Realism and Modernism in Art History

Realism

• Often considered the start of modern art
• Focused on everyday life and the modern world as subjects
• Embraced progressive aims, seeking truth by re-examining values
• Dealt with social, economic, political, and cultural structures of the mid-19th century
• Showed unflinching views of unpleasant moments
• Used dark, earthy colors to challenge ideals of beauty
• The first explicitly anti-institutional art movement
• Realist painters targeted the bourgeoisie and monarchy
• Displayed work independently, despite submitting to the Academy of Art
• Promoted artists as self-publicists due to newspaper and mass media growth
• Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet used the media to enhance their celebrity

Modernism

• Represented a break from the past, pursuing new forms of expression in fine arts
• Art experimentation occurred between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries
• All arts sought authentic responses to industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th century
• Modernist literature, like Henry James and Virginia Woolf, rejected traditional continuity
• Stream-of-consciousness narration was used
• Artists such as Édouard Manet abandoned traditional perspective and modeling
• Architects explored unique forms for new technologies
• Choreographers and composers rejected traditions and explored new tonality approaches

Impressionism

• Perhaps the most important movement in modern painting
• In the 1860s, artists aimed to simply paint what they saw, thought, and felt
• The focus was on capturing an "impression" of a landscape, thing, or person at a specific moment
• Lighter, looser brushwork and painting outdoors was common
• Impressionists rejected official exhibitions, organizing their own, which were initially met with hostility
• Predicted the emergence of modern art and the avant-garde

Post-Impressionism

• Encompassed a range of artistic styles responding to Impressionism's opticality
• Variations ranged from Neo-Impressionism to the Symbolism
• Focused on the subjective vision of the artist
• Painting shifted from depicting the world to reflecting the artist's mind and soul
• Influenced groups like the Expressionists and Feminist Art

Post - Impressionism

• Often regarded as a necessary precursor for many Modernist art movements
• Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and others made it famous in the late 19th century
• The movement expanded on Impressionism's limitations by researching methods for a more untainted form of expression
• It retained Impressionism's use of vibrant and vivid colors with short brushstrokes in the majority of cases
• Artists mainly created their works individually allowing artists to experiment in various directions
• Intensified Impressionism, as defined by van Gogh, to pointillism, as seen in Seurat's most well-known work, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86)

Fauvism

• Known as one of the first avant-garde movements to succeed in the early 20th century
• Henri Matisse spearheaded it
• Fauvism drew heavily on Impressionism, using vibrant colors to portray landscapes and still lifes
• Fauvists, such as Matisse, incorporated a heightened feeling of emotionalism into their works
• Crude, overt brushstrokes and intense colors straight from their tubes were frequently used
• Art critic Louis Vauxcelles gave these painters the moniker "fauves" (wild beasts) as a result of the exaggerated expressiveness of these simple techniques
• Other notable Fauvists include André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque
• The latter progressed from Fauvism's exposed emotionalism to develop the more structured and logical Cubism

Cubism

• Possibly recognized as the best-known Modernist art movement
• Commonly related to Pablo Picasso in particular
• Georges Braque also served as a leader in the movement
• Picasso and Braque's paintings are almost indistinguishable from one another at the height of Cubism's reign
• The revelation of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which depicts naked women in a fractured perspective and displays a significant African influence, is frequently cited as the beginning of Cubism
• Art critic Louis Vauxcelles gave the movement its name in 1908 after describing Braque's House at L'Estaque as being constructed of cubes
• The main goals of Cubists were to reject the past's conventions of just imitating nature and to begin a new movement that accentuated the canvas's flat dimensionality
• The employment of varied conflicting vantage points, which paint pictures of typical objects like musical instruments, pitchers, bottles, and the human figure, was used to achieve this effect
• Braque and Picasso started using a monochromatic scale to emphasize their concentration on the inherent structure of their works as they made progress
• Cubism had a long-lasting impact on many sculptors and architects of the period, despite being closely linked to painting

Futurism

• Perhaps one of the Modernist era's most divisive movements
• On the surface, it compared humans to machines and vice versa in order to celebrate progress, speed, and innovation while discarding artistic and cultural traditions
• However, advocacy of war and misogyny was at the center of the Futurist platform
• Filippo Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, in which Futurism was created, was embraced by sculptors, architects, painters, and writers

Vorticism

• Since its mouthpiece was the well-known London-based magazine Blast, it can be considered a particularly English artistic movement
• Vorticism followed a similar path as futurism in that it reveled in the innovative advances of the machine age and grasped the prospective virtues of dynamic change
• Famous painter Wyndham Lewis and ubiquitous Modernist poet Ezra Pound founded it right before the start of World War I
• Vorticism stayed localized in London
• Vorticists prized being distinct from like movements
• They employed simple vocabulary in their literature
• Vorticists advocated abstraction as the only way to break ties with the dominant and stifling Victorian past so they could advance into a new era
• Vorticism fought to embrace the indescribable destruction as a result of the new equipment

Constructivism

• Cubism and Futurism extended westward into Russia in the late 1910s
• They combined to produce a new art movement known as Constructivism
• It adopted the notion that art should be “constructed" from contemporary industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass in order to serve a societal function
• Vladimir Tatlin, who was greatly impacted by Picasso's geometric constructions while studying in Paris in 1913
• Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo published the Realist Manifesto in 1920 in the footsteps of the Futurists and Vorticists
• It declared an admiration of machines and technology, as well as their functionalism
• Tatlin also saw painting as a "dead" art form unless it was going to be used as a blueprint for something that would be physically constructed

Suprematism

• Another Russian Modernist movement , although it placed a greater emphasis and adoption of abstraction
• Identified the first movement to employ pure geometric abstraction in painting
• Kazimir Malevich is regarded as its founder, that he, along with other contemporaries, wrote the Suprematist manifesto
• Derived from Malevich's claim that the movement would stimulate the "superiority of pure emotion or perception in the pictorial arts"
• The objective was to deconstruct art to its most basic components, employing fundamental shapes -squares, triangles, and circles as well as primary and neutral colors
• As Soviet suppression grew, the movement came to an almost full stop