impression expressionism

In the next phase of our journey through art history we will observe the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and George Brauque. We will focus on the

attempts of these artists to depict the passing time and the idea that multiple perspectives that can exist in one moment. The main idea behind

their work is to find a more real “truth”

TIME WARP: Caravaggio TO PICASSO

IDEAS ARE BUILT UPON IDEAS• Movements in Art and literature are visibly and conceptually noticeable as a progression

of thought.

• Artists and writers are often REACTING to the concepts, ideas and methods that have come before them.

• Artists “build” from the rules and guidelines of past movements with the goal to either:

Push current conventions further

• OR

• React against conventions to create a new mode of expression.

• Art is never created in a void! Internal (personal experience, health and culture) and external (war, money and technological advancements etc) realities impact all creation.

Caravaggio painted his reality, his version of the TRUTH

AMERICAN NATURALISM • Prior to the impressionist art movement painters were highly trained and skilled masters

of their craft.

• They most often would paint commissioned portraits of the elite

• OR

• Still lives that were used to show wealth as well.

• Art in American began to focus on the wild landscape, resources and change. But all in all are still based in Imitationism or Realism

• Realism (or naturalism) in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.

STILL LIFE'S AND PORTRAITS

AMERICAN NATURALISM

• In fine art panting, "naturalism" describes a true-to-life style which involves the representation or depiction of nature (including people) with the least possible distortion or interpretation.

Impressionism

• LIFE= A series of “fleeting moments” (move or pass quickly, lasting a very short time)

• Attempted to capture these moments and forever freeze them in time.

• RADICALS in their time, early impressionists violated the rules of academic painting.

• FREE BRUSH STROKES Short and Broken.

• Scenes of modern life and often painted outside.

HOW IMPRESSIONISTS PAINTED THEIR REALITY• LIGHT. REAL SUNLIGHT is the most important factor for Impressionist painters.

• Focused on How sunlight illuminates, fades and reflects.

• Simple subjects such as a landscape or simple ordinary movements or moment of daily life.

• Formal Qualities:

• Big Smushy brush strokes.

• Blending

• Undefined lines

• NO BLACK

• Color Harmonies

Why did they focus on LIGHT?

They focused on light to illustrate the passing of time. Claude Monet: 1908

• Claude Monet once wrote ““when you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you- a tree, a house, a field, or whatever, merely think, Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it give your own naïve impression of the scene before you.”

• He said he wishes he was born blind and then suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint this way without knowing what the objects were that he saw before him. He held that the first real look at the motif was likely to truest and most unprejudiced one.

What do you think he meant by this statement?

LITERATURE AND MUSIC FOLLOW AND INFLUENCE ARTISTIC MOVEMENTS.

• For writers: Pages = Canvas

• Verbs and adjectives = Colors on their pallet.

• Literary Devices = Painter's Technique

• Authors of this time used literary devices to SLOW the passing of time, allowing us to linger on every image of a FLEETING scene.

• Examples: Catching someone’s eye from across a crowded room.

• The moment before a long anticipated kiss.

• A sunset.

• The split second before the light fades from a stage.

• “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.” Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Expanded the sentence to slow the syntax so the reader can linger on every image and involve their senses. He attempts to bring the reading into the scene, to see, to hear, to feel and to be a part of the moment.

POST IMPRESSIONISM TAKING THE FLEETING MOMENT A BIT FURTHER

• Building and expanding from IMPRESSIONISM, POST-IMPRESSIONISM opened the door for artist to become more experimental with technique and imbed personal and emotional elements into their work.

• Take Risks and push painting to the outermost limits to see what they could get away with.

• How did they do this?

Cropping/Composition

Color Harmonies

Multiple Light Sources

Reintroduction of black outlines

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

(1864-1901) Moulin Rouge 1893

• Also in this movement, artists begin to manipulate the depth and balance of their compositions, distort proportions and balance and manipulate and exaggerate the use of color.

Clockwise from top left:CezanneCezanneDegasSeuratVan Gogh

Paintings began to “Flatten” and distort therefor exposing the multiple perspectives that exist in one

moment. A new truth that lead to cubism.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

HENRI TOULOUSE LAUTREC

PAUL CEZANNE

• 706 × 588 - aliexpress.com

PAUL GAUGUIN

EDWARD DEGAS

EXPRESSIONISM…•"Everyone who renders directly and honestly whatever drives him to create is one of us."• E. L. Kirchner

• Expressionism was a MODERNIST movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world

solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.

EXPRESSIONISM HISTORY

• WHERE: Expressionism emerged simultaneously in various cities across Germany as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality.

• WHY: In part a reaction against Impressionism and academic art, Expressionism was inspired most heavily by the Symbolist currents in late nineteenth-century art. Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor proved particularly influential to the Expressionists, encouraging the distortion of form and the deployment of strong colors to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings.

• WHEN: The classic phase of the Expressionist movement lasted from approximately 1905 to 1920 and spread throughout Europe. Its example would later inform Abstract Expressionism, and its influence would be felt throughout the remainder of the century in German art. It was also a critical precursor to the Neo-Expressionist artists of the 1980s.

EXPRESSIONISM…..KEY CONCEPTS• WHY IS THIS DIFFERENT:The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the

creation and judgment of art. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition.

• HOW THEY PAINTED DIFFERENTLY: Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world.

• WHAT THEY ARE TRYING TO COMMUNICATE: Through their confrontation with the urban world of the early twentieth century, Expressionist artists developed a powerful mode of social criticism in their serpentine figural renderings and bold colors. Their representations of the modern city included alienated individuals - a psychological by-product of recent urbanization - as well as prostitutes, who were used to comment on capitalism's role in the emotional distancing of individuals within cities.

•

BEFORE WE MEET THE ARTISTS…• As before Art moves forward but not necessarily in the same direction.

• Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque took the composition and painting techniques to a new level of inturpitation and began the CUBIST MOVEMENT

LETS MEET THE ARTISTS

EDWARD MUNCH

THE SICK CHILD

THE MADONNA

E.L.KIRCHNERTHE STREET

SELF PORTRAITAS SOLDIER

NOLLENDORFPLATZ

EMELINE NOLDE

• Masks

MOTHER AND CHILD

EGON SHIELE

MAX BECKMAN