Evolution of Modern and Contemporary Art

A Short Guide to Art Movements from 1900 to Today

FAUVISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Fauvism was the first and among the shortest-lived movements in European avant-garde art of the 20th century, reaching its peak between 1905 and 1907. The artists—Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Andre Derain (1880–1954), and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958)—who exhibited together at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 were called fauves ( wild animals ) by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles (1869–1958 ), despising their aggressive lines, lack of nuance, and strident, unnatural use of color. For a short period, the following also manifested themselves as Fauvists: Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Albert Marquet (1875-1947), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), Kees van Dongen (1877-1968). Fauvist experiments developed from post-impressionist art.

PARIS SCHOOL:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The School of Paris does not designate an artistic movement per se, but rather a social and cultural phenomenon that grouped a series of artists. This phenomenon occurred somewhere between 1904 and 1940. During this period, artists such as: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), but also the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) came together;

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The movement originated in Germany, and expressionist artists wanted to create a type of art that would confront the viewer with an intense, direct and personal representation of the artist's feelings. The term expressionist was first used in 1912. Expressionist artists were: Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976), Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1963). The expressionist movement was associated with two groups of artists, one established in Dresden with the name Die Brucke (The Bridge) at the suggestion of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, active between 1905 and 1913. Emil Nolde (1867-1956), Max Pechstein (1881-1955) also joined this group. The second group called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was formed in southern Germany around Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) starting in 1911 and including Aleksei von Jawlenski (1864-1941), Franz Marc (1880-1916), Gabriele Munter (1877-1962), but which fell apart with the Nazis taking power in Germany in 1933 ;

CUBISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Considered today as the first Cubist painting , Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was exhibited by Pablo Picasso in 1907. However, it took another 30 years for the art world to come to terms with the painting that gave meaning to Cubism. The main initiators were Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), but they were also influenced by the works of the post-impressionist Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). Other artists who were active: Robert Delauny (1885-1941), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) Cubism had several phases:

- The first period, also called the Cezanne Period, does not have a very clear progression in time;

- The second period, also called Analytical Cubism, begins approximately around 1911 , including, in addition to the two initiators, also: Juan Gris (1887-1927), Fernand Leger (1881-1955);

- Between 1912 and 1920, the transformations in the artists' works lead to what is called the synthetic phase , where they focused less on how to see things and more on the process of structuring and composition;

FUTURISM, ORPHISM AND REIONISM :

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Futurism has its starting point in Cubism around 1909, with the Futurist Manifesto initiated by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), he glorified new technologies, mechanization, speed and rejected traditional values. It has as artists: Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Carlo Carra (1881-1966), Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), Gino Severini (1883-1966) and Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)
• In France, Robert Delauny (1885-1941) and his wife Sonia imitated the Futurists, but the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1962) later coined the term Orphism to describe the two's kaleidoscopic paintings .
• In Russia, Futurism had a strong impact on art and literature. Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) and his wife Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), between 1911 and 1920, combined the movement accents of Futurism with the fragmented forms of Cubism, giving rise to Rayonism, which used diagonal lines of color like rays that ran through the entire painting.

SUPREMATISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Suprematism defined itself as "the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art", but was inspired by impressionism and futurism and was born in 1913 , with representatives such as Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), Liubov Popova (1889-1924), Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956);
• After the Russian Revolution of 1917, however, Suprematist spiritualism was abandoned, gradually moving towards Constructivism which initiated the use, as Tatlin put it, of "real materials in real space". Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko adhered to Constructivism, but Naum Gabo (1890–1977) and his brother Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962) were the ones who laid the foundations for the Realist Manifesto (1920);

STYLE GROUP:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The group was born in the Netherlands in 1917 with the publication of the periodical De Stijl, which expressed the theories of the artist and poet Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) and the painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). The term neoplasticism is representative of the group, defining the approach reduced to three primary colors, plus black, white and gray, and the elements of the composition reduced to horizontal and vertical lines. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959), Le Corbusier (1887-1956) and the painter, sculptor and architect Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965) also worked and joined the group.

DADA:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• It flourished between 1916 and 1922, incorporating both a destructive desire and a playful inventiveness. They promoted the non-aesthetic, the illogical, the self-contradiction. The representative artists of the DADA movement are: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Man Ray (1890-1976);

BAUHAUS:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The Bauhaus (building house) was founded by Walter Gropius (1883-1969) in Weimar in 1919 , being more of a school of artistic crafts and design that in all its complexity wanted to produce simple and well-made objects, having a utopian vision of a community of craftsmen and artists. One of the teachers is Johannes Itten (1888-1967), then Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee (1879-1940) who came in 1921. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) replaced Itten, along with Joseph Albers (1888-1976);

NEW OBJECTIVENESS:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The term New Objectivity represented the tendency of a growing number of artists from the early 1920s to harshly criticize the society they lived in and to depict reality in an objective and unsympathetic way. Among the artists we can mention: George Grosz (1893-1959), Otto Dix (1891-1969);

SURREALISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• It emerged in Paris in the early 1920s , where the poets Andre Breton (1896-1966) and Louis Aragon (1897-1982) gave the term surrealist a theoretical and practical meaning. Its representatives were: Max Ernst (1891-1976), Juan Miro (1893-1983), Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), but also the Chilean Roberto Matta (1911-2002);

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Many of the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism had made their careers in the 1930s. This generation of artists wanted to develop a more abstract pictorial language, based in part on European precedent and which had two directions, one that Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) uses, through an apparently naive working technique with color called dripping resulting in a flattening of the pictorial space, this direction being called action painting. The second direction no longer reflected the psyche of the artist, and artists such as Barnett Newman (1905-1970), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) wanted to eliminate all non-essential details and create a complete space.

EUROPEAN FIGURATIVE PAINTING:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• After World War II, figurative artists preferred to depict recognizable characters and objects, sometimes being sentimental, sometimes brutal in the way they treated their subjects, such as Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Lucian Freud (b. 1922) and Frank Auerbach (b. 1931);

EUROPEAN LYRICAL ABSTRACTIONISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• George Mathieu (b.1921) coined the term in 1947 and it developed from certain aspects of surrealism, abstract expressionism combined with surrealism's fascination with the free expression of the artist's mental state. The artists are: Hans Hartung (1904-1989), Michel Tapie (1909-1987), Yves Klein (1928-1962), Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955);

POP ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The term first appears in a work by the English artist Richard Hamilton (b. 1922), who said of his art that it had the following characteristics: popular (i.e. addressed to a very wide audience), transient, consumable, cheap, mass-produced, young, shiny, a big deal. In England we have as representatives: David Hockney (b. 1937,) Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005). The explosion of POP art also spread overseas, with artists such as: Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008);

NEW REALISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The artists sought to describe everyday reality without idealizing it, drawing inspiration from the Dadaists and the Surrealists' inclination to find the miraculous element in the ordinary. It was founded in 1960. Representatives: Yves Klein (1928-1962), Christo (b.1935), Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), Martial Raysse (b.1936) and others;

CONCEPTUAL ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• It emerged in the 1960s as a challenge to the categories imposed on gallery and museum art, with representatives such as: Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), Piero Manzoni (1933-1963), Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), etc.

INSTALLATION:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The source of inspiration is in the ready-made works of Marcel Duchamp and is a three-dimensional art form that transforms the exhibition space into an ambient environment. Among the most significant artists we name the following: Christo (b.1935), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Richard Wilson (b.1953), etc.

PERFORMANCE ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• It originated in the theatrical performances of futurist artists starting in the 1950s, which today have become known as happenings. Artists who practiced this art form are: John Cage (1912-1992), Yoko Ono (b.1933), Nam June Paik (1932-2006);

ARTS POVERTY:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The German critic Germano Celant (b. 1940) coined the term for this Italian movement in 1967 , drawing attention to the humble materials used by artists of that time to make anti-elitist art: Mario Merz (1925-2003), Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933), Luciano Fabro (1936-2007), Pino Pascali (1935-1968) and many others.

MINIMALISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• This term derives from the title of an essay by the British philosopher Richard Wolheim (1923-2003), who meditated on the minimal effort that the artists around him made, creating objects reduced to a minimum in which no attempt at representation or illusion is noticeable. Artists: Frank Stella (b.1936), Sol LeWitt (1928-2007);

OP ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• OP-ART (a term first used in 1964) teases the eye, even hurts it, using optical illusions with psycho-physiological effects on the viewer. Representatives are: Bridget Riley (b.1931), Victor Vasarely (1908-1997), Joseph Albers (1888-1976), but also Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).

LAND ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Or earth art emerged in the early 1960s , with artists using nature directly in their works. Some of the representatives are: Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), Nancy Holt (b.1938), Richard Serra (b.1939) Robert Smithson (1938-1973), etc.

HYPERREALISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• This movement has its roots in photorealism that emerged in the late 1960s in the United States. Among the hyperrealist artists we can count: Richard Estes (b.1936), Chuck Close (b.1940);

NEO-EXPRESSIONISM:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• In the late 1970s , painting returned to the forefront thanks to Neo-Expressionism , with artists working on monumental dimensions, brutally applying color, even including different materials in their works to be as unrecognizable as possible. Here we have: George Baselitz (b.1938), Julian Schnabel (b.1951), Steven Campbell (1953-2007);

DIGITAL ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• The term was first used in 1980 when a painting program was first used. Representatives: Harold Cohen (b.1928), Thomas Ruff (b.1958), Jeff Wall (b.1946) and many others;

URBAN ART:

Timeline, periods and artists:

• Graffiti was considered the first form of urban art, emerging in the 1980s, being large, colorful, and visually complex calligraphic illustrations. In New York we have: Futura 2000 (b.1955), Dondi White (1961-1998), and John Fekner (b.1940).