KINETIC ART

Kinetic Art

(Beginning in the 1950s)

   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.

   The Kinetic art form was pioneered by Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, and Alexander Calder. Among the earliest attempts to incorporate movement in a plastic artwork were Moholy-Nagy's Space-Light Modulator, a sculpture producing moving shadows made at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1930, certain Constructivists works, Marcel Duchamp's Rotary Glass Plate and Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), and Alexander Calder's motorized sculptures from 1930s.

   The expression Kinetic Art was used from the mid-1950s onward. It referred to an international trend followed by artists such as Soto, Takis, Agam and Schoffer. Some Kinetic artists also worked in the field of Op Art. Their works were influenced by a modernist aesthetic and could be made with contemporary materials (e.g., aluminum, plastic, neon). Most kinetic works were moving geometric compositions. In Italy artists belonging to Gruppo N, founded in Padua in 1959 (including Biasi, Costa and Massironi, among others), carried out experiments with light, projections and reflections associated with movement.

   The members of the French group GRAV, which included Le Parc, Morellet and Sobrino and was established in 1960's in Paris, created optical and kinetic environments that disturbed and interfered with meanings and relations to space.

   The term kineticism broadened the concept of Kinetic Art to all artistic works involving movement, without any reference to a specific aesthetics. It applies to all those artists today who work with any kind of movement, rather than only geometric art. 

MINIMAL ART

Minimal Art

Minimal art was an artistic style, which emerged in America the late 1950s. The term was taken from an essay about modern American art by art philosopher Richard Wollheim in 1965. Hard Edge and Colour Field Painting tendencies were an important pre-requisite for the development of this style, as they had essentially prepared the ground for the use of very simple, reduced minimal forms. Minimal Art first established itself in painting, and then sculpture, where it had the greatest impact.

Minimal art sculptures were primarily made from industrial materials, such as aluminium, steel, glass, concrete, wood, plastic or stone. The objects, frequently reduced to very simple geometric shapes, were industrially produced, thus removing the artist’s personal signature from the work. The works were also characterised by serial arrangements of a number of bodies/shapes, and large dimensions.

The main representatives of Minimal art were Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken and Robert Morris.

In contrast with Abstract Expressionism and its impulsive and gestural expression of the unconsciousness, Minimal artists focused on material aesthetics, the relationship of objects to space, the effects of light, and producing highly reduced arrangements. Donald Judd (1928-94) followed these basic principles, arranging coloured aluminium boxes in different ways, above, or next to one another. Carl Andre (born 1935) stacked rectangular wooden pegs on top of each other, or in a row. Dan Flavin (1933-96) created subtle light spaces with evenly laid out neon tubes. Minimalism also had an impact on dance and music in the 1960s. Minimalist principles also influenced artistic phenomenon such as Land Art, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. 

HARD EDGE

Hard-Edge

Hard-Edge Painting reinforces the idea of the canvas or paper as a field of abstract forms. Similar to the interrelationship of colorful forms that we find in Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, this abstract movement also emphasizes the flatness of the surface (either canvas or paper). But that's it! Hard-Edge Painting shows us clean-edged, monochromatic areas of color that defy AbEx and Color Field's freewheeling ambiguity in favor of a detached clarity of vision. Cooler yet still spiritual, it can track its influences way back to Synthetic Cubism, Park Avenue Cubism, De Stijl, Suprematism and the Bauhaus.

The British critic Lawrence Alloway wrote: "The whole picture becomes a unit; forms extend the length of the painting or are restricted to two or three tones. The result of this sparseness is that the spatial effect of figures on a field is avoided." This response to space may relate to the contemporaneous obsession with exploring outerspace, ignited by the success of the Soviet Sputnik Program of the late 1950s.

California critic Jules Langsner (1911-1967) invented the term "Hard-Edge" for his exhibition Four Abstract Classicist at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum in 1959. Lawrence Alloway introduced the term to a wider audience in his title West Coast Hard-Edge, a 1960 revision of the show created for the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Queens College in Belfast.

What are the Key Characteristics of Hard-Edge Painting?

-Clean lines

-Colorful geometric areas

-Flat surface

-The canvas/paper/print as a unit, a shape on the wall

POP ART

Pop Art

(Beginning in 1956 in England, early 1960's USA)

   Pop Art has started in England in late 50's and grown in United States in early 60's. Among the Pop Art forerunners are two unique models - prototypes of the modern artists: the French artist Marcel Duchamp and the German Kurt Schwitters. Duchamp's work and his thoughts have altered the definition of the art and our way of understanding it. He was famous with his "ready-mades," objects torn from their usual contexts and exhibited as art. Kurt Schwitters produced collages and assemblages that lay somewhere between painting and sculpture. The work of his art turned into an environment that was no longer something only to be looked at.

   English art critic Lawrence Alloway used the term "Pop" first to describe the art that made use of the objects, materials and technologies from mass culture to bring out the yields of the industrial society. It is often borrowed from advertising, photography, comic strips and other mass media sources. Everyday life is endless resource for the pop art … today is the core of pop art.

   Pop stresses frontal presentation and flatness of unmodulated and unmixed color bound by hard edges. They suggest the depersonalized processes of mass production. Pop Art investigates in areas of popular taste and kitsch previously considered outside the limits of fine art. It was rejecting the attributes associated with art as an expression of personality. Works were close enough to reality and at the same time it was clear that they were no ready-mades but artificial re-creations of real things.

   Pop Art definitely broke the hegemony of the Abstract Expressionism in Europe and United States that occupied center art stage in 1950's-1960. It excreted the edges between high and low art. It confronted institutional art with everyday endless objects which gained, displayed as art, a new quality.

   After the large-scale pop art exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1962, Pop Art established itself as a serious, recognized form of art. This exhibition becomes a turning point for Pop Art. According to a series of critics, Pop Art marked the end of modernism and the beginning of the postmodern era. Although Pop is rather treated as an entertainment, it had a profound impact on the art scene.

   There are some differences between the Pop Art in England and United States.

   British Pop was the product of the Independent Group (IG), formed in 1952 whose members resisted the institute's commitment to modernist art, design, and architecture. They were particularly intrigued by American automobile design, with its emphasis on "planned obsolescence," the intentional production of goods that would soon require replacement. British Pop artists had optimistic point of view. They preferably dealt with various forms of direct action - assemblages and happenings rather than comics or AD. In Britain popular culture and technology was just the subject of the popular art.

   In America Pop artists reproduced, duplicated, combined, overlaid and arranged the endless visual details that make up American society, introducing shifts and transformations and acting like commentaries. The most famous American Pop artist, Andy Warhol specially had a lifelong interest in movie stars which first surfaced in his art in 1962 when he begun working on portraits of Marilyn Monroe. Warhole attempted to keep his personal fascination with fame from showing through too clearly in his works, preferring to leave their meaning open to the interpretation of viewers. The Pop and media role was summarized with Warhol's famous quotation:" In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes". Television, newspapers, magazines and Hollywood are just producing new images everyday. They are only enlarging the popular culture. Everything is just an image, ready to be consumed. The reality aura of art work is death, the millions copies are the survival of it. 

POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

Post-Painterly Abstraction 

        

The Western American Paining takes place in 1950s and it is known as the Post-Painterly Abstraction. The term, Post-Painterly Abstraction becomes popular. The prominent art viewer Green Greenberg provided an appropriate title for an art exposition in the year, 1964. The related painters utilized the physical openness of design in consistency with the un-modulated colors. The Post-Painterly Abstraction accesses the high-edge color field paining figments of the abstract Art.  These works often savor with the Hard Edge paintings, brought sharp contours, stressed the flat colors. These artistic paintings became focused in Abstract Expressionism. It leads the art viewers of the 50s and 60s that made it well-liked.

The Post-Painterly Abstract artworks appeared in the flat surfaces with the thinner thin colors that indicated the scenic drama as these focus on the background landscapes. The artworks were the blending of vague or abstract expressions and the intellectual beauty. The artists would truthfully move into or come out sentimentalism and intellectualism. Basically, Post-painterly abstraction was based on the concept of the art viewer, Clement Greenberg as the title for and exhibition while running it in the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art in 1964.  It travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery, Toronto afterwards. Greenberg felt that there was a new movement in painting deriving from the abstract expressionism in 1940s and 1950s; however, it favored honesty or lucidity. It was the opposition of dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. There were 31 artists in the exposition

Barnett Newman belonged to the earlier generation of the existing artists; Newman had guessed some of the characteristics of the Post-painterly abstraction.  The paining continued to move in the different directions and that is primarily absent from the abstract expressionism. It is influenced by the spirit of modernism of the time.  The concept, Post-Painterly Abstraction that gained some currency in the 1960s was steadily displaced by Minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting. The art reviewers tried to codify the concrete features of American Color Field painting. Color Field paining has also known as Post-Painterly Abstraction, new Abstraction or Abstract Imagism. The prominent art critic Clement Greenberg and Greenberg had many painters of Color Field. It is used the term, Post-Painterly Abstraction.

It is the imprecise, broken and loose definition of color and shape. Moreover, Greenberg created the demarcation between the color field painters and the abstract expressionists.  There is a movement of the physical openness of design or towards the linear clarity or both. The artists Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland all displayed a candidness of design in many of their works. The major qualitative examples can be available in the Unfolding light of Louis and in The Human Edge of Frankenthaler. Linear clarity is also seen in the works as it is present in all works of Kenneth Noland. In the works of Morris Louis, Linear clarity is concentrated less. The overlapping, collaborating colors are one of the most unique features of his masterful grown-up works. Color Field painting or Post-painterly abstraction is different from Pop art and the other existing movements. The Post-painterly abstraction specially continued the culture of painting in its purist form.

COBRA

Cobra

(1948 - 1951)

   Cobra was a post-World War II European avant-garde movement. The name was derived from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Copenhagen is the head, Brussels is the body, and Amsterdam is the tail of the Cobra.

   The group's founders included Asger Jorn, the Dutch painter Constant, the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and the painters Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Corneille and Carl-Henning Pedersen. Later on the group was expanded substantially.

   In a Europe devastated by war, artists were eager to join forces, pool their thoughts and react to the inhumanity of a civilization based on reason and science. Cobra had a distinctive political and social dimension based on a criticism of the Cold War society of their day.

   Cobra was formed from an amalgamation of the Dutch group Reflex, the Danish group Host and the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealist Group. Their fundamental values were nonconformity and spontaneity. Their inspiration was children's drawings, the alienated and folk art, motifs from Nordic mythology, Marxism. They rejected erudite art and all official art events. They sought to express combination of the Surrealist unconscious with the romantic forces of nature but unlike the former group they felt an abstract idiom better served that purpose. They were primary distinguished by a semiabstract expressive paintings style with brilliant color, violent brushwork, and distorted human figures.

   Cobra was a milestone in the development of European Abstract Expressionism and was very similar to American Action Painting. 

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract Expressionism

(Late 1940's - early 1960's)

   Abstract expressionism was an specifically American post-World War II art movement. It was the first American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

   After WWII, with images of the Holocaust everywhere, it seemed redundant for socially-aware artists to paint these same images ... a photograph at the time was much more powerful. Artists began to explore color and shape and to paint an entire canvas orange or blue.

   These works were produced in an extremely specific geographical setting and revealed a specific attitude. It was the result of the rivalry and dialogue between young American artists and the large community of European artists living in exile in New York. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, and highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. It is seen as combining the emotional intensity and self-expression of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. The movement describe formal trend in American abstraction at the time. It can be broadly divided into two groups: Action Painting and Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting. It has its non-American parallels with similar aims (Art Informel, Cobra, Lyrical Abstraction).

   By the 1960s, the movement had lost most of its impact, and was no longer so influential. Movements which were direct responses to, and rebellions against, abstract expressionism had begun, such as pop art and minimalism. However, many painters who had produced abstract expressionist work continued to work in that style for many years afterwards.

Action Painting(late 1940's - late 1950's)

   One of the significant streams of Abstract Expressionism is the Action Painting. The term "Action Painting" was used for the first time in 1952 to describe the works of painters such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The life energy and the psyche of the painter were at once the driving force, the resource and the meaning of these works. The canvas was seen as an arena. Painting became an irrational, instinctive and impulsive moment of existence. The Action Painting work thus turned into the form and trace of the living body, conveying split-second action and motion.

Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting (early 1960's)

   Another significant stream of Abstract Expressionism is the Color Field and Hard-Edge Painting. The terms Color Field and Hard Edge describe two formal trends in American abstraction in the early 1960's. Color Field works consist of large colored areas; neither signs nor forms existed for the eye to latch on to. Color was used without any perspective device, producing a sensation of impressive size. The shades of color were usually diluted so as to sink into the canvas.

   The expression Hard Edge appeared in the late 1950's to describe geometric abstract works, which emphasized colorful atmospheres and imprecise shapes. Hard Edge works were typified by their clearly defined outlines and edges and the precision and clarity of the compositions.

(Late 1940's - early 1960's)

d clarity of the compositions. 

AMERICAN SCENE PAINTING

American Scene Painting

( 1920s - early1940 )

   American Scene Painting depicts scenes of typical American life and landscape painted in a naturalistic, descriptive vein during the Great Depression in the United States. It is an umbrella term for the rural American Regionalism and the urban and politically-oriented Social Realism, but its specific boundaries remain ambiguous.

   An antimodernist style and reaction against the modern European style, American Scene Painting was seen as an attempt to define a uniquely American style of art. The term does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a broad tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars.

   Benton, Curry and Wood were the three major representatives of Regionalism. They had all studied art in Paris but they declared their goal to create an art form that would be truly American. These artists insisted that the real solution to the many and growing problems of urban American life, made clear by the Great Depression, was for the United States to return to its agrarian roots.

   The Regionalist's argument received unintentional support from the so-called Urban Realists (Social Realists), who focused their attention on the city.

   The art produced by the American Scene artists was ambiguous and cultivated, and it drew from diverse cultures. The choice of subjects might have attested to a quest for identity.

SOCIALIST REALISM

Social Realism Vs. Socialist Realism

(Beginning in the 1920s)

   Social Realism is a term used to describe visual and other realistic art works which chronicle the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and are critical of the social environment that couses these conditions. Social Realism should be seen as a democratic tradition of socially prompted artists of liberal or left-wing conviction. Social Realism fully presents an international phenomenon, rooting in Realism of the 19th century.

   Social Realism was broadly accepted during the depression in 1930s in United States. The government used art to sell its political programs during the 30s and 40s. President Roosevelt sought to use the power and resources of the federal government to help those in need during the depression. His administration's decision had a precedent in Mexico, where the revolutionary government that took control in 1921 employed artists to help forge a national cultural identity. The American painters Ben Shahn, Leon Bibel, and the Mexican painters (muralists)José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera are all examples of Social Realists.

   In Paris, shortly after the end of the WWII, many artists of left-wing focused on depicting the dramatic conditions of working-class lives, their social plight, but workers, builders, men and women, capable of building a better world. In that group were Pablo Picasso, Eduard Pignon, Andre Fougeron, Fernand Leger, Paul Rebeyrolle, Bernard Buffet, and Francis Gruber.

   Social Realism was especially common in communist countries. Social Realism appears differently, but it always utilizes a descriptive or critical realism as form.

   Social Realism was linked with and often confused with Socialist Realism.

   Socialist Realism is Soviet artistic doctrine, realistic in its nature which has a purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. It was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934, and later by allied Communist parties worldwide. New role of art in Soviet society defined that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The art produced under socialist realism is realistic, optimistic, and heroic. Its purpose was education in the spirit of socialism. Its practice is marked by strict adherence to party doctrine and to conventional techniques of realism. A similar approach was also enforced for a time in the People's Republic of China during the rule of Mao Zedong or in Albania during the rule of Enver Hoxha. After the death of Stalin in 1953 some relaxation of strictures was evident. Today, arguably the only country still focused on these aesthetic principles is North Korea.

   Socialist Realism has been widely condemned as stifling to artistic values. Czeslaw Milos, writing in the introduction to Sinyavsky's On Socialist Realism, describes the products of socialist realism as "inferior", ascribing this as necessarily proceeding from the limited view of reality permitted to creative artists. 

SURREALISM

Surrealism

(Beginning in 1924)

   It was an artistic movement that brought together artists, thinkers and researchers in hunt of sense of expression of the unconscious. They were searching for the definition of new aesthetic, new humankind and a new social order. Surrealists had their forerunners in Italian Metaphysical Painters (Giorgio de Chirico) in early 1910's.

   As the artistic movement, Surrealism came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1924 published the first Manifeste du surrealisme. In this book Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. An admirer of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the subconscious, Breton felt that contact with this hidden part of the mind could produce poetic truth. 

BAUHAUS

                

Bauhaus

(1919 - 1933)

   The Bauhaus is one of the first colleges of design. It came into being from the merger of the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. It was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and was closed in 1933 by the Nazis.

   The Bauhaus holds a place of its own in the culture and visual art history of 20th century. This outstanding school affirmed innovative training methods and also created a place of production and a focus of international debate. It brought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists. The Bauhaus stood almost alone in attempt to achieve reconciliation between the aesthetics of design and the more commercial demands of industrial mass production.

   The teaching program was organized in the form of workshops to produce works that were both aesthetically pleasing and useful. The creed of this program asserted that the modernization process could be mastered by means of design. As a result, in 1923 the Bauhaus turned it attention to industry. The first major Bauhaus exhibition which was opened in 1923 reflected the revised principle of art and technology a new unity spanned the full spectrum of Bauhaus work. It was Art and Technology, a New Unity, which was also the name of the workshop in which the art was created.

   The Nazi Party and other fascist political groups had opposed the Bauhaus throughout the 1920s. They considered it a front for communists, especially because many Russian artists were involved with it. Gropius was succeeded in turn by Hannes Meyer and then Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. School was moved first from Weimar to Dessau, from Dessau again to Berlin, and was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime in 1933.

   The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in western Europe and the United States in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled or were exiled by the Nazi regime.

DE STIJL

De Stijl (The Style)

(1916-1931)

   The De Stijl (literally, "the style") art movement was founded by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in Leiden in 1917. It encompassed a new type of style in modern art and architecture. This movement used the artistic talent of the artists by designing homes, buildings, and furniture.

   Founder members of the group included the painter Mondrian, the sculptor Vantongerloo, the architect J.J.P. Oud and the designer and architect Rietveld. They were eager to develop a new aesthetic consciousness and an objective art based on clear principles. Their work and research extended to the fine arts, city and town planning, the applied arts and philosophy.

   A magazine called De Stijl, published between 1917 and 1932, presented the movement's works and theoretical foundations to an international readership. In the magazine Mondrian wrote, "The pure plastic vision should build a new society, in the same way that in art it has built a new plasticism." Hiss article, "The New Plastic in Painting", best expresses their ideas for reduction of form and simplistic abstraction: "The new plastic art...can only be based on the abstraction of all form and color, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary color" (Lemoine, 1987, p.29).

   Art was seen as a collective approach, with a language that went beyond cultural, geographical and political divisions. The depersonalization of the artwork was carried through into the execution which was anonymous and impersonal. The artist's personality took a back seat to a conscious and calculated working process. The key ideas underpinning the movement could not be separated from Mondrian's aesthetic theory of Neo-Plasticism. This theory was aimed at scaling down the formal components of art - only primary colors and straight lines. A painting was derived from the features of the surface, although many De Stijl paintings were abstractions of natural phenomena, such as van Doesburg's "Rhythms of a Russian Dance" (1918).

   While Mondrian's work adhered to the strict principles of Neo-Plasticism, Van Doesburg sought to broaden the movement's research projects into architecture, reconceiving the entire living environment. A De Stijl picture represented a fragment of a larger project concerning space: the house as an interior space, and the city as an assembly of houses. The austere forms of De Stijl were well suited to the geometric structures favored by the International Modernist movement, while the primary colors favored by the painters could be used as decorative elements to articulate an otherwise plain facade.

   The principles of De Stijl art and design exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus Style in Germany in the 1920s, and after Mondrian's immigration to New York in 1940, the U.S.A.

PITTURA METAFISICA

Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting)

( 1910-1921 )

 Metaphysical Painting (ital. Pittura Metafisica) is an Italian art movement, born in 1917 with the work of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico in Ferrara. The word metaphysical, adopted by De Chirico himself, is core to the poetics of the movement.

They depicted a dreamlike imagery, with figures and objects seemingly frozen in time. Metaphysical Painting artists accept the representation of the visible world in a traditional perspective space, but the unusual arrangement of human beings as dummy-like models, objects in strange, illogical contexts, the unreal lights and colors, the unnatural static of still figures.

Opposition to futurism, Metaphysical Painting brings no new way of painting but only a new way of seeing things. Using a sort of different logic, Carrà and De Chirico painted deserted squares, silent, rigidly rendered buildings, colonnades and shadows, trains passing faraway in the distance, clocks and statues. There is never any precise hint in the paintings about the place or moment of the scene. They are eventless, with a tome of silence, imminence and enigma. All that generated a new reality which goes beyond the meaning of the things presented, creating a sense of expectation and mystery and bonded with the unconscious mind.

 We can see Metaphysical Painting today as the reaction against both Cubism and Futurism during the period of Italian Fascism. It may seem strange that many of the achievements of 20th century Italian art came during that time. On the other side, Metaphysical Painting creates the premises of Surrealism.