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Archive for September, 2009

A 20th century art movement with itsâ?? roots in Italian and Russian beginnings, Futurism is said to have largely began with the writing of a 1907 essay on music by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni, and explored every medium of art to convey itsâ?? meanings. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first to produce an article in which was summed up the major principles that became the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909. It included the passionate loathing of ideas from the past, and with that enmity of political and artistic traditions, espoused a love for speed and technology.

The philosophy of Futurism regarded the car, the plane, and the industrial town as legendary of the technological triumph of mankind over nature. With Marinetti at the helm, a few artists of the time introduced the tenets of the philosophy to the visual arts, and represented the movement in itsâ?? first phase in 1910. The Russian Futurists were fascinated with dynamism and the restlessness of modern urban life, purposefully seeking to provoke controversy and attract attention to their works through insulting reviews of the static art of the past, and the circle of Russian Futurists were predominantly literary as opposed to being overtly artistic.

Cubo-Futurism was a school of Russian Futurism formulated in 1913, and many of the works incorporated Cubismâ??s usage of angular forms combined with the Futurist predisposition for dynamism. The Futurist painter Kazimir Malevich was the artist to develop the style, but dismissed it for the inception of the artistic style known as Suprematism, that focused upon the fundamental geometric shapes as a form of non-objective art. Suprematism grew around Malevich, with most prominent works being produced between 1915 and 1918, but the movement had halted for the most part by 1934 in Stalinist Russia.

Though at one point, those Russian poets and artists that considered themselves Futurists had collaborated on works such a Futurist opera, but the Russian movement broke down from persecution for their belief in free thought with the start of the Stalinist age. Italian Futurists were strongly linked with the early fascists in the hope for modernizing the society and economy in the 1920s through to the 1930s, and Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party in early 1918, which was later absorbed into Benito Mussoliniâ??s National Fascist Party.

As tensions grew within the various artistic faces that considered themselves Futurists, many Futurists became associated with fascism which later translated into Futurist architecture being born, and interesting examples of this style can be found today even though many Futurist architects were at odds in the fascist taste for Roman imperial patterns. Futurism has even influenced many other 20th century art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Art Deco styles. Futurism as a movement is considered extinct for the most part with the death of Marinetti in 1944.

As Futurism gave way to the actual future of things, the ideals of the artistic movement have remained significant in Western culture through the expressions of the commercial cinema and culture, and can even be as an influence in modern Japanese anime and cinema. The Cyberpunk genre of films and books owe much to the Futurist tenets, and the movement has even spawned Neo-Futurism, a style of theatre at utilizes on Futurismâ??s focuses to create a new form of theatre. Much of Futurismâ??s inspiration came from the previous movement of Cubism, that involved such famed artists as Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne, and created much of the basis for Futurism through itsâ?? philosophy.

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Though sometimes referred to as the â??anti-classicalâ? movement in art, Romanticism is a style that focuses on the artistâ??s individualistic and emotionally wrought point of view, and is found to oppose the art movement known as Neoclassicism. Even though there have been many artists to combine elements of both. Some of the more renowned names around this movement, which utilized strong emotion to convey meaning, were Francisco de Goya and William Blake respectively. This particular art form became a reaction to the outgrowth of reason by homing in on imagination and feeling.

It is not difficult to see the value in the paintings by these artists, and there have been many examples of how other artists have influenced one another over time. As the whole category of Romanticism refers more to the trends of artists, poets, and philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries than as much to an artistic movement. Though one has definitely influenced the other and vice versa rather equally as time went along, there are very few areas in modern life that can be said to stay untouched by the Romantic period, and many agree that this was a vital point in the worldâ??s development as a whole.

Where the people of the period at the time were involved in an overwhelming interest in things of a rational or enlightened nature, the Romantic ideal favored intuition instead, and has been the subject of many differing characterizations of the movement for intellectual and literary histories. There are many varying attitudes on how Romanticism has affected the modern world, and what place this movement has had in the greater picture of history. Some cite Romanticism as being the originating moment of modernity, while others seem to think that it is a beginning to a resistance to the enlightened age, and still others date the movement as a direct aftermath of the French Revolution that is completely continuous with the present.

Romanticism was previously mentioned as affecting music and literature as well as art, but this is less understated than it might seem at first, Romanticism is very prominent in the music and literature of this period. As the age moved along, more than a few critics have considered composers such as Mozart, Hadyn, and Beethoven as being the three Romantic composers. In literature all over the world, the Romanticism movement deeply affected every writer from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe through to even the 20th centuryâ??s Ayn Rand, and many more writers between those times when Romanticism was most prominent.

As it became apparent that Romanticism was going to stay a strong influence for many years to come, many critics have taken to confirming that the Romantic period has been elemental in the progress of art to the present day, and that there is almost no famed artist who has not been in part affected by these potent periods of artwork and creative purpose. This rebellion against social and political standards of the age was instrumental in the changing over from those same standards, and created a lush place from which to draw inspiration for the next centuries to come.

Romanticism has become a piece of history that cannot be overlooked for very long as every place that one can turn has somehow been affected by the progress from this one particular time period, though that is certain for many artistic movements that have been present throughout time, and seems to put more clout into the common statement of art imitating life and life imitating art. Neo-Romanticism worked itself out through artistsâ?? reevaluation of the earlier works by those like William Blake, and especially in areas like Britain, creating a new underground of writers, artists, and composers.

Neo-Romanticists have been considered the contrast to naturalism as Romanticism was considered the opposite to Neoclassicism in itsâ?? heyday because of the movement seems to stress feeling and internal observation, as opposed to the naturalistic tendency to stress external observation, and utilize historic rural landscapes to react to the modern world of machines and itsâ?? urbanization. Post-romanticism is an outgrowth of passionate art that refers to a postmodern re-enactment of romantic themes and motifs in contemporary art up to today, and combines the best of traditional artwork with a more modern flair.

In regards to the 20th century turns that Romanticism has made, Romantic realism has evolved out of Romanticism to incorporate elements of themes of value while referring to objective reality and the importance of technique, and was popularized though not coined by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. This lead to artists incorporating Romanticism and Realism, though they seemed more weighed to the Romanticist side of the equation, and is considered more as a branching of the Romanticism movement today.

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What started out as a rather avant-garde art movement has become one of the greatest examples of artistic forms breaking that mold of convention, revolutionizing European painting and sculpture up to the present century, and was first developed between 1908 and 1912 during a collaboration between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso with influences from the works of Paul Cezanne and Tribal art. Though the movement itself was not long-lived, it began an immense creative explosion that has had long lasting repercussions, and focused on the underlying concept that the essence of an object can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously.

The movement had run its’ course by the end of World War I, and influenced similar ideal qualities in the Precisionism, Futurism, and Expressionistic movements. In the paintings representative of Cubist artworks, objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form, and the artist depicts the subject in a multitude of viewpoints instead of one particular perspective. Surfaces seemingly intersecting at random angles to produce no real sense of depth, with background and object interpenetrating with one another, and creating the shallow space characteristic of Cubism.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term cubism, and it was after viewing a piece of artwork produced by Braque, the term was in wide use though the creators kept from using the term for quite some time. The Cubist movement expanded from France during this time, and became such a popular movement so quickly that critics began referring to a Cubist school of artists influenced by Braque and Picasso, many of those artists to Cubism into different directions while the originators went through several distinct phases before 1920.

As Braque and Picasso worked to further to advance their concepts along, they went through a few distinct phases in Cubism, and which culminated in both Analytic and Synthetic Cubism. With Analytic Cubism, a style was created that incorporated densely patterned near-monochrome surfaces of incomplete directional lines and modeled forms that play against each other, the first phases of which came before the full artistic swing of Cubism. Some art historians have also pegged a smaller “Hermetic” phase within this Analytical state, and in which the work produced is characterized by being monochromatic and hard to decipher.

In the case with Synthetic Cubism, which began in 1912 as the second primary phase to Cubism, these works are composed of distinct superimposed parts. These parts, painted or pasted on the canvas, were characterized by brighter colors. Unlike the points of Analytical Cubism, which fragmented objects into composing parts, Synthetic Cubism attempted to bring many different objects to create new forms. This phase of Cubism also contributed to creating the collage and papier colle, Picasso used collage complete a piece of work, and later influenced Braque to first incorporate papier colle into his work.

Similar to collage in practice, but very much a different style, papier colle consists of pasting materials to a canvas with the pasted shapes representing objects themselves. Braque had previously used lettering, but the works of the two artists began to take this idea to new extremes at this point. Letters that had previously hinted at objects became objects as well, newspaper scraps began the exercise, but from wood prints to advertisements were all elements incorporated later as well. Using mixed media and other combinations of techniques to create new works, and Picasso began utilizing pointillism and dot patterns to suggest planes and space.

By the end of the movement, with help from Picasso and Braque, Cubism had influenced more than just visual art. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was inspired by Cubism in some examples of his music that reassembled pieces of rhythm from ragtime music with the melodies from his own country’s influence. In literature, Cubism influenced poets and their poetry with elements parallel with Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, and this poetry frequently overlaps other movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism.

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Though I could enjoy speaking on the topic of art for sometime, I found myself without a way to truly understand the differing values in the ways of thought that permeate this grouping of human experience, and found myself looking to sources over the Internet to further my knowledge to utilize the information gathered to purchase paintings. I have always been interested in the passions evoked by the series of artists and movements that proliferate what we have come to know as the history of art. Reflecting on this notion of lifeâ??s passing interaction whether Romanticist, Surrealist, or Minimalist in nature.

Speaking on Minimalism now, the ideas that made this movement unique relied heavily upon the work being stripped down to the barest fundamental aspects, and laying bare those integral parts of self-expression. Many pieces of work other than visual art has been affected by these ideals of minimalism, and acted outside of this particular aesthetic appeal, creating new ways to interpret literature and even lifestyles. As far as painting goes, however, the minimalist paintings will typically use limited color schemes and simple geometric designs. Minimalist sculpture is focused on the materials used.

Some of the phases commonly agreed on about this movement are each notable for how they have progressed the overall conception of minimalism as a movement. A distillation in forms was the first phase, with contributors claiming in order to create a universal language of art that masses were meant to understand easily, and seemed poised to support the rapid industrialization for particular settings of the time. Searching for a purity of form, and paving the way for the abstractions to come later on, allowing for the second more notable phase to reach itsâ?? crescendo afterwards.

Much of the formats for commercial artwork we see today have had a great deal of background in this movement of visual art, allowing us to understand on a fundamental level what the message is that the work is trying to convey, and a large amount of the signs and signals we find today relies heavily upon these ideals to translate a universal meaning to the general populace. We can easily see the progression of minimalism in these examples of the world over, and it almost as ingrained into our society now as much as we care to see.

A minimalist painting will typically use a very limited amount of colors and have a very simplistic geometric design. Minimalism in sculpture, on the other hand, is much more concerned with the materials used. Many people believe that minimalism in generally is about geometric shapes, but this interpretation depends widely on the branch of art as well as the interpreter.

But the simplest way to describe minimalism is that the less that is in the painting or work of art, the better it is. Minimalism is all about drawing attention to the few objects and colors of the composition. In this way minimalism shows us that less is better, for the eye is not drawn away by this of that filler or extra objects.

Minimalism is about starting with nothing and then carefully applying the few objects and colors that will define the piece as a whole. Minimalism is still one of the major parts of contemporary art, but it is used I conjunction with other styles and flairs from other art movements to form new types of minimalism.

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In literature as well as art realism is the depiction of subjects as they appear in practical, everyday life. Realism does not deal with interpretation or embellishment. The point of realism is to capture people or situations in a gritty and real way. Similar to realist photography, the realist painter does not place emphasis on stylization but is most interested in depicting situations just as they appear to the naked eye.

While realism depicts real characters in real situations, there tends to be emphasis placed on the sordid or ugly. In this way, realism is very much the opposite of idealism. In idealism the theory is that the reality and regular world around us is merely a reflection of a higher truth. With realism, however, it’s as though we’re saying “all I know for sure is what my eyes and other sense organs tell me”.

As a reaction to the idealism of Romanticism in France during the middle of the nineteenth century, realism became the popular cultural movement in many ways. Realism is often linked to demands for political and social reform, as well as ideas about democracy. Dominating the literature and visual arts of England, France and the United States between the years 1840 and 1880, realism was popular throughout many facets of life.

Realists tend to throw out such hubris as classical forms, theatrics and lofty esoteric subjects in favor of the most commonplace subjects and themes. A very famous example of a realist painting is Jean-Francois Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ from the year 1857. This painting portrays three women working in the fields. The colors are very realistic, almost drab, by contrast to non-realist paintings.

Realism as an art movement appears as early as 2400 BC in India in the city of Lothal. Examples of this type of art can be found around the world and throughout art history. In a very broad sense, realism is art that shows any subject or object that has been observed and accurately depicted, though the entire art piece may not conform to realism conditions.

During the late sixteenth century the most prominent mode of art in European art was a form called mannerism, which showed artificial and elongated figures in very unreal, though graceful positions. Then an artist by the name of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio emerged and changed much of the direction of art simply by depicting real humans doing real things. His work shows images painted directly fro meveryday life and shows an immediacy that had never been seen before.

Dutch art had any realism entries, with their fondness for homely details and humble situations and subjects. Rembrandt is a very well known example of Dutch realism in paintings. The Barbizon School took realism in a whole new direction when, by observing and painting nature, the beginnings of Impressionism took shape.

Realism still plays a role in paintings and art of all kinds today. From film to television and the fine arts, realism is still a major player in the world of creative and expressive processes and productions. Throughout human history there have been those that wish to see things as they are and those that see in reality a hint of the divine. Realism went a long way in providing the one extreme with which we’ve discovered several in betweens in more modern and contemporary art.

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