Assignment writing
In review of the art movements presented in this module including:
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Into Abstraction and the Bauhaus, Suprematism, and De Stijl; write a paragraph about the art movement that you found the most interesting.
Describe how artists used color and space in a revolutionary way period. Use your own words and references from the lectures or videos, rather than from the internet. Please use proper grammar, punctuation, and correct spelling.
Required 1 to 2 pages(attached are the lecture and the video links.
Impressionism was a time when artists first started using color in revolutionary ways. Manet was a leader of Impressionism. In Paris, there was an Academy where artists exhibited their work called the Salon. This work created a lot of controversies when it was exhibited. It was not unusual for nude women to be painted with clothed men, the women were imaginary muses to the men. The scandalous part of this painting was that the woman was recognizable from society. Other controversial things happening in this painting include the lack of realism, and emphasis on unblended strokes and a flatness, notice the unfinished quality of the food and the lack of shading and dimension on the nude woman. In addition, the woman in the background does not quite seem to fit into the landscape.
Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe) 1863
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After Impressionism came Post-Impressionism. The way artists use color in innovative shifts further.
Seurat developed a technique that he called “divisionism.” He painted with tiny dots of color that when viewed from a distance would optically mix and we just see one color. So, tiny dots of blue and yellow would make up a field of green. Today we call this pointillism. The figures are distant and stylized. This is a fairly large painting and it took Seurat two years to paint it.
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Expressionism
Encyclopedia Britannica describes Expressionism as:
An artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.
Wikipedia describes
Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: “I was walking down the road with two friends when the sunset; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish-black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormos, infinite scream of nature.”
He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, “for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, ‘The Scream?’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”
Edvard Munch, The Shriek, 1896
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“Suprematism
was an art movement focused on basic geometric (Links to an external site.) forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. It was founded by Kazimir Malevich (Links to an external site.) in Russia…The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects.”
Some of the simple paintings by Malevich may be difficult to understand, it is a reduction of form to its most basic elements. Try thinking of it as a meditation, as a sort of clearing away of the subject matter or images with labels or names.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle 1915
