Abstract - Fauvism - Cubism - Futurism - Dada -Surrealism
Abstract
In art, abstraction means that the artist changes the appearance so it no longer looks realistic. Artists use abstraction in many ways and for many different reasons. The artist may leave out details, shift the point of view, exagerate, simplify or otherwise distort the image.
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which exists independently of visual references to 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 attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist.
By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a 'new kind of art' which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual turmoil in all areas of Western culture at that time.
Abstract works of art that have no recognizable subject are called "non-objective."
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10
Fauvism
Fauvist portrait by RouaultAt the turn of the century a group of artists so shocked the public with their art that they were called "wild beasts" or "fauves", in French. Fauvism flourished from 1898 to 1908. Fauvist paintings often used very bright, pure colors and short blunt brushstrokes. Fauvism differed from the Impressionism in that it was very emotional, raw, and even shocking and violent. Fauvist artist often chose colors, lines and shapes to express emotion rather than to represent the real world.
Some well-known painters of this period were Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse. Portrait of Madame Matisse. (The green line). 1905
Andre Derain, The Turning Road, L´Estaque, 1906
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 and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.
English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three phases of Cubism in his seminal book The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was Early Cubism, (from 1906-1908) during which time the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called High Cubism, (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to Late Cubism (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.
Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.
Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso, showing the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight German bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured. The Spanish rulers commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.
Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering war inflicts upon individuals, and in particular, innocent civilians. This monumental work has eclipsed the bounds of a single time and place, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. Within fifteen days of the attack, Pablo Picasso began painting this mural. This tour brought the Spanish civil war to the world's attention.
Futurism
Futurism developed in Italy and Russia in the early 1900s. An Italian poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, named the style to emphasise speed, power, change and innovation in art. He wanted art to reflect the power of the machine, which he felt was more applicable to the times than the static and irrelevant art of the past. The invention of the automobile, a machine with power and speed, was a symbol of this movement's interest in technology.
Umberto Boccioni: Unique forms of continuity in space
Futurist painters adopted many of the techniques of the Cubists, but while the Cubists favoured still life's and portraits, Futurists portrayed speeding cars, cyclists, dancers and sciences from urban life. Futurism was a proponent of violence and conflict and became eventually affiliated with Mussolini's Fascist Party in 1919 which assisted in the downfall of the movement. It called for the destruction of institutions such as libraries and museums. Futurism was aggressive and inflammatory, and the art of this era was intended to anger and inspire controversy.
Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises (1910)
The gist of their ideas was that the past should be neglected in favour of the present and more particularly the future.
In the first Futurist manifesto, published in 1909, they announced that the old guard must yield to the avant-garde.
We want to demolish museums and libraries...Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other... To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year... We even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda (Mona Lisa)
It is interesting to note that although the futurist embraced change in respect of their depiction of speed , violence and machines they still used conventional media to portray it such as paintings and sculptor and not the more modern methods photography or cinematography.
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)
Some well-known artists of this period were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra and Gino Severini.
Dada
"Dada" was apparently chosen randomly for this art movement. During a meeting of young artists and war resisters in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland, they stuck a paper knife into a French-German dictionary and selected the word it pointed to. They felt "dada" was a good fit for their art movement, which emphasised protest activities, despair regarding World War I, and distaste for what they thought were the bourgeois values of the art of the time.
Dada art was nihilistic, anti-aesthetic and a reaction to the rationalisation, rules and conventions of mainstream art. Many Dada artists considered their work to be anti-art or art that defied reason. They felt one purpose of their art was to enrage, as well as engage, their audiences. Dada's naiveté and antics helped clear the air of stale ideas making way for new ones. For example, Marcel Duchamp 1887 - 1969 "improved" the Mona Lisa by painting a copy and adding a moustache.
He also signed his name on a snow shovel and called it art. Some well-known artists of this period were Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. One of the most important features of dada is chance. They believed that f art reflects life, then everything in a composition would not be composed.
Presented "Nude descending a staircase No 2" which was inspired by the futurist way of illustrating the passage of time and dissected into cubist units, to the american audience who declared it was not art.
Before leaving Europe he began creating what he called readymades which was an aggressive protest against traditional art. A readymade is an everyday object transformed into art not by craft but by the will or the idea behind it. They raised interesting questions about the difference between art and non-art. His readymades suggest that if you strip away the utilitarian function from an object, give it an arty tile ( He called a snow shovel "In advance of a broken arm} and put it into a gallery, it then becomes art.
In 1917 he famously entered a porcelain urinal in the Society Of Independent Artists exhibition to which all entries were supposed to be accepted, and called it Fountain by R. Mutt. As a founder member of the association, he seemed to be testing the nerve of his colleagues. How avant-garde were they? The piece was rejected and Duchamp resigned immediately in protest. This was a hugely important piece as it questioned what is art and challenged the popular conception that art and craft were synonymous rather than the meaning or idea behind the piece was the real constituent of what art is. In other words it is the Context that is everything.
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.
The following article is from the Dada magazine "The Blind Man" and refers to the above
Surrealism
Surrealism is an invented word—"sur" means beyond or farther than, so "surreal" means to go beyond real. It was named this because surrealist art derives much of it's meaning from the theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud and the unconscious.
This surrealist way of image making was hardly new if reference is made to artist such as Hieronymus Bosch who operated in the late 1400s and his work could almost certainly considered surreal as shown in part of the tryptic the garden of earthly delights
The Surrealism movement grew out of the Dada movement and flourished in Europe between World War I and World War II. Surrealism employed many of the techniques of Dada but emphasised the positive rather than the negative. Surrealism tried to meld the conscious and the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasy along with reality so that the line between these ideas was completely blurred. Many artists of this time felt the unconscious was where the true centre of art lay, and that artists could tap into this genius by bending and softening the lines between what one's eyes see and the dreamworld. Much of Surrealistic art portrays alternate realities; some created by accident, some using the unconventional realities of blind feeling and impulse. Some of the art of this time is quite cruel and violent as well as very beautiful. The artists, like the Dada artists before them, wanted to shock their viewers with the unexpected and make people think in new ways.
Some well-known artists of this period were Andre Masson, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.
The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman
Swans Reflecting Elephants Salvador Dalí, 1937
René Magritte. The Son of Man, oil painting, 1964
In art, abstraction means that the artist changes the appearance so it no longer looks realistic. Artists use abstraction in many ways and for many different reasons. The artist may leave out details, shift the point of view, exagerate, simplify or otherwise distort the image.
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which exists independently of visual references to 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 attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist.
By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a 'new kind of art' which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual turmoil in all areas of Western culture at that time.
Abstract works of art that have no recognizable subject are called "non-objective."
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10
Fauvism
Fauvist portrait by RouaultAt the turn of the century a group of artists so shocked the public with their art that they were called "wild beasts" or "fauves", in French. Fauvism flourished from 1898 to 1908. Fauvist paintings often used very bright, pure colors and short blunt brushstrokes. Fauvism differed from the Impressionism in that it was very emotional, raw, and even shocking and violent. Fauvist artist often chose colors, lines and shapes to express emotion rather than to represent the real world.
Some well-known painters of this period were Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse. Portrait of Madame Matisse. (The green line). 1905
Andre Derain, The Turning Road, L´Estaque, 1906
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 and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.
English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three phases of Cubism in his seminal book The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was Early Cubism, (from 1906-1908) during which time the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called High Cubism, (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to Late Cubism (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.
Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.
Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso, showing the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by twenty-eight German bombers, on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The attack killed between 250 and 1,600 people, and many more were injured. The Spanish rulers commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.
Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering war inflicts upon individuals, and in particular, innocent civilians. This monumental work has eclipsed the bounds of a single time and place, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion Guernica was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. Within fifteen days of the attack, Pablo Picasso began painting this mural. This tour brought the Spanish civil war to the world's attention.
Futurism
Futurism developed in Italy and Russia in the early 1900s. An Italian poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, named the style to emphasise speed, power, change and innovation in art. He wanted art to reflect the power of the machine, which he felt was more applicable to the times than the static and irrelevant art of the past. The invention of the automobile, a machine with power and speed, was a symbol of this movement's interest in technology.
Umberto Boccioni: Unique forms of continuity in space
Futurist painters adopted many of the techniques of the Cubists, but while the Cubists favoured still life's and portraits, Futurists portrayed speeding cars, cyclists, dancers and sciences from urban life. Futurism was a proponent of violence and conflict and became eventually affiliated with Mussolini's Fascist Party in 1919 which assisted in the downfall of the movement. It called for the destruction of institutions such as libraries and museums. Futurism was aggressive and inflammatory, and the art of this era was intended to anger and inspire controversy.
Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises (1910)
The gist of their ideas was that the past should be neglected in favour of the present and more particularly the future.
In the first Futurist manifesto, published in 1909, they announced that the old guard must yield to the avant-garde.
We want to demolish museums and libraries...Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other... To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year... We even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda (Mona Lisa)
It is interesting to note that although the futurist embraced change in respect of their depiction of speed , violence and machines they still used conventional media to portray it such as paintings and sculptor and not the more modern methods photography or cinematography.
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)
Some well-known artists of this period were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra and Gino Severini.
Dada
"Dada" was apparently chosen randomly for this art movement. During a meeting of young artists and war resisters in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland, they stuck a paper knife into a French-German dictionary and selected the word it pointed to. They felt "dada" was a good fit for their art movement, which emphasised protest activities, despair regarding World War I, and distaste for what they thought were the bourgeois values of the art of the time.
Dada art was nihilistic, anti-aesthetic and a reaction to the rationalisation, rules and conventions of mainstream art. Many Dada artists considered their work to be anti-art or art that defied reason. They felt one purpose of their art was to enrage, as well as engage, their audiences. Dada's naiveté and antics helped clear the air of stale ideas making way for new ones. For example, Marcel Duchamp 1887 - 1969 "improved" the Mona Lisa by painting a copy and adding a moustache.
He also signed his name on a snow shovel and called it art. Some well-known artists of this period were Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. One of the most important features of dada is chance. They believed that f art reflects life, then everything in a composition would not be composed.
Presented "Nude descending a staircase No 2" which was inspired by the futurist way of illustrating the passage of time and dissected into cubist units, to the american audience who declared it was not art.
Before leaving Europe he began creating what he called readymades which was an aggressive protest against traditional art. A readymade is an everyday object transformed into art not by craft but by the will or the idea behind it. They raised interesting questions about the difference between art and non-art. His readymades suggest that if you strip away the utilitarian function from an object, give it an arty tile ( He called a snow shovel "In advance of a broken arm} and put it into a gallery, it then becomes art.
In 1917 he famously entered a porcelain urinal in the Society Of Independent Artists exhibition to which all entries were supposed to be accepted, and called it Fountain by R. Mutt. As a founder member of the association, he seemed to be testing the nerve of his colleagues. How avant-garde were they? The piece was rejected and Duchamp resigned immediately in protest. This was a hugely important piece as it questioned what is art and challenged the popular conception that art and craft were synonymous rather than the meaning or idea behind the piece was the real constituent of what art is. In other words it is the Context that is everything.
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.
The following article is from the Dada magazine "The Blind Man" and refers to the above
Surrealism
Surrealism is an invented word—"sur" means beyond or farther than, so "surreal" means to go beyond real. It was named this because surrealist art derives much of it's meaning from the theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud and the unconscious.
This surrealist way of image making was hardly new if reference is made to artist such as Hieronymus Bosch who operated in the late 1400s and his work could almost certainly considered surreal as shown in part of the tryptic the garden of earthly delights
The Surrealism movement grew out of the Dada movement and flourished in Europe between World War I and World War II. Surrealism employed many of the techniques of Dada but emphasised the positive rather than the negative. Surrealism tried to meld the conscious and the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasy along with reality so that the line between these ideas was completely blurred. Many artists of this time felt the unconscious was where the true centre of art lay, and that artists could tap into this genius by bending and softening the lines between what one's eyes see and the dreamworld. Much of Surrealistic art portrays alternate realities; some created by accident, some using the unconventional realities of blind feeling and impulse. Some of the art of this time is quite cruel and violent as well as very beautiful. The artists, like the Dada artists before them, wanted to shock their viewers with the unexpected and make people think in new ways.
Some well-known artists of this period were Andre Masson, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.
The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman
Swans Reflecting Elephants Salvador Dalí, 1937
René Magritte. The Son of Man, oil painting, 1964