New Movements in the Visual Arts
New Movements in the Visual Arts
Something of the feverish activity in the visual arts during this period can be gauged by the sheer number of movements and styles that followed one another in rapid succession: Impressionism, post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, culminating in the birth of Cubism around the time of World War I. all of the movements form important stages in the transition from traditional artistic styles to present-day art, much of which rejects any attempt at Realism in favour of abstract values of line, shape, and color. An understanding of their significance is thus a necessary prerequisite for a full appreciation of modern abstract art. Quite apart from their historical interest, however, the artistic movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have much visual pleasure to offer.
Manet
As so often in the past, the center of artistic activity was Paris, where Édouard Manet (1832-1883) created a sensation in 1863 with his painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). Public outcry was directed against the subject of the painting: a female nude among two fully clothed young men and another clothed female figure. Other artists had combined nude females and clothed males before in a single picture, but Manet’s scene has a particular air of reality; the way the unclad young woman stares out from the canvas and the two smartly dressed young men appear nonchalantly indifferent to her condition can still take the spectator by surprise. The true break with tradition, however, lay not in the picture’s subject but its style. The artist is much less interested in telling us what his characters are doing than in showing us how he sees them and their surroundings. Instead of representing them as rounded, three-dimensional forms, he has painted them as a series of broad, flat areas in which the brilliance of color is unmated. In creating this style, Manet laid the philosophical foundations that made Impressionism
Something of the feverish activity in the visual arts during this period can be gauged by the sheer number of movements and styles that followed one another in rapid succession: Impressionism, post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, culminating in the birth of Cubism around the time of World War I. all of the movements form important stages in the transition from traditional artistic styles to present-day art, much of which rejects any attempt at Realism in favour of abstract values of line, shape, and color. An understanding of their significance is thus a necessary prerequisite for a full appreciation of modern abstract art. Quite apart from their historical interest, however, the artistic movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have much visual pleasure to offer.
Manet
As so often in the past, the center of artistic activity was Paris, where Édouard Manet (1832-1883) created a sensation in 1863 with his painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). Public outcry was directed against the subject of the painting: a female nude among two fully clothed young men and another clothed female figure. Other artists had combined nude females and clothed males before in a single picture, but Manet’s scene has a particular air of reality; the way the unclad young woman stares out from the canvas and the two smartly dressed young men appear nonchalantly indifferent to her condition can still take the spectator by surprise. The true break with tradition, however, lay not in the picture’s subject but its style. The artist is much less interested in telling us what his characters are doing than in showing us how he sees them and their surroundings. Instead of representing them as rounded, three-dimensional forms, he has painted them as a series of broad, flat areas in which the brilliance of color is unmated. In creating this style, Manet laid the philosophical foundations that made Impressionism