Cubism

Cubism
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Georges Braque, 'Woman with a Guitar,' 1913 Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three phases of Cubism in his seminal book "The Cubist Epoch". According to Cooper there was "Early Cubism", (from 1906 to 1908) when the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called "High Cubism", (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to "Late Cubism" (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.[1]
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.
Contents
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1 Conception and origins 2 Analytical Cubism 3 Synthetic Cubism 4 Cubism and its ideologies 5 Cubism in other fields 6 Cubism today 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links
[edit] Conception and origins
Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity
of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism. Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul Czanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones. However the cubists explored this concept further than Czanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time. This new kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects could be visualized in painting and art. The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. A later active participant was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and influence that persuaded Braque by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began working closely together in late 1908early 1909 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as "full of little cubes", after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a coloured canvas."[2]
Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on canvas
Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group or Section d'Or was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement; it included Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, and Fernand Lger, and Francis Picabia. Other important artists associated with cubism include: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Max Weber, Diego Rivera, Marie Vorobieff, Louis Marcoussis, Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, Roger de La Fresnaye, Henri Le Fauconnier, Alexander Archipenko, Frantiek Kupka, Amde Ozenfant, Lopold Survage, Patrick Henry Bruce among others. Section d'Or is basically just another name for many of the artists associated with cubism and orphism. In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery. Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its components for their own work in all branches of artistic creativity especially painting and architecture. This developed into Czech Cubism which was an avantgarde art movement of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914.
[edit] Analytical Cubism
Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, The Art Institute of Chicago. Picasso's Analytical Cubist portrait of his longtime art dealer. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense? Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Colour was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often
included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on colour, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.
Juan Gris, Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin, 1919, oil on canvas. Both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque. In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Czanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Czanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Picasso was the main analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned Fauvism to work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon.
[edit] Synthetic Cubism

Synthetic Cubism was the second main movement within Cubism that was developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier coll and a large variety of merged subject matter. It was the beginning of collage materials being introduced as an important ingredient of fine art work. Considered the first work of this new style was Pablo Picasso's "Still Life with Chair-caning" (19111912), which includes oil cloth that was printed to look like chair-caning pasted onto an oval canvas, with text; and rope framing the whole picture. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings and refers to the newspaper titled "Le Journal". [3]
Newspaper clippings were a common inclusion, physical pieces of newspaper, sheet music, and like items were also included in the collages. JOU may also at the same time be a pun on the French words jeu (game) or jouer (to play). Picasso and Braque had a friendly competition with each other and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of their game. Whereas Analytic Cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), Synthetic Cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Less pure than Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space.
[edit] Cubism and its ideologies

Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. The new anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were especially active and vigorous, but patriotic, nationalist movements were strong as well. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly leftist or radical, and others strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment.[citation needed]
[edit] Cubism in other fields
A part of the enormous Creators of the Bulgarian State monument near Shumen. The written works of Gertrude Stein employ repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks in both passages and whole chapters. Most of Stein's important works utilize this technique, including the novel The Makings of Americans (190608) Not only were they the first important patrons of Cubism, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were also important influences on Cubism as well. Picasso in turn was an important influence on Stein's writing. The poets generally associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Andr Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As American poet Kenneth Rexroth explains, Cubism in poetry "is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of
elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada."[4] Nonetheless, the Cubist poets' influence on both Cubism and the later movements of Dada and Surrealism was profound; Louis Aragon, founding member of Surrealism, said that for Breton, Soupault, luard and himself, Reverdy was "our immediate elder, the exemplary poet."[5] Though not as well remembered as the Cubist painters, these poets continue to influence and inspire; American poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett have recently produced new translations of Reverdy's work.
Cubist House of the Black Madonna, Prague, Czech Republic, 1912 Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is also said to demonstrate how cubism's multiple perspectives can be translated into poetry.[6] The composer Edgard Varse was heavily influenced by Cubist writing and art.[citation needed]
[edit] Cubism today
Cal Poly Pomona university library in Pomona, California.[7] Far from being an art movement confined to the annals of art history, Cubism and its legacy continue to inform the work of many contemporary artists. Not only is cubist imagery regularly used commercially but significant numbers of contemporary artists continue to draw upon it both
stylistically and perhaps more importantly, theoretically. The latter contains the clue as to the reason for cubism's enduring fascination for artists. As an essentially representational school of painting, having to come to grips with the rising importance of photography as an increasingly viable method of image making, cubism attempts to take representational imagery beyond the mechanically photographic and to move beyond the bounds of traditional single point perspective perceived, as though, by a totally immobile viewer. The questions and theories which arose during the initial appearance of cubism in the early 20th century are, for many representational artists, as current today as when first proposed.
Neoclassicism
(Redirected from Neo-classicism) Jump to: navigation, search For other uses, see Neoclassical.
Porcelain vase of "Medici Vase" profile, decorated in "Pompeian" black and red, St Petersburg, ca 1830
David's Oath of the Horatii (178485) is not just neoclassical in subject.
Late Baroque classicizing: G. P. Pannini assembles the canon of Roman ruins and Roman sculpture into one vast imaginary gallery (1756) Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon Western classical art and culture (usually that of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome). These movements were dominant during the mid 18th to the end of the 19th century. This article addresses what these "neoclassicisms" have in common.
Contents
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1 Overview 2 Neoclassicism in architecture and in the decorative and visual arts 3 Covert neoclassicism in Modern styles 4 Neoclassicism Part II: Between the Wars 5 Neoclassicism in Russia and the Soviet Union 6 Neoclassicism in the 21st century 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links
[edit] Overview
What any "neo"-classicism depends on most fundamentally is a consensus about a body of work that has achieved canonic status (illustration, below). These are the "classics." Ideallyand neoclassicism is essentially an art of an idealan artist, well schooled and comfortably familiar with the canon, does not repeat it in lifeless reproductions, but synthesizes the tradition anew in each work. This sets a high standard, clearly; but though a neoclassical artist who fails to achieve it may create works that are inane, vacuous or even mediocre, gaffes of taste and failures of craftsmanship are not commonly neoclassical failings. Novelty, improvisation, self-expression, and blinding inspiration are not neoclassical virtues. "Make it new" was the modernist credo of the poet Ezra Pound; contrarily, neoclassicism does not seek to re-create art forms from the ground up with each new project. It instead exhibits perfect control of an idiom. Speaking and thinking in English, "neoclassicism" in each art implies a particular canon of "classic" models. Virgil, Raphael, Nicolas Poussin, Haydn. Other cultures have other canons of classics, however, and a recurring strain of neoclassicism appears to be a natural expression of a culture at a certain moment in its career, a culture that is highly self-aware, that is also confident of its own high mainstream tradition, but at the same time feels the need to regain something that has slipped away: Apollonius of Rhodes is a neoclassic writer; Ming ceramics pay homage to Sung celadon porcelains; Italian 15th century humanists learn to write a "Roman" hand we call italic (based on the Carolingian); Neo-Babylonian culture is a neoclassical revival, and in Persia the "classic" religion of Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism, is revived after centuries, to "re-Persianize" a culture that had fallen away from its own classic Achaemenean past. Within the direct Western tradition, the earliest movement motivated by a neoclassical inspiration is a Roman style that was first distinguished by the German art historian Friedrich Hauser (Die Neuattische Reliefs Stuttgart 1889), who identified the style-category he called "Neo-Attic" among sculpture produced in later Hellenistic circles during the last century or so BCE and in Imperial Rome; the corpus that Hauser called "Neo-Attic" consists of bas reliefs molded on decorative vessels and plaques, employing a figural and drapery style that looked for its canon of "classic" models to late 5th and early 4th century Athens and Attica.
[edit] Neoclassicism in architecture and in the decorative and visual arts

For more details on this topic, see Neoclassical architecture.
The Academy, designed by Theophil Freiherr von Hansen and completed in 1885, in Athens, Greece
Antonio Canova's Psyche Revived by Love's Kiss -In the visual arts the European movement called "neoclassicism" began after A.D. 1765, as a reaction against both the surviving Baroque and Rococo styles, and as a desire to return to the perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome, the more vague perception ("ideal") of Ancient Greek arts, and, to a lesser extent, 16th century Renaissance Classicism. Contrasting with the Baroque and the Rococo, Neo-classical paintings are devoid of pastel colors and haziness; instead, they have sharp colors with Chiaroscuro. In the case of Neo-classicism in France, a prime example is Jacques Louis David whose paintings often use Roman and Greek elements to extol the French Revolution's virtues (state before family).
Henry Fuseli, The artist moved to despair at the grandeur of antique fragments, 177879 Each "neo"- classicism selects some models among the range of possible classics that are available to it, and ignores others. The neoclassical writers and talkers, patrons and collectors, artists and sculptors of 17651830 paid homage to an idea of the generation of Pheidias, but the sculpture examples they actually embraced were more likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures. They ignored both Archaic Greek art and the works of Late Antiquity. The Rococo art of ancient Palmyra came as a revelation, through engravings in Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra. Even Greece was all-but-unvisited, a rough backwater of the Ottoman Empire, dangerous to explore, so neoclassicists' appreciation of Greek architecture was mediated through drawings and engravings, which subtly smoothed and regularized, "corrected' and "restored" the monuments of Greece, not always consciously. As for painting, Greek painting was utterly lost: neoclassicist painters imaginatively revived it, partly through bas-relief friezes, mosaics, and pottery painting and partly through the examples of painting and decoration of the High Renaissance of Raphael's generation, frescos in Nero's Domus Aurea, Pompeii and Herculaneum and through renewed admiration of Nicholas Poussin. Much "neoclassical" painting is more classicizing in subject matter than in anything else.
Faade of the Larger Marble Palace built by Luigi Vanvitelli's pupil Antonio Rinaldi. There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented in the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland, but also recognizable in a classicizing vein of architecture in Berlin. It is a robust architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of "the best" Roman models. Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a generation of French art students trained in Rome and influenced by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it was quickly adopted by progressive circles in Sweden. At first, classicizing decor was grafted onto familiar European forms, as in the interiors for Catherine II's lover Count Orlov, designed by an Italian architect with a team of Italian stuccadori: only the isolated oval medallions like cameos and the bas-relief overdoors hint of neoclassicism; the furnishings are fully Italian Rococo (illustration, left).
G.B. Piranesi's design for a vase on stand, Rome ca 1780, appealed more to his English and French patrons. Similar gilt-bronze vases were made in London and Paris, from ca. 1768 onwards. But a second neoclassic wave, more severe, more studied (through the medium of engravings) and more consciously archaeological, is associated with the height of the Napoleonic Empire. In France, the first phase of neoclassicism is expressed in the "Louis XVI style", the second phase in the styles we call "Directoire" or Empire. Italy clung to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new archaeological classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by young, progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings. The high tide of neoclassicism in painting is exemplified in early paintings by Jacques-Louis David (illustration, left) and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' entire career. David's Oath of the Horatii was painted in Rome and made a splash at the Paris Salon of 1785. Its central perspective is perpendicular to the picture plane, made more emphatic by the dim arcade behind, against
which the heroic figures are disposed as in a frieze, with a hint of the artificial lighting and staging of opera, and the classical coloring of Nicholas Poussin. In sculpture, the most familiar representatives are the Italian Antonio Canova, the Englishman John Flaxman and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen. The European neoclassical manner also took hold in the United States, where its prominence peaked somewhat later and is exemplified in the sculptures of William Henry Rinehart (18251874). In the decorative arts, neoclassicism is exemplified in Empire furniture made in Paris, London, New York, Berlin; in Biedermeier furniture made in Austria; in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's museums in Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built "capitol" in Washington, DC; and in Wedgwood's bas reliefs and "black basaltes" vases. The Scots architect Charles Cameron created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in Russian St. Petersburg: the style was international.
At the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, William Henry Playfair employs a Greek Doric octastyle portico. Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had started in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the 1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly controlled distribution of Le Antichit di Ercolano. The antiquities of Herculaneum showed that even the most classicizing interiors of the Baroque, or the most "Roman" rooms of William Kent were based on basilica and temple exterior architecture, turned outside in: pedimented window frames turned into gilded mirrors, fireplaces topped with temple fronts, now all looking quite bombastic and absurd. The new interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and genuinely interior vocabulary, employing flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaeu ("like cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or busts or bucrania or other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian red" or pale tints, or stone colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the Got grec, not a court style. Only when the plump, young king acceded to the throne in 1774 did his fashion-loving Queen bring the "Louis XVI" style to court. From about 1800 a fresh influx of Greek architectural examples, seen through the medium of etchings and engravings, gave a new impetus to neoclassicism that is called the Greek Revival.
Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the 19th century and beyonda constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic revivals although from the late 19th century on it had often been considered anti-modern, or even reactionary, in influential critical circles. By the mid-19th century, several European citiesnotably St Petersburg and Munich were transformed into veritable museums of Neoclassical architecture.
Jacob Ungerer, Mende fountain Leipzig, Triton and Hippocamp Jacob Ungerer, Hymen (Bridal Gate, City Hall Hamburg) In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the American Renaissance movement, ca 18901917; its last manifestation was in Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public projects were the Lincoln Memorial (highly criticized at the time), The National Gallery in Washington, DC (also heavily criticized by the architectural community as being backward thinking and old fashioned in its design), and the American Museum of Natural History's Roosevelt Memorial. These were white elephants when they were built. In the British Raj, Sir Edwin Lutyens' monumental city planning for New Delhi marks the glorious sunset of neoclassicism. World War II was to shatter most longing for and imitation of mythical, heroic times.
[edit] Covert neoclassicism in Modern styles

Meanwhile, conservative modernist architects like Charles Perret in France kept the rhythms and spacing of columnar architecture even in factory buildings. Where a colonnade would have been decried as "reactionary," a building's pilaster-like fluted panels under a repeating frieze looked "progressive." Pablo Picasso experimented with classicizing motifs in the years immediately following World War I, and the Art Deco style that peaked in the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Dcoratifs often drew on neoclassical motifs without expressing them overtly: severe, blocky commodes by E. J. Ruhlmann or Sue et Mare; crisp, extremely low-relief friezes of damsels and gazelles in every medium; fashionable dresses that were draped or cut on the bias to recreate Grecian lines; the art dance of Isadora Duncan; the Streamline Moderne styling of US post offices and county court buildings built as late as 1950; and the Roosevelt dime. Neoclassic themes can even be detected in the Smith Tower, Seattle.
[edit] Neoclassicism Part II: Between the Wars

There was an entire 20th century movement in the Arts which was also called Neo-classicism. It encompassed at least music, philosophy, and literature. It was between the end of World War I and the end of World War II. For information on the musical aspects, see 20th century classical
music and Neoclassicism (music). For information on the philosophical aspects, see Great Books. This literary neo-classical movement rejected the extreme romanticism of (for example) dada, in favour of restraint, religion (specifically Christianity) and a reactionary political program. Although the foundations for this movement in English literature were laid by T. E. Hulme, the most famous neoclassicists were T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. In Russia, the movement crystallized as early as 1910 under the name of Acmeism, with Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam as the leading representatives.
[edit] Neoclassicism in Russia and the Soviet Union

File:Palace of Soviets - perspectice.jpg Palace of Soviets, 1936 version a joint effort of moderate modernist Boris Iofan and neoclassicist Vladimir Shchuko, supervised by Joseph Stalin. In 19051914 Russian architecture passed through a brief but influential period of neoclassical revival; the trend began with recreation of Empire style of alexandrine period and quickly expanded into a variety of neo-Renaissance, palladian and modernized, yet recognizably classical schools. They were led by architects born in 1870s, who reached creative peak before World War I like Ivan Fomin, Vladimir Shchuko, Ivan Zholtovsky. When economy recovered in 1920s, these architects and their followers continued working in primarily modernist environment; some (Zholtovsky) strictly followed the classical canon, others (Fomin, Schuko, Ilya Golosov) developed their own modernized styles.[1] With the crackdown on architects' independence and official denial of modernism (1932), demonstrated by the international contest for the Palace of Soviets, neoclassicism was instantly promoted as one of the choices in stalinist architecture, although not the only one. It coexisted with moderately modernist architecture of Boris Iofan, bordering with contemporary Art Deco (Schuko); again, the purest examples of the style were produced by Zholtovsky school that remained an isolated phenomena. The political intervention was a disaster for constructivist leaders yet was sincerely welcomed by architects of the classical schools.[2] Neoclassicism was an easy choice for the USSR since it did not rely on modern construction technologies (steel frame or reinforced concrete) and could be reproduced in traditional masonry. Thus the designs of Zholtovsky, Fomin and other old masters were easily replicated in remote towns under strict material rationing. Improvement of construction techology after World War II permitted stalinist architects to venture into skyscraper construction, although stilistically these skyscrapers (including "exported" architecture of Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw and the Shanghai International Convention Centre) share little with the classical models. Neoclassicism and neo-Renaissance persisted in less demanding residential and office projects until 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev put an end to expensive stalinist architecture.[2]
[edit] Neoclassicism in the 21st century
Schermerhorn Symphony Center After a lull during the period of modern architectural dominance (roughly post-WWII until the mid 1980s), neoclassicism has seen somewhat of a resurgence. In the United States some public buildings are built in the neoclassical style as of at least 2006, with the completion of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. In Britain a number of architects are active in the neoclassical style. Examples of their work include two university Libraries: Quinlan Terry's Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College and Robert Adam Architects' Sackler Library. The majority of new neoclassical buildings in Britain are private houses.[citation needed] As of the 2000s, neoclassical architecture is usually classed under the umbrella term of "traditional architecture".[3] Also, a number of pieces of postmodern architecture draw inspiration from and include explicit references to neoclassicism,[citation needed] the National Theatre of Catalonia in Barcelona among them.
Dada
(Redirected from Dadaism) Jump to: navigation, search For other uses, see Dada (disambiguation).
Cover of the first edition of the publication Dada by Tristan Tzara; Zrich, 1917.
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zrich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.[1] The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature poetry, art manifestoes, art theorytheatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau ralisme, pop art, Fluxus and punk rock. Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation
Contents
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1 Overview 2 History o 2.1 Origin of the word Dada o 2.2 Zrich o 2.3 Berlin o 2.4 Cologne o 2.5 New York o 2.6 Paris o 2.7 Netherlands o 2.8 Georgia
2.9 Tokyo 2.10 Yugoslavia 3 Poetry; music and sound 4 Legacy 5 Art techniques developed o 5.1 Collage o 5.2 Photomontage o 5.3 Assemblage o 5.4 Readymades 6 See also 7 Footnotes o 7.1 References 8 External links
o o
[edit] Overview
It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic. Carl Jung on the Dada productions.[2]
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity in art and more broadly in society that corresponded to the war. [3]
Hannah Hch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90x144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.
Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction".[4] According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art." For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics. As dadaist Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."[5] A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."[6] Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."[6]
[edit] History
[edit] Origin of the word Dada
One explanation maintains that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara [7] and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, which, translated into English is equivalent to yeah, yeah, as in a sarcastic or facetious yeah, right. (Da in Romanian strictly translates as yes.) Some believe that it is simply a nonsensical word. Another theory is a group of artists assembled in Zrich in 1916, wanting a name for their new movement, chose it at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child's word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c'est mon dada, means it's my hobby.[8] According to the Dada ideal, the movement would not be called "Dadaism", much less designated an art-movement.[9]
[edit] Zrich
In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Tuber, Hans Richter, along with others, discussed art and put on
performances in the Cabaret Voltaire expressing their disgust with the war and the interests that inspired it. By some accounts Dada coalesced on October 6 at the cabaret. By other accounts Dada did not spring full-grown from a Zrich literary salon but grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, that transposed to Switzerland when a group of Romanian modernist artists Tzara, Marcel & Iuliu Iancu, Arthur Segal, and others, settled in Zrich. Because Bucharest and other cities had already been the scene of Dada-like poetry, prose and spectacle in the years before WW1., this suggests Dada came from the East.[10] The artists were in "neutral" Zrich, Switzerland, having left Germany and Romania during the happenings of WWI. It was here that they decided to use abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time that they believed had caused the war. Abstraction was viewed as the result of a lack of planning and logical thought processes. [11] "[A]bstract art signified absolute honesty for us." - Richard Huelsenbeck At the first public soiree at the cabaret on July 14, 1916, Ball recited the first manifesto (see text). Tzara, in 1918, wrote a Dada manifesto considered one of the most important of the Dada writings. Other manifestos followed. Marcel Janco recalled,
We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the "tabula rasa". At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.
A single issue of Cabaret Voltaire was the first publication to come out of the movement. After the cabaret closed down, activities moved to a new gallery, and Ball left Europe. Tzara began a relentless campaign to spread Dada ideas. He bombarded French and Italian artists and writers with letters, and soon emerged as the Dada leader and master strategist. The Cabaret Voltaire has by now re-opened, and is still in the same place at the Spiegelgasse 1 in the Niederdorf. Zrich Dada, with Tzara at the helm, published the art and literature review Dada beginning in July 1917, with five editions from Zrich and the final two from Paris. When World War I ended in 1918, most of the Zrich Dadaists returned to their home countries, and some began Dada activities in other cities.
[edit] Berlin
Cover of Anna Blume, Dichtungen, 1919
The groups in Germany were not as strongly anti-art as other groups. Their activity and art was more political and social, with corrosive manifestos and propaganda, satire, public demonstrations and overt political activities. It has been suggested that this is at least partially due to Berlin's proximity to the front, and that for an opposite effect, New York's geographic distance from the war spawned its more theoretically-driven, less political nature. In February 1918, Huelsenbeck gave his first Dada speech in Berlin, and produced a Dada manifesto later in the year. Hannah Hch and George Grosz used Dada to express post-World War I communist sympathies. Grosz, together with John Heartfield, developed the technique of photomontage during this period. The artists published a series of short-lived political journals, and held the First International Dada Fair, 'the greatest project yet conceived by the Berlin Dadaists', in the summer of 1920.[12] As well as the main members of Berlin Dada, Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hch, Johannes Baader, Huelsenbeck and Heartfield, the exhibition also included work by Otto Dix, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rudolf Schlichter, Johannes Baargeld and others.[12] In all, over 200 works were exhibited, surrounded by incendiary slogans, some of which also ended up written on the walls of the Nazi's Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937. Despite high ticket prices, the exhibition made a loss, with only one recorded sale.[13] The Berlin group published periodicals such as Club Dada, Der Dada, Everyman His Own Football , and Dada Almanach.
[edit] Cologne
In Cologne, Ernst, Baargeld, and Arp launched a controversial Dada exhibition in 1920 which focused on nonsense and anti-bourgeois sentiments. Cologne's Early Spring Exhibition was set up in a pub, and required that participants walk past urinals while being read lewd poetry by a
woman in a communion dress. The police closed the exhibition on grounds of obscenity, but it was re-opened when the charges were dropped.[14]
[edit] New York
Rrose Slavy, the alter ego of famed Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.
Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp; photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.
Like Zrich, New York City was a refuge for writers and artists from World War I. Soon after arriving from France in 1915, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia met American artist Man Ray. By 1916 the three of them became the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States. American Beatrice Wood, who had been studying in France, soon joined them, along with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Arthur Cravan, fleeing conscription in France, was also present
for a time. Much of their activity centered in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, and the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg. The New Yorkers, though not particularly organized, called their activities Dada, but they did not issue manifestos. They issued challenges to art and culture through publications such as The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada in which they criticized the traditionalist basis for museum art. New York Dada lacked the disillusionment of European Dada and was instead driven by a sense of irony and humor. In his book Adventures in the arts: informal chapters on painters, vaudeville and poets Marsden Hartley included an essay on "The Importance of Being 'Dada'". During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (found objects) such as a bottle rack, and got involved with the Society of Independent Artists. In 1917 he submitted the now famous Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, to the Society of Independent Artists show only to have the piece rejected. First an object of scorn within the arts community, the Fountain has since become almost canonized by some. The committee presiding over Britain's prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, for example, called it "the most influential work of modern art."[15] In an attempt to "pay homage to the spirit of Dada" a performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli made a crack in The Fountain with a hammer in January 2006; he also urinated on it in 1993. Picabia's travels tied New York, Zrich and Paris groups together during the Dadaist period. For seven years he also published the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona, New York City, Zrich, and Paris from 1917 through 1924. By 1921, most of the original players moved to Paris where Dada experienced its last major incarnation (see Neo-Dada for later activity).
[edit] Paris
The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zrich with regular communications from Tristan Tzara (whose pseudonym means "sad in country," a name chosen to protest the treatment of Jews in his native Romania), who exchanged letters, poems, and magazines with Guillaume Apollinaire, Andr Breton, Max Jacob, Clment Pansaers, and other French writers, critics and artists. Paris had arguably been the classical music capital of the world since the advent of musical Impressionism in the late 19th century. One of its practitioners, Erik Satie, collaborated with Picasso and Cocteau in a mad, scandalous ballet called Parade. First performed by the Ballet Russes in 1917, it succeeded in creating a scandal but in a different way than Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps had done almost 5 years earlier. This was a ballet that was clearly parodying itself, something traditional ballet patrons would obviously have serious issues with. Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of the originators converged there. Inspired by Tzara, Paris Dada soon issued manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances and produced a number of journals (the final two editions of Dada, Le Cannibale, and Littrature featured Dada in several editions.)[16]
The first introduction of Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the Salon des Indpendants in 1921. Jean Crotti exhibited works associated with Dada including a work entitled, Explicatif bearing the word Tabu. In the same year Tzara staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls of derision from the audience. When it was re-staged in 1923 in a more professional production, the play provoked a theatre riot (initiated by Andr Breton) that heralded the split within the movement that was to produce Surrealism. Tzara's last attempt at a Dadaist drama was his "ironic tragedy" Handkerchief of Clouds in 1924.
[edit] Netherlands
In the Netherlands the Dada movement centered mainly around Theo van Doesburg, most well known for establishing the De Stijl movement and magazine of the same name. Van Doesburg mainly focused on poetry, and included poems from many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such as Hugo Ball, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Van Doesburg became a friend of Schwitters, and together they organized the so-called Dutch Dada campaign in 1923, where Van Doesburg promoted a leaflet about Dada (entitled What is Dada?), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszr demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Nelly Van Doesburg (Theo's wife), played avant-garde compositions on piano. Van Doesburg wrote Dada poetry himself in De Stijl, although under a pseudonym, I.K. Bonset, which was only revealed after his death in 1931. 'Together' with I.K. Bonset, he also published a short-lived Dutch Dada magazine called Mcano.
[edit] Georgia
Although Dada itself was unknown in Georgia until at least 1920, from 1917-1921 a group of poets called themselves "41st Degree" (referring both to the latitude of Tbilisi, Georgia and to the temperature of a high fever) organized along Dadaist lines. The most important figure in this group was Iliazd, whose radical typographical designs visually echo the publications of the Dadaists. After his flight to Paris in 1921, he collaborated with Dadaists on publications and events.
[edit] Tokyo
There was also a Dada movement in Japan . One group is MAVO, founded by Tomoyoshi Murayama and Yanase Masamu. Others are Jun Tsuji, Eisuke Yoshiyuki, Shinkichi Takahashi and Katsue Kitasono.
[edit] Yugoslavia
In Yugoslavia there was heavy Dada activity between 1920 and 1922 run mainly by Dragan Aleksic and including Mihailo S. Petrov, Zenitists & brothers Ljubomir Micic and Branko Ve Poljanski. Aleksic used the term "Yugo-Dada" and is known to have been in contact with Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara.[17]
[edit] Poetry; music and sound

Dada was not confined to the visual and literary arts; its influence reached into sound and music. Kurt Schwitters developed what he called sound poems and composers such as Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Heusser and Albert Savinio wrote Dada music, while members of Les Six collaborated with members of the Dada movement and had their works performed at Dada gatherings. The above mentioned Erik Satie dabbled with Dadaist ideas throughout his career although he is primarily associated with musical Impressionism. In the very first Dada publication, Hugo Ball describes a "balalaika orchestra playing delightful folk-songs." African music and jazz was common at Dada gatherings, signaling a return to nature and naive primitivism.
[edit] Legacy
See also: Postmodernism#Notable philosophical and literary contributors
The Janco Dada Museum, named after Marcel Janco, in Ein Hod, Israel
While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.[18] By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of "Degenerate art" that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature. Dada is a named influence and reference of various anti-art and political and cultural movements including the Situationists and culture jamming groups like the Cacophony Society. At the same time that the Zrich Dadaists made noise and spectacle at the Cabaret Voltaire, Vladimir Lenin wrote his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment. Tom Stoppard used this coincidence as a premise for his play Travesties (1974), which includes Tzara, Lenin,
and James Joyce as characters. French writer Dominique Noguez imagined Lenin as a member of the Dada group in his tongue-in-cheek Lnine Dada (1989). The Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until it was occupied from January to March, 2002, by a group proclaiming themselves neo-Dadaists, led by Mark Divo.[19] The group included Jan Thieler, Ingo Giezendanner, Aiana Calugar, Lennie Lee and Dan Jones. After their eviction the space became a museum dedicated to the history of Dada. The work of Lennie Lee and Dan Jones remained on the walls of the museum. Several notable retrospectives have examined the influence of Dada upon art and society. In 1967, a large Dada retrospective was held in Paris, France. In 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a Dada exhibition in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
[edit] Art techniques developed

[edit] Collage
The dadaists imitated the techniques developed during the cubist movement through the pasting of cut pieces of paper items, but extended their art to encompass items such as transportation tickets, maps, plastic wrappers, etc. to portray aspects of life, rather than representing objects viewed as still life.
[edit] Photomontage
The Berlin Dadaists - the "monteurs" (mechanics) - would use scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media. A variation on the collage technique, photomontage utilized actual or reproductions of real photographs printed in the press.
[edit] Assemblage
The assemblages were three-dimensional variations of the collage - the assembly of everyday objects to produce meaningful or meaningless (relative to the war) pieces of work.
[edit] Readymades
Marcel Duchamp began to view the manufactured objects of his collection as objects of art, which he called "readymades". He would add signatures and titles to some, converting them into artwork that he called "readymade aided" or "rectified readymades". One such example of Duchamp's readymade works is the urinal that was turned onto its back, signed "R. Mutt", titled "Fountain", and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition that year.
Impressionism

Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the art movement. For other uses, see Impressionism (disambiguation).
Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, oil on canvas, Musee Marmottan Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Parisbased artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.
Contents
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1 Overview 2 Beginnings 3 Impressionist techniques 4 Content and composition 5 Main Impressionists 6 Gallery o 6.1 Timeline 7 Associates and influenced artists o 7.1 Beyond France 8 Sculpture, photography and film
9 Music and literature 10 Post-Impressionism 11 See also 12 Notes 13 References 14 External links
[edit] Overview
Alfred Sisley, Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving colours, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugne Delacroix. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the modern world. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes had usually been painted indoors.[1] The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details. They used short, "broken" brush strokes of pure and unmixed colour, not smoothly blended, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense colour vibration. Although the rise of Impressionism in France happened at a time when a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, were also exploring plein-air painting, the Impressionists developed new techniques that were specific to the movement. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the approval of the art critics and establishment. By re-creating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became a precursor seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, including Neo-Impressionism, PostImpressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.
[edit] Beginnings
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876 In an atmosphere of change as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war, the Acadmie des Beaux-Arts dominated the French art scene in the middle of the 19th century. The Acadmie was the upholder of traditional standards for French painting, both in content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued (landscape and still life were not), and the Acadmie preferred carefully finished images which mirrored reality when examined closely. Colour was somber and conservative, and the traces of brush strokes were suppressed, concealing the artist's personality, emotions, and working techniques.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Girl with a Hoop, 1885 The Acadmie held an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries reflected the values of the Acadmie, represented by the highly polished works of such artists as Jean-Lon Grme and Alexandre Cabanel. Some younger artists painted in a lighter and brighter manner than painters of the preceding generation, extending further the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school. They were more interested in painting landscape and contemporary life than in recreating scenes from history. Each year, they submitted their art to the Salon, only to see the juries reject their best efforts in favour of trivial works by artists working in the approved style. A core group of young realists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frdric Bazille, who had studied under Charles
Gleyre, became friends and often painted together. They soon were joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Czanne, and Armand Guillaumin.[2]
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago
Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol, (Camille and Jean Monet), 1875, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In 1863, the jury rejected The Luncheon on the Grass (Le djeuner sur l'herbe) by douard Manet primarily because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While nudes were routinely accepted by the Salon when featured in historical and allegorical paintings, the jury condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting.[3] The jury's sharply worded rejection of Manet's painting, as well as the unusually large number of rejected works that year, set off a firestorm among French artists. Manet was admired by Monet and his friends, and led the discussions at Caf Guerbois where the group of artists frequently met. After seeing the rejected works in 1863, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, and the Salon des Refuss (Salon of the Refused) was organized. While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refuss drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visitors than the regular Salon.[4] Artists' petitions requesting a new Salon des Refuss in 1867, and again in 1872, were denied. In the latter part of 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley organized the Socit Anonyme Cooprative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs ("Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers") for the purpose of exhibiting their artworks independently. Members of the association, which soon included Czanne, Berthe Morisot, and
Edgar Degas, were expected to forswear participation in the Salon. The organizers invited a number of other progressive artists to join them in their inaugural exhibition, including the slightly older Eugne Boudin, whose example had first persuaded Monet to take up plein air painting years before.[5] Another painter who greatly influenced Monet and his friends, Johan Jongkind, declined to participate, as did Manet. In total, thirty artists participated in their first exhibition, held in April 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar.
Claude Monet, The Cliff at tretat after the Storm, 1885, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts The critical response was mixed, with Monet and Czanne bearing the harshest attacks. Critic and humorist Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review in the Le Charivari newspaper in which, making wordplay with the title of Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), he gave the artists the name by which they would become known. Derisively titling his article The Exhibition of the Impressionists, Leroy declared that Monet's painting was at most, a sketch, and could hardly be termed a finished work. He wrote, in the form of a dialog between viewers, Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.[6]
Claude Monet, Haystacks, (sunset), 1890-1891, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The term "Impressionists" quickly gained favour with the public. It was also accepted by the artists themselves, even though they were a diverse group in style and temperament, unified primarily by their spirit of independence and rebellion. They exhibited togetheralbeit with shifting membershipeight times between 1874 and 1886.
Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Pissarro may be considered the "purest" Impressionists, in their consistent pursuit of an art of spontaneity, sunlight, and colour. Degas rejected much of this, as he believed in the primacy of drawing over colour and belittled the practice of painting outdoors.[7] Renoir turned against Impressionism for a time in the 1880s, and never entirely regained his commitment to its ideas. douard Manet, despite his role as a leader to the group, never abandoned his liberal use of black as a colour, and never participated in the Impressionist exhibitions. He continued to submit his works to the Salon, where his Spanish Singer had won a 2nd class medal in 1861, and he urged the others to do likewise, arguing that "the Salon is the real field of battle" where a reputation could be made.[8]
Camille Pissarro, Boulevard Montmartre, 1897, the Hermitage, St. Petersburg Among the artists of the core group (minus Bazille, who had died in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870), defections occurred as Czanne, followed later by Renoir, Sisley, and Monet, abstained from the group exhibitions in order to submit their works to the Salon. Disagreements arose from issues such as Guillaumin's membership in the group, championed by Pissarro and Czanne against opposition from Monet and Degas, who thought him unworthy.[9] Degas invited Mary Cassatt to display her work in the 1879 exhibition, but he also caused dissention by insisting on the inclusion of Jean-Franois Raffalli, Ludovic Lepic, and other realists who did not represent Impressionist practices, leading Monet in 1880 to accuse the Impressionists of "opening doors to first-come daubers".[10] The group divided over the invitation of Signac and Seurat to exhibit with them in 1886. Pissarro was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions. The individual artists saw few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance. Their dealer, Durand-Ruel, played a major role in this as he kept their work before the public and arranged shows for them in London and New York. Although Sisley would die in poverty in 1899, Renoir had a great Salon success in 1879. Financial security came to Monet in the early 1880s and to Pissarro by the early 1890s. By this time the methods of Impressionist painting, in a diluted form, had become commonplace in Salon art.[11]
[edit] Impressionist techniques
Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872, Muse d'Orsay

Short, thick strokes of paint are used to quickly capture the essence of the subject, rather than its details. The paint is often applied impasto. Colours are applied side-by-side with as little mixing as possible, creating a vibrant surface. The optical mixing of colours occurs in the eye of the viewer. Grays and dark tones are produced by mixing complementary colours. In pure Impressionism the use of black paint is avoided. Wet paint is placed into wet paint without waiting for successive applications to dry, producing softer edges and an intermingling of colour. Painting in the evening to get effets de soir - the shadowy effects of the light in the evening or twilight. Impressionist paintings do not exploit the transparency of thin paint films (glazes) which earlier artists built up carefully to produce effects. The surface of an Impressionist painting is typically opaque. The play of natural light is emphasized. Close attention is paid to the reflection of colours from object to object. In paintings made en plein air (outdoors), shadows are boldly painted with the blue of the sky as it is reflected onto surfaces, giving a sense of freshness and openness that was not captured in painting previously. (Blue shadows on snow inspired the technique.)
Mary Cassatt, Lydia Leaning on Her Arms (in a theatre box), 1879 Painters throughout history had occasionally used these methods, but Impressionists were the first to use all of them together, and with such boldness. Earlier artists whose works display these techniques include Frans Hals, Diego Velzquez, Peter Paul Rubens, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. French painters who prepared the way for Impressionism include the Romantic colourist Eugne Delacroix, the leader of the realists Gustave Courbet, and painters of the Barbizon school such as Thodore Rousseau. The Impressionists learned much from the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Eugne Boudin, who painted from nature in a style that was close to Impressionism, and who befriended and advised the younger artists. Impressionists took advantage of the mid-century introduction of premixed paints in lead tubes (resembling modern toothpaste tubes) which allowed artists to work more spontaneously, both outdoors and indoors. Previously, painters made their own paints individually, by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil, which were then stored in animal bladders.[12]
[edit] Content and composition
Camille Pissarro, Hay Harvest at ragny, 1901, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario Prior to the Impressionists, other painters, notably such 17th-century Dutch painters as Jan Steen, had focused on common subjects, but their approaches to composition were traditional. They arranged their compositions in such a way that the main subject commanded the viewer's attention. The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so that the effect of an Impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance.[13] Photography was gaining popularity, and as cameras became more portable, photographs became more candid. Photography inspired Impressionists to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-day lives of people.
Berthe Morisot, Reading, 1873, Cleveland Museum of Art The rise of the impressionist movement can be seen in part as a reaction by artists to the newly established medium of photography. The taking of fixed or still images challenged painters by providing a new medium with which to capture reality. Initially photography's presence seemed to undermine the artist's depiction of nature and their ability to mirror reality. Both portrait and landscape paintings were deemed somewhat deficient and lacking in truth as photography "produced lifelike images much more efficiently and reliably". [14]
Alfred Sisley, View of the Saint-Martin Canal, Paris, 1870, Muse d'Orsay In spite of this, photography actually inspired artists to pursue other means of artistic expression, and rather than competing with photography to emulate reality, artists focused "on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated".[14] The Impressionists sought to express their perceptions of nature, rather than create exacting reflections or mirror images of the world. This allowed artists to subjectively depict what they saw with their "tacit imperatives of taste and conscience". [15] Photography encouraged painters to exploit aspects of the painting medium, like colour, which photography then lacked; "the Impressionists were the first to consciously offer a subjective alternative to the photograph".[14] Another major influence was Japanese art prints (Japonism), which had originally come into France as wrapping paper for imported goods. The art of these prints contributed significantly to the "snapshot" angles and unconventional compositions which would become characteristic of the movement. Edgar Degas was both an avid photographer and a collector of Japanese prints.[16] His The Dance Class (La classe de danse) of 1874 shows both influences in its asymmetrical composition. The dancers are seemingly caught off guard in various awkward poses, leaving an expanse of empty floor space in the lower right quadrant.
[edit] Main Impressionists
Camille Pissarro, Hoarfrost, 1873, Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Berthe Morisot, The Harbor at Lorient, 1869, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The central figures in the development of Impressionism in France, listed alphabetically, were:

Frdric Bazille, (1841-1870) Gustave Caillebotte (who, younger than the others, joined forces with them in the mid 1870s), (1848-1894) Mary Cassatt (American-born, she lived in Paris and participated in four Impressionist exhibitions), (1844-1926) Paul Czanne (although he later broke away from the Impressionists), (1839-1906) Edgar Degas (a realist who despised the term Impressionist, but is considered one, due to his loyalty to the group), (1834-1917) Armand Guillaumin, (1841-1927) douard Manet (who did not regard himself as an Impressionist, but is generally considered one), (1832-1883) Claude Monet (the most prolific of the Impressionists and the one who most clearly embodies their aesthetic), [17] (1840-1926) Berthe Morisot, (1841-1895) Camille Pissarro, (1830-1903) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, (1841-1919) Alfred Sisley, (1839-1899)
[edit] Gallery
Gallery
Edgar Degas, (1834-1917), Dancer with a Bouquet of Flowers (Star of the Ballet), 1878
Edgar Degas, Stage Rehearsal, 1878-1879, The Metropolitan Edgar Degas, Dancers at The Museum of Art New York City Bar, 1888, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Edgar Degas, Woman in the douard Manet, (1832-1883), Edgar Degas, L'Absinthe, 1876, Bath, 1886, Hill-Stead Museum, Plum, 1878, National Gallery of Muse d'Orsay, Paris Farmington, Connecticut Art, Washington, DC.
Frdric Bazille, (1841-1870), Armand Guillaumin, (1841Gustave Caillebotte, (1848Paysage au bord du Lez, 1870, 1927), Sunset at Ivry (Soleil 1894), Paris Street, Rainy Day, couchant Ivry) 1873, Musee 1877. Art Institute of Chicago Minneapolis Institute of Art d'Orsay
[edit] Timeline
The Impressionists
[edit] Associates and influenced artists

Among the close associates of the Impressionists were several painters who adopted their methods to some degree. These include Giuseppe De Nittis, an Italian artist living in Paris who participated in the first Impressionist exhibit at the invitation of Degas, although the other Impressionists disparaged his work.[18] Federico Zandomeneghi was another Italian friend of Degas who showed with the Impressionists. Eva Gonzals was a follower of Manet who did not exhibit with the group. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born painter who played a part in Impressionism although he did not join the group and preferred grayed colours. Walter Sickert, an English artist, was initially a follower of Whistler, and later an important disciple of Degas; he did not exhibit with the Impressionists. In 1904 the artist and writer Wynford Dewhurst wrote the first important study of the French painters to be published in English, Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development, which did much to popularize Impressionism in Great Britain. By the early 1880s, Impressionist methods were affecting, at least superficially, the art of the Salon. Fashionable painters such as Jean Beraud and Henri Gervex found critical and financial success by brightening their palettes while retaining the smooth finish expected of Salon art.[19] Works by these artists are sometimes casually referred to as Impressionism, despite their remoteness from Impressionist practice.
[edit] Beyond France
Mary Cassatt, The Child's Bath (The Bath), 1893, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago As the influence of Impressionism spread beyond France, artists, too numerous to list, became identified as practitioners of the new style. Some of the more important examples are:
The American Impressionists, including Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Lilla Cabot Perry, Theodore Robinson, Edmund Charles Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir. Walter Richard Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer were well known Impressionist painters from the United Kingdom. The Australian Impressionists, including Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts who were prominent members of the Heidelberg School and John Peter Russell a friend of Van Gogh, Rodin, Monet and Matisse as well as Rupert Bunny, Agnes Goodsir and Hugh Ramsay. Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, and Max Slevogt in Germany Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov in Russia Francisco Oller y Cestero, a native of Puerto Rico and a friend of Pissarro and Czanne William McTaggart in Scotland. Laura Muntz Lyall, a Canadian artist Wadysaw Podkowiski, a Polish Impressionist and symbolist Nazmi Ziya Gran, who brought Impressionism to Turkey Chafik Charobim in Egypt Eliseu Visconti in Brazil Martins Krumins in Latvia, Germany and the United States. Joaqun Sorolla in Spain Fernando Fader, Martn Malharro, Ramn Silva in Argentina
[edit] Sculpture, photography and film

The sculptor Auguste Rodin is sometimes called an Impressionist for the way he used roughly modeled surfaces to suggest transient light effects.
Pictorialist photographers whose work is characterized by soft focus and atmospheric effects have also been called Impressionists. Examples are Kirk Clendinning, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Robert Farber, Eduard Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Clarence H. White. French Impressionist Cinema is a term applied to a loosely defined group of films and filmmakers in France from 1919-1929, although these years are debatable. French Impressionist filmmakers include Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Marcel LHerbier, Louis Delluc, and Dmitry Kirsanoff.
[edit] Music and literature

Main article: Impressionist music Main article: Impressionism (literature)
Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1916, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo Musical Impressionism is the name given to a movement in European classical music that arose in the late 19th century and continued into the middle of the 20th century. Originating in France, musical Impressionism is characterized by suggestion and atmosphere, and eschews the emotional excesses of the Romantic era. Impressionist composers favoured short forms such as the nocturne, arabesque, and prelude, and often explored uncommon scales such as the whole tone scale. Perhaps the most notable innovations used by Impressionist composers were the first uses of major 7th chords and the extension of chord structures in 3rds to five and six part harmonies. The influence of visual Impressionism on its musical counterpart is debatable. Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are generally considered the greatest Impressionist composers, but Debussy disavowed the term, calling it the invention of critics. Erik Satie was also considered to be in this category although his approach was considered to be less serious, more of musical novelty in nature. Paul Dukas is another French composer sometimes considered to be an Impressionist but his style is perhaps more closely aligned to the late Romanticists. Musical Impressionism beyond France includes the work of such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ottorino Respighi. The term Impressionism has also been used to describe works of literature in which a few select details suffice to convey the sensory impressions of an incident or scene. Impressionist literature is closely related to Symbolism, with its major exemplars being Baudelaire, Mallarm, Rimbaud,
and Verlaine. Authors such as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad have written works which are Impressionistic in the way that they describe, rather than interpret, the impressions, sensations and emotions that constitute a character's mental life.
[edit] Post-Impressionism
Main article: Post-Impressionism
Camille Pissarro, Children on a Farm, 1887 Post-Impressionism developed from Impressionism. From the 1880s several artists began to develop different precepts for the use of colour, pattern, form, and line, derived from the Impressionist example: Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. These artists were slightly younger than the Impressionists, and their work is known as post-Impressionism. Some of the original Impressionist artists also ventured into this new territory; Camille Pissarro briefly painted in a pointillist manner, and even Monet abandoned strict plein air painting. Paul Czanne, who participated in the first and third Impressionist exhibitions, developed a highly individual vision emphasising pictorial structure, and he is more often called a post-Impressionist. Although these cases illustrate the difficulty of assigning labels, the work of the original Impressionist painters may, by definition, be categorised as Impressionism.
Post-Impressionism
The Centenary of Independence (Le centenaire de l'indpendance)
Artist Year Type
Henri Rousseau 1892 Oil on canvas
Dimensions 57 cm 110 cm (22.4 in 43.3 in) Location Presently in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles
Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations: they continued using vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brushstrokes, and real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour.
Contents
[hide]

1 Overview 2 Defining Post-Impressionism o 2.1 Reviews and adjustments o 2.2 Conclusion 3 Concise Gallery of major Post-Impressionist artists 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links
[edit] Overview
The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Czanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting, to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums".[1] He achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the bright fresh colours of Impressionism. The Impressionist Camille Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas between the mid 1880s and the early 1890s. Discontented with what he referred to as romantic Impressionism, he investigated Pointillism which he called scientific Impressionism before returning to a purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life.[2] Vincent van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind. Although they often exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists were not in agreement concerning a cohesive movement. Younger painters during the 1890s and early 20th century worked in geographically disparate regions and in various stylistic categories, such as Fauvism and Cubism.
[edit] Defining Post-Impressionism
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Portrait of mile Bernard, 1886, Tate Gallery London The term was coined in 1910 by Roger Fry in the title of an exhibition of modern French painters, organized by Fry in London. Most of the artists in the exhibition were younger than the Impressionists. Fry later explained: "For purposes of convenience, it was necessary to give these artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most non-committal, the name of PostImpressionism. This merely stated their position in time relatively to the Impressionist movement."[3] John Rewald, one of the first professional art historians to focus on the birth of early modern art, limited the scope to the years between 1886 and 1892 in his pioneering publication on Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin (1956): Rewald considered it to continue his History of Impressionism (1946), and pointed out that a "subsequent volume dedicated to the second half of the post-impressionist period"[4]Post-Impressionism: From Gauguin to Matissewas to follow, extending the period covered to other artistic movements derived from Impressionism and confined to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rewald focused on outstanding early Post-Impressionists active in France: on Van Gogh, Gauguin,
Seurat, Redon, and their relations as well as the artistic circles they frequented (or they were in opposition to):

Neo-Impressionism: ridiculed by contemporary art critics as well as artists as Pointillism; Seurat and Signac would have preferred other terms: Divisionism for example Cloisonnism: a short-lived term introduced in 1888 by the art critic Edouard Dujardin, was to promote the work of Louis Anquetin, and was later also applied to contemporary works of his friend mile Bernard Synthetism: another short-lived term coined in 1889 to distinguish recent works of Gauguin and Bernard from that of more traditional Impressionists exhibiting with them at the Caf Volpini. Pont-Aven School: implying little more than that the artists involved had been working for a while in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in Brittany. Symbolism: a term highly welcomed by vanguard critics in 1891, when Gauguin dropped Synthetism as soon as he was acclaimed to be the leader of Symbolism in painting.
Furthermore, in his introduction to Post-Impressionism, Rewald opted for a second volume featuring Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau "le Douanier", Les Nabis and Czanne as well as the Fauves, the young Picasso and Gauguin's last trip to the South-Sea; it was to expand the period covered at least into the first decade of the 20th centuryyet this second volume remained unfinished.
Camille Pissarro, Haying at Eragny, 1889, Private Collection
[edit] Reviews and adjustments

Rewald wrote that "the term 'Post-Impressionism' is not a very precise one, though a very convenient one." Convenient, when the term is by definition limited to French visual arts derived from Impressionism since 1886. Rewald's approach to historical data was narrative rather than analytic, and beyond this point he believed it would be sufficient to "let the sources speak for themselves."[4]
Rival terms like Modernism or Symbolism were never as easy to handle, for they covered literature, architecture and other arts as well, and they expanded to other countries.
Modernism, thus, is now considered to be the central movement within international western civilization with its original roots in France, going back beyond the French Revolution to the Age of Enlightenment. Symbolism, however, is considered to be a concept which emerged a century later in France, and implied an individual approach. Local national traditions as well as individual settings therefore could stand side by side, and from the very beginning a broad variety of artists practising some kind of symbolic imagery, ranged between extreme positions: The Nabis for example united to find synthesis of tradition and brand new form, while others kept to traditional, more or less academic forms, when they were looking for fresh contents: Symbolism is therefore often linked to fanatastic, esoteric, erotic and other non-realist subject matter.
To meet the recent discussion, the connotations of the term 'Post-Impressionism' were challenged again: Alan Bowness and his collaborators expanded the period covered to 1914, but limited their approach widely on the 1890s to France. Other European countries are pushed back to standard connotations, and Eastern Europe is completely excluded. So, while a split may be seen between classical 'Impressionism' and 'Post-Impressionism' in 1886, the end and the extend of 'Post-Impressionism' remains under discussion. For Bowness and his contributors as well as for Rewald, 'Cubism' was an absolutely fresh start, and so Cubism has been seen in France since the beginning, and later in Anglosaxonia. Meanwhile Eastern European artists, however, did not care so much for western traditions, and proceeded to manners of painting called abstract and suprematicterms expanding far into the 20th century.
[edit] Conclusion
According to the present state of discussion, Post-Impressionism is a term best used within Rewald's definition in a strictly historical manner, concentrating on French art between 1886 and 1914, and re-considering the altered positions of impressionist painters like Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, and othersas well as all new brands at the turn of the century: from Cloisonnism to Cubism. The declarations of war, in July/August 1914, indicate probably far more than the beginning of a World Warthey signal a major break in European cultural history, too.
[edit] Concise Gallery of major Post-Impressionist artists
Paul Czanne (1839 1906)
Odilon Redon (1840 Henri Rousseau (18441916) 1910)
Paul Gauguin (18481903)
Vincent van Gogh (18531890)
Charles Angrand (18541926)
Henri Edmond Cross (18561910)
Georges Seurat (1859 1891)
Paul Signac (1863 Theo van Rysselberghe 1935) (18621926)
Henri de ToulouseLautrec (18641901)
Paul Srusier (1864 1927)
Paul Ranson (1864 1909)
mile Bernard (1868- Flix Vallotton (1865 1925) 1941)
Edouard Vuillard (18681940)
Pierre Bonnard (1867 1947)
Expressionism
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The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893) which inspired 20th century Expressionists
Expressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism.[1] It sought to express the meaning of "being alive"[2] and emotional experience rather than physical reality.[2][3] It is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; it is a subjective art form. Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms, including: painting, literature, theatre, film, architecture and music. The term often implies emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grnewald and El Greco can be called expressionist, though in practice, the term is applied mainly to 20th century works.
Contents
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1 Origin of the term 2 Visual artists 3 Expressionist groups in painting 4 In other arts
4.1 Sculpture 4.2 Film 4.3 Literature 4.4 Theatre 4.5 Music 4.6 Architecture 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links
o o o o o o
[edit] Origin of the term
Portrait of Eduard Kosmack by Egon Schiele
"View of Toledo" by El Greco, 1595/1610 has been pointed out to bear a particularly striking resemblance to 20th century expressionism. Historically speaking it is however part of the Mannerist movement.
Although it is used as a term of reference, there has never been a distinct movement that called itself "expressionism", apart from the use of the term by Herwarth Walden in his polemic magazine Der Sturm in 1912. The term is usually linked to paintings and graphic work in Germany at the turn of the century which challenged the academic traditions, particularly through the Die Brcke and Der Blaue Reiter groups. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche played a key role in originating modern expressionism by clarifying and serving as a conduit for previously neglected currents in ancient art. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche presented his theory of the ancient dualism between two types of aesthetic experience, namely the Apollonian and the Dionysian; a dualism between the plastic "art of sculpture", of lyrical dream-inspiration, identity (the principium individuationis), order, regularity, and calm repose, and, on the other hand, the non-plastic "art of music", of intoxication, forgetfulness, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective. The analogy with the world of the Greek gods typifies the relationship between these extremes: two godsons, incompatible and yet inseparable. According to Nietzsche, both elements are present in any work of art. The basic characteristics of expressionism are Dionysian: bold colours, distorted forms-in-dissolution, two-dimensional, without perspective.[4] More generally the term refers to art that expresses intense emotion. It is arguable that all artists are expressive but there is a long line of art production in which heavy emphasis is placed on communication through emotion. Such art often occurs during time of social upheaval, and through the tradition of graphic art there is a powerful and moving record of chaos in Europe from the 15th century on the Protestant Reformation, Peasants' War, Eight Years' War, Spanish Occupation of the Netherlands, the rape, pillage and disaster associated with countless periods of chaos and oppression are presented in the documents of the printmaker. Often the work is unimpressive aesthetically, but almost without exception has the capacity to move the viewer to strong emotions with the drama and often horror of the scenes depicted. The term was also coined by Czech art historian Antonn Matjek in 1910 as the opposite of impressionism: "An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself... (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures... Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence [...and] are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols." (Gordon, 1987)
[edit] Visual artists
"On White II" by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923.
Sokea soittoniekka (Blind Musician) by Alvar Cawn, 1922.
"Elbe Bridge I" by Rolf Nesch
Die groen blauen Pferde by Franz Marc (1911)
Some of the movement's leading visual artists in the early 20th century were:

Australia: Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman, John Perceval, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester Austria: Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka Belgium: Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, James Ensor, Floris Jespers and Albert Droesbeke. Brazil: Anita Malfatti. Finland: Tyko Sallinen, Alvar Cawn, Juho Mkel and Win Aaltonen. France: Georges Rouault, Gen Paul and Chaim Soutine Germany: Heinrich Campendonk, Emil Nolde, Rolf Nesch, Franz Marc, Ernst Barlach, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Erich Heckel, Otto Dix, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Max Beckmann, Conrad Felixmller, Carl Hofer, Paul Klee, August Macke, Elfriede Lohse-Wchtler, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Mnter, Max Pechstein and Kthe Kollwitz. Hungary: Tivadar Kosztka Csontvry Iceland: Einar Hkonarson Indonesia: Affandi Lithuania: Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. Mexico: Rufino Tamayo Netherlands: Charles Eyck, Willem Hofhuizen, Jaap Min, Jan Sluyters, Vincent van Gogh, Jan Wiegers and Hendrik Werkman Norway: Edvard Munch, Kai Fjell Poland: Henryk Gotlib Portugal: Mrio Eloy Russia: Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Alexej von Jawlensky and Natalia Goncharova. Switzerland: Carl Eugen Keel, Cuno Amiet USA: Ivan Albright, Milton Avery, Thomas Hart Benton, George Biddle, Hyman Bloom, Peter Blume, Peyton Boswell, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney, Edwin Dickinson, Arthur G. Dove, Norris Embry, Philip Evergood, Hugo Gellert, John D. Graham, William Gropper, George Grosz, Louis O. Guglielmi, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, Charles Hawthorne, Albert Kotin, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rico Lebrun, Jack Levine, Alfred Henry Maurer, Alice Neel, David Park, Gregorio Prestopino, Clayton S. Price, Abraham Rattner, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ben Shahn, Harry Shoulberg, Raphael Soyer, Joseph Stella, Harry Sternberg, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dorothea Tanning, Max Weber, Hale Woodruff, Karl Zerbe
[edit] Expressionist groups in painting

The movement primarily originated in Germany and Austria. There were a number of Expressionist groups in painting, including the Blaue Reiter and Die Brcke. The Der Blaue Reiter group was based in Munich and Die Brcke was based originally in Dresden (although some later moved to Berlin). Die Brcke was active for a longer period than Der Blaue Reiter which was only truly together for a year (1912). The Expressionists had many influences, among them Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and African art. They also came to know the work being done by the Fauves in Paris.
Influenced by the Fauves, Expressionism worked with arbitrary colors as well as jarring compositions. In reaction and opposition to French Impressionism which focused on rendering the sheer visual appearance of objects, Expressionist artists sought to capture emotions and subjective interpretations: It was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter; the Expressonists focused on capturing vivid emotional reactions through powerful colors and dynamic compositions instead. The leader of Der Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky, would take this a step further. He believed that with simple colors and shapes the spectator could perceive the moods and feelings in the paintings, therefore he made the move to abstraction.
Expressionist imagery exploded into modern art from the subconscious. Its divers formal means and emotional effects range from anguish to exuberance. As the powerful, personal creations of modern individuals, these images have little in common except their inventive power and their reliance upon a distinctly private vision.
In late 1939, at the beginning of World War II, New York welcomed a great number of leading European artists.
The heritage of their interest in the mythic realm of the unconscious would be continuedand extendedby another group of younger, New World artistsNew York School. [5]
Following World War II Expressionism began to influence young American artists. Norris Embry (1921-1981) studied with Oskar Kokoschka in 1947 and over the next 43 years produced a large body of work grounded in the Expressionist tradition. Norris Embry has been called "the first American German Expressionist". Other American artists of the late 20th and early 21st century have developed distinct movements that are generally considered part of Expressionism. Another prominent artist who came from the German Expressionist "school" was Bremen born Wolfgang Degenhardt. After working as a commercial artist in Bremen he migrated to Australia in 1954 and became quite prominent and sought after in the Hunter Valley region. His paintings captured the spirit of Australian and world issues but presented them in a way which was true to his German Expressionist roots. American Expressionism[6] and American Figurative Expressionism particularly the Boston figurative expressionism[7] were an integral part of American modernism around the Second World War.
Rehe im Walde by Franz Marc
Major figurative Boston expressionists included: Karl Zerbe, Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, David Aronson, Philip Guston. The Boston figurative expressionists post World War II were increasingly marginalized by the development of abstract expressionism centered in New York City. Later in the 20th century, after World War II, figurative expressionism influenced worldwide a large number of artists and movements. Thomas B. Hess,[8] wrote:
the New figurative painting which some have been expecting as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism was implicit in it at the start, and is one of its most lineal continuities.
New York Figurative Expressionism[9],[10] of the fifties represented New York figurative artists such as: Robert Beauchamp, Elaine de Kooning, Robert Goodnough, Grace Hartigan, Lester Johnson, Alex Katz, George McNeil, Jan Muller, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers and Bob Thompson. Lyrical Abstraction, Tachisme[11] of the 1940s and 1950s in Europe represented by artists such as Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, Nicolas de Stal and others. Bay Area Figurative Movement[12],[13] represented by the early figurative expressionists from the San Francisco area Elmer Bischoff Richard Diebenkorn, and David Park. The movement from 1950-1965 was joined by Theophilius Brown, Paul Wonner, James Weeks, Hassel Smith, Nathan Oliveira, Bruce McGaw, Joan Brown, Manual Neri, Joan Savo and Roland Peterson. Abstract Expressionism, of the 1950s represented American artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Hans Burkhardt, Mary Callery, Nicolas Carone, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others [14] [15] , that took part in figurative expressionism. In the United States and Canada Lyrical Abstraction beginning in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Characterized by the work of Dan Christensen, Peter Young, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Charles Arnoldi, Pat Lipsky and many others.[16][17][18] Neo-expressionism was an international revival movement beginning in the late 1970s and centered around artists across the world: o Germany: Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz and others; o USA: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel; o Cuba: Pablo Carreno;
o o o
France: Rmi Blanchard, Herv Di Rosa and others; Italy: Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi; England: David Hockney, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff
Franz Marc, Fighting Forms, 1914.
Egon Schiele, Pair of Women (Women embracing each other), 1915.
Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, 1916.
[edit] In other arts

Expressionism is also used to describe styles in other art forms.
[edit] Sculpture
Some sculptors also adopted this style, as for example Ernst Barlach. Other expressionist artists mainly known as painters, such as Erich Heckel, also worked in sculptural media.
[edit] Film
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" a silent film by Robert Wiene, 1920
There was also an expressionist movement in film, often referred to as German Expressionism. The most important examples are Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922). The term "expressionism" is also sometimes used to refer to stylistic devices that either resemble or draw inspiration from the German Expressionism movement, such as in Film Noir cinematography or in several of the films of Ingmar Bergman. More generally, expressionism can be used to describe to film styles of
heightened artifice, such as the technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk or the striking sound and visual design in David Lynch's films.
[edit] Literature
In literature the novels of Franz Kafka are often described as expressionist. Expressionist poetry also flourished mainly in the German-speaking countries. The most influential expressionist poets were Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, Ernst Stadler, Gottfried Benn and August Stramm.
[edit] Theatre
In the theatre, there was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th century German theatre of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge, Walter Hasenclever, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Arnolt Bronnen. They looked back to Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind as precursors of their dramaturgical experiments. Oskar Kokoschka's 1909 playlet, Murderer, The Hope of Women is often called the first expressionist drama. In it, an unnamed man and woman struggle for dominance. The Man brands the woman; she stabs and imprisons him. He frees himself and she falls dead at his touch. As the play ends, he slaughters all around him (in the words of the text) "like mosquitoes." The extreme simplification of characters to mythic types, choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity all would become characteristic of later expressionist plays. It is noteworthy that the young Paul Hindemith created an operatic version of this play, to shocking effect in the music world. Expressionist plays often dramatize the spiritual awakening and sufferings of their protagonists, and are referred to as Stationendramen (station plays), modeled on the episodic presentation of the suffering and death of Jesus in the Stations of the Cross. August Strindberg had pioneered this form with his autobiographical trilogy To Damascus. The plays often dramatize the struggle against bourgeois values and established authority, often personified in the figure of the Father. In Sorge's The Beggar, (Der Bettler), the young hero's mentally ill father raves about the prospect of mining the riches of Mars; he is finally poisoned by his son. In Bronnen's Parricide (Vatermord), the son stabs his tyranncial father to death, only to have to fend off the frenzied sexual overtures of his mother. In expressionist drama, the speech is heightened, whether expansive and rhapsodic, or clipped and telegraphic. Director Leopold Jessner became famous for his expressionistic productions, often unfolding on the stark, steeply raked flights of stairs that quickly became his trademark. In the 1920s, expressionism enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the American theatre, including plays by Eugene O'Neill (The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones and The Great God Brown), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal) and Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine).
Einsteinturm in Potsdam
[edit] Music
Main article: Expressionism (music)
In music, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, the members of the Second Viennese School, wrote pieces described as expressionist (Schoenberg also made expressionist paintings). Other composers who followed them, such as Ernst Krenek, are often considered as a part of the expressionist movement in music. What distinguished these composers from their contemporaries such as Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin and Igor Stravinsky is that expressionist composers self-consciously used atonality to free their artform from the traditional tonality. They also sought to express the subconscious, the 'inner necessity' and suffering through their highly dissonant musical language. Erwartung and Die Glckliche Hand, by Schoenberg, and Wozzeck, an opera by Alban Berg (based on the play Woyzeck by Georg Bchner), are examples of expressionist works.
[edit] Architecture
Main article: Expressionist architecture
In architecture, two specific buildings are identified as expressionist: Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914), and Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany completed in 1921. Hans Poelzig's Berlin theatre (Grosse Schauspielhaus) interior for Max Reinhardt is also sometimes cited. The influential architectural critic and historian, Sigfried Giedion in his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941) dismissed Expressionist architecture as a side show in the development of functionalism. It was only in the 1970s that expressionism in architecture came to be re-evaluated in a more positive light.
Fauvism
Henri Matisse, Portrait of Madame Matisse (The green line), 1905, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark Les Fauves (French for The Wild Beasts) were a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only three years, 1905 1907, and had three exhibitions.[1] The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and Andr Derain.[1]
Contents
[hide]

1 Artists and style 2 Origins 3 Salon D'Automne 1905 4 Gallery 5 See also 6 Further reading 7 Notes and references 8 External links
[edit] Artists and style
Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Alfred Maurer, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the Swiss painter Alice Bailly, and Georges Braque (subsequently Picasso's partner in Cubism).[1] The paintings of the Fauves were characterised by seemingly wild brush work and strident colours, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction.[2] Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat[2] and other Neo-Impressionist painters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cezanne[3] and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated colournotably in paintings from Tahitistrongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in 1905.[4] In 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Srusier:[5]
How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.
Fauvism can also be seen as a mode of Expressionism.[2]
[edit] Origins
Gustave Moreau was the movement's inspirational teacher;[6] a controversial professor at the cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a Symbolist painter, he taught Matisse, Marquet, Manguin, Rouault and Camoin during the 1890s, and was viewed by critics as the group's philosophical leader until Matisse was recognized as such in 1904.[7] Moreau's broad-mindedness, originality and affirmation of the expressive potency of pure colour was inspirational for his students.[8] Matisse said of him, "He did not set us on the right roads, but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency."[8] This source of empathy was taken away with Moreau's death in 1898, but the artists discovered other catalysts for their development.[8] In 1896, Matisse, then an unknown art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle le off Brittany.[9] Russell was an Impressionist painter; Matisse had never previously seen an Impressionist work directly, and was so shocked at the style that he left after ten days, saying, "I couldn't stand it any more."[9] The next year he returned as Russell's student and abandoned his earth-coloured palette for bright Impressionist colours, later stating, "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me."[9] Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing.[9]
Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupt, 1904, Muse National d'Art Moderne. In 1901, Maurice de Vlaminck encountered the work of Van Gogh for the first time at an exhibition, declaring soon after that he loved Van Gogh more than his own father; he started to work by squeezing paint directly onto the canvas from the tube.[8] In parallel with the artists' discovery of contemporary avant-garde art came an appreciation of pre-Renaissance French art, which was shown in a 1904 exhibition, French Primitives.[8] Another aesthetic feeding into their work was African sculpture, which Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse were early collectors of.[8] Many of the Fauve characteristics first cohered in Matisse's painting, Luxe, Calme et Volupt ("Luxury, Calm and Pleasure"), which he painted in the summer of 1904, whilst in Saint-Tropez with Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.[8]
[edit] Salon D'Automne 1905
Henri Matisse. Woman with a Hat, 1905. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. The group gained their name, after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their show of work with the phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a
Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.[10] Henri Rousseau was not a Fauve, but his large jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope was exhibited near Matisse's work and may have had an influence on the pejorative used.[11]
Henri Rousseau, The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, 1905 Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage.[10][12] The pictures gained considerable condemnation, such as "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" from the critic Camille Mauclair (18721945), but also some favourable attention.[10] The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, which was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein: this had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralisation from the bad reception of his work.[10]
[edit] Gallery
Henri Matisse, Les toits Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure, de Collioure, 1905, oil on canvas, The 1905, Museum of Modern Art, New York Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia City
Henri Matisse, Le Henri Matisse, Open bonheur de vivre, Window, Collioure, 1905-6, Barnes 1905, National Gallery Foundation, Merion, of Art, Washington, PA DC.
Maurice de Vlaminck, Andr Derain, Charing The River Seine at Cross Bridge, London, Henri Matisse, The Kees van Dongen, Chatou, 1906, Young Sailor II, 1906, 1906, National Gallery Metropolitan Museum Woman with Large Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington, DC. of Art Hat, 1906
of Art, New York City
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), 1907, Baltimore Museum of Art
Surrealism
The Elephant Celebes (1921) by Max Ernst. Surrealism
Surrealist music Surrealist films Surrealist Manifesto
Surrealist techniques Surrealist humor Surrealism articles
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader Andr Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s on, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.
Contents
[hide]
1 Founding of the movement o 1.1 Surrealist Manifesto o 1.2 La Rvolution surraliste o 1.3 Bureau of Surrealist Research 2 Expansion o 2.1 Writing continues o 2.2 Surrealist films o 2.3 Music by Surrealists 3 Surrealism and international politics o 3.1 Internal politics 4 Golden age o 4.1 World War II and the Post War period 5 Post-Breton Surrealism 6 Impact of Surrealism o 6.1 Surrealist groups o 6.2 Surrealism and theatre o 6.3 Surrealism and film o 6.4 Surrealism and comedy 7 Criticism of Surrealism o 7.1 Feminist o 7.2 Freudian o 7.3 Situationist 8 See also
9 References 10 Bibliography 11 External links o 11.1 Andr Breton writings o 11.2 Overview websites o 11.3 Surrealism and politics o 11.4 Surrealist poetry
[edit] Founding of the movement

World War I scattered the writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and while away from Paris many involved themselves in the Dada movement, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the terrifying conflict upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-rational anti-art gatherings, performances, writing and art works. After the war when they returned to Paris the Dada activities continued. During the war Surrealism's soon-to-be leader Andr Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used the psychoanalytic methods of Sigmund Freud with soldiers who were shell-shocked. He also met the young writer Jacques Vach and felt that he was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysician Alfred Jarry, and he came to admire the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I am successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautramont, but it is Jacques Vach to whom I owe the most."[1] Back in Paris, Breton joined in the Dada activities and also started the literary journal Littrature along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writingspontaneously writing without censoring their thoughtsand published the "automatic" writings, as well as accounts of dreams, in Littrature. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magntiques) in 1919. They continued the automatic writing, gathered more artists and writers into the group, and came to believe that automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. In addition to Breton, Aragon and Soupault the original Surrealists included Paul luard, Benjamin Pret, Ren Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise[2], Marcel Noll, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Simone Breton, Gala luard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dal, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, Andr Masson, Joan Mir, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prvert and Yves Tanguy.[3]
Cover of the first issue of La Rvolution surraliste, December 1924.
As they developed their philosophy they felt that while Dada rejected categories and labels, Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Freud's work with free association, dream analysis and the hidden unconscious was of the utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. However, they embraced idiosyncrasy, while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness or darkness of the mind. (Later the idiosyncratic Salvador Dal explained it as: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."[2]) The group aimed to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed, the true aim of Surrealism is "long live the social revolution, and it alone!" To this goal, at various times surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism. In 1924 they declared their intents and philosophy with the issuance of the first Surrealist Manifesto. That same year they established the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began publishing the journal La Rvolution surraliste.
[edit] Surrealist Manifesto

Main article: Surrealist Manifesto
Breton wrote the manifesto of 1924 (another was issued in 1929) that defines the purposes of the group and includes citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works and discussion of Surrealist automatism. He defined Surrealism as: Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
[edit] La Rvolution surraliste

Main article: La Rvolution surraliste
Shortly after releasing the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, the Surrealists published the inaugural issue of La Rvolution surraliste and publication continued into 1929. Pierre Naville and Benjamin Pret were the initial directors of the publication and modeled the format of the journal on the conservative scientific review La Nature. The format was deceiving, and to the Surrealists' delight La Rvolution surraliste was consistently scandalous and revolutionary. The journal focused on writing with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Andr Masson and Man Ray.
[edit] Bureau of Surrealist Research

Main article: Bureau of Surrealist Research
The Bureau of Surrealist Research (Centrale Surraliste) was the Paris office where the Surrealist writers and artists gathered to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews with the goal of investigating speech under trance.
[edit] Expansion
Andr Masson. Automatic Drawing. 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games and discussed the theories of Surrealism. The Surrealists developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, and decalcomania. Soon more visual artists joined Surrealism including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dal, Enrico Donati, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Mret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grgoire Michonze, and Luis Buuel. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.[4] More writers also joined, including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Ren Char, Georges Sadoul, Andr Thirion and Maurice Heine. In 1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels becoming official in 1926. The group included the musician, poet and artist E.L.T. Mesens, painter and writer Ren Magritte, Paul Noug, Marcel Lecomte, Camille Goemans, and Andr Souris. In 1927 they were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and frequented Breton's circle.[3] The artists, with their roots in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to older "bloodlines" such as Hieronymus Bosch, and the so-called primitive and naive arts. Andr Masson's automatic drawings of 1923, are often used as the point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they reflect the influence of the idea of the
unconscious mind. Another example is Alberto Giacometti's 1925 Torso, which marked his movement to simplified forms and inspiration from preclassical sculpture. However, a striking example of the line used to divide Dada and Surrealism among art experts is the pairing of 1925's Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen)[5] with The Kiss (Le Baiser)[6] from 1927 by Ernst. The first is generally held to have a distance, and erotic subtext, whereas the second presents an erotic act openly and directly. In the second the influence of Mir and the drawing style of Picasso is visible with the use of fluid curving and intersecting lines and colour, whereas the first takes a directness that would later be influential in movements such as Pop art.
Giorgio de Chirico The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge) (1913).
Giorgio de Chirico, and his previous development of Metaphysical art, was one of the important joining figures between the philosophical and visual aspects of Surrealism. Between 1911 and 1917, he adopted an unornamented depictional style whose surface would be adopted by others later. The Red Tower (La tour rouge) from 1913 shows the stark colour contrasts and illustrative style later adopted by Surrealist painters. His 1914 The Nostalgia of the Poet (La Nostalgie du poete)[7] has the figure turned away from the viewer, and the juxtaposition of a bust with glasses and a fish as a relief defies conventional explanation. He was also a writer, and his novel Hebdomeros presents a series of dreamscapes with an unusual use of punctuation, syntax and grammar designed to create a particular atmosphere and frame around its images. His images, including set designs for the Ballets Russes, would create a decorative form of visual Surrealism, and he would be an influence on the two artists who would be even more closely associated with Surrealism in the public mind: Salvador Dal and Magritte. He would, however, leave the Surrealist group in 1928. In 1924, Miro and Masson applied Surrealism theory to painting explicitly leading to the La Peinture Surrealiste exhibition of 1925. La Peinture Surrealiste exhibition was the first ever Surrealist exhibition at Gallerie Pierre in Paris, and displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Mir, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), and techniques from Dada, such as photomontage, were used. The following year, on March 26, 1926 Galerie Surraliste opened with an exhibition by Man Ray.
Breton published Surrealism and Painting in 1928 which summarized the movement to that point, though he continued to update the work until the 1960s.
[edit] Writing continues
Ren Magritte "This is not a pipe." The Treachery of Images 1928-9
The first Surrealist work, according to leader Breton, was Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magntiques) (MayJune 1919). Littrature contained automatist works and accounts of dreams. The magazine and the portfolio both showed their disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused rather on the undertones, the poetic undercurrents present. Not only did they give emphasis to the poetic undercurrents, but also to the connotations and the overtones which "exist in ambiguous relationships to the visual images." Because Surrealist writers seldom, if ever, appear to organize their thoughts and the images they present, some people find much of their work difficult to parse. This notion however is a superficial comprehension, prompted no doubt by Breton's initial emphasis on automatic writing as the main route toward a higher reality. But as in Breton's case itself much of what is presented as purely automatic is actually edited and very "thought out". Breton himself later admitted that automatic writing's centrality had been overstated, and other elements were introduced, especially as the growing involvement of visual artists in the movement forced the issue, since automatic painting required a rather more strenuous set of approaches. Thus such elements as collage were introduced, arising partly from an ideal of startling juxtapositions as revealed in Pierre Reverdy's poetry. And as in Magritte's case (where there is no obvious recourse to either automatic techniques or collage) the very notion of convulsive joining became a tool for revelation in and of itself. Surrealism was meant to be always in flux to be more modern than modern and so it was natural there should be a rapid shuffling of the philosophy as new challenges arose. Surrealists revived interest in Isidore Ducasse, known by his pseudonym "Le Comte de Lautramont" and for the line "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", and Arthur Rimbaud, two late 19th century writers believed to be the precursors of Surrealism.
Examples of Surrealist literature are Crevel's Mr. Knife Miss Fork (1931), Aragon's Irene's Cunt (1927), Breton's Sur la route de San Romano (1948), Pret's Death to the Pigs (1929), and Artaud's Le Pese-Nerfs (1926). La Rvolution surraliste continued publication into 1929 with most pages densely packed with columns of text, but also included reproductions of art, among them works by de Chirico, Ernst, Masson and Man Ray. Other works included books, poems, pamphlets, automatic texts and theoretical tracts.
[edit] Surrealist films

Main article: List of surrealist films
Early films by Surrealists include:

Entr'acte by Ren Clair (1924) La Coquille et le clergyman by Germaine Dulac, screenplay by Antonin Artaud (1928) Un chien andalou by Luis Buuel and Salvador Dal (1929) L'toile de mer by Man Ray (1928) L'ge d'Or by Luis Buuel and Salvador Dal (1930) Le sang d'un pote by Jean Cocteau (1930)
[edit] Music by Surrealists

Main article: Surrealist music
In the 1920s several composers were influenced by Surrealism, or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martin, Andr Souris, and Edgard Varse, who stated that his work Arcana was drawn from a dream sequence.[citation needed] Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte, and worked on Paul Nouge's publication Adieu Marie. Germaine Tailleferre of the French group Les Six wrote several works which could be considered to be inspired by Surrealism[citation needed], including the 1948 Ballet Paris-Magie (scenario by Lise Deharme), the Operas La Petite Sirne (book by Philippe Soupault) and Le Matre (book by Eugne Ionesco).[citation needed] Tailleferre also wrote popular songs to texts by Claude Marci, the wife of Henri Jeanson, whose portrait had been painted by Magritte in the 1930s. Even though Breton by 1946 responded rather negatively to the subject of music with his essay Silence is Golden, later Surrealists have been interested inand found parallels toSurrealism in the improvisation of jazz and the blues. Surrealists such as Paul Garon have written articles and full-length books on the subject. Jazz and blues musicians have occasionally reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by Honeyboy Edwards.
[edit] Surrealism and international politics

Surrealism as a political force developed unevenly around the world, in some places more emphasis was on artistic practices, in other places political and in other places still, Surrealist praxis looked to supersize both the arts and politics. During the 1930s the Surrealist idea spread from Europe to North America, South America (founding of the Mandrgora group in Chile in 1938), Central America, the Caribbean, and throughout Asia. As both an artistic idea and as an ideology of political change. Politically, Surrealism was ultra-leftist, communist, or anarchist. The split from Dada has been characterised as a split between anarchists and communists, with the Surrealists as communist. Breton and his comrades supported Leon Trotsky and his International Left Opposition for a while, though there was an openness to anarchism that manifested more fully after World War II. Some Surrealists, such as Benjamin Pret, Mary Low, and Juan Bre, aligned with forms of left communism. Dal supported capitalism and the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco but cannot be said to represent a trend in Surrealism in this respect; in fact he was considered, by Breton and his associates, to have betrayed and left Surrealism. Pret, Low, and Bre joined the POUM during the Spanish Civil War. Breton's followers, along with the Communist Party, were working for the "liberation of man." However, Breton's group refused to prioritize the proletarian struggle over radical creation such that their struggles with the Party made the late 1920s a turbulent time for both. Many individuals closely associated with Breton, notably Louis Aragon, left his group to work more closely with the Communists. Surrealists have often sought to link their efforts with political ideals and activities. In the Declaration of January 27, 1925,[8] for example, members of the Paris-based Bureau of Surrealist Research (including Andr Breton, Louis Aragon, and, Antonin Artaud, as well as some two dozen others) declared their affinity for revolutionary politics. While this was initially a somewhat vague formulation, by the 1930s many Surrealists had strongly identified themselves with communism. The foremost document of this tendency within Surrealism is the Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art,[9] published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, but actually co-authored by Breton and Leon Trotsky.[10] However, in 1933 the Surrealists assertion that a 'proletarian literature' within a capitalist society was impossible led to their break with the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Rvolutionnaires, and the expulsion of Breton, luard and Crevel from the Communist Party.[3] In 1925, the Paris Surrealist group and the extreme left of the French Communist Party came together to support Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco. In an open letter to writer and French ambassador to Japan, Paul Claudel, the Paris group announced:
"We Surrealists pronounced ourselves in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution,
of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the colour question."
The anticolonial revolutionary and proletarian politics of "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932) which was drafted mainly by Ren Crevel, signed by Andr Breton, Paul luard, Benjamin Pret, Yves Tanguy, and the Martiniquan Surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot perhaps makes it the original document of what is later called 'black Surrealism',[11] although it is the contact between Aim Csaire and Breton in the 1940s in Martinique that really lead to the communication of what is known as 'black Surrealism'. Anticolonial revolutionary writers in the Ngritude movement of Martinique, a French colony at the time, took up Surrealism as a revolutionary method - a critique of European culture and a radical subjective. This linked with other Surrealists and was very important for the subsequent development of Surrealism as a revolutionary praxis. The journal Tropiques, featuring the work of Cesaire along with Ren Mnil, Lucie Thse, Aristide Mauge and others, was first published in 1940.[12] It is interesting to note that when in 1938 Andr Breton traveled with his wife the painter Jacqueline Lamba to Mexico to meet Trotsky; staying as the guest of Diego Rivera's former wife Guadalupe Marin; he met Frida Kahlo and saw her paintings for the first time. Breton declared Kahlo to be an "innate" Surrealist painter.[13]
[edit] Internal politics

In 1929 the satellite group around the journal Le Grand Jeu, including Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Maurice Henry and the Czech painter Josef Sima, was ostracized. Also in February, Breton asked Surrealists to assess their "degree of moral competence", and theoretical refinements included in the second manifeste du surralisme excluded anyone reluctant to commit to collective action, a list which included Leiris, Georges Limbour, Max Morise, Baron, Queneau, Prvert, Desnos, Masson and Boiffard. Excluded members launched a counterattack, sharply criticizing Breton in the pamphlet Un Cadavre, which featured a picture of Breton wearing a crown of thorns. The pamphlet drew upon an earlier act of subversion by likening Breton to Anatole France, whose unquestioned value Breton had challenged in 1924. In hindsight, the disunion of 1929-30 and the effects of Un Cadavre had very little negative impact upon Surrealism as Breton saw it, since core figures such as Aragon, Crevel, Dal and Buuel remained true the idea of group action, at least for the time being. The success (or at least the controversy) of Dal and Buuel's film L'Age d'Or in December 1930 had a regenerative effect, drawing a number of new recruits, and encouraging countless new artistic works the following year and throughout the 1930s. Disgruntled surrealists moved to the periodical Documents, edited by Georges Bataille, whose anti-idealist materialism formed a hybrid Surrealism intending to expose the base instincts of humans.[3][14] To the dismay of many, Documents fizzled out in 1931, just as Surrealism seemed to be gathering more steam.
There were a number of reconciliations after this period of disunion, such as between Breton and Bataille, while Aragon left the group after committing himself to the communist party in 1932. More members were ousted over the years for a variety of infractions, both political and personal, while others left of to pursue creativity of their own style. By the end of World War II the surrealist group led by Andr Breton decided to explicitly embrace anarchism. In 1952 Breton wrote "It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself."[15] "Breton was consistent in his support for the Federation Anarchiste and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists around Fontenis transformed the FA into the Federation Communiste Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer his support to the FCL during the Algerian war when the FCL suffered severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the French anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as well with the new FA set up by the synthesist anarchists and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the 60s alongside the FA."[15]
[edit] Golden age
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dal.
Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Dal and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dal joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935. Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer. 1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)[1] is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another
Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire), with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dal, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting. The characteristics of this style - a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological - came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality". From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford and Roberto Matta joined the group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic techniques. Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dal continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.
L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surralisme (1937) by Max Ernst.
During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim, an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Tanguy and the British artist John Tunnard. Major exhibitions in the 1930s

1936 - London International Surrealist Exhibition is organised in London by the art historian Herbert Read, with an introduction by Andr Breton. 1936 - Museum of Modern Art in New York shows the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. 1938 - A new International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp to do so. At the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dal's Rainy Taxi (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of
water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists. He designed the main hall to seem like subterranean cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting,[2] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. The floor was carpeted with dead leaves, ferns and grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.[4]
[edit] World War II and the Post War period
Yves Tanguy Indefinite Divisibility 1942
World War II created havoc not only for the general population of Europe but especially for the European artists and writers that opposed Fascism, and Nazism. Many important artists fled to North America, and relative safety in the United States. The art community in New York City in particular was already grappling with Surrealist ideas and several artists like Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Roberto Matta, converged closely with the surrealist artists themselves, albeit with some suspicion and reservations. Ideas concerning the unconscious and dream imagery were quickly embraced. By the Second World War, the taste of the American avant-garde swung decisively towards Abstract Expressionism with the support of key taste makers, including Peggy Guggenheim, Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg. However, it should not be easily forgotten that Abstract Expressionism itself grew directly out of the meeting of American (particularly New York) artists with European Surrealists self-exiled during World War II. In particular, Arshile Gorky and Wolfgang Paalen influenced the development of this American art form, which, as Surrealism did, celebrated the instantaneous human act as the wellspring of creativity. The early work of many Abstract Expressionists reveals a tight bond between the more superficial aspects of both movements, and the emergence (at a later date) of
aspects of Dadaistic humor in such artists as Rauschenberg sheds an even starker light upon the connection. Up until the emergence of Pop Art, Surrealism can be seen to have been the single most important influence on the sudden growth in American arts, and even in Pop, some of the humor manifested in Surrealism can be found, often turned to a cultural criticism. The Second World War overshadowed, for a time, almost all intellectual and artistic production. In 1940 Yves Tanguy married American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. In 1941, Breton went to the United States, where he co-founded the short-lived magazine VVV with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and the American artist David Hare. However, it was the American poet, Charles Henri Ford, and his magazine View which offered Breton a channel for promoting Surrealism in the United States. The View special issue on Duchamp was crucial for the public understanding of Surrealism in America. It stressed his connections to Surrealist methods, offered interpretations of his work by Breton, as well as Breton's view that Duchamp represented the bridge between early modern movements, such as Futurism and Cubism, to Surrealism. Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1942 due to political/philosophical differences with Breton, founding his journal Dyn. Though the war proved disruptive for Surrealism, the works continued. Many Surrealist artists continued to explore their vocabularies, including Magritte. Many members of the Surrealist movement continued to correspond and meet. While Dal may have been excommunicated by Breton, he neither abandoned his themes from the 1930s, including references to the "persistence of time" in a later painting, nor did he become a depictive pompier. His classic period did not represent so sharp a break with the past as some descriptions of his work might portray, and some, such as Thirion, argued that there were works of his after this period that continued to have some relevance for the movement. During the 1940s Surrealism's influence was also felt in England and America. Mark Rothko took an interest in biomorphic figures, and in England Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Paul Nash used or experimented with Surrealist techniques. However, Conroy Maddox, one of the first British Surrealists whose work in this genre dated from 1935, remained within the movement, and organized an exhibition of current Surrealist work in 1978 in response to an earlier show which infuriated him because it did not properly represent Surrealism. Maddox's exhibition, titled Surrealism Unlimited, was held in Paris and attracted international attention. He held his last one-man show in 2002, and died three years later. Magritte's work became more realistic in its depiction of actual objects, while maintaining the element of juxtaposition, such as in 1951's Personal Values (Les Valeurs Personneles)[3] and 1954's Empire of Light (LEmpire des lumires).[4] Magritte continued to produce works which have entered artistic vocabulary, such as Castle in the Pyrenees (La Chateau des Pyrenees),[5] which refers back to Voix from 1931, in its suspension over a landscape. Other figures from the Surrealist movement were expelled. Several of these artists, like Roberto Matta (by his own description) "remained close to Surrealism."[4] After the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Endre Rozsda returned to Paris to continue creating his own word that had been transcended the surrealism. The preface to his first exhibition in the Furstenberg Gallery (1957) was written by Breton yet.[16]
Many new artists explicitly took up the Surrealist banner for themselves. Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois continued to work, for example, with Tanning's Rainy Day Canape from 1970. Duchamp continued to produce sculpture in secret including an installation with the realistic depiction of a woman viewable only through a peephole. Breton continued to write and espouse the importance of liberating of the human mind, as with the publication The Tower of Light in 1952. Breton's return to France after the War, began a new phase of Surrealist activity in Paris, and his critiques of rationalism and dualism found a new audience. Breton insisted that Surrealism was an ongoing revolt against the reduction of humanity to market relationships, religious gestures and misery and to espouse the importance of liberating the human mind. Major exhibitions of the 1940s, '50s and '60s
1942 - First Papers of Surrealism - New York - The Surrealists again called on Duchamp to design an exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.[6] He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.[4] 1947 - International Surrealist Exhibition - Paris 1959 - International Surrealist Exhibition - Paris 1960 - Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain - New York
[edit] Post-Breton Surrealism
Roberto Matta. Elle Loge La Folie, oil on canvas, 1970.
There is no clear consensus about the end, or if there was an end, to the Surrealist movement. Some art historians suggest that World War II effectively disbanded the movement. However, art historian Sarane Alexandrian (1970) states, "the death of Andr Breton in 1966 marked the end of Surrealism as an organized movement." There have also been attempts to tie the obituary of the movement to the 1989 death of Salvador Dal[citation needed]. In the 1960s, the artists and writers grouped around the Situationist International were closely associated with Surrealism. While Guy Debord was critical of and distanced himself from
Surrealism, others, such as Asger Jorn, were explicitly using Surrealist techniques and methods. The events of May 1968 in France included a number of Surrealist ideas, and among the slogans the students spray-painted on the walls of the Sorbonne were familiar Surrealist ones. Joan Mir would commemorate this in a painting titled May 1968. There were also groups who associated with both currents and were more attached to Surrealism, such as the Revolutionary Surrealist Group. In Europe and all over the world since the 1960s, artists have combined Surrealism with what is believed to be a classical 16th century technique called mischtechnik, a kind of mix of egg tempera and oil paint rediscovered by Ernst Fuchs, a contemporary of Dal, and now practiced and taught by many followers, including Robert Venosa and Chris Mars. The former curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Michael Bell, has called this style "veristic Surrealism", which depicts with meticulous clarity and great detail a world analogous to the dream world. Other tempera artists, such as Robert Vickrey, regularly depict Surreal imagery. During the 1980s, behind the Iron Curtain, Surrealism again entered into politics with an underground artistic opposition movement known as the Orange Alternative. The Orange Alternative was created in 1981 by Waldemar Fydrych (alias 'Major'), a graduate of history and art history at the University of Wrocaw. They used Surrealist symbolism and terminology in their large scale happenings organized in the major Polish cities during the Jaruzelski regime, and painted Surrealist graffiti on spots covering up anti-regime slogans. Major himself was the author of a "Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism". In this manifesto, he stated that the socialist (communist) system had become so Surrealistic that it could be seen as an expression of art itself. Surrealistic art also remains popular with museum patrons. The Guggenheim Museum in New York City held an exhibit, Two Private Eyes, in 1999, and in 2001 Tate Modern held an exhibition of Surrealist art that attracted over 170,000 visitors. In 2002 the Met in New York City held a show, Desire Unbound, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris a show called La Rvolution surraliste.
[edit] Impact of Surrealism

While Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said to transcend them; Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense, Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified "Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination. In addition to Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, Surrealism is seen by its advocates as being inherently dynamic and as dialectical in its thought. Surrealists have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Clark Ashton Smith, Montague Summers, Horace Walpole, Fantomas, The Residents, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and the hobo writer and humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that Surrealist strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor etc.) and even in the daily lives of people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the effort of humanity to liberate imagination as an act of insurrection against
society, Surrealism finds precedents in the alchemists, possibly Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud. Surrealists believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western culture. Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary politics, both directly as in some Surrealists joining or allying themselves with radical political groups, movements and parties and indirectly through the way in which Surrealists' emphasize the intimate link between freeing imagination and the mind, and liberation from repressive and archaic social structures. This was especially visible in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and the French revolt of May 1968, whose slogan "All power to the imagination" rose directly from French Surrealist thought and practice. Many significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as the Postmodern era; though there's no widely agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many themes and techniques commonly identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism. Perhaps the writers within the Postmodern era who have the most in common with Surrealism are the playwrights of Theatre of the Absurd. Though not an organized movement, these playwrights were grouped together based on some similarities of theme and technique; these similarities can perhaps be traced to influence from the Surrealists. Eugne Ionesco in particular was fond of Surrealism, claiming at one point that Breton was one of the most important thinkers in history. Samuel Beckett was also fond of Surrealists, even translating much of the poetry into English; he may have had closer ties had the Surrealists not been critical of Beckett's mentor and friend James Joyce. Many writers from and associated with the Beat Generation were influenced greatly by Surrealists. Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans are often categorized as both Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers claimed Surrealism as a significant influence. A few examples include Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg. In popular culture much of the stream of consciousness song writing of the young Bob Dylan, c. 1960s and including some of Dylan's more recent writing as well, (c. mid - 1980s-2006) clearly have Surrealist connections and undertones. Magic Realism, a popular technique among novelists of the latter half of the 20th century especially among Latin American writers, has some obvious similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the normal and the dream-like. The prominence of Magic Realism in Latin American literature is often credited in some part to the direct influence of Surrealism on Latin American artists (Frida Kahlo, for example).
[edit] Surrealist groups

See also Category:Surrealist groups. This section requires expansion.
Surrealist individuals and groups have attempted to carry on with Surrealism after the death of Andr Breton in 1966. The original Paris Surrealist Group was disbanded by member Jean Schuster in 1969.
[edit] Surrealism and theatre

Surrealist theater depicts the subconscious experience, moody tone and disjointed structure, sometimes imposing a unifying idea.[17] Antonin Artaud, one of the original Surrealists, rejected Western theatre as a perversion of the original intent of theatre, which he felt should be a religious and mystical experience. He thought that rational discourse comprised "falsehood and illusion", which embodied the worst of discourse. Endeavouring to create a new theatrical form that would be immediate and direct, linking the unconscious minds of performers and spectators, a sort of ritual event,[18] Artaud created the Theatre of Cruelty where emotions, feelings, and the metaphysical were expressed not through text or dialogue but physically, creating a mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the world of dreams.[19] These sentiments also led to the Theatre of the Absurd whose inspiration came, in part, from silent film and comedy, as well as the tradition of verbal nonsense in early sound film (Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers). Virginia Woolf's only play Freshwater conjurs surreal images by suggestion using a collective identity.
[edit] Surrealism and film

See also, List of surrealist films. This section requires expansion.
[edit] Surrealism and comedy

Main article: Surreal humour
[edit] Criticism of Surrealism

[edit] Feminist
Feminists have in the past critiqued the Surrealist movement, claiming that it is fundamentally a male movement and a male fellowship, despite the occasional few celebrated woman Surrealist painters and poets. They believe that it adopts archaic attitudes toward women, such as worshipping them symbolically through stereotypes and sexist norms. Women are often made to represent higher values and transformed into objects of desire and of mystery.[20] One of the pioneers in feminist critique of Surrealism was Xavire Gauthier. Her book Surralisme et sexualit (1971) inspired further important scholarship related to the marginalization of women in relation to "the avant-garde." However these criticisms are perhaps
more so of other avant-garde movements like Situationism, where women had a much more subordinate role to the men. Also, despite the theoretical objectification, Surrealism as a living praxis allowed room for women artists, and painters in particular.[citation needed], to work and produce work on their own terms. One who produces surreal photographs and image-text pieces is the avant-garde artist Barbara Rosenthal[21], who has written I gave my subconscious a camera, and promised not to interfere.[22]
[edit] Freudian
Freud initiated the psychoanalytic critique of Surrealism with his remark that what interested him most about the Surrealists was not their unconscious but their conscious. His meaning was that the manifestations of and experiments with psychic automatism highlighted by Surrealists as the liberation of the unconscious were highly structured by ego activity, similar to the activities of the dream censorship in dreams, and that therefore it was in principle a mistake to regard Surrealist poems and other art works as direct manifestations of the unconscious, when they were indeed highly shaped and processed by the ego. In this view, the Surrealists may have been producing great works, but they were products of the conscious, not the unconscious mind, and they deceived themselves with regard to what they were doing with the unconscious. In psychoanalysis proper, the unconscious does not just express itself automatically but can only be uncovered through the analysis of resistance and transference in the psychoanalytic process.[citation needed]
[edit] Situationist
While some individuals and groups on the core and fringes of the Situationist International were Surrealists themselves, others were very critical of the movement, or indeed what remained of the movement in the late 1950s and '60s. The Situationist International could therefore be seen as a break and continuation of the Surrealist praxis
Modernism
Jump to: navigation, search For Catholic theological modernism, see Modernism (Roman Catholicism). For other uses of the word, see Modernism (disambiguation). For the period in sociology beginning with the industrialization, see Modernity.
Hans Hofmann, "The Gate", 19591960, collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he introduced modernism and modernist theories to a new generation of American artists. Through his teaching and his lectures at his art schools in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, he widened the scope of modernism in America.[1]
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator.[2][3] This is not to say that all modernists or modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age. A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).[4] The poet Ezra Pound's paradigmatic injunction was to "Make it new!" However, the break from the past was not a clean break. Pound's phrase identified one modernist objective, even as T.S. Eliot emphasized the relation of the artist to tradition. Eliot wrote:
"[W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."[5]
Literary scholar Peter Childs sums up the complexity:

"There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair."[6]
These oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny. Current interpretations of modernism vary. Some divide 20th century reaction into modernism and postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.
Contents
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1 Present-day perspectives 2 History of Modernism o 2.1 Beginnings o 2.2 Turn of the century o 2.3 Explosion, 19101930 o 2.4 Second generation, 19301945 3 Modernism after World War II (The visual and performing arts) o 3.1 Pollock and abstract influences o 3.2 In the 1960s after abstract expressionism o 3.3 Pop art o 3.4 Minimalism o 3.5 Collage, assemblage, installations o 3.6 Neo-Dada o 3.7 Performance and happenings o 3.8 Fluxus o 3.9 Late period 4 Goals of the movement 5 Criticisms of modernism 6 Differences between modernism and postmodernism 7 See also 8 Notes and references 9 Further reading
10 External links
[edit] Present-day perspectives

Some commentators approach Modernism as an overall socially progressive trend of thought, that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge or technology.[7] From this perspective, Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end. Others focus on Modernism as an aesthetic introspection. This facilitates consideration of specific reactions to the use of technology in The First World War, and anti-technological and nihilistic aspects of the works of diverse thinkers and artists spanning the period from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett.[8]
[edit] History of Modernism

[edit] Beginnings
Eugne Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, 1830, a Romantic work of art.
The first half of the nineteenth century for Europe was marked by a number of wars and revolutions, which contributed to an aesthetic "turning away" from the realities of political and social fragmentation, and so facilitated a trend towards Romanticism: emphasis on individual subjective experience, the sublime, the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty. By mid-century, however, a synthesis of these ideas with stable governing forms had emerged, partly in reaction to the failed Romantic and democratic Revolutions of 1848. It was exemplified by Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik and by "practical" philosophical ideas such as positivism. Called by various namesin Great Britain
it is designated the "Victorian era"this stabilizing synthesis was rooted in the idea that reality dominates over subjective impressions. Central to this synthesis were common assumptions and institutional frames of reference, including the religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics and doctrines that asserted that the depiction of external reality from an objective standpoint was not only possible but desirable. Cultural critics and historians label this set of doctrines realism, though this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist, materialist and positivist movements established a primacy of reason and system. Against the current ran a series of ideas, some of them direct continuations of Romantic schools of thought. Notable were the agrarian and revivalist movements in plastic arts and poetry (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the philosopher John Ruskin). Rationalism also drew responses from the anti-rationalists in philosophy. In particular, Hegel's dialectic view of civilization and history drew responses from Friedrich Nietzsche and Sren Kierkegaard, who were major influences on existentialism. All of these separate reactions together began to be seen[by whom?] as offering a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived by civilization, history, or pure reason. From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that progress was always good came under increasing attack. Writers Wagner and Ibsen had been reviled for their own critiques of contemporary civilization and for their warnings that accelerating "progress" would lead to the creation of individuals detached from social values and isolated from their fellow men. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, and could not move forward in its present form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism. The work of Schopenhauer was labelled "pessimistic" for its idea of the "negation of the will", an idea that would be both rejected and incorporated by later thinkers such as Nietzsche. Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin, and in political science, Karl Marx. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx argued there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist systemand that, contrary to the libertarian ideal, the workers were anything but free. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing modernism. Historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. William Everdell has argued that modernism began with Richard Dedekind's division of the real number line in 1872 and Boltzmann's statistical thermodynamics in 1874. Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant "the first real Modernist",[9] but also wrote, "What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last centuryand rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Flaubert, too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture)."[10] At first, modernism was
called the "avant-garde,"[by whom?] and the term remained to describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.[11] Separately, in the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France would have particular impact. The first was impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon, the impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refuss, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement.
Odilon Redon, Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, charcoal on paper, The Art Institute of Chicago.
The second school was symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature and a portrayal of patriotism, and that poetry and writing should follow connections that the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The poet Stphane Mallarm would be of particular importance to what would occur afterwards. At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work that would become the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. Chief among these was steam-powered industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and engineering in new industrial materials such as cast iron to produce railroad bridges and glass-and-iron train shedsor the Eiffel Tower, which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could beand at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life. The miseries of industrial urbanism and the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects[which?] brought changes that would shake a European civilization which had, until then,
regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph's harnessing of a new power, offering instant communication at a distance, the experience of time itself was altered. Many modern disciplines (for example, physics, economics, and arts such as ballet and architecture) denote their pre-twentieth century forms as "classical." This distinction indicates the scope of the changes that occurred across a wide range of scientific and cultural pursuits during the period.
[edit] Turn of the century

In the 1890s a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of current techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled such developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of the internal combustion engine and industrialization; and the increased role of the social sciences in public policy. It was argued that, if the nature of reality itself was in question, and if restrictions which had been in place around human activity were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music.
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, 1939-42, oil on canvas, 80 x 73 cm, private collection.
Powerfully influential in this wave of modernity were the theories of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach, who argued, beginning in the 1880s, that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind. All subjective reality was based, according to Freud's ideas, on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Ernst Mach developed a well-known philosophy of science, often called "positivism", according to which the relations of objects in nature were not guaranteed but only known through a sort of mental shorthand. This represented a break with the past, in that previously it was believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it
was, on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke's empiricism, with the mind beginning as a tabula rasa. Freud's description of subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung with a belief in natural essence to stipulate a collective unconscious that was full of basic typologies that the conscious mind fought or embraced. Darwin's work had introduced the concept of "man, the animal" to the public mind, and Jung's view suggested that people's impulses toward breaking social norms were not the product of childishness or ignorance, but derived from the essential nature of the human animal. Friedrich Nietzsche championed a philosophy in which forces, specifically the 'Will to power', were more important than facts or things. Similarly, the writings of Henri Bergson championed the vital 'life force' over static conceptions of reality. All these writers were united by a romantic distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty. Instead they championed, or, in the case of Freud, attempted to explain, irrational thought processes through the lens of rationality and holism. This was connected with the century-long trend to thinking in holistic terms, which would include an increased interest in the occult, and "the vital force". Out of this collision of ideals derived from Romanticism, and an attempt to find a way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of works, which, while their authors considered them extensions of existing trends in art, broke the implicit contract[by whom?] that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of cubism from the work of Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908. This wave of the modern movement broke with the past in the first decade of the twentieth century, and tried to redefine various artforms in a radical manner. Leading lights within the literary wing of this movement (or, rather, these movements) include:

Rafael Alberti Gabriele D'Annunzio Guillaume Apollinaire Louis Aragon Djuna Barnes Bertolt Brecht Basil Bunting Mrio de SCarneiro Constantine P. Cavafy Blaise Cendrars Jean Cocteau
Joseph Conrad T. S. Eliot Paul luard William Faulkner H.D. Ernest Hemingway[12] Hugo von Hofmannsthal Max Jacob James Joyce Franz Kafka D. H. Lawrence
Wyndham Lewis Federico Garca Lorca Hugh MacDiarmid Marianne Moore Robert Musil Almada Negreiros Luigi Pirandello Ezra Pound Marcel Proust Pierre Reverdy Gertrude Stein
Wallace Stevens Italo Svevo Tristan Tzara Giuseppe Ungaretti Paul Valry Robert Walser William Carlos Williams Virginia Woolf William Butler Yeats
Composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and George Antheil represent modernism in music. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and the movements Les Fauves, Cubism and Surrealism represent various strains of Modernism in the visual arts, while architects and designers such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe brought Modernist ideas into everyday urban life. Artistic modernism also influenced figures outside the movement; for example, John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the Bloomsbury group.
[edit] Explosion, 19101930
Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm, Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
On the eve of the First World War a growing tension and unease with the social order, seen in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the agitation of "radical" parties, also manifested itself in artistic works in every medium which radically simplified or rejected previous practice. In 1913the year of Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and, in Saint Petersburg, the "first futurist opera," Victory Over the Sun by Alexey Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov and Kasimir Malevich another Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed The Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that depicted human sacrifice. Meanwhile, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintingsa step that none of the impressionists, not even Czanne, had taken. These developments began to give a new meaning to what was termed 'modernism': It embraced discontinuity, rejecting smooth change in everything from biology to fictional character development and moviemaking. It approved disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple realism in literature and art, and rejecting or dramatically altering tonality in music. This set modernists apart from 19th century artists, who had tended to believe not only in smooth change
('evolutionary' rather than 'revolutionary') but also in the progressiveness of such change 'progress.' Writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like Brahms were not 'radicals' or 'Bohemians,' but were instead valued members of society who produced art that added to society, even sometimes while critiquing its less desirable aspects. Modernism, while still "progressive," increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore recast the artist as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening. Futurism exemplifies this trend. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F.T. Marinetti's first manifesto. Soon afterward a group of painters (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on the famous "Communist Manifesto" of the previous century, such manifestoes put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. Strongly influenced by Bergson and Nietzsche, Futurism was part of the general trend of Modernist rationalization of disruption. Modernist philosophy and art were still viewed as only a part of the larger social movement. Artists such as Klimt and Czanne, and composers such as Mahler and Richard Strauss were "the terrible moderns"those farther to the avant-garde were more heard of than heard. Polemics in favour of geometric or purely abstract painting were largely confined to 'little magazines' (like The New Age in the UK) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, but were not seen as representative of the Edwardian mainstream, which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and liberal optimism. However, the Great War and its subsequent events were the cataclysmic upheavals that late 19th century artists such as Brahms had worried about, and avant-gardists had embraced. First, the failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earthprior to the war, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. Second, the birth of a machine age changed the conditions of lifemachine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality. Finally, the immensely traumatic nature of the experience dashed basic assumptions: realism seemed bankrupt when faced with the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare, as exemplified by books such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Moreover, the view that mankind was making slow and steady moral progress came to seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter. The First World War fused the harshly mechanical geometric rationality of technology with the nightmarish irrationality of myth. Thus modernism, which had been a minority taste before the war, came to define the 1920s. It appeared in Europe in such critical movements as Dada and then in constructive movements such as surrealism, as well as in smaller movements such as the Bloomsbury Group. Each of these "modernisms," as some observers labelled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results. Again, impressionism was a precursor: breaking with the idea of national schools, artists and writers adopted ideas of international movements. Surrealism, cubism, Bauhaus, and Leninism are all examples of movements that rapidly found adopters far beyond their geographic origins.
Illustration of the Spirit of St. Louis
Exhibitions, theatre, cinema, books and buildings all served to cement in the public view the perception that the world was changing. Hostile reaction often followed, as paintings were spat upon, riots organized at the opening of works, and political figures denounced modernism as unwholesome and immoral. At the same time, the 1920s were known as the "Jazz Age," and the public showed considerable enthusiasm for cars, air travel, the telephone and other technological advances. By 1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 modernism, which emphasized its continuity with a past while rebelling against it, and against the aspects of that period which seemed excessively mannered, irrational, and emotionalistic. The post-World War period, at first, veered either to systematization or nihilism and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada. While some writers attacked the madness of the new modernism, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. Among modernists there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Modernism comprised a series of sometimes contradictory responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it. In the end science and scientific rationality, often taking models from the 18th-century Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and stability, while the basic primitive sexual and unconscious drives, along with the seemingly counter-intuitive workings of the new machine age, were taken as the basic emotional substance. From these two seemingly incompatible poles, modernists began to fashion a complete weltanschauung that could encompass every aspect of life.
[edit] Second generation, 19301945

By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be looked to[by whom?] as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day. As modernism gained traction in academia, it was developing a selfconscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist innovation. By 1930 The New Yorker magazine began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, and James Thurber, amongst others. Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and logos, the
famous London Underground logo, designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols. Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War I Modernism, which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions, and the neoclassicism of the 1920s, as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinskywhich rejected popular solutions to modern problemsthe rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. The Russian Revolution catalyzed the fusion of political radicalism and utopianism, with more expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, Andr Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist Marxism. This move to the radical left, however, was neither universal, nor definitional, and there is no particular reason to associate modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left'. Modernists explicitly of 'the right' include Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Wyndham Lewis, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Dutch author Menno ter Braak and many others. One of the most visible changes of this period was the adoption of objects of modern production into daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the automobileand the need to work with them, repair them and live with themcreated the need for new forms of manners and social life. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life. Modernism as leading to social organization would produce inquiries into sex and the basic bondings of the nuclear, rather than extended, family. The Freudian tensions of infantile sexuality and the raising of children became more intense, because people had fewer children, and therefore a more specific relationship with each child: the theoretical, again, became the practical and even popular.
[edit] Modernism after World War II (The visual and performing arts)
In Britain and America, modernism as a literary movement is generally considered to be relevant up to the early 1930s, and "modernist" is rarely used to describe authors prominent after 1945. This is somewhat true for all areas of culture, with the exception of the visual and performing arts. The post-war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris (the former center of European culture and the former capital of the art world) the climate for art was a disaster. Important collectors, dealers, and modernist artists, writers, and poets had fled Europe for New York and America. The surrealists and modern artists from every cultural center of Europe had fled the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. A few
artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, remained in France and survived. The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, surrealism, Joan Mir, cubism, Fauvism, and early modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Lger, Max Ernst and the Andr Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors. [edit] Pollock and abstract influences
Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948, oil on fiberboard, 244 x 122 cm. (96 x 48 in.), private collection
During the late 1940s Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all who came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's processplacing unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artistic and industrial materials; dripping and throwing linear skeins of paint; drawing, staining, and brushing; using imagery and non-imageryessentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism
generally expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities available to artists for the creation of new works of art. The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Rereadings into abstract art by art historians such as Linda Nochlin,[13] Griselda Pollock [14] and Catherine de Zegher [15] critically show, however, that pioneering women artists who produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by official accounts of its history. [edit] In the 1960s after abstract expressionism
Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, 1966. Typical of Newman's later work, with the use of pure and vibrant color. Main articles: Post-painterly abstraction, Color field painting, Lyrical abstraction, Arte Povera, Process art, and Western painting
In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like hard-edge painting and other forms of geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avantgarde circles as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism. Clement Greenberg became the voice of post-painterly abstraction when he curated an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. Color field painting, hard-edge painting and lyrical abstraction[16] emerged as radical new directions.
By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera[17] also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture, via lyrical abstraction and the postminimalist movement, and in early conceptual art.[17] Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Sam Gilliam, Mario Merz and Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.[18] [edit] Pop art
Main articles: Pop art and Western painting
Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam! (1963)
In 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted The New Realists, the first major pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in England in 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior in favor of art that depicted and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the movement. Meanwhile in the downtown scene in New York's East Village 10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show the works of Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli exhibited the works of other American artists, including those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a connection between the radical works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists with a sense of humor, and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings reproduce the look of Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction. [edit] Minimalism
Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. It was created in 1970 and still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt. Main articles: Minimalism and Western painting
By the early 1960s minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction of Kazimir Malevich, the Bauhaus and Piet Mondrian) that rejected the idea of relational and subjective painting, the complexity of abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement. Minimalism is variously construed either as a precursor to postmodernism, or as a postmodern movement itself. In the latter perspective, early minimalism yielded advanced modernist works, but the movement partially abandoned this direction when some artists[who?] changed direction in favor of the anti-form movement. In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten[17] coined the term postminimalism to describe minimalist-derived art which had content and contextual overtones that minimalism rejected. The term was applied[by whom?] to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Sol Lewitt, and Barry Le Va, and others. Other minimalists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainders of their careers. In the 1960s the work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley also achieved prominence in the New York art world. Since then, many artists have embraced minimal or postminimal styles and the label "postmodern" has been attached to them[by whom?]. [edit] Collage, assemblage, installations
Main articles: Collage, Assemblage, and Installation art
Robert Rauschenberg Untitled Combine, 1963
Related to abstract expressionism was the emergence of combining manufactured items with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. The work of Robert Rauschenberg exemplifies this trend. His "combines" of the 1950s were forerunners of pop art and installation art, and used assemblages of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photographs. Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz were among important pioneers of both abstraction and pop art. Creating new conventions of art-making, they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion in their works of unlikely materials. Another pioneer of collage was Joseph Cornell, whose more intimately-scaled works were seen as radical because of both his personal iconography and his use of found objects. [edit] Neo-Dada
Main article: Neo-Dada
In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His professed his intent that people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "readymades." Fountain was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, the exhibition of which shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage's 4'33", which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning. Many conceptual works take the position that
art is the result of the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not of the intrinsic qualites of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture. Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess. Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross, that features a chess game in which each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. Duchamp and Cage played the game at the work's premier. Another trend in art associated with neo-Dada is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new artforms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet, husband of artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp. [edit] Performance and happenings
Main articles: Performance and Happenings
Carolee Schneemann, performing her piece Interior Scroll
During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push the boundaries of contemporary art. Yves Klein in France, and in New York City, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono were pioneers of performancebased works of art. Groups like The Living Theater with Julian Beck and Judith Malina collaborated with sculptors and painters creating environments, radically changing the relationship between audience and performer especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater, located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York; and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and others; collaborated with artists Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and engineers like Billy Klver. Park Place Gallery was a center for musical performances by electronic composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass and
other notable performance artists including Joan Jonas. These performances were intended as works of a new art form combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. They were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism and the spontaneous improvisation and expressivity of abstract expressionism. During the same period, various avant-garde artists created Happenings. Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in various specified locations, often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physicality, costuming, spontaneous nudity, and various random or seemingly disconnected acts. Notable creators of happenings included Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman. [edit] Fluxus
Main article: Fluxus
Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931-78), a Lithuanianborn American artist. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht and Dick Higgins. Fluxus encouraged a do-it-yourself aesthetic and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.
[edit] Late period
Ronnie Landfield, Garden of Delight, 1971, lyrical abstraction from the early 1970s
Main article: Late modernism
Artists from many disciplines continue to work in modernist styles into the 21st century. The continuation of abstract expressionism, color field painting, lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction, minimalism, abstract illusionism, process art, pop art, postminimalism, and other late 20th century modernist movements in both painting and sculpture continue through the first decade of the 21st century. At the turn of the 21st century, well-established artists such as Sir Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and younger artists including Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam, Isaac Witkin, Sean Scully, Joseph Nechvatal, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Richard Serra, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and dozens of others continued to produce vital and influential paintings and sculpture. However, by the early 1980s the postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish its position through various conceptual and intermedia formats. Postmodernism in music and literature began to take hold even earlier, some[who?] say by the 1950s. While postmodernism implies an end to modernism, many theorists and scholars[who?] contend that late modernism continues into the 21st century.
[edit] Goals of the movement
The 'Glass Palace' (1935) in the Netherlands - functional and open
Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Arnold Schoenberg rejected traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided music making for at least a century and a half. He believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelvenote rows. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the impressionists, as well as Paul Czanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete,
strongly affected this aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 330 North Wabash (formerly IBM Plaza) in Chicago Main article: International style (architecture)
Other modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views. Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced the horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or from the Middle Ages. In some cases form superseded function. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York (19561958), became the archetypal modernist building. Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasized simplicity and clarity of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of clutter. Modernism reversed the 19th-century relationship of public and private: in the 19th century, public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and private buildings emphasized verticalityto fit more private space on increasingly limited land. Conversely, in the 20th century, public buildings became vertically oriented and private buildings became organized horizontally. Many aspects of modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture today, though its previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.
Wassily Chair
In other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important. In literature and visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch.[19] Greenberg labelled the products of consumer culture "kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism. Some modernists did see themselves as part of a revolutionary cultureone that included political revolution. Others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. Many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Some[who?] even argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.
[edit] Criticisms of modernism
Franz Marc, The fate of the animals, 1913, oil on canvas. Displayed at the exhibition of Entartete Kunst in Munich, Nazi Germany, 1937.
The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterisation in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation. After the rise of Stalin, the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed futurism and constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see Anti-semitism). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine," whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.[20] In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture emerged calling itself "modernist" (usually shortened to Mod), following such representative music groups as The Who and The Kinks. The likes of Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, and others. The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various modernist musical effects on several albums, while musicians such as Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. Modernist devices also started to
appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future. This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism". First, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Second, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers[who?] declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as postmodernism. For others, such as art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism. "Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and emergent effects. Many modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000), Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday life more emotionally acceptable. In some fields the effects of modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to 'Modern Art' as distinct from post-Renaissance art (circa 1400 to circa 1900). Examples include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. These galleries make no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, seeing both as developments within 'Modern Art'.
[edit] Differences between modernism and postmodernism

Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements. Postmodernism is essentially a centralized movement that named itself, based on socio-political theory, although the term is now used in a wider sense to refer to activities from the 20th Century onwards which exhibit awareness of and reinterpret the modern.[21][22][23] Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.[24] In a narrower sense, what was modernist was not necessarily also postmodern. Those elements of modernism which accentuated the benefits of rationality and socio-technological progress were only modernist.
Postmodernism

Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the philosophy. For the condition or state of being, see Postmodernity. It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles accessible from a disambiguation page. (Discuss) Postmodernism Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist preceded by Modernism movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something Post-anarchism "related to the present", the movement of modernism Posthumanism and the following reaction of postmodernism are Post-Marxism defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical Postmodernity theory to refer to a point of departure for works of Postmodern architecture literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism and Postmodern art design, as well as in marketing and business and in the Postmodern Christianity interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in Postmodern dance the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Postmodern feminism Postmodern fusion Postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or Postmodern literature social philosophy, which was the basis of the attempt Postmodern music to describe a condition, or a state of being, or Postmodern picture book something concerned with changes to institutions and Postmodern philosophy conditions (as in Giddens, 1990) as postmodernity. In Postmodern social construction of nature other words, postmodernism is the "cultural and Postmodern theater intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' Postmodernism in political science new movements in the arts, while postmodernity Postmodernist anthropology focuses on social and political outworkings and Postmodernist film innovations globally, especially since the 1960s in the Postmodernist school West. Post-postmodernism Post-structuralism The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."[1]
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The term postmodern is described by Merriam-Webster as meaning either "of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one" or "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)", or finally "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language".[2] The American Heritage Dictionary describes the meaning of the same term as "Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes:
It [a roadhouse] is so architecturally interesting with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock.[3]
Contents
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1 Reaction to modernism 2 History of the term 3 Influence and distinction from postmodernity 4 The usage and extent of the concept of postmodernism 5 Development of postmodernism o 5.1 Notable philosophical and literary contributors o 5.2 Postmodern music 6 Philosophical movements and contributors 7 Deconstruction o 7.1 Social construction, structuralism, poststructuralism 8 Criticism 9 Quotations 10 See also o 10.1 Theory o 10.2 Culture and politics o 10.3 Law o 10.4 Philosophy o 10.5 Politics o 10.6 Psychology 11 References 12 Further reading 13 External links
[edit] Reaction to modernism

Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism refers to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality,[4] in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence.[5] Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely developments in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.[6] When the idea of a reaction or rejection of modernism was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with
poststructuralism (cf. Michel Foucault) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its perceived bourgeois, elitist culture.[7]
[edit] History of the term

The term was first used around the 1870s in various areas. For example, John Watkins Chapman avowed "a postmodern style of painting" to get beyond French Impressionism[8] Then, J.M.Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition" ('Post-Modernism, J.M.Thompson, The Hibbert Journal Vol XII No.4 July 1914 p. 733). In 1917 Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically oriented culture. Pannwitz's idea of post-modernism came from Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its ends of decadence and nihilism. Overcoming the modern human would be the post-human. But, contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also includes nationalist and mythical elements.[9] It was used later in 1926 by B.I.Bell in his "Postmodernism & other Ess." In 1925 and 1921 it had been used to describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays used it for a new literary form but as a general theory of an historical movement it was first used in 1939 by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918." [10] In 1949 it was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading to the postmodern architecture movement.[11] Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the reemergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style. The term was applied to a whole host of movements, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modernism, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques.[12] Walter Truett Anderson identifies postmodernism as one of four world views. These four worldviews are the postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed, the scientific-rational in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry, the socialtraditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation and the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.[13]
[edit] Influence and distinction from postmodernity

Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of
history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since 1950's and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968 are described with the term postmodernity,[14] as opposed to postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Whereas something being "postmodernist" would make it part of the movement, its being "postmodern" would place it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.
[edit] The usage and extent of the concept of postmodernism

Whether postmodernism is seen as a critical concept or merely a buzzword, one cannot deny its range. Dick Hebdige, in his Hiding in the Light illustrates this: When it becomes possible for a people to describe as postmodern the dcor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a scratch video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the intertextual relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the metaphysics of presence, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the predicament of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the decentring of the subject, an incredulity towards metanarratives, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the implosion of meaning, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a media, consumer or multinational phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of placelessness or the abandonment of placelessness (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as postmodern (or more simply using a current abbreviation as post or very post) then its clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.[15]
[edit] Development of postmodernism

Main article: Postmodern architecture
Detail of the postmodern Abteiberg Museum in Germany. The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a reactionary movement against the perceived blandness and hostility present in the Modern movement. Modern Architecture as established and developed by masters such as Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson was focused on the pursuit of an ideal perfection, harmony of form and function[16] and dismissal of frivolous ornament.[17] Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.[18] Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael Graves rejects the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects. Postmodern architecture began the reaction against the almost totalitarian qualities of Modernist thought, favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles. It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism and subjectivity that defines the postmodern philosophy.
[edit] Notable philosophical and literary contributors

This section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (September 2008) Main article: Postmodern literature Certain interpretations of Sren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche are important precursors to postmodernism. With their emphasis on skepticism, especially concerning objective reality, social morals, and societal norms[19], all three philosophers, for the postmodernists, represent a reaction to modernism ending in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Other notable influences on postmodernism include Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, Alfred Jarry's 'Pataphysics, and the work of Lewis Carroll.[citation needed] Art and literature of the early part of the 20th century play a significant part in shaping the character of postmodern culture. Dadaism attacked notions of high art in an attempt to break down the distinctions between high and low culture; Surrealism further developed concepts of Dadaism to celebrate the flow of the subconscious with influential techniques such as automatism and nonsensical juxtapositions (evidence of Surrealism's influence on postmodern thought can be seen in Foucault's and Derrida's references to Rene Magritte's experiments with signification). Some other significant contributions to postmodern culture from literary figures include the following: Jorge Luis Borges experimented in metafiction and magical realism; William S. Burroughs wrote the prototypical postmodern novel Naked Lunch and developed the cut up method (similar to Tristan Tzara's "How to Make a Dadaist Poem") to create other novels such as Nova Express; Samuel Beckett attempted to escape the shadow of James Joyce by focusing on the failure of language and humanity's inability to overcome its condition, themes later to be explored in such works as Waiting for Godot. Postcolonialism after World War II contributed to the idea that one cannot have an objectively superior lifestyle or belief. This idea was taken further by the anti-foundationalist philosophers:
Heidegger, then Derrida, who examined the fundamentals of knowledge; they argued that rationality was neither as sure nor as clear as modernists or rationalists assert. It is with the end of the Second World War that recognizably postmodernist attitudes begin to emerge. It is possible to identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the constituting event of postmodernism. The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1971, the Arab-American theorist Ihab Hassan was one of the first to use the term in its present form (though it had been used by many others before him, Charles Olson for example, to refer to other literary trends) in his book: The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature; in it, Hassan traces the development of what he called "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman. In 1979 Jean-Franois Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Richard Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes are also influential in 1970s postmodern theory.
[edit] Postmodern music

Main articles: Postmodern music and Postmodern classical music The postmodern impulse in classical music arose in the 1970s with the advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, John Adams, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular music and world ethnic musical traditions. Though representing a general return to certain notions of music-making that are often considered to be classical or romantic[citation needed], not all postmodern composers have eschewed the experimentalist or academic tenets of modernism. The works of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, for example, exhibit experimentalist preoccupation that is decidedly anti-romantic. Eclecticism and freedom of expression, in reaction to the rigidity and aesthetic limitations of modernism, are the hallmarks of the postmodern influence in musical composition.
[edit] Philosophical movements and contributors

This section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (September 2008) Influencer Karl Barth Martin Heidegger Thomas Samuel Kuhn Jacques Year Influence c.1925 fideist approach to theology brought a rise in subjectivity rejected the philosophical grounding of the concepts of "subjectivity" and c.1927 "objectivity" posited the rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a c.1962 provisional consensus of scientists, coined the term "paradigm shift" c.1967 re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on
Derrida
Michel Foucault JeanFranois Lyotard Richard Rorty Jean Baudrillard
philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of western metaphysics (deconstruction) examined discursive power in Discipline and Punish, with Bentham's panopticon as his model, and also known for saying "language is c.1975 oppression" (Meaning that language was developed to allow only those who spoke the language not to be oppressed. All other people that don't speak the language would then be oppressed.) c.1979 opposed universality, meta-narratives, and generality argues philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; advocates c.1979 dissolving traditional philosophical problems; anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism Simulacra and Simulation - reality disappears underneath the c.1981 interchangeability of signs
[edit] Deconstruction
Main article: Deconstruction Deconstruction is a term which is used to denote the application of postmodern ideas of criticism, or theory, to a "text" or "artifact", based on architectural deconstructivism. A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text or the artifact. The term "deconstruction" comes from Martin Heidegger, who calls for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotes both English words) of the history of ontology. The point, for Heidegger, was to describe Being prior to its being covered over by Plato and subsequent philosophy. Thus, Heidegger himself engaged in "deconstruction" through a critique of post-Socratic thought (which had forgotten the question of Being) and the study of the pre-Socratics (where Being was still an open question). In later usage, a "deconstruction" is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors and philosophers. They argue that aspects in the text itself would undermine its own authority or assumptions and that internal contradictions would erase boundaries or categories which the work relied on or asserted. Poststructuralists beginning with Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstructions implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the contrast of difference. This is analogous to the idea that the difference in perception between black and white is the context. A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not isolated to poststructuralists but is related to the idea of hermeneutics in literature; intellectuals as early as Plato asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as Leo Strauss. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings and the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.
Popularly, close textual analyses describing deconstruction within a text are often themselves called deconstructions. Derrida argued, however, that deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as deconstructive readings. Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text might imply. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text. The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex may be said to "deconstruct" gender identity, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance and the "reality" of the person's gender.
[edit] Social construction, structuralism, poststructuralism

Further information: Manifestations of Postmodernism Often opposed to deconstruction are social constructionists, labeled as such within the analytic tradition, but not usually in the case of the continental tradition. The term was first used in sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality. Usually in the continental tradition, the terms structuralism or poststructuralism are used. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is seen as the biggest contributor to structuralism, which is epitomized in the philosophy of Claude Levi-Strauss. Michel Foucault was also a structuralist but then turned to what would be termed poststructuralism, although he himself declined to call his work either poststructuralist or postmodern. Structuralism historically gave way to poststructuralism; often the role of postmodernism within the analytic tradition is played down, although works by major figures of the analytic tradition in the 20th century, including those of Thomas Kuhn and Willard Van Orman Quine, show a similarity with works in the continental tradition for their lack of belief in absolute truth as well as in the pliability of language. In the continental tradition, most works argue that power dissimulates and that society constructs reality, while its individuals remain powerless or almost powerless. Often, both continental and analytic sources argue for a renewed subjectivity, borrowing heavily from Immanuel Kant, while they largely reject his a priori/a posteriori distinction. They both minimize discussions of practical ethics, instead borrowing heavily from post-Holocaust accounts of the need for an ethics of responsibility, which is very rarely practically defined. One of the large differences between analytic postmodern sources and continental postmodern sources is that the analytic tradition by and large guards at least some of the tenets of liberalism, while many continental sources flirt with, or completely immerse themselves in, Marxism.
Recently, it is noticeable that some of the ideas found in poststructuralism and postmodernism, as the lack of belief in absolute truth or the idea of a reality constructed, is promoted in a new paradigm within constructivist epistemology.
[edit] Criticism
Main article: Criticism of postmodernism Formal, academic critiques of postmodernism can be found in works such as Beyond the Hoax and Fashionable Nonsense. The term postmodernism, when used pejoratively, describes tendencies perceived as relativist, counter-enlightenment or antimodern, particularly in relation to critiques of rationalism, universalism or science. It is also sometimes used to describe tendencies in a society that are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality.
[edit] Quotations
In 1994, the then-President of the Czech Republic and renowned playwright Vclav Havel gave a hopeful description of the postmodern world as one based on science, and yet paradoxically where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.[20] Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler offer the following definition of postmodernism: A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesnt exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered. Truth is created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.[21] The Italian medievalist and semiotician Umberto Eco characterised "the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.
Mannerism
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Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe.[1] Stylistically, Mannerism encompasses a variety of approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals and restrained naturalism associated with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo. Mannerism is notable for its intellectual sophistication as well as its artificial (as opposed to naturalistic) qualities. The definition of Mannerism, and the phases within it, continue to be the subject of debate among art historians. For example, some scholars have applied the label to certain early modern forms of literature (especially poetry) and music of the 16th and 17th centuries. The term is also used to refer to some Late Gothic painters working in northern Europe from about 1500 to 1530, especially the Antwerp Manneristsa group unrelated to the Italian movement. Mannerism also has been applied by analogy to the Silver Age of Latin.
In Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck (1534-40), Mannerism makes itself known by elongated proportions, highly stylized poses, and lack of clear perspective.
Contents
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1 Nomenclature o 1.1 Early mannerism o 1.2 High maniera 2 Spread of mannerism 3 Early theorists
3.1 Giorgio Vasari 3.2 Gian Paolo Lomazzo 4 Some mannerist examples o 4.1 Jacopo da Pontormo o 4.2 Rosso Fiorentino & the School of Fontainebleau o 4.3 Agnolo Bronzino o 4.4 Alessandro Allori o 4.5 Jacopo Tintoretto o 4.6 El Greco o 4.7 Benvenuto Cellini 5 Mannerist architecture 6 Mannerism in literature and music 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 Further reading
o o
[edit] Nomenclature
The word mannerism derives from the Italian maniera, meaning "style" or "manner". Like the English word style, maniera can either be used to indicate a specific type of style (a beautiful style, an abrasive style), or maniera can be used to indicate an absolute that needs no qualification (someone has style).[2] In the second edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), Giorgio Vasari used maniera in three different contexts: to discuss an artist's manner or method of working; to describe a personal or group style, such as the term maniera greca to refer to the Byzantine style or simply to the maniera of Michelangelo; and to affirm a positive judgment of artistic quality.[3] Vasari was also a Mannerist artist, and he described the period in which he worked as "la maniera moderna", or the "modern style".[4] As a stylistic label, "Mannerism" is not easily pigeonholed. It was used by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt and popularized by German art historians in the early 20th century to categorize the seemingly uncategorizable art of the Italian 16th century art that was no longer perceived to exhibit the harmonious and rational approaches associated with the High Renaissance. High Renaissance suggested a period of harmony, grandeur and the revival of classical antiquity and the term was redefined in 1967 by John Shearman.[5] The label Mannerism was used during the 16th century to comment on social behaviour and to convey a refined virtuoso quality or to signify a certain technique. However for later writers, such as the 17th-century Gian Pietro Bellori, "la maniera" was a derogatory term for the decline of art after Raphael, especially in the 1530s and 1540s.[6] From the late 19th-century on, art historians have commonly used the term to describe art that follows Renaissance classicism and precedes the Baroque. Yet historians differ in opinion, as to whether Mannerism is a style, a movement, or a period, and while the term remains controversial it is commonly used to identify European art and culture of the 16th century.[7]
[edit] Early mannerism
Jacopo Pontormo, Entombment, 1528; Santa Felicit, Florence
Depending on the historical account, Mannerism developed between 1510 and 1520 in either Florence,[8] Rome, or both cities.[9] The early Mannerists in Florenceespecially the students of Andrea del Sarto: Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentinoare notable for elongated forms, precariously balanced poses, a collapsed perspective, irrational settings, and theatrical lighting. Parmigianino, a student of Correggio, and Giulio Romano, Raphaels head assistant were moving in similarly stylized aesthetic directions in Rome. These artists had matured under the influence of the High Renaissance, and their style has been characterized as a reaction or exaggerated extension of it. Instead of studying nature directly, younger artists began studying Hellenistic sculptures and paintings of masters past. Therefore, this style is often identified as "anti-classical.[10] yet at the time it was considered a natural progression from the High Renaissance. The earliest experimental phase of Mannerism, known for its "anti-classical" forms, lasted until about 1540 or 1550.[9][page needed] Marcia Hall notes in her book 'After Raphael' Raphael's premature death marked the beginning of Mannerism in Rome. Michelangelo was one of the great creative exponents of Mannerism and it was his style which raised the standard of art to a new level. His varied Ignudi painted in distinctive positions on the Sistine Chapel ceiling could have been influenced by the "Belvedere Torso and which influenced other painters. Raphaels "Lo Spasimo di Sicilia depicts an event in Christian history when Christ falls while carrying the cross, sees his mother in distress and is helped up by Simon of Cyrene. The composition is linked by the diagonals of the soldiers spears and the wooden cross. Unusually, Christ cannot be singled out immediately amongst the gathering figures in the foreground,
whereas Simon stands out quite prominently. The spectators eyes look down the composition to the drama and charge of the narrative. The competitive spirit which was spurred on by the patrons encouraged the artists to show off their virtuoso painting. When in Florence Leonardo and Michelangelo were each given a commission by Gonfaloniere Piero Soderini to decorate a wall in the Hall of Five Hundred. These two artists were set to paint side by side and compete against each other fueling the incentive of being as innovative as possible. Later on in Rome Raphael was commissioned to paint The Transfiguration by Cardinal Gioulio di Medici who had been appointed as arch bishop of Narbonne in the south of France. At this time Raphael was also busy painting the Stanze, various altarpieces, painting versions of Madonna and child and being the principal architect in Rome after the death of Bramante which gave him little time to do The Transfiguration. Therefore the cardinal commissioned Sebastiano del Piombo who was great Venetian colourist and a friend of Michelangelo to paint The Raising of Lazarus. This spurred Raphael on to complete the commission. This period has been described as both a natural extension of the art of Andrea del Sarto, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as a decline of those same artists' classicizing achievements. In past analyses, it has been noted that mannerism arose in the early 1500s alongside a number of other social, scientific, religious and political movements such as the Copernican model, the Sack of Rome, and the Protestant Reformation's increasing challenge to the power of the Catholic church. Because of this, the style's elongated forms and distorted forms were once interpreted as a reaction to the idealized compositions prevalent in High Renaissance art.[11] This explanation for the radical stylistic shift c. 1520 has fallen out of scholarly favor, though the early Mannerists are still set in stark contrast to High Renaissance conventions; the immediacy and balance achieved by Raphael's School of Athens, no longer seemed interesting to young artists. Indeed, Michelangelo himself displayed tendencies towards Mannerism, notably in his vestibule to the Laurentian Library, in the figures on his Medici tombs, and above all in his Last Judgment.
Venus, c. 125; Marble, Roman; British Museum
[edit] High maniera

The second period of Mannerism is commonly differentiated from the earlier, so-called "anticlassical" phase. Subsequent mannerists stressed intellectual conceits and artistic virtuosity, features that have led later critics to accuse them of working in an unnatural and affected "manner" (maniera). Maniera artists held their elder contemporary Michelangelo as their prime example; theirs was an art imitating art, rather than an art imitating nature. Freedberg argues that the intellectualizing aspect of maniera art comes in the artist expecting his audience to notice and understand this visual reference, the familiar figure in an unfamiliar setting surrounded by "unseen, but felt, quotation marks." [12] The supreme artifice comes in the Maniera painter's love of deliberately misappropriating a quotation, for example Bronzino including the figure of a woman after the Medici Venus (similar to the one illustrated at right) in a religious picture depicting Christ's resurrection. Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari exemplify this strain of Maniera that lasted from about 1530 to 1580. Based largely at courts and in intellectual circles around Europe, Maniera art couples exaggerated elegance with exquisite attention to surface and detail: porcelain-skinned figures recline in an even, tempered light, regarding the viewer with a cool glance, if at all. The Maniera subject rarely displays an excess of emotion, and for this reason are often interpreted as 'cold' or 'aloof,' and is often called the "stylish" style or the Maniera.[13]
[edit] Spread of mannerism
English Mannerism: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, 1546, a rare English Mannerist portrait by a Flemish immigrant.
Mannerist centers in Italy were Rome, Florence and Mantua. Venetian painting, in its separate "school," pursued a separate course, represented in the long career of Titian. A number of the earliest Mannerist artists who had been working in Rome during the 1520s fled the city after the Sack of Rome in 1527. As they spread out across the continent in search of employment, their style was distributed throughout Italy and Europe.[14] The result was the first international artistic style since the Gothic.[15] The style waned in Italy after 1580, as a new generation of artists, including the Carracci brothers, Caravaggio and Cigoli, reemphasized naturalism. Walter Friedlaender identified this period as "anti-mannerism", just as the early mannerists were "anticlassical" in their reaction to the High Renaissance.[16]
Town Hall of Zamod by Bernardo Morando
Outside of Italy, however, mannerism continued into the 17th century. In France, where Rosso traveled to work for the court at Fontainebleau, it is known as the "Henry II style" and it had a particular impact on architecture. Other important continental centers include the court of Rudolf II in Prague, as well as Haarlem and Antwerp. Mannerism as a stylistic category is less frequently applied to English visual and decorative arts, where local categories such as
"Elizabethan" and "Jacobean" are more common. Eighteenth-century Artisan Mannerism is one exception.[17]
[edit] Early theorists
Giorgio Vasari, from Vite de' piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e archittetori (Lives of the Artists) 1568
[edit] Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari's opinions about the "art" of creating art come through in his praise of fellow artists in the great book that lay behind this frontispiece: he believed that excellence in painting demanded refinement, richness of invention (invenzione), expressed through virtuoso technique (maniera), and wit and study that appeared in the finished work, all criteria that emphasized the artist's intellect and the patron's sensibility. The artist was now no longer just a craftsman member of a local Guild of St Luke. Now he took his place at court with scholars, poets, and humanists, in a climate that fostered an appreciation for elegance and complexity. The coat-ofarms of Vasari's Medici patrons appear at the top of his portrait, quite as if they were the artist's own. The framing of the woodcut image of Mannerist artist Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (illustration, left) would be called "Jacobean" in an English-speaking context. In it, Michelangelo's Medici tombs inspire the anti-architectural "architectural" features at the top, the papery pierced frame, the satyr nudes at the base. In the vignette of Florence at the base, papery or vellum-like material is cut and stretched and scrolled into a cartouche (cartoccia). The design is self-conscious, overcharged with rich, artificially "natural" detail in physically improbable juxtapositions of jarring scale changes, overwhelming as a mere frame: Mannerist.
[edit] Gian Paolo Lomazzo
Another literary source from the period is Gian Paolo Lomazzo, who produced two worksone practical and one metaphysicalthat helped define the Mannerist artist's self-conscious relation to his art. His Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Milan, 1584) is in part a guide to contemporary concepts of decorum, which the Renaissance inherited in part from Antiquity but Mannerism elaborated upon. Lomazzo's systematic codification of aesthetics, which typifies the more formalized and academic approaches typical of the later 16th century, controlled a consonance between the functions of interiors and the kinds of painted and sculpted decors that would be suitable. Iconography, often convoluted and abstruse, is a more prominent element in the Mannerist styles. His less practical and more metaphysical Idea del tempio della pittura ("The ideal temple of painting", Milan, 1590) offers a description along the lines of the "four temperaments" theory of the human nature and personality, containing the explanations of the role of individuality in judgment and artistic invention.
[edit] Some mannerist examples
Jacopo Pontormo Joseph in Egypt, 1515-18; Oil on wood; 96 x 109 cm; National Gallery, London
[edit] Jacopo da Pontormo

Jacopo da Pontormo's Joseph in Egypt stood in what would have been considered contradicting colors and disunified time and space in the Renaissance. Neither the clothing, nor the buildingsnot even the colorsaccurately represented the Bible story of Joseph.
Rosso Francois I Gallery, Chteau de Fontainebleau, France
[edit] Rosso Fiorentino & the School of Fontainebleau

Rosso Fiorentino, who had been a fellow-pupil of Pontormo in the studio of Andrea del Sarto, brought Florentine mannerism to Fontainebleau in 1530, where he became one of the founders of the French 16th century Mannerism called the "School of Fontainebleau". The examples of a rich and hectic decorative style at Fontainebleau transferred the Italian style, through the medium of engravings, to Antwerp and thence throughout Northern Europe, from London to Poland, and brought Mannerist design into luxury goods like silver and carved furniture. A sense of tense controlled emotion expressed in elaborate symbolism and allegory, and elongated proportions of female beauty are characteristics of his style.
[edit] Agnolo Bronzino

Mannerist portraits by Agnolo Bronzino are distinguished by a still elegance and meticulous attention to detail. As a result, Bronzino's sitters (at left) have been said to put an uncommunicative abyss between subject and viewer, concentrating on rendering of the precise pattern and sheen of rich textiles.
[edit] Alessandro Allori

Alessandro Allori's (1535 - 1607) Susanna and the Elders (at right) uses artificial, waxy eroticism and consciously brilliant still life detail, in a crowded contorted composition. The viewer is brought so close to the subjects as to almost feel claustrophobiclike a third elder leering at the scene of a young, seemingly paralyzed Susanna being groped and assaulted by the two lecherous predators.
[edit] Jacopo Tintoretto
Tintoretto, Last Supper
Jacopo Tintoretto's Last Supper (at right) epitomizes Mannerism by taking Jesus and the table out of the middle of the room. He showed all that was happening. In sickly, disorienting colors he painted a scene of confusion that somehow separated the angels from the real world. He had removed the world from God's reach.
[edit] El Greco
El Greco attempted to express the religious tension with exaggerated Mannerism. This exaggeration would serve to cross over the Mannerist line and be applied to Classicism. After the realistic depiction of the human form and the mastery of perspective achieved in high Renaissance Classicism, some artists started to deliberately distort proportions in disjointed, irrational space for emotional and artistic effect. There are aspects of Mannerism in El Greco (at right), such as the jarring "acid" color sense, elongated and tortured anatomy, irrational perspective and light of his crowded composition, and obscure and troubling iconography.
[edit] Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini created the Cellini Salt Cellar of gold and enamel in 1540 featuring Poseidon and Amphitrite (earth and water) in elongated form and uncomfortable positions. It is considered a masterpiece of Mannerist sculpture.
Bronzino, Portrait of Bia de'Medici
Alessandro Allori, Susanna and the elders
El Greco, Baptism
Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the head of Medusa
[edit] Mannerist architecture

Main article: Renaissance architecture#Mannerism This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2008)
The porphyry portal of the "church house" at Colditz Castle, Saxony, designed by Andreas Walther II (1584), is a clear example of the exuberance of "Antwerp Mannerism".
An example of mannerist architecture is the Villa Farnese at Caprarola in the rugged country side outside of Rome. The proliferation of engravers during the 16th century spread Mannerist styles more quickly than any previous styles. A center of Mannerist design was Antwerp during its 16th century boom. Through Antwerp, Renaissance and Mannerist styles were widely introduced in England, Germany, and northern and eastern Europe in general. Dense with ornament of "Roman" detailing, the display doorway at Colditz Castle (illustration, left) exemplifies this northern style, characteristically applied as an isolated "set piece" against unpretentious vernacular walling.
[edit] Mannerism in literature and music

See also: Metaphysical poets
In English literature, Mannerism is commonly identified with the qualities of the "Metaphysical" poets of whom the most famous is John Donne. The witty sally of a Baroque writer, John Dryden, against the verse of Donne in the previous generation, affords a concise contrast between Baroque and Mannerist aims in the arts: He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice[18] speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softnesses of love.[cite this quote] (italics added) The rich musical possibilities in the poetry of the late 16th century and early 17th provided an attractive basis for the madrigal, which quickly rose to prominence as the pre-eminent musical form in Italian musical culture, as discussed by Tim Carter[19]: "The madrigal, particularly in its aristocratic guise, was obviously a vehicle for the stylish style of Mannerism, with poets and musicians revelling in witty conceits and other visual, verbal and musical tricks to delight the connoisseur." The word Mannerism has also been used to describe the style of highly florid and contrapuntally complex polyphonic music made in France in the late 14th century.[20] This period is now usually referred to as the ars subtilior.
Romanticism
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 38.58 29.13 inches, 1818, Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Hamburg For other uses, see Romance. See also: Romantic poetry Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution.[1] It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature,[2] and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature. The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and aweespecially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom to something noble, and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
Our modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society. Although the movement is rooted in German Pietism, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which Romanticism emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, which would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
Contents
[hide]

1 Characteristics 2 Romanticism and music 3 Visual art and literature o 3.1 Voyage of Life 4 Influence of European Romanticism on American writers 5 Nationalism 6 Gallery 7 See also o 7.1 Related terms o 7.2 Opposing terms o 7.3 Related subjects o 7.4 Related movements o 7.5 Romantic scholars 8 References 9 Bibliography 10 External links
[edit] Characteristics
In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus
emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenmenta Counter-Enlightenmentand still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."[3] Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the CounterEnlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
[edit] Romanticism and music

Main article: Romantic music
Ludwig van Beethoven In general, the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to mean the period roughly from the 1820s until around 1900. The contemporary application of 'romantic' to music did not coincide with modern categories, however: in 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Technically, Mozart and Haydn are considered Classical composers, and by most standards, Beethoven represents the start of the musical Romantic period. By the early twentieth century, the sense that there had been a decisive break with the musical past led to the establishment of the nineteenth century as "The Romantic Era," and it is referred to as such in the standard encyclopedias of music. The traditional modern discussion of the music of Romanticism includes elements, such as the growing use of folk music, which are also directly related to the broader current of Romantic nationalism in the arts[4] as well as aspects already present in eighteenth-century music, such as the cantabile accompanied melody[5] to which Romantic composers beginning with Franz Schubert applied restless key modulations.
Niccol Paganini The heightened contrasts and emotions of Sturm und Drang (German for "Storm and Stress") seem a precursor of the Gothic novel in literature, or the sanguinary elements of some of the operas of the period of the French Revolution. The libretti of Lorenzo da Ponte for Mozart's eloquent music convey a new sense of individuality and freedom. The romantic generation viewed Beethoven as their ideal of a heroic artista man who first dedicated a symphony to Consul Bonaparte as a champion of freedom and then challenged Emperor Napoleon by striking him out from the dedication of the Eroica Symphony. In Beethoven's Fidelio he creates the apotheosis of the 'rescue operas' which were another feature of French musical culture during the revolutionary period, in order to hymn the freedom which underlay the thinking of all radical artists in the years of hope after the Congress of Vienna.
Frdric Chopin In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed a public career, depending on sensitive middle-class audiences rather than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier musicians and composers. Public persona characterized a new generation of virtuosi who made their way as soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of Paganini and Liszt. Beethoven's use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow significant expansion of musical forms and structures was immediately recognized as bringing a new dimension to music. His later piano music and string quartets, especially, showed the way to a completely unexplored musical universe. E.T.A. Hoffmann was able to write of the supremacy of instrumental music over vocal music in expressiveness, a concept which would previously have been regarded as absurd. Hoffmann himself, as a practitioner both of music and literature, encouraged the notion of music as 'programmatic' or narrative, an idea which new audiences found attractive. Early nineteenth century developments in instrumental technologyiron frames for pianos, wound metal strings for string instrumentsenabled louder dynamics, more varied tone colours, and the potential for sensational virtuosity. Such developments swelled the length of pieces, introduced
programmatic titles, and created new genres such as the free-standing concert overture or tone poem, the piano fantasia, nocturne and rhapsody, and the virtuosic concerto, which became central to musical romanticism.
Richard Wagner In opera, a new Romantic atmosphere combining supernatural terror and melodramatic plot in a folkloric context was most successfully achieved by Weber's Der Freischtz (1817, revised 1821). Enriched timbre and color marked the early orchestration of Hector Berlioz in France, and the grand operas of Meyerbeer. Amongst the radical fringe of what became mockingly characterised (adopting Wagner's own words) as 'artists of the future', Liszt and Wagner each embodied the Romantic cult of the free, inspired, charismatic, perhaps ruthlessly unconventional individual artistic personality. It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true age of Romanticism in music the age of the last compositions of Beethoven (d. 1827) and Schubert (d. 1828), of the works of Schumann (d. 1856) and Chopin (d.1849), of the early struggles of Berlioz and Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as Paganini (d. 1840), and the young Liszt and Thalberg. Now that we are able to listen to the work of Mendelssohn (d. 1847) stripped of the Biedermeier reputation unfairly attached to it, he can also be placed in this more appropriate context. After this period, with Chopin and Paganini dead, Liszt retired from the concert platform at a minor German court, Wagner effectively in exile until he obtained royal patronage in Bavaria, and Berlioz still struggling with the bourgeois liberalism which all but smothered radical artistic endeavour in Europe, Romanticism in music was surely past its primegiving way, rather, to the period of musical romantics.
[edit] Visual art and literature

See also: Romantic poetry, Victorian architecture, and Gothic Revival architecture
Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814 In visual art and literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism also helped in the emergence of new ideas and in the process led to the emergence of positive voices that were beneficial for the marginalized sections of the society. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang Goethe whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism. Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling,Hegel, Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a center for early German romanticism ("Jenaer Romantik"). Important writers were Ludwig Tieck, Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1799), Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hoelderlin. Heidelberg later became a center of German romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met regularly in literary circles. Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and ancient myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements.
J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Tmraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1839 In Spain, the Romantic movement developed a well-known literature with a huge variety of poets and playwrights. The most important Spanish poet during this movement was Jos de Espronceda. After him there were other poets like Gustavo Adolfo Bcquer and the dramatist
Jos Zorrilla, author of Don Juan Tenorio. Before them may be mentioned the pre-romantics Jos Cadalso and Manuel Jos Quintana. Spanish Romanticism also influenced regional literatures. For example, in Catalonia and in Galicia there was a national boom of minor Spanish language writers, like the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer and the Galician Rosala de Castro. Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book Lyrical Ballads (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in utopian social thought in the wake of the French Revolution. The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books. The painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.
Eugne Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People 1830 In predominantly Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon. Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand is often called the "Father of French Romanticism". In France, the movement is associated with the nineteenth century, particularly in the paintings of Thodore Gricault and Eugne Delacroix, the plays, poems and novels of Victor Hugo (such as Les Misrables and Ninety-Three), and the novels of Stendhal. In Russia, the principal exponent of Romanticism is Alexander Pushkin. Mikhail Lermontov attempted to analyse and bring to light the deepest reasons for the Romantic idea of metaphysical discontent with society and self, and was much influenced by Lord Byron. The poet Fyodor Tyutchev was also an important figure of the movement in Russia, and was heavily influenced by the German Romantics.
Thodore Gricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819. In the United States, romantic gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. But by the 1880s, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel. The poetry of Emily Dickinsonnearly unread in her own timeand Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. As in England, Germany, and France, literary Romanticism had its counterpart in American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of untamed America found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often combined a sense of the sublime with underlying religious and philosophical themes. Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave (see below).
[edit] Voyage of Life
Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life Childhood
Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life Youth
Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life Manhood
Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life Old Age
[edit] Influence of European Romanticism on American writers

The European Romantic movement that took place in the late eighteenth century reached America in the early nineteenth century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe.[citation needed] ...Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world is a source of goodness and human society a source of corruption.[citation needed] Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which involved the belief that the universe and all the events within it are subject to the power of God. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new religion presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion. As a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systemized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom. It appealed to those who disdained the harsh God of their Puritan ancestors, and it appealed to those who scorned the pale deity of New England Unitarianism....[]...They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. They believed in the transcendence of the "Oversoul", an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are parts.[citation needed] American Romance embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence modern writers. Novels, short stories, and poems began to take the place of the sermons and manifestos that were associated with the early American literary principals. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters. "Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement"[citation needed]
[edit] Nationalism
Main article: Romantic nationalism
Egide Charles Gustave Wappers, Episode of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, 1834, Muse d'Art Ancien, Brussels a romantic vision by a Belgian painter. One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning. Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau, and by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a people, and shaped their customs and society. The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the French Revolution with the rise of Napoleon, and the reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were held to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other countries in battle. But as the French Republic became Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of Kant. The word Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German as part of this resistance to the now conquering emperor. Fichte expressed the unity of language and nation in his address "To the German Nation" in 1806:
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Forging of the Sampo, 1893. An artist from Finland deriving inspiration from the compilation the Kalevala. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. ...Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar qualitythen, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be. This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such people as the Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as in the Kalevala, compiled from Finnish tales and folklore, or Ossian, where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from outside literary sources, were preserved in the same form over thousands of years, was not exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but fit in well with their views that such tales expressed the primordial nature of a people. For instance, the Brothers Grimm rejected many tales they collected because of their similarity to tales by Charles Perrault, which they thought proved they were not truly German tales; Sleeping Beauty survived in their collection because the tale of Brynhildr convinced them that the figure of the sleeping princess was authentically German. Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, not least in Poland, which had recently lost its independence when Russia's army crushed the Polish Rebellion under Nicholas I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic nationalism. Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an
idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people.
[edit] Gallery
Joseph Vernet, 1759, Henry Fuseli, 1781, The James Ward, 1814Shipwreck , Groeninge Nightmare, Detroit 1815, Gordale Scar Museum, Bruges Institute of Arts
John Constable, 1821, The Hay Wain
William Blake, c. 1824J. C. Dahl, 1826, John Martin, 1852, The 27, The Wood of the Outbreak of the George Caleb Bingham, Destruction of Sodom Vesuvius, Stdelsches Self-Murderers: The c. 1845, Fur traders on and Gomorrah Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt Harpies and the the Missouri River Suicides, Tate am Main
Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, 1863, 1860, Twilight in the The Rocky Mountains: Wilderness, Cleveland Lander's Peak Museum of Art
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, c. 1867, Ville dAvray National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
John William Waterhouse, 1888, The Lady of Shalott, PreRaphaelite Brotherhood
Pointillism
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Detail from Seurat's La Parade de Cirque (1889), showing the contrasting dots of paint used in pointillism. Main article: Neo-Impressionism Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct dots of colour create the impression of a wide selection of other colors and blending. Aside from color "mixing" phenomena, there is the simpler graphic phenomenon of depicted imagery emerging from disparate points. Historically, Pointillism has been a figurative mode of executing a painting, as opposed to an abstract modality of expression. The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones and is related closely to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. It is a style with few serious practitioners and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac and Cross. The term Pointillism was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation. The practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the more common methods of blending pigments on a palette or using the many commercially available premixed colors. Pointillism is analogous to the four-color CMYK printing process used by some color printers and large presses, Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Key (black). Televisions and computer monitors use a pointillist technique to represent images but with Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) colors.
Contents
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1 Practice 2 Mathematics 3 Notable artists 4 See also 5 References
[edit] Practice
If red, blue and green light (the additive primaries) are mixed, the result is something close to white light. The brighter effect of pointillist colours could rise from the fact that subtractive mixing is avoided and something closer to the effect of additive mixing is obtained even through pigments. The painting technique used to perform pointillistic color mixing is at the expense of traditional brushwork which could be used to delineate texture. Pointillism also refers to a style of 20th-century music composition, used by composers like Anton Webern.
[edit] Mathematics
Field of mathematics which deals with scattering of points in a volume, surface.Sciences et Vie Magazin num1054 Juillet 2005, p84 et seq Other example: scattering of electrons on a conductive object surface.
[edit] Notable artists

Chuck Close Henri-Edmond Cross John Roy Georges-Pierre Seurat Paul Signac Maximilien Luce Vincent van Gogh

Cubism

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Cubism

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Cubism

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[edit] Conception and origins

Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on canvas

[edit] Analytical Cubism

[edit] Synthetic Cubism

[edit] Cubism and its ideologies

[edit] Cubism in other fields

[edit] Cubism today

David's Oath of the Horatii (178485) is not just neoclassical in subject.

[edit] Neoclassicism in architecture and in the decorative and visual arts

[edit] Covert neoclassicism in Modern styles

[edit] Neoclassicism Part II: Between the Wars

[edit] Neoclassicism in Russia and the Soviet Union

[edit] Neoclassicism in the 21st century

Cover of Anna Blume, Dichtungen, 1919

[edit] New York

Rrose Slavy, the alter ego of famed Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp; photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.

[edit] Poetry; music and sound

[edit] Art techniques developed

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[edit] Impressionist techniques

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872, Muse d'Orsay

[edit] Content and composition

[edit] Main Impressionists

Camille Pissarro, Hoarfrost, 1873, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

[edit] Associates and influenced artists

[edit] Beyond France

[edit] Sculpture, photography and film

[edit] Music and literature

The Centenary of Independence (Le centenaire de l'indpendance)

Artist Year Type

Henri Rousseau 1892 Oil on canvas

[edit] Defining Post-Impressionism

Camille Pissarro, Haying at Eragny, 1889, Private Collection

[edit] Reviews and adjustments

[edit] Concise Gallery of major Post-Impressionist artists

Paul Czanne (1839 1906)

Odilon Redon (1840 Henri Rousseau (18441916) 1910)

Paul Gauguin (18481903)

Vincent van Gogh (18531890)

Charles Angrand (18541926)

Henri Edmond Cross (18561910)

Georges Seurat (1859 1891)

Paul Signac (1863 Theo van Rysselberghe 1935) (18621926)

Henri de ToulouseLautrec (18641901)

Paul Srusier (1864 1927)

Paul Ranson (1864 1909)

mile Bernard (1868- Flix Vallotton (1865 1925) 1941)

Edouard Vuillard (18681940)

Pierre Bonnard (1867 1947)

[edit] Origin of the term

Portrait of Eduard Kosmack by Egon Schiele

[edit] Visual artists

"On White II" by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923.

Sokea soittoniekka (Blind Musician) by Alvar Cawn, 1922.

"Elbe Bridge I" by Rolf Nesch

Die groen blauen Pferde by Franz Marc (1911)

[edit] Expressionist groups in painting

Rehe im Walde by Franz Marc

Franz Marc, Fighting Forms, 1914.

Egon Schiele, Pair of Women (Women embracing each other), 1915.