Early modernist art movements - Essay Example

Early Modernist Art Movements Introduction People communicate many ways with each other. Music, curving, and any other form of art has existed for a very time now and has been perhaps the most important method of passing on culture from one generation the other. Paintings and drawings are a very popular way through which the people today have come to learn about how the past was, thousands and hundreds of years ago. Portraits such as that of the Mona Lisa still draw a lot of attention yet it has been around for hundreds of years. Since art is clearly among the fields that the human race has taken as seriously as possible, it is evident that it has a lot of impact on how we relate with each other and like every other field in history, it has gone through a lot of changes. Some of these changes arose since the renaissance and the advent of humanism. Discussion 1. Futurism Futurism is clearly an innovative movement which was launched in Italy in 1909. Nonetheless, there were parallel art movements in Russia, England, and other regions. It is one of the first and among the most critical early modernist art movements that were not centred in Paris-this is evidently the reason why France does not take the movement seriously. Futurism was responsible for exalting the modern world dynamism, particularly in the field of science and technology. Futurism had begun in literature but spread its wings covering painting, industrial design, sculpture, and so on and their ideology influenced all other types of art. This piece, The City Rises, is considered to be the first painting in the futurism movement (Martin & Grosenick 2005). The artist, Boccioni, illustrates a modern city in construction. In the image, it is clear that the artist depicts chaos and movement that resembles a war scene. Some people state that this work shows that the futurism movement believed that war was the only viable means toward culture progress. The racing horses into the work’s foreground as workers are seen struggling to gain control indicate a struggle between animals and people. Animals shown are not very clear indicating movement while other objects are painted more realistically. Boccioni also shows the influences of Impressionism, Cubism, and Post-Impressionism as seen in the broken exemplification of space and the brushstrokes too. 2. Constructivism Constructivism happened in Russia and was the most influential in the 20th century, it was also the last modern art movement. The movement evolved during the time when Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917 October Revolution and was very important to a lot of advanced Russian artists who were in support of the goals of the revolution (Hunter & Jacobus 2000). While the art borrowed a lot from Suprematism, Futurism, and Cubism, it was a whole lot different in that its approach to making objects was not cantered on the traditional concern of artists to composition. The movement abolished this and replaced it with ‘construction’. The idea behind the movement was hope and focus on mass production as it was intended to serve the ends of the modern, communist society. The movement therefore called for a careful and thorough analysis. Rodchenko attended a Russian Futurists lecture in 1912 and was converted immediately. In this photo, anyone can tell that cubism was really at work here. The placement of the object on the corner of the room does echo the Russian piety in their traditional household and that religious icons were generally placed at the corner of a room. His choice of placing the object at the corner shows that he believed experiment and modernity to be the new gods of the country. The way the object spans the corner shows a certain relationship between the object and the room, just like how Boccioni had called upon sculptors to place environments inside objects. This also shows the relationship between constructivism had with futurism. 3. Berlin Dada The Dada movement began in Zurich and Switzerland in 1916 as a reaction to nationalism that World War 1 had brought. The movement was largely influenced by several of the earlier movements. These included Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, and Cubism. The output of this movement was inarguably diverse as it affected not only performance art to poetry, but also collage, painting photography, and sculpture. Dada employed mockery of both naturalistic and materialistic attitudes and also used aesthetics which proved of having quite an impact on artists from cities such as Paris, Cologne, Berlin, New York and Hanover. Jean (Hans) Arp, in this painting, made a series of collages out of chance through dropping squares of contrasting colours while standing above the larger sheet of paper and then gluing all the papers wherever they fell onto the paper he was standing on. This type of art provoked visceral reactions such as those from I-Ching coins that primarily focused on fortune telling, something that Arp was really interested in. It is alleged that he became frustrated when his attempts to compose formal geometric designs failed (Dickerman & Doherty 2005). It is quite difficult to understand how a person would expected to drop pieces of different coloured paper from a distance above the ground and then expect them to fall into place or into a specific pattern. Nonetheless, these chance collages is what brought about ‘anti-art’, Dada’s primary goal. 4. The Surrealist Movement This movement was founded in Paris by a group of artists and writers whose aim was to unlock the power of the imagination through channelling the unconscious. The movement was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud and greatly scorned literary realism and rationalism. It is from Freud that the movement believed that taboos were weighing down the power of imagination through the conscious mind. The movement had faith that the psych, as borrowed from Karl Marx, had the power to reveal all the contradictions that existed at the time thus creating a good opportunity for a revolution. While the Surrealists were essentially falling into the Romanticism tradition, they departed from forbears since they believed that revelation could occur anywhere including the street. Also, they believed that they could also occur in everyday life (Durozoi 2002). In this collage, Max Ernst used painted found objects. The combination of painted canvas with 3-D objects depicts the artists desire to major in techniques entailing collages. Looking at the combination, it is clear that it is surrealist. This is seen from the collage being uptight with both dream-inspired symbols and a touch of mystery. On the roof, a man can be seen carrying a woman away. On the left below, there is a startled nightingale holding weapons and who appears disturbed. According to Ernst, the woman holding the weapons referenced not only a hallucination he had had while he was sick in bed but also the death of his sister. Bibliography Dickerman, Leah, and Brigid Doherty. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. Washington [D.C.: National Gallery of Art in Association with D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2005. Durozoi, Ge. History of the Surrealist Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hunter, Sam, and John M. Jacobus. Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. 3rd Rev. ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Martin, Sylvia, and Uta Grosenick. Futurism. Köln: Taschen, 2005. Read More