Definition and Development of Impressionism and Realism - Essay Example

Definition and Development of impressionism and Realism Impressionism refers to an art movement which originated from a group of artists based in Paris in the 19th century. Despite severe opposition from France’s conventional art community, in 1870s and 1880s they became prominent due to their independent exhibitions. Relatively thin, small but visible brush strokes, unusual visual angles, inclusion of movement as an important element of the perception of human and experience (Scott 150). The ordinary subject matter, open composition and emphasis on depiction of light in its varying qualities accurately characterized their works. Impressionism prefers the interaction of color and light, equalizing brushstrokes across the canvas’ surface and rejects chiaroscuro. The viewer experiences background foreground and middle ground on an almost equal shallow foreground plane after elimination of chiaroscuro. With a complete rejection of reality, impressionists embraced idealism. Impressionist’s paintings depict pleasures, tastes, as well as values of the upper middle class (Scott 153). Realism portrays life without making it romantic and it aims to show how people make it in life. Realism focus revolves around middle-class, farm workers, livestock and other normal activities (Scott 157). The difference between the two is the impressionist’s exciting movement and the intentionally dull and ordinary realism. Realism aimed at conveying an objective vision and truthful of contemporary life. In realism, real images are used in portraying the lives of common people unlike impressionists who use pastimes of the middle and upper classes. Relationship between Realism and Impressionism and Influence on Impressionists To an impressionist, realism meant that the artist painting needed to take into record the most understated sensations of reflected light. A fleeting and specific moment of time is conveyed by this style when a specific kind of captured light. Impressionist paintings appeared like sketches according to the views of the public back then and lacked the finish and polish that more fashionable paintings possessed. Application of paints in tiny strokes by impressionist allowed them to display open color sensations, keep colors intense and unmixed and let the eyes of the viewer’s mix the colors. The active participation of the viewer and the bright colors brought in the scintillation of natural light experience. It can, therefore, be concluded that by remaining true to their, impressionists remained realists though they ignored numerous old conventions for object representation. Impressionist’s truthfulness lay in their subjective and personal sensations and not in the reproduction of the exact object. For impressionists, their concern was more of representing subject and not objects. Intensity of focusing on the subject grew because artists were more concerned with an individual’s independent expression. What an individual saw became the reality and the meaning change of realism into subjective realism that led to the birth of subjectivity of modern art (Scott 153). Synthetic Cubism Analytic Cubism led to the growth of Synthetic Cubism. Synthetic developed Cubism by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and later Salon Cubists copied it. Braque and Picasso discovered that their work became flatter, more geometrically simplified and generalized through repetition of analytical signs. Sometimes overlapping planes shared one color. The painted flat depictions of the paper were replaced by real pieces of paper. Drawn musical notation replaced by real scores of music. Real or painted fragments of playing cards, newspapers, advertisements, and cigarette packs interacted on the canvas’ flat plane. Consequently, the artists strived to accomplish a total interpretation of art and life. Collage invention that integrated fragments and signs of real things is Synthetic Cubism’s aspect. Synthetic Cubism lasted to the period after the First World War and influenced artist like Romare Bearden, Hans Hoffman, Jacob Lawrence and many more of the 20th Century (Scott 167). Comparison between Analytical Cubism and Synthetic Cubism Development of Analytical Cubism took place before Synthetic Cubism. Analytical Cubism aimed at analyzing an idea and subject matter through image breakdown. In this regard the artist brings together various views, angles and perspectives of the object in several possible qualities and forms. Synthetic Cubism, on the other hand, is like a college since it brings together different textures, subject matters, and surfaces. It means that Synthetic Cubism is 2-D while analytical cubism is 3-D. While analytical cubism sought to do analysis of an object, various objects are combined (or synthesized) by synthetic cubism. Nevertheless, both synthetic and analytical cubism manipulate shape, color, form, and line to realize this. Influence of Van Gogh, a Gauguin Work on Fauvism and the German Expressionists Vincent Van Gogh indicated that the color can be used to express one’s self in a more forceful way other than reproducing what is seen. Van Gogh is an iconic tortured artist who strove to pass around his spiritual and emotional state in all his artworks. Though in the whole of his lifetime only one of his paintings was sold, he is currently one of the world’s most celebrated artists. Van Gogh’s canvases with densely laden, clearly seen brushstrokes provided in a lively, opulent palette bring to life his personal expression through painting (Scott 173). Every painting gives a direct sense of Van Gogh’s view of the scene, interpretation using his eyes, heart, and mind. His emotionally evocative, radically idiosyncratic style has continuously affected movements and artists throughout the 20th century to the present time which guarantees the importance of Van Gogh’s artistic works into the future. Dedication of Van Gogh to articulating the nature and inner spirituality of man led to the fusion of content and style. The fusion resulted in imaginative, dramatic, emotional and rhythmic canvases that convey more than the mere subject’s appearance. He expressed subjective emotions using gestural, impulsive application symbolic colors and paint. These practices and methods have defined several subsequent current movements to Abstract Expressionism from Fauvism Expressionism. Gauguin noted that if according to an artist trees look yellow then they must be painted bright yellow. In modern art, the first twentieth-century movement was Fauvism. Examples of Van Gogh and Gauguin inspired growth of Fauvism by a group of French painters. Henri Matisse was identified as the leader of the group, and he put a lot of emphasis on intense color use in describing space and light and also in communicating the state of emotion of the artist. Fauvism, therefore, stood out as a valuable precursor to Expressionism and Cubism as well as an inspiration to future’s means of abstraction. Post-Impressionist painters like Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Seurat in the initial years of the 20th Century were regarded as the frontrunners in avant-garde art (Scott 150). Their experiments with subject matter, paint application, form, and more importantly unmixed, pure color was the reasons behind emergence of Fauvism. Post-Painterly Abstraction within the Context of Modernism Post painterly Abstraction refers to a term that describes several styles that cropped up in response to some Abstract Expressionists painterly, gestural approaches. It was coined in 1964 by Clement Greenberg. It then served originally as the heading of an exhibition that consisted of a huge number of artists. They were associated with several tendencies like, hard-edge abstraction, Washington color school and color field painting. Modernism refers to a philosophical movement which in conjunction with cultural changes and trends arose from far-reaching and wide-scale transformations in Western society that occurred in the late 19th, as well as the early 20th centuries. Rapid growth of cities, horror of World War I and development of modern industrial societies are the main factors that shaped modernism. Self-consciousness is a notable characteristic of modernism. Modernism rejected the realism ideology completely and used the art of the past by employing incorporation, recapitulation, parody, revision, rewriting and reprise. Reduction of some Abstract Expressionism to a set of mannerisms was Greenberg’s major concern. Also, it led to an increase in seeking for a new set of artists who were not keen on elements like connection with the artist, definite brushstrokes, and subject matter (Scott 143). Greenberge believed that the process accomplished a purity level which would reveal the canvas truthfulness and the space’s two-dimensional aspects. To differentiate the term from Abstract Expressionism Greenberge named it Post-Painterly Abstraction. This term was given to numerous abstract arts that opposed the second generation’s Abstract Expressionists gestural abstraction. Hard-edged painters like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly are among the main Post-Painterly Abstraction’s trends. They explored the association between tightly ruled edges and shapes in Kelly’s case and between the literal shape of the support and the shapes portrayed on the surface in Stella’s case. Color-Field Painters like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler stained first Magna into unprimed canvas, thereby exploring optical and tactile aspects of large, brilliant fields of open pure color. Post-Painterly Abstractions is regarded as a continuation of the self-criticism of the modernist dialect. Pop Art Pop Art refers to an art movement which developed in Britain in mid-1950s and the United States in the late 1950s. Traditions of fine art were challenged by Pop art by including imagery from popular cultures like news and advertising. Materials in pop art are in some cases visually ejected from its usual context, joined with unrelated material or isolated. Pop art’s concept mainly refers to the attitudes that led to it than the art itself. It employs mass culture aspects like comic books and advertising as well as mundane cultural objects. Pop art is regarded as a reaction to abstract expression ideas which were dominant and also an expansion to the same ideas (Scott 151). It is similar to Dada because it utilizes images and found objects. Pop art assumed images of some popular cultural practices in art, emphasizing any given culture’s kitschy or banal elements and mostly by using irony. Pop art is also associated with the use mechanical means of rendering techniques or reproduction by artists. Pop art was mainly intended to repudiate and extend Dadaism. Though Dadaism and pop art played the same roles in addressing some subjects, Dada movement’s satirical, destructive and anarchic impulses pop art replaced these with detached affirmation of the mass culture’s artifacts. Pop art was popular, expendable, transient mass produced, low cost, young sexy, witty, glamorous, gimmicky and meant for business. Pop art is industrial painting, and it is high in America because America was hit harder and sooner with capitalism and industrialism, and the whole world is likely to experience that soon. Integration of high and low art by Synthetic Cubism is regarded as the first Pop Art. Relationship between Cezzane’s Work and Analytical Cubism Georges Braque along with Pablo Picasso made a cubism that turned out as modern art’s truly revolutionary style. Introduced in the 20th century as a result of the speed, it was not precedent to which the whole world was changing. Cubism was aimed at revitalizing the Western art’s tired traditions by artists. Conventional styles of presentation like perspective was challenged by cubists with an aim of developing new ways of seeing that brought into the picture the modern age. Ideas developed by Braque and Picasso on Cubism in a period around 1907 were a common interest of Paul Cezanne’s later paintings (Scott 157). In his paintings, Cezzane had no interest in generating an impression of depth in his artistic works and therefore abandoned the perspective drawing tradition. Perspective that is geometric formula for drawing three-dimensional objects on the surface with two dimensions had been in use since Early Renaissance. Cezanne had a feeling that illusionism of perspective opposed the perception that painting is a two-dimensional flat object. In his paintings, he liked to flatten the space in order to emphasize on their surface through which he stressed out the difference between reality and painting. Cezzane viewed painting in abstract forms as the arrangement and construction of color on the surface of two dimensions. The flat abstract style was preferred by analytical cubists during their early painting works. Works cited Scott, Diana G. Approaches to Art History. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2007. Print. Read More