Impressionism & Modern Art Bakke
Dec 23, 2015
Impressionism & Modern Art
Bakke
Impressionism
• Began w/ Paris School • Characteristics: – 1) instead of portraying religious, mythological,
and historical themes, painters began to depict modern life of urban middle and lower middle classes
– 2) Artists were fascinated with light color and the representation through painting itself of momentary, largely unfocused visual experience whether of social life or of landscapes
Impressionism 1875-1905
• Scandalous for the time• Against the Salon of Paris requirements and
rules impressionists were art renegades • Napoleon III & Hausmann’s Paris were the the
backdrop– Paris café scenes, danse studios, concerts, picnics,
boating, lesiure, & still lifes / landscapes
Artists of Note
• Manet• Monet• Pissaro• Renoir• Degas
Manet’s Olympia 1863
Monet’s Water Lillys 1906
“L’Avenue Opera De Paris” 1896- Pissaro
Renoir -Dance at the Le Moulin Gallette 1876
Post Impressionism 1880s onward
• Form and Structure rather than impression of the moment played the major role
• A continuation of Impressionism not a reaction to
• Key figures: Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin
Seurat (pointillism) 1884 “Grande Jatte”
Gauguin -1892The Seed of the Areoi- Tahiti
Cubism 1907 and beyond• Braque and Picasso • Rejected the idea of a painting as constituting a
window onto the real world• Saw painting as an autonomous realm of art itself w/
no purpose beyond itself • Represented only two dimensions in their painting–
flatness of surface • Attempted to include at one time on a single surface
as many different perspectives, angles, or views of object as possible
Picasso – Blue Period
1906-7
Las Meninas (Original
Velazquez Version)
Abstract Art- Post WWI
Otto Dix- Portrait of Sylvia Von Harden 1926
Blue explained • Blue was a symbol of a world of cosmic dreams, an
unconscious state where his mind flowed clearly and without any sort of order.
• This blue was the color of a surreal night, a night that embodied the only place where dreams could exist in their rawest state, untouched and uncensored by conscious, rational though
• “The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge, empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains—everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”
Surrealism
• Dali- The Great Masturbator 1929
Dali- Persistence of Memory 1931
Contemporary Art- Jackson Pollock “springs” 1956
Pop Art- Andy Warhol -1967