Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. 


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. 
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. 


Artist => Carlo Carra

Italian artist who participated to futurism on 1910s. He had a metaphsyical understanding of painting.


Library Source => "Futurism" / Caroline Tisdall


"Italian futurism was the first cultural movement of the twentieth century to aim directly and deliberately at a mass audience. To do so it made use of every available means and medium, and invented others beside. It was a hectic herald of the recurrent concern in the art of our times to equate art and life, an equation which still remains unresolved. But in the heady years which led up to and into the First World War the small group of writers, artists and musicians who called themselves the Italian Futurists set out to do more than that. Their aim and their claim was to transform the mentality of an anachronistic society. Marinetti and his friends were determined to prepare Italy for what seemed to be the great adventure of modern times: 'What we want to do is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible.'" (pg 7)
"The roots of Futurism are a tangled web of turn-of-the-century political, cultural and philosophical currents that come to light, unacknowledged, in 'The Founding and Manifesto'. Few, if any, of the ideas in it are totally original. Violence, war, anarchy, nationalism, the cult of the superman, glorification of urban life, of technology and of spee, together with hatred of the past and scorn of academic value, had all been voiced before. What was new was the way in which they were all brought together and synthesized into one inflammatory cultural document ripe for distribution." (pg 17)
"To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere." (pg33)

(speed of a motorcycle)

Die Brücke

Die brücke means "the bridge" in German. Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings make their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison.


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. 


Fritz Bleyl => The one of the starters of the movement.

Les fauves

(Fauvism) which means "the wild beasts in French, a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions.


Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.


2 artists => Matisse & Derain


At the start of the 20th century, two young artists, Henri Matisse and André Derain formed the basis of a group of painters who enjoyed painting pictures with outrageously bold colours. The group were nicknamed 'Les Fauves' which meant 'wild beasts' in French. Their title was coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles who was amused by the exaggerated colour in their art. At the Salon d'automne of 1905 he entered a gallery where Les Fauves were exhibiting their paintings. Surprised by the contrast with a typical renaissance sculpture that stood in the centre of this room, he exclaimed with irony, "Donatello au mileau des fauves!" ( Donatello in the middle of the wild beasts! ). The name stuck.

(by Matisse)

(by Derain)

Library Source: "Les Fauves, a Sourcebook" /Russell T. Clement


"The initial contacts that led eventually  to the creation of Fauvism date to 1892. In that year, Henri Natisse, 22 years old and having just spent his first year in Paris in the stifling and frustrating atmosphere of William Adolfe, Bouguereau's class at l'Académie Julian, joined the studio of celebrated symbolist Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Ironically, Bouguereau's vast studio on the Left Bank, in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, was taken over after his death in 1905 by the Fauve painter Othan Friest." (introduction xiii)

Expressionism

 Expressionism developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Expressionis was opposed to academic standards that had prevailed in Europe and emphasized artist's subjective emotion, which overrides fidelity to the actual appearance of things. The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted, or otherwise altered. Landmarks of this movement were violent colors and exaggerated lines that helped contain intense emotional expression. Application of formal elements is vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic. Expressionist were trying to pinpoint the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in them. 


Vincent Van Gogh => The expressionistic tradition was significantly, rose to the emergence with a series of paintings of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh from the last year and a half of his life. There was recorded his heightened emotional state. One of the earliest and most famous examples of Expressionism is Gogh's "The Starry Night." Whatever was cause, it cannot be denied that a great many artists of this period assumed that the chief function of art was to express their intense feelings to the world.

Wikipedia:" In architecture, two specific buildings are identified as Expressionist: Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion of the CologneWerkbund Exhibition (1914), and Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany completed in 1921. The interior of Hans Poelzig's Berlin theatre (the Grosse Schauspielhaus), designed for the director Max Reinhardt, is also cited sometimes. The influential architectural critic and historian Sigfried Giedion, in his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941), dismissed Expressionist architecture as a part of the development of functionalism. In Mexico, in 1953, German émigré Mathias Goeritz, published the "Arquitectura Emocional" (Architecture emotional) manifesto with which he declared that "architecture's principal function is emotion".^[56] Modern Mexican architect Luis Barragán adopted the term that influenced his work. The two of them collaborated in the project Torres de Satélite (1957–58) guided by Goeritz's principles of Arquitectura Emocional. It was only during the 1970s that Expressionism in architecture came to be re-evaluated more positively. "

Library Source: Expressionism in Art/ Cheney's


"Expressionist artists speak often of the purification of the means of the art: a stripping away of the accretions of insensitive eras, and a sifting of the remaining basic elements for characteristic expressiveness. Isadora Duncan stripped away courtly ornament and literary purpose- as well as masquerade costume- from the dance: purified the art for direct expression of the body in rhytmic movement." <85>


"Expressionism: paintings expressive in ways unrecognized by the Realists and literalists. It seems to this writer that there is no other word that so obviously describes the varied anti-Realistic achievement of contemporary and recent artists: an achievement constituting the main stream of Modernism. Therein is the answer to the chapter's title question. It remains only to shape our working definition of Expressionism, in the light of this broad expressiveness." <92>

The Scream by Edvard Munch

les nabis

Les Nabis (pronounced nah bee) were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian (Académie Julian) in Paris in the late 1880s.
Nabi means prophet in Hebrew and in Arabic.
Les Nabis artists worked in a variety of media, using oils on both canvas and cardboard, distemper on canvas and wall decoration, and also produced posters, prints, book illustration, textiles and furniture. Considered to be on the cutting edge of modern art during their early period, their subject matter was representational (though often symbolist in inspiration), but was design oriented along the lines of the Japanese prints they so admired, and art nouveau. Unlike those types however, the artists of this circle were highly influenced by the paintings of the impressionists, and thus while sharing the flatness, page layout and negative space of art nouveau and other decorative modes, much of Nabis art has a painterly, non-realistic look, with color palettes often reminding one of Cézanne and Gauguin. Bonnard's posters and lithographs are more firmly in the art nouveau, or Toulouse-Lautrec manner. After the turn of the century, as modern art moved towards abstraction,expressionism, cubism, etc., the Nabis were viewed as conservatives, and indeed were among the last group of artists to stick to the roots and artistic ambitions of the impressionists, pursuing these ends almost into the middle of the 20th century. In their later years, these painters also largely abandoned their earlier interests in decorative and applied arts.

==> Pierre Bonnard
In his twenties he was a part of Les Nabis, a group of young artists committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. Other Nabis include Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis. He left Paris in 1910 for the south of France.
Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brushmarks and close values. His often complex compositions—typically of sunlit interiors of rooms and gardens populated with friends and family members—are both narrative and autobiographical. His wife Marthe was an ever-present subject over the course of several decades. She is seen seated at the kitchen table, with the remnants of a meal; or nude, as in a series of paintings where she reclines in the bathtub. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes, and many still lifes which usually depict flowers and fruit.

Library Source: 

Symbolism

   Symbolism originated in France, and was part of a 19th-century movement in which art became infused with mysticism. French Symbolism was both a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a reaction to the realistic approach of impressionism. It served as a catalyst in the outgrowth of the darker sides of Romanticism and toward abstraction. 
The term Symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an important element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus, the Symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. 
Not so much a style of art, Symbolism was more an international ideological trend. Symbolists believed that art should apprehend more absolute truths which could only be accessed indirectly. Thus, they painted scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner. They provided particular images or objects with esoteric attractions.
 There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists. Symbolism in painting had a large geographical reach, reaching several Russian artists, as well as American. The closest to Symbolism was Aestheticism. The Pre-Raphaelites, also, were contemporaries of the earlier Symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on Expressionism and Surrealism, two movements which descend directly from Symbolism proper. The work of some Symbolist visual artists directly impacted the curvilinear forms of the contemporary Art Nouveau movements in Europe and Les Nabis.  


==> Carlos Schwabe (July 21, 1866 – 1926) was a German Symbolist painter and printmaker.

Library Source: "Symbolist Art" / Edward Lucie-Smith

"Born of the Symbolist Movement, Modernism has nevertheless been hostile to the symbol as a means of visual communication. The rise of abstract art, in particular, has tended to focus our attention upon the work as a thing in itself, wholly identified with the art-process. Any art which can be described as symbolist must necessarily reject such an attitude. Behind the shapes and colours to be found on the picture-surface, there is always something else, another realm, another order of meaning." (p.7)

"Elements drawn from a language which every educated person was expected to be able to understand are mixed with other symbols whose meaning would reveal itself only to initiates." (p.7 )

"Symbolism, in the narrow, historical sense of the term, must be approached only as part of a larger whole: the Romantic Movement. Romanticism represents a crisis, a convulsion in the European spirit whose effects are still being felt at the present day." (p. 23)

Puvis de Chavannes and Carriere  ==>

 "Puvis wanted to give new life to the academic tradition; to restore to it its old seriousness and nobility of purpose. He appealed to those who wanted to follow modern ideas without losing touch with established orthodoxy. But his influence spread a good deal further than this; we find a dept to Puvis in quarters which might at first sight be unexpected."  (p.81)

Neo-Impressionism

From 1884 until 1935 (the end of Signac's life).
Neo-Impressionism organized the system of applying separate colors to the surface so that the eye mixed the colors rather than the artist on his or her palette. The theory of chromatic integration claims that these independent tiny touches of color can be mixed optically to achieve better color quality.
The Neo-Impressionist surface seems to vibrate with a glow that radiates from the minuscule dots that are packed together to create a specific hue. The painted surfaces are especially luminescent.

Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863. He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter after attending an exhibit of Monet's work. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.

In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colors and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism.

Impressionism

1- Impressionism

Impressionism is a movement in French painting, sometimes called optical realism because of its almost scientific interest in the actual visual experience and effect of light and movement on appearance of objects.  Impressionist motto - human eye is a marvelous instrument. Impact worldwide was lasting and huge. The name 'Impressionists' came as artists embraced the nickname a conservative critic used to ridicule the whole movement. 

Claude Monet => a well-known impressionist artist.

Impressionist fascination with light and movement was at the core of their art. Exposure to light and/or movement was enough to create a justifiable and fit artistic subject out of literally anything. Impressionists learned how to transcribe directly their visual sensations of nature, unconcerned with the actual depiction of physical objects in front of them. Two ideas of Impressionists are expressed here. One is that a quickly painted oil sketch most accurately records a landscape's general appearance. The second idea that art benefits from a naïve vision untainted by intellectual preconceptions was a part of both the naturalist and the realist traditions, from which their work evolved.


Library source: Resimde İzlenimcilik Yılları ve İzlenimci Ressamlar / Önder Şenyapılı


"İzlenimcilik akımının adı 1874 yılında Nadar'ın stüdyosunda yaşama geçirilen Reddedilenler Salonu'nda düzenlenen Claude Monet(1840-1926) ve arkadaşlarının grup sergisinde konulmuş."
"Bu ilk sergide izlenen yapılar arasında Claude Monet'nin "İzlenim/Impression" adını verdiği tablosu da var."