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| Henri-Odmond Cross, Oil on Canvas, 81 x 100 cm |
An art movement is a style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a period of time. Art in the modern era has come to be defined by its styles, schools, and movements. The major and minor collected here provide an introduction to the developments in western art together with all the participated artists.
1) Surrealism - As one of the most famous art movements of the Modernist era, thanks mainly to the indelible work The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí, Surrealism has come to be remembered for its production of visceral, eye-grabbing and aesthetic images. Leaping off from the absurdist inclinations of the Dadaists and the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud, André Breton, a well-known poet and critic of his time, published “The Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, in which he declared the group’s intention to unite consciousness with unconsciousness so that the realms of dream and fancy could merge with everyday reality in an “absolute reality, a surreality.” Although they were best-remembered for the work of their painters—such as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and André Masson—Surrealists worked with a variety of mediums, including poetry, literature, sculpture, and the then-new medium of film. Because Breton was militant in the adherence to his manifesto by the members of the movement, many members splintered off into new art forms, though still incorporating techniques and motifs of Surrealism.
2) Cubism - Highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature.
Cubism statement by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in 1912:
To understand Cézanne is to foresee cubism. Henceforth we are justified in saying that between this school and previous manifestations there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of this we have only to study the methods of this realism, which, departing from the superficial reality of Courbet, plunges with Cézanne into profound reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat.
Some maintain that such a tendency distorts the curve of tradition. Do they derive their arguments from the future or the past? The future does not belong to them, as far as we are aware, and one be singularly ingenuous to seek to measure that which exists by that which exists no longer.
Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting.
3) Dada - An international movement among European artists and writers between 1915 and 1922, characterised by a spirit of anarchic revolt. Dada revelled in absurdity, and emphasised the role of the unpredictable in artistic creation.
It began in Zürich with the French poet Tristan Tzara thrusting a penknife into the pages of a dictionary to randomly find a name for the movement. This act in itself displays the importance of chance in Dada art. Irreverence was another key feature: in one of Dada’s most notorious exhibitions, organised by Max Ernst, axes were provided for visitors to smash the works on show.
While perhaps seeming flippant on the surface, the Dada artists were actually fuelled by disillusionment and moral outrage at the unprecedented carnage of World War One, and the ultimate aim of the movement was to shock people out of complacency.
Among the leading Dadaists were Marcel Duchamp (whose Mona Lisa adorned with moustache and goatee is a Dada classic), George Grosz, Otto Dix, Hans Richter and Jean Arp. The movement had a strong influence on Pop Art, which was sometimes called neo-Dada.
4) De Stijl - The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement embraced an abstract, pared-down aesthetic centered in basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colors. Partly a reaction against the decorative excesses of Art Deco, the reduced quality of De Stijl art was envisioned by its creators as a universal visual language appropriate to the modern era, a time of a new, spiritualized world order. Led by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian - its central and celebrated figures - De Stijl artists applied their style to a host of media in the fine and applied arts and beyond. Promoting their innovative ideas in their journal of the same name, the members envisioned nothing less than the ideal fusion of form and function, thereby making De Stijl in effect the ultimate style. To this end, De Stijl artists turned their attention not only to fine art media such as painting and sculpture, but virtually all other art forms as well, including industrial design, typography, even literature and music. De Stijl's influence was perhaps felt most noticeably in the realm of architecture, helping give rise to the International Style of the 1920s and 1930s.
5) Suprematism - The first actual exhibition of suprematist paintings was in December 1915 in St Petersburg, at an exhibition called O.10. The exhibition included thirty-five abstract paintings by Kazimir Malevich, among them the famous black square on a white ground (Russian Museum, St Petersburg) which headed the list of his works in the catalogue.
In 1927 Malevich published his book The Non-Objective World, one of the most important theoretical documents of abstract art. In it he wrote: ‘In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.’ Out of the ‘suprematist square’ as he called it, Malevich developed a whole range of forms including rectangles, triangles and circles often in intense and beautiful colours. These forms are floated against a usually white ground, and the feeling of colour in space in suprematist painting is a crucial aspect of it.
Suprematism was one of the key movements of modern art in Russia and was particularly closely associated with the Revolution. After the rise of Stalin from 1924 and the imposition of socialist realism, Malevich’s career languished. In his last years before his death in 1935 he painted realist pictures. In 1919 the Russian artist El Lissitsky met Malevich and was strongly influenced by suprematism, as was the Hungarian born Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
6) Fauvism - In modern art, the term Fauvism refers to a highly fashionable, if short-lived, art movement associated with the Ecole de Paris, which formed around friendships between French artists around the turn of the century. Famous above all for their bold use of colour, the 'Fauves' received their name at the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition in Paris, from the influential French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who insultingly described their vividly coloured canvases as being the work of wild beasts (in French, fauves), and the name stuck. Curiously, while Matisse (1869-1954) and his French colleagues were dubbed fauvists, neither Wassily Kandinsky nor the 'Russian Matisse' Alexei von Jawlensky - both of whom exhibited alongside the Fauves at the Salon - were given the same treatment. Part of the general Post-Impressionism movement, which tried to go beyond the mere imitation of nature as practised by Impressionists, Fauvism is an early form of expressionism, since its use of colour is non-naturalistic and often garish. The close artistic association between Fauvism and the expressionist movement can be seen in the fact that Neo-Expressionism is known in Germany as Neue Wilden(German for 'new Fauves'). Fauvism was also influenced by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), whose flat areas of pure colour paved the way for the great expressionist paintings of the early 20th century.
7) Futurism - Futurism was an avant-garde art movement which was launched in Italy, in 1909, although parallel movements arose in Russia, England and elsewhere. It was one of the first important modern art movements not centered in Paris - one reason why it is not taken seriously in France. Futurism exalted the dynamism of the modern world, especially its science and technology. Futurist ideology influenced all types of art. It began in literature but spread to every medium, including painting, sculpture, industrial design, architecture, cinema and music. However, most of its major exponents were painters and the movement produced several important 20th century paintings. It ceased to be an aesthetic force in 1915, shortly after the start of the First World War, but lingered in Italy until the 1930s.
8) Post-Impressionism - Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style’s inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.
In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.
9) Vorticism - A unique blend of Cubism and Futurism, Vorticism was an important British avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century, although it lasted officially for no more than two years. The movement's central figure was the English painter, writer and polemicist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), while the name - referring to the emotional vortex which was considered to be the necessary source of artistic creation - was coined by the American poet Ezra Pound. These two, together with members of the Rebel Art Centre founded Vorticism in 1914. The journal "Blast", published only twice (in 1914 and 1915) proclaimed the Vorticist Manifesto and supplied publicity for the movement. Two exhibitions in London of Futurist art were significant catalysts for the movement's launch, while the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 led to its premature demise. As a result only one Vorticist exhibition was ever held. The movement effectively broke up in 1915 due to the impact of war, and the loss of financial support from its backer, the artist Kate Lechmere (1887-1976). Vorticist philosophy was briefly revived in 1920 with Lewis' formation of Group X.
10) Constructivism - Constructivism was an invention of the Russian avant-garde that found adherents across the continent. Germany was the site of the most Constructivist activity outside of the Soviet Union (especially as home to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, a progressive art and design school sympathetic to the movement) but Constructivist ideas were also carried to other art centers, like Paris, London, and eventually the United States.
Constructivist art is marked by a commitment to total abstraction and a wholehearted acceptance of modernity. Often very geometric, it is usually experimental, rarely emotional. Objective forms which were thought to have universal meaning were preferred over the subjective or the individual. The art is often very reductive as well, paring the artwork down to its basic elements. New media were often used. Again, the context is crucial: the Constructivists sought an art of order, which would reject the past (the old order which had culminated in World War I) and lead to a world of more understanding, unity, and peace. This utopian undercurrent is often missing from more recent abstract art that might be otherwise tied to Constructivism.
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