Abstract Expressionism: Unleashing Emotion on Canvas

Abstract Expressionism, often referred to as the New York School, is a quintessential American art movement of the 20th century. It encompasses a diverse range of abstract art forms, including large painted canvases and sculptures. At its core, Abstract Expressionism is characterized by the intense and spontaneous application of brushstrokes, along with the transformative effects of dripping and spilling paint onto the canvas. This style is synonymous with “action painting,” where the artist’s emotions are palpably woven into each stroke.

Art Deco: Merging Elegance and Modernity

Emerging in France before World War I, Art Deco burst onto the scene in 1925 during the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. This movement seamlessly blends various mediums, from architecture and furniture to clothing and jewelry. It artfully combines modern aesthetics with meticulous craftsmanship, advanced technology, and luxurious materials. Art Deco transcends the boundaries between art forms, creating a harmonious fusion of beauty and functionality.

Art Nouveau: Embracing Organic Forms

Art Nouveau, which thrived from 1890 to 1910 in Europe and the U.S., is characterized by its sinuous and asymmetrical lines inspired by organic shapes. It sought to break free from the imitative historicism prevalent in the 19th century. While it left its mark on various art forms, including painting and sculpture, its most prominent contributions were in architecture, decorative arts, and graphic design. Art Nouveau aimed to create a new, liberated style that celebrated nature’s forms.

Avant-garde: Pioneers of Innovation

The term “avant-garde” originated from the French, meaning “advanced guard.” It encompasses innovative and experimental concepts, works, and individuals in the realms of culture, politics, and the arts. Avant-garde challenges conventions and pushes the boundaries of traditional thinking, often leading to groundbreaking artistic movements.

Baroque: The Drama of Motion and Detail

The Baroque movement, which emerged in Europe from the early 17th to mid-18th century, emphasizes dramatic and exaggerated motion, coupled with clear and intricate detailing. Baroque art creates a sense of grandeur, exuberance, and tension, contrasting sharply with the surrealistic tendencies of Surrealism.

Bauhaus: A Hub of Modern Art and Design

Founded in Germany by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school of art and design brought together artists, architects, and designers. It pioneered an experimental pedagogy that prioritized materials and functions over traditional art school methodologies. Throughout its various incarnations, Bauhaus fostered influential discussions on the role of modern art and design in society.

Classicism: A Return to Elegance and Symmetry

Classicism draws inspiration from the art forms of ancient Greece and Rome, emphasizing traditional forms characterized by elegance and symmetry. This movement celebrates the enduring beauty and balance found in classical art.

CoBrA: A Post-war Quest for Spontaneity

Founded in 1948 in Paris, CoBrA was a short-lived yet groundbreaking post-war group comprising international artists who championed spontaneity as a means of creating a new societal order. The name “CoBrA” is derived from the home cities of its founders: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

Color Field Painting: Embracing Contemplative Color

Color Field Painting, often associated with Abstract Expressionism, rejects active gestures in favor of expressing the sublime through expansive surfaces of contemplative color and open compositions. This movement seeks to convey profound emotions through harmonious color combinations.

Conceptual Art: Art as an Idea

Conceptual art, or conceptualism, is a 20th-century movement that prioritizes ideas and theoretical practices over visual forms. Coined by artist Sol LeWitt in 1967, it posits that the idea itself, even if not visually realized, is a work of art. Conceptual art challenges traditional notions of art creation.

Constructivism: Art for Social Progress

Developed by the Russian avant-garde around 1915, constructivism is a branch of abstract art that rejects “art for art’s sake” in favor of art directed towards social purposes. Its work is geometric, precise, and sometimes mathematical, advocating for the role of art in societal progress.

Cubism: Deconstructing Tradition

Cubism, initiated in 1907 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, introduced a revolutionary visual language. It deconstructed traditional subjects into fragmented compositions, challenging conventional representations of nudes, landscapes, and still lifes. Cubism redefined how art could be perceived.

Dadaism: A Revolution of Nihilism

Dadaism emerged during World War I as a radical response to traditional social values and artistic conventions. Dada artists rejected established norms and aimed to shock society into self-awareness. Their work often sought to expose accepted conventions of order and logic.

Digital Art: Embracing Technology’s Canvas

Digital art encompasses a wide range of creative practices utilizing electronic technologies, resulting in digital products. From computer graphics to virtual reality, digital art is an innovative and contemporary movement that explores the intersection of technology and art.

Expressionism: Capturing Emotional Experience

Expressionism, an international movement from 1905 to 1920, particularly in Germany and Austria, seeks to convey emotional experience rather than physical reality. It employs distortion, exaggeration, and vivid color to express the inner feelings and ideas of artists.

Fauvism: Vibrant Colors and Bold Brushstrokes

Coined as “wild beasts” by critic Louis Vauxcelles, Fauvism is an early 20th-century movement associated with artists like Henri Matisse and André Derain. Fauvist works are characterized by their vibrant colors and bold brushwork, departing from traditional representational art.

Futurism: Celebrating Modernity’s Energy

Futurism, founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Italy, seeks to capture the dynamism, speed, and energy of the modern mechanical world. It embraces technology and revels in the urbanization of the early 20th century.

The post Exploring the Most Influential Art Movements and Styles appeared first on Gentar-Lawren.

The art of ancient peoples depicted humans in accordance with certain canons, while animals, on the contrary, were shown in a more believable and accurate manner. For example, rhinoceros figures created several centuries before Christ in China are as realistic as those we see today in exhibitions.In the Middle Ages most animals were given the inferior role of personifications of various human vices: chimeras and all sorts of devils – grotesque fantasies of anonymous masters – were torn away from the sacred space of temples. Romantic artists were fascinated by the fights, the fierce passion of predators attacking their victims.

In today’s animalistics we will not find a reflection of the real cruelty of wild animals, the struggle of animals for survival. Rhinoceroses, hippos, and bulls reclaiming their place in the exhibition halls give no insight into their natural environment or their encounters with the hunter, the tamer, or the shepherd. And is it so interesting to reproduce in sculpture an exotic animal made only with realistic accuracy and no more than that? Looking at an animal made of bronze or clay, we see … a person!

Nowadays a purely coloristic portrayal of an animal worries very few people. If we look at the halls of any large painting exhibition we can see that industrial motifs or other signs of the present day have become an indispensable feature of modern landscape art. The animalistic genre is now a purely sculptural phenomenon. But the authors of the best works do not just show figurines of animals, but embody in the material artistic images that embody the essential for our lives humanistic problems.

Animalistic sculpture is a type of fine art devoted to the image of animals and beasts. Artists-sculptors working in the genre of animalism are called animalists.

Animalistic sculptures can vary markedly in appearance. Modern animalistic sculptures, most often are anatomically accurate models of animals, such as the Blue Mustang monument.

Ancient masters more often created sculptural images from various myths and legends of their peoples. They were dominated by sculptures depicting more humanized animals: from a human face literally attached to the head of the animal, to the fact that the animal was depicted doing human acts: saving children, guerrilla activity against invaders from another country, and so on down the list of myths and legends.

A good example of ancient animalistics is the Capitoline She-wolf, a depiction of a she-wolf nursing two babies, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. For a long time it was thought that the sculpture was created in the 5th century B.C., but recent research using the latest technology has shown that the sculptural work is newer than previously thought: the she-wolf was created around the 13th century A.D.

The post Animalistic genre appeared first on Gentar-Lawren.

Household scenes known from ancient times became a special genre of art in feudal epoch – in the Far East and during the formation of bourgeois society in Europe. The heyday periods of B.G. of the new times were connected with the growth of democratic and realistic artistic tendencies, with the artists’ appeal to a wide range of spheres of people’s life and labor activity, with raising important social issues in art.

Scenes of hunts, marches and rituals are already known in primitive art. Kings and nobles, craftsmen and farmers are often depicted in characteristic moments of their lives in ancient eastern murals and reliefs. Ancient Greek vases and reliefs depict scenes of everyday life (with a simple plot and the relationships of the characters) that are akin to ancient lyrics and comedy; they occupied a significant place in Hellenistic and Roman paintings, mosaics and sculpture (especially small), reflecting the increased interest of art in everyday phenomena and private life.

In medieval art genre scenes and specific observations of everyday life emerged, as a rule, with the development of secular humanistic tendencies within the framework of the dominant religious worldview and were often woven into religious and allegorical compositions. They are common in murals, reliefs and miniatures – both in Europe (Naumburg Cathedral reliefs, Germany, mid 13th century), and in Asia (Ajanta murals in India, mostly 5th-6th centuries; reliefs of Borobudur in Indonesia, ca. 800, Angkor in Cambodia, 10th-13th centuries; schools of secular miniature in Iraq, Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Iran, India that formed between the 13th and 16th centuries). The first genre pictures in China (Gu Kai-zhi, the 4th c.) are connected with religious-philosophical ideas of moral perfection and affirmation of the ideal of nobility and stately manners as a norm of human behavior in everyday life. During the Tang period (7th-10th centuries) the schools of Chinese genre painting evolved. Genre painters appeared (Yan Li-ben, Chou Fang, Han Huang), who depicted scenes of court life, often with great fidelity and intimacy. During the Song Dynasty (10th-13th centuries), Chinese genre painters (Li Tang, Su Han-chen) began to depict the life of the people in paintings that were full of humor and precise observations. The genre painting of Japan and Korea developed in roughly the same way.

Household genre sculpture depicts its characters in their usual environment, most often in the process of some activity. Household sculpture is small or medium-sized, and the composition may consist of one or more figures. Folk or mythological motifs play a significant role in the domestic genre. Sculptors working in this direction use a variety of details and decorative elements designed to emphasize the features of behavior or character of the depicted object.

The post Domestic Genre appeared first on Gentar-Lawren.

At the end of the fifth century B.C. in Demetrius of Alopecia the portrait art acquired a master who was mainly interested in the physiognomic features of his models but not deeply penetrating into their psyche. In the 4th century B.C., in connection with the general tendency toward individualism and the interest in the individual as such, portraiture rapidly developed as a separate branch of sculpture and masters appeared who worked, if not exclusively, then primarily in this field. Portraits were made not only of living persons, but also of the long dead: philosophers, poets, political figures.

In the late 4th century B.C. the statues of the great tragedians were erected in the Dionysus Theater in Athens. Masters did not work from nature and sought to create an image that corresponded to the general idea of a given personality, with its typical psychological features. In portraiture in the 4th century several trends coexisted. In the era of Lysippus a certain prevalence received a direction which sought to in-depth transfer of psyche depicted persons and their sharp individual characteristics, without, however, abandoning the classical principles of the formal construction of the head.

These features are reflected in the portrait of Alexander, found in Pergamum and, most likely, going back to the original work of Lysippus. Alexander is presented here not as a hero of ancient mythology, or in a dispassionate and objective manner, as he was sometimes portrayed by other masters. Lysippus gave the image of a man – a hero of his time, struggling, suffering and torn by internal contradictions.

The post Portrait sculpture appeared first on Gentar-Lawren.