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

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

Giorgio de Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece. He went to Polytechnic School in Athens with his brother. He encounters paintings by Arnold Böcklin, Max Klinger and Alfred Kubin in Munich for the first time, which leave a great impression on him. He went to Italy in 1990 and started living there.He mostly tarveled and participated in some exhibitions. The choice of topics and the atmosphere of his paintings show the strong influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's works.Reality and dream worlds mingle, he paints fantastic ideal architecture and city and landscapes views, strictly following the rules of perspectives, in them he places single statues and the "Manichini" - faceless manikins, that seem to be lost in the surroundings. 
The Red Tower (1913)


Carlo Carra decided to join him in 1917. They express the basic theories of the "Pittura Metafisica" after the war, which Chirico will publish in form of articles for the magazine "Valori Plastici".De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. 


 Love Song 1914 
                                                                                                                             1947 replica of The Disquieting Muses




Giorgio de Chirico's compositions became more classical as of the late 1930s. He drew some of his earlier metaphysic works again, some of them he even dates back. Giorgio de Chirico died in Rome on November 11, 1978.


*http://www.giorgio-de-chirico.com/

PITTURA METAFISICA

Metaphysical Painting is developed around 1913 by Giorgio de Chirico. This movement's paintings are still and quiet in contrast to the Futurist works. They has classical trimmings, disorted perspectives and strange dream imagery. Their strategy was to transcend the physcial appearance of reality, to make viewers nervous or surprise them with impossible to read and mysterious images.
Many of Chirico's paintings shows a lonely city square or claustrophobic interior painted in dark colours with theatrical lightning and amnious shadows.
The "metapyhsical" name was given by the French peot and art critic, Guillauma Apollinaire who first call De Chirico's painting with that adjective.
 Mario Sironi "Periferia" 1922


Giorgio De Chirico - Incertezza del poeta 1913


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

HANNAH HÖCH

Hannah Höch was born in 1889 in Germany. She studied art in Berlin and worked as a pattern designer and writer on women's handicrafts from 1916-1926. In 1915 she began a friendship with  Raoul Hausmann who was a member of Berlin Dada movement. Then they became more than friends and with their relationship going by they worked together. She is the founder of photomontage.Her most famous piece is Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser DADA durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands ("Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany"), a critique of Weimar Germany in 1919. This piece combines images from newspapers of the time re-created to make a new statement about life and art in the Dada movement. Höch herself expressed herself less politically than many of the others in the group. From 1926-1929 she lived and worked in Holland. She lived for some years in a lesbian relationship with Dutch poet Til Brugman. She died in Berlin at age 88.


      




*http://womenshistory.about.com/od/artpainting/a/hannah_hoch.htm

DADA

Dada movement developed in New York, Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne and Barcelona during the World War 1.Young artists came together to express their anger about war.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. Their target was not only about political, but also about art. The origin of "dada" is from the French word for "hobbyhorse" from baby-talk. Absurdist provocations, whether aggressive or irrevent, challenged the status quo via satire, irony, games and word play. The dadaists practise of dislocating objects from their familiar context and presenting them as art radically altered the conventions of visual art. And Dadaists imitated new technologies like collage, Photomontage, assemblage and readymades.
Hannah Höch-Cut With the Kitchen Knife


Marcel Duchamp-Fountain


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

MORGAN RUSSELL

Morgan Russell was born in 1886 in New York. He is the founder-with  Stanton Macdonald-Wright- of the movement Synchromism. He studied architecture and sculpture.Returning to Paris in 1909 he studied at Matisse’s art school. After meeting Stanton Macdonald-Wright in 1911, the two began developing theories about color and its relationship to pattern. With Macdonald-Wright, he co-founded the Synchromist movement in 1912. He exhibited his paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and  famous New York Armory Show. After spending nearly forty years as artist in France from 1909 until 1946, Russell retired to the United States. After suffering two strokes, he died at age 67 near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1953.

SYNCHROMISM

Synchromism-that means colour in Greek- was founded by two American painters, Morgan Russel and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. They were both figurative painters but with the affect of avant-garde artists such as Henri Matisse, Frantisek Kupka, Robert Delaunay. Russell and MacDonald-Wright sought to develop the structural principles of Cubism and the colour theories of the Neo-Impressionists, and their experiments in colour abstraction were to those of the Orphists. In 1913 they issued a manifesto. As Russell was being a musician he tried to create rhythms and music with colour and forms. Their exhibitions placed in Munich and Paris. By the end of the World War 1 Synchromism was almost over with many of its artists returning to figuration. 


 Cosmic Synchromy-Morgan Russell


 Vase of Flowers-MacDonald-Wright


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

JUAN GRIS

Juan Gris was born in 1887 in Spain but he spent most of his time in France.
 He studied mechanical drawing in Madrid from 1902 to 1904.  In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and in 1915 was painted by his friend, Amedeo Modigliani. He seriously began painting in 1910 then in 1912 he became a Cubist painter. Unlike Picasso and Braque, whose Cubist works were monochromatic, Gris painted with bright harmonious colors. He died in Paris in 1927.


 Portrait of Picasso
        Harlequin with Guitar

*http://www.juangris.org/biography.html

SECTION D'OR

Section d'or means "Golden section" in French. It is a Pariis based movement that has Cubist innovators. The group was active from 1912 to 1914.The groups name was suggested by Jacques Villion. This name reflects that this group concerns geometric forms when they are creating.The movement began with an exhibition at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris in 1912.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. 


City of Paris by Robert Delaunay




*http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/531974/Section-dOr
*Bergil, Mehmet Suat; Altın oran : doğada, bilimde, sanatta,1993

GABRIELE MÜNTER

Gabriele Münter was born in 1877.

Because of the official art academies were being closed to women, she had to improve herself privately, first at the Ladies School of Art in Dusseldorf. After that she studied at Phalanx School which was founded by Wassily Kandinsky. They became lovers traveled and painted together for years but their relationship ended because of Kandinsky marrying another women.

She is most well known for her landscapes, many of which were painted in Murnau. Her composition and forms are very flat and the colors are muted. In the early 1900s her style began to change as a result of the influence of Matisse and Fauvism, Gauguin and van Gogh. Her paintings became more representative. Color played a large role in her work for example she used a number of blues, greens, yellows, and pinks that were very unusual. She also found it important that her figures were as abstract as the rest of her piece. Even though her palette was very bright, there seems to be no happiness.








*http://www.glitzqueen.com/art/BRmunter.html

DER BLAUE REITER

Der Blaue Reiter -means the blue rider- started in 1911 in December as a Expressionist German art movement by Kadinsky, Klee, Marc, and Macke.  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.It came from one of the Kandinsky's painting.
  The Blue Rider-1903-Wassily Kandinsky


The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms had relationship 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.The Der Blaue Reiter artists were trying to find spiritual truths that they felt impressionists had not conveyed. 


The group was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. As a result this movement was lasted for 3 years.




*http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c20th/blauereiter.htm

UMBERTO BOCCIONI

Umberto Boccioni  was born in 1882 in Italy. He learned Pointilism in the studio of Giacomo Balla from 1898 to 1902. He met his Futurist collaborator Gino Severini in Rome. Boccioni adapted Filippno Marinetti's idea which glorified the dynamism of modern technology to the visual arts and become the lead of Futurist art. Boccioni was important not only in developing the movement's theories, but also in introducing the stylistic innovations that led to the dynamic, Cubist-like style now so closely associated with them.
He died while volunteering in the Italian army, aged only thirty-three, making him emblematic of the Futurists' celebration of the machine and the violent destructive force of modernity.




"To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere."


   Dynamism of a Soccer player




*http://www.theartstory.org/artist-boccioni-umberto.htm

FUTURISM

Futurism started in Italy in the early 20th century when Filippo Marinetti announced the first manifesto of Futurism until the end of World War 1. The Futurists love technology, speed and violence. Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoviries of science. While Futurism was certainly a product of the industrialized and urban north, Marinetti's internationalism brought a new dimension of experience and a firmer sense of identitiy to artists trapped between the achievements of the ever-present Renaissence.They are supporters of future and modern tools and vehicles like cars, planes. Painters are usually was trying to express the feeling of movement in their paintings.  Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques.Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had effects in other countries, France and most notably Russia.  Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.




 Giacomo Balla ,Abstract Speed + Sound

 Example of Futuristic architecture by Antonio Sant'Elia

  Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913



*http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/futurism.htm
*http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/futurism/
*Bozolla. Angelo& Tısdall, Caroline; Futurism; Thame and Hudson; 1992