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1. the advance group in any field, especially in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods.
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2. of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.
3. belonging to the avant-garde: an avant-garde composer.
4. unorthodox or daring; radical. |
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James MacNeill Whistler
Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother,
Or Whistler's Mother,
1871, 56.81 by 63.94 inches |
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The life and work of Claude Monet serves as an allegory to Impressionism itself. One of the revolutionary aspects of Impressionism was its unfinished, sketchy quality seen in works such as Monet’s Impression-Sunrise or Bridge over a Pool of Water Lilies.
Impressionist artists were the first to paint outside (plein-air painting). The technical innovation of collapsible tubes of paint allowed this practice, which enabled the Impressionists to record, first-hand, fleeting effects of color and light in the landscape. |
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Berthe Morisot. Reading. 1873.
17 3/4 x 28 1/2 in. |
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| The Two Roads of Post-Impressionism |
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Post-Impressionism embodied two separate tendencies rather than a consistent style evident in the works of Impressionists. One tendency was a focus on formal concerns, as exemplified by the works of Paul Cézanne.
...whereas the other tendency expressed emotion, as seen in and Paul Gauguin. |
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Paul Gauguin. The Day of the Gods (Mahana no Atua). 1894.
26 7/8 x 36 1/8 in. |
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Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, founders of the revolutionary art movement Cubism, were interested in elevating artistic form to a new level.
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged the Newtonian concept that space and time are two separate entities. His theory of relativity proposed that we live in a space-time continuum, which links space to time, thus offering a completely new way of looking at the world.
Similarly, Cubism was about presenting multiple points of view of an object or figure on a single two-dimensional plane. The development of Cubism―from early compositions such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to Analytical Cubism’s geometric manifestations, visible in Georges Braque’s Houses at l’Estaque.
Cubism’s success, it could be argued, is in liberating form from its traditional role of objectively ...from describing an object to representing the multifaceted object in space and time. |
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| Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907. |
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Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque. 1908.
28 3/4 x 23 3/4 in. |
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Fauvism was a relatively short-lived art movement (1905-07), but in that time, it managed to have a significant impact on the world of art. Just as Cubist artists liberated form from its traditional methods of merely describing an object, Fauve artists similarly liberated color from its traditional way of describing things.
Henri Matisse’s The Green Stripe and Franz Marc’s The Large Blue Horses, exemplify the radical nature of the Fauve movement and how they were labeled “wild beasts.”
Consider the traditional role of color in representing an object and how Matisse and the Fauve artists were interested in expressing themselves with subjective or arbitrary color as opposed to objective or local color. Matisse famously said, “Every aspect of my composition is expressive!” |
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Henri Matisse,
The Green Line
(Madame Matisse),
1909.
15 7/8 x 12 7/8 in. |
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The German Expressionists consisted of two groups, The Bridge and The Blue Riders. A raw and direct style characterized The Bridge group, as illustrated in Street Berlin by Ernst Kirchner.
The Bridge artists felt that their art provided the necessary “bridge” into the modern world, which they portrayed as corrupt and egocentric. The Blue Rider artists expressed a similar philosophy, however, their style was more lyrical.
The leader of The Blue Rider group, Wassily Kandinsky, equated his non-objective style to music. Kandinsky even claimed that he could “hear color and see music,” which he wrote about in his 1916 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Does Kandinsky’s Sketch I for Composition VII look like music? |
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Artists often/always reflect the time in which they live. It is no coincidence that the art of Futurism resembles the dynamism of the machine age. Beginning as a literary movement by the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti,
Futurism was all about progress and change...
With manifestos, public performances, and poetry, Futurist artists aimed to destroy the past and begin anew. The movement extended itself into the visual arts where painter Giacomo Balla celebrated the rapid changes of the modern world in his Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.
Other artists similarly expressed the rapid movement of the new age such as Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space or Dynamism of an Automobile. The stylistic characteristics of Futurist painting and sculpture were concurrent in many ways to experiments in photography (Muybridge and Marey) and the new medium of film of that same era. |
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Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913.
43 7/8 x 34 7/8 x 15 3/4 in. |
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Alfons Mucha.
Gismonda.
Lithograph.
1894. |
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| The Vienna Sececcionists, 1897 |
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The Viennese Secessionists were artists who broke away from the conservative Austrian Association of Artists. They adopted the name, Union of Austrian Artists, taken in solidarity with artist unions in Paris and Munich. The Secessionists adopted many of the ideals of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in areas of art education and social improvements. They encouraged all artistic mediums and introduced the new art movements of Impressionism, Art Nouveau and artist-craftsmen in their exhibitions.
Unlike other movements, there was no definitive style of the Secessionists |
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World War I was the first war to use machine technology. Planes equipped with bombs, tanks, and machine guns all contributed to the devastation of European cities, and the killing of millions of individuals. The horrors of war were expressed in the actions and artworks of Dada artists.
Dada was not an art movement with consistent stylistic characteristics, such as Futurism, but more of an attitude―nihilistic and anarchic. According to Dada artists, so-called rational, civilized society was responsible for World War I, so to reflect their disgust, they created irrational, uncivilized art. |
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| Marcel Duchamp. The Fountain. 1917. |
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Surrealists were influenced by the then-contemporary writings of psychologist Sigmund Freud and the Dada movement’s emphasis on irrationality and nonsense. Surrealist poetry, which eliminated traditional grammar and sentence structure, found its equivalent in visual works that juxtaposed familiar objects in an unfamiliar way ...what would come to be known as “an exquisite corpse.”
More than any other artists, Salvador Dali represents the ideas of the Surrealists in visual form. Compare his painting The Persistence of Memory with the more abstract side of Surrealism illustrated in Joan Miró’s Painting and consider Surrealism’s characteristics and its preoccupation with dream imagery. |
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The time between World War I and World War II was a time of great change and upheaval in the world. Political change throughout Europe and in Mexico led to distinctive art forms in both. In Europe, dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin preferred their artists to advance their agenda by turning to Classical models, borrowing from the Greco-Roman tradition and the Neo-Classicism.
The style was called Social Realism, but the message was similar to what Jacques-Louis David advocated in revolutionary France. In Mexico, a very different message emerged and the art was both progressive and accessible.
Artists like David Sigueros, Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera (Los Tres Grandes), created work that was modern in its style but also communicated with a wide audience.
Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe is an excellent example of this. The message is populist and the images are rendered naturalistically, but Rivera drew heavily on his time studying in Europe and his style owes an allegiance to Cubism. |
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Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937.
11 ft. 5 1/2 in. x 25 ft. 5 1/4 in. |
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...was an art and design movement that involved a mix of modern decorative art styles, largely of the 1920s and 1930s, whose main characteristics were derived from various avant-garde painting
styles of the early twentieth century. Art deco works exhibit aspects of Cubism, Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism — with abstraction, distortion, and simplification, particularly geometric shapes and highly intense colors — celebrating the rise of commerce, technology, and speed.
The growing impact of the machine can be seen in repeating, overlapping, streamlined forms derived from the principles of aerodynamics.
The name came from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes, held in Paris, which celebrated living in the modern world. |
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| Rockefeller Center, NYC, 1930 (detail) |
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| ...the German work for a 'total art work' The synthesis of all arts, including painting, graphics, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture and performing arts, into a single expressive whole. |
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In the 1940s, many European modern artists, such as the Surrealists and the Bauhaus artists, left war-torn Europe for America, which resulted in the shifting of the art world from Paris to New York.
Abstract Expressionism seems to reflect the American spirit after World War II. Abstract Expressionist painters moved away from the dominant realistic styles exemplified by Hopper and O’Keeffe to more nonrepresentational ways of creating art.
Social Realism, for example, was used as a form of propaganda (see works by Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera or American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange). At this time was also the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of creativity in all areas of the arts, including paintings, poetry, photography, and music (see works by Archibald Motley, Jr., Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, James Vander Zee, and Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington). |
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Edward Hopper. Nighthawks. 1942.
30 x 60 in. |
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Frank Stella. Empress of India. 1965.
6 ft. 5 in. x 18 ft. 8 in. |
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How can we define Postmodernism?
The pluralistic nature of the art world at the time reflected the all-inclusive atmosphere and encouraged new art historical methodology, such as Deconstruction, Semiotics, Structuralism, and Marxism, to interpret the new kinds of art and representation.
From the presentation of global cultures seen in the works of Frida Kahlo to the feminist expressions exemplified in the works of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, Postmodernism manifested itself in many different directions.
Are we still living in a Postmodern world or does the term Post-Industrial better reflect the time in which we live? |
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| The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–68, Ed Ruscha. Oil on canvas. |
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| Barbara Kruger. Super rich, Ultra-gorgeous, Extra-skinny, Forever-young. 1997 |
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| Exposing The Foundation Of The Museum, 2010, Chris Burden, installation. |
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