History of Art

History of Art

Renaissance - A revival or rebirth of cultural awareness and learning that took place during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly in Italy, but also in Germany and other European countries. The period was characterized by a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman art and design and included an emphasis on human beings, their environment, science, and philosophy.

Baroque - The art style or art movement of the Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth century. Although some features appear in Dutch art, the Baroque style was limited mainly to Catholic countries. It is a style in which painters, sculptors, and architects sought emotion, movement, and variety in their works.

Romanticism and the Romantic school - An art movement and style that flourished in the early nineteenth century. It emphasized the emotions painted in a bold, dramatic manner. Romantic artists rejected the cool reasoning of classicism -- the established art of the times -- to paint pictures of nature in its untamed state, or other exotic settings filled with dramatic action, often with an emphasis on the past. Classicism was nostalgic too, but Romantics were more emotional, usually melancholic, even melodramatically tragic.

Paintings by members of the French Romantic school include those by Théodore Géricault (French, 1791-1824) and Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863), filled with rich color, energetic brushwork, and dramatic and emotive subject matter. In England the Romantic tradition began with Henry Fuseli (Swiss-English, 1741-1825) and William Blake (1757-1827), and culminated with Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). The German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) produced images of solitary figures placed in lonely settings amidst ruins, cemetaries, frozen, watery, or rocky wastes. And in Spain, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) depicted the horrors of war along with aristocratic portraits.

Impressionism - An art movement and style of painting that started in France during the 1860s. Impressionist artists tried to paint candid glimpses of their subjects showing the effects of sunlight on things at different times of day. The leaders of this movement were: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830-1903), Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917), Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926), and Pierre Renoir (French, 1841-1919). Some of the early work of Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) fits into this style, though his later work so transcends it that it belongs to another movement known as Post-Impressionism.

Cubism - One of the most influential art movements (1907-1914) of the twentieth century, Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), and by the Fauves.

In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."

There were three phases in the development of Cubism: Facet Cubism, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism.

After fauvist beginnings, Braque went with Raoul Dufy in 1908 on a trip to l'Estaque, a place often painted by Cézanne. They produced a series of landscapes with simplified forms and a limited variety of colors. The controversy surrounding their exhibition at the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Gallery brought Cubism its name. In effect, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles described the works in this way: "M. Braque scorns form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemas and cubes."

The break with homogeneous form was completed the following year. Braque and Picasso's similar compositions are broken into planes with open edges, sliding into each other while denying all depth. Color is reduced to a gray-tan cameo, applied uniformly in small brushstrokes creating vibrations of light. The interpenetration of the forms lends these paintings a previously unknown aspect of continuity and density. Withdrawing before the abstract and hermetic character of this new space, Braque and Picasso brought recognizable illusionistic features back into their paintings during their stay in Céret, from 1911 to 1913. They used letters, fragments of words, musical notes, then significant material elements: sand or sawdust which create relief, and tend to make the picture more physically an object.

Color returned in force in 1912, in parallel to the creation of the "papiers collés" -- collages. Creating a simple geometric armature and pieces of glued paper with trompe l'oeil patterns imitating wood, marble or newsprint, then introducing "already made" elements (musical scores, tobacco packets or playing cards), the "papiers collés" definitively dissociate color and form. Picasso, then Henri Laurens would create construction pieces from ordinary materials, cut out and assembled into colored geometric planes, where empty and full spaces combine to sketch out the forms.

Although the war of 1914-19 ended Picasso and Braque's collaboration, the cubist core group remained active until the 1920s, through the explorations of Braque, Matisse, Laurens, Lipchitz and Fernand Léger, whose geometric world and abstractly organized canvases with their contrasting, dynamic forms owe almost everything to the pioneering breakthroughs of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso.

Source: Artlex.com