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

Degas

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”

Cezanne Still-Life’s 1890-94

Cezanne – Landscape of Provence

Van Gogh Starry Night 1889

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

Braque- La Femme a la Guitarra

Picasso – Jolie 1913

Picasso – Blue Period

1906-7

Guernica 1936

Las Meninas (Cubist Version)

Las Meninas (Original

Velazquez Version)

Abstract Art- Post WWI

Otto Dix- Portrait of Sylvia Von Harden 1926

Joan Miro Blue 3 -1961

Blue II

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