History Of Art

Thursday, 29 January 2015

Cubism

It is beyond question that amongst the numerous artistic masterpieces which had left effective imprints in the story and development of art through the centuries, one would come across pivotal compositions such as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles Avignon or Georges Braque’s Rum and Guitar. A new era in painting had started in the initial years of the twentieth century.

Cubism had become the abandonment of the idea of a single view point, and instead opted for multiple viewpoints so that when the object was reassembled out of the many fragments of the object from the different angles in which it was drawn, it would produce an image where a single object could be observed at as many different perspectives as possible at the same time. To a certain extent it looked like someone had taken a photograph of the same objects at different angles, cut the photos and made a collage with them where they were reassembled and overlapped on a flat surface.

What makes Les Demoiselles Avignon such an influential composition is that it is the singular painting that had developed the beginning of cubism. Picasso, being a revolutionary in painting ideas, had made this painting different from all his others. It acted as a bridge between his initial Rose Period and Blue Period to his cubist period. It is not to say, a single composition, composed in a strict uniform matter of technique, but rather, it is the combination of different paintings put together. The artist’s use of semi-realistic proportions suggest that he is still in transition of changing his techniques according to the movement that interests him, while the angular shapes of the limbs and features suggest the development of cubist ideas. Also, the darker and more strangely formed faces in the picture suggest Picasso’s budding interest in Primitive art, where it is inspired from the African fang mask which similarly to the cubist figures is simplifies and angular in composition.

From this composition onwards Picasso decided to improve and refine cubism, where he had eventually met and became friends with Georges Braque where they both shared the common growing interest in Cubism.

Georges Braque’s Rum and Guitar on the other hand marks the midway development of the cubist period. One would notice the evident development active between Picasso’s compositions to that of his co-worker’s. Despite still donning the multi-faceted characteristic of the objects the painting almost looks like a collage from a distance with brightly coloured squares painted and instead had a black outline drawn over them to mark the edge of the guitar.

While Braque had decided to quite painting cubism, Picasso had instead persisted, eventually creating the paintings that would now characterize cubism accordingly. He made the subject matter indecipherable and would make use of very bright colour and patterns when painting his work.

Graphic designers nowadays still use these artists as

inspiration for their work.

References:

· http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm

· http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/cubism.htm

· Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London

Art Nouveau

Art nouveau

Art nouveau was an global decorative style that thrived basically during the two decades, the 1890s and 1910s that fixed the turn of the century. It included all the design arts and furniture, architecture, and product design, fashion, and graphics and subsequently included posters, and teapots, dishes, advertisements, packages, and spoons; chairs, door frames, and staircases, factories, subway entrances, and households. Art nouveau’s finding visual value is an organic, plantlike line. Freed from origins and gravity, it can either ripple with whiplash energy or flow with neat lines as it expresses, modulates, and decorates a given space. Vine tendrils, flowers for example the rose and lily, birds mainly peacocks, and the human female form were normal motifs from which this fluid line was changed.

The term art nouveau ascended in a Paris gallery run by art dealer Samuel Bing, which opened in 1895 as the Salon de l’Art Nouveau. In adding to Japanese art, “new art” by European and American artists was showed and sold there. This gallery became a global meeting place where many fresh artists were presented, between them the American glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose work had a sizable impact in Europe.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design, which first seen in 1936, was one of the first records to give art nouveau an important place in the expansion of twentieth-century art and architecture. Pevsner saw the movement’s main features as “the long sensitive curve, evocative of the lily’s stem, an insect’s feeler, the thread of a blossom or infrequently a slender flame, the arc undulating, flowing and interplaying with others, sprouting from angles and covering irregularly all available surfaces.”

Chéret and Grasset

The change from Victorian graphics to the art nouveau style was a steady one. Two graphic artists working in Paris, Jules Chéret from 1836 till 1933 and Eugène Grasset from 1841 till 1917, played significant roles in the change. In 1881 a new French law regarding freedom of the press lifted many censorship limits and allowed posters everywhere except on churches, at polls, or in areas chosen for official notices. This new rule led to a booming poster industry employing designers, printers, and affi cheurs (billposters). The streets developed an art gallery for the state, and valued painters felt no shame at creating publicity posters. The Arts and Crafts movement was making a new respect for the applied arts, and Jules Chéret showed the way. Now commended as the father of the modern poster, Chéret was the son of an indigent typesetter who paid four hundred francs to secure a three-year lithographic internship for his son at age thirteen. The teenager spent his weekdays lettering backwards on lithographic stones and his Sundays riveting art at the Louvre. After completing his education he worked as a lithographic craftsman and renderer for numerous businesses and took drawing classes. At age eighteen he went to London but could only find work making catalogue drawings of furniture, so he return ed to Paris after six months.

Jules Chéret, poster for Orphée

aux Enfers (Orpheus in Hades), 1879.

Chéret evolved toward larger, more

animated fi gures and greater unity of

word and image.

Jules Chéret, poster for La

biche au bois (The Doe in the Wood),

1866. Chéret’s early green and black

poster used the multiple image

format so popular in the 1860s. The

lettering is a harbinger of the swirling

forms marking his mature style.

Bibliography:

· Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

· Mr. Bing and L'art Nouveau | New York Public Library | BiblioCommons. 2015. Mr. Bing and L'art Nouveau | New York Public Library | BiblioCommons. [ONLINE] Available at:http://nypl.bibliocommons.com/item/print_item/18673934052_mr_bing_and_lart_nouveau. [Accessed 30 January 2015].

The Conceptual Image

Sensing that traditional narrative design did not report the wants of the times, post–World War I graphic designers reinvented the forthcoming image to express the engine age and progressive graphic ideas. In alike task for new imagery, the periods after World War II saw the expansion of the abstract image in graphic design. Images transported not merely story information but ideas and concepts. Mental content joined perceived content as theme. The illustrator understanding a writer’s text produced to the graphic imagist making a report. A new type of image maker was worried with the total plan of the space and the integration of word and picture. In the exploding information culture of the second half of the twentieth century, the entire past of visual arts was available to the graphic artist as a library of possible methods and pictures. In particular, motivation was gained from the advances of twentieth-century art movements, the spatial shapes of cubism, the juxtapositions, displacements, and scale variations of surrealism, the pure color undone from natural position by expressionism and fauvism, and the recycling of mass-media pictures by pop art. In the decades following World War II, graphic artists had greater chance for self-expression, produced more personal images, and founded individual styles and methods. The old fashioned boundaries among the fine arts and public visual communications became hazy.

The creation of conceptual pictures developed a significant design approach in Poland, Germany, the United States, and even Cuba. It also cropped up around the whole world in the work of individuals whose quest for relevant and effective images in the post–World War II era led them near the abstract image.

Armando Testa, poster for

Pirelli, 1954. The strength of a bull

elephant is bestowed on the tire by

the surrealist technique of image

combination.

Armando Testa, rubber and

plastics exhibition poster, 1972. A

synthetic hand holds a plastic ball in a

distinctive and appropriate image for

this trade exhibition.

In the most unique work of the Italian graphic designer Armando Testa, for example, metaphysical mixtures were used to convey essential truths about the subject. Testa was an abstract painter until after the war, when he established a graphic design studio in his native Turin. His 1950s publicity movements for Pirelli tires had a global impact on graphic design rational Testa borrowed the language of surrealism by joining the image of a tire with immediately familiar symbols. In his posters and ads, the image is the main means of communication, and he reduces the vocal content to a few words or just the creation name. Testa effectively used more subtle flaws, such as images made of artificial materials as a means of inserting unexpected elements into graphic design.

Bibliography:

· Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

· Testa | sitographics. 2015. Testa | sitographics. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.sitographics.it/imagini_testa.html. [Accessed 30 January 2015].

Post Modernism

Post Modernism developed from critiques of architectural modernism in the 1970s. By the 1980s, visual art which criticized was also being referred to as ‘post modern’. Post Modernism started during the late 20th century that has spread across the entire world. The terminology of the word Post Modernism comes from artist that refused and reacted against the styles and practices of the actual modernism.

Post modernism architecture uses more eclectic materials and styles with greater playfulness. Parody of earlier styles is a dominant Post modern trait. Another is the refusal to develop comprehensive theories about architecture and social progress. Modernism and the international style in architecture rejected tradition and embraced the innovations of the industrial capitalism.

Leading artists who worked at the style include people like Studio Dumbar, Rick Valicenti, April Greiman and more helped in producing works that encourage the movement. The Style avoids using something that was part of traditional Modernism and looked at previous movements such as Dada, Art Deco and Expressionism. Important things were fashionable at that time that aided motivate the art is the music of that period, the fashion sense, the idea of bright lively colors in products to make them more striking on the eye and also -revolution continuous by youths.

After World War 2, Modernism and positivism got an even bigger shoe as economic conditions enhanced for the middle class in many states. Jacking up the standard of existing on such a vast scale indirect that the ‘Machine Age’ was wrong. People came to expect new houses, televisions, dishwashers, toasters, vehicles and the other entire creature luxuries the contemporary age could shake out.

The Wet magazine was fixated on health and fashion topics where it was Greiman’s designs that signified all this in a front page. When observing at confident aspects within the image we can see that there are many shades composed together that shows difference in order to make some forms more significant than others, a sample is the relation of the yellow typography on the blue rectangle where it gives the word an important share of the work. There is also that idea of symetry giving a sense of direction at where the viewer should look, and there isn’t any free hand drawings to disturbe the simplicity and symmetry of it. Roughly that is very stimulating in the design is that if we look at the upper left hand corner of the image just under the word wet there is a stepped feature which is found alot in Wolfgang Weignart who mentored April Greiman influencing her in the International Style and that of the New Wave.

Bibliography:

· April Greiman | biography - American graphic designer | Encyclopedia Britannica. 2015. April Greiman | biography - American graphic designer | Encyclopedia Britannica. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1080159/April-Greiman. [Accessed 30 January 2015].

· Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London

Art Deco

Art Deco started in the early decades of the 20th century, to be precise in the 1920’s and it was a very famous movement, but it decreased its popularity in the 1930’s and 1940’s just after World War 2.

At that time, many countries started to develop in industry, science and technology that were a big part of the society and economy because with these the world increased work for people and there were more money turning around. This also had some changes on the people's calm life, because of the economy life came faster, speedier and more hectic one. A lot of people felt the change but the world was turning a new page in its history. More and more factories were opening and there was work for people, and even lower class people worked to get some money. Therefore, this art movement was directly influenced by what had become these people's everyday life. Due to the ongoing progress economically and politically, the line which separated the social classes started becoming more blurred, and soon the working class began mixing with the high class.Now, all could afford to make use of the train, and cinema and every household owned a radio.

Therefore, this style appealed to all tastes and people of all walks of life. It was both simple and opulent and appeared very stylish and attractive. Art Deco posters are very simple but still effective in the way the composition has a lot of lines and at first site one would know that it has a large influence from Cubism. Art Deco posters represented in itself an illusion of speed and light thanks to the use of streamlined form, the light blending of colours, and the subject of the posters themselves.

Art Deco had developed its roots from influential art movements that had surfaced previously such as Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism due to the common feature of the use of linear and geometric shapes.

Archaeological findings, being unearthed at the time in various parts of the world had left a large impact on the designer's inspiration. Many people turned working to sculptures, ornaments cause of the influence of the architecture from ancient Rome, Greece, Aztec, African and Egyptian art and remains.

They made use of contrasting textures such as that of marble, hardwood, metals, plastic, glass and crystal as well as that from exotic sources like ivory, bone, and animal skin and furs of the interior of especially rich families, politics, and expensive hotels.

Other than the use of materiels they compose their posters out of drawing geometric shapes, straight lines, and make use of bold curves. The posters are commonly designed to be either in full vibrant colours, grayscale, or monochromatic. Colours blend subtly in lighter or darker tones to represent light and speed.

Bibliography:

Art Deco - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2015. Art Deco - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco. [Accessed 29 January 2015].

Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

Incorporating Fauvism in Graphic Design: Part 2

Henri Matisse was one of the most prominent French painters in the twentieth century. He was a draughtsman by occupation, but soon developed his artistic talent to become also a printmaker, sculptor and a painter. By looking at his work alone, one would find it hard to guess that in reality he was an intellectual artist instead of an emotional artist. Matisse is commonly viewed together with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the few artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the first half of the twentieth century, accountable for important progresses in painting and sculpture. He worked hard to try out several different techniques and styles of painting, similarly to what Paul Cezanne had done. Having however worked with a particular conviction during the Fauvist movement, he became well known for his use of bright colour.

In 1905, Matisse and Derain together departed for the port of Collioure in Southern France and the Fauvist pictures that they extracted there rehabilitated outlooks towards color in art. The complete delight of expression that they attained through their freethinking tactic to color was a gunshot in the arm for the art of painting. In Matisse's paintings the outward liberty of his form seems to contradict any dexterity or performance, but when one starts to examine his effective use of visual foundations one begins to comprehend that there is an innate awareness at work. The key to his success in using such overstated colors was the understanding that he had to simplify his picture. He recognized that if he strengthened the quality of colour for expressive effect, he must diminish the amount of detail used in drawing the forms of the image. By using the same kind of simplification and naturalness to his drawing and brushwork, Matisse was amplifying the sense of pleasure that he had realized through color.

His painting's audience was scandalized at the painting, especially in the initial years of the movement. The subject matter which was quite conventional to say the least, but that was not what left the people perturbed. The fact that the colours used were unnatural and in the shaking combinations were what left the viewers like this. Although many would settle on saying that Matisse's work exemplified the Fauvist art movement, features reminiscent of Van Gogh's and Cezanne's art were visibly present in his compositions. By doing so, Matisse helped incline other painters away from the traditional and customary academic artistic ideas.

Although he was initially labeled as one of the trouble-making Fauvists, by the 1920s he had completely broken away any connections with this movement. However, since he mastered the animated language of colour and drawing, exhibited in a frame of work traversing over fifty years he had won himself recognition as a leading figure in the history of modern art.

Nowadays this art movement is also a strong influence graphic design, where similarly artists use vivid colours in their posters, magazine covers, and adverts.

Bibliography:

· Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London

· Jesse Bryant Wilder, Art History for Dummies, 2007, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis

A beginner's guide to Fauvism | Fauvism and Matisse | Khan Academy. 2015. A beginner's guide to Fauvism | Fauvism and Matisse | Khan Academy. [ONLINE] Available at:https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/fauvism-matisse/a/a-beginners-guide-to-fauvism. [Accessed 19 January 2015].

Incorporating Fauvism in Graphic Design: Part 1

Fauvism was one of the artistic advances that thrived in France in the early twentieth century. The Fauve painters were the first to halt their Impressionist techniques and instead opted for the more vivacious and colour-focused Fauvist movement. Such artists included Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Rouault. The conservative and academic art critic Louis Vauxelles who reviewed their work, labeled them with the term Fauves that was stuck with the small group of friends for another five years which means Wild Beasts after they collectively decided to exhibit their compositions in the year 1905 in the much renowned Autumn Salon found in the heart of Paris. These daring artists were directly inspired by the likes of Van Gogh, Gaugin, Suerat and Cezanne due to their revolutionary choice of subject matter, the forms and colours they used.

Henri Matisse and Andre Derain introduced unnatural colours and vivid brushstrokes into their painting, relating their scene or subject by using areas of flat colour without any hint of blending or applying any shades and tints. Derain and de Vlaminck specifically applied lurid paint with thick and intense brushstrokes which was a defining characteristic of Van Gogh's art. Henri Matisse was ultimately acknowledged as the frontrunner of Les Fauves and like the rest of the group, he highlighted the use of powerful hue as a means of defining space and light and was also used as the direct approach for artists to express their emotions. This can be proved to be so in the painting of Henri Matisse's wife where he includes bright random colours in the portrait. It is called The Green Stripe due to the green part extending from the forehead to the upper lip.

The fact that Matisse and the other Fauvists painted many nudes, particularly women, put them in the position of brutal accusations, where art critics reproached them for being weak in the face of bodily and materialistic pleasure and of being hedonists. Moreover some of the painting's subject matter is quite extroversive and sensual. Paintings such as that of The Bonheur de Vivre depicts men and women

in the nude in the acts of embracing, reclining and dancing in the outdoor environment.

Matisse however, given his reserved manner and ordinary practices was not a hedonist at all. On the contrary, he expressed conservative bourgeois standards in most of his landscapes including The Canal du Midi, which he completed in 1898.

Bibliography:

· Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London

· Jesse Bryant Wilder, Art History for Dummies, 2007, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis

· A beginner's guide to Fauvism | Fauvism and Matisse | Khan Academy. 2015. A beginner's guide to Fauvism | Fauvism and Matisse | Khan Academy. [ONLINE] Available at:https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/early-abstraction/fauvism-matisse/a/a-beginners-guide-to-fauvism. [Accessed 19 January 2015].