KINETIC ART

Kinetic Art is art that moves, or appears to move. According to novelist Umberto Eco, it is a "form of plastic art which the moevement of forms, colours and planes is the means to obtain a cahnging whole." Altough Kinetic Art came into its own in the 1950s, many artists of the early twentieth century experimented with movement. The main lines of development were provided by Constructivism on the one hand and Dada on the other. The interest in science and technology, which was a part of the Constructivist project, has been a constant theme in Kinetic Art. As early 1919, Viladamir Tatlin designed a building incorporating moving elements and in the same time year fellow Naum Gabo began Kinetic Construction.

Monument of the Third International

Kinetic Construction

Kinetic drawing makes use of the critical balance and creates 3D drawings from various materials. Kinetic means that the object holds energy, kinetic drawings usually are critical in their stability and are eager to find a more stable position, through gravity. From there they are built up again, better and stronger and with a repetition of this process a beauty of its own starts to grow by natural forces.
Red Mobile, Alexander Calder

*Dempsey Amy, Art in the Modern Era, Harry N. Abrams Inc.,2002

MINIMAL ART

Minimalism is a movement that everything inessential in the work of art, has been removed.As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. 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.Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said  "Less is more" to describe his aesthetic tactic of arranging the necessary components of a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity. Minimalist architecture became popular in 1980s around New York and London. It is achieved by using white elements, cold lighting, large space with minimum objects and furniture.

Black Square-Kazimir Malevich
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

HARD-EDGE

Hard-edge painting is a tendency in late 1950s and 1960s art that is closely related to Post-painterly abstraction and color field painting. It describes an abstract style that combines the clear composition of geometric abstraction with the intense color and bold, unitary forms of color field painting. Although it was first identified with Californian artists, today the phrase is used to describe one of the most distinctive tendencies in abstract painting throughout the United States in the 1960s.

Hard-edge painting is known for its economy of form, fullness of color, impersonal execution, and smooth surface planes.
The term "hard-edge abstraction" was devised by Californian art critic Jules Langsner, and was initially intended to title a 1959 exhibition that included four West Coast artists - Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley and Lorser Feitelson. Although, later, the style was often referred to as "California hard-edge," and these four artists became synonymous with the movement, Langsner eventually decided to title the show Four Abstract Classicists (1959), as he felt that the style marked a classical turn away from the romanticism of Abstract Expressionism.
Theo van Doesburg- Counter-composition V
June Harwood

*http://www.theartstory.org/movement-hard-edge-painting.htm

POP ART

This movement first appeared in 1950s in Britain by a Independent Group in London.Meeting informally at the Institute of Contemporary Arts: Alloway, Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Hamilton,Eduardo Paolozzi and others discussed the growing mass culture of movies, advertising, science fiction, consumerism, media and communications, product design and new technologies originating in America, but now spreading throughout the West. At the first Independent Group meeting in 1952, co-founding member, artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi presented a lecture using a series of collages titled Bunk! that he had assembled during his time in Paris between 1947–1949. This material consisted of "found objects" such as, advertising, comic book characters, magazine covers and various mass produced graphics that mostly represented American popular culture. One of the images in that presentation was Paolozzi's 1947 collage, I was a Rich Man's Plaything, which includes the first use of the word "pop″, appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver. They were fascinated by advertising and graphic and product design, and wanted to make art and architecture that had a similar popular appeal. Richard Hamilton's collage "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?"(1956) was the first work to achieve iconic status.

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.
In the early 1960s the public saw for the first time the work that has since become internationally famous: Andy Warhol's silk screens of Marilyn Monroe, Lichtenstein's comic-strip oils, Oldenburg's huge vinyl burgers and ice-cream cones and Wesselmann's nudes set in domestic setting which incorporate real shower curtains, telephones and bathroom cabinets.
     
                        

*Dempsey Amy, Art in the Modern Era, Harry N. Abrams Inc.,2002

POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

This movement was coined in 1964 by the critic, Clement Greenberg for a exhibition. Artists are; Al Held, Ellsword Kelly, Frank Stella and Jack Youngerman. It grow out from Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s and early 1960s and in some ways reacted against it. In general, the new abstract artists shunned to overt emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism and rejected the expressicve gestural brushstrokes and tactile surfaces. For Greenberg, the most vocal champion of Post-Painterly Abstraction the history of modern art from Cubism through Abstract Expressionism to Post-Painterly Abstraction was one of purist reduction. He believed that each art form should restrict itself to those qualities essential only to itself to visual or optical experiances, and avoid any associations with sculpture, architecture, theatre, music or literature. Works of this that stressed their formal qualities, exploiting the purely optical qualities of pigment, emphasizing the shape of the canvas and the flatness of the picture plane. represented for Greenberg the superior art form of the 1960s.
Morris Louis, Where






 Shaped Canvas, Frank Stella 1967






Ellsworth Kelly, The Meschers, 1951



*Dempsey Amy, Art in the Modern Era, Harry N. Abrams Inc.,2002

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract Expressionism is a landmark in the general history of art and of modern art in particular. It has been used during the 1920s.Like the Cubist epoch it represents a revolutionary event which revises our view of things before and after.

The term was introduced by critic Robert Coates in an article in 1946 about the work of Gorky, Pollock and De Kooning though it was only one of many terms of art which might confront an irrational absurd world.

The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.

Hans Hoffmann who had gained firsthand experience of the European avant-garde befroe opening his school in 1934, taught his visual experiences to others. hewas joined by other European artists seeking refuge during World War II, notably the Surrealists Andre Breton, Andre Masson, Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst. 

Abstract Expressionism received international recognition after the MoMA's 1958-59 travelling exhibition, "The New American Painting" which toured 8 European countries. By this time, however not only wasthe work no longer particularly new.

Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948, 

Jane Frank (1918-1986): Crags and Crevices, 1961

Hans Hofmann The Gate,

*Anfom, David, Abstract Expressionism, 1990, Thames and Hudson

*Dempsey Amy, Art in the Modern Era, Harry N. Abrams Inc.,2002

SURREALISM

Surrealism was started in 1924 by the French poet Andre Breton. He defined Surrealism as " Thought expressed in the absebce of any control exerted by reason, outside all moral and aesthetic considerations." Surrealism aimed to break down the barriers between the people's inner and outer worlds, and change the way they percieve reality.

Max Ernst, Man Ray and Jean Arp are some of the original surrealists. The most important intellectual influence on the artists was Freud. The unconsiousnus, dreams and number of key Freudion theories were used by the Surrealists as repertiores of repressed images to exploit at will. In particular they were interested in Freud's ideas about castration anxiety, fetishes and the strange. Man Ray was the first Surrealist photographer.

 Salvador Dali

 Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes (1921)

A Night at Saint Jean-de- Luz (1929)-Man Ray

*Dempsey Amy, Art in the Modern Era, Harry N. Abrams Inc.,2002