Evolution of Modern Art: Expressionism to Baroque
Expressionism
Expressionism was an artistic literary movement related to plastics, born in 1890 in Germany and the northern European countries, extending well into the twentieth century. Outstanding artists in this movement included Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Georges Rouault, and Emil Nolde. Expressionist painting seeks and manages to express violent emotions, going from the inside out, unlike Impressionism, which goes from outside to inside. Its main objective was to create impetuous reactions in the viewer through the artist’s feelings and emotions expressed with boldly colorful shapes and rigid forms.
Fauvism
In 1905, a group of young painters exhibited their works. Critics coined the name Fauvism; it seemed those artists were Fauves (wild beasts). As an art movement, it lasted only five years, but as a style, it exerted a greater and more persistent influence on the use of drawing and color than any other school in the twentieth century. Fauvism grew out of the strong colors and passionate brushstrokes of Van Gogh and the simplified forms and bold decorative schemes of Gauguin. Both showed contempt for formal academic qualities of composition. Henri Matisse, the first figure of the original Fauve group, in his red paintings, presents intense Fauve colors, but used with quite different results. Because red is considered naturally brilliant, it produces color and excitement. In his tableaus, the effect of the composition gives a sense of deep repose.
Cubism
This artistic movement emerged in France around 1907 and spread worldwide. It draws on the ideas of the art of Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat. Its basic approach is to represent reality, but fractured by means of geometrical shapes, representing the same object viewed from various angles as simultaneous planes. Cubist artists painted on flat surfaces; the perspective was apparent, achieved through the stretching of lines and angles. Color was virtually suppressed, subordinated to the forms and, therefore, the drawing. Cubists created through overlapping, multifaceted, and simultaneous viewing of the object. Important figures such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were creators of the Cubist movement. In Venezuela, Cubism has many supporters; we can mention Ángel Hurtado, Armando Barrios, and Manuel Quintanilla as representatives of this trend in our country.
Renaissance
The Renaissance is the cultural and artistic movement begun in Italy in the fifteenth century that directs its eyes to Roman classicism and man as the center of things, moving away from the medieval theocentric tradition.
Futurism
Futurism was an Italian movement that included Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà. Its purpose was to raise Italy from its cultural apathy, which had been submerged since the late eighteenth century. It attacked museums, academies, the cult of the old, and the entire Italian artistic past. Futurism demanded a new artistic concept based on the dynamics of velocity, which for the Futurists was essential and peculiar to modern life. The most revered symbol was the racing car. In essence, the Futurist painting portrait of movement was related to analytical Cubism as fragmented, but unlike Cubism’s static object from various angles, in Futurism, the viewer is stationary while the object moves. Therefore, a futuristic representation of the simultaneous movement of a dog trotting down the street might show twenty feet and six legs, similar to a long photo exposure of a moving object.
Surrealism
This avant-garde movement was not confined to one geographic location, and its manifestations are as varied as its interpreters. Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy were just some of the artists active in the group of Surrealist painters. Surrealism freed painting from its long subjection to the realistic image and concept of space inherited from the Renaissance, unleashing the artist to express their innermost feelings and impulses. Influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and revolutionary doctrines of the time, Surrealism gave a vague cause, renovating impulses latent in the intelligentsia that emerged from the First World War. Its most thriving period was from 1924 to 1928. Proposing the marvelous as an aesthetic ideal, uniting two incongruous objects in an unrelated context, the purpose of the Surrealists was not “making art” but exploring possibilities.
Dadaism (1926)
Dadaism emerged with the intent to destroy all codes and systems established in the art world. It is an anti-artistic, anti-literary, and unpoetic movement because it challenges the existence of art, literature, and poetry. It appears as a total ideology, a way of life, and an absolute rejection of any tradition or previous scheme.
Baroque Art (Seventeenth Century)
Baroque Art was born in the late sixteenth century and covers the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century. Contrasted with the rationalism and classicism of the Renaissance, which meant balance and symmetry, Baroque proposes new aesthetic values where motion predominates, using curved shapes, both concave and convex, to create forms. It represents realism in its performances, like theatrical and scenic displays. The artist’s goal is to represent reality to exalt feelings and move the beholder. The artwork is presented as a theatrical scene. The first feature is the triumph of color over drawing. Colors are enhanced by the use of oil, but fresco painting continues. Another feature is realism, which represents things as they really are, using real-life models to paint even religious subjects. It is concerned with the search for movement.