MODERNISM 1880 - 1945 AD (CE)
Post Impressionism 1880 - 1910 AD - Post-Impressionism was a diverse art movement that engulfed the European art community in the latter part of the 19th century. Post-Impressionism constitutes a continuation of the Impressionist effort to portray painting in a differential and unbridled manner. The paramount figures to emerge in the movement include: Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Georges Seraut, Paul Gauguin, and Pierre Bonnard. The Post-Impressionists each developed individual styles that supported, or eroded the fabricated principles of the Impressionist movement.
The movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Postimpressionism 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 color and light. The Postimpressionists rejected this limited aim in favor of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colors of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken color. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for modern art in general.
Less closely connected with the Impressionists were Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Odilon Redon. Concerned with perceptive portraiture and decorative effect, Toulouse-Lautrec used the vivid contrasting colors of Impressionism in flat areas enclosed by a distinct, sinuous outline. Redon's still-life florals were somewhat Impressionistic, but his other works are more linear and Symbolistic. In general, Postimpressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through color and line.
Vincent Van Gogh
Starry Night
Saint-Rémy: June, 1889
Oil on canvas
73 x 92 cm. (New York City, The Museum of Modern Art)
Pre-Raphaelites (1880-1920) - The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was started in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, as a reaction against what they saw as the stale, formula-driven art produced by the Royal Academy at the time. They aimed to go back to a more genuine art, exemplified as they saw it by the work of the Nazarenes, and rooted in realism and truth to nature.
The original three - Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt - recruited Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and two other students at the RA, James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens. They exhibited their work with the initials "P.R.B." (for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) for a short while, and had a journal, The Germ, attracting much criticism, especially from Charles Dickens, before support from John Ruskin lead to their work being reconsidered in a more favorable light.
Collinson resigned in 1850, and was replaced by Walter Howell Deverell. However, the Brotherhood faded out quite quickly, as the three main members went in different artistic directions. Millais became a successful establishment artist, and moved away from his Pre-Raphaelite works to more popular paintings, Rossetti's work became more and more mystical, and very individual, and Holman Hunt, while retaining the realist aspects of Pre-Raphaelite ideals, painted moralistic pictures that may be thought of as moving towards mainstream Victorian subjects.
Other artists working in the Pre-Raphaelite style in the 1850s included Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Henry Wallis. Later, Rossetti inspired a new, younger generation of artists to follow the romantic, medieval type of painting which he himself produced, and these are also called Pre-Raphaelites, and sometimes referred to as the second generation. Most notably they include Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Morris, and later Simeon Solomon and Evelyn de Morgan. Many other artists of large or small talent who worked in similar style, or somewhere between Pre-Raphaelitism and the aestheticism of Leighton are sometimes called Pre-Raphaelite in a more wishy-washy sense. Several illustrators, such as Henry Justice Ford (who illustrated the Andrew Lang 'Fairy books') and Evelyn Paul were drawing in the Pre-Raphaelite style well past the turn of the century.
John William Waterhouse
The Lady of Shallot 1888
Tate Gallery, London
Expressionism 1900 - 1920 AD - While the German Expressionists may have been an obscure bunch, unknown in global respects, they did have a significant impact on art history as we look back on their accomplishments.
Movement in fine arts that emphasized the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist. Artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his 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 later 19th and the 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.
The most famed German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.
The Meeting of St. Anthony Abbot and
St. Paul in the Wilderness ca. 1512-16
A panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece
Fauvism 1900 - 1920 AD - The Fauvists' artwork made them appear to be the most advanced group working in Paris. The Fauvists had abandoned traditional art after the downfall of the Post-Impressionists. Henri Matisse (-Émile-Benoît) was the leader of Fauvist movement.
Henri Matisse
La Musique 1939
Oil on canvas, 115.2 x 115.2 cm
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Cubism 1907 - 1914 AD - Today, the word Cubism, and its members, have become synonymous with innovation and idealism. People and critics viewed their art as something refreshing.
The Cubist art movement will forever loom over the era of modern art. The movement lasted approximately eighteen years, and existed around the time of Fauvism and Expressionism. Cubism consisted of a desire to deny the work of their art predecessors in a way that would dis-value their meanings and intentions. The movement’s most significant members: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris each developed certain styles that worked to achieve their purpose. The Cubist art period represented a new and dramatic change in art history. Since the time of the Renaissance, no other art period had been so well known by the lay-people as Cubism. And possibly, no other movement has enjoyed their success and influence since.
Portrait of Picasso 1912
Oil on canvas, 93.4 x 74.3 cm
Collection of Mrs. and Mrs. Leigh Block,
Art Institute of Chicago
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