20 Century Art

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Movements
Goldfish, Matisse 1911 The Open Window, Matisse 1905

The Pool of London, Derain 1906

• Fauvism was a joyful style of painting that delighted in
using bold colors.
• It was developed in France at the beginning of the 20th
century by Henri Matisse and André Derain.
• The artists who painted in this style were known as 'Les
Fauves'.
• 'Les Fauves' believed that color should be used at its
highest pitch to express the artist's feelings about a
subject, rather than simply to describe what it looks
like.
• Fauvist paintings have two main characteristics:
extremely simplified drawing and intensely exaggerated
color.
EXPRESSIONISM Red Tower at Halle, Kirchner, 1915

Still from the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Self Portrait with Horn,

Max Beckmann 1938-40
• The 'self expression' in the art of Vincent
Van Gogh and Edvard Munch inspired
Expressionist artists in the 20th century.
• German Expressionism is a style of art that is
charged with an emotional or spiritual vision
of the world.
 ABSTRACT

Abstract composite, Anne Bonnet

Fugue in Two Colors, Frantisek Kupka 1912

Squares with Concentric Circles, Kandinsky 1913

There is no must in art, because art is free. Wassily Kandinsky
• Abstract art attempts to shift the focus to
one or more of those elements so the
viewer can witness those elements in a
new and unusual way that the viewer
hasn't witnessed before.
• The word 'abstract' means to withdraw
part of something in order to consider it
separately.
• In Abstract art that 'something' is one or
more of the visual elements of a subject:
its line, shape, tone, pattern, texture, or
form.
 Three Musicians,
CUBISM Picasso 1921

Woman with a guitar, Braque

Seated Woman (Marie-Therese), 1913
Picasso 1937
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth” –
Pablo Picasso
• Cubism was invented around 1907 in Paris
by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
• It was the first abstract style of modern
art.
• Cubist paintings ignore the traditions of
perspective drawing and show you many
views of a subject at one time.
• The Cubists believed that the traditions of
Western art had become exhausted and to
revitalize their work, they drew on the
expressive energy of art from other
 FUTURISM

Movement and Sensation, Balla

Development of a Bottle in Space, Boccioni 1913

Dynamism of a Cyclist, Boccioni 1913

• Futurism was a revolutionary Italian movement
that celebrated modernity.
• The Futurists adopted the visual vocabulary of
Cubism to express their ideas - but with a slight
twist. In a Cubist painting the artist records
selected details of a subject as he moves around
it, whereas in a Futurist painting the subject itself
seems to move around the artist.
• The main figures associated with the movement
were the artists, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo
Balla, Gino Severini, the musician Luigi Russolo
and the architect Antonio Sant'Elia.
DE STIJL

Composition VII (the three

graces), Van Doesburg 1917.

Composition with Yellow, Blue

and Red, Mondrian 1937-42
Red & Blue chair designed by
Gerrit Rietveld, 1917
• De Stijl was a Dutch 'style' of pure abstraction
developed by Piet Mondrian, Theo Van
Doesburg and Bart van der Leck.
• Mondrian was the outstanding artist of the
group.
• Mondrian gradually refined the elements of
his art to a grid of lines and primary colors.
• He saw primary colors in a universal harmony
way: yellow radiated the sun's energy; blue
receded as infinite space and red materialized
where blue and yellow met.
DADA

L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp 1919

Readymade: pencil markings on a
"Mona Lisa" reproduction print
ABCD (Self-portrait),
Raoul Hausmann 1923-24
• It was a form of artistic anarchy born out of
disgust for the social, political and cultural
establishment of the time which it held
responsible for Europe's descent into World War.
• Dadaism was an ‘anti art’ stance as it was intent
on destroying the artistic values of the past.
• Dada’s weapons in the war against the art
establishment were confrontation and
provocation.
• They confronted the artistic establishment with
the irrationality of their collages and assemblages.
SURREALISM

The Persistence of Memory, Dali 1931

Time Transfixed, Magritte 1938

Uba Imperator, Ernst 1923

• Surrealism was the positive response to Dada's
negativity. Its aim was to liberate the artist's
imagination by tapping into the unconscious mind
to discover a 'superior' reality - a 'sur-reality'.
• To achieve this the Surrealists drew upon the
images of dreams, the effects of combining
disassociated images, and the spontaneous form
of drawing without the conscious control of the
mind.
• The most influential of the Surrealist artists were
Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali and René
Magritte.
Abstract Expressionism

Eyes in the Heat, Pollock 1946

Painting Number 2, Kline 1954

Cherries, Guston 1976

• Abstract Expressionism was fueled by the idea of
the subconscious, to paint without thought was
in full flow by 1946.
• The pioneers of Abstract Expressionism were
Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko,
Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and
Philip Guston.
• The modern/contemporary art was the first
American art style to exert an influence on a
global scale.
• Abstract Expressionism was also known as
‘Action Painting’, a title which implied that the
physical act of painting was as important as the
result itself.
Pop Art

Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol 1962

Marilyn Monroe, Warhol 1962

Whaam, Lichtenstein 1963

• Pop Art was hugely successful and became an
icon of the 1960s. The champions of Pop Art were
Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Tom
Wesselmann.
• It coincided with the globalization of pop music
and youth culture, personified by Elvis and The
Beatles.
• Pop Art was brash, colorful, young, fun and
hostile to the artistic establishment.
• The images of celebrity and consumerism by
Andy Warhol and the comic book iconography of
Roy Lichtenstein represent the style as we know
it today.
OP ART

Intrinsic Harmony, Anuszkiewicz 1965

Movement in Squares, Riley 1961

Vega-Nor, Vasarely 1969
• Op Art is short for 'optical art'. It was an abstract
style that emerged in the 1960's based on the
illusionistic effects of line, shape, pattern and
color.
• Op Artists such as Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley
and Richard Anuszkiewicz popularized the
movement.
• Time magazine referred to the new wave as Op
art and how it manipulated the eye.
• Op Art was very popular with the public and was
quickly commercialized by the design and fashion
industries.
MINIMALISM

Harran II, Stella 1967

Free Ride, Tony Smith 1962

’23’, McCracken 1964

• Minimalism was not only a reaction against the
emotionally charged techniques of Abstract
Expressionism but also a further refinement of pure
abstraction.
• It used hard-edged forms and geometric grid structures.
Color was used to define space or surface.
• Ad Reinhardt, whose late paintings anticipate
Minimalism, put it simply, ‘The more stuff in it, the
busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less
is more...’
• Frank Stella, Don Judd, Robert Morris, John McCracken
and Sol LeWitt were important contributors to
Minimalism.
• Minimalism was a style which could be easily translated
into architecture and furnishing and it was.
PHOTO-REALISM

Paris Street Scene, Estes 1972

Self-Portrait, Close 1997

Ralph’s Diner, Goings 1981-82

• Photo-realism, also called Super-realism, 
American art movement that began in the 1960s,
taking photography as its inspiration.
• Photo-realist painters created highly illusionistic
images that referred not to nature but to the
reproduced image.
• Artists such as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Audrey
Flack, Robert Bechtle, and Chuck Close attempted
to reproduce what the camera could record.
• Photo-realists typically projected a photographed
image onto a canvas and then used an airbrush to
reproduce the effect of a photo printed on glossy
paper
 POINTILISM
• 1. Points of pure colour: Pointillism involved the application of paint in
carefully placed dots of pure, unmixed colour. According to Seurat and
Signac, these would be blended by the viewer’s eye to create a more striking
image than any made after mixing colours conventionally on a palette.
• 2: Science of the eye: As important to Pointillism as any artist was the
French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul – and his book, Principles of
Harmony and Contrast of Colours. Employed by a Parisian tapestry works
that wished to improve the strength of its colours, he discovered that the issue
wasn't the dyes being used but the way different hues were being combined. 
• In short, the visual impact of a tapestry was actually a matter of optics, not
chemistry. It depended on the juxtaposition of complementary colours (which
enhanced each other's intensity) – blue and orange, for example. Seurat and
the Pointillists drew heavily on Chevreul’s discoveries, applying to paints
what the chemist had found in threads.
• 3. 'Painting by dots': The movement's name derives from a review of Seurat's
work by the French art critic, Félix Fénéon, who used the expression peinture au
point (“painting by dots”). Seurat actually preferred the label "Divisionism" – or,
for that matter, Chromoluminarism – but it was Pointillism that stuck. As
for Fénéon, one of the movement’s great champions, he'd go on to be
immortalised in a celebrated canvas, Signac's Portrait of Félix Fénéon, from
1890, now part of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) collection in New
York.
• 4. Meticulous technique: Pointillism is regarded as a Neo-Impressionist
movement. Which is to say, it grew out of – and beyond – Impressionism. Works
such as Un Dimanche Après-Midi À L'île De La Grande Jatte were even
exhibited as part of the eighth (and final) Impressionist exhibition, in Paris in
May 1886. Like members of that earlier movement, Pointillists wished to render
optical phenomena. However, they renounced fluid, spontaneous strokes in
favour of a measured, meticulous technique.
Resources

www.op-art.co.uk
www.artyfactory.com
http://www.historybyzim.com/art/
http://www.incredibleart.org/links/artstyles.html

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/255397/Harlem-Ren
aissance/272830/Visual-art

http://www.allbuyart.com/art-movements.asp