Modern Art & Ideas
Class: ART Created: Feb 07, 2020 11:37 AM Materials: https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/ Reviewed: No Source: Coursera
Week 1: Introduction to Modern Art & Ideas
Birth of Modern Art
About late-19th-century artists broke with tradition to create art for the modern age. The birth of modernism and modern art can be traced to the Industrial Revolution from mid-18 century and lasted through the 19th century. The evolution of transportation changes the way that people exploring the world and their worldview. Also as manufacturing got improved, urban centers prospered, industries and population boomed. New technology also brought new mediums like photography.
Before the 19th century, artists are commissioned with wealthy patrons or institutions like church. Their works of art are most often related to religious and mythological scenes which trying to tell stories to the viewers. During the 19th century, many artist begun to make art based on their own, personal experiences and about topics that they chose. With the publication of psychologist Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and the popularization of the idea of a subconscious mind, many artists began exploring dreams, symbolism, and personal iconography as avenues for the depiction of their subjective experiences. Challenging the notion that art must realistically depict the world, some artists experimented with the expressive use of color, non-traditional materials, and new techniques and mediums. Among these new mediums was photography, whose invention in 1839 offered radical possibilities for depicting and interpreting the world.
Big thing happened during this period: Paris Exposition of 1900.
Rise of the Modern City
The emergence of the Art Nouveau style toward the end of the nineteenth century resulted from a search for a new aesthetic that was not based on historical or classical models. The sinuous, organic lines of Guimard’s design and the stylized, giant stalks drooping under the weight of what seem to be swollen tropical flowers, but are actually amber glass lamps, make this a quintessentially Art Nouveau piece. Guimard’s designs for this famous entrance arch and two others were intended to visually enhance the experience of underground travel on the new subway system for Paris.
Guimard’s gate design typifies the Art Nouveau style, which emerged in France and Belgium in the late 19th century and was characterized by its references to nature and organic forms. Much like subway travel itself, Art Nouveau was unfamiliar to most Parisians, who responded hesitantly at first to this novel visual vocabulary. Installed throughout the city, the gates soon brought Art Nouveau into the realm of popular culture. In their merging of design, architecture, urbanism, and advertisement, Guimard’s gates exemplify the modern spirit.
The New Art: An international, middle-class artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that emphasized the unity of the arts and sought to reflect the intensive psychic and sensory stimuli of the modern city. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, the movement’s chief manifestations were in design, performance art, and architecture. Variants in cities throughout Europe and the US accrued labels such as Arte Nova, Glasgow Style, Stile Liberty, and Arte Modernista. The version commonly referred to as Art Nouveau flourished in France and Belgium and was characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms. Its more rectilinear counterpart, called Jugendstil or Secession style, flourished concurrently in Germany and Central Europe.
Modern Painting
Classicism: The principles embodied in the styles, theories, or philosophies of the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Pointillism: A painting technique developed by French artists Georges-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac in which small, distinct points of unmixed color are applied in patterns to form an image. In the viewer’s eye, these small points of color can both coalesce into coherent scenes and remain separate particles that seem to generate a shimmer over the composition. In reference to these dots of color, this technique became known as Pointillism. Neo-Impressionism: A term coined by French art critic Fénéon in 1886, applied to an avant-garde art movement that flourished principally in France from 1886 to 1906. Led by the example of Georges Seurat, the Neo-Impressionists renounced the spontaneity of Impressionism in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics. Neo-Impressionists came to believe that separate touches of pigment result in a greater vibrancy of color than is achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the palette. Impressionism: A label applied to a loose group of mostly French artists who positioned themselves outside of the official Salon exhibitions organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Rejecting established styles, the Impressionists began experimenting in the early 1860s with a brighter palette of pure unblended colors, synthetic paints, sketchy brushwork, and subject matter drawn from their direct observations of nature and of everyday life in and around Paris. They worked out of doors, the better to capture the transient effects of sunlight on the scenes before them. With their increased attention to the shifting patterns of light and color, their brushwork became rapid, broken into separate dabs that better conveyed the fleeting quality of light. Post-Impressionism: A term coined in 1910 by the English art critic and painter Roger Fry and applied to the reaction against the naturalistic depiction of light and color in Impressionism, led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. Though each of these artists developed his own, distinctive style, they were unified by their interest in expressing their emotional and psychological responses to the world through bold colors and expressive, often symbolic images. Post-Impressionism can be roughly dated from 1886 to 1905. Surrealism: An artistic and literary movement led by French poet André Breton from 1924 through World War II. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists sought to overthrow what they perceived as the oppressive rationalism of modern society by accessing the sur réalisme (superior reality) of the subconscious. In his 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto,” Breton argued for an uninhibited mode of expression derived from the mind’s involuntary mechanisms, particularly dreams, and called on artists to explore the uncharted depths of the imagination with radical new methods and visual forms. These ranged from abstract “automatic” drawings to hyper-realistic painted scenes inspired by dreams and nightmares to uncanny combinations of materials and objects. Expressionism: Encompasses varying stylistic approaches that emphasize intense personal expression. Renouncing the stiff bourgeois social values that prevailed at the turn of the 20th century, and rejecting the traditions of the state-sponsored art academies, Expressionist artists turned to boldly simplified or distorted forms and exaggerated, sometimes clashing colors. As Expressionism evolved from the beginning of the 20th century through the early 1920s, its crucial themes and genres reflected deeply humanistic concerns and an ambivalent attitude toward modernity, eventually confronting the devastating experience of World War I and its aftermath. Cubism: Originally a term of derision used by a critic in 1908, Cubism describes the work of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and those influenced by them. Working side by side, they developed a visual language whose geometric planes and compressed space challenged what had been the defining conventions of representation in Western painting: the relationship between solid and void, figure and ground. Traditional subjects—nudes, landscapes, and still lifes—were reinvented as increasingly fragmented compositions. Cubism’s influence extended to an international network of artists working in Paris in those years and beyond.