Minimal Art

Minimal art was an artistic style, which emerged in America the late 1950s. The term was taken from an essay about modern American art by art philosopher Richard Wollheim in 1965. Hard Edge and Colour Field Painting tendencies were an important pre-requisite for the development of this style, as they had essentially prepared the ground for the use of very simple, reduced minimal forms. Minimal Art first established itself in painting, and then sculpture, where it had the greatest impact.
Minimal art sculptures were primarily made from industrial materials, such as aluminium, steel, glass, concrete, wood, plastic or stone. The objects, frequently reduced to very simple geometric shapes, were industrially produced, thus removing the artist’s personal signature from the work. The works were also characterised by serial arrangements of a number of bodies/shapes, and large dimensions.
The main representatives of Minimal art were Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken and Robert Morris.
In contrast with Abstract Expressionism and its impulsive and gestural expression of the unconsciousness, Minimal artists focused on material aesthetics, the relationship of objects to space, the effects of light, and producing highly reduced arrangements. Donald Judd (1928-94) followed these basic principles, arranging coloured aluminium boxes in different ways, above, or next to one another. Carl Andre (born 1935) stacked rectangular wooden pegs on top of each other, or in a row. Dan Flavin (1933-96) created subtle light spaces with evenly laid out neon tubes. Minimalism also had an impact on dance and music in the 1960s. Minimalist principles also influenced artistic phenomenon such as Land Art, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art.

The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. In addition, the work of De Stijl  artists is a major source of reference for this kind of work. De Stijl expanded the ideas that could be expressed by using basic elements such as lines and planes organized in very particular manners.

The reconstruction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion in Barcelona

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto "Less is more" to describe his aesthetic tactic of arranging the numerous necessary components of a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity, by enlisting every element and detail to serve multiple visual and functional purposes (such as designing a floor to also serve as the radiator, or a massive fireplace to also house the bathroom). Designer Buckminster Fuller adopted the engineer's goal of "Doing more with less", but his concerns were oriented towards technology and engineering rather than aesthetics. A similar sentiment was industrial designer Dieter Rams' motto, "Less but better" adapted from Mies. The structure uses relatively simple elegant designs; ornamentations are quality rather than quantity. The structure's beauty is also determined by playing with lighting, using the basic geometric shapes as outlines, using only a single shape or a small number of like shapes for components for design unity, using tasteful non-fussy bright color combinations, usually natural textures and colors, and clean and fine finishes. Using sometimes the beauty of natural patterns on stone cladding and real wood encapsulated within ordered simplified structures, and real metal producing a simplified but prestigious architecture and interior design. May use color brightness balance and contrast between surface colors to improve visual aesthetics. The structure would usually have industrial and space age style utilities (lamps, stoves, stairs, technology, etc.), neat and straight components (like walls or stairs) that appear to be machined with equipment, flat or nearly flat roofs, pleasing negative spaces, and large windows to let in lots of sunlight. This and science fiction may have contributed to the late twentieth century futuristic architecture design, and modern home decor. Modern minimalist home architecture with its unnecessary internal walls removed probably have led to the popularity of the open plan kitchen and living room style.

Piet Mondrian

Barnett Newman, Voice of Fire, 1967,
National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa

Another modern master who exemplifies reductivist ideas is Luis Barragán. In minimalism, the architectural designers pay special attention to the connection between perfect planes, elegant lighting, and careful consideration of the void spaces left by the removal of three-dimensional shapes from an architectural design. The more attractive looking minimalist home designs are not truly minimalist, because these use more expensive building materials and finishes, and are relatively larger.

Contemporary architects working in this tradition include John Pawson, Eduardo Souto de Moura. Álvaro Siza Vieira, Tadao Ando, Alberto Campo Baeza, Yoshio Taniguchi, Peter Zumthor, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Vincent Van Duysen, Claudio Silvestrin, Michael Gabellini, and Richard Gluckman.

POP-ART

POP-ART

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In Pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

Richard Hamilton's collage
 Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?
 (1956) is one of the earliest works to be considered "pop art".

Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. And due to its utilization of found objects and images it is similar to Dada. Pop art is aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Much of pop art is considered incongruent, as the conceptual practices that are often used make it difficult for some to readily comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of Postmodern Art themselves.
Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, like in the Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol. Even the labeling on the shipping carton containing retail items has been used as subject matter in pop art, for example in Warhol's Campbell's Tomato Juice Box 1964, or his Brillo Soap Box sculptures.

Andy Warhol
, Campbell's Tomato Juice Box, 1964, Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood,
 Museum of Modern Art, New York City

The origins of pop art in North America and Great Britain developed differently. In the United States, it marked a return to hard-edged composition and representational art as a response by artists using impersonal, mundane reality, irony and parody to defuse the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of Abstract Expressionism. By contrast, the origin in post-War Britain, while employing irony and parody, was more academic with a focus on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American popular culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while improving prosperity of a society. Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture viewed from afar, while the American artists were inspired by the experience of living within that culture.Similarly, pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism. While pop art and Dadaism explored some of the same subjects, pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement with detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture Among those artists seen by some as producing work leading up to Pop art are Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Man Ray.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM



The Glazier, 1940
Willem de Kooning (American, born The Netherlands, 1904–1997)



A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did, however, share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content. Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so, attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a highly abstracted mode.



Abstract Expressionism developed in the context of diverse, overlapping sources and inspirations. Many of the young artists had made their start in the 1930s. The Great Depression yielded two popular art movements, Regionalism and Social Realism, neither of which satisfied this group of artists' desire to find a content rich with meaning and redolent of social responsibility, yet free of provincialism and explicit politics. The Great Depression also spurred the development of government relief programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a jobs program for unemployed Americans in which many of the group participated, and which allowed so many artists to establish a career path.

But it was the exposure to and assimilation of European modernism that set the stage for the most advanced American art. There were several venues in New York for seeing avant-garde art from Europe. The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, and there artists saw a rapidly growing collection acquired by director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. They were also exposed to groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of new work, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and retrospectives of Matisse, Léger, and Picasso, among others. Another forum for viewing the most advanced art was Albert Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, which was housed at New York University from 1927 to 1943. There the Abstract Expressionists saw the work of Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky, and others. The forerunner of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—opened in 1939. Even prior to that date, its collection of Kandinskys had been publicly exhibited several times. The lessons of European modernism were also disseminated through teaching. The German expatriate Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) became the most influential teacher of modern art in the United States, and his impact reached both artists and critics.

The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man's dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance. Direct contact with European artists increased as a result of World War II, which caused so many—including Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Breton, Mondrian, and Léger—to seek refuge in the U.S. The Surrealists opened up new possibilities with their emphasis on tapping the unconscious. One Surrealist device for breaking free of the conscious mind was psychic automatism—in which automatic gesture and improvisation gain free rein.

Early Work
Early on, the Abstract Expressionists, in seeking a timeless and powerful subject matter, turned to primitive myth and archaic art for inspiration. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Newman, and Baziotes all looked to ancient or primitive cultures for expression. Their early works feature pictographic and biomorphic elements transformed into personal code. Jungian psychology was compelling too, in its assertion of the collective unconscious. Directness of expression was paramount, best achieved through lack of premeditation. In a famous letter to the New York Times (June 1943), Gottlieb and Rothko, with the assistance of Newman, wrote: "To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is critical."

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Gesture
In 1947, Pollock developed a radical new technique, pouring and dripping thinned paint onto raw canvas laid on the ground (instead of traditional methods of painting in which pigment is applied by brush to primed, stretched canvas positioned on an easel). The paintings were entirely nonobjective. In their subject matter (or seeming lack of one), scale (huge), and technique (no brush, no stretcher bars, no easel), the works were shocking to many viewers. De Kooning, too, was developing his own version of a highly charged, gestural style, alternating between abstract work and powerful iconic figurative images. Other colleagues, including Krasner and Kline, were equally engaged in creating an art of dynamic gesture in which every inch of a picture is fully charged. For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a revelation of the artist's authentic identity. The gesture, the artist's "signature," is evidence of the actual process of the work's creation. It is in reference to this aspect of the work that critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term "action painting" in 1952: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."

Mature Abstract Expressionism: Color Field
Another path lay in the expressive potential of color. Rothko, Newman, and Still, for instance, created art based on simplified, large-format, color-dominated fields. The impulse was, in general, reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified in order to create a kind of elemental impact. Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of a goal to achieve the "sublime" rather than the "beautiful," harkening back to Edmund Burke in a drive for the grand, heroic vision in opposition to a calming or comforting effect. Newman described his reductivism as one means of "… freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting." For Rothko, his glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent color should provoke in viewers a quasi-religious experience, even eliciting tears. As with Pollock and the others, scale contributed to the meaning. For the time, the works were vast in scale. And they were meant to be seen in relatively close environments, so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work. Rothko said, "I paint big to be intimate." The notion is toward the personal (authentic expression of the individual) rather than the grandiose.  



Hans Hofmann The Gate, 1959–1960. Hofmann's presence in New York City and Provincetown as a teacher and as an artist was influential to the development of American painting in the 1930s and 1940s.



The Aftermath
The first generation of Abstract Expressionism flourished between 1943 and the mid-'50s. The movement effectively shifted the art world's focus from Europe (specifically Paris) to New York in the postwar years. The paintings were seen widely in traveling exhibitions and through publications. In the wake of Abstract Expressionism, new generations of artists—both American and European—were profoundly marked by the breakthroughs made by the first generation, and went on to create their own important expressions based on, but not imitative of, those who forged the way.

PITTURA METAFISICA

PITTURA METAFISICA

   Metaphysical art (Italian: Pittura metafisica), style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality. De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917.

'The Song of Love' by Giorgio de Chirico

While Futurism staunchly rejected the past, other modern movements identified a nostalgia for the now faded Classical grandeur of Italy as a major influence in their art. Giorgio de Chirico first developed the style that he later called Metaphysical Painting while in Milan. It was in the more sedate surroundings of Florence, however, that he subsequently developed his emphasis on strange, eerie spaces, based upon the Italian piazza. Many of de Chirico's works from his Florence period evoke a sense of dislocation between past and present, between the individual subject and the space he or she inhabits. These works soon drew the attention of other artists such as Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi.
In his painting Turin Melancholy (1915), for example, he illustrated just such a square, using unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend an aura of poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene. The arcades in this painting, as well as the deep perspectival space and dark-toned sky, are pictorial devices typical of de Chirico’s strange, evocative works. He gave his paintings enigmatic titles — such as The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1913–14), The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914), and The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) — that contribute to their cryptic effect. Other Metaphysical painters included Filippo de Pisis, and Mario Sironi.
In 1917, in the midst of the First World War, Carrà and de Chirico spent time in Ferarra where they further developed the Metaphysical Painting style that was later to attract the attention of the French Surrealists.


The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico

 The Metaphysical school proved short-lived; it came to an end about 1920 because of dissension between de Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group.

   Pittura Metafisica (Ital. for "metaphysic painting") denotes a style that came up in Italy as early as in 1911/12, lasting up into the 1920s. The term originates from the main master and founding father of Pittura Metafisica, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). Artists such as Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) followed his example around 1917/18.
A fundamental feature of the Pittura Metafisica, in its literal sense, is the depiction of the object's "super-natural" features (Greek "metá" = beyond; "phýsis" = nature), the object's content beyond its visible features. These ideas had clearly been influenced by Giorgio de Chirico's younger brother Andrea, who was working as a writer and painter under the pseudonym Alberto Savinio. Philosophical concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer also occupied fundamental roles in this context.
   The painters of the Pittura Metafisica created coulisse-like and perspectively exaggerated views that seemed like dreams filled with over-sharply modeled figures and objects, which have been taken from their original contexts and rearranged in new and strange relations. Man is also treated as an object - as "manichino", a faceless jointed doll, or as a construct of stereometric basic forms. Isolation, alienation, inexplicability and mysteriousness coin the atmosphere of the calm, motionless Pittura Metafisica that wanted to be less a way of painting than a means of observing.
   In their concept of materiality, but also in terms of style, the artists of the Pittura Metafisica referred to the solemn and strict austerity of the Early Renaissance (Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello). The simultaneosuly upcoming dynamic Futurism can be perceived as a counter movement to the Pittura Metafisica - Carlo Carrà, up until 1915 one of the leading artists of Futurism, explained his turn to the Pittura Metafisica with the rediscovery of the "principio italiano", which was prevailing in Renaissance.
The Pittura Metafisica had effects beyond the borders of Italy, especially on New Oobjectivity and Surrealism, which both came up up a little later.

SURREALISM



Photo: This Is the Color of My Dreams, 1925
Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983)



SURREALISM

 

Surrealism is a cultural movement and artistic style that was founded in 1924 by André Breton. Surrealism style uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without the intention of logical comprehensibility.
 
 
 
The movement was begun primarily in Europe, centered in Paris, and attracted many of the members of the Dada community. Influenced by the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung, there are similarities between the Surrealist movement and the Symbolist movement of the late 19th century.



Some of the greatest artists of the 20th century became involved in the Surrealist movement, and the group included Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, René Magritte, and many others.
The Surrealist movement eventually spread across the globe, and has influenced artistic endeavors from painting and sculpture to pop music and film directing. 



Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

 


The Potato, 1928
Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983)



The Barbarians, 1937
Max Ernst (French, born Germany, 1891–1976)



Surrealist poets were at first reluctant to align themselves with visual artists because they believed that the laborious processes of painting, drawing, and sculpting were at odds with the spontaneity of uninhibited expression. However, Breton and his followers did not altogether ignore visual art. They held high regard for artists such as Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) because of the analytic, provocative, and erotic qualities of their work. For example, Duchamp's conceptually complex Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23; Philadelphia Museum of Art) was admired by Surrealists and is considered a precursor to the movement because of its bizarrely juxtaposed and erotically charged objects. In 1925, Breton substantiated his support for visual expression by reproducing the works of artists such as Picasso in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste and organizing exhibitions that prominently featured painting and drawing.

The visual artists who first worked with Surrealist techniques and imagery were the German Max Ernst (1891–1976), the Frenchman André Masson (1896–1987), the Spaniard Joan Miró (1893–1983), and the American Man Ray (1890–1976). Masson's free-association drawings of 1924 are curving, continuous lines out of which emerge strange and symbolic figures that are products of an uninhibited mind. Breton considered Masson's drawings akin to his automatism in poetry. The Potato  of 1928 by Miró uses comparable organic forms and twisted lines to create an imaginative world of fantastic figures.

About 1937, Ernst, a former Dadaist, began to experiment with two unpredictable processes called decalcomania and grattage. Decalcomania is the technique of pressing a sheet of paper onto a painted surface and peeling it off again, while grattage is the process of scraping pigment across a canvas that is laid on top of a textured surface. He used a combination of these techniques in The Barbarians. This composition of sparring anthropomorphic figures in a deserted postapocalyptic landscape exemplifies the recurrent themes of violence and annihilation found in Surrealist art.

In 1927, the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898–1967) moved from Brussels to Paris and became a leading figure in the visual Surrealist movement. Influenced by de Chirico's paintings between 1910 and 1920, Magritte painted erotically explicit objects juxtaposed in dreamlike surroundings. His work defined a split between the visual automatism fostered by Masson and Miró (and originally with words by Breton) and a new form of illusionistic Surrealism practiced by the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), the Belgian Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and the French-American Yves Tanguy (1900–1955). In The Eternally Obvious , Magritte's artistic display of a dismembered female nude is emotionally shocking. In The Satin Tuning Fork , Tanguy fills an illusionistic space with unidentifiable, yet sexually suggestive, objects rendered with great precision. The painting's mysterious lighting, long shadows, deep receding space, and sense of loneliness also recall the ominous settings of de Chirico.

In 1929, Dalí moved from Spain to Paris and made his first Surrealist paintings. He expanded on Magritte's dream imagery with his own erotically charged, hallucinatory visions. In The Accommodations of Desire  of 1929, Dalí employs Freudian symbols, such as ants, to symbolize his overwhelming sexual desire. In 1930, Breton praised Dalí's representations of the unconscious in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. They became the main collaborators on the review Minotaure (1933–39), a primarily Surrealist-oriented publication founded in Paris.

The organized Surrealist movement in Europe dissolved with the onset of World War II. Breton, Dalí, Ernst, Masson, and others, including the Chilean artist Matta (1911–2002), who first joined the Surrealists in 1937, left Europe for New York. The movement found renewal in the United States at Peggy Guggenheim's (1898–1979) gallery, Art of This Century, and the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1940, Breton organized the fourth International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, which included the Mexicans Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957) (although neither artist officially joined the movement). Surrealism's surprising imagery, deep symbolism, refined painting techniques, and disdain for convention influenced later generations of artists, including Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) and Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), the latter whose work formed a continuum between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

 
The greatest known Surrealist artist is the world famous Salvador Dali.
 

   SALVADOR DALI(1904-1989)

Born on May 11, 1904, Salvador Dali i Domenech would become one of the world’s most recognized surrealist artists. Raised by his lawyer/notary father and a mother who encouraged her artistic son, Dali grew up in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, having been told by his parents that he was the reincarnation of his older brother, Salvador, who died just nine months before Dali’s birth.

Following the death of his mother to breast cancer in 1921, Dali moved to the student residences at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. He spent several years studying there and then shortly before his graduation, he was expelled for declaring that no one on the faculty of the school was competent enough to examine him.
By 1931, Dali had collaborated on a short film with surrealist director Luis Bunuel; illustrated a book called “The Witches of Liers”, a poem written by his friend and classmate Carles Fages de Climent; met his muse and future wife Gala; and painted arguably his most famous work The Persistence of Memory. He had officially joined the surrealist group in Paris, and was hailed by the surrealist community of artists.

When Salvador Dali openly supported the regime of Francisco Franco following the Spanish Civil war, and showed interest in what he referred to as the “Hitler phenomenon”, he became somewhat of an outcast among his fellow artists. Many of his fellow surrealists referred to Dali in past tense, indicating their feeling that he was dead to them. He wrote prolifically during this time, and continued producing his art.

In 1940, Dali and Gala moved to the United States, and it was during

this time that Dali reclaimed his Catholic faith. In 1942, Dali wrote his autobiography, “The Secret Life of Salvador Dali”. He asked an Italian monk to perform an exorcism on him in the late 1940’s, and in exchange for the exorcism, he presented the friar with a sculpture of Jesus Christ on the cross, which was not discovered until 2005. Although they had been married civilly in 1934, Dali and Gala were married in the Catholic Church in 1958.

Dali’s work was used in advertising campaigns, most notably for Chupa Chups candy and Lanvin chocolates, and he became fascinated by DNA and the hypercube, which can be seen in some of his later work.

King Juan Carlos of Spain bestowed upon Dali the title Marquis of Pubol in 1982. By this time, Dali was seriously ill, having been given unprescribed medicine by his senile wife Gala. The medications damaged Dali’s nervous system and gave him Parkinson’s like tremors in his hands.

Gala died in 1982, leaving the stricken Dali devastated. He was brought back to Figueres in 1984 by friends who felt a deliberate dehydration of the artist and a fire in his bedroom were suicide attempts.

On January 23, 1989, Salvador Dali, known for his contributions not only to surrealism, but also to fashion, theatre, and photography, died from heart failure. He is buried in a crypt at his Teatro Museo de Figueres, just steps from his childhood home.

DADA

DADA

Cover of the first edition of the publication Dada by Tristan Tzara;
 Zurich, 1917

 Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.

   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 aesthetics, Dada ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning--interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada offends. Perhaps it is then ironic that Dada is an influential movement in Modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.

   The artists of the Dada movement had become disillusioned by art, art history and history in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I and had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Thus they became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world (they thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even art), and created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down.



   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.

  Zurich
In 1916, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Sophie Täuber, and 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.
Some sources state that Dada coalesced on October 6 at the Cabaret Voltaire. Other sources state that Dada did not originate fully in a Zurich literary salon but grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, that transposed to Switzerland when a group of Jewish modernist artists (Tzara, Marcel & Iuliu Iancu, Arthur Segal, and others) settled in Zurich. In the years prior to World War I similar art had already risen in Bucharest and other Eastern European cities; it is likely that DADA's catalyst was the arrival in Zurich of artists like Tzara and Janco.
Having left Germany and Romania during World War I, the artists found themselves in Switzerland, a country recognized for its neutrality. Inside this space of political neutrality they decided to use abstraction to fight against the social, political, and cultural ideas of that time. The dadaists believed those ideas to be a byproduct of bourgeois society, a society so apathetic it would rather fight a war against itself than challenge the status quo.

 

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu 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."
According to Hans Richter, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art." Everything for which art stood, Dada represented 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 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."
A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "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, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."
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."

SECTION D' OR

SECTION D' OR

The Section d'Or ("Golden Section" in French), also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters and critics associated with an offshoot of Cubism known as Orphism (a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire). Based in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, they were active from 1912 to around 1914, coming to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911.

Theo van Doesburg. Design for an exhibition poster for 'La Section d'Or'. c 1920. Ink on paper. 65 × 62,5 cm. Instituut Collectie Nederland

History
The movement began with an exhibition at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris in 1912, which was also accompanied by publication of the treatise Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes. In addition to featuring works by the Duchamp brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp, other exhibitors included artists such as Archipenko, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Jean Marchand and Francis Picabia, among others. The opening address was given by Guillaume Apollinaire.
The group's title was suggested by Jacques Villon, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura by Joséphin Péladan. Peladan attached great mystical significance to the golden section (French: Section d'Or), and other similar geometric configurations. For Villon, this symbolised his belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, because it reflected patterns and relationships occurring in nature.
The group adopted its name to distinguish itself from the narrower definition of Cubism developed earlier by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris.
The onset of World War I in 1914 largely ended the group's activities, which had never been much more than a loose association.

DER BLAUE REITER

DER BLAUE REITER



Franz Marc

 Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. Der Blaue Reiter was a movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded the previous decade in 1905.

 

Vasily Kandinsky

Picture with an Archer

1909

The Blue Rider (or in German Der Blaue Reiter) was a German Expressionist movement that was established in December 1911 by Kandinsky, Marc and Gabriele Münter.

   Painters Kandinsky and Marc worked on an almanac in which they showed their artistic conceptions. The title of the almanac, which then became the name of the group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), came from the painting by Kandinsky. His Blaue Reiter ( Blue Rider ) was an adventure in the simplification and stylization of forms and the connection between music and painting.

   The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms had equivalence with sounds and music, and sought to create color harmonies which would be purifying to the soul. Although in this very earliest works, the impressionistic influence was recognizable, the artists who took part in The Blue Rider were considered to be the pioneers of abstract art or abstract expressionism. Their work promoted individual expression and broke free from any artistic restraints. These Nietzsche's words sum up the group's motto, "Who wishes to be creative must first blast and destroy accepted values."

   The first exhibitions of The Blue Rider included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, and Arnold Schönberg. These artists, who early in their careers broke from the mainstream, were later to become the driving force behind modern art as we know it today.

Main Representatives

-Vassily Kandinsky
-Paul Klee
-Alfred Kubin
-Franz Marc
-August Macke
-Gabriel Munter

FUTURISM

FUTURISM

  
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Painting by Giacomo Balla

 Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Key figures of the movement include the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Tullio Crali and Luigi Russolo, and the Russians Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Important works include its seminal piece of the literature, Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, as well as Boccioni's sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Balla's painting, Abstract Speed + Sound (pictured). Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Rayonism and Vorticism.

What is Futurism

Futurism was a 20th century art movement. The Futurists loved speed, noise, machines, pollution, and cities; they embraced the exciting new world that was then upon them rather than hypocritically enjoying the modern world's comforts while loudly denouncing the forces that made them possible. Fearing and attacking technology has become almost second nature to many people today; the Futurist manifestos show us an alternative philosophy.

Although a nascent Futurism can be seen surfacing throughout the very early years of that century, the 1907 essay Entwurf einer neuen ?sthetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music) by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni is sometimes claimed as its true jumping-off point. Futurism was a largely Italian and Russian movement although it also had adherents in other countries.

The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto of their artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of man over nature.

Marinetti's impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese painters ? Boccioni, Carr?, and Russolo ? who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, and introduced Futurist ideas into his compositions). The painters Balla and Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and together these artists represented Futurism's first phase.

The painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882 - 1916) wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910 in which he vowed: "We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal."

Futurism in the 1920's and 1930's

Many Italian Futurists instinctively supported the rise of fascism in Italy in the hope of modernizing the society and the economy of a country that was still torn between unfilled industrial revolution in the North and the rural, archaic South. Some Futurists' glorification of modern warfare as the ultimate artistic expression and their intense nationalism also induced them to embrace Italian fascism. Many Futurists became associated with the regime over the 1920's, which gave them both official recognition and the ability to carry out important works, especially in architecture.

However, some leftists that came to Futurism in the earlier years continued to oppose Marinetti's domination of the artistic and political direction of Futurism.

Futurism expanded to encompass other artistic domains. In architecture, it was characterized by a distinctive thrust towards rationalism and modernism through the use of advanced building materials. In Italy, futurist architects were often at odds with the fascist state's tendency towards Roman imperial/classical aesthetic patterns. However several interesting futurist buildings were built in the years 1920?1940, including many public buildings: stations, maritime resorts, post offices, etc. See, for example, Trento's railway station built by Angiolo Mazzoni (as you can see in the picture on the right).

Futurist architecture

The Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia expressed his ideas of modernity in his drawings for La Città Nuova (The New City) (1912–1914). This project was never built and Sant'Elia was killed in the First World War, but his ideas influenced later generations of architects and artists. The city was a backdrop onto which the dynamism of Futurist life is projected. The city had replaced the landscape as the setting for the exciting modern life. They wanted to see the bare bones, the structure behind things as part of the aesthetic quality. Sant'Elia aimed to create a city as an efficient, fast-paced machine. He manipulates light and shape to emphasize the sculptural quality of his projects. Baroque curves and encrustations had been stripped away to reveal the essential lines of forms unprecedented from their simplicity. In the new city, every aspect of life was to be rationalized and centralised into one great powerhouse of energy. The city was not meant to last, and each subsequent generation was expected to build their own city rather than inheriting the architecture of the past.


The Futurism art movement was a totally Italian modern art movement. Unlike other modern art movements that sprang from developing or reacting against other artistic styles developments in art, Futurism seemed to spring from an idea, and the style of how to translate the ideas into the visual arts came afterwards.
The Futurism art movement celebrated technology, modernity, speed, violence and youth; it glorified war and was in favour of the growth of Fascism. The Futurism movement really began with the publication of the poet Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism Manifesto, in Le Figaro in February 1909. The manifesto was passionate and bombastic in tone, expressing disdain for anything old, particularly in the fields of art and politics. One could be forgiven for thinking that the primary aim of the manifesto was to shock people.




Futurism Art Movement - Umberto Boccioni'The Street Enters The House' 1911

 















The Futurism art movement was by no means a movement of painters. It covered all fields of creativity, including architecture, literature, textiles, ceramics, theatre, film, industrial design, etc. Marinetti's manifesto attracted the attention of young painters in Milan, who wanted to translate the Futurist ideas to the visual arts. This led in 1910 to the publication of the 'Manifesto of the Futurist Painters'.
This manifesto was not unlike Marinetti's original in tone, including for example the following section; "We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal."


  Despite their passionate manifesto, the Futurist painters took a while to develop a meaningful style that
would embody their ideas. The earliest Futurist paintings utilised the theory of Divisionism, building images up from a series of dots and strips of pure colour. It wasn’t until seeing the work of Cubist painters in Paris in 1911 that the Futurists adopted the techniques of the Cubist artists, which they felt presented a means of analysing and controlling the energy of paintings, to capture what they called the ‘force lines’ of objects.
Despite learning lessons from the Cubists, the paintings of the Futurist art movement were very different to the work of Picasso and Braque. While the Futurists did produce some portraits, their more typical subjects were urban scenes and vehicles in motion. The focus on movement and speed contrasts strongly with the Cubists static analytical works.

 
 


Futurism Art Movement - Umberto Boccioni
'Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space' 1913



Futurism artists

Giacomo Balla

Umberto Boccioni (1882 - 1916)

Kasimir Malevich (1878 - 1935)

Liubov Popova (1889 - 1924)

An example of Futurist architecture by Antonio Sant'Elia

 Futurist architects were sometimes at odds with the Fascist state's tendency towards Roman imperial-classical aesthetic patterns. Nevertheless, several Futurist buildings were built in the years 1920–1940, including public buildings such as railway stations, maritime resorts and post offices. Examples of Futurist buildings still in use today are Trento's railway station, built by Angiolo Mazzoni, and the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. The Florence station was designed in 1932 by the Gruppo Toscano (Tuscan Group) of architects, which included Giovanni Michelucci and Italo Gamberini, with contributions by Mazzoni

DIE BRUCKE

DIE BRUCKE

 Die Brucke was the association of artist expressionists from Dresden, Germany. Their first exhibition was held in 1906.
  
 Die Brucke made use of a technique that was controlled, intentionally unsophisticated and crude, developing a style hallmarked by expressive distortions and emphases. Die Brucke artists often used color similar to the Fauves, and they were also influenced by art form from Africa and Oceania.
   
Some of the painters in the group sympathized with the revolutionary socialism of the day and drew inspiration from Van Gogh's ideas on artists' communities. Die Brucke expressionists believed that their social criticism of the ugliness of modern life could lead to a new and better future. 

 Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism.

Fritz Bleyl
 poster for the first Die Brücke show in 1906

Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings make their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison.


The founding members of Die Brücke in 1905 were four Jugendstil architecture students: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976). They met through the Königliche Technische Hochschule (technical university) of Dresden, where Kirchner and Bleyl began studying in 1901 and became close friends in their first term. They discussed art together and also studied nature, having a radical outlook in common. Kirchner continued studies in Munich 1903–1904, returning to Dresden in 1905 to complete his degree. The institution provided a wide range of studies in addition to architecture, such as freehand drawing, perspective drawing and the historical study of art. The name "Die Brücke" was intended to "symbolize the link, or bridge, they would form with art of the future".
Die Brücke aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the name) between the past and the present. They responded both to past artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well as contemporary international avant-garde movements. The group published a broadside called Programme in 1906, where Kirchner wrote:

We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces.

As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older media, particularly woodcut prints.The group developed a common style based on vivid color, emotional tension, violent imagery, and an influence from primitivism. After first concentrating exclusively on urban subject matter, the group ventured into southern Germany on expeditions arranged by Mueller and produced more nudes and arcadian images. They invented the printmaking technique of linocut, although they at first described them as traditional woodcuts, which they also made.
The group members initially "isolated" themselves in a working-class neighborhood of Dresden, aiming thereby to reject their own bourgeois backgrounds. Erich Heckel was able to obtain an empty butcher's shop on the Berlinerstrasse in Friedrichstadt for their use as a studio. Bleyl described the studio as:



Painting of the group members by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

 that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student.

Kirchner's became a venue which overthrew social conventions to allow casual love-making and frequent nudity. Group life-drawing sessions took place using models from the social circle, rather than professionals, and choosing quarter-hour poses to encourage spontaneity. Bleyl described one such model, Isabella, a fifteen-year-old girl from the neighbourhood, as "a very lively, beautifully built, joyous individual, without any deformation caused by the silly fashion of the corset and completely suitable to our artistic demands, especially in the blossoming condition of her girlish buds."
The group composed a manifesto (mostly Kirchner's work), which was carved on wood and asserted a new generation, "who want freedom in our work and in our lives, independence from older, established forces."

In September and October 1906, the first group exhibition was held, focused on the female nude, in the showroom of K.F.M. Seifert and Co. in Dresden.
Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Max Pechstein (1881–1955) joined the group in 1906. Bleyl married in 1907, and, with a concern to support his family, left the group. Otto Mueller (1874–1930) joined in 1910.

EXPRESSIONISM

EXPRESSIONISM
   


Vincent van Gogh ''The Starry Night'' 

    Expressionism developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expressionis was opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe and emphasized artist's subjective emotion, which overrides fidelity to the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted, or otherwise altered. Landmarks of this movement were violent colors and exaggerated lines that helped contain intense emotional expression. Application of formal elements is vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic. Expressionist were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in them.
    The expressionistic tradition was significantly, rose to the emergence with a series of paintings of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from the last year and a half of his life. There was recorded his heightened emotional state. One of the earliest and most famous examples of Expressionism is Gogh's "The Starry Night." Whatever was cause, it cannot be denied that a great many artists of this period assumed that the chief function of art was to express their intense feelings to the world.




The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893), which inspired 20th-century Expressionists

   The Belgian painter and printmaker James Ensor was such an artist - with his sense of isolation.
   The Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch dealt - with different fears.
   The Vienesse painters Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele first started with their expressionistic styles within Klimt's circle of the Vienna Secession. Vienesse Expressionism later gained significance between years 1905 and 1918 during a politically and culturally turbulent era of revelation of the profoundly problematic conditions of the turn-of-the-century Europe.
   In the years just around 1910 the expressionistic approach pioneered by Ensor, Munch, and van Gogh, in particular, was developed in the work of three artists' groups: the Fauves, Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter.

SYMBOLISM

SYMBOLISM

Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, gaining popular credence with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas' manifesto in Le Figaro. Reacting against the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, Moréas proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world. This philosophy, which would incorporate the poet Stéphane Mallarmé's conviction that reality was best expressed through poetry because it paralleled nature rather than replicating it, became a central tenet of the movement. In Mallarmé's words, "To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem... suggestion, that is the dream."
 



  



Bathers in Brittany, from the Volpini Suite: Dessins lithographiques, 1889
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
Zincograph on chrome yellow wove paper

Though it began as a literary concept, Symbolism was soon identified with the artwork of a younger generation of painters who were similarly rejecting the conventions of Naturalism. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, quasi-scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism. Returning to the personal expressivity advocated by the Romantics earlier in the nineteenth century, they felt that the symbolic value or meaning of a work of art stemmed from the recreation of emotional experiences in the viewer through color, line, and composition. In painting, Symbolism represents a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and the artist's inner subjectivity.

In an article on Paul Gauguin published in 1891, Albert Aurier gave the first definition of symbolism as an aesthetic, describing it as the subjective vision of an artist expressed through a simplified and non-naturalistic style and hailing Gauguin as its leader. However, the groundwork for pictorial Symbolism was laid as early as the 1870s by an older generation of artists such as Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898), Odilon Redon, Eugène Carrière, Arnold Böcklin, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898). All would have a profound influence on Gauguin and his contemporaries in the later nineteenth century.
Wanting to imbue their works with spiritual value, these progenitors of Symbolism produced imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious figures from biblical stories and Greek mythology as well as fantastical, often monstrous, creatures. Their suggestive imagery established what would become the most pervasive themes in Symbolist art: love, fear, anguish, death, sexual awakening, and unrequited desire. Woman became the favored symbol for the expression of these universal emotions, appearing alternately as wistful virgins and menacing femmes fatales. In this latter category, Gustave Moreau popularized the motifs of Salome brandishing the head of John the Baptist and the man-eating sphinx through paintings such as Oedipus and the Sphinx in the Salons of the mid-1860s and 1870s. These two mythical female types—the virgin and the femme fatale—would become staples of Symbolist imagery, appearing frequently in both visual and literary sources from the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century.


The Siesta, ca. 1892–94
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
Oil on canvas



Unlike the Impressionists, the Symbolists who emerged in the 1880s were a diverse group of artists often working independently with varying aesthetic goals. Rather than sharing a single artistic style, they were unified by a shared pessimism and weariness of the decadence they perceived in modern society. The Symbolists sought escape from reality, expressing their personal dreams and visions through color, form, and composition. Their almost universal preference for broad strokes of unmodulated color and flat, often abstract forms was inspired by Puvis de Chavannes, who created greatly simplified forms in order to clearly express abstract ideas. His muted palette and decorative treatment of forms made a considerable impact on a new generation of artists, most notably Gauguin (1848–1903) and the young Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).

Paul Gauguin

Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), 1891
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)

Gauguin's Symbolism was unique in that he sought escape from civilization in less industrialized, so-called primitive cultures rather than in the imaginary dream world of his predecessors. Vision of the Sermon (1888; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) marks his first intentionally Symbolist picture painted in the Synthetic style that he developed with Émile Bernard (1868–1941) in Brittany in 1888, which aimed to synthesize abstracted form with emotional or spiritual experience. Here, Gauguin combined heavily outlined, simplified shapes with solid patches of vivid color to symbolically express the ardent piety of simple Breton women. This painting exerted a tremendous influence on the group of artists known as the Nabis, who enthusiastically adopted his aesthetic in the late 1880s and 1890s.

Gauguin's search for a lost paradise ultimately led him to the South Seas, where he filled his canvases, prints, and sculptures with highly personal and esoteric imagery that deliberately elude a clear or finite interpretation. Describing his greatest Symbolist masterpiece, the monumental Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Gauguin echoed Mallarmé in proclaiming that "explanatory attributes—known symbols—would congeal the canvas into a melancholy reality, and the problem indicated would no longer be a poem."


Though it began in France, Symbolism was an international avant-garde movement that spread across Europe and North America during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was closely associated with Symbolist circles, spending time in Paris before settling in Germany in the early 1890s. Munch's intensely personal style is often referred to as Symbolic Naturalism as his subjects are not exotic or fantastical but based on the real anxieties of modern existence. Virtually all of the canvases he produced between 1893 and 1902 belong to a series called the "Frieze of Life." These paintings explore themes of illness, loneliness, despair, and mental suffering associated with love, conditions that Munch deemed emblematic of "modern psychic life." The Scream of 1893 (Munch-Museet, Oslo) best exemplifies fin-de-siècle feelings of isolation, disillusionment, and psychological anguish conveyed through distorted forms, expressive colors, and fluid brushwork.

In Central Europe, Symbolism witnessed a late flourishing in the works of the Vienna Secession and Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) in particular, whose canvases display a deep fascination with both the productive and destructive forces of female sexuality (Salome, 1909, Museo Ca' Pesaro, Venice). Klimt's highly ornamental style reveals the close connection between Symbolism and parallel movements in the decorative arts such as Art Nouveau.

The Symbolists' rejection of naturalism and narrative in favor of the subjective representation of an idea or emotion would have a significant effect on the artwork of the twentieth century, particularly the formulation of German Expressionism and Abstraction.

Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, quasi-scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism.