Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement. It is a term used to describe the reaction in the 1880s against Impressionism. It was led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat. It is characterized by a subjective approach to painting, as artists opted to evoke emotion rather than realism in their work. Post-Impressionists they continued using vivid colours, often thick application of paint, and real-life subject matter, but were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, distort form for expressive effect, and use unnatural or arbitrary colour. The Post-Impressionists shared their work with the public through independent exhibitions across Paris. Post-Impressionists believed that a work of art should not revolve around style, process, or aesthetic approach. Instead, it should place emphasis on symbolism, communicating messages from the artist’s own subconscious. Post-Impressionists purposely employed an artificial colour palette as a way to portray their emotion-drive perceptions of the world around them. Saturated hues, multicoloured shadows, and rich ranges of colour are evident in most Post-Impressionist paintings, proving the artists’ innovative and imaginative approach to representation. Most Post-Impressionist pieces feature discernible, broad brushstrokes. In addition to adding texture and a sense of depth to a work of art, these marks also point to the painterly qualities of the piece, making it clear that it is not intended to be a realistic representation of its subject.
Rococo Rococo is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours and sculpted molding to create surprise and the illusion of motion and drama. The Rococo style began in France in the 1730s as a reaction against the more formal and geometric Style Louis XIV. Rococo features exuberant decoration, with an abundance of curves, counter-curves, undulations and elements modelled on nature. The intent was to create an impression of surprise, awe and wonder on first view. Genre paintings were popular ways to represent the Rococo period’s bold and joyous lust for life. This included fete galante, or works denoting outdoor pastimes, erotic paintings alive with a sense of whimsical hedonism, Arcadian landscapes, and the “celebrity” portrait, which positioned ordinary people in the roles of notable historical or allegorical characters. Tendency to produce whimsical scenes of people socializing in pastoral landscapes. Rococo works are characterized by an airy pastel palette. Often featuring fluttering Cupids, Greek goddesses, and other mythological figures, these depictions blend fantasy with reality. Rococo paintings showcase an exquisite attention to detail.
Pop Art Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material. Pop art often takes imagery that is currently in use in advertising. Product labelling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists. Renowned for its bold imagery, bright colour palette, and repetitive approach inspired by mass production.
Baroque The Baroque is a highly ornate and often extravagant style. The Baroque style used contrast, movement, exuberant detail, deep colour, grandeur and surprise to achieve a sense of awe. The style began at the start of the 17th century in Rome. Baroque painters, in their palette, used intense and warm colours, and particularly made use of the primary colours red, blue and yellow, frequently putting all three in close proximity. They used strong contrasts of light and darkness on certain parts of the picture to direct attention to the central actions or figures. In their composition, they chose the moments of the greatest movement and drama. The faces in Baroque paintings clearly expressed their emotions. interest in drama materializes as intense contrasts between beaming light and looming shadows. They often used asymmetry, with action occurring away from the centre of the picture, and created axes that were neither vertical nor horizontal, but slanting to the left or right, giving a sense of instability and movement. They enhanced this impression of movement by having the costumes of the personages blown by the wind, or moved by their own gestures. The overall impressions were movement, emotion and drama. Another essential element of baroque painting was allegory; every painting told a story and had a message, often encrypted in symbols and allegorical characters, which an educated viewer was expected to know and read.
Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement. Featuring fractured forms and topsy-turvy compositions, Cubism abandoned the figurative portrayals found in genres of art and moved toward total abstraction. The style is characterized by fragmented subject matter deconstructed in such a way that it can be viewed from multiple angles simultaneously.
Impressionism Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Parisbased artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. They constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours. They also painted realistic scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting outdoors. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, and used short “broken” brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour — not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary — to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration. Impressionist artists showcased a new way to observe and depict the world in their work, foregoing realistic portrayals for fleeting impressions of their surroundings —which, often, were found outside.
Renaissance Emerging as a distinct style in Italy in about 1400. Renaissance (meaning “rebirth”) art, perceived as the noblest of ancient traditions, took as its foundation the art of Classical antiquity, but transformed that tradition by absorbing recent developments in the art of Northern Europe and by applying contemporary scientific knowledge. Historical sources suggest that interest in nature, humanistic learning, and individualism were already present in the late medieval period Use of proportion, as treatment of the painting as a window into space. True linear perspective. The term foreshortening refers to the artistic effect of shortening lines in a drawing to create an illusion of depth. The term sfumato refers to a fine art painting technique of blurring or softening of sharp outlines by subtle and gradual blending of one tone into another through the use of thin glazes to give the illusion of depth or three-dimensionality. The term chiaroscuro refers to the fine art painting modeling effect of using a strong contrast between light and dark to give the illusion of depth or three-dimensionality.
Surrealism Surrealism is a cultural movement that started in 1917 and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes, sometimes with photographic precision, creating strange creatures from everyday objects, and developing painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. The most important centre of the movement was Paris.
The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” A number of specific techniques were devised by the Surrealists to evoke psychic responses. Among these were frottage (rubbing with graphite over wood or other grained substances) and grattage (scraping the canvas), automatic drawing, a spontaneous, uncensored recording of chaotic images that “erupt” into the consciousness of the artist; and found objects.
Expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality. Artists working in this style distort the reality of their subjects in order to “express” their own emotions, feelings, and ideas. Expressionists employed artificial colour palettes, energetic brushstrokes, and exaggerated textures in their works. Together, these characteristics culminate in avant-garde paintings that favour the subjective over the true-to-life in order to reveal a glimpse into the psyche of artists.