Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 13, 2007 19:55:59 GMT -5
b]The School of Modern Art[/b]
Until the 20th Century, the artist was considered his own person and presented his art as he saw it. However, this was closer to photography than creative art, at the same time, capturing the life of the same era. With the invention of the camera, the artist was forced to become more creative and look into himself and his imagination thus producing new horizons in art. In their search for new types of art, the artists turned to African, Chinese and tribal arts and were obviously influenced by them.
Modern art turned to the use of parts of machinery, equipment, computers, etc. in order to create compositions of color and shape which would touch all the senses at the same time. Modern art has no rules. It uses the artists' imaginative skills to capture the soul and heart of the viewer. It's both interesting and confusing at the same time. Although everything created today is modern art, there are differing conceptions of what this modern art is. There are those who zealously guard the absolute realism they feel truly represents the school of modern art. The following styles are some examples of modern art:
Abstract Art. Term used to describe the various kinds of anti-representational painting and sculpture that have characterized much of 20th-century art. Broadly, they can be divided into two categories. One category includes the pure abstract as exemplified in the geometric works of the painter Piet MONDRIAN and the sculptor Alexander ARCHIPENKO. The other category includes highly subjective treatments of recognizable objects, as in the Cubist canvases if Georges BRAQUE and the monumentally simplified sculptures of Henry MOORE.
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 also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. The term "Abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the critic Robert Coates.
Action Painting. An art movement that originated in the USA after the Second World War. Its exponents stressed the physical act of painting and produced work by spontaneously dribbling, splashing or smearing the paints onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work emphasizes the physical act of painting itself. Its pioneer was Jackson POLLOCK.
Art Nouveau. Decorative art style in vogue in Europe between 1890 and 1910, marked by tendril-like lines and swirling forms. Inspired partly by Japanese art and partly by the English ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT of the late 19th century, it permeated all the decorative arts. Its most famous practitioners included the English illustrator Aubrey BEARDSLEY and the French glass designer Emile GALLE.
Constructivism. Art movement of the 20th century which aimed to fuse painting and sculpture in abstract constructions marked by geometrically exact relationships of mass and space. It was founded in Russia by the painter Vladimir TATLIN and developed by the sculptors Naum GABO and Antoine PEVSNER.
Cubism. The most revolutionary of all movements in 20th-century art. It lasted from about 1907 to 1914, but its influence is still evident in modern painting. The movement, partly inspired by African and Oceanic sculpture and the later paintings of Paul CEZANNE, abandoned most of the conventions of the representational painting tradition of the past, to which even IMPRESSIONISM and FAUVISM had adhered. Cubism did not, as its name implies, reduce everything to cubes, but it distorted perspective, introduced multiple viewpoints, used non-realistic colors and generally simplified its subject matter. Movement, emotion, sensuality and allusion were abandoned in favor of intellectualism and austerity. The pioneers were Pablo PICASSO and Georges BRAQUE. Other leading exponents of the movement were Juan GRIS, Fernand LEGER and Marcel DUCHAMP.
Dadaism. Cultural movement of the early 20th century which rejected every previously accepted artistic standard and encouraged the artist to create what he wanted, no matter how absurd. In keeping with its aims, it chose its name at random from a French dictionary. Originating in Zurich in 1916, the movement became international and influenced most of the arts until about 1923. Typical of its manifestations was the French painter Marcel DUCHAMP’s mustached and captioned version of the “Mona Lisa”. It was from the ruins of Dada that a more constructive movement, Surrealism, emerged.
De Stijl. Dutch art movement of the 20th century which took abstraction to an extreme. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.
De Stijl, Dutch for “the Style” as founded in 1917 by Theo VAN DOESBURG. Its best-known exponent was Piet MONDRIAN.
Expressionism. Artistic and literary movement of the early 20th century which broke with naturalism and aimed at the direct expression and the deliberate distortion of the artist’s feelings. It was predominantly a German movement. Influenced by the Fauves, Expressionism worked with arbitrary colors as well as jarring compositions. In reaction and opposition to French Impressionism which focused on rendering the sheer visual appearance of objects, Expressionist artists sought to capture emotions and subjective interpretations: It was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter; the Expressonists focused on capturing vivid emotional reactions through powerful colors and dynamic compositions instead. In painting, its leading exponents included Oskar KOKOSCHKA, Emil NOLDE, Wassily KANDINSKY, Georges ROUAULT and the Norwegian Edvard MUNCH.
Fauvism. Les Fauves (French for wild beasts) were a short-lived and loose grouping of early Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the use of deep color over the representational values retained by Impressionism. Fauvists simplified lines, made the subject of the painting easy to read, exaggerated perspectives and used brilliant but arbitrary colors. They also emphasized freshness and spontaneity over finish. The name was given (humorously) to the group by art critic Louis Vauxcelles. In French, "Fauves" means "wild beasts." The painter Gustave Moreau was the movement's inspirational teacher, and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris who pushed his students to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions. The leaders of the movement, Moreau's top students, were Henri Matisse and André Derain — friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. The paintings, for example Matisse's 1908 The Dessert or Derain's The Two Barges, use powerful reds or other forceful colors to draw the eye. Their disciples included Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, and Picasso's partner in Cubism, Georges Braque. Fauvism, as a movement, had no concrete theories, and was short lived (they only had three exhibitions). Matisse was seen as a leader of the movement. He said he wanted to create art to delight; art as a decoration was his purpose; therefore his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition.
Futurism. A 20th-century art movement, primarily Italian, which had an avowed revolutionary aim. It was inaugurated by a manifesto published in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo MARINETTI in which he glorified the energy and speed of modern life together with the dynamism and violence of the new technological society and reviled what he regarded as the dead weight of the cultural past. In their manifestos, art, poetry, and theatrical events, the Futurists celebrated automobiles, airplanes, machine guns, and other phenomena that they associated with modernity; they denounced moralism and feminism, as well as museums and libraries, which they considered static institutions of an obsolete culture. The Futurists sought to represent the experience of the modern metropolis — namely, the overstimulation of the individual’s sensorium — by portraying multiple phases of motion simultaneously and by showing the interpenetration of objects and their environment through the superimposition of different chromatic planes. Among its leading exponents were Umberto BOCCIONI and Luigi RUSSOLO.
Impressionism. Movement in French painting in the second half of the 19th century, founded by Claude MONET, Pierre Auguste RENOIR and Alfred SISLEY. Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists who began publicly exhibiting their art in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). Critic Louis Leroy inadvertently coined the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, light colors, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, and unusual visual angles.
Minimalism. Though never a self-proclaimed movement, Minimalism refers to painting or sculpture made with an extreme economy of means and reduced to the essentials of geometric abstraction. Minimalist art is generally characterized by precise, hard-edged, unitary geometric forms; rigid planes of color—usually cool hues or commercially mixed colors, or sometimes just a single color; non-hierarchical, mathematically regular compositions, often based on a grid; the reduction to pure self-referential form, emptied of all external references; and an anonymous surface appearance, without any gestural inflection. As a result of these formal attributes, this art has also been referred to as ABC art, Cool art, Imageless Pop, Literalist art, Object art, and Primary Structure art. Minimalist art shares Pop art’s rejection of the artistic subjectivity and heroic gesture of Abstract Expressionism. In Minimal art what is important is the phenomenological basis of the viewer’s experience, how he or she perceives the internal relationships among the parts of the work and of the parts to the whole. The repetition of forms in Minimalist sculpture serves to emphasize the subtle differences in the perception of those forms in space and time as the spectator’s viewpoint shifts in time and space.
Neo-Impressionism. Development from IMPRESSIONISM led by Georges SEURAT. The other principal members of the group were Paul SIGNAC and, for a time, Camille PISARRO. In an attempt to make painting more scientific, the painter applied point of dots of pure colors that would blend in the viewer’s eye, a technique known as “Pointillism”.
Post-Impressionism. In early MODERNISM, a French art movement that immediately followed IMPRESSIONISM and NEO-IMPRESSIONISM. The artists involved, usually meaning Paul CEZANNE, Vincent VAN GOGH, Paul GAUGUIN, and Henri de TOULOUSE-LAUTREC showed a greater concern for expression, structure and form than did the Impressionist artists. Building on the works of the Neo-Impressionists, these artists rejected the emphasis the Impressionists put on naturalism and the depiction of fleeting effects of light. The term was coined by the British art critic and painter, Roger FRY, on the occasion of an exhibit of works by these artists, which he curated in 1910 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Op Art. Branch of modern abstract art that bases itself on exploiting optical effects to create an impression of movement. Victor VASARELY, a Hungarian-born Frenchman, is a leading exponent of Op – short for optical – Art which aims to create an illusion of movement through geometrical patterns. Pop Art. An art movement that arose in the USA in the 1960’s. Using consumer goods, comic strips and other everyday aspects of contemporary life as its subject matter, it sought to establish a new popular culture in the fine arts. Among its leading American exponents are the painters Robert RAUSCHENBERG, Andy WARHOL and Roy LICHTENSTEIN.
Primitivism. An art movement that arose in Western Europe in late 19th century. “Primitivism” is less an aesthetic movement than a sensibility or cultural attitude that has informed diverse aspects of Modern art. It refers to modern art that alludes to specific stylistic elements of tribal objects and other non- western art forms. With roots in late-19th-century Romanticism’s fascination with foreign civilizations and distant lands, particularly with what were considered to be naive, less-developed cultures, it also designates the “primitive” as a myth of paradise lost for late-19th- and 20th-century culture. Behind his captivation with the “other” was a belief in the intrinsic goodness of all humankind, a conviction inspired by French philosopher Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU’s notion of the Noble Savage. At the same time, however, industrialized Western culture evoked the “primitive” s a sign on which to map what it had socially and psychologically repressed: desire and sexual abandon. The problematic nature of “primitivism” can be illustrated by the example of Paul Gauguin, who spurned his own culture to join that of an “uncivilized” yet more “ingenuous” people. Although he sought spiritual inspiration in Tahiti, he showed a more earthy preoccupation with Tahiti-an women, often depicting them nude.
Realism. A 19th-century literary and artistic movement that sought to record life objectively without moral or idealistic overtones, and often in its harsh or sordid aspects. In this it was the forerunner of NATURALISM. In painting, the movement is exemplified in the work of Gustave COURBET and Jean-Francois MILLET. The term is also applied more generally to any work that is marked by detailed and faithful reproduction of aspects of nature or everyday life.
Surrealism. A 20th century art movement which developed between the two world wars and explored the world of fantasy, dreams and the subconscious. The term “Surrealism” adopted by the French poet Andre BRETON for the movement by means “above Realism” and the canvases of Surrealist painters employ such illogical and bizarre juxtapositions as a fur-lined teacup and a railway engine emerging from a fireplace. The movement embraced a wide range of styles and some of the finest and most celebrated painters of the century, including Marc CHAGALL, Salvador DALI, Max ERNST, Rene MAGRITTE, Georges DE CHIRICO and Joan MIRO.
Symbolism. Symbolism is a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with a spooky mysticism. It was a continuation of the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David FRIEDRICH and John Henry FUSELI. Anticipating Freud and Jung, the Symbolists mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, they influenced the contemporary ART NOUVEAU movement and LES NABIS. The leading Symbolists included Gustave MOREAU, Odilon REDON, and Pierre Puvis DE CHAVANNES. The movement was also a major influence on some of the Expressionists, especially through the work of Edvard MUNCH and Franz VON STUCK.
Vorticism. An art movement of the early 20th century, the English equivalent of the Italian FUTURISM. The self-consciously shocking magazine Blast expressed the movement’s belief that all art must spring from an “emotional vortex” hence Vorticism. Its leading exponents were the poet EZRA POUND and the artist Wyndham LEWIS, whose paintings express energy through abstract forms.
Until the 20th Century, the artist was considered his own person and presented his art as he saw it. However, this was closer to photography than creative art, at the same time, capturing the life of the same era. With the invention of the camera, the artist was forced to become more creative and look into himself and his imagination thus producing new horizons in art. In their search for new types of art, the artists turned to African, Chinese and tribal arts and were obviously influenced by them.
Modern art turned to the use of parts of machinery, equipment, computers, etc. in order to create compositions of color and shape which would touch all the senses at the same time. Modern art has no rules. It uses the artists' imaginative skills to capture the soul and heart of the viewer. It's both interesting and confusing at the same time. Although everything created today is modern art, there are differing conceptions of what this modern art is. There are those who zealously guard the absolute realism they feel truly represents the school of modern art. The following styles are some examples of modern art:
Abstract Art. Term used to describe the various kinds of anti-representational painting and sculpture that have characterized much of 20th-century art. Broadly, they can be divided into two categories. One category includes the pure abstract as exemplified in the geometric works of the painter Piet MONDRIAN and the sculptor Alexander ARCHIPENKO. The other category includes highly subjective treatments of recognizable objects, as in the Cubist canvases if Georges BRAQUE and the monumentally simplified sculptures of Henry MOORE.
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 also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. The term "Abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the critic Robert Coates.
Action Painting. An art movement that originated in the USA after the Second World War. Its exponents stressed the physical act of painting and produced work by spontaneously dribbling, splashing or smearing the paints onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work emphasizes the physical act of painting itself. Its pioneer was Jackson POLLOCK.
Art Nouveau. Decorative art style in vogue in Europe between 1890 and 1910, marked by tendril-like lines and swirling forms. Inspired partly by Japanese art and partly by the English ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT of the late 19th century, it permeated all the decorative arts. Its most famous practitioners included the English illustrator Aubrey BEARDSLEY and the French glass designer Emile GALLE.
Constructivism. Art movement of the 20th century which aimed to fuse painting and sculpture in abstract constructions marked by geometrically exact relationships of mass and space. It was founded in Russia by the painter Vladimir TATLIN and developed by the sculptors Naum GABO and Antoine PEVSNER.
Cubism. The most revolutionary of all movements in 20th-century art. It lasted from about 1907 to 1914, but its influence is still evident in modern painting. The movement, partly inspired by African and Oceanic sculpture and the later paintings of Paul CEZANNE, abandoned most of the conventions of the representational painting tradition of the past, to which even IMPRESSIONISM and FAUVISM had adhered. Cubism did not, as its name implies, reduce everything to cubes, but it distorted perspective, introduced multiple viewpoints, used non-realistic colors and generally simplified its subject matter. Movement, emotion, sensuality and allusion were abandoned in favor of intellectualism and austerity. The pioneers were Pablo PICASSO and Georges BRAQUE. Other leading exponents of the movement were Juan GRIS, Fernand LEGER and Marcel DUCHAMP.
Dadaism. Cultural movement of the early 20th century which rejected every previously accepted artistic standard and encouraged the artist to create what he wanted, no matter how absurd. In keeping with its aims, it chose its name at random from a French dictionary. Originating in Zurich in 1916, the movement became international and influenced most of the arts until about 1923. Typical of its manifestations was the French painter Marcel DUCHAMP’s mustached and captioned version of the “Mona Lisa”. It was from the ruins of Dada that a more constructive movement, Surrealism, emerged.
De Stijl. Dutch art movement of the 20th century which took abstraction to an extreme. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.
De Stijl, Dutch for “the Style” as founded in 1917 by Theo VAN DOESBURG. Its best-known exponent was Piet MONDRIAN.
Expressionism. Artistic and literary movement of the early 20th century which broke with naturalism and aimed at the direct expression and the deliberate distortion of the artist’s feelings. It was predominantly a German movement. Influenced by the Fauves, Expressionism worked with arbitrary colors as well as jarring compositions. In reaction and opposition to French Impressionism which focused on rendering the sheer visual appearance of objects, Expressionist artists sought to capture emotions and subjective interpretations: It was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter; the Expressonists focused on capturing vivid emotional reactions through powerful colors and dynamic compositions instead. In painting, its leading exponents included Oskar KOKOSCHKA, Emil NOLDE, Wassily KANDINSKY, Georges ROUAULT and the Norwegian Edvard MUNCH.
Fauvism. Les Fauves (French for wild beasts) were a short-lived and loose grouping of early Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the use of deep color over the representational values retained by Impressionism. Fauvists simplified lines, made the subject of the painting easy to read, exaggerated perspectives and used brilliant but arbitrary colors. They also emphasized freshness and spontaneity over finish. The name was given (humorously) to the group by art critic Louis Vauxcelles. In French, "Fauves" means "wild beasts." The painter Gustave Moreau was the movement's inspirational teacher, and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris who pushed his students to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions. The leaders of the movement, Moreau's top students, were Henri Matisse and André Derain — friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. The paintings, for example Matisse's 1908 The Dessert or Derain's The Two Barges, use powerful reds or other forceful colors to draw the eye. Their disciples included Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, and Picasso's partner in Cubism, Georges Braque. Fauvism, as a movement, had no concrete theories, and was short lived (they only had three exhibitions). Matisse was seen as a leader of the movement. He said he wanted to create art to delight; art as a decoration was his purpose; therefore his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition.
Futurism. A 20th-century art movement, primarily Italian, which had an avowed revolutionary aim. It was inaugurated by a manifesto published in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo MARINETTI in which he glorified the energy and speed of modern life together with the dynamism and violence of the new technological society and reviled what he regarded as the dead weight of the cultural past. In their manifestos, art, poetry, and theatrical events, the Futurists celebrated automobiles, airplanes, machine guns, and other phenomena that they associated with modernity; they denounced moralism and feminism, as well as museums and libraries, which they considered static institutions of an obsolete culture. The Futurists sought to represent the experience of the modern metropolis — namely, the overstimulation of the individual’s sensorium — by portraying multiple phases of motion simultaneously and by showing the interpenetration of objects and their environment through the superimposition of different chromatic planes. Among its leading exponents were Umberto BOCCIONI and Luigi RUSSOLO.
Impressionism. Movement in French painting in the second half of the 19th century, founded by Claude MONET, Pierre Auguste RENOIR and Alfred SISLEY. Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists who began publicly exhibiting their art in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). Critic Louis Leroy inadvertently coined the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, light colors, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, and unusual visual angles.
Minimalism. Though never a self-proclaimed movement, Minimalism refers to painting or sculpture made with an extreme economy of means and reduced to the essentials of geometric abstraction. Minimalist art is generally characterized by precise, hard-edged, unitary geometric forms; rigid planes of color—usually cool hues or commercially mixed colors, or sometimes just a single color; non-hierarchical, mathematically regular compositions, often based on a grid; the reduction to pure self-referential form, emptied of all external references; and an anonymous surface appearance, without any gestural inflection. As a result of these formal attributes, this art has also been referred to as ABC art, Cool art, Imageless Pop, Literalist art, Object art, and Primary Structure art. Minimalist art shares Pop art’s rejection of the artistic subjectivity and heroic gesture of Abstract Expressionism. In Minimal art what is important is the phenomenological basis of the viewer’s experience, how he or she perceives the internal relationships among the parts of the work and of the parts to the whole. The repetition of forms in Minimalist sculpture serves to emphasize the subtle differences in the perception of those forms in space and time as the spectator’s viewpoint shifts in time and space.
Neo-Impressionism. Development from IMPRESSIONISM led by Georges SEURAT. The other principal members of the group were Paul SIGNAC and, for a time, Camille PISARRO. In an attempt to make painting more scientific, the painter applied point of dots of pure colors that would blend in the viewer’s eye, a technique known as “Pointillism”.
Post-Impressionism. In early MODERNISM, a French art movement that immediately followed IMPRESSIONISM and NEO-IMPRESSIONISM. The artists involved, usually meaning Paul CEZANNE, Vincent VAN GOGH, Paul GAUGUIN, and Henri de TOULOUSE-LAUTREC showed a greater concern for expression, structure and form than did the Impressionist artists. Building on the works of the Neo-Impressionists, these artists rejected the emphasis the Impressionists put on naturalism and the depiction of fleeting effects of light. The term was coined by the British art critic and painter, Roger FRY, on the occasion of an exhibit of works by these artists, which he curated in 1910 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Op Art. Branch of modern abstract art that bases itself on exploiting optical effects to create an impression of movement. Victor VASARELY, a Hungarian-born Frenchman, is a leading exponent of Op – short for optical – Art which aims to create an illusion of movement through geometrical patterns. Pop Art. An art movement that arose in the USA in the 1960’s. Using consumer goods, comic strips and other everyday aspects of contemporary life as its subject matter, it sought to establish a new popular culture in the fine arts. Among its leading American exponents are the painters Robert RAUSCHENBERG, Andy WARHOL and Roy LICHTENSTEIN.
Primitivism. An art movement that arose in Western Europe in late 19th century. “Primitivism” is less an aesthetic movement than a sensibility or cultural attitude that has informed diverse aspects of Modern art. It refers to modern art that alludes to specific stylistic elements of tribal objects and other non- western art forms. With roots in late-19th-century Romanticism’s fascination with foreign civilizations and distant lands, particularly with what were considered to be naive, less-developed cultures, it also designates the “primitive” as a myth of paradise lost for late-19th- and 20th-century culture. Behind his captivation with the “other” was a belief in the intrinsic goodness of all humankind, a conviction inspired by French philosopher Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU’s notion of the Noble Savage. At the same time, however, industrialized Western culture evoked the “primitive” s a sign on which to map what it had socially and psychologically repressed: desire and sexual abandon. The problematic nature of “primitivism” can be illustrated by the example of Paul Gauguin, who spurned his own culture to join that of an “uncivilized” yet more “ingenuous” people. Although he sought spiritual inspiration in Tahiti, he showed a more earthy preoccupation with Tahiti-an women, often depicting them nude.
Realism. A 19th-century literary and artistic movement that sought to record life objectively without moral or idealistic overtones, and often in its harsh or sordid aspects. In this it was the forerunner of NATURALISM. In painting, the movement is exemplified in the work of Gustave COURBET and Jean-Francois MILLET. The term is also applied more generally to any work that is marked by detailed and faithful reproduction of aspects of nature or everyday life.
Surrealism. A 20th century art movement which developed between the two world wars and explored the world of fantasy, dreams and the subconscious. The term “Surrealism” adopted by the French poet Andre BRETON for the movement by means “above Realism” and the canvases of Surrealist painters employ such illogical and bizarre juxtapositions as a fur-lined teacup and a railway engine emerging from a fireplace. The movement embraced a wide range of styles and some of the finest and most celebrated painters of the century, including Marc CHAGALL, Salvador DALI, Max ERNST, Rene MAGRITTE, Georges DE CHIRICO and Joan MIRO.
Symbolism. Symbolism is a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with a spooky mysticism. It was a continuation of the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David FRIEDRICH and John Henry FUSELI. Anticipating Freud and Jung, the Symbolists mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, they influenced the contemporary ART NOUVEAU movement and LES NABIS. The leading Symbolists included Gustave MOREAU, Odilon REDON, and Pierre Puvis DE CHAVANNES. The movement was also a major influence on some of the Expressionists, especially through the work of Edvard MUNCH and Franz VON STUCK.
Vorticism. An art movement of the early 20th century, the English equivalent of the Italian FUTURISM. The self-consciously shocking magazine Blast expressed the movement’s belief that all art must spring from an “emotional vortex” hence Vorticism. Its leading exponents were the poet EZRA POUND and the artist Wyndham LEWIS, whose paintings express energy through abstract forms.