in Indian art. He was also a noted writer, particularly for children...
, a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
. Tagore painted a number of works influenced by Mughal art, a style that he and Havel believed to be expressive of India's distinct spiritual qualities, as opposed to the "materialism" of the West. Tagore's best-known painting, Bharat Mata (Mother India), depicted a young woman, portrayed with four arms in the manner of Hindu deities, holding objects symbolic of India's national aspirations. Tagore later attempted to develop links with Japanese artists as part of an aspiration to construct a pan-Asianist model of art.
The Bengal School's influence in India declined with the spread of modernist ideas in the 1920s. In the post-independence period, Indian artists showed more adaptability as they borrowed freely from european styles and amalgamated them freely with the Indian motifs to new forms of art. While artists like Francis Newton Souza
Francis Newton Souza
Francis Newton Souza , commonly referred to as F. N. Souza, was an Indian artist. He was a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group of Bombay, and was the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West...
and Tyeb Mehta
Tyeb Mehta
Tayyabb Mehta was a noted Indian painter. He was part of the noted Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, which included greats like F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and M.F...
were more western in their approach, there were others like Ganesh Pyne
Ganesh Pyne
Ganesh Pyne is a Calcutta-born Indian artist.- Biographical :Pyne was born in Calcutta in 1937. He was a student at the Government College of Arts & Craft, Calcutta between 1955 and 1959...
and Maqbool Fida Husain who developed thoroughly indigenous styles of work. Today after the process of liberalization of market in India, the artists are experiencing more exposure to the international art-scene which is helping them in emerging with newer forms of art which were hitherto not seen in India. Jitish Kallat
Jitish Kallat
Jitish Kallat is an Indian artist who works in varied media. He was born in 1974 in Mumbai . He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai in 1996....
had shot to fame in the late 90s with his paintings which were both modern and beyond the scope of generic definition. However while artists in India in the new century are trying out new styles, themes and metaphors, it would not have been possible to get such quick recognition without the aid of the business houses which are now entering the art field like they had never before.
Modern Indian painting
Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil , was an eminent Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo, and today considered an important woman painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance; she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India.-Early...
was an Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
, and today considered an important women painter of 20th century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance
Bengal Renaissance
The Bengal Renaissance refers to a social reform movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the region of Bengal in Undivided India during the period of British rule...
; she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India.
Today, she is amongst Nine Masters, whose work was declared as art treasures by The Archaeological Survey of India
Archaeological Survey of India
The Archaeological Survey of India is a department of the Government of India, attached to the Ministry of Culture . The ASI is responsible for archaeological studies and the preservation of archaeological heritage of the country in accordance with the various acts of the Indian Parliament...
, in 1976 and 1979, and over 100 of her paintings are now displayed at National Gallery of Modern Art
National Gallery of Modern Art
The National Gallery of Modern Art is the leading Indian art gallery. The main museum at New Delhi was established on March 29, 1954 by the Government of India, with subsequent branches at Mumbai and Bangalore...
, New Delhi
New Delhi
New Delhi is the capital city of India. It serves as the centre of the Government of India and the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. New Delhi is situated within the metropolis of Delhi. It is one of the nine districts of Delhi Union Territory. The total area of the city is...
.
During the colonial era, Western influences started to make an impact on Indian art. Some artists developed a style that used Western ideas of composition, perspective and realism to illustrate Indian themes. Others, like Jamini Roy
Jamini Roy
-Early life:Jamini Roy was born in 1887 into a middle-class family of land-owners in a village called Beliatore in the District of Bankura in Bengal .When he was sixteen he was sent to study at the Government School of Art in Calcutta...
, consciously drew inspiration from folk art.
By the time of Independence in 1947, several schools of art in India provided access to modern techniques and ideas. Galleries were established to showcase these artists. Modern Indian art typically shows the influence of Western styles, but is often inspired by Indian themes and images. Major artists are beginning to gain international recognition, initially among the Indian diaspora, but also among non-Indian audiences.
The Progressive Artists' Group, established shortly after India became independent in 1947, was intended to establish new ways of expressing India in the post-colonial era. The founders were six eminent artists - K. H. Ara, S. K. Bakre, H. A. Gade, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza
S.H. Raza
Syed Haider Raza Alias S.H. Raza is an eminent Indian artist who has lived and worked in France since 1950, but maintains strong ties with India....
and F. N. Souza
Francis Newton Souza
Francis Newton Souza , commonly referred to as F. N. Souza, was an Indian artist. He was a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group of Bombay, and was the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West...
, though the group was dissolved in 1956, it was profoundly influential in changing the idiom of Indian art. Almost all India's major artists in the 1950s were associated with the group. Some of those who are well-known today are Bal Chabda, Manishi Dey
Manishi Dey
Manishi Dey was an Indian painter of the Bengal school of art. He was born in Dhaka on 22. September 1909 and died 1966 in Kolkata. He was the younger brother of Mukul Dey, a pioneering Indian teacher and engraver....
, Mukul Dey
Mukul Dey
Mukul Chandra Dey was a student of Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan. He is considered as a pioneer of drypoint-etching in India....
, V. S. Gaitonde
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde was regarded as India's foremost abstract artist. He received Padma Shri Award in 1971.-Personal life and education:...
, Ram Kumar
Ram Kumar
Ram Kumar is a contemporary Indian artist who has been described as one of India's foremost abstract painters. Educated as an economist with an M.A. from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, Ram Kumar took classes at the Sharda Ukil School of Art, and then went to Paris and studied further there under...
, Tyeb Mehta
Tyeb Mehta
Tayyabb Mehta was a noted Indian painter. He was part of the noted Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, which included greats like F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza and M.F...
, and Akbar Padamsee
Akbar Padamsee
Akbar Padamsee is a contemporary Indian artist.He received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1951...
. Other famous painters like Jahar Dasgupta
Jahar Dasgupta
Jahar Dasgupta, is senior contemporary painter from India.-Biography:Jahar Dasgupta was born in Jamshedpur in the year 1942. He was admitted to Kalabhavan, Santiniketan in 1959 and took his primary lessons under legendary mentors like Nand Lal Bose, Ramkinkar Baiz and Benode Behari Mukherjee...
, Prokash Karmakar, John Wilkins
John Wilkins (Indian artist)
John Wilkins , was an Indian artist was born on June 20, 1927 at Kolar Gold Fields.-Biography:John Wilkins was one of the leading painters from India which include Tyeb Mehta, S.H. Raza, M.F...
, Narayanan Ramachandran, and Bijon Choudhuri enriched the art culture of India. They have become the icons of modern Indian art. Art historians like Prof. Rai Anand Krishna
Anand Krishna
Rai Anand Krishna is an art historian and museologist, who has not only helped in restoration and chronicling of Indian art but also created a breed of professional art researchers. Scholars from India and abroad have eagerly sought his evaluation of their work...
have also referred to those works of modern artistes that reflect Indian ethos. Geeta Vadhera has had acclaim in translating complex, Indian spiritual themes onto canvas like Sufi thought, the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Geeta.
Indian Art got a boost with the economic liberalization of the country since early 1990s. Artists from various fields now started bringing in varied styles of work. Post liberalization Indian art works not only within the confines of academic traditions but also outside it. Artists have introduced new concepts which have hitherto not been seen in Indian art. Devajyoti Ray
Devajyoti Ray
Devajyoti Ray is an Indian painter and installation artist whose works attained significance in the post-liberalization phase of Indian economy. His works have been exhibited internationally and have been acquired by many art academies...
has introduced a the new genre of art called Pseudorealism
Pseudorealism
Pseudorealism, also spelled pseudo-realism, is a term used in a variety of discourses connoting any artistic and dramatic technique, or work of art, film and literature perceived as superficial, not-real or non-realistic...
. Pseudorealist Art is an original art style that has been developed entirely on the Indian soil. Pseudorealism takes into account the Indian concept of abstraction and uses it to transform regular scenes of Indian life into a fantastic images.
In post-liberalization India, many artists have established themselves in the international art market like the abstract painter Natvar Bhavsar
Natvar Bhavsar
Natvar Bhavsar is an Indian artist, based in Soho, New York City, noted as an abstract expressionist and color field artist. Bhavsar's paintings appear in more than 800 private and public collections, including the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New...
and sculptor Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor CBE RA is a British sculptor of Indian birth. Born in Mumbai , Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice...
whose mammoth postminimalist artworks have acquired attention for their sheer size. Many art houses and galleries have also opened in USA and Europe to showcase Indian artworks.
Philippines
Filipino painting as a whole can be seen as an amalgamation of many cultural influences, though it tends to be more Western in its current form with Eastern roots.Early Filipino painting can be found in red slip (clay mixed with water) designs embellished on the ritual pottery of the Philippines such as the acclaimed Manunggul Jar
Manunggul Jar
The Manunggul Jar is a secondary burial jar excavated from a Neolithic burial site in Manunggul cave of Lipuun dating from 890-710 B.C...
.Evidence of Philippine pottery-making dated as early as 6000 BC has been found in Sanga-sanga Cave, Sulu and Laurente Cave, Cagayan. It has been proven that by 5000 BC, the making of pottery was practiced throughout the country. Early Filipinos started making pottery before their Cambodian neighbors and at about the same time as the Thais as part of what appears to be a widespread Ice Age development of pottery technology.Further evidences of painting are manifested in the tattoo tradition of early Filipinos, whom the Portugese explorer referred to as Pintados or the 'Painted People' of the Visayas. Various designs referencing flora and fauna with heavenly bodies decorate their bodies in various colored pigmentation. Perhaps, some of the most elaborate painting done by early Filipinos that survive to the present day can be manifested among the arts and architecture of the Maranao
Maranao
Maranao is the term used for the people of Lanao, a predominantly Muslim region in the Philippines island of Mindanao. They are famous for their artwork, sophisticated weaving, wood and metal craft, and their epic literature...
who are well known for the Nāga
Naga
Naga or NAGA may refer to:* Nāga, a group of serpent deities in Hindu and Buddhist mythology.-People:* Nayan / Nayar/Nair people of Kerala Society* Naga people, a diverse ethnic identity in Northeast India...
Dragons and the Sarimanok
Sarimanok
The Sarimanok is a legendary bird of the Maranao people who originate from Mindanao, a major island in the Philippines. It comes from the words "sari" and "manok." "Sari" means cloth or garment, which is generally of assorted colors...
carved and painted in the beautiful Panolong of their Torogan or King's House.
Filipinos began creating paintings in the European tradition during 17th century Spanish period. The earliest of these paintings were Church frescoes, religious imagery from Biblical sources, as well as engravings, sculptures and lithographs featuring Christian icons and European nobility. Most of the paintings and sculptures between the 19th, and 20th century produced a mixture of religious, political, and landscape art works, with qualities of sweetness, dark, and light. Early modernist
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
painters such as Damián Domingo was associated with religious, and secular paintings. The art of Juan Luna
Juan Luna
Juan Luna y Novicio was an Ilocano Filipino painter, sculptor and a political activist of the Philippine Revolution during the late 19th century...
and Felix Hidalgo
Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo
Félix Resurrección Hidalgo y Padilla was a Filipino artist. He is acknowledged as one of the great Filipino painters of the late 19th century, and is significant in Philippine history for having been an acquaintance and inspiration for members of the Philippine reform movement which included José...
showed a trend for political statement. Artist such as Fernando Amorsolo
Fernando Amorsolo
Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto is one of the most important artists in the history of painting in the Philippines. Amorsolo was a portraitist and painter of rural Philippine landscapes. He is popularly known for his craftsmanship and mastery in the use of light...
used post-modernism to produce paintings that illustrated Philippine culture, nature and harmony. While other artist such as Fernando Zóbel
Fernando Zobel
Fernando Zóbel de Ayala , is a Filipino businessman, from the prominent Ayala-Zóbel family. Zóbel graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1982. He also completed a program in International Management at INSEAD in France....
used realities and abstract
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
on his work. In early 80s other unique folk artist exist one of these is Elito Circa
Elito Circa
Elito Villaflor Circa , better known as "Amangpintor", is a Filipino painter and was recognized in his hometown as a folk painter...
as amangpintor the famous Filipino folk painter. He uses his own hair to make his paintbrushes, and signs his name with his own blood on the right side of his paintings. He developed his own styles without professional training or guidance from masters.
South-East Asia
Egypt, Greece and Rome
Ancient EgyptAncient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
, a civilization with very strong traditions of architecture and sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
(both originally painted in bright colours) also had many mural paintings in temples and buildings, and painted illustrations on papyrus
Papyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
s. Egyptian wall painting and decorative painting is often graphic, sometimes more symbolic than realistic. Egyptian painting depicts figures in bold outline and flat silhouette
Silhouette
A silhouette is the image of a person, an object or scene consisting of the outline and a basically featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black. Although the art form has been popular since the mid-18th century, the term “silhouette” was seldom used until the early decades...
, in which symmetry is a constant characteristic. Egyptian painting
Art of Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the civilization in the lower Nile Valley from 5000 BC to 300 AD. Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly stylized and symbolic...
has close connection with its written language - called Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
. Painted symbols are found amongst the first forms of written language. The Egyptians also painted on linen
Linen
Linen is a textile made from the fibers of the flax plant, Linum usitatissimum. Linen is labor-intensive to manufacture, but when it is made into garments, it is valued for its exceptional coolness and freshness in hot weather....
, remnants of which survive today. Ancient Egyptian paintings survived due to the extremely dry climate. The ancient Egyptians created paintings to make the afterlife
Afterlife
The afterlife is the belief that a part of, or essence of, or soul of an individual, which carries with it and confers personal identity, survives the death of the body of this world and this lifetime, by natural or supernatural means, in contrast to the belief in eternal...
of the deceased a pleasant place. The themes included journey through the afterworld or their protective deities introducing the deceased to the gods of the underworld. Some examples of such paintings are paintings of the gods and goddesses Ra
Ra
Ra is the ancient Egyptian sun god. By the Fifth Dynasty he had become a major deity in ancient Egyptian religion, identified primarily with the mid-day sun...
, Horus
Horus
Horus is one of the oldest and most significant deities in the Ancient Egyptian religion, who was worshipped from at least the late Predynastic period through to Greco-Roman times. Different forms of Horus are recorded in history and these are treated as distinct gods by Egyptologists...
, Anubis
Anubis
Anubis is the Greek name for a jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion. In the ancient Egyptian language, Anubis is known as Inpu . According to the Akkadian transcription in the Amarna letters, Anubis' name was vocalized as Anapa...
, Nut
Nut (goddess)
In the Ennead of Egyptian mythology, Nut was the goddess of the sky.-Goddess of the sky:...
, Osiris
Osiris
Osiris is an Egyptian god, usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. He is classically depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and...
and Isis
Isis
Isis or in original more likely Aset is a goddess in Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the matron of nature and magic...
. Some tomb paintings show activities that the deceased were involved in when they were alive and wished to carry on doing for eternity. In the New Kingdom
New Kingdom
The New Kingdom of Egypt, also referred to as the Egyptian Empire is the period in ancient Egyptian history between the 16th century BC and the 11th century BC, covering the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties of Egypt....
and later, the Book of the Dead
Book of the Dead
The Book of the Dead is the modern name of an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day". Another translation would be "Book of...
was buried with the entombed person. It was considered important for an introduction to the afterlife.
To the north of Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
was the Minoan civilization
Minoan civilization
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BC to the 15th century BC. It was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of the British archaeologist Arthur Evans...
on the island of Crete
Crete
Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...
. The wall paintings found in the palace of Knossos
Knossos
Knossos , also known as Labyrinth, or Knossos Palace, is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and probably the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization and culture. The palace appears as a maze of workrooms, living spaces, and store rooms close to a central square...
are similar to that of the Egyptians
Egyptians
Egyptians are nation an ethnic group made up of Mediterranean North Africans, the indigenous people of Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population of Egypt is concentrated in the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to...
but much more free in style. Around 1100 B.C., tribes from the north of Greece conquered Greece and the Greek art took a new direction.
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
had great painters, great sculptors (though both endeavours were regarded as mere manual labour at the time), and great architects. The Parthenon
Parthenon
The Parthenon is a temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena, whom the people of Athens considered their virgin patron. Its construction began in 447 BC when the Athenian Empire was at the height of its power. It was completed in 438 BC, although...
is an example of their architecture that has lasted to modern days. Greek marble sculpture is often described as the highest form of Classical
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
art. Painting on pottery of Ancient Greece
Pottery of Ancient Greece
As the result of its relative durability, pottery is a large part of the archaeological record of Ancient Greece, and because there is so much of it it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society...
and ceramics
Ceramics (art)
In art history, ceramics and ceramic art mean art objects such as figures, tiles, and tableware made from clay and other raw materials by the process of pottery. Some ceramic products are regarded as fine art, while others are regarded as decorative, industrial or applied art objects, or as...
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
Apelles
Apelles of Kos was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of this artist rated him superior to preceding and subsequent artists...
, Zeuxis and Parrhasius
Zeuxis and Parrhasius
.Zeuxis was a painter who flourished during the 5th century BC.-Life and work:Zeuxis was born in Heraclea, probably Heraclea Lucania in southern Italy, around 464 BC and was presumably the pupil of Apollodorus. Zeuxis often thought himself misunderstood by his public and Aristotle did not like...
, however no examples of Ancient Greek panel painting survive, only written descriptions by their contemporaries or later Romans. Zeuxis lived in 5-6 BC and was said to be the first to use sfumato
Sfumato
Sfumato is one of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance .The most prominent practitioner of sfumato was Leonardo da Vinci, and his famous painting of the Mona Lisa exhibits the technique. Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or...
. According to Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...
, the realism of his paintings was such that birds tried to eat the painted grapes. Apelles is described as the greatest painter of Antiquity
Classical antiquity
Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...
for perfect technique in drawing, brilliant color and modeling.
Roman art
Roman art
Roman art has the visual arts made in Ancient Rome, and in the territories of the Roman Empire. Major forms of Roman art are architecture, painting, sculpture and mosaic work...
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. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall paintings, many from villas in Campania
Campania
Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...
, in Southern Italy. Such painting can be grouped into 4 main "styles" or periods and may contain the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape. Almost the only painted portraits surviving from the Ancient world are a large number of coffin-portraits
Fayum mummy portraits
Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits is the modern term given to a type of naturalistic painted portraits on wooden boards attached to mummies from the Coptic period. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world...
of bust form found in the Late Antique cemetery of Al-Fayum. 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
Miniature (illuminated manuscript)
The word miniature, derived from the Latin minium, red lead, is a picture in an ancient or medieval illuminated manuscript; the simple decoration of the early codices having been miniated or delineated with that pigment...
from Late Antique illustrated books also survive, and a rather larger number of copies of them from the Early Medieval period.
Middle Ages
The rise of Christianity imparted a different spirit and aim to painting styles. Byzantine artByzantine art
Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Byzantine Empire from about the 5th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453....
, once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditional iconography
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
and style, and has changed relatively little through the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
and the continuing traditions of Greek and Russian Orthodox icon
Icon
An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...
-painting. Byzantine painting has a particularly hieratic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a reflection of the divine. There were also many wall-paintings in fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...
, but fewer of these have survived than Byzantine mosaics. In general Byzantium art borders on abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
, in its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. However there are periods, especially in the so-called Macedonian art of around the 10th century, when Byzantine art became more flexible in approach.
Insular art
Insular art, also known as Hiberno-Saxon art, is the style of art produced in the post-Roman history of Ireland and Great Britain. The term derives from insula, the Latin term for "island"; in this period Britain and Ireland shared a largely common style different from that of the rest of Europe...
of the British Isles, where the only surviving examples (and quite likely the only medium in which painting was used) are miniatures in Illuminated manuscript
Illuminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...
s such as the Book of Kells
Book of Kells
The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier...
. These are most famous for their abstract decoration, although figures, and sometimes scenes, were also depicted, especially in Evangelist portrait
Evangelist portrait
Evangelist portraits are a specific type of miniature included in ancient and mediæval illuminated manuscript Gospel Books, and later in Bibles and other books, as well as other media. Each Gospel of the Four Evangelists, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, may be prefaced by a portrait of...
s. Carolingian
Carolingian art
Carolingian art comes from the Frankish Empire in the period of roughly 120 years from about AD 780 to 900 — during the reign of Charlemagne and his immediate heirs — popularly known as the Carolingian Renaissance. The art was produced by and for the court circle and a group of...
and Ottonian art
Ottonian art
In pre-romanesque Germany, the prevailing style was what has come to be known as Ottonian art. With Ottonian architecture, it is a key component of the Ottonian Renaissance named for the emperors Otto I, Otto II, and Otto III...
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
Romanesque architecture
Romanesque architecture is an architectural style of Medieval Europe characterised by semi-circular arches. There is no consensus for the beginning date of the Romanesque architecture, with proposals ranging from the 6th to the 10th century. It developed in the 12th century into the Gothic style,...
and Gothic
Gothic art
Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...
churches were decorated with fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...
es 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 manuscript
Illuminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniature illustrations...
s survive from the period, showing the same characteristics, which continue into the Gothic period
Gothic art
Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that developed in France out of Romanesque art in the mid-12th century, led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, but took over art more completely north of the Alps, never quite effacing more classical...
.
Panel painting becomes more common during the Romanesque
Romanesque art
Romanesque art refers to the art of Western Europe from approximately 1000 AD to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century, or later, depending on region. The preceding period is increasingly known as the Pre-Romanesque...
period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons. Towards the middle of the 13th century, Medieval art
Medieval art
The medieval art of the Western world covers a vast scope of time and place, over 1000 years of art history in Europe, and at times the Middle East and North Africa...
and Gothic painting became more realistic, with the beginnings of interest in the depiction of volume and perspective
Perspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...
in Italy with Cimabue
Cimabue
Cimabue , also known as Bencivieni di Pepo or in modern Italian, Benvenuto di Giuseppe, was an Italian painter and creator of mosaics from Florence....
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
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
become a staple in decoration. One of the most famous examples of this is found in the cathedral
Cathedral
A cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop...
of Notre Dame de Paris
Notre Dame de Paris
Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of...
. By the 14th century Western societies were both richer and more cultivated and painters found new patrons in the nobility and even the bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...
. 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
Tempera
Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigment mixed with a water-soluble binder medium . Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium. Tempera paintings are very long lasting, and examples from the 1st centuries AD still exist...
panel paintings and altarpieces gained importance.
Renaissance and Mannerism
The RenaissanceRenaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
is said by many to be the golden age
Golden Age (metaphor)
A golden age is a period in a field of endeavour when great tasks were accomplished. The term originated from early Greek and Roman poets who used to refer to a time when mankind lived in a better time and was pure .-Golden Age in society:...
of painting. Roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th century. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello , born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and a mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artists wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his...
, Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico , born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter described by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent"...
, Masaccio
Masaccio
Masaccio , born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense...
, Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...
, Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...
, Filippo Lippi
Filippo Lippi
Fra' Filippo Lippi , also called Lippo Lippi, was an Italian painter of the Italian Quattrocento .-Biography and works:...
, Giorgione
Giorgione
Giorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
, Tintoretto
Tintoretto
Tintoretto , real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso...
, Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance...
, Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
, Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it...
, and Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective
Perspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...
, the study of human anatomy
Human anatomy
Human anatomy is primarily the scientific study of the morphology of the human body. Anatomy is subdivided into gross anatomy and microscopic anatomy. Gross anatomy is the study of anatomical structures that can be seen by the naked eye...
and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques.
Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the Renaissance such as Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein the Younger
Hans Holbein the Younger was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art, satire and Reformation propaganda, and made a significant contribution to the history...
, Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...
, Lucas Cranach
Lucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach the Elder , was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving...
, Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald
Matthias Grünewald or "Mathis" , "Gothart" or "Neithardt" , , was a German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century.Only ten paintings—several consisting...
, Hieronymous Bosch, and Pieter Brueghel
Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a Flemish renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes . He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but he is also the one generally meant when the context does...
represent a different approach from their Italian colleagues, one that is more realistic and less idealized. Genre painting became a popular idiom amongst such Northern painters as Pieter Brueghel. A new verisimilitude
Verisimilitude
Verisimilitude is the quality of realism in something .-Competing ideas:The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory...
in depicting reality became possible with the adoption of oil painting
Oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
, whose invention was traditionally, but erroneously, credited to Jan Van Eyck
Jan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century....
(an important transitional figure who bridges painting in the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
with painting of the early Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
). Unlike the Italians whose work drew heavily from the art of ancient Greece and Rome, the northerners retained a stylistic residue of the sculpture and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. These tendencies are also see in the art of Tudor England
Artists of the Tudor court
The artists of the Tudor court are the painters and limners engaged by the monarchs of England's Tudor dynasty and their courtiers between 1485 and 1603, from the reign of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I....
, which was heavily influenced by Protestant refugees from the Low Countries
Low Countries
The Low Countries are the historical lands around the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, including the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany....
.
Renaissance painting reflects the revolution of ideas and science (astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
, geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
) that occur in this period, the Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
, and the invention of the printing press
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
. Dürer, considered one of the greatest of printmakers, states that painters are not mere artisan
Artisan
An artisan is a skilled manual worker who makes items that may be functional or strictly decorative, including furniture, clothing, jewellery, household items, and tools...
s but thinkers
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
as well. With the development of easel
Easel
An easel is an upright support used for displaying and/or fixing something resting upon it.-Etymology:The word is an old Germanic synonym for donkey...
painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture. 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.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, panel painting
Panel painting
A panel painting is a painting made on a flat panel made of wood, either a single piece, or a number of pieces joined together. Until canvas became the more popular support medium in the 16th century, it was the normal form of support for a painting not on a wall or vellum, which was used for...
s which could be hung on walls and moved around at will, became increasingly popular for both churches and private houses, rather than fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...
wall-paintings or paintings incorporated into on permanent structures, such as altarpiece
Altarpiece
An altarpiece is a picture or relief representing a religious subject and suspended in a frame behind the altar of a church. The altarpiece is often made up of two or more separate panels created using a technique known as panel painting. It is then called a diptych, triptych or polyptych for two,...
s. The High Renaissance
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
gave rise to a stylized art known as Mannerism
Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...
. 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
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...
and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo
Pontormo
Jacopo Carucci , usually known as Jacopo da Pontormo, Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo, was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine school. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine...
and the emotional intensity of El Greco
El Greco
El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...
. Some decades later Northern Mannerism
Northern Mannerism
Northern Mannerism is the term in European art history for the versions of Mannerism practiced in the visual arts north of the Alps in the 16th and early 17th century...
dominated Netherlandish and German art until the arrival of the Baroque.
Baroque and Rococo
Baroque painting is associated with the BaroqueBaroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
cultural movement
Cultural movement
A cultural movement is a change in the way a number of different disciplines approach their work. This embodies all art forms, the sciences, and philosophies. Historically, different nations or regions of the world have gone through their own independent sequence of movements in culture, but as...
, a movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival; 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 1600 and continuing throughout the 17th century, painting is characterized as Baroque. Among the greatest painters of the Baroque are Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...
, Rembrandt, Frans Hals
Frans Hals
Frans Hals was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He is notable for his loose painterly brushwork, and helped introduce this lively style of painting into Dutch art. Hals was also instrumental in the evolution of 17th century group portraiture.-Biography:Hals was born in 1580 or 1581, in Antwerp...
, Rubens, Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
, Poussin
Nicolas Poussin
Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...
, and Jan Vermeer. Caravaggio is an heir of the humanist
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
painting of the High Renaissance
High Renaissance
The expression High Renaissance, in art history, is a periodizing convention used to denote the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance...
. His realistic
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
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
Le Nain
The three Le Nain brothers were painters in 17th-century France: Antoine Le Nain , Louis Le Nain , and Mathieu Le Nain...
and La Tour
Georges de La Tour
Georges de La Tour was a French Baroque painter, who spent most of his working life in the Duchy of Lorraine, which was temporarily absorbed into France between 1641 and 1648...
.
During the 18th century, Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
followed as a lighter extension of Baroque, often frivolous and erotic. Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
developed first in the decorative arts and interior design in France. Louis XV
Louis XV of France
Louis XV was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, his first cousin Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, served as Regent of the kingdom until Louis's majority in 1723...
's succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion. The 1730s represented the height of Rococo development in France exemplified by the works of Antoine Watteau
Antoine Watteau
Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement...
and François Boucher
François Boucher
François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
. 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
Bohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
, 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
Frederician Rococo
Frederician Rococo is a form of rococo, which developed in Prussia during the reign of Frederick the Great and combined influences from both France and the Netherlands. Its most famous adherent was the architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. Furthermore, the painter Antoine Pesne and even...
developed in the Kingdom of Prussia
Kingdom of Prussia
The Kingdom of Prussia was a German kingdom from 1701 to 1918. Until the defeat of Germany in World War I, it comprised almost two-thirds of the area of the German Empire...
.
The French masters Watteau, Boucher
François Boucher
François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
and Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings , of which only five...
represent the style, as do Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , also known as Gianbattista or Giambattista Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice...
and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was an 18th-century French painter. He is considered a master of still life, and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities...
who was considered by some as the best French painter of the 18th century - the Anti-Rococo. Portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
ure was an important component of painting in all countries, but especially in England, where the leaders were William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
, in a blunt realist style, and Francis Hayman
Francis Hayman
Francis Hayman was an English painter and illustrator who became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768 and later its first librarian....
, Angelica Kauffman (who was Swiss), Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter.-Suffolk:Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. He was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woolen goods. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his penciling skills so that he let...
and Joshua Reynolds
Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy...
in more flattering styles influenced by Antony Van Dyck. While in France during the Rococo era Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter.-Early life:He was born at Tournus, Saône-et-Loire. He is generally said to have formed his own talent; this is, however, true only in the most limited sense, for at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a...
(the favorite painter of Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
), Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Maurice Quentin de La Tour
Maurice Quentin de La Tour was a French Rococo portraitist who worked primarily with pastels. Among his most famous subjects were Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour.-Biography:...
, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun were highly accomplished Portrait painters
Portrait painting
Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject. Beside human beings, animals, pets and even inanimate objects can be chosen as the subject for a portrait...
and History painters
History painting
History painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...
.
William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) 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
Classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...
). The beginning of the end for Rococo came in the early 1760s as figures like Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
and Jacques-François Blondel
Jacques-François Blondel
Jacques-François Blondel was a French architect. He was the grandson of François Blondel , whose course of architecture had appeared in four volumes in 1683 -Biography:...
began to voice their criticism of the superficiality and degeneracy of the art. Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors.http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/sammlung6/allg/buch.xml?docname=blondel1737 By 1785, Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness of Neoclassical
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
artists like Jacques Louis David.
19th century: Neo-classicism, History painting, Romanticism, Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Symbolism
After RococoRococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
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
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...
. Ingres' work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterize Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
.
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
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
philosophy (see Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
and Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
) within this conception that opposes Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
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
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
is in contradiction to Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
and Renaissance ideals where mankind was above all things and owned his fate. This thinking led romantic artists to depict the sublime
Sublimation (psychology)
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defence mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour, possibly converting the initial impulse in the long term...
, ruined churches, shipwrecks, massacres and madness.
By the mid-19th 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.M.W. Turner. Romantic painters turned landscape painting into a major genre, considered until then as a minor genre or as a decorative background for figure compositions.
Some of the major painters of this period are Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
, Théodore Géricault
Théodore Géricault
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings...
, J. M. W. Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
, Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning...
and John Constable
John Constable
John Constable was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection...
. Francisco de Goya's late work demonstrates the Romantic interest in the irrational, while the work of Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss symbolist painter.-Life and art:He was born at Basel. His father, Christian Frederick Böcklin , was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade. His mother, Ursula Lippe, was a native of the same city...
evokes mystery and the paintings of Aesthetic movement artist James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
evoke both sophistication and decadence
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
. In the United States the Romantic tradition of landscape painting was known as the Hudson River School
Hudson River school
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism...
: exponents include Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...
, Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...
, Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...
, Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran
Thomas Moran from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist...
, and John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett
John Frederick Kensett was an American artist and engraver. He attended school at Cheshire Academy, and studied engraving with his immigrant father, Thomas Kensett, and later with his uncle, Alfred Dagget...
. Luminism
Luminism (American art style)
Luminism is an American landscape painting style of the 1850s – 1870s, characterized by effects of light in landscapes, through using aerial perspective, and concealing visible brushstrokes...
was a movement in American landscape painting related to the Hudson River School
Hudson River school
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism...
.
The leading Barbizon School
Barbizon school
The Barbizon school of painters were part of a movement towards realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870...
painter Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century...
painted in both a romantic and a realistic
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
vein; his work prefigures Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
, as does the paintings of Eugène Boudin
Eugène Boudin
Eugène Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors.Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores...
who was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was also an important influence on the young Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
, whom in 1857 he introduced to Plein air painting. A major force in the turn towards Realism
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
at mid-century was Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...
. In the latter third of the century Impressionists like Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
, Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...
, Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...
, Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life, in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air...
, Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.In 1864, she exhibited for the first...
, Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
, and Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
worked in a more direct approach than had previously been exhibited publicly. 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
Water Lilies
Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet . The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years of his life...
painted in Giverny
Giverny
Giverny is a commune in the Eure department in north-western France. It is best known as the location of Claude Monet's garden and home.-Location:Giverny sits on the "right bank" of the River Seine where the river Epte meets the Seine...
.
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and Post-Impressionism...
. Slightly younger Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
, Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
, and Georges Seurat, along with Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
led art to the edge of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
; for Gauguin Impressionism gave way to a personal symbolism; Seurat transformed Impressionism's broken color into a scientific optical study, structured on frieze-like
compositions; Van Gogh's turbulent method of paint application, coupled with a sonorous use of color, predicted Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
and Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
, and Cézanne, desiring to unite classical composition with a revolutionary abstraction of natural forms, would come to be seen as a precursor of 20th century art.
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
Childe Hassam
Frederick Childe Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums...
, John Twachtman, and Theodore Robinson
Theodore Robinson
Theodore Robinson was an American painter best known for his impressionist landscapes. He was one of the first American artists to take up impressionism in the late 1880s, visiting Giverny and developing a close friendship with Claude Monet...
. It also exerted influence on painters who were not primarily Impressionistic in theory, like the portrait and landscape painter John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...
. 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
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
, the Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
, and the landscapes and seascapes of Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art....
, 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
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality...
and Ralph Albert Blakelock
Ralph Albert Blakelock
Ralph Albert Blakelock was a romanticist painter from the United States.-Biography:Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847. His father was a successful physician. Blakelock initially set out to follow in his footsteps, and in 1864 began studies at the Free Academy of the...
.
In the late 19th century there also were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
whose works resonated with younger artists of the 20th century, especially with the Fauvists
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
and the Surrealists
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. Among them were Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists.- Biography :Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie...
, Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon
Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...
, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter, who became the president and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and whose work influenced many other artists.-Life:...
, Henri Fantin-Latour
Henri Fantin-Latour
Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.-Biography:...
, Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss symbolist painter.-Life and art:He was born at Basel. His father, Christian Frederick Böcklin , was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade. His mother, Ursula Lippe, was a native of the same city...
, Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
, Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops
Félicien Rops was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.-Early life:Rops was born in Namur as the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile. He was educated at the University of Brussels...
, and Jan Toorop
Jan Toorop
Jean Theodoor Toorop , better known as Jan Toorop, was an Indo painter, whose works straddle the space between the Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.-Biography:...
, and Gustave Klimt amongst others including the Russian Symbolists
Russian Symbolism
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...
like Mikhail Vrubel
Mikhail Vrubel
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel is usually regarded amongst the Russian painters of the Symbolist movement. In reality, he deliberately stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought in Late Byzantine and Early Renaissance painting.-Early...
.
Symbolist painters
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
mined mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
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
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
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
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
movement and Les Nabis
Les Nabis
Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian in Paris in the...
. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today; Bernard Delvaille has described René Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
's surrealism as "Symbolism plus Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
".
20th century Modern and Contemporary
The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri MatisseHenri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
and several other young artists revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
. Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
made his first cubist
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube
Cube
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and...
, sphere
Sphere
A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space, such as the shape of a round ball. Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface lying the same distance r from the center point...
and cone
Cone (geometry)
A cone is an n-dimensional geometric shape that tapers smoothly from a base to a point called the apex or vertex. Formally, it is the solid figure formed by the locus of all straight line segments that join the apex to the base...
.
Pioneers of the 20th century
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
, Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy[p] was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics and textiles, as well as decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events...
and Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.-Life:Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris to a family...
revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
- (as seen in the gallery above). Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
's second version of The Dance
The Dance (painting)
The Dance are two related paintings made by Henri Matisse between 1909 and 1910. The first, preliminary version is Matisse's study for the second version...
signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflects Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism
Hedonism
Hedonism is a school of thought which argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure .-Etymology:The name derives from the Greek word for "delight" ....
. Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
made his first cubist
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube
Cube
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and...
, sphere
Sphere
A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space, such as the shape of a round ball. Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface lying the same distance r from the center point...
and cone
Cone (geometry)
A cone is an n-dimensional geometric shape that tapers smoothly from a base to a point called the apex or vertex. Formally, it is the solid figure formed by the locus of all straight line segments that join the apex to the base...
. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
He followed his success by developing into his Rose period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work...
1907, (see gallery) 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
African tribal masks
Ritual and ceremonial masks are an essential feature of the traditional culture and art of the peoples of Subsaharan and West Africa. While the specific implications associated to ritual masks widely vary in different cultures, some traits are common to most African cultures: for example, masks...
and his own new Cubist inventions. analytic Cubism (see gallery) was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, (seen above) from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
, Juan Gris
Juan Gris
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...
, Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes , was a French painter. Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop...
, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
and countless other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
elements, papier collé
Papier collé
Papier collé is a painting technique and type of collage. With papier collé the artist pastes pieces of flat material into a painting in much in the same way as a collage, except the shape of the pasted pieces are objects themselves...
and a large variety of merged subject matter.
Louis Vauxcelles
Louis Vauxcelles was an influential French art critic. He is credited with coining the terms Fauvism , and Cubism ....
. Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
was a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century artists whose works emphasized painterly
Painterly
Painterliness is a translation of the German term , a word popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in order to help focus, enrich and standardize the terms being used by art historians of his time to characterize works of art...
qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. Fauvists made the subject of the painting easy to read, exaggerated perspectives and an interesting prescient prediction of the Fauves was expressed in 1888 by Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
to Paul Sérusier
Paul Sérusier
Paul Sérusier was a French painter who was a pioneer of abstract art and an inspiration for the avant-garde Nabi movement, Synthetism and Cloisonnism.- Education :...
,
"How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine
Ultramarine
Ultramarine is a blue pigment consisting primarily of a double silicate of aluminium and sodium with some sulfides or sulfates, and occurring in nature as a proximate component of lapis lazuli...
; these red leaves? Put in vermilion
Vermilion
Vermilion is an opaque orangish red pigment, similar to scarlet. As a naturally occurring mineral pigment, it is known as cinnabar, and was in use around the world before the Common Era began. Most naturally produced vermilion comes from cinnabar mined in China, and vermilion is nowadays commonly...
."
The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
and André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
— friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso's yin in the 20th century. Fauvist painters included Albert Marquet
Albert Marquet
Albert Marquet was a French painter, associated with the Fauvist movement.-Life and work:Marquet was born in 1875 at Bordeaux. In 1890 he moved to Paris to attend the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, where he met Henri Matisse. They were roommates for a time, and they influenced each other's work...
, Charles Camoin
Charles Camoin
Charles Camoin[p] was a French painter associated with the Fauves.Born in Marseille, France, Camoin met Henri Matisse in Gustave Moreau's class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris...
, Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.-Life:Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris to a family...
, Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy[p] was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics and textiles, as well as decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events...
, Othon Friesz
Othon Friesz
Achille-Émile Othon Friesz who later called himself just Othon Friesz , a native of Le Havre, was a French artist of the Fauvist movement....
, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen
Kees van Dongen
Cornelis Theodorus Maria van Dongen , usually known as Kees van Dongen or just Van Dongen, was a Dutch painter and one of the Fauves. He gained a reputation for his sensuous, at times garish, portraits....
, and Picasso's partner in Cubism, Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
amongst others.
Fauvism, as a movement, had no concrete theories, and was short lived, beginning in 1905 and ending in 1907, they only had three exhibitions. 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 1905 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. In 1906 at the suggestion of his dealer Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard is regarded as one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century...
, André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
went to London and produced a series of paintings like Charing Cross Bridge, London (above) in the Fauvist
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
style, paraphrasing the famous series by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
. Masters like Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
and Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:...
continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement throughout the 20th century.
By 1907 Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, soon it was replaced by Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
on the critics' radar screen as the latest new development in Contemporary Art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
of the time.
In 1907 Appolinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
, 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."
Analytic cubism (see gallery) was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
, Juan Gris
Juan Gris
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...
, Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes , was a French painter. Born Albert Léon Gleizes and raised in Paris, he was the son of a fabric designer who ran a large industrial design workshop...
, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
and countless other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
elements, papier collé
Papier collé
Papier collé is a painting technique and type of collage. With papier collé the artist pastes pieces of flat material into a painting in much in the same way as a collage, except the shape of the pasted pieces are objects themselves...
and a large variety of merged subject matter.
During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
, several movements emerged in Paris. Giorgio De Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
moved to Paris in July 1911, where he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter known as Alberto Savinio
Alberto Savinio
Alberto Savinio, real name Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico was an Italian writer, painter, musician, journalist, essayist, playwright, set designer and composer. He was the younger brother of 'metaphysical' painter Giorgio De Chirico...
). 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: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
and Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
and several others. His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. (see gallery) During the first half of the 20th century in Europe masters like Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
, and Giorgio De Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
continued painting independent of any movement.
Pioneers of Modern art
In the first two decades of the 20th century and after CubismCubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
, several other important movements emerged; futurism
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
(Balla
Giacomo Balla
Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter.-Biography:Born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist, as a child Giacomo Balla studied music....
), abstract art
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
(Kandinsky), Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and...
), Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
, (Kandinsky) and (Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
), Orphism
Orphism (art)
Orphism or Orphic Cubism , the term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was a little known art movement during the time of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors influenced by Fauvism and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul...
, (Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...
and František Kupka
František Kupka
František Kupka was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic cubism...
), Synchromism
Synchromism
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their abstract "synchromies", based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art...
(Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell was a U.S. abstract painter. He was born and raised in New York City in 1886. He was, along with artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the founder of Synchromism an important modernist movement in early 20th century art.-Biography:Initially he studied architecture and after 1903 he...
), De Stijl
De Stijl
De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
(Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
), Suprematism
Suprematism
Suprematism was an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms which formed in Russia in 1915-1916. It was not until later that suprematism received conventional museum preparations...
(Malevich), Constructivism
Constructivism (art)
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...
(Tatlin), Dadaism (Duchamp, Picabia, Arp
Jean Arp
Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper....
) and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
(De Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
, André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
, Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
, Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
, Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
). Modern painting influenced all the visual arts, from Modernist architecture and design, to avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
film, theatre and modern dance
Modern dance
Modern dance is a dance form developed in the early 20th century. Although the term Modern dance has also been applied to a category of 20th Century ballroom dances, Modern dance as a term usually refers to 20th century concert dance.-Intro:...
and became an experimental laboratory for the expression of visual experience, from photography and concrete poetry
Concrete poetry
Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on....
to advertising art and fashion. Van Gogh's painting exerted great influence upon 20th century Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
, as can be seen in the work of the Fauves
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
, Die Brücke
Die Brücke
Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller...
(a group led by German painter Ernst Kirchner), and the Expressionism of Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
, Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity, and the many self-portraits the artist produced...
, Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
, Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
, Chaim Soutine
Chaim Soutine
Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris....
and others..
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, one of the most famous 20th-century artists is generally considered the first important painter of modern
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
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
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...
was a French artist who is associated with Orphism
Orphism (art)
Orphism or Orphic Cubism , the term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was a little known art movement during the time of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors influenced by Fauvism and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul...
, (reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism). His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
. 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
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
, Delaunay and his wife the artist Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay was a Jewish-French artist who, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design...
, joined The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and...
), a Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
-based group of abstract artists, in 1911, 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 1917, and after pressure from the Stalinist regime in 1924 returned to painting imagery and Peasants and Workers in the field, and Swiss painter Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
whose masterful color experiments made him an important pioneer of abstract painting at the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
. Still other important pioneers of abstract painting include the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. She belonged to a group called 'The Five' and the paintings or diagrams were a visual representation of complex philosophical ideas.- Early life :...
, Czech painter František Kupka
František Kupka
František Kupka was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic cubism...
as well as American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell
Morgan Russell was a U.S. abstract painter. He was born and raised in New York City in 1886. He was, along with artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the founder of Synchromism an important modernist movement in early 20th century art.-Biography:Initially he studied architecture and after 1903 he...
who, in 1912, founded Synchromism
Synchromism
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their abstract "synchromies", based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art...
, an art movement that closely resembles Orphism
Orphism (art)
Orphism or Orphic Cubism , the term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, was a little known art movement during the time of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors influenced by Fauvism and the dye chemist Eugène Chevreul...
.
Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
and Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
are broad rubrics that describes 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. Expressionism was painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria. Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
, Die Brücke
Die Brücke
Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller...
, and Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and...
are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters.
Artists as interesting and diverse as Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
, whose painting I and the Village
I and the Village
I and the Village is a 1911 painting by the Russian-French artist Marc Chagall. It is currently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.The work contains many soft, dreamlike images overlapping each other in a...
, (above) tells an autobiographical story that examines the relationship between the artist and his origins, with a lexicon of artistic Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...
, Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity, and the many self-portraits the artist produced...
, Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
, Emil Nolde
Emil Nolde
Emil Nolde was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great oil painting and watercolour painters of the 20th century. He is known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors...
, Chaim Soutine
Chaim Soutine
Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris....
, James Ensor
James Ensor
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life...
, Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes.-Biography:...
, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a...
, Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
, Franz Marc
Franz Marc
Franz Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement...
, Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, Georges Rouault
Georges Rouault
Georges Henri Rouault[p] was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter, and printmaker in lithography and etching.-Childhood and education:Rouault was born in Paris into a poor family...
, Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
and some of the Americans abroad like Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...
, and Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.
Pioneers of abstraction
Piet MondrianPiet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
's art was also related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908 he became interested in the theosophical
Theosophy
Theosophy, in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy developed since the late 19th century. Its major themes were originally described mainly by Helena Blavatsky , co-founder of the Theosophical Society...
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
De Stijl
De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. The term De Stijl
De Stijl
De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 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
Theo van Doesburg
Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl.-Biography:-Early life:...
propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
, Vilmos Huszár
Vilmos Huszàr
Vilmos Huszár was a Hungarian painter and designer. He lived in The Netherlands, where he was one of the founder members of the art movement De Stijl....
, and Bart van der Leck
Bart van der Leck
Bart van der Leck was a Dutch painter, designer, and ceramacist. With Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian he founded the De Stijl art movement....
, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld
Gerrit Rietveld
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was a Dutch furniture designer and architect. One of the principal members of the Dutch artistic movement called De Stijl, Rietveld is famous for his Red and Blue Chair and for the Rietveld Schröder House, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.-Biography:Rietveld was born in...
, Robert van 't Hoff
Robert van 't Hoff
Robert van 't Hoff , born Robbert van 't Hoff, was a Dutch architect and furniture designer. His Villa Henny, designed in 1914, was one of the earliest modernist houses and one of the first to be built out of reinforced concrete...
, and J.J.P. Oud. The artistic philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
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 utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
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
Primary Colors
Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics is a roman à clef, a work of fiction that purports to describe real life characters and events — namely, Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992...
along with black and white. Indeed, according to the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
's online article on neoplasticism, Mondrian himself sets forth these delimitations in his essay 'Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art'. He writes, "... this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. 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." The Tate article further summarizes that this art allows "only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line." The Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
's online article on De Stijl summarizes these traits in similar terms: "It [De Stijl] was posited on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines."
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
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
M.H.J. Schoenmaekers. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
style and the international style
International style (architecture)
The International style is a major architectural style that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the formative decades of Modern architecture. The term originated from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style...
of architecture as well as clothing and interior design
Interior design
Interior design describes a group of various yet related projects that involve turning an interior space into an effective setting for the range of human activities are to take place there. An interior designer is someone who conducts such projects...
. 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.
Dada and Surrealism
Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, came to international prominence in the wake of his notorious success at the New York City Armory Show
Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...
in 1913, (soon after he denounced artmaking for chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...
). After Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase became the international cause celebre at the 1913 Armory show in New York he created the The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even , most often called The Large Glass , is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp....
, Large Glass (see above). 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
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement that began in neutral Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. 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
Anti-art
Anti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...
cultural works. Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.- Early life :...
(see above), Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
, Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
, Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
, Hans Richter
Hans Richter (artist)
Hans Richter was a painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.-Germany:...
, Jean Arp
Jean Arp
Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper....
, Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter and sculptor. Born in Davos, Switzerland, Sophie Täuber began her art studies in her homeland, at the School of Applied Arts in St. Gallen...
, along with Duchamp and many others are associated with the Dadaist movement. Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the 1920s and 1930s.
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
published the Surrealist Manifesto
Surrealist Manifesto
Two Surrealist Manifestos were issued by the Surrealist movement, in 1924 and 1929. The first was written by André Breton, the second was supervised by him. Breton drafted a third Surrealist manifesto which was never issued.-First manifesto:...
. The Surrealist movement in painting became synonymous with the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
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
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
movement through 1919 in Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
art. Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.-Biography:Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin...
, René Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
and Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
are particularly known for their realistic depictions of dream imagery and fantastic manifestations of the imagination. Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
's The Tilled Field of 1923-1924 verges on abstraction, this early painting of a complex of objects and figures, and arrangements of sexually active characters; was Miro's first Surrealist masterpiece. The more abstract Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
, Jean Arp
Jean Arp
Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper....
, André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...
, and Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s.
British Surrealist Group
The British Surrealist Group was involved in the organisation of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.The London Bulletin was published by the Surrealist Group in England, according to the June 1940 edition , edited by E. L. T...
and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition
London International Surrealist Exhibition
The International Surrealist Exhibition was held from 11 June to 4 July 1936 at the New Burlington Galleries in London, England.The exhibition was organised by:* Hugh Sykes Davies* David Gascoyne* Humphrey Jennings* Rupert Lee* Diana Brinton Lee...
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.
Dalí and Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
created some of the most widely recognized images of the movement. The 1928/1929 painting This Is Not A Pipe, by Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
is the subject of a Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
1973 book, This is not a Pipe (English edition, 1991), that discusses the painting and its paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.
Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, and perception, sometimes evoking empathy from the viewer, sometimes laughter and sometimes outrage and bewilderment.
1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: in one example (see gallery above) liquid shapes become the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí, and is one of his most recognizable works. The painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1934...
, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting. 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
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality."
Max Ernst whose 1920 painting Murdering Airplane, studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. His paintings may have been inspired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
'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.
During the 1920s André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...
's work was enormously influential in helping the newly arrived in Paris and young artist Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
find his roots in the new Surrealist painting. Miró acknowledged in letters to his dealer Pierre Matisse
Pierre Matisse
Pierre Matisse was an art dealer active in New York City. He was the youngest child of French painter Henri Matisse.-Background and early years:...
the importance of Masson as an example to him in his early years in Paris.
Long after personal, political and professional tensions have fragmented the Surrealist group into thin air and ether, Magritte, Miro, Dalí and the other Surrealists continue to define a visual program in the arts. Other prominent surrealist artists include Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
, Méret Oppenheim
Méret Oppenheim
-External links:**** http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/man_ray.html...
, Toyen
Toyen
Marie Čermínová , known as Toyen, was a Czech painter, draftsperson and illustrator and a member of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
, Grégoire Michonze
Grégoire Michonze
Grégoire Michonze was a Russian-French painter, born in 1902 in Kishinev , Russia Grégoire Michonze (1902–1982) (variant name Grégoire Michonznic, Grogórij Mišónznik) was a Russian-French painter, born in 1902 in Kishinev (Bessarabia), Russia Grégoire Michonze (1902–1982) (variant name Grégoire...
, Roberto Matta
Roberto Matta
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren , better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art....
, Kay Sage
Kay Sage
Katherine Linn Sage , usually known as Kay Sage, was an American Surrealist artist and poet.-Biography:...
, Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington OBE was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter and a novelist. She lived most of her life in Mexico City.-Early life:...
, Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning
Dorothea Tanning is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer. She has also designed sets and costumes for ballet and theatre.-Biography:...
, and Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini was an Argentine surrealist painter.-Life and work:Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she was raised in Trieste, Italy. She moved to Milan at the age of 17, and then to Paris, in either 1931 or 1932...
among others.
Between the Wars
Der Blaue Reiter was a German movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die BrückeDie Brücke
Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller...
which was founded the previous decade in 1905 and was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
in 1905. Founding members of Die Brücke were Fritz Bleyl
Fritz Bleyl
Hilmar Friedrich Wilhelm Bleyl, known as Fritz Bleyl, was a German artist of the Expressionist school, and one of the four founders of artist group Die Brücke . He designed graphics for the group including, for their first show, a poster, which was banned by the police...
, Erich Heckel
Erich Heckel
Erich Heckel was a German painter and printmaker, and a founding member of the Die Brücke group which existed 1905-1913.-Biography:Heckel was born in Döbeln . His parents were born in Saxony...
, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a...
and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a German expressionist painter and printmaker, and a member of Die Brücke.-Life and work:...
. Later members included Max Pechstein
Max Pechstein
Hermann Max Pechstein was a German expressionist painter and printmaker, and a member of Die Brücke group.-Life and career:...
, Otto Mueller
Otto Mueller
Otto Mueller or Müller was a German painter and printmaker of the Die Brücke expressionist movement.-Life and work:...
and others. The group was one of the seminal ones, which in due course had a major impact on the evolution of modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
.
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
, Franz Marc
Franz Marc
Franz Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement...
, August Macke
August Macke
August Macke was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter . He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art which saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which...
, Alexej von Jawlensky
Alexej von Jawlensky
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association , Der Blaue Reiter group and later the Die Blaue Vier .-Life and work:Alexej von Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, a town in Tver...
, whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancer Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff
Alexander Sakharoff
Alexander Sakharoff was a dancer, teacher, and choreographer.He was born Alexander Zuckermann in Mariupol on May 13, 1886 , Ukraine.Alexander was one of the most innovative soloist dancers of the first decades of the 20th century...
, 1909 is in the gallery above, Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne von Werefkin , born Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina , was a Russian-Swiss Expressionist painter.-Life and career:...
, Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist.-Life and work:...
and others founded the Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and...
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. Artists Gabriele Münter
Gabriele Münter
Gabriele Münter was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. Artists and writers associated with German Expressionism shared a rebellious attitude toward the materialism and mores of German imperial and bourgeois society...
and Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
were also involved.
The name of the movement comes from a painting by Kandinsky created in 1903 (see illustration). 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: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.
In the USA during the period between World War I and World War II painters tended to go to Europe for recognition. Artists like Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...
, Patrick Henry Bruce
Patrick Henry Bruce
Patrick Henry Bruce was an American cubist painter.-Biography:A descendant of Patrick Henry, Bruce was born in Campbell County, Virginia, the second of four children. His family had once owned a huge plantation, Berry Hill, worked by over 3,000 slaves...
, Gerald Murphy and Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, created reputations abroad. In New York City, Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality...
and Ralph Blakelock
Ralph Albert Blakelock
Ralph Albert Blakelock was a romanticist painter from the United States.-Biography:Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847. His father was a successful physician. Blakelock initially set out to follow in his footsteps, and in 1864 began studies at the Free Academy of the...
were influential and important figures in advanced American painting between 1900 and 1920. During the 1920s photographer Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form...
exhibited Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
, Alfred Henry Maurer
Alfred Henry Maurer
Alfred Henry Maurer was an American modernist painter. He exhibited his work in avant-garde circles internationally and in New York City during the early 20th century.-Biography:...
, Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism....
, John Marin
John Marin
John Marin was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.-Biography:...
and other artists including European Masters Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
, Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector...
, Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
, and Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, at his gallery the 291.
Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
and Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
are broad rubrics that describes several important and related movements in 20th century painting that dominated much of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe. Expressionism was painted largely between World War I and World War II, mostly in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Belgium, and Austria. Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
, Die Brücke
Die Brücke
Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller...
, and Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter
Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and...
are three of the best known groups of Expressionist and Symbolist painters. Artists as interesting and diverse as Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
, Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...
, Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele
Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity, and the many self-portraits the artist produced...
, Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
, Emil Nolde
Emil Nolde
Emil Nolde was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great oil painting and watercolour painters of the 20th century. He is known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors...
, Chaim Soutine
Chaim Soutine
Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris....
, James Ensor
James Ensor
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life...
, Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes.-Biography:...
, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a...
, Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
, Franz Marc
Franz Marc
Franz Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement...
, Otto Dix
Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...
, Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, Georges Rouault
Georges Rouault
Georges Henri Rouault[p] was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter, and printmaker in lithography and etching.-Childhood and education:Rouault was born in Paris into a poor family...
, Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
and some of the Americans abroad like Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...
, and Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, were considered influential expressionist painters. Although Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings of figures as well.
Social consciousness
During the 1920s and the 1930s and the Great DepressionGreat Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
, De Stijl
De Stijl
De Stijl , propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian , Vilmos Huszár , and Bart van der Leck , and the architects Gerrit Rietveld , Robert van 't Hoff , and J.J.P. Oud...
, Dada, German Expressionism, Expressionism, and modernist and masterful color painters like Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
and Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:...
characterized the European art scene. In Germany Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
, Otto Dix
Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...
, George Grosz
George Grosz
Georg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
and others politicized their paintings, foreshadowing the coming of World War II. While in America American Scene painting
American scene painting
American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. American scene painting is also known as Regionalism....
and the social realism
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
and regionalism
Regionalism (art)
Regionalism is an American realist modern art movement that was popular during the 1930s. The artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life...
movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world. Artists like Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton (painter)
Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States...
, Grant Wood
Grant Wood
Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter, born four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century.- Life and career :His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his...
, George Tooker
George Tooker
George Clair Tooker, Jr. was a figurative painter whose works are associated with the Magic realism and Social realism movements...
, John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry was an American painter whose career spanned from 1924 until his death. He was noted for his paintings depicting life in his home state, Kansas...
, Reginald Marsh
Reginald Marsh (artist)
Reginald Marsh was an American painter, born in Paris, most notable for his depictions of life in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Crowded Coney Island beach scenes, popular entertainments such as vaudeville and burlesque, women, and jobless men on the Bowery are subjects that reappear...
, and others became prominent. In Latin America besides the Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
an painter Joaquín Torres García
Joaquín Torres García
Joaquín Torres García , was a Uruguayan plastic artist and art theorist, also known as the founder of Constructive Universalism...
and Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Tamayo was active in the mid-20th century in Mexico and New York, painting figurative abstraction with surrealist influences....
from Mexico, the muralist movement
Mexican Muralism
Mexican muralism is a Mexican art movement. The most important period of this movement took place primarily from the 1920s to the 1960s, though it exerted an influence on later generations of Mexican artists...
with Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
, David Siqueiros, José Orozco, Pedro Nel Gómez
Pedro Nel Gómez
Pedro Nel Gómez was a Colombian engineer, architect, painter, and sculptor. He started the Colombian Muralist Movement with Santiago Martinez Delgado, strongly influenced by the Mexican movement. With the fresco mural technique, Pedro Nel Gómez created 2,200 square meters of murals in public...
and Santiago Martinez Delgado
Santiago Martínez Delgado
Santiago Martínez Delgado was a Colombian painter, sculptor, art historian and writer. He established a reputation as a prominent muralist during the 1940s and is also known for his watercolors, oil paintings, illustrations and woodcarvings....
and the Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
paintings by Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
began a renaissance of the arts for the region, with a use of color and historic, and political messages. Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
's Symbolist works also relate strongly to Surrealism and to the Magic Realism
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
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
American Gothic
American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood's inspiration came from a cottage designed in the Gothic Revival style with a distinctive upper window and a decision to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that...
is a painting by Grant Wood
Grant Wood
Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter, born four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century.- Life and career :His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his...
from 1930. Portraying a pitchfork
Pitchfork
A pitchfork is an agricultural tool with a long handle and long, thin, widely separated pointed tines used to lift and pitch loose material, such as hay, leaves, grapes, dung or other agricultural materials. Pitchforks typically have two or three tines...
-holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house of Carpenter Gothic
Carpenter Gothic
Carpenter Gothic, also sometimes called Carpenter's Gothic, and Rural Gothic, is a North American architectural style-designation for an application of Gothic Revival architectural detailing and picturesque massing applied to wooden structures built by house-carpenters...
style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th century American art
American Art
American Art is the debut album of the band Weatherbox. It was released on May 8, 2007 on Doghouse Records. The album received critical acclaim from several sources including underground music distribution company Smartpunk, who lauded the band's style:...
. Art critics had favorable opinions about the painting, like Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
and Christopher Morley
Christopher Morley
Christopher Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures.-Biography:Christopher Morley was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania...
, they assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio
Winesburg, Ohio (novel)
Winesburg, Ohio is a 1919 short story cycle by the American author Sherwood Anderson. The work is structured around the life of protagonist George Willard, from the time he was a child to his growing independence and ultimate abandonment of Winesburg as a young man...
, Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
' 1920 Main Street
Main Street (novel)
- Plot summary :Carol Milford is a liberal, free-spirited young woman, reared in the metropolis of Saint Paul, Minnesota. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart....
, and Carl Van Vechten
Carl van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.-Biography:...
's The Tattooed Countess in literature. However, with the onset of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.
Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, "Man at the Crossroads
Man at the Crossroads
Man at the Crossroads was a mural by Diego Rivera.The Rockefellers wanted to have a mural put on the ground-floor wall of Rockefeller Center. Nelson Rockefeller wanted Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso to do it because he favored their modern style, but neither was available...
", in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering between 48th and 51st streets in New York City, United States. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning the area between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. It was declared a National...
. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Rockefeller
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...
discovered that the mural included a portrait of Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff. The film Cradle Will Rock
Cradle Will Rock
Cradle Will Rock is a 1999 drama film which chronicles the process and events that surrounded the production of the original 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein...
includes a dramatization of the controversy. Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
(Rivera's wife's) works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings 55 are self-portraits
Self Portrait
Self Portrait is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's tenth studio album, released by Columbia Records in June 1970.Self Portrait was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions...
, 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
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the 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 1920s to the 1950s 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. He ran a political art workshop in New York City in preparation for the 1936 General Strike for Peace and May Day
May Day
May Day on May 1 is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and usually a public holiday; it is also a traditional spring holiday in many cultures....
parade
Parade
A parade is a procession of people, usually organized along a street, often in costume, and often accompanied by marching bands, floats or sometimes large balloons. Parades are held for a wide range of reasons, but are usually celebrations of some kind...
. The young Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
attended the workshop and helped build float
Float (parade)
A float is a decorated platform, either built on a vehicle or towed behind one, which is a component of many festive parades, such as those of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Carnival of Viareggio, the Maltese Carnival, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Key West Fantasy Fest parade, the...
s for the parade. Between 1937 and 1938 he fought in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
alongside the Spanish Republican forces, in opposition to Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's military coup. He was exile
Exile
Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...
d twice from Mexico, once in 1932 and again in 1940, following his assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
.
World conflict
During the 1930s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to SurrealismSurrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, including Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
. On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, the Basque
Basque Country (autonomous community)
The Basque Country is an autonomous community of northern Spain. It includes the Basque provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa, also called Historical Territories....
town of Gernika was the scene of the "Bombing of Gernika" by the Condor Legion of Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. 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
Guernica (painting)
Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso. It was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, Basque Country, by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces, on 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War...
to commemorate the horrors of the bombing.
Picasso painted the mural sized painting called Guernica
Guernica (painting)
Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso. It was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, Basque Country, by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces, on 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War...
in protest of the bombing. The painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1937, then Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
, then London in 1938 and finally in 1939 at Picasso's request the painting was sent to the United States in an extended loan (for safekeeping) at MoMA
Moma
Moma may refer to:* Moma , an owlet moth genus* Moma Airport, a Russian public airport* Moma District, Nampula, Mozambique* Moma River, a right tributary of the Indigirka River* Google Moma, the Google corporate intranet...
. The painting went on a tour of museums throughout the USA until its final return to the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York City where it was exhibited for nearly thirty years. Finally in accord with Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
's wish to give the painting to the people of Spain as a gift, it was sent to Spain in 1981.
During the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
of the 1930s, through the years of World War II American art was characterized by Social Realism
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
and American Scene Painting
American scene painting
American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. American scene painting is also known as Regionalism....
(as seen above) in the work of Grant Wood
Grant Wood
Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter, born four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century.- Life and career :His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his...
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton (painter)
Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States...
, and several others. Nighthawks
Nighthawks
Nighthawks is a 1942 painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is considered Hopper's most famous painting, as well as one of the most recognizable in American art...
(1942) is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner
Diner
A diner, also spelled dinor in western Pennsylvania is a prefabricated restaurant building characteristic of North America, especially in the Midwest, in New York City, in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey, and in other areas of the Northeastern United States, although examples can be found throughout...
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
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
. The scene was inspired by a diner
Diner
A diner, also spelled dinor in western Pennsylvania is a prefabricated restaurant building characteristic of North America, especially in the Midwest, in New York City, in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey, and in other areas of the Northeastern United States, although examples can be found throughout...
(since demolished) in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
, Hopper's home neighborhood in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
. Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor
Attack on Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941...
. 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 1930s 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
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
and abstraction
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
that many left for the Americas. Degenerate art
Degenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe 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...
was a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist
Jewish Bolshevism
Jewish Bolshevism, Judeo-Bolshevism, and known as Żydokomuna in Poland, is an antisemitic stereotype based on the claim that Jews have been the driving force behind or are disproportionately involved in the modern Communist movement, or sometimes more specifically Russian Bolshevism.The expression...
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
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
in 1937, 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. German artist Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
and scores of others fled Europe for New York. In New York City a new generation of young and exciting Modernist painters led by Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...
, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, and others were just beginning to come of age.
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...
's portrait of someone who might be Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
(above) is an example of the evolution of abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
from the context of figure painting, cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
and surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. Along with his friends de Kooning and John D. Graham
John D. Graham
John D. Graham was a Ukrainian-born American Modernist / figurative painter.He was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, Ukraine...
Gorky created bio-morphically shaped and abstracted figurative compositions that by the 1940s 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.
Towards mid-century
The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionismAbstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Surrealism, Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
, Cubism, Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
, and early Modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
and John D. Graham
John D. Graham
John D. Graham was a Ukrainian-born American Modernist / figurative painter.He was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, Ukraine...
. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian
Piet Mondrian
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...
, Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
, Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
and the André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...
's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors. The figurative work of Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Lucien Freud Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century....
and others served as a kind of alternative to abstract expressionism. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is Wyeth's painting, Christina's World
Christina's World
Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth, and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century...
, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. It depicts a woman lying on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at and crawling towards a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. This tempera
Tempera
Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigment mixed with a water-soluble binder medium . Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium. Tempera paintings are very long lasting, and examples from the 1st centuries AD still exist...
work, done in a realist style, is nearly always on display at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York.
Post-Second World War American painting called Abstract expressionism included artists like Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...
, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
, Franz Kline
Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys...
, Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and graphic artist.-Biography:Gottlieb was born in New York to Jewish parents. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year...
, Mark Tobey
Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey was an American abstract expressionist painter, born in Centerville, Wisconsin. Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the...
, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, James Brooks
James Brooks (painter)
James Brooks was an American muralist, abstract painter and winner of the Logan Medal of the Arts. Brooks was a friend of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner on Eastern Long Island. In 1947 he married artist Charlotte Park...
, Philip Guston
Philip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
, Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
, Conrad Marca-Relli
Conrad Marca-Relli
Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris...
, Jack Tworkov
Jack Tworkov
Jack Tworkov was a Polish born American abstract expressionist painter.He was born in Biała Podlaska, Russian Empire and immigrated to the United States in 1913 with his mother and younger sister who would later become known as Janice Biala...
, William Baziotes
William Baziotes
William Baziotes was an American painter influenced by Surrealism and was a contributor to Abstract Expressionism.-Life and career:...
, Richard Pousette-Dart
Richard Pousette-Dart
Richard Pousette-Dart was an American Abstract Expressionist painter.-Biography:He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Valhalla, New York. Although Richard never attended art school, his father, Nathaniel J. Pousette-Dart, was a painter and writer on art. He moved to Manhattan in 1937...
, Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
, Hedda Sterne
Hedda Sterne
Hedda Sterne was an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others...
, Jimmy Ernst
Jimmy Ernst
Jimmy Ernst was an American painter born in Germany.-Early life:Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents divorced in 1922 and Ernst staying with his mother in Cologne...
, Esteban Vicente
Esteban Vicente
Esteban Vicente Pérez , was an American painter born in Turégano, Spain. He was one of the first generation of New York School abstract expressionists.-Early life:...
, Bradley Walker Tomlin
Bradley Walker Tomlin
Bradley Walker Tomlin belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists. He participated in the famous ‘’Ninth Street Show.’’ According to John I. H...
, and Theodoros Stamos
Theodoros Stamos
Theodoros Stamos , was a Greek American artist. He is one of the youngest painters of the original group of abstract expressionist painters , which included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko...
, among others. American Abstract expressionism got its name in 1946 from the art critic Robert Coates
Robert Coates (critic)
Robert Myron Coates was an American writer and a long-term art critic for the New Yorker. He coined the term "abstract expressionism" in 1946 in reference to the works of Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.As a writer of fiction, he is considered a member of the Lost Generation,...
. 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
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
, the Bauhaus
Bauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
and synthetic cubism. Abstract expressionism, action painting
Action painting
Action painting sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...
, and Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting are synonymous with the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
.
Technically Surrealism was an important predecessor for abstract expressionism with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic
Surrealist automatism
Automatism has taken on many forms: the automatic writing and drawing initially practiced by surrealists can be compared to similar, or perhaps parallel phenomena, such as the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz....
or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...
. Another important ear
Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey was an American abstract expressionist painter, born in Centerville, Wisconsin. Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the...
, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.
Abstract expressionism
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 paintingAction painting
Action painting sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...
s", with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
. As seen above in the gallery Woman V is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 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 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historian Meyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro was a Lithuanian-born American art historian known for forging new art historical methodologies that incorporated an interdisciplinary approach to the study of works of art...
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: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Woman III
Woman III
Woman III is a painting by abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. Woman III is one of a series of six paintings by de Kooning done between 1951 and 1953 in which the central theme was a woman...
, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art
Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art
Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art is an art museum in Tehran, Iran.Inaugurated in 1977, and built adjacent to Tehran's Laleh Park, the museum was designed by Iranian architect Kamran Diba, who employed elements from traditional Persian architecture. The building can be listed as a contemporary...
, Woman IV, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its neoclassical architecture and extensive collection of Asian art....
, Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
. During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton
East Hampton (town), New York
The Town of East Hampton is located in southeastern Suffolk County, New York, at the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. It is the easternmost town in the state of New York...
, 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 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much the same time. The Woman series are decidedly figurative paintings
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
. Another important artist is Franz Kline
Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys...
, as demonstrated by his painting High Street, 1950 (see gallery) as with Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
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
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, (see above), Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and graphic artist.-Biography:Gottlieb was born in New York to Jewish parents. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year...
, and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
'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
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
termed the Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
(see gallery) and Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
(gallery) can be comfortably described as practitioners of action painting
Action painting
Action painting sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...
and Color Field painting.
Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
. 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 1950s is a matter of debate. American Social realism
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
but also by the Social Realists
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros
David Alfaro Siqueiros
José David Alfaro Siqueiros was a social realist painter, known for his large murals in fresco that helped establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance, together with works by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, and also a member of the Mexican Communist Party who participated in an...
and Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...
. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of those painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early 1940s at galleries in New York like The Art of This Century Gallery
The Art of This Century Gallery
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 W. 57th Street in New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of...
. The late 1940s through the mid 1950s ushered in the McCarthy era. It was after World War II and a time of political conservatism and extreme artistic censorship in the United States. 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.
Although Abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
, and the San Francisco Bay area. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over"
All-over painting
All-over painting refers to the non-differential treatment of the surface of a work of two-dimensional art, for instance a painting. This concept is most popularly thought of as emerging in relation to the so-called "drip" paintings of Jackson Pollock and the "automatic writing" or "abstract...
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. Many other artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s including Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie
Alfred Leslie is an American artist and filmmaker. He first achieved success as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but changed course in the early 1960s and became a painter of realistic figurative paintings.-Biography:...
, Sam Francis
Sam Francis
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker.-Early life:...
, Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell was a "second generation" abstract expressionist painter. She was an essential member of the American Abstract expressionist movement, even though much of her career took place in France. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era's few...
, Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...
, Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors...
, Milton Resnick
Milton Resnick
Milton Resnick was a major abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his mystical, abstract and figurative paintings. Born in Bratslav, Russia, he emigrated to the United States in 1922.-Biography:...
, Michael Goldberg
Michael Goldberg
Michael Goldberg was an American abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his gestural action paintings, abstractions and still-life paintings. His work was recently seen in September 2007 in a solo exhibition at Knoedler & Company in New York City, as well as several exhibitions at...
, Norman Bluhm
Norman Bluhm
Norman Bluhm , was an American painter classified as an abstract expressionist, and as an action painter.- Biography :...
, Ray Parker
Ray Parker (painter)
Raymond Parker was born in 1922 and he died in 1990. He was known as an Abstract expressionist painter who also is associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction...
, Nicolas Carone
Nicolas Carone
Nicolas Carone belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris...
, Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School in the 1950s.-Biography and early career:...
, Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter.-Life and work:Friedel Dzubas studied art in his native land before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and settling in New York City. In Manhattan during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler...
, and Robert Goodnough
Robert Goodnough
Robert Goodnough was an American abstract expressionist painter. A veteran of World War II, Goodnough was one of the last of the original generation of the New York School; , even though he began exhibiting his work in galleries in New York City in the...
among others.
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, especially the work of Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
and Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and graphic artist.-Biography:Gottlieb was born in New York to Jewish parents. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year...
. It essentially described 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
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
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-mid-1960s Color Field painting was the term used to describe artists like Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, and Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...
, whose works were related to second generation abstract expressionism, and to younger artists like Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, and Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, - all moving in a new direction. Artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...
, Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, and others often used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. In Mountains and Sea, from 1952, (see above) a seminal work of Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting by Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...
the artist used the stain technique for the first time.
In Europe there was the continuation of Surrealism, Cubism, Dada and the works of Matisse. Also in Europe, Tachisme
Tachisme
Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism...
(the European equivalent to Abstract expressionism) took hold of the newest generation. Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff was a Russian-born French modernist painter belonging to the 'New' Ecole de Paris .- Biography :...
, Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting...
, Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu is a French painter in the style of lyrical abstraction.-Biography:He was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and gained an international reputation in the 1950s as a leading Abstract Expressionist. His large paintings are created very rapidly and impulsively...
, Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.-Life and work:Dubuffet was...
, Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
and Pierre Soulages
Pierre Soulages
Pierre Soulages is a French painter, engraver, and sculptor.-Biography:Born in Rodez in 1919, Soulages also is known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour, "...both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up...
among others are considered important figures in post-war European painting.
Eventually abstract painting in America evolved into movements such as Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
, Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction, Op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
, hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, Minimal art, shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
painting, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
, Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
and the continuation of Abstract expressionism. As a response to the tendency toward abstraction imagery emerged through various new movements, notably Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
.
Pop art
The term "pop art" was used by Lawrence AllowayLawrence Alloway
Lawrence Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from the 1960s. In the 1950s he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US...
in England in 1958 to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. 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. The early works of David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
and the works of Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
Peter Blake
Peter Blake (artist)
Sir Peter Thomas Blake, KBE, CBE, RDI, RA is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.-Career:...
and Eduardo Paolozzi
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, KBE, RA , was a Scottish sculptor and artist. He was a major figure in the international art sphere, while, working on his own interpretation and vision of the world. Paolozzi investigated how we can fit into the modern world to resemble our fragmented civilization...
were considered seminal examples in the movement.
Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
in America was to a large degree initially inspired by the works of Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
, and Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
. Although the paintings of Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
and Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth
Charles Demuth was an American watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism....
during the 1920s and 1930s set the table for pop art in America. In New York City during the mid 1950s Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
and Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
created works of art that at first seemed to be continuations of Abstract expressionist painting. Actually their works and the work of Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
, 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
George Washington
George Washington was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of...
crossing the Delaware
Delaware
Delaware is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, and to the north by Pennsylvania...
, 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
Taxidermy
Taxidermy is the act of mounting or reproducing dead animals for display or for other sources of study. Taxidermy can be done on all vertebrate species of animals, including mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians...
gave rise to a radical new movement in American art
American Art
American Art is the debut album of the band Weatherbox. It was released on May 8, 2007 on Doghouse Records. The album received critical acclaim from several sources including underground music distribution company Smartpunk, who lauded the band's style:...
. Eventually by 1963 the movement came to be known worldwide as pop art.
American pop art is exemplified by artists: Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
, Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
, James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...
, Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...
, Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture.-Early years:...
and Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
among others. Pop art merges popular and mass culture with fine art, while injecting humor, irony, and recognizable imagery and content into the mix. In October 1962 the Sidney Janis
Sidney Janis
Sidney Janis was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited the work of most of the emerging leaders of Abstract Expressionism, but also that of such important European artists as...
Gallery mounted The New Realists the first major pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Sidney Janis
Sidney Janis
Sidney Janis was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited the work of most of the emerging leaders of Abstract Expressionism, but also that of such important European artists as...
mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in the fall of 1962 an historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects
New Painting of Common Objects
The exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962 was the first museum survey of American pop art. The eight artists included were: Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, Joe Goode and Wayne Thiebaud...
exhibition of pop art, curated by Walter Hopps
Walter Hopps
Walter Hopps was an American museum director and curator of contemporary art. His obituary in the Washington Post described him as a "sort of a gonzo museum director -- elusive, unpredictable, outlandish in his range, jagged in his vision, heedless of rules."Hopps was born in Eagle Rock, Los...
at the Pasadena Art Museum sent shock waves across the Western United States.
While in the downtown scene in New York City's East Village
East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, lying east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side...
10th Street galleries
Tenth street galleries
The Tenth Street galleries was a collective term for the co-operative galleries that operated mainly in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The galleries were artist run and generally operated on very low budgets, often without any staff. Some artists became members...
artists were formulating an American version of Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
. Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
had his storefront, and the Green Gallery
Green Gallery
The Green Gallery was an art gallery that operated between 1960 and 1965 and was located at 15 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York, United States. The director of the gallery was Richard Bellamy , and it was one of the first uptown galleries to show the work of the downtown New York avant-garde...
on 57th Street
57th Street (Manhattan)
57th Street is one of New York City's major east-west thoroughfares, which runs east-west in the Midtown section of the borough of Manhattan, from the New York City Department of Sanitation's dock on the Hudson River at the West Side Highway to a small park overlooking the East River built on a...
began to show Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann
Tom Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture.-Early years:...
and James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...
. Later Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...
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
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
, the rebellious Dadaists - with a sense of humor; and pop artists like Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.-Life and work:...
(who became known for his parody's 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
Milton Avery
Milton Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City.-Biography:...
, John D. Graham
John D. Graham
John D. Graham was a Ukrainian-born American Modernist / figurative painter.He was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, Ukraine...
, Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter was an American painter and art critic. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus....
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Balthus
Balthus
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist....
, Francis Bacon, Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting...
, Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century....
, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
, Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein is an American painter, and part of the contemporary Realist school.-Biography:Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from...
, David Park, Nathan Oliveira
Nathan Oliveira
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to Portuguese parents...
, David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
, Malcolm Morley
Malcolm Morley
Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.-Early life:Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...
, Richard Estes
Richard Estes
Richard Estes is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters...
, Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack is an American photorealist painter, printmaker, and sculptor.Flack studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953. She earned a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University. She studied art history at...
, Chuck Close
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...
, Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New Mexico, USA.-Background:Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945...
, Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker.-Early life:Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1967...
, Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins is an American artist.-Early life:Vija Celmins immigrated to the United States with her family from Latvia when she was ten years old. She and her family settled in Indiana...
and Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...
.
Figurative, Landscape, Still-Life, and Realism
During the 1930s through the 1960s abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as abstract expressionismAbstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, Color Field painting, Post painterly abstraction, Op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
, hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, Minimal art, shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
painting, and Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
. 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 1950s and new forms of expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
from the 1940s through the 1960s. In Italy during this time, Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...
was the foremost still life painter, exploring a wide variety of approaches to depicting everyday bottles and kitchen implements. Throughout the 20th century many painters practiced Realism
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
and used expressive imagery; practicing landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, and unique expressivity like still-life painter Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...
, Milton Avery
Milton Avery
Milton Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City.-Biography:...
, John D. Graham
John D. Graham
John D. Graham was a Ukrainian-born American Modernist / figurative painter.He was born Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky in Kiev, Ukraine...
, Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter was an American painter and art critic. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus....
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century....
, Balthus
Balthus
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola , best known as Balthus, was an esteemed but controversial Polish-French modern artist....
, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff is a British expressionist painter, known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England....
, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
, Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein is an American painter, and part of the contemporary Realist school.-Biography:Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from...
, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...
, Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School in the 1950s.-Biography and early career:...
, Robert De Niro, Sr.
Robert De Niro, Sr.
Robert Henry De Niro, Sr. was an American abstract expressionist painter and the father of actor Robert De Niro.-Life and career:...
, Elaine de Kooning
Elaine de Kooning
Elaine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist, Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era and editorial associate for Art News magazine...
and others. Along with Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, as well as a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:...
, Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, and other 20th century masters.
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a 1953 painting by the Irish artist Francis Bacon. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X painted by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of a series of variants of the Velázquez painting which...
, 1953 (see above) is a painting by the Irish born artist Francis Bacon and is an example of Post World War II European Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X
Portrait of Innocent X
The Portrait of Pope Innocent X is an oil on canvas portrait by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, finished during a trip to Italy around 1650. Many artists and art critics consider it the finest portrait ever created. It is housed in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome...
painted by the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez
Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist...
in 1650. The work is one of a series of variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, over a total of forty-five works. When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against the Popes, that he merely "wanted an excuse to use these colours, and you can't give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
manner." The Pope in this version seethes with anger and aggression, and the dark colors give the image a grotesque and nightmarish appearance. The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent, and seem to fall through the Pope's face.
Italian painter Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.-Biography:Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna...
was an important 20th century, early pioneer of Minimalism. Born in Bologna, Italy in 1890, 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 133 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
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
. He died in Bologna in 1964.
After World War II the term School of Paris
School of Paris
School of Paris refers to two distinct groups of artists — a group of medieval manuscript illuminators, and a group of non-French artists working in Paris before World War I...
often referred to Tachisme
Tachisme
Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism...
, the European equivalent of American Abstract expressionism and those artists are also related to Cobra
COBRA (avant-garde movement)
COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...
. Important proponents being Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.-Life and work:Dubuffet was...
, Pierre Soulages
Pierre Soulages
Pierre Soulages is a French painter, engraver, and sculptor.-Biography:Born in Rodez in 1919, Soulages also is known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour, "...both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up...
, Nicholas de Staël, Hans Hartung
Hans Hartung
Hans Hartung was a German-French painter, known for his gestural abstract style. He was also a decorated World War II veteran of the French Foreign Legion.-Life:...
, Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff was a Russian-born French modernist painter belonging to the 'New' Ecole de Paris .- Biography :...
, and Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu
Georges Mathieu is a French painter in the style of lyrical abstraction.-Biography:He was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and gained an international reputation in the 1950s as a leading Abstract Expressionist. His large paintings are created very rapidly and impulsively...
, among several others. During the early 1950s Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.-Life and work:Dubuffet was...
(who was always a figurative artist), and de Staël
Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting...
, abandoned abstraction, and returned to imagery via figuration and landscape. De Staël 's work was quickly recognised within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. His return to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters like Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...
, David Park, Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Nelson Bischoff was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area.Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.-Biography:Elmer Bischoff, second...
, Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud
Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...
, Nathan Oliveira
Nathan Oliveira
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to Portuguese parents...
, Joan Brown
Joan Brown
Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a notable member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement....
and others made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. Much of de Staël 's late work - in particular his thinned, and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s predicts Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël
Nicolas de Staël was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting...
's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop art of the 1960s.
Art brut, New Realism, Bay Area Figurative Movement, neo-Dada, photorealism
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting, post-painterly abstraction
Post-painterly Abstraction
Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto....
, op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
, hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, minimal art, shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
painting, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
, and the continuation of Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. Other artists reacted as a response to the tendency toward abstraction with art brut
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...
, fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
, New Realism
New realism
Nouveau réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan...
, allowing imagery to re-emerge through various new contexts like pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
. The Bay Area Figurative Movement of whom David Park, Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Nelson Bischoff was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area.Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.-Biography:Elmer Bischoff, second...
, Nathan Oliveira
Nathan Oliveira
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to Portuguese parents...
and Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...
whose painting Cityscape 1, 1963 is a typical example (see above) were influential members flourished during the 1950s and 1960s in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. Although throughout the 20th century painters continued to practice Realism
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...
and use imagery, practicing landscape and figurative painting with contemporary subjects and solid technique, and unique expressivity like Milton Avery
Milton Avery
Milton Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City.-Biography:...
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.-Life and work:Dubuffet was...
, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
, Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein is an American painter, and part of the contemporary Realist school.-Biography:Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from...
, and others. Younger painters practiced the use of imagery in new and radical ways. Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
, Martial Raysse
Martial Raysse
Martial Raysse is a French artist born in Golfe-Juan on 12 February 1936. He lives in Issigeac - France.-Biography: Raysse was born in a ceramicist family in Vallauris and began to paint and write poetry at age 12. After studying and practising athleticism at a high level, he began to accumulate...
, Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle was a French sculptor, painter, and film maker.-The early years:...
, Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
, David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
, Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.-Life and work:...
, Malcolm Morley
Malcolm Morley
Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.-Early life:Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...
, Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings
Ralph Goings is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s...
, Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack
Audrey Flack is an American photorealist painter, printmaker, and sculptor.Flack studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953. She earned a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from Cooper Union in New York City, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University. She studied art history at...
, Richard Estes
Richard Estes
Richard Estes is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters...
, Chuck Close
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...
, Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New Mexico, USA.-Background:Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945...
, Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker.-Early life:Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1967...
, John Baeder
John Baeder
John Baeder is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealist movement. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside diners and eateries.-Early life:...
and Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins is an American artist.-Early life:Vija Celmins immigrated to the United States with her family from Latvia when she was ten years old. She and her family settled in Indiana...
were a few who became prominent between the 1960s and the 1980s. Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter
Fairfield Porter was an American painter and art critic. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus....
(see above) was largely self-taught, and produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
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
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
of writers, including John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...
, and James Schuyler
James Schuyler
James Marcus Schuyler was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1980 collection The Morning of the Poem...
. Many of his paintings were set in or around the family summer house on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine
Great Spruce Head Island, Maine
Great Spruce Head Island is a privately owned island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. It has long belonged to the family of the painter Fairfield Porter and his brother, photographer Eliot Porter, both of whom did creative work there. For example, Eliot's book Summer Island is a visual tribute to the...
.
Also during the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against painting. Critics like Douglas Crimp viewed the work of artists like Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
, and declared the 'death of painting'. Artists began to practice new ways of making art. New movements gained prominence some of which are: Postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
, Earth art, video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, arte povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
, performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, body art
Body art
Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping , full body tattoo and body painting.More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation...
, fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, mail art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
, the situationists and conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
among others.
Neo-Dada is also a movement that started 1n the 1950s and 1960s 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
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
and Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography. Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, (see untitled combine, 1963, above), Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects...
, George Segal
George Segal (artist)
George Segal was an American painter and sculptor associated with the Pop Art movement. He was presented with a National Medal of Arts in 1999.-Works:...
, Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...
, and Edward Kienholz
Edward Kienholz
Edward Kienholz was an American installation artist whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and wife, Nancy Reddin 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.
New abstraction from the 1950s through the 1980s
Color Field painting clearly pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from abstract expressionismAbstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. Color Field painting is related to post-painterly abstraction
Post-painterly Abstraction
Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto....
, suprematism
Suprematism
Suprematism was an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms which formed in Russia in 1915-1916. It was not until later that suprematism received conventional museum preparations...
, abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
and Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
.
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, Color Field painting and minimal
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
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
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting, his work can serve as a bridge between abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, Color Field painting, and minimal art. Two influential teachers Josef Albers
Josef Albers
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....
and Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Josef Albers
Josef Albers
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....
is best remembered for his work as an 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, (see gallery). In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, 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
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
and Op art.
Josef Albers
Josef Albers
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....
, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, Ilya Bolotowsky
Ilya Bolotowsky
Ilya Bolotowsky was a leading early 20th-century painter in abstract styles in New York City. His work, a search for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced cubism and geometric abstraction and was much influenced by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.Born to Jewish parents in St...
, Burgoyne Diller
Burgoyne Diller
Burgoyne A. Diller was an American abstract painter. Many of his best-known works are characterized by orthogonal geometric forms that reflect his strong interest in the De Stijl movement and the work of Piet Mondrian in particular...
, Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art.His work entitled Zebra, created by Vasarely in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op-art...
, Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley
Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of Op art.-Early life:...
, Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Life and work:Richard Anuszkiewicz trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio , and then with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut where he earned his...
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, Larry Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
, Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, Al Held
Al Held
Al Held was an American Abstract expressionist painter. He was particularly well known for his large scale Hard-edge paintings.-Background and education:...
and some others like Mino Argento
Mino Argento
Mino Argento is an Italian artist, whose works comprise abstract paintings on canvas and paper.-Life and work:Mino Argento was born in Rome, Italy in 1927. He worked in architecture as a young man...
, are artists closely associated with Geometric abstraction, Op art, Color Field painting, and in the case of Hofmann and Newman Abstract expressionism as well.
In 1965, an exhibition called The Responsive Eye, curated by William C. Seitz, was held at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, in New York City. The works shown were wide ranging, encompassing the Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
of Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, the Op art of Larry Poons, the work of Alexander Liberman
Alexander Liberman
Alexander Semeonovitch Liberman was a Russian-American magazine editor, publisher, painter, photographer, and sculptor. He held senior artistic positions during his 32 years at Condé Nast Publications.-Biography:When his father took a post advising the Soviet government, the family moved to Moscow...
, alongside the masters of the Op Art movement: Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art.His work entitled Zebra, created by Vasarely in the 1930s, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op-art...
, Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Life and work:Richard Anuszkiewicz trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio , and then with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut where he earned his...
, Bridget Riley and others. 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 used to describe some paintings and other works of art which use optical illusion
Optical illusion
An optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality. The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a perception that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source...
s. Op art is also closely akin to geometric abstraction and hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
. 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. Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. 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. Artists like Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...
, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...
, John Hoyland
John Hoyland
John Hoyland RA was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.-Life:...
, Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, and others often used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general these artists eliminated recognizable imagery. 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
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
, artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image.
Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
, Neil Williams, Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold is an American minimalist artist.- Works :“Robert Mangold’s paintings,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 1997, “are more complicated to describe than they seem, which is partly what’s good about them: the way they invite intense scrutiny, which, in the nature of good...
, Charles Hinman, Richard Tuttle
Richard Tuttle
Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line.- Biography :...
, David Novros, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Many Geometric abstract art
Geometric abstract art
Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective compositions...
ists, minimalists
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, 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
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. The Andre Emmerich Gallery, the Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...
Gallery, the Richard Feigen Gallery, and the Park Place Gallery
Park Place Gallery
Park Place Gallery was a contemporary art gallery located in SoHo in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA, during the mid to late 1960s. Park Place Gallery was located at 542 West Broadway, on what is now LaGuardia Place just north of Houston Street in the neighborhood that is now called "SoHo"...
were important showcases for Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting, shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
painting and Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
in New York City during the 1960s. There is a connection with post-painterly abstraction
Post-painterly Abstraction
Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto....
, which reacted against abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
s' 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 1960s Color Field painting and Minimal art were often closely associated with each other. In actuality by the early 1970s both movements became decidedly diverse.
Washington Color School, Shaped Canvas, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction
Another related movement of the late 1960s Lyrical AbstractionLyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
is a European term that was borrowed by Larry Aldrich (the founder of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield Connecticut) in 1969 to describe what Aldrich said he saw in the studios of many artists at that time. It is also the name of an exhibition that originated in the Aldrich Museum and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
and other museums throughout the United States between 1969 and 1971.
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
in the late 1960s is characterized by the paintings of Dan Christensen
Dan Christensen
Dan Christensen, the American abstract painter, was born in Cozad, Nebraska on October 6, 1942, he died in Easthampton, New York on January 20, 2007....
, Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, , and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.Landfield is...
, Peter Young
Peter Young (artist)
Peter Young, is an American painter who was born in Pittsburgh, Pa, January 2, 1940. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings that have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe since the 1960s. His work is associated with Minimal Art, Post-minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction...
and others, and along with the fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
movement and postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
(a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany...
. Lyrical Abstraction, conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
, Earth art, video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, along with the continuation of fluxus, abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting, hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, minimal art, op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
, pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, photorealism
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
and New Realism
New realism
Nouveau réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan...
extended the boundaries of contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. Lyrical Abstraction is a type of freewheeling abstract painting that emerged in the mid-1960s when abstract painters returned to various forms of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on process, gestalt and repetitive compositional strategies in general.
Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with color field painting and abstract expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
as exemplified by the 1968 Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, , and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.Landfield is...
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
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
and action painting
Action painting
Action painting sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied...
of the 1940s and 1950s 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.,
Hard-edge painting, minimalism, postminimalism, monochrome painting
Agnes MartinAgnes Martin
Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist.She won a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998....
, Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold is an American minimalist artist.- Works :“Robert Mangold’s paintings,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 1997, “are more complicated to describe than they seem, which is partly what’s good about them: the way they invite intense scrutiny, which, in the nature of good...
(see above), Brice Marden
Brice Marden
Brice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.Marden is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...
, Jo Baer
Jo Baer
Josephine Gail "Jo" Baer, born Josephine Kleinberg August 7, 1929, is an American artist, whose works are associated with minimalist art...
, Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He is best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lives and works in New York.-Early life and career:...
, Richard Tuttle
Richard Tuttle
Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line.- Biography :...
, Neil Williams, David Novros, Paul Mogenson, are examples of artists associated with Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and (exceptions of Martin, Baer and Marden) the use of the shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
also during the period beginning in the early 1960s. Many Geometric abstract art
Geometric abstract art
Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective compositions...
ists, 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
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character. The Bykert Gallery
Bykert Gallery
Bykert Gallery was an influential contemporary art gallery in New York City between 1966 and 1975, run by Klaus Kertess and Jeff Byers, who had been classmates at Yale College, class of 1958...
, and the Park Place Gallery
Park Place Gallery
Park Place Gallery was a contemporary art gallery located in SoHo in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA, during the mid to late 1960s. Park Place Gallery was located at 542 West Broadway, on what is now LaGuardia Place just north of Houston Street in the neighborhood that is now called "SoHo"...
were important showcases for Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
painting in New York City during the 1960s.
During the 1960s and 1970s artists such as Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
, Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and graphic artist.-Biography:Gottlieb was born in New York to Jewish parents. From 1920-1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which he traveled in France and Germany for a year...
, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. On October 25, 1945, she married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement....
, Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors...
, Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
, Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...
, Josef Albers
Josef Albers
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....
, Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Nelson Bischoff was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area.Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.-Biography:Elmer Bischoff, second...
, Agnes Martin, Al Held
Al Held
Al Held was an American Abstract expressionist painter. He was particularly well known for his large scale Hard-edge paintings.-Background and education:...
, Sam Francis
Sam Francis
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker.-Early life:...
, Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract expressionist painter. She is a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work...
, Gene Davis
Gene Davis (painter)
Gene Davis was an American painter known especially for his paintings of vertical stripes of color, and was a member of the group of abstract painters in Washington DC during the 1960s known as the Washington Color School....
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell was a "second generation" abstract expressionist painter. She was an essential member of the American Abstract expressionist movement, even though much of her career took place in France. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era's few...
, Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter.-Life and work:Friedel Dzubas studied art in his native land before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and settling in New York City. In Manhattan during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler...
, and younger artists like Brice Marden, Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold
Robert Mangold is an American minimalist artist.- Works :“Robert Mangold’s paintings,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 1997, “are more complicated to describe than they seem, which is partly what’s good about them: the way they invite intense scrutiny, which, in the nature of good...
, Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam is internationally recognized as one of America's foremost Color Field Painter and Lyrical Abstractionist artists....
, John Hoyland
John Hoyland
John Hoyland RA was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.-Life:...
, Sean Scully
Sean Scully
Sean Scully is an Irish-born American painter and printmaker who has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. His work is collected in major museums worldwide.-Life and work:...
, Pat Steir
Pat Steir
Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker.-Education:Steir was born in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives in New York City. She attended the Pratt Institute in New York from 1956 to 1958, and Boston University College of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1960. She then returned to Pratt,...
, Elizabeth Murray
Elizabeth Murray (artist)
Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R...
, Larry Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...
, Walter Darby Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard , also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract painter.Bannard attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, which continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme...
, Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield
Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, , and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.Landfield is...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
, Dan Christensen
Dan Christensen
Dan Christensen, the American abstract painter, was born in Cozad, Nebraska on October 6, 1942, he died in Easthampton, New York on January 20, 2007....
, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner
Ross Bleckner
-Life and work:"'I always absolutely thought there was a difference between being a young artist and an important young artist,' said Mr. Bleckner, who grew up in Hewlett, L.I., graduated in 1971 from New York University and earned an M.F.A...
, Archie Rand
Archie Rand
Archie Rand is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is displayed around the world, including in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de...
, Susan Crile
Susan Crile
Susan Crile is an artist, primarily a painter and printmaker. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions, and her work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Phillips Collection, and...
, and dozens of others produced a wide variety of paintings.
During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a reaction against abstract painting. Some critics viewed the work of artists like Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
, and declared the 'death of painting'. Artists began to practice new ways of making art. New movements gained prominence some of which are: postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...
, Earth art, video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, arte povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
, performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, body art
Body art
Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping , full body tattoo and body painting.More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation...
, fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
, mail art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
, the situationists and conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
among others.
However still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the 1960s and the 1970s characterized by monochrome painting
Monochrome painting
Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Painters have created the exploration of one color, the examination of values changing across a surface, the expressivity of texture and nuance, expressing a wide...
and hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
inspired by Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
, Milton Resnick
Milton Resnick
Milton Resnick was a major abstract expressionist painter and teacher known for his mystical, abstract and figurative paintings. Born in Bratslav, Russia, he emigrated to the United States in 1922.-Biography:...
, and Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing the simplicity of form found similar to the work of John McLaughlin. Kelly often employs bright colors to...
. Artists as diverse as Agnes Martin, Al Held, Larry Zox
Larry Zox
Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Larry Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...
, Brice Marden and others explored the power of simplification. The convergence of Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting, minimal art, hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
, and postminimalism blurred the distinction between movements that became more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s. The neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
movement is related to earlier developments in abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
, Lyrical Abstraction and postminimal painting.
Neo Expressionism
In the late 1960s the abstract expressionist painter Philip GustonPhilip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
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 1973, seen above in the gallery is an example of Guston's final and conclusive return to representation.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, 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
Figuration Libre
Figuration Libre is a French art movement of the 1980s. It is the French equivalent of Bad Painting and Neo-expressionism in America and Europe, Junge Wilde in Germany and Transvanguardia in Italy. The term was coined by Fluxus artist Ben Vautier.The group was formed in 1981 by Robert Combas, Remi...
, Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
, the school of London, and in the late 80s 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
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries. This type of art continues in popularity into the 21st century, even after the art crash of the late 1980s. Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac...
is a leading figure in European Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
by the 1980s, (see To the Unknown Painter 1983, in the gallery above) Kiefer's themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involves not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult
Occult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ism, theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
and mysticism
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life.
During the late 1970s in the United States painters who began working with invigorated surfaces and who returned to imagery like Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New Mexico, USA.-Background:Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945...
gained in popularity, especially as seen above in paintings like Horse 2, 1979. During the 1980s American artists like Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker.-Early life:Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1967...
, (see Bad Boy, 1981, above), David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
, Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting.-Early life:...
, Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
, and Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, and Italian painters like Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino
Mimmo Paladino is an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker.-Paintings and drawing:Mimmo Paladino was born Domenico Paladino in Paduli, Campania, southern Italy...
, Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor.A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi....
, and Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi
Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter. A native of Morro d'Alba, province of Ancona, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia...
, among others defined the idea of Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
in America.
Neo-expressionism was a style of modern
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
painting that became popular in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. It developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
art of the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour harmonies. The veteran painters Philip Guston
Philip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
, Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff
Leon Kossoff is a British expressionist painter, known for portraits, life drawings and cityscapes of London, England....
, Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.- Biography :Gerhard Richter was born in...
, A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany...
, along with slightly younger artists like Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac...
, Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker.-Early life:Fischl was born in New York City and grew up on suburban Long Island; his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1967...
, Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg
Susan Rothenberg is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New Mexico, USA.-Background:Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945...
, Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente is an Italian and American contemporary artist. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente is inclusive and nomadic, crossing many borders, intellectual and geographical.Dividing his time...
, Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting.-Early life:...
, Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates....
, Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, and many others became known for working in this intense expressionist vein of painting.
Painting still holds a respected position in contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
. Art is an open field no longer divided by the objective versus non-objective dichotomy. Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract. What has currency is content, exploring the boundaries of the medium, and a refusal to recapitulate the works of the past as an end goal.
Contemporary painting into the 21st century
At the beginning of the 21st century Contemporary painting and Contemporary art in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralismCultural pluralism
Cultural pluralism is a term used when smaller groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities, and their values and practices are accepted by the wider culture. Cultural pluralism is often confused with Multiculturalism...
. The "crisis" in painting and current art and current art criticism
Art criticism
Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty...
today is brought about by pluralism
Cultural pluralism
Cultural pluralism is a term used when smaller groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities, and their values and practices are accepted by the wider culture. Cultural pluralism is often confused with Multiculturalism...
. There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently magnificent and important works of art continue to be made albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit.
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, geometric abstraction, appropriation
Appropriation (art)
Appropriation is a fundamental aspect in the history of the arts . Appropriation can be understood as "the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work."...
, hyperrealism, photorealism
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
, expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
, minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
, pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
, abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
painting, monochrome painting
Monochrome painting
Monochromatic painting has been an important component of avant-garde visual art throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. Painters have created the exploration of one color, the examination of values changing across a surface, the expressivity of texture and nuance, expressing a wide...
, neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
, collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, intermedia
Intermedia
Intermedia was a concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the ineffable, often confusing, inter-disciplinary activities that occur between genres that became prevalent in the 1960s. Thus, the areas such as those between drawing and poetry, or between painting...
painting, assemblage
Assemblage (art)
Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects...
painting, digital painting
Digital painting
Digital painting is an emerging art form in which traditional painting techniques such as watercolor, oils, impasto, etc. are applied using digital tools by means of a computer, a digitizing tablet and stylus, and software. Traditional painting is painting with a physical medium as opposed to a...
, postmodern painting, neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
painting, shaped canvas
Shaped canvas
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...
painting, environmental mural painting, traditional figure
Human physical appearance
Human physical appearance refers to the outward phenotype or look of human beings. There are infinite variations in human phenotypes, though society reduces the variability to distinct categories...
painting, landscape painting, portrait painting
Portrait painting
Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject. Beside human beings, animals, pets and even inanimate objects can be chosen as the subject for a portrait...
, are a few continuing and current directions in painting at the beginning of the 21st century.
Painting in the Americas
During the period before and after European exploration and settlement of the Americas, including North America, Central America, South America and the Islands of the Caribbean, the AntillesAntilles
The Antilles islands form the greater part of the West Indies in the Caribbean Sea. The Antilles are divided into two major groups: the "Greater Antilles" to the north and west, including the larger islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola , and Puerto Rico; and the smaller "Lesser Antilles" on the...
, the Lesser Antilles
Lesser Antilles
The Lesser Antilles are a long, partly volcanic island arc in the Western Hemisphere. Most of its islands form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean, with the remainder located in the southern Caribbean just north of South America...
and other island groups, indigenous native cultures produced creative works including architecture, pottery
Pottery
Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery . Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery...
, ceramics
Ceramic art
In art history, ceramics and ceramic art mean art objects such as figures, tiles, and tableware made from clay and other raw materials by the process of pottery. Some ceramic products are regarded as fine art, while others are regarded as decorative, industrial or applied art objects, or as...
, weaving
Weaving
Weaving is a method of fabric production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. The other methods are knitting, lace making and felting. The longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft or filling...
, carving, sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
, painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
and murals as well as other religious and utilitarian objects. Each continent of the Americas hosted societies that were unique and individually developed cultures; that produced totems, works of religious symbolism, and decorative and expressive painted works. African influence was especially strong in the art of the Caribbean and South America. The arts of the indigenous people of the Americas had an enormous impact and influence on European art and vice-versa during and after the Age of Exploration. Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, and England were all powerful and influential colonial powers in the Americas during and after the 15th century. By the 19th century cultural influence began to flow both ways across the Atlantic
Islamic painting
The depiction of humans, animals or any another figurative subjects is forbidden within Islam to prevent believers from idolatryIdolatry
Idolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god, or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God. In all the Abrahamic religions idolatry is strongly forbidden, although...
so there is no religiously motivated painting (or sculpture) tradition within Muslim culture. Pictorial activity was reduced to Arabesque
Arabesque
The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements...
, mainly abstract
Abstract art
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. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
, with geometrical configuration or floral and plant-like patterns. Strongly connected to architecture and calligraphy
Calligraphy
Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...
, it can be widely seen as used for the painting of tile
Tile
A tile is a manufactured piece of hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, or even glass. Tiles are generally used for covering roofs, floors, walls, showers, or other objects such as tabletops...
s in mosques or in illuminations around the text of the Koran and other books. In fact abstract art is not an invention of modern art but it is present in pre-classical, barbarian
Barbarian
Barbarian and savage are terms used to refer to a person who is perceived to be uncivilized. The word is often used either in a general reference to a member of a nation or ethnos, typically a tribal society as seen by an urban civilization either viewed as inferior, or admired as a noble savage...
and non-western cultures many centuries before it and is essentially a decorative or applied art
Applied art
Applied art is the application of design and aesthetics to objects of function and everyday use. Whereas fine arts serve as intellectual stimulation to the viewer or academic sensibilities, the applied arts incorporate design and creative ideals to objects of utility, such as a cup, magazine or...
. Notable illustrator M. C. Escher
M. C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher , usually referred to as M. C. Escher , was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints...
was influenced by this geometrical and pattern based art. Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
(Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, done in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A....
and the architect Antonio Gaudí) re-introduced abstract floral patterns into western art.
Note that despite the taboo of figurative visualization, some muslim countries did cultivate a rich tradition in painting, though not in its own right, but as a companion to the written word. Iranian or Persian art, widely known as Persian miniature, concentrates on the illustration of epic or romantic works of literature. Persian illustrators deliberately avoided the use of shading and perspective, though familiar with it in their pre-islamic history, in order to abide by the rule of not creating any life-like illusion of the real world. Their aim was not to depict the world as it is, but to create images of an ideal world of timeless beauty and perfect order.
In present days, painting by art students or professional artists in Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries follow the same tendencies of Western culture art.
Iran
Oriental historian Basil Gray believes "Iran has offered a particularly unique [sic] art to the world which is excellent in its kind". Caves in Iran's Lorestan province exhibit painted imagery of animals and hunting scenes. Some such as those in Fars Province and Sialk are at least 5,000 years old. Painting in Iran is thought to have reached a climax during the Tamerlane era when outstanding masters such as Kamaleddin Behzad gave birth to a new style of painting.Paintings of the Qajar period, are a combination of European influences and Safavid miniature schools of painting such as those introduced by Reza Abbasi
Reza Abbasi
Riza Abbasi, Riza yi-Abbasi or Reza-e Abbasi, رضا عباسی in Persian, usually "Riza" or Reza Abbasi also Aqa Riza or Āqā Riżā Kāshānī was the leading Persian miniaturist of the Isfahan School during the later Safavid period, spending most of his career working for Shah Abbas I...
and classical works by Mihr 'Ali. Masters such as Kamal-ol-molk
Kamal-ol-molk
Mohammad Ghaffari , better known as Kamal-ol-Molk , was an Iranian painter and part of the Ghaffari Clan in Kashan.-Biography:...
, further pushed forward the European influence in Iran. It was during the Qajar era when "Coffee House painting" emerged. Subjects of this style were often religious in nature depicting scenes from Shia epics and the like.
Australia
Africa
African traditional culture and tribes do not seem to have great interest in two-dimensional representations in favour of sculptureSculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
and relief
Relief
Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...
. However, decorative painting in African culture is often abstract and geometrical. Another pictorial manifestation is body painting
Body painting
Body painting, or sometimes bodypainting, is a form of body art. Unlike tattoo and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, painted onto the human skin, and lasts for only several hours, or at most a couple of weeks. Body painting that is limited to the face is known as face painting...
, and face painting present for example in Maasai and Kĩkũyũ
Kikuyu
The Kikuyu are Kenya's most populous ethnic group. 'Kikuyu' is the Swahili form of the proper name and pronunciation of Gĩkũyũ although they refer to themselves as the Agĩkũyũ people.There are about 5,300,000 Kikuyu people in Kenya The Kikuyu are Kenya's most populous ethnic group. 'Kikuyu' is the...
culture in their ceremony rituals. Ceremonial cave painting
Cave painting
Cave paintings are paintings on cave walls and ceilings, and the term is used especially for those dating to prehistoric times. The earliest European cave paintings date to the Aurignacian, some 32,000 years ago. The purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known...
in certain villages can be found to be still in use. Note that Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
and other modern artists were influenced by African sculpture
African sculpture
African sculpture varies widely with location. Each region has a unique style and meaning to their sculptures. The type of material and purpose for the sculpture reflects that of the region of creation.-Regional variations:...
and masks in their varied styles.
Contemporary African artists follow western art movements and their paintings have little difference from occidental art works.
Influence on Western art
At the start of the 20th century, artists like PicassoPablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
, Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
and Modigliani
Amedeo Modigliani
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
became aware of, and were inspired by, African art. In a situation where the established avant garde was straining against the constraints imposed by serving the world of appearances, African Art demonstrated the power of supremely well organised forms; produced not only by responding to the faculty of sight, but also and often primarily, the faculty of imagination, emotion and mystical and religious experience. These artists saw in African art a formal
Formalism (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...
perfection and sophistication unified with phenomenal expressive power.
See also
- 20th-century Western painting
- Art periodsArt periodsArt period n. A phase in the development of the work of an artist, groups of artists or art movement.-Renaissance:Renaissance c. 1300 - c. 1602...
- History of Eastern art
- Hierarchy of genresHierarchy of genresA hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value....
- History of artHistory of artThe History of art refers to visual art which may be defined as any activity or product made by humans in a visual form for aesthetical or communicative purposes, expressing ideas, emotions or, in general, a worldview...
- History paintingHistory paintingHistory painting is a genre in painting defined by subject matter rather than an artistic style, depicting a moment in a narrative story, rather than a static subject such as a portrait...
- List of painters
- Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and ArchitectsLives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and ArchitectsThe Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times, or Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri, as it was originally known in Italian, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th century...
- Native American artNative American artVisual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas encompasses the visual artistic traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Americas from ancient times to the present...
- Outline of painting historyOutline of painting historyOutline of painting history is a brief outline with templates and links to Wikipedia articles and subjects related to Art History and specifically the history of painting as an art form.- Ancient painting :*Art of Ancient Egypt*Knossos...
- PaintingPaintingPainting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
- Painting in the Americas before ColonizationPainting in the Americas before ColonizationPainting in the Americas before colonization is the Precolumbian painting traditions of the Americas. Painting was a relatively widespread, popular and diverse means of communication and expression for both religious and utilitarian purpose throughout the regions of the Western Hemisphere...
- Plains hide paintingPlains hide paintingPlains hide painting is a traditional Plains Indian artistic practice of painting on either tanned or raw animal hides. Tipis, tipi liners, shields, parfleches, robes, clothing, drums, and winter counts could all be painted.-Genres:...
- Self portraitSelf PortraitSelf Portrait is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's tenth studio album, released by Columbia Records in June 1970.Self Portrait was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions...
- Timeline of Italian painters to 1800
- Western art historyWestern art historyWestern art is the art of the North American and European countries, and art created in the forms accepted by those countries.Written histories of Western art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Aegean civilisations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC...
, - Western paintingWestern paintingThe history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...
- Visual arts of Australia
Further reading
- Clement GreenbergClement GreenbergClement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961 - Lyrical AbstractionLyrical AbstractionLyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
, Exhibition Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American ArtWhitney Museum of American ArtThe Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
, NYC, 1971. - O'Connor, Francis V. Jackson PollockJackson PollockPaul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
Exhibition Catalogue, (New York, Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, [1967]) OCLC 165852 - Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts), Kirk VarnedoeKirk VarnedoeJohn Kirk Train Varnedoe was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia and was an American art historian and writer, a Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a noted curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.-Life:He studied...
, 2003 - The Triumph of ModernismModernismModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
: The Art World, 1985–2005, Hilton KramerHilton KramerHilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
, 2006, ISBN 0 1-56663-708 - David Piper, The Illustrated Library of Art, Portland House, New York, 1986, ISBN 0-517-62336-6