Munchs and Redans paintings - Assignment Example

SYMBOLISM & ART NOUVEAU Question The paintings presented are all excellent examples of symbolism, an art movement that took off in the 19th century in reaction to classical painting. The world was changing and these artists felt they needed a new mode to express these changes. All of these paintings do not attempt to perfectly represent the figures in them. In fact the brush strokes are often quite broad and detail is rendered in an insignificant way. The characters are not meant to be individuals, but are meant to be archetypes that say something about the human unconscious.

Some, for example, Munch’s paintings rely much more on colour, while Redan’s work does not. Additionally, Munch’s colours are dark and rich which have strong emotional associations. Each picture is a kind of tableaux trying to communicate a single emotion be it relaxation, jealousy, or grief. This was in keeping with modernism at the time. Question 2 One of the things I would love to do regarding interior design and art nouveau is to have lots of stained glass in the house I would be designing.

I think these kinds of windows are very atmospheric. The whole house would let it multi-coloured light and each window would tell a different story. However, unlike the windows in churches, these would tell more secular, modern stories—perhaps about celebrities. Churches from the past, whether they have art nouveau stained windows or not are traditionally thought of stuffy and cloistered. One of the innovations of the art nouveau movement was to free the medium by using more colour and untraditional shapes in order to push past the classics and out into the realm of modernism.