Painting 3

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 André 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, and philosophy and social theory.

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet, considered one of the chief representatives of Dadaism and Surrealism.

Salvador Dali was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Salvador Dalí's artistic repertoire also included film, sculpture, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney on the unfinished Academy Award-nominated short cartoon Destino, which was completed and released posthumously in 2003.

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. 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 painting 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.

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 Eugene Delacroix. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the world. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes had usually been painted indoors. 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.

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which exists independently of visual references to the world. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a 'new kind of art' which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual turmoil in all areas of Western culture at that time Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling Rocket, (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of objects.

Wassily Kandinsky a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, one of the most famous 20th-century artists is generally considered the first important painter of modern abstract art. As an early modernist, in search of new modes of visual expression, and spiritual expression, he theorized as did contemporary occultists and theosophists, that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality.

Movement in painting based on the use of intensely vivid, nonnaturalistic colours; centred on a group of French artists who worked together from about 1905 to 1907, it was the first of the major avantgarde movements in European art in the period of unprecedented experimentation between the turn of the century and the First World War. The dominant figure of the Fauvist group was Henri Matisse, who used vividly contrasting colours as early as 1899, but first realized the potential of colour freed from its traditional descriptive role when he painted with Cross and Signac in the bright light of StTropez in the summer of 1904 and with Derain at Collioure in the summer of 1905. The Fauves first exhibited together at the Salon d'Automne of 1905 and their name was given to them by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who pointed to a Renaissance-like sculpture in the middle of the same gallery and exclaimed: ‘Donatello au milieu des fauves!’ (Donatello among the wild beasts).

The remark was printed in the 17 October issue of Gil Blas and the name immediately caught on. Predictably, the Fauvist pictures came in for a good deal of mockery and abuse; Camille Mauclair, for example, wrote that ‘A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public'. However, there were also some sympathetic reviews, and Gertrude and Leo Stein bought Matisse's Woman with a Hat (private collection), the picture that was attracting the worst abuse. This greatly helped to restore Matisse's battered morale and marked the beginning of a dramatic rise in his fortunes.

Things to Consider When Looking at This Painting: Composition:

Look at how both the strong lines in the composition and the use of color draw your eye into the painting, towards the houses. How the large areas of black in the foreground and background frame the main subject of painting.

Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors. 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 word Pointillism is actually the incorrect term used more populary today than its actual name of Neo-Impressionism. The term itself 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 method of blending pigments on a palette or using the many commercially available premixed colors. The latter is analogous to the CMYK or four-color printing process used by personal color printers and large presses; Pointillism is not analogous to the colors and process used by computer monitors and television sets to produce colors; the latter uses green and no yellow at all to produce colors from green through orange as well as gray, brown and black.

Practice: Pointillism in printmaking: a chromolithography of a King Kelly baseball card from 1888. 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 brushwork used to perform pointillistic color mixing is at the expense of traditional brushwork which could be used to delineate texture. Color television receivers and computer screens, both CRT and LCD, use tiny dots of primary red, green, and blue to render color, and can thus be regarded as a kind of pointillism. Pointillism also refers to a style of 20th-century music composition, used by composers like Anton Webern.

Cubism was the first 'abstract' art style which began in the early 1900s when artists such as Georges Braque (French) and Pablo Picasso (Spanish) began painting in such a way that was far removed from traditional art styles. The Cubists tried to create a new way of seeing things in art. Many of their subjects, be they people or landscapes, were represented as combinations of basic geometric shapes - sometimes showing multiple viewpoints of a particular image. In Cubism the subject matter was less important that the way it was represented. Early Cubist works represented objects, figures, and landscapes. It developed into more cryptic and indecipherable works, in which overall pattern became most important. Early Cubist works were mostly in drab colours; later Cubists such as Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, used more brilliant colours. The name Cubism was coined by the art critic Louis Vauxelles, from a remark made by Matisse about Braque's painting of "little cubes." The cubists were influenced most by the art of the Post Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne.

Analytic Cubism Analytic 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.

Synthetic Cubism Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. It was seen as the first time that collage had been made as a fine art work. Synthetic cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together.

Still Life with Chair Cane 1912

Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass 1912

A modern art movement originating among Italian artists in 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of World War I. Futurism was a celebration of the machine age, glorifying war and favoring the growth of fascism. Futurist painting and sculpture were especially concerned with expressing movement and the dynamics of natural and man-made forms. Some of these ideas, including the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the cubists, and the constructivists.

The City Rises

Street Light (Lampada — Studio di luce)

The Laugh (La risata)

Umberto Boccioni The City Rises (1910)