GECC 101

ART APPRECIATION
MODULE 2

LESSON 1: PHILOSOPHY OF ART

LESSON 2: ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ART

LESSON 3: ART MOVEMENTS

(RENAISSANCE TO REALISM)

LESSON 4: ART MOVEMENTS

(SYMBOLISM TO EXPRESSIONISM)

LESSON 5: MODERN AND

CONTEMPORARY ART MOVEMENTS

LESSON 1: PHILOSOPHY OF ART

Philosophy of art, the study of the nature of art, including concepts such
as interpretation, representation and expression, and form. It is closely
related to aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste.
Distinguishing characteristics

The philosophy of art is distinguished from art criticism, which is

concerned with the analysis and evaluation of particular works of art.
Critical activity may be primarily historical, as when a lecture is given on
the conventions of the Elizabethan theatre in order to explain some of the
devices used in William Shakespeare’s plays. It may be
primarily analytical, as when a certain passage of poetry is separated into
its elements and its meaning or import explained in relation to other
passages and other poems in the tradition. Or it may be primarily
evaluative, as when reasons are given for saying that the work of art in
question is good or bad, or better or worse than another one. Sometimes
it is not a single work of art but an entire class of works in a certain style
or genre (such as pastoral poems or Baroque music) that is being
elucidated, and sometimes it is the art of an entire period (such
as Romantic). But in every case, the aim of art criticism is to achieve an
increased understanding or enjoyment of the work (or classes of works) of
art, and its statements are designed to achieve this end.

The test of the success of art criticism with a given person is: Has this
essay or book of art criticism increased or enhanced the person’s
understanding or appreciation of the work of art in question? Art criticism
is particularly helpful and often necessary for works of art that are more
than usually difficult, such that persons not already familiar with the artist
or the genre or the period would be unable to adequately understand or
enjoy the work if left to themselves.

The task of the philosopher of art is more fundamental than that of the art
critic in that the critic’s pronouncements presuppose answers to the
questions set by the philosopher of art. The critic says that a given work
of music is expressive, but the philosopher of art asks what is meant by
saying that a work of art is expressive and how one determines whether it
is. In speaking and writing about art, critics presuppose that they are
dealing with clear concepts, the attainment of which is the task of the
philosopher of art.

The task of the philosopher of art is not to heighten understanding and

appreciation of works of art but to provide conceptual foundations for the
critic by (1) examining the basic concepts that underlie the activities of
critics and enable them to speak and write more intelligibly about the arts
and by (2) arriving at true conclusions about art, aesthetic value,
expression, and the other concepts that critics employ.

Upon what do philosophers of art direct their attention? “Art” is the ready
answer, but what is art and what distinguishes it from all other things?
The theorists who have attempted to answer this question are many, and
their answers differ greatly. But there is one feature that virtually all of
them have in common: a work of art is a human-made thing, an artifact,
as distinguished from an object in nature. A sunset may be beautiful, but
it is not a work of art. A piece of driftwood may have aesthetic qualities,
but it is not a work of art since it was not made by a human. On the other
hand, a piece of wood that has been carved to look like driftwood is not an
object of nature but of art, even though the appearance of the two may be
exactly the same. This distinction was challenged in the 20th century by
artists who declared that objets trouvés (“found objects”) are works of art,
since the artist’s perception of them as such makes them so, even if the
objects were not human-made and were not modified in any way (except
by exhibition) from their natural state.

Nevertheless, according to the simplest and widest definition, art is

anything that is human made. Within the scope of this definition, not only
paintings and sculptures but also buildings, furniture, automobiles, cities,
and garbage dumps are all works of art: every change that human activity
has wrought upon the face of nature is art, be it good or bad, beautiful or
ugly, beneficial or destructive.

The ordinary usage of the term is clearly less wide. When works of art are
spoken of in daily life, the intention is to denote a much narrower range of
objects—namely, those responded to aesthetically. Among the things in
this narrower range, a distinction, although not a precise one, is made
between fine and useful art. Fine art consists of those works designed to
produce an aesthetic response or that (regardless of design) function as
objects of aesthetic appreciation (such as paintings, sculptures, poems,
musical compositions)—those human-made things that are enjoyed for
their own sake rather than as means to something else. Useful art has
both an aesthetic and a utilitarian dimension: automobiles, glass
tumblers, woven baskets, desk lamps, and a host of other handmade or
manufactured objects have a primarily useful function and are made for
that purpose, but they also have an aesthetic dimension: they can be
enjoyed as objects of beauty, so much so that people often buy one brand
of car rather than another for aesthetic reasons even more than for
mechanical reasons (of which they may know nothing). A borderline case
is architecture: many buildings are useful objects the aesthetic function of
which is marginal, and other buildings are primarily objects of beauty the
utility of which is incidental or no longer existent (Greek temples were
once places of worship, but today their value is entirely aesthetic). The
test in practice is not how they were intended by their creators, but how
they function in present-day experience. Many great works
of painting and sculpture, for example, were created to glorify a deity and
not, insofar as can be ascertained, for an aesthetic purpose (to be enjoyed
simply in the contemplation of them for their own sake). It should be
added, however, that many artists were undoubtedly concerned to satisfy
their aesthetic capabilities in the creation of their work, since they were
highly perfectionistic as artists, but in their time there was no
such discipline as aesthetics in which they could articulate their goals; in
any case, they chose to create “for the greater glory of God” by producing
works that were also worthwhile to contemplate for their own sake.

This aesthetic sense of the word art, whether applied to fine art or useful
art, is the one most employed by the majority of critics and philosophers
of art today. There are two other senses of art, however, that are still
narrower, and, to avoid confusion, their use should be noted: (1)
Sometimes the term art is restricted to the visual arts alone or to some of
the visual arts. But as philosophers of art use the term (and as it is used
here), art is not limited to visual art; music and drama and poetry are as
much arts as are painting, sculpture, and architecture. (2) Sometimes the
term art is used in a persuasive sense, to include only those works
considered good art. Viewers at an art gallery, examining a painting they
dislike, may exclaim “That’s not art!” But if the term art is to be used
without confusion, it must be possible for there to be bad art as well as
good art. The viewer, then, is not really denying that the work in question
is art (it is a human-made object presented to be contemplated for its own
sake) but only that it is worthwhile.

The word art is also ambiguous in another way: it is sometimes used to

designate the activity of creating a work of art, as in the slogan “Art is
expression,” but it is more often used to designate the product of that
process, the completed artwork or artifact itself, as in the remark “Art is a
source of great enjoyment to me.” There will be occasion later to remark
on this ambiguity.

Countless proffered definitions of art are not definitions at all but are
theories about the nature of art that presuppose that the ability to identify
certain things in the world as works of art already exists. Most of them are
highly unsatisfactory even as theories. “Art is an exploration of reality
through a sensuous presentation”—but in what way is it an exploration? Is
it always concerned with reality (how is music concerned with reality, for
example)? “Art is a re-creation of reality”—but is all art re-creation, even
music? (It would seem likely that music is the creation of something,
namely, a new set of tonal relationships, but not that it is the re-creation
of anything at all.) “Art is an expression of feeling through a medium”—
but is it always an expression and is it always feeling that is expressed?
And so on. It appears more certain that Shakespeare’s King Lear is a work
of art than that these theories are true. All that seems to be required for
identifying something as a work of art in the wide sense is that it be not a
natural object but something made or transformed by a human being, and
all that is required for identifying it as art (not as good art but as art) in
the narrower sense is that it function aesthetically in human experience,
either wholly (fine art) or in part (useful art); it is not even necessary, as
has been shown, that it be intended by its creator to function in this way.

LESSON 2: ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ART

Stone Age Art (From c.2,500,000 BCE)

Paleolithic Art (c.2,500,000 – 10,000 BCE)

The earliest art of prehistory, created during the Lower Paleolithic Age, is
the Bhimbetka Petroglyphs, found in the Auditorium cave in Central India
and dated to at least 290,000 BCE. Next oldest is the Venus of Berekhat
Ram (c.230,000 BCE) discovered on the Golan Heights, and the Venus of
Tan-Tan (c.200,000), discovered in Morocco. Also, stone engravings have
been found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa dating from 70,000 BCE.
The first type of so-called "cave art", is the cave painting in Cantabria, as
exemplified by the abstract El Castillo cave paintings dated to 39,000
BCE.

Early mobiliary art includes the Swabian Lion Man of Hohlenstein-

Stadel (38,000 BCE). After this comes the miniature female sculptures,
known as the Venus Figurines, as exemplified by the ivory Venus of Hohle
Fels (38,000-33,000 BCE), the Venus of Willendorf (25,000 BCE), and the
Venus of Brassempouy (23,000 BCE) and the Venus of Kostenky (22,000
BCE). The most ancient pottery - currently Chinese pottery (for more
details please see Xianrendong Cave Pottery) - also appeared from about
18,000 BCE.

Up until recently, paleo archeologists and art historians considered that

neither Homo errectus nor the early sub-species of Homo sapiens (eg.
Neanderthal man, who died out about 35,000 BCE) were capable of
creating cave painting or other types of parietal art. Instead, they
considered that the oldest art was created by "anatomically modern man"
after 40,000 BCE, exemplified by the abstract art at El Castillo, the
primitive engravings at the Abri Castanet (c.35,000 BC), the
figurative Chauvet cave paintings (c.30,000 BCE) in the Ardeche, the
polychrome Lascaux cave paintings (c.17,000 BCE), the Altamira cave
paintings (15,000 BCE), and the extraordinary Addaura Cave
engravings (11,000 BCE). However, this view is now changing - not least
because microanalysis of the Venus of Berekhat Ram has shown that it
was shaped by human hand, and because of the conclusive dating of
the cupules at Bhimbetka, now the world's oldest rock art.

Mesolithic Art (c.10,000-4,000 BCE)

Artworks created by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers include petroglyphs,

stylized cave paintings, hand stencils - as in the Cave of Hands (Cueva
de las Manos) (7,000 BCE) in Argentina - body adornments like bracelets
as well as functional objects like paddles and weapons. These types
of Mesolithic art have been located in many different areas around the
world, including the Waterberg area in Africa, the Rock Shelters of
Bhimbetka in India, Arnhem Land in Australia. Jomon pottery, an early
exemplar of Japanese Art also emerged during the early Mesolithic.
Neolithic Art (c.4000–2000 BCE)

Neolithic art, influenced by the development of agriculture, and animal

husbandry, was responsible for more portable art and less rock/cave
painting. Artworks become enhanced by the use of precious metals (eg.
copper), and the design of new tools. Free standing sculpture, statues,
pottery, primitive jewellery and decorated artifacts become more
common during this time. The advent of hieroglyphic writing systems in
Sumer heralds the arrival of pictorial methods of communication, while
greater prosperity leads to more religious activity and religious art in
temples and tombs. A great example of Neolithic art includes: the
"Thinker of Cernavoda", a sculpture found in Romania. Another
significant category of megalithic art, concerns megaliths made out of
large stones such as the Passage Tomb at Newgrange (Dún Fhearghusa),
the UN World Heritage site in County Meath. See also: American Indian
art for a short guide to tribal culture at this time. For Neolithic cultures of
the Far East, see Neolithic Art in China (7500-2000 BCE) and Xia Dynasty
Culture (2100-1600 BCE).

Bronze Age Art (c.3000-1200 BCE)

The best examples of Bronze Age art appeared in the 'cradle

of civilization' around the Mediterranean in the Near East, during the rise
of Mesopotamia - see Sumerian Art and Mesopotamian art as well
as Mesopotamian sculpture - Greece, Crete (Minoan civilization) and
Egypt. The emergence of cities, the use of written languages and the
development of more sophisticated tools led the creation of a wider
range of ceramics. Other Bronze Age art included statues, sculptures and
paintings of Gods. During this period, art began to assume a significant
role in reflecting the community, its rulers and its relationship with the
deities it worshipped. For other cultures of the Middle East, see: Assyrian
art (c.1500-612 BCE) and Hittite art (c.1600-1180 BCE).
Egyptian Art (from 3100 BCE)

Ancient Egypt is most famous for its monumental Egyptian

Architecture (c.3000 BCE - 160 CE), and its associated Egyptian
sculpture. It is also the first civilization with a recognizable style of art. In
paintings, artists depicted the head, legs and feet of their human
subjects in profile, while portraying the eye, shoulders, arms and torso
from the front. Other conventions dictated how Gods, Pharaohs and
ordinary people should be portrayed, and regulated the size, colour and
figurative positions of these images accordingly. Women were painted
with fair skin, men with dark skin. Much of Egyptian art in tombs and
temples (hieroglyphs, papyrus scrolls, murals, panel paintings and
sculptures) reflects religious themes, especially those concerning the
afterlife. In modern times, a number of outstanding
Egyptian encaustic wax paintings, known as the Fayum Mummy portraits,
dating from 50 CE, have been found preserved in coffins. These pictures
offer a fascinating glimpse into the styles, customs and culture of the
day.

Minoan Art (c.1600 BCE)

The first major strand of Aegean Art - Minoan civilization (named after
King Minos) - grew up during the bronze age on the island of Crete. By
2100 BCE they had built up a prosperous maritime trade with countries
around the Mediterranean from buying tin and combining it with copper
from Cyprus, to make bronze - the key metal of the time. This prosperity
led to the construction of palaces and court buildings at Knossos,
Phaestus, Akrotiri, Kato Zakros and Mallia, along with other public
buildings. Thus emerged a Minoan art and culture noted for its
sculpture, metalwork, fresco painting, pottery, and stone engravings
(particularly seal stones).

In about 1500 BCE, following an unknown catastrophe the Minoan

civilization collapsed, and around 1425 BCE the Minoans were conquered
by the Mycenaeans.

Iron Age Art (c.1500-200 BCE)

The Iron Age saw a huge growth in artistic activity, especially in Greece
and around the eastern Mediterranean. It coincided with the rise of
Hellenic (Greek-influenced) culture. See Art of Classical Antiquity (1000
BCE - 450 CE).The period is typically classified into several smaller
periods: the Dark Ages (c.1200-900 BCE), the Geometric Period (c.900-
700 BCE), Oriental-Style Period (c.700-625 BCE), the Archaic Period
(c.625-500 BCE), the Classical Period (c.500-323 BCE), and the Hellenistic
Period (c.323-100 BCE).

Mycenean Art (c.1400-1000 BCE)

Mycenae was an ancient Greek city in the Peloponnese. But the term
"Mycenaean" or "Mycenean" culture commonly denotes mainland Greek
culture as a whole during the late Bronze Age (c.1650-1200 BCE). At first,
Mycenean/Greek arts were dominated by Minoan culture. Minoan artists
and painters visited Greece regularly. In contrast to the Minoans,
Mycenean kings were warriors with a tradition of conquest. Mycenean
painters and sculptors emphasized military and other mythological
exploits, in a more formal 'geometric' style than that of the Minoans.
Mycenean art encompassed ceramics, pottery, carved gemstones,
jewelry, glass ornaments, as well as tomb and palace murals, frescoes
and sculptures.

Celtic Art (c.500 BCE - c.17 CE)

By around 1100 BCE, the Celts, an Indo-European group of tribes had

established themselves in a controlling position astride the main trade
routes along the river systems of the Rhone, Seine, Rhine and Danube.
Between 1100 and 700 BCE, they were the first non-Mediterranean
people to develop iron which gave them the technological superiority to
colonize their neighbours throughout France, Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia. Two styles of Iron Age Celtic art
emerged: Hallstatt and La Tene. The more advanced La Tene form of
Celtic culture was characterized by its distinctive geometric designs and
stylized bird and animal forms, as exemplified by the decorative designs
on the stonework of the Turoe Stone, one of the earliest examples of
visual art in Ireland. Celtic metalwork also achieved an extremely high
standard of craftsmanship, as exemplified by the Irish Petrie Crown and
Broighter Collar. La Tene style Celtic Designs were strongly influenced by
the Mediterranean culture of the Greek and Etruscan civilizations and
continued to flourish until the advent of the Roman Empire.

Classical Greek Art (500-323 BCE)

Before the beginning of the sixth century BCE, there is Archaic Greek
painting, and Archaic Style Greek Sculpture. From 500 BCE, Athens was
the strongest of the Greek city states, a position it maintained for the
next few centuries. During the 5th century BCE, Greece witnessed a
creative Renaissance - exemplified by the architecture and sculpture of
the Parthenon - which, when rediscovered by Renaissance Europe 2000
years later, became the absolute artistic standard for another four
centuries. Most original Greek architecture, painting and Greek sculpture
have been destroyed, but its genius survives through Roman copies and
Greek Pottery. Among the foremost sculptors were Polykleitos, Myron,
and Phidias. Polykleitos, in particular, was renowned for his mastery of
contrapposto. Classical Greek painting is rather scarce, sculpture less so,
which is why art historians tend to subdivide sculptures from this era into
early classical, high classical and late classical. period. The Greek grasp
of linear perspective and naturalist representation remained unsurpassed
until the Italian Renaissance.

Hellenism (323-31 BCE)

During the era of Hellenistic art, classical realism was replaced with
greater solemnity and heroicism, an almost Baroque-like dramatization of
subject matter. The principal art-forms were Hellenistic painting,
Hellenistic free-standing sculpture and reliefs. Famous examples of Greek
sculpture include: "Dying Gaul" (c.232 BCE) by Epigonus; the frieze "Altar
of Zeus" at Pergamum(c.180 BCE); "Aphrodite, Pan and Eros" (c.100
BCE); the "Winged Victory of Samothrace" (c.1st/2nd century BCE), now
in the Louvre; "Laocoon and His Sons" by Hagesandrus, Polydorus and
Athenodorus (c.40-31 BCE). The famous marble statue known as the
"Venus de Milo", now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, was completed
around 100 BCE. During this period, new forms secular patrons of the
visual arts emerged who influenced the choice of subject matter in
sculpture, painting and mosaics. Meanwhile, the rise of Roman power
caused many Greek artists to move to Italy to participate in the growing
Roman art market. In Egypt, the most famous example of Hellenistic
painting was the Fayum Mummy portraits, unearthed mainly west of the
Nile in the Faiyum Basin.

China was also becoming more artistically active at this time. See for
instance the Chinese collection of terracotta sculpture, known as the
Terracotta Army, created during the era of Qin Dynasty art (221-206
BCE), as well as other forms of Chinese art like the highly regarded
medium of Calligraphy.

Art of Ancient Rome (c.200 BCE - 400 CE)

Roman architecture and engineering was always grandiose, but its

paintings and sculptures remained largely imitative of Greek art. Greek
styles, reworked with Roman clothes and accessories, were used to
reinforce Rome's power and majesty. Early Roman art (c.200-27 BCE)
was realistic and direct. Portraits of their leaders were detailed and
unidealized, but they, along with sculptural reliefs, friezes and wall
paintings, were used nevertheless to convey political messages through
the poses and subject matter. Later Hellenistic Roman art (c.27 BCE - 200
CE) during the height of Empire, was more heroic, as in Trajan's Column
(c.106-113 CE). Decorative arts flourished throughout the Roman area,
largely through a proliferation of murals. Panel painting was regarded
more highly, being executed in tempera or in encaustic pigments. Roman
sculpture was commissioned mainly for its visual effect on the public. The
underlying message of Roman greatness was rarely far from the surface.
Late Roman art (200-400 CE) came under the influence of the Eastern
Roman Empire in Constantinople, and also during this period we see the
emergence of both Celtic Roman art and Christian Roman art.

Cave painting of a bison head

Altamira Cave 15,000 BCE
 World's oldest hand stencil painting
dating to at least 37,900 BCE

Aboriginal Rock Art (Australia) from Ubirr, Arnhem Land

c.30,000-6,000 BCE. Pictographs form a major part of Aboriginal rock
painting.

The 1974 discovery of buried vaults at Xi'an filled with thousands of terra
cotta warriors stunned the world. O. Louis Mazzatenta / NGS Image
Collection
LESSON 3: ART MOVEMENTS (RENAISSANCE TO
REALISM)

Renaissance art, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature

produced during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe under the
combined influences of an increased awareness of nature, a revival of
classical learning, and a more individualistic view of man. Scholars no
longer believe that the Renaissance marked an abrupt break with
medieval values, as is suggested by the French word renaissance,
literally “rebirth.” Rather, historical sources suggest that interest in
nature, humanistic learning, and individualism were already present in
the late medieval period and became dominant in 15th- and 16th-century
Italy concurrently with social and economic changes such as the
secularization of daily life, the rise of a rational money-credit economy,
and greatly increased social mobility.

In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important “proto-

renaissance” in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew
inspiration from Franciscan radicalism. St. Francis had rejected the formal
Scholasticism of the prevailing Christian theology and gone out among
the poor praising the beauties and spiritual value of nature. His example
inspired Italian artists and poets to take pleasure in the world around
them. The most famous artist of the proto-renaissance period, Giotto di
Bondone (1266/67 or 1276–1337), reveals a new pictorial style that
depends on clear, simple structure and great psychological penetration
rather than on the flat, linear decorativeness and hierarchical
compositions of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as the
Florentine painter Cimabue and the Siennese painters Duccio and Simone
Martini. The great poet Dante lived at about the same time as Giotto, and
his poetry shows a similar concern with inward experience and the subtle
shades and variations of human nature. Although his Divine Comedy
belongs to the Middle Ages in its plan and ideas, its subjective spirit and
power of expression look forward to the Renaissance. Petrarch and
Giovanni Boccaccio also belong to this proto-renaissance period, both
through their extensive studies of Latin literature and through their
writings in the vernacular. Unfortunately, the terrible plague of 1348 and
subsequent civil wars submerged both the revival of humanistic studies
and the growing interest in individualism and naturalism revealed in the
works of Giotto and Dante. The spirit of the Renaissance did not surface
again until the beginning of the 15th century.

In 1401 a competition was held at Florence to award the commission for

bronze doors to be placed on the Baptistery of San Giovanni. Defeated by
the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and
Donatello left for Rome, where they immersed themselves in the study of
ancient architecture and sculpture. When they returned to Florence and
began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the
ancient world was reborn. The founder of Renaissance painting was
Masaccio (1404–28). The intellectuality of his conceptions, the
monumentality of his compositions, and the high degree of naturalism in
his works mark Masaccio as a pivotal figure in Renaissance painting. The
succeeding generation of artists—Piero della Francesca, Pollaiuolo, and
Andrea del Verrocchio—pressed forward with researches into linear and
aerial perspective and anatomy, developing a style of scientific
naturalism.

The situation in Florence was uniquely favourable to the arts. The civic
pride of Florentines found expression in statues of the patron saints
commissioned from Ghiberti and Donatello for niches in the grain-market
guildhall known as Or San Michele, and in the largest dome built since
antiquity, placed by Brunelleschi on the Florence cathedral. The cost of
construction and decoration of palaces, churches, and monasteries was
underwritten by wealthy merchant families.

Principal among these were the Medici, who dominated Florence from
1434, when the first pro-Medici government was elected, until 1492,
when Lorenzo de Medici died. During their ascendancy the Medici
subsidized virtually the entire range of humanistic and artistic activities
associated with the Renaissance. Cosimo (1389–1464), made wealthy by
his trading profits as the papal banker, was a scholar who founded the
Neoplatonic academy and collected an extensive library. He gathered
around him the foremost writers and classical scholars of his day, among
them Marsilio Ficino, the Neoplatonist who served as the tutor of Lorenzo
de Medici, Cosimo’s grandson. Lorenzo (1449–92) became the centre of a
group of artists, poets, scholars, and musicians who believed in the
Neoplatonic ideal of a mystical union with God through the contemplation
of beauty. Less naturalistic and more courtly than the prevailing spirit of
the first half of the Quattrocento, this aesthetic philosophy was
elucidated by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, incarnated in painting by
Sandro Botticelli, and expressed in poetry by Lorenzo himself. Lorenzo
also collaborated with the organist and choirmaster of the Florence
cathedral, Heinrich Isaac, in the composition of lively secular choral music
which anticipated the madrigal, a characteristic form of the High
Renaissance.

The Medici traded in all of the major cities in Europe, and one of the most
famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, the Portinari
Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes (c. 1476; Uffizi, Florence), was
commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari. Instead of being
painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted
with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like colour and a
glossy surface. Early Northern Renaissance painters were more
concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic
meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even
after these achievements became widely known. On the other hand,
central Italian painters began to adopt the oil painting medium soon after
the Portinari Altarpiece was brought to Florence in 1476.

High Renaissance art, which flourished for about 35 years, from the early
1490s to 1527, when Rome was sacked by imperial troops, revolves
around three towering figures: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519),
Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520). Each of the three
embodies an important aspect of the period: Leonardo was the ultimate
Renaissance man, a solitary genius to whom no branch of study was
foreign; Michelangelo emanated creative power, conceiving vast projects
that drew for inspiration on the human body as the ultimate vehicle for
emotional expression; Raphael created works that perfectly expressed
the classical spirit—harmonious, beautiful, and serene.

Although Leonardo was recognized in his own time as a great artist, his
restless researches into anatomy, the nature of flight, and the structure
of plant and animal life left him little time to paint. His fame rests mainly
on a few completed paintings; among them are the Mona Lisa (1503–05,
Louvre), The Virgin of the Rocks (1483–86, Louvre), and the sadly
deteriorated fresco The Last Supper (1495–98; restored 1978–99; Santa
Maria delle Grazie, Milan).

Michelangelo’s early sculpture, such as the Pietà (1499; St. Peter’s,

Rome) and the David (1501–04; Accademia, Florence), reveals a
breathtaking technical ability in concert with a disposition to bend rules
of anatomy and proportion in the service of greater expressive power.
Although Michelangelo thought of himself first as a sculptor, his best
known work is the giant ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican,
Rome. It was completed in four years, from 1508 to 1512, and presents
an incredibly complex but philosophically unified composition that fuses
traditional Christian theology with Neoplatonic thought.

Raphael’s greatest work, School of Athens (1508–11), was painted in the

Vatican at the same time that Michelangelo was working on the Sistine
Chapel. In this large fresco Raphael brings together representatives of
the Aristotelian and Platonic schools of thought. Instead of the densely
packed, turbulent surface of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Raphael places
his groups of calmly conversing philosophers and artists in a vast court
with vaults receding into the distance. Raphael was initially influenced by
Leonardo, and he incorporated the pyramidal composition and beautifully
modelled faces of The Virgin of the Rocks into many of his own paintings
of the Madonna. He differed from Leonardo, however, in his prodigious
output, his even temperament, and his preference for classical harmony
and clarity.

The creator of High Renaissance architecture was Donato Bramante

(1444–1514), who came to Rome in 1499 when he was 55. His first
Roman masterpiece, the Tempietto (1502) at S. Pietro in Montorio, is a
centralized dome structure that recalls classical temple architecture.
Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–13) chose Bramante to be papal architect,
and together they devised a plan to replace the 4th-century Old St.
Peter’s with a new church of gigantic dimensions. The project was not
completed, however, until long after Bramante’s death.

Humanistic studies continued under the powerful popes of the High

Renaissance, Julius II and Leo X, as did the development of polyphonic
music. The Sistine Choir, which performed at services when the pope
officiated, drew musicians and singers from all of Italy and northern
Europe. Among the most famous composers who became members were
Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521) and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.
1525–94).

The Renaissance as a unified historical period ended with the fall of Rome
in 1527. The strains between Christian faith and classical humanism led
to Mannerism in the latter part of the 16th century. Great works of art
animated by the Renaissance spirit, however, continued to be made in
northern Italy and in northern Europe.

Seemingly unaffected by the Mannerist crisis, northern Italian painters

such as Correggio (1494–1534) and Titian (1488/90–1576) continued to
celebrate both Venus and the Virgin Mary without apparent conflict. The
oil medium, introduced to northern Italy by Antonello da Messina and
quickly adopted by Venetian painters who could not use fresco because
of the damp climate, seemed particularly adapted to the sanguine,
pleasure-loving culture of Venice. A succession of brilliant painters—
Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese—
developed the lyrical Venetian painting style that combined pagan
subject matter, sensuous handling of colour and paint surface, and a love
of extravagant settings. Closer in spirit to the more intellectual
Florentines of the Quattrocento was the German painter Albrecht Dürer
(1471–1528), who experimented with optics, studied nature assiduously,
and disseminated his powerful synthesis of Renaissance and Northern
Gothic styles through the Western world by means of his engravings and
woodcuts.

Baroque and late Baroque, or Rococo, are loosely defined terms,

generally applied by common consent to European art of the period from
the early 17th century to the mid-18th century.

Baroque was at first an undisguised term of abuse, probably derived from

the Italian word barocco, which was a term used by philosophers during
the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently,
this became a description for any contorted idea or involuted process of
thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco, with its
Spanish form barrueco, used to describe an irregular or imperfectly
shaped pearl; this usage still survives in the jeweler’s term “baroque
pearl.”

The derivation of the word Rococo is equally uncertain, though its source
is most probably to be found in the French word rocaille, used to describe
shell and pebble decorations in the 16th century. In the 18th century,
however, the scope of the word was increased when it came to be used
to describe the mainstream of French art of the first half of the century;
Neoclassical artists used it as a derogatory term. Fundamentally a style
of decoration, Rococo is much more a facet of late Baroque art than an
autonomous style, and the relationship between the two presents
interesting parallels to that between High Renaissance and Mannerist art.

During the Baroque period (c. 1600–1750), architecture, painting, and

sculpture were integrated into decorative ensembles. Architecture and
sculpture became pictorial, and painting became illusionistic. Baroque art
was essentially concerned with the dramatic and the illusory, with vivid
colours, hidden light sources, luxurious materials, and elaborate,
contrasting surface textures, used to heighten immediacy and sensual
delight. Ceilings of Baroque churches, dissolved in painted scenes,
presented vivid views of the infinite to the worshiper and directed him
through his senses toward heavenly concerns. Seventeenth-century
Baroque architects made architecture a means of propagating faith in the
church and in the state. Baroque palaces expanded to command the
infinite and to display the power and order of the state. Baroque space,
with directionality, movement, and positive molding, contrasted markedly
with the static, stable, and defined space of the High Renaissance and
with the frustrating conflict of unbalanced spaces of the preceding
Mannerist period. Baroque space invited participation and provided
multiple changing views. Renaissance space was passive and invited
contemplation of its precise symmetry. While a Renaissance statue was
meant to be seen in the round, a Baroque statue either had a principal
view with a preferred angle or was definitely enclosed by a niche or
frame. A Renaissance building was to be seen equally from all sides,
while a Baroque building had a main axis or viewpoint as well as
subsidiary viewpoints. Attention was focused on the entrance axis or on
the central pavilion, and its symmetry was emphasized by the central
culmination. A Baroque building expanded in its effect to include the
square facing it, and often the ensemble included all the buildings on the
square as well as the approaching streets and the surrounding landscape.
Baroque buildings dominated their environment; Renaissance buildings
separated themselves from it.

The Baroque rapidly developed into two separate forms: the strongly
Roman Catholic countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Flanders, Bohemia,
southern Germany, Austria, and Poland) tended toward freer and more
active architectural forms and surfaces; in Protestant regions (England,
the Netherlands, and the remainder of northern Europe) architecture was
more restrained and developed a sober, quiet monumentality that was
impressive in its refinement. In the Protestant countries and France,
which sought the spirit through the mind, architecture was more
geometric, formal, and precise—an appeal to the intellect. In the Roman
Catholic south, buildings were more complex, freer, and done with
greater artistic license—an appeal to the spirit made through the senses.

Treatises on the orders and on civil and military architecture provided a

theoretical basis for Baroque architects. While many 16th-century
architects published treatises on architecture or prepared them for
publication, major 17th-century architects published very little. Two
fragmentary volumes by Francesco Borromini appeared years after his
death, and Guarino Guarini’s major contribution (though he brought out
two volumes on architecture before he died) did not appear until well into
the 18th century. Other Italian publications tended to be repetitions of
earlier ideas with the exception of a tardily published manuscript of
Teofilo Gallaccini, whose treatise on the errors of Mannerist and early
Baroque architects became a point of departure for later theoreticians.

In France, Jacques-François Blondel and Augustin d’Aviler published notes

for lectures given at the Academy of Architecture, but the most important
publications were those of Fréart de Chambray and Claude Perrault.
Perrault attacked established Italian theory. Other notable French works
included writings by René Ouvard, André Félibien, Pierre Le Muet, and
Julien Mauclerc. In England, Sir Henry Wotton’s book was an adaptation of
Vitruvius, and Balthazar Gerbier’s was a compendium of advice for
builders. Among the notable 17th-century German publications were
books by Georg Boeckler, Josef Furttenbach, and Joachim von Sandrart.

During the period of the Enlightenment (about 1700 to 1780), various

currents of post-Baroque art and architecture evolved. A principal
current, generally known as Rococo, refined the robust architecture of
the 17th century to suit elegant 18th-century tastes. Vivid colours were
replaced by pastel shades; diffuse light flooded the building volume; and
violent surface relief was replaced by smooth flowing masses with
emphasis only at isolated points. Churches and palaces still exhibited an
integration of the three arts, but the building structure was lightened to
render interiors graceful and ethereal. Interior and exterior space
retained none of the bravado and dominance of the Baroque but
entertained and captured the imagination by intricacy and subtlety.

In Rococo architecture, decorative sculpture and painting are inseparable

from the structure. Simple dramatic spatial sequences or the complex
interweaving of spaces of 17th-century churches gave way to a new
spatial concept. By progressively modifying the Renaissance-Baroque
horizontal separation into discrete parts, Rococo architects obtained
unified spaces, emphasized structural elements, created continuous
decorative schemes, and reduced column sizes to a minimum. In
churches, the ceilings of side aisles were raised to the height of the nave
ceiling to unify the space from wall to wall (e.g., church of the Carmine,
Turin, Italy, 1732, by Filippo Juvarra; Pilgrimage Church, Steinhausen,
near Biberach, Germany, 1728, by Dominikus Zimmermann; Saint-
Jacques, Lunéville, France, 1730, by Germain Boffrand). To obtain a
vertical unification of structure and space, the vertical line of a
supporting column might be carried up from the floor to the dome (e.g.,
church of San Luis, Sevilla, Spain, begun 1699, by Leonardo de Figueroa).
The entire building was often lighted by numerous windows placed to
give dramatic effect (e.g., Schloss Brühl, near Cologne, by Balthasar
Neumann, 1740) or to flood the space with a cool diffuse light (e.g.,
Pilgrimage Church, Wies, Germany, by Zimmermann, 1745).

Neoclassicism was a widespread and influential movement in painting

and the other visual arts that began in the 1760s, reached its height in
the 1780s and ’90s, and lasted until the 1840s and ’50s. In painting it
generally took the form of an emphasis on austere linear design in the
depiction of classical themes and subject matter, using archaeologically
correct settings and costumes.

Neoclassicism arose partly as a reaction against the sensuous and

frivolously decorative Rococo style that had dominated European art from
the 1720s on. But an even more profound stimulus was the new and
more scientific interest in classical antiquity that arose in the 18th
century. Neoclassicism was given great impetus by new archaeological
discoveries, particularly the exploration and excavation of the buried
Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (the excavations of which
began in 1738 and 1748, respectively). And from the second decade of
the 18th century on, a number of influential publications by Bernard de
Montfaucon, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Comte de Caylus, and Robert
Wood provided engraved views of Roman monuments and other
antiquities and further quickened interest in the classical past. The new
understanding distilled from these discoveries and publications in turn
enabled European scholars for the first time to discern separate and
distinct chronological periods in Greco-Roman art, and this new sense of
a plurality of ancient styles replaced the older, unqualified veneration of
Roman art and encouraged a dawning interest in purely Greek
antiquities. The German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s writings
and sophisticated theorizings were especially influential in this regard.
Winckelmann saw in Greek sculpture “a noble simplicity and quiet
grandeur” and called for artists to imitate Greek art. He claimed that in
doing so such artists would obtain idealized depictions of natural forms
that had been stripped of all transitory and individualistic aspects, and
their images would thus attain a universal and archetypal significance.

Neoclassicism as manifested in painting was initially not stylistically

distinct from the French Rococo and other styles that had preceded it.
This was partly because, whereas it was possible for architecture and
sculpture to be modeled on prototypes in these media that had actually
survived from classical antiquity, those few classical paintings that had
survived were minor or merely ornamental works—until, that is, the
discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The earliest Neoclassical
painters were Joseph-Marie Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Pompeo Batoni,
Angelica Kauffmann, and Gavin Hamilton; these artists were active during
the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. Each of these painters, though they may have
used poses and figural arrangements from ancient sculptures and vase
paintings, was strongly influenced by preceding stylistic trends. An
important early Neoclassical work such as Mengs’s “Parnassus” (1761;
Villa Albani, Rome) owes much of its inspiration to 17th-century
classicism and to Raphael for both the poses of its figures and its general
composition. Many of the early paintings of the Neoclassical artist
Benjamin West derive their compositions from works by Nicolas Poussin,
and Kauffmann’s sentimental subjects dressed in antique garb are
basically Rococo in their softened, decorative prettiness. Mengs’s close
association with Winckelmann led to his being influenced by the ideal
beauty that the latter so ardently expounded, but the church and palace
ceilings decorated by Mengs owe more to existing Italian Baroque
traditions than to anything Greek or Roman.

A more rigorously Neoclassical painting style arose in France in the 1780s

under the leadership of Jacques-Louis David. He and his contemporary
Jean-François-Pierre Peyron were interested in narrative painting rather
than the ideal grace that fascinated Mengs. Just before and during the
French Revolution, these and other painters adopted stirring moral
subject matter from Roman history and celebrated the values of
simplicity, austerity, heroism, and stoic virtue that were traditionally
associated with the Roman Republic, thus drawing parallels between that
time and the contemporary struggle for liberty in France. David’s history
paintings of the “Oath of the Horatii” (1784; Louvre, Paris [see
photograph]) and “Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons”
(1789; Louvre) display a gravity and decorum deriving from classical
tragedy, a certain rhetorical quality of gesture, and patterns of drapery
influenced by ancient sculpture. To some extent these elements were
anticipated by British and American artists such as Hamilton and West,
but in David’s works the dramatic confrontations of the figures are
starker and in clearer profile on the same plane, the setting is more
monumental, and the diagonal compositional movements, large
groupings of figures, and turbulent draperies of the Baroque have been
almost entirely repudiated (see photograph). This style was ruthlessly
austere and uncompromising, and it is not surprising that it came to be
associated with the French Revolution (in which David actively
participated).

Neoclassicism as generally manifested in European painting by the 1790s

emphasized the qualities of outline and linear design over those of colour,
atmosphere, and effects of light. Widely disseminated engravings of
classical sculptures and Greek vase paintings helped determine this bias,
which is clearly seen in the outline illustrations made by the British
sculptor John Flaxman in the 1790s for editions of the works of Homer,
Aeschylus, and Dante. These illustrations are notable for their drastic and
powerful simplification of the human body, their denial of pictorial space,
and their minimal stage setting. This austere linearity when depicting the
human form was adopted by many other British figural artists, including
the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli and William Blake, among others.

Neoclassical painters attached great importance to depicting the

costumes, settings, and details of their classical subject matter with as
much historical accuracy as possible. This worked well enough when
illustrating an incident found in the pages of Homer, but it raised the
question of whether a modern hero or famous person should be
portrayed in classical or contemporary dress. This issue was never
satisfactorily resolved, except perhaps in David’s brilliantly evocative
portraits of sitters wearing the then-fashionable antique garb, as in his
“Portrait of Madame Récamier” (1800; Louvre).

Classical history and mythology provided a large part of the subject

matter of Neoclassical works. The poetry of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, the
plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and history recorded by
Pliny, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Livy provided the bulk of classical sources,
but the most important single source was Homer. To this general literary
emphasis was added a growing interest in medieval sources, such as the
pseudo-Celtic poetry of Ossian, as well as incidents from medieval
history, the works of Dante, and an admiration for medieval art itself in
the persons of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and others. Indeed, the Neoclassicists
differed strikingly from their academic predecessors in their admiration of
Gothic and Quattrocento art in general, and they contributed notably to
the positive reevaluation of such art.

Finally, it should be noted that Neoclassicism coexisted throughout much

of its later development with the seemingly obverse and opposite
tendency of Romanticism. But far from being distinct and separate, these
two styles intermingled with each other in complex ways; many
ostensibly Neoclassical paintings show Romantic tendencies, and vice
versa. This contradictory situation is strikingly evident in the works of the
last great Neoclassical painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who
painted sensuous Romantic female nudes while also turning out precisely
linear and rather lifeless historical paintings in the approved Neoclassical
mode.

Realism, in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of

nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in
favour of a close observation of outward appearances. As such, realism in
its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different
civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in
ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and
decrepit old women. The works of such 17th-century painters as
Caravaggio, the Dutch genre painters, the Spanish painters José de
Ribera, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán, and the Le Nain
brothers in France are realist in approach. The works of the 18th-century
English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett may
also be called realistic.

Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the

mid-19th century in France, however. Indeed, realism may be viewed as
a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880.
One of the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure
français du XIXe siècle in 1826, in which the word is used to describe a
doctrine based not upon imitating past artistic achievements but upon
the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and
contemporary life offer the artist. The French proponents of realism were
agreed in their rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and
Romanticism of the academies and on the necessity for contemporaneity
in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the lives,
appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower
classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the
unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to reproducing
all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society—its
mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.

Realism was stimulated by several intellectual developments in the first

half of the 19th century. Among these were the anti-Romantic movement
in Germany, with its emphasis on the common man as an artistic subject;
Auguste Comte’s Positivist philosophy, in which sociology’s importance as
the scientific study of society was emphasized; the rise of professional
journalism, with its accurate and dispassionate recording of current
events; and the development of photography, with its capability of
mechanically reproducing visual appearances with extreme accuracy. All
these developments stimulated interest in accurately recording
contemporary life and society.
LESSON 4: ART MOVEMENTS (SYMBOLISM TO
EXPRESSIONISM)

Symbolism, a loosely organized literary and artistic movement that

originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread
to painting and the theatre, and influenced the European and American
literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolist artists
sought to express individual emotional experience through the subtle and
suggestive use of highly symbolized language.

Symbolism in painting took its direction from the poets and literary
theorists of the movement, but it also represented a reaction against the
objectivist aims of Realism and the increasingly influential movement of
Impressionism. In contrast to the relatively concrete representation these
movements sought, Symbolist painters favoured works based on fantasy
and the imagination. The Symbolist position in painting was
authoritatively defined by the young critic Albert Aurier, an enthusiastic
admirer of Paul Gauguin, in an article in the Mercure de France (1891).
He elaborated on Moréas’s contention that the purpose of art “is to clothe
the idea in sensuous form” and stressed the subjective, symbolical, and
decorative functions of an art that would give visual expression to the
inner life. Symbolist painters turned to the mystical and even the occult
in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual forms.

Such Postimpressionist painters as Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh as well

as the Nabis may be regarded as Symbolists in certain aspects of their
art. However, the painters who are truly representative of Symbolist
aesthetic ideals include three principal figures: Gustave Moreau, Odilon
Redon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Moreau was a figurative painter
who created scenes based on legendary or ancient themes. His highly
original style utilized brilliant, jewel-like colours to portray the ornate,
sumptuous interiors of imaginary temples and palaces in which scantily
clad figures are caught in statuesque poses. His work is characterized by
exotic eroticism and decorative splendour. Redon explored mystical,
fantastic, and often macabre themes in his paintings and graphics. His
paintings stress the poetics of colour in their delicate harmonies of hues,
while his subject matter was highly personal in its mythical and dreamlike
figures. Puvis de Chavannes is now remembered primarily as a muralist.

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not

objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that
objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this
aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and
through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal
elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents
of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly
subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide
range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be
seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least
the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or
spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist
and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.

More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to

a number of German artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian
ones, who became active in the years before World War I and remained
so throughout much of the interwar period.

Strongly influenced by Expressionist stagecraft, the earliest Expressionist

films set out to convey through decor the subjective mental state of the
protagonist. The most famous of these films is Robert Wiene’s The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which a madman relates his
understanding of how he came to be in the asylum. The misshapen
streets and buildings of the set are projections of his own universe, and
the other characters have been abstracted through makeup and dress
into visual symbols. The film’s morbid evocation of horror, menace, and
anxiety and the dramatic, shadowy lighting and bizarre sets became a
stylistic model for Expressionist films by several major German directors.
Paul Wegener’s second version of The Golem (1920), F.W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), among other films,
present pessimistic visions of social collapse or explore the ominous
duality of human nature and its capacity for monstrous personal evil.

While some classify the composer Arnold Schoenberg as an Expressionist

because of his contribution to the Blaue Reiter almanac, musical
Expressionism seems to have found its most natural outlet in opera.
Among early examples of such Expressionist works are Paul Hindemith’s
operatic settings of Kokoschka’s proto-Expressionist drama, Mörder,
Hoffnung der Frauen (1919), and August Stramm’s Sancta Susanna
(1922). Most outstanding of the Expressionist operas, however, are two
by Alban Berg: Wozzeck, performed in 1925, and Lulu, which was not
performed in its entirety until 1979.
LESSON 5: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
MOVEMENTS

Modern art, painting, sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts

characteristic of the 20th and 21st centuries and of the later part of the
19th century. Modern art embraces a wide variety of movements,
theories, and attitudes whose modernism resides particularly in a
tendency to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and
conventions in an effort to create an art more in keeping with changed
social, economic, and intellectual conditions.

The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but

there is general agreement that it started in 19th-century France. The
paintings of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists
represent a deepening rejection of the prevailing academic tradition and
a quest for a more naturalistic representation of the visual world. These
painters’ Post-Impressionist successors can be viewed as more clearly
modern in their repudiation of traditional techniques and subject matter
and their expression of a more subjective personal vision. From about the
1890s on, a succession of varied movements and styles arose that are
the core of modern art and that represent one of the high points of
Western visual culture. These modern movements include Neo-
Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism,
Suprematism, Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, De Stijl, Dada,
Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Op art,
Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism. Despite the enormous variety seen
in these movements, most of them are characteristically modern in their
investigation of the potentials inherent within the painting medium itself
for expressing a spiritual response to the changed conditions of life in the
20th century and beyond. These conditions include accelerated
technological change, the expansion of scientific knowledge and
understanding, the seeming irrelevance of some traditional sources of
value and belief, and an expanding awareness of non-Western cultures.

An important trend that began in the 20th century was that of abstract,
or nonobjective, art—i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to
objectively reproduce or depict the appearances or forms of objects in
the realm of nature or the existing physical world. It should also be noted
that the development of photography and of allied photomechanical
techniques of reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important
influence on the development of modern art, because these mechanical
techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed drawing and painting
of their hitherto crucial role as the only means of accurately depicting the
visible world.

Modern architecture arose out of the rejection of revivals, classicism,

eclecticism, and indeed all adaptations of past styles to the building
types of industrializing late 19th- and 20th-century society. It also arose
out of efforts to create architectural forms and styles that would utilize
and reflect the newly available building technologies of structural iron
and steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. Until the spread of
postmodernism, modern architecture also implied the rejection of the
applied ornament and decoration characteristic of premodern Western
buildings. The thrust of modern architecture has been a rigorous
concentration on buildings whose rhythmical arrangement of masses and
shapes states a geometric theme in light and shade. This development
has been closely tied to the new building types demanded by an
industrialized society, such as office buildings housing corporate
management or government administration. Among the most important
trends and movements of modern architecture are the Chicago School,
Functionalism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the
International Style, the New Brutalism, and postmodernism.

Contemporary art has a variety too broad to define and a pace too fast to
pinpoint. It is an umbrella term for the art of today and recent times,
rather than a style or genre. In simple terms, contemporary art refers to
art about today, created today.

One characteristic that is synonymous, or perhaps symptomatic of

contemporary art is an avant-garde approach. As a continuation of the
pivotal modern art movements that shaped the 20th century, from the
concept of Cubism to the style of Surrealism, contemporary art also takes
its influence from postmodern ideas in seeking to challenge the discourse
of traditional art.

Experimentation is integral to the development of contemporary art.

Challenging and provocative, contemporary artists combine everything
from the new and the old, to the two dimensional and the three
dimensional. Using the past as a way to understand the present,
contemporary artists create art that looks to the future.

Explore our ever-expanding collection of contemporary art and discover

pieces from emerging artists alongside some of the biggest names in
today’s art market.

There still remains a much-debated uncertainty about the timeline of

contemporary art. Whilst some believe that contemporary art was
established on the cusp of the 1950s, others argue that contemporary art
truly came into being in the late 70s. Depending on the point at which
modern art ended and contemporary art began, movements such as Pop
Art, Post-Modernism and Abstract Expressionism can technically be
categorised as both, perhaps bridging the gap between the two.

Although they may sound as if they refer to the same period, modern and
contemporary art are two separate movements. Contemporary art
presents a progression of technological advancements that embraced
mediums such as video art and installation, as well as developing
practices across painting, sculpture and photography.

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https://www.riseart.com/guide/2400/what-is-contemporary-art