(LEA2) Module Overview

Later Europe and Americas II

Introduction

The Nineteenth century was characterized by three distinctly different art styles. They were Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and a third style known as Realism. The realists were opposed to the often mythological character of many Neoclassical and Romantic artworks. Artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they looked. The basic Realist philosophy is that one should paint what one sees with one's own eyes. Realism often involved a social, political, or moral message in the depiction of common subjects. Daumier, Millet and Courbet were realists.

Cropped portion of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry NightIn the late 19th century, a French art movement made a momentous break from tradition in Western painting. The Impressionists used a new representation of light, color, and tone. Preferring to apply paint in small strokes or dots of pure color and painting outdoors (plein eir) to catch the impression of light, the Impressionists, as the critics named them, radically changed the art world. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir. Pointillism was developed from Impressionism and involved the use of many small dots of color to give a painting a greater sense of vibrancy when mixed optically with the eye. One of the leading exponents was Georges Seurat.

Post-Impressionism is a French movement that was an extension of Impressionism but a rejection of that style's perceived limitations. Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec are all Post-Impressionists. Each of these painters abandoned Impressionism to form a more personal art. The Post-Impressionists rejected the objective recording of nature in favor of personal expression through color as it expresses emotions.

With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 19th century, new art styles and movements appeared and disappeared at an increasingly fast pace - thus reflecting the growing rate of changes in our society. By the mid-19th century, painting was no longer in service to either the church or royal court but was patronized by the upper and middle classes. Society was undergoing rapid change because of the growth of science and technology, industrialization, urbanization, and the fundamental questioning of religion. Artists began to reject traditional or academic forms and conventions in art in order to create an art that would better reflect the changing conditions of modern life. The invention of photography freed the artists from serving as the recorder of reality and freed the artist to explore aesthetically in a formal context. The depiction of the world in an abstract or non-objective manner created seemingly infinite possibilities, which manifested in various movements.

Module Lessons Preview

In this module, we will study the following topics:

  • Why and how does art change?
  • How do we describe our thinking about art?
  • How does religion influence art and architecture?
  • How has art been utilized to foster political beliefs?
  • Is art a reflection of its culture or a force to form or shape culture?

Key Terms

In this module, we will study the following key terms:

  1. Analytic Cubism - Analytic Cubism is the first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole.
  2. Art Nouveau - Art Nouveau is the late-19th- and early-20th-century art movement whose proponents tried to synthesize all the arts in an effort to create art based on natural forms that could be mass produced by technologies of the industrial age.
  3. Avant-garde - Avant-garde is French, for “advance guard” (in a platoon). This term applies to late-19th- and 20th-century artists who emphasized innovation and challenged established convention in their work. Also used as an adjective.
  4. Cubism - Cubism is an early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. See also Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism
  5. Fin de Siècle - The term means in French, “the end of the century.” This period refers to Western cultural history from the end of the 19th century until just before World War I, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.
  6. Impressionism - Impressionism is a late-19th-century art movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment, thereby conveying the illusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.
  7. Japonisme - Japonisme is the French fascination with all things Japanese. Japonisme emerged in the second half of the 19th century.
  8. Modernism - Modernism is a movement in Western art that developed in the second half of the 19th century and sought to capture the images and sensibilities of the age. Modernist art goes beyond simply dealing with the present and involves the artist’s critical examination of the premises of art itself.
  9. Plein Eir - Plein eir is the approach to painting much favored by the Impressionists, in which artists sketch outdoors to achieve a quick impression of light, air, and color. The sketches were then taken to the studio for reworking into more finished works of art.
  10. Pointillism - Pointillism is a system of painting devised by the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color into its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The image becomes comprehensible only from a distance, when the viewer’s eyes optically blend the pigment dots. Sometimes referred to as divisionism.
  11. Realism - Realism is a movement that emerged in mid-19th-century France. Realist artists represented the subject matter of everyday life (especially that which up until then had been considered inappropriate for depiction) in a relatively naturalistic mode.
  12. Salon - The Salon is the official art exhibition in Paris sanctioned by a government-approved jury; beginning in the 18th century, the exhibition was public and held in the Louvre.
  13. Symbolism - Symbolism is a late-19th-century movement based on the idea that the artist was not an imitator of nature but a creator who transformed the facts of nature into a symbol of the inner experience of that fact.
  14. Synthetic Cubism - Synthetic Cubism is a later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction.

[CC BY 4.0] UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED | IMAGES: LICENSED AND USED ACCORDING TO TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION