HARD-EDGE

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 can be seen to be associated with one or more school of painting, but is also a generally descriptive term, for these qualities found in any painting. Hard-edged painting can be both figurative or nonrepresentational.

John McLaughlin

McLaughlin had begun painting during the 1930s, relatively late in life. He was self-taught, without receiving formal artistic training. His fondness for Asian art and his travels in that part of the world influenced his artistic style. From 1952 onward, he ceased using curves in his work. Paintings from his later period show increasing simplification of form and color palette. He described his artistic philosophy: "My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract. I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer's natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle. I must therefore free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular by omitting the image. This I manage by the use of neutral forms.

POP ART

POP-ART

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. 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. Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. A London-based group of young painters, writers, critics and sculptors, The Independent Group, pioneered the exploration of Pop Art in Britain and coined its name as well, to denote art stemming from popular mass culture. Pop art is considered to be art movement that precede postmodern art. Some prominent artists of the movement were Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Tom Wesselman and Richard Hamilton.


David Hockney

An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.He was associated with the movement pop art, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging, named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men. From 1963, Hockney was represented by the art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. A subsequent visit to California, where he lived for many years, inspired Hockney to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, using the comparatively new acrylic medium and rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool

POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

Post-painterly abstraction is a broad term that encompasses a variety of styles that evolved in reaction to the painterly, gestural approaches of some Abstract Expressionists. Coined by Clement Greenberg in 1964, it originally served as the title of an exhibition that included a large number of artists who were associated with various tendencies, including color field painting, hard-edge abstraction, and the Washington Color School.

CLEMENT GREENBERG

Clement Greenberg was probably the single most influential art critic in the 20th century. Although he is most closely associated with his support for Abstract Expressionism, and in particular Jackson Pollock, his views closely shaped the work of many other artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. His attention to the formal properties of art – color, line, space and so forth – his rigorous approach to criticism, and his understanding of the development of modern art – although they have all been challenged – have influenced generations of critics and historians.     

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract Expressionism is a type of art in which the artist expresses himself purely through the use of form and color. It non-representational, or non-objective, art, which means that there are no actual objects represented.

Now considered to be the first American artistic movement of international importance, the term was originally used to describe the work of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky.

The movement can be more or less divided into two groups: Action Painting, typified by artists such as Pollock, de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, stressed the physical action involved in painting; Color Field Painting, practiced by Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland, among others, was primarily concerned with exploring the effects of pure color on a canvas.

WILLEM DE KOONING

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam on 24 April 1904. In 1916 de Kooning began to train as a commercial artist; at the same time he attended evening courses at the Rotterdam Academie voor Beldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen (Rotterdam Academy) until 1924. Afterwards he studied at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the van Schelling School of Design in Antwerp.
In 1926 the young artist emigrated to the US, where he worked illegally in New York as a commercial artist, window dresser, sign painter and carpenter. There Willem de Kooning met other artists, including John Graham, Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky and worked for the Federal Art Project, for which he did murals between 1935 and 1939. From 1935 in fact, he was able to devote himself entirely to painting.
He shared a studio with Gorky and his early pictures were influenced by Gorky's Surrealist style and by Picasso's painting. However, de Kooning was also inspired by the Gestural branch of the New York School as well as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Contact with Pollock and Kline inspired him to do his first black-and-white abstract works in 1946; he returned to them in 1959.
From 1950 he developed his first "Women" pictures, which are notable for such vehemence of handling that they at first caused a scandal. He retained this type of figuration until the 1990s. At the same time Willem de Kooning also worked on fairly abstract landscapes, mainly during the years between 1957 and 1961.
Naturalised as an American citizen in 1962, de Kooning left New York the following year to settle at Springs on Long Island. In 1964 he received one of the greatest distinctions awarded in America, the "Presidential Medal of Freedom". In 1970 he turned to sculpturing in bronze.
At the latest from his participation in the 1954 Venice Biennale, where he was represented with one of his most important works, "Excavation", Willem de Kooning has been regarded as a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism. These years of his career were filled with numerous shows of his work and retrospectives. His exceptional œuvre is suffused with the duality of traditional figuration and Gestural Abstract painting.
Willem de Kooning died in Springs, USA on 19 March 1997.

SURREALISM

The Surrealist movement was founded in Paris by a small group of writers and artists who sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by Sigmund Freud, the Surrealists believed the conscious mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighting it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Their emphasis on the power of the imagination puts them in the tradition of Romanticism, but unlike their forbears, they believed that revelations could be found on the street and in everyday life. The Surrealist impulse to tap the subconscious mind, and their interests in myth and primitivism, went on to shape the Abstract Expressionists, and they remain influential today.

Salvador DALI


 Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931).
In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse.
Apart from painting, Dalí's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Buñuel he also made the first Surrealist films---Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)---and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dalí's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

MINIMAL ART

MINIMAL ART

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. 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.  Minimalism would probably have been accepted as a part of modernism. The term "Minimalism" has evolved over the last half-century to include a vast number of artistic media, and its precedents in the visual arts can be found in Mondrian, van Doesburg, Reinhardt, and in Malevich's monochromes.

Donald Judd

Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent works that defied the term "minimalism". Nevertheless, he is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism," and its most important theoretician through such seminal writings such as "Specific Objects" (1964).

KINETIC ART

KINETIC ART

Kinetic art explores how things look when they move and refers mostly to sculptured works, made up of parts designed to be set in motion by an internal mechanism or an external stimulus, such as light or air. The movement is not virtual or illusory, but a real movement that might be created by a motor, water, wind or even a button pushed by the viewer. Over time, kinetic art developed in response to an increasingly technological culture. Kinetic art has its origins in the Dadaist and Constructivist movements that emerged in the 1910s. It flourished into a lively avant-garde following the landmark exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1955, after which it attracted a wide international following.The Kinetic art form was pioneered by Marcel Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp’s work with kinetic art (a work that employs a moving part) and found objects resulted in other pieces that would cement his fame. A wheel mounted on a stool, Bicycle Wheel, hinted at the artist’s preoccupation with physics and mathematics. Duchamp also continued to write and organize important art exhibitions such as the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Gallerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938. Duchamp became a U.S. citizen in 1955, but died in Paris in 1968. His work not only dramatically influenced the Dada and Surrealist movements, but Pop Art too. Some of his most famous works can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

DADA   



Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art; it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning--interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada offends. Perhaps it is then ironic that Dada is an influential movement in Modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.

The artists of the Dada movement had become disillusioned by art, art history and history in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I and had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Thus they became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world (they thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even art), and created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down.

Andre BRETON

 French poet and critic, a leader of the surrealist movement. He was born in Tinchebray, Orne Department, studied medicine, and worked in psychiatric wards in World War I. Later, as a writer in Paris, he was a pioneer in the antirationalist movements in art and literature known as Dadaism and surrealism, which developed out of the general disillusionment with tradition that marked the post-World War I era. Breton's study of the works of Sigmund Freud and his experiments with automatic writing influenced his initial formulation of surrealist theory. He expressed his views in Literature, the leading surrealist periodical, which he helped found and edited for many years, and in three surrealist manifestos (1924, 1930, 1942). His best creative work is considered the novel Nadja (1928), based partly on his own experiences. His poetry, in Selected Poems (1948; trans. 1969), reflects the influence of the poets Paul Valery and Arthur Rimbaud.

SYNCHRONISM

Synchromism, often wrongly spelt as Synchronism, was an American art movement founded in the year 1912-13. Co-founded by Abstractionists Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton MacDonald-Wright, this purely abstract style was the first to bring America on the international stage of Fine Arts. It is easy to draw a parallel between Synchromism and its Contemporary Art form Orphism, which was essentially a trend or specialization in the Cubist Art that placed a premium on the understanding and the use of colors. Orphism was considered the crucial piece leading to the evolution of Abstract Art from Cubism. The body of works in Orphism was related to the Greek God Orpheus, who represented music, fine arts, and the musical instrument lyre. Synchromism never restricted itself to a particular subject or a group of subjects. Nevertheless, in techniques and forms it remained similar to Orphism

RUSSELL

Russell, who was born in New York City in 1886, visited Paris in 1906 and returned a few years later to settle there, supported by a stipend from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. A Virginian who was four years younger than Russell, MacDonald-Wright was in residence from 1907 on.
Though too late for the ''scandalous'' Fauve show of 1905, the painters were in time for its aftershocks - and for the rest of the prewar ferment in Paris. They met and became friends while studying with Ernest Percyval-Tudor, an American specializing in Ogden Rood's theory of color, one of many then circulating.
This exhaustive survey is in large part due to the archival material bestowed on the museum by Henry Reed, one of its trustees and a collector. Also a triumph of documentation is the accompanying monograph by Marilyn Kushner, curator of the show and of the museum's collections, and its introductory essay by William Agee, professor of art history at Hunter College.
Russell has already been revived by way of Synchromist anthologies, including a major one staged by Gail Levin at the Whitney Museum in 1978. But here he stands alone, a pioneer of abstraction and, depending on one's view, an important contributor to American Modernism.
A Russell ''Synchromy'' can be an abstraction involving diamond or wedge shapes that are generally but not always painted in prismatic colors; it can also be a figure or still life defined by stripes in the same hues. Such canvases occupied the artist from 1910 to 1916 and, after a hiatus, were followed by the ''Eidos Synchromies,'' where the colors tend to be more somber and there is a noticeable sense of space.

SECTION D'OR

The Section d'or ("Golden Section"), also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters, sculptors and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism. Based in the Parisian suburbs of Puteaux and Courbevoie, the group was active from 1911 to around 1914, coming to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911. This showing by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier and Fernand Léger, created a scandal that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time. The Salon de la Section d'Or further exposed Cubism to a wider audience. The group seems to have adopted the name Section d'Or to distinguish themselves from the narrower definition of Cubism developed in parallel by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and to show that Cubism, rather than being an isolated art-form, represented the continuation of a grand tradition (indeed, the golden ratio had fascinated Western intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years).

Pablo PICASSO 


Pablo Picasso is born in Malaga on October 25, 1881 the son of the painter and drawing teacher José Ruiz Blasco. He attends the Art Academy La Lonja in Barcelona in 1895, where his father also teaches. Picasso studies at the Madrid Academy in 1897. He travels to Paris in 1900, where he has his first one-man show with Ambroise Vollard. 
Picasso's early work begins with the melancholic pictures of the "Blue Period". The cheerful "Rose Period" follows from 1905 to 1907, a period in which his circus paintings were made. The painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" marks the beginning of Cubism in 1907, which Pablo Picasso develops together with Georges Braque and that can be separated into two categories, the "analytical Cubism" and the "synthetic Cubism".
Picasso gets to know Fernande Olivier in 1904. His women also play a big role for his artistic oeuvre, they are his lovers, his models and his muses. Their facial features appear in many of his works. Fernande is followed by the dancer Olga Koklowa, whom he meets while working on designs for Sergej Diaghilew's "Ballets Russes". Around 1917 Picasso was also working as costume andstage designer for Jean Cocteau's ballet "Parade". 
Pablo Picasso's works after 1918 can not be clearly categorized in terms of stylistic terminology, it contains objective-realistic, classicist, symbolistic, surreal and also abstracts elements. The artist takes on what is already there, familiarizes himself with it and breaks new grounds in terms of composition, finding inspiration in his own reality and motifs that surround him.
Picasso meets Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927, she also becomes his lover and muse at the same time. Besides paintings, a vast graphic oeuvre is created, such as first series of etchings. Picasso makes more and more sculpture as of 1928, as well as mixed media objects with wires and assemblages. 
Picaso executes the large-size painting "Guernica" for the Spanish pavilion at the world exhibition in Paris in 1937, a haunting anti-war painting, which is seen as the key work of art of the 20th century. The photographer Dora Maar, his new lover, captures the painting's creation.
Françoise Gilot enters Picaso's life in 1943. As of 1945 the lithography becomes the predominant graphic technique. Picasso makes objects of utility and pottery objects in the town of Vallauris in South France as of 1947.
He purchases the Castle of Vauvenargues in Provence in 1958, making it a place of retreat for the aging genius. Picasso marriages Jacqueline Roque in 1961. He dies in Mougins on April 8, 1973.
The Museo Picasso is opened in Barcelona as early as in 1963, which gets most of his estate after his death. The Musée Picasso in Paris is opened in 1985.

DER BLAUE REITER


Der Blaue Reiter was a German Expressionist movement that was established in December 1911 by Kandinsky, Marc and Gabriele Münter.

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, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), came from the painting by Kandinsky. His Blaue Reiter ( Blue Rider ) was an adventure in the simplification and stylization of forms and the connection between music and painting.

The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms had equivalence 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. Their work promoted individual expression and broke free from any artistic restraints. These Nietzsche's words sum up the group's motto, "Who wishes to be creative must first blast and destroy accepted values."

The first exhibitions of The Blue Rider included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, and Arnold Schönberg. These artists, who early in their careers broke from the mainstream, were later to become the driving force behind modern art as we know it today.

KANDINSKY





The Russian painter and graphic artist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the great masters of modern art, as well as the outstanding representative of pure abstract painting (using only colors and forms) that dominated the first half of the twentieth century.  

Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 4, 1866, in Moscow, Russia. His father was a tea merchant. When he was five years old the family moved to Odessa, Russia. The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and the cello. Because his family was fond of traveling, Kandinsky got to see the Italian cities of Venice, Rome, and Florence as a young boy. He was also influenced by the imposing Muscovite (from Moscow) buildings such as the Kremlin.
Between 1886 and 1892 Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. In 1889 he was a member of a team formed to study the life of the people in the Vologda district in northwestern Russia. He was highly impressed by their folk art and the interior decorations of the village houses. The use of forms and colors became an influence in his art. In 1893 he accepted a position on the university's law faculty.     

It was not until 1896, when Kandinsky was thirty years old, that he decided to become an artist. His artistic development was shaped greatly by an exhibition of French impressionist painters that was shown in Moscow in 1895. The impressionists used values of color and light to show their subjects rather than painting in fine detail. The works of Claude Monet (1840–1926) attracted Kandinsky's attention. In Monet's paintings the subject matter played a secondary role to color. It was as though reality and fairy tale were intermixed. That was the secret of Kandinsky's early work, which was based on folk art, and it remained so even as his work became more complex.
The year 1910 was crucial for Kandinsky and for the art world. Kandinsky produced his first abstract watercolor. In that work all elements of representation (the actual look of a subject) seem to have disappeared. In continuing his early abstract works he used strong straight-line strokes combined with powerful patches of color.

FUTURISM

Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind. 

Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists. He and others espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the motion in modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the cubist, the constructivist and the dadaist. 
      Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques. The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their repetitions of lines. Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were breaking motion into small sequences, and using the wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the picture. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also additionally were creating the illusion of movement. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.  Futurists mixed activism and artistic research. They organized events that caused scandal. Everything was there to help them to glorify Italy and lead their country into the age of modernity. Certain Futurists vehemently promoted themselves to try to join forces with the Fascists, who were coming to power at the time. But Mussolini showed a preference for the Novecento Italiano, movement of artists who identified with the classical order and Italian heritage.

Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Precisionism, an important development of American Modernism.

Although Futurism itself is now regarded as extinct, having died out during the 1920s, powerful echoes of Marinetti's thought, still remain in modern, popular culture and art. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.




Umberto Boccioni

 Boccioni studied art through the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, beginning in 1901. He also studied design with a sign painter in Rome. Together with his friend Gino Severini, he became a student ofGiacomo Balla, a divisionist painter. In 1906, Boccioni studied Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles in Paris. During the late 1906 and early 1907, he shortly took drawing classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. In 1901, Boccioni first visited the Famiglia Artistica, a society for artists in Milan. After moving there in 1907, he became acquainted with fellow Futurists, including the famous poetFilippo Tommaso Marinetti. The two artists would later join with others in writing manifestos on Futurism.

Boccioni became the main theorist of the artistic movement. He also decided to be a sculptor after he visited various studios in Paris, in 1912, among which those of Braque,Archipenko, Brancusi, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and, probably, Medardo Rosso. While in 1912 he exhibited some paintings together with other Italian futurists at the Bernheim-Jeun, in 1913 he returned to show his sculptures at the Gallerie La Boetie: all related to the elaboration of what Boccioni had seen in Paris, they in their turn probably influenced thecubist sculptors, especially Duchamp-Villon.

EXPRESSIONISM


Expressionism is an art movement whose effects are seen in music, literature, architecture, painting, sculpturing and also theatre. Expressionism begun to seen in 20th century in Germany. This movement aim artists to express their emotions by using masses, colors and lights, musical notes. In architecture, expressionism shows parallelism in Bauhaus.

Ernst BARLACH

The northern German sculptor and graphic artist Ernst Barlach began his professional education in Hamburg. In 1888 Berlach attended a vocational school. In 1891 the artist attended the Dresden 'Akademie', where he continued to study sculpture and became Robert Diez's master student. During two study trips to Paris in 1895 and 1897 Barlach's well-founded academic training was reinforced. His artistic work was influenced greatly by a trip to Russia in 1906. The powerful and folk-like design of Barlach's sculptures after this time reflect the impressions of rugged farm-life and Russian folk art. During these years Barlach also produced graphic illustration cycles for his own plays. In 1910 Ernst Barlach settled in Güstrow (Mecklenburg), Germany. In 1917 Barlach had his first exhibition at Paul Cassirer's in Berlin. In 1919 the sculptor was admitted to the 'Preußische Akademie der Künste' in Berlin as a full member. During the following years Barlach produced numerous wood carvings, including one on Goethe's 'Walpurgisnacht'. In 1928 Barlach published his autobiography entitled 'Ein selbsterzähltes Leben' ('A Selftold Life'). In 1930 a comprehensive exhibition of Barlach's sculptures and graphic works took place at the 'Preussische Akademie der Künste' in Berlin. In 1933 the artist received the order 'Pour le mérité'. In 1935, commission by Hermann F. Reemtsma, Barlach designed the 'Fries der Lauschenden' and a tombstone for Theodor Däubler. During the years that followed, the sculptor was ostracized by the Nazis. In 1936 Barlach's works were systematically removed from museums, churches, and public spaces. Today, Ernst Barlach is known as one of the most important sculptors of Classical Modernism. Excellent examples of his expressionist wood and bronze sculptures can now be seen at the Güstrow Cathedral, the Elisabeth Church in Marburg and the Berlin National Gallery. Ernst Barlach's home and studio in Güstrow is now open to the public as a museum.

DIE BRUCKE

Die Brucke was the association of artist expressionists from Dresden, Germany. Their first exhibition was held in 1906.
Die Brucke made use of a technique that was controlled, intentionally unsophisticated and crude, developing a style hallmarked by expressive distortions and emphases. Die Brucke artists often used color similar to the Fauves, and they were also influenced by art form from Africa and Oceania.
Some of the painters in the group sympathized with the revolutionary socialism of the day and drew inspiration from Van Gogh's ideas on artists' communities. Die Brucke expressionists believed that their social criticism of the ugliness of modern life could lead to a new and better future.

VAN GOGH

(March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890) is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt, though he had little success during his lifetime. Van Gogh produced all of his work (some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings) during a period of only 10 years before he succumbed to mental illness (possibly bipolar disorder) and committed suicide. His fame grew rapidly after his death especially following a showing of 71 of van Gogh's paintings in Paris on March 17, 1901 (11 years after his death).

(Properly the name rhymes with loch, but it is also pronounced 'goph', 'go' and 'goe'.)

Van Gogh's influence on expressionism, fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-century art. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is dedicated to Van Gogh's work and that of his contemporaries.

Several paintings by Van Gogh rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. On March 30, 1987 Van Gogh's painting Irises was sold for a record $53.9 million at Southeby's, New York. On May 15, 1990 his Portrait of Doctor Gachet was sold for $82.5 million at Christie's, thus establishing a new price record (see also List of most expensive paintings).