background preloader

Surrealism

Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality." Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself and/or an idea/concept.[1] Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. Founding of the movement[edit] The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects. Surrealist Manifesto[edit] Expansion[edit]

Anti-war movement An anti-war poster An anti-war movement (also antiwar) is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many activists distinguish between anti-war movements and peace movements. Usage[edit] Many groups call themselves anti-war activists though their opinions may differ: some anti-war activists may be equally opposed to both sides' military campaign; in contrast, many modern activists are against only one side's campaigns (usually the one they see as most unethical). Pacifist and anti-war movements are similar, but not the same. The historic peace churches such as the Brethren, the Mennonites and the Quakers teach that Jesus advocates nonviolence, and that his followers must do likewise. History of modern movements[edit] Antebellum Era[edit] American Civil War[edit]

Cultural movement A cultural movement is a change in the way a number of different disciplines approach their work. This embodies all art forms, the sciences, and philosophies. Historically, different nations or regions of the world have gone through their own independent sequence of movements in culture, but as world communications have accelerated this geographical distinction has become less distinct. When cultural movements go through revolutions from one to the next, genres tend to get attacked and mixed up, and often new genres are generated and old ones fade. These changes are often reactions against the prior cultural form, which typically has grown stale and repetitive. There is continual argument over the precise definition of each of these periods, and one historian might group them differently, or choose different names or descriptions. This current article covers western, notably European and American cultural movements. Cultural movements[edit] See: Romanesque architecture — Ottonian Art

Dada Dada (/ˈdɑːdɑː/) or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, began in 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter, but the height of New York Dada was the year before, in 1915.[1] The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 when he created his first readymades.[2] Dada, in addition to being anti-war, had political affinities with the radical left and was also anti-bourgeois.[3] Francis Picabia, Dame! Illustration for the cover of the periodical Dadaphone, n. 7, Paris, March 1920 Overview[edit] Francis Picabia, (left) Le saint des saints c'est de moi qu'il s'agit dans ce portrait, 1 July 1915; (center) Portrait d'une jeune fille americaine dans l'état de nudité, 5 July 1915: (right) J'ai vu et c'est de toi qu'il s'agit, De Zayas! Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge, Zurich[edit]

Modernism Hans Hofmann, "The Gate", 1959–1960, collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he introduced Modernism and modernist theories to a new generation of American artists. Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. History[edit] Beginnings: the 19th century[edit] According to one critic, modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values: "The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view […] the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism".[5][6][7] While J. However, the Industrial Revolution continued.

Postmodernism Philosophical and artistic movement Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism,[8][9][10] and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the theories of deconstruction and post-structuralism.[4] Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.[13] Definition[edit] Origins of term[edit] In 1942 H. In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Author Peter Drucker suggested the transformation into a post-modern world that happened between 1937 and 1957 and described it as a "nameless era" characterized as a shift to a conceptual world based on pattern, purpose, and process rather than a mechanical cause. History[edit] Theories and derivatives[edit] Structuralism and post-structuralism[edit] Deconstruction[edit] Philosophy[edit]

Postmodern art Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern. There are several characteristics which lend art to being postmodern; these include bricolage, the use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, performance art, the recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context, as well as the break-up of the barrier between fine and high arts and low art and popular culture.[1][2] Use of the term[edit] The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is "contemporary art". As well as describing certain tendencies of contemporary art, postmodern has also been used to denote a phase of modern art. As with all uses of the term postmodern there are critics of its application. Dada[edit]

Avant-garde The avant-garde (from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard"[1]) are people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics. The avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" ("The artist, the scientist and the industrialist", 1825), which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political and economic reform.[3] Theories[edit] Several writers have attempted, with limited success, to map the parameters of avant-garde activity. Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. Relation to mainstream society[edit]

Abstract expressionism Style[edit] Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all-over" look of Pollock's drip paintings. Mark Tobey, Canticle, 1954. Tobey, like Pollock, was known for his calligraphic style of allover compositions. Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. Art critics of the post–World War II era[edit] Barnett Newman, Onement 1, 1948. History[edit]

Romanticism Defining Romanticism[edit] Basic characteristics[edit] Defining the nature of Romanticism may be approached from the starting point of the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The importance the Romantics placed on untrammelled feeling is summed up in the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich that "the artist's feeling is his law".[7] To William Wordsworth poetry should be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".[8] In order to truly express these feelings, the content of the art must come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should consist of. Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature. The term[edit] The period[edit] The early period of the Romantic Era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815.

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Fox Lichtenstein (pronounced /ˈlɪktənˌstaɪn/; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody.[2] Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. Whaam! Early years[edit] Career[edit] Cap de Barcelona, sculpture, mixed media, Barcelona Lichtenstein entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor, a post he held on and off for the next ten years. In 1951 Lichtenstein had his first solo exhibition at the Carlebach Gallery in New York.[1][17] He moved to Cleveland in the same year, where he remained for six years, although he frequently traveled back to New York. Rise to prominence[edit] Later work[edit]

Industrial Revolution Iron and Coal, 1855–60, by William Bell Scott illustrates the central place of coal and iron working in the industrial revolution and the heavy engineering projects they made possible. The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of machine tools. It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested; the textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods.[1] The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. Etymology Textile manufacture Chemicals

Visual arts The current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as the applied, decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term 'artist' was often restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft, craft, or applied art media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms.[4] Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts, maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts. The increasing tendency to privilege painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, above other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. Education and training[edit] Training in the visual arts has generally been through variations of the apprentice and workshop system.

Realism (arts) Realism in the arts may be generally defined as the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. The term originated in the 19th century, and was used to describe the work of Gustave Courbet and a group of painters who rejected idealization, focusing instead on everyday life.[1] In its most specific sense, Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution.[2] Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the late 18th century. In general, Realists depicted everyday subjects and situations in contemporary settings, and attempted to depict individuals of all social classes in a similar manner. As an art movement Realism was a reaction in the mid 19th century against what was seen as the artificiality of Romanticism, led by Courbet in France.

Related: