Art movement between 1900-present day
Modern art in a term that refers to the art born in the
years 1870-1970.
These changes, that art has had during all these years have
certainly also due to the change of society and therefore people, thought,
philosophy, we can say that art can be seen as the "reflection 'of human
society.
Between 1870-1970 in the history there have been many
changes, below we are going to analyze some of these movements.
Fauvism
The term Fauves (wild beasts in French) is a group of
painters, mostly French, who at the beginning of the twentieth century
(1905-1908) gave rise to the short time duration experience, but of great
importance in the evolution art. This current is also called Fauvism.
The first to use the term fauves was an art critic,
precisely Vauxcelles, he called the room where exposed these artists as a
"cage aux Fauves", a "wild beasts", for the
"wild" expressive violence of color .
Young Fauves discussed much impressionism, often in negative
terms but appreciating the novelty of a light generated from the combination of
pure colors.
Their art was based on the simplification of forms, on the
abolition of perspective and chiaroscuro, the use of bright and unnatural, sharp
colors on the use of pure color, often squeezed directly from the tube onto the
canvas, and a clear and marked line contour. The important thing was not as
academic art, the meaning of the work, but the shape, the color, the immediacy.
the purpose of this movement of art was to use art as a
means of expression
the greatest exponents of this corrent are: Matisse,
Rouault, Derain, Vlaminck, Alexis Mérodack-Jeanneau and Marquet
Futurism
Futurism is the most important movement that was born in
Italy in the twentieth century, a movement that has tried to change the way of
thinking and living of society.
The artists of futurism gather around the writer Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti.
Marinetti is the man
who invented the word Futurism, with which the group claims to want to get rid
of everything that was produced. The past, they think, hurts the man and makes
him weak and sentimental, so it should be replaced with symbols of progress:
the speed of cars, the power of the air, the energy produced in the factories.
In 1909 and in those years the city are transformed into cities and industrial
centers arise.
To strike the attention of contemporaries, Marinetti writes
that a racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, a famous
Greek statue of a winged woman, symbol of victory: the myth of classicism
opposes the myth of modernity.
The futurists love to talk about them through the challenge:
go in cafes, theaters, concerts and trigger riots and unrest among the public
with offensive or violent behavior sentences. It's the way they shake people,
to manifest a rebellion that affects all aspects of life and reach into the
homes
For even futuristic books and literature, like art, they
must get rid of the rules of the past that make them boring and outdated.
Marinetti therefore invents a new way to write and read the texts: in his books
are not the words printed neatly, but are free on the page (for this are called
parolibere). If the word indicates an explosion, such as bum, this should be
written in large and from the bottom up, to the reader to imagine the roar of
the explosion suddenly.
The way the words are written helps the imagination and
affects the reader's attention.
Umberto Boccioni recounts in his works does he see from the balcony of his house, or walking through the streets of Milan. In The City Rises (1910-11) the movement of horses, the workers, the smoke of industries in the distance, everything becomes a raging river that rises up and sweeps streets and buildings. It is the strength of the work and the frensy of modern life that creates a vortex in which things and people mingle as if they were liquid; Boccioni believes that the bodies and objects can penetrate, get in each other, and on this issue creates some sculptures in wood and plaster.
Another place loved by Boccioni and the Futurists is the train station, another symbol of progress. There, the artist can paint the shadows of people shuffled steam locomotives and capture under the moods of those who leave and those who remain.
Dadaism
Dadaism is an artistic protest movement that was born during
the First World War as a reaction to the culture and values that led to the
war.
The dadismo want to give scandal with an art that refuses
Traditional methods and experiments with new forms of expression.
The dadismo takes its name from the "dada", a word
that means nothing, it is said that this word was found by the Dadaists opening
the French vocabulary at random, when they were looking for a suitable name to
express their protest.
Dadaism was founded in Zurich in Switzerland, while Europe
is shocked by the First World War, and Switzerland is a pacifist nation, which
brought together German refugees, Romanian, French and Russian. Among them are
artists, poets, actors and politicians emigrated like Tristan Tzara and Hugo
Ball who in 1916 founded the Cabaret Voltaire, a literary cafe which ridicules
the rationality in which the French philosopher Voiltaire believed.
Is here comes the dadismo with his revolt: The Dadaists
refuse values such as homeland, moral and honor that led to the outbreak of
war, they believe that everything is casual and meaningless and so seek a new
freedom of expression.
From Switzerland, Dadaism spreads in New York, Germany and
France, and, thanks to magazines, become an international movement. Mixing
literature, theater, dance, music, painting, Dadaists want to fuse art and life
through provocative actions even life becomes an artistic experience.
For the first time the art does not depend more on the
ability of the artist or manually by an aesthetic idea, but by chance, by the
unexpected, the impromptu combination of objects or words.
Hans Arp, for example, hand ripping some squares and paste
them in the order in which they fell: Art becomes the result of a casual
gesture.
The big news introduced by the Dadaists is a way to
"make art '. Until then artists have "created": they chose a
model and have it copied with a traditional technique such as painting. The
Dadaists do not create works, but built objects. Refuse techniques and I traditional
subjects, do not copy reality but create taking objects from them and pasting
them on wood, cardboard and even on photo paper.
Surrealism
Giving voice to the forces of imagination, dreams and the unconscious.
Born officially in 1924 with the manifesto drawn up by the French poet André Breton, Surrealism is an avant-garde movement that aims to express, either with words or with images, the free operation of thought, to free him from the control exercised by reason. The artists who are part come from different countries; the German Max Ernst and Hans-Jean Arp, the French André Masson and Yves Tanguy, the Belgian René Magritte and Paul Delvaux, the Catalans Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. They intend to create art forms directly resulting from the powerful world of fantasy, dreams and the unconscious forces that live in the deepest and most hidden part of the human mind.
What is surreal? Literally is something super-real, that is something that goes beyond what we can see or live daily in so-called real. When the end of the First World War was born the surrealist movement, coordinated by the French poet André Breton, is quite the disappointment with the real life that leads to the search for a super-reality, a different reality, which is 'over', in other worlds: the dream, the fantasy, the underwater world in the most hidden part of the human soul and the surrealists want to bring to light through art.
Surrealism, doing just the critical and rebellious spirit of Dadaism, was thus born as a protest movement against a society that believed rich in spiritual values but then was able to produce inhuman events such as the First World War. Between 1924 and 1925 this group of poets and artists is animated by a deep desire for transformation and improvement of the human condition. Unlike the Dadaist group, Breton and his friends, the poets Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Benjamin Peret; the painters Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Hans-Jean Arp, Joan Miro, believe in the possibility of a better future and make their art available to the change. First you need to reform the same art, giving the artist complete freedom to expression,
The surrealists set out to express, both with writing with painting, man's inner forces, of which we are not aware of and that we are not able to explain, since they are located in the deepest part of the mind and inaccessible (the unconscious).
From childhood man follows rules and social behaviors that lead him into adulthood to be what society asks him to be giving priority to reason and order.
The surrealists want to eliminate with art and art itself the barrier that separates the waking from sleep. Behind these ideas there are studies of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, the science that studies the mechanisms of the mind. As Freud treated his patients bringing in their inner surface through free association of thoughts, so the Surrealists bring to light the hidden reality by composing poems in words that, from time to time, come out without a logical order, a technique that is called automatic writing, or making paintings populated by fantastic creatures, pure imagination, that come straight from the depths of thought.
The surrealist painters are very different personality from each other, so each one plays in an original way these basic ideas: the monstrous beings Ernst to extraterrestrial worlds of Tanguy, by deliberately childish drawings of Miró the harmonious forms and dreamy Delvaux, from images Magritte's magic to the baroque paintings of Dalí
The absurdity of surrealist scenes provokes astonishment, surprise, leaves you speechless because it destroys the certainties, it questions what we are used to; the reality may be as we see it in another way: this is precisely the surreality sought by Breton and others. After recovering from the initial shock, the viewer realises that those images have stimulated other mechanisms of his mind, that not even know they had, by setting in motion his ability to imagine, awakening the imagination, giving voice to the dreams or nightmares; these images, therefore, make you think about the fact that a different world from the current is not impossible.
Pop Art
Born between Europe and America in the fifties and sixties
of the 20th century, the movement of pop art reflected in their works the
modern consumer society. Going into the race with the same aggressive and
impersonal language of the mass media, pop art experiments new techniques, uses
retouched photographs, collages and assemblages, sculptures of plaster and even
theatrical gestures to unveil the latest light and shadow well-being and
reporting the loss of man in front of a civilisation that desires always
requires new and increasingly amplified dreams
Although the term pop comes from the abbreviation of the
English word popular "popular", pop art does not identify a form of
folk art, but an art that speaks a language that everyone knows: that of the
mass media, advertising, television and film.
The birth of this art form takes place in England in the
fifties, with a debate on the mass society; US pop art takes shape around the
middle of the decade with the first research of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper
Johns on the relationship between painting and objects.
Pop art plays with the new idols created by the media and
transformed into images to admire objects like the can of Coca Cola or Campbell
soup and the celebrities of the moment, from Marilyn Monroe to John and
Jacqueline Kennedy.
In an age where everything is become reproducible and
duplicated thanks to the possibilities offered by the industry, the art is
considering its own role: the artists ask themselves whether and how to
maintain the unique character of the work of art, or if there is a need to
reconcile the reality of consumerism with its own language.
By the different answers given to these questions comes the
diversity of styles and techniques that distinguishes the pop art: there are
those who appropriates and industrial techniques obsessively repeats the
images, such as Andy Warhol, who plays plaster the exalted objects from
advertising, such as Claes Oldenburg. Some people even through traditional
instruments enhances the same content of the mass media, such as Johns painting
the American flag on the ambiguity of mind between the object and its
reproduction: worth more the picture or symbol that is represented?
The leading representatives of pop art are Warhol,
Oldenburg, George Segal, Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and James
Rosenquist
The main interpreter of pop remains, however, Andy Warhol,
who is also a film director Original: is able to transform from one object into
a work of art produced in series, where the image repetition reinforces the
message, as in the case of the series in the electric chair. When playing on
cans of soup canvas confirmation that the language of advertising is become art
and which tastes have become standardised.