Art Movements: A Comprehensive Guide to Styles and Techniques

Pop Art.

Pop Art was an important twentieth-century art movement characterized by the use of images drawn from popular culture media such as advertisements, comic books, and cultural objects considered “mundane.” Pop art is commonly interpreted as a reaction to the then prevailing ideals of abstract expressionism. Pop art replaced the destructive impulses, satirical and anarchic Dada movement. Among the artists considered as precursors of the pop movement are Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Man Ray. The movement itself emerged in the mid-1950s in the United Kingdom and in the late 1950s in the United States, with different motivations. In the United States, it marked the return of the Hard-edge design type (translated as “contour drawing sharp”) and of representational art as a response by artists using impersonal mundane reality, irony, and parody to counteract the personal symbolism of Abstract Expressionism.

Op Art

Optical Art is an art movement born in the United States in 1958. It is an artistic movement based on purely optical phenomena, sensations of movement in a two-dimensional surface, fooling the human eye through optical illusions. Works of Optical Art cause the viewer to interact with a sense of virtual movement through effects of optical illusion, one situation that triggers a dynamic response of the eye and a certain psychological reaction stemming from its striking appearance. It is used for the construction of perspectives that the eye cannot fix in space, the effect of Rubin, who discovers from convex figures. Emerging from the interference of lines and concentric circles with other perceptual illusions of instability, vibration, or confusion.

Op Art is characterized by several aspects:

  • The complete absence of real movement; all its works are physically static, which distinguishes it from Kinetic Art.
  • It aims to create visual effects such as apparent motion, vibration, flicker, or blurring.
  • It uses the resources of parallel lines, either straight or winding, marked color contrasts, either poly or bichromate, changes in shape and size, combination and repetition of forms and figures. It also uses simple geometric shapes such as rectangles, triangles, and circles in engineered, combination, or complex formation.

Naturalism (Natural)

Naturalist or Naturalistic Photography, as the word implies, is to capture images of an artistic, testimonial, or documentary nature related to nature.

In general terms, it is divided into two groups: flora and fauna, also comes after all that is landscape and compositions.

Naturalist Photography is something we see every day, something that the author photographed always find handy for capturing and achieving good images. In this case, hands of the Italian photographer Luca Cavallari.

Realism

Realism in photography has been developing in the history of photography through different movements known as photographic realism, which have given more attention to the photographic documentation of reality in the absence of the aesthetic values of the picture.

You can also address the understanding of the term “realism” versus the term “abstraction,” which defines realism as an artistic expression that uses images taken from the outside world, facing the abstraction that replaces these images taken by gestures or signs of mental process or artistic activity itself, i.e., the artist’s inner world.

By extension, it also applies the term “realism” to indicate that a camera, film, or photograph are very accurate in colors and resolutions, “real.”

Contemporary

– Photography is an ambiguous category in postmodernism. For three main reasons: the very ambiguity of the broader concept of postmodernism, because within it and various practices coexist but mutually antagonistic, and that it is less clear which represents a break with modern photography as a speech seems rather neo-avant-garde and therefore fully akin to the original principles of photographic modernism. It seems that opposition to the hegemony of the late-modern canon of straight photography is not enough to set a critical category, historiographical and epistemological sufficient entity.

– Postmodern photographic activity is a phenomenon inseparable from the art market and, in particular, the new hegemony of photography in this market since the eighties, which led to occupy the dominant place that had the painting in the context of late-modern. This relationship with the two-sided market characterized the debate between, on one hand, the discussion on the problem of representation in the photographic image and, second, its legitimacy as a form of high culture. The epistemological question (reproducibility, loss of aura, multiplicity, lack of original, etc.) and the artistic question (recognition of photography in the system of fine arts and their victory over the painting, or, conversely, collapse of the fine arts because of the triumph of photography) are raised in an inseparable manner.

Impressionism

Edgar Degas is considered one of the founders of Impressionism. However, the style of the group itself apart in several respects, primarily in their preference for urban issues artificially lit scenes instead of passion for nature and natural light of other group members. Their academic background is evident in that it leaves the drawing makes it an essential element of their craft from figures, mainly because of the color line, leaving the oil technique to focus exclusively on the cake, using frames that approach photography.

Baroque

During the Baroque period, painting takes a prominent role in artistic expression. Being the most characteristic expression of the weight of religion in Catholic countries and bourgeois taste in Protestant countries.

They develop new genres such as still lifes, landscapes, portraits, genre paintings, or custom, as well as enriching the iconography of religious matters. There is a trend and a search for realism that blends with the theatrical and showy.

Surrealism

What the absorbed surrealist photographic model was fundamentally the way they operate and proceed through the articulation of unconscious images of reality, for it made use of two procedures: the manipulated photographs, or technical surrealism, and those that were not manipulated, or surrealist “found.”

Regarding the manipulated photographs, many techniques were invented to convey concepts such as automatism and surrealist free association.

To understand how photography can translate these surreal ideas, remember that image manipulation is entirely acceptable in that it breaks the rules of reality and free invention and creativity.

Rococo

The Rococo is defined by a taste for bright colors, smooth and clear. Predominate forms inspired by nature, mythology, the beauty of naked bodies in Oriental art, and especially in matters of gallantry and love. It is an art essentially mundane, without religious influences, dealing with daily life issues and human relationships. It is a style that will reflect what is pleasant, refined, exotic, and sensual.

Neoclassicism

Photography is the star of the second section. In the first half of the nineteenth century, along with the portrait and landscape, the nude was one of the favorite subjects of artists. Often tried to replace the photographic medium realistic painting. The nude was linked to sports and science, losing its erotic features and reaching a social space.
This exhibition documents with numerous examples of extraordinary historical and stylistic development of the nude in photography, whose evolution in the first half of the nineteenth century ran parallel to that of the various creative movements in other artistic media: painting, sculpture, and drawing.