General Art Research

Art and Design 20^th Century

Expressionism had developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expressionism focused on the artist’s personal emotion, rather than the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were always distorted, or altered. The paintings tended to use violent colours and exaggerated lines that helped contain extreme intense emotional expression. The paintings created either a vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic look. Expressionists were trying to pinpoint the expression of their inner experience rather than the realistic portrayal, trying to not show objective reality but the personal emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in them. Vincent Van Gogh, a Dutch painter had started expressionism and made it rise to appearance.

Vincent Van Gogh

Fauvism is a movement in French painting that transformed the concept of color in modern art. Fauves earned their name (“les fauves”-wild beasts) by shocking exhibit visitors when they had their their first public appearance, in 1905. At the end of the nineteenth century, neo Impressionist painters were already using pure colors, but they applied those colors to their canvases in small strokes. The fauves rejected the impressionist palette of soft, shimmering tones in favor of radical new style, full of violent color and bold distortions. These painters never formed a movement in the strict sense of the word, but for years they would nurse a shared ambition, before each went his separate and more personal way.

Henri Matisse

Cubism was an art movement that had began in 1908. Cubism is the most radical, innovative, and influential movement of twentieth-century art. Cubism was rejected from the Classical conception of beauty, so alot of people did not find cubist drawings that beautiful. Cubism was invented by two men, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Their achievement was built from Picasso’s early work then developed to a Synthetic Cubism. As the various phases of Cubism emerged from their studios, it became clear to the art world that something of great significance was happening. The extreme methods of the new style confused the public, but the avant-garde visualised them in thefuture of art and new challenge.

Cubism seeks to reproduce different perspectives or forms at the same time, as they might be seen by the mind’s eye. It attempts to mimic the mind’s power to abstract and create its different impressions of the world into new ‘wholes’.

Pablo Picasso

Georges Braque

Futurism was an art movement from 1909 – 1914. Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind.

Futurists portrayed a love of speed, technology and violence in their work, because the car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the motion in modern life and the technological success of man over nature. The Futurist painters made a lot of rhythm from their repetitions of lines. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also additionally were creating the illusion of movement. Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had supporters in other countries, France and Russia. Futurism is now known to be extinct and has died in the 1920’s, but we do still see it in our modern art culture today.

Fillippo Marinetti

Carlo Carra

Graphic Art

Lithography, which is a method for printing was first invented in the 1790s. Graphic art had first been recognised from a poster designer called Jules Cheret, who was also responsible for the newer method of printing called chromolithography, which could make prints in colour. In the late 1860s and early 1870s he produced a lot of commercial work such as menus, theatre and cafe posters which attracted the attention of collectors and critics.

By the end of the decade the poster trend was still going on not only in France but throughout the West. A number of talented and ambitious young artists turned their attention to designing them, including Alexandre Steinlen, Eugene Grasset, Alphonse Mucha etc. The most famous poster artist was Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Graphic arts gave the tempo and visual melody of the age of time. Through the graphic works of talented artists, every innovation was immediately part of the everyday world. Books, newspapers, posters, tracts and advertisements, were being designed with extremely influential withwords, signs and images.

Henry de Toulouse – Lautrec.

Surrealism

Surrealism had started in 1924. It was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and researchers in hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious. They were searching for the definition of new art, new humankind and a new social order. Surrealists had their forerunners in Italian Metaphysical Painters (Giorgio de Chirico) in early 1910’s.

As the artistic movement, Surrealism had started after the French poet Andre Breton 1924 published the first book called Manifeste du surrealisme. In this book Breton suggested that sensible thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus disadvantageous to artistic expression. An admirer of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the subconscious, Breton felt that contact with this hidden part of the mind could produce poetic truth.

Andre Breton

Max Ernst

Pop Art

Pop art in England had started in 1956, and early 1960s in America. The pop art exhibition at 1962 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York was a turning point for Pop Art. English art critic Lawrence Alloway used the term “Pop” first to describe the art that made use of the objects, materials and technologies from mass culture to bring out the yields of the industrial society.

Pop Art is not ready made artwork it is artificial recreations of real things. A lot of the material was borrowed from advertising, photography, comic strips and other mass media sources. Everyday life is endless resource for the pop art … today is the core of pop art. Pop art was mainly seen as an entertainment but it had a huge impact on the art industry. Pop stresses confident presentation and flatness of solid and unmixed colors with hard edges. They suggest the processes of mass production without making it personal. Pop Art investigates in areas of popular taste has been considered to be outside the limits of fine art. It was rejecting the attributes associated with art as an expression of personality. Works were close enough to reality!

Eduardo Paolozzi (British)

Roy Lichtenstein (American)

Kinetic Art

Kinetic Art began in the 1950s. Kinetic art explores how things look when they move and refers mostly to sculptured works, made up of parts designed to be set in motion by an internal mechanism or an external stimulus, such as light or air. The movement is not virtual or illusory, but a real movement that might be created by a motor, water, wind or even a button pushed by the viewer. Over time, kinetic art developed in response to an increasingly technological culture.

Yaacov Agam

Julio Le Parc

Grafitti

Grafitti had started in the 1970s. Graffiti is a type of deliberate marking on property, both private and public. It can take the form of pictures, drawings, words, or any decorations inscribed on any surface usually outside walls and sidewalks. When done without the property owner’s consent, it constitutes illegal vandalism.

Graffiti has existed at least since the days of ancient civilizations. Graffiti originally was the term used for inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs, or at Pompeii.

In the modern era, in early 1970s young New Yorkers, belonging to the black and Puerto Rican communities, started to adopt tags – signatures and signs made with aerosol sprays and markers in public places. Tags started to cover the city’s walls, buses and, above all, subway trains, with spectacular “whole car” works covering entire trains. Tags, like screen names, are sometimes chosen to reflect some qualities of the writer. Some tags also contain subtle and often cryptic messages.

The first modern identified tagger in New York was Taki. The Greek-American artist signed himself Taki 183 (probably the number of his apartment block).

Jean-Mitchell Basquiat

 

This is a sketch for the 1990s timeline that I have drawn to see all the information gathered into one set of data. This makes it clearer for us to visualise what we need to include in our final timeline and pinpoint the necessary and valuable information.