The Neo-Impressionist desire to conform art-making to universal laws of perception, color, and expression echoes throughout Modernism.
Dr. Charles Cramer
Severini and Boccioni use brilliant colors, abstraction, fragmentation and repetition of forms to create a vibrant whirling energy.
Gino Severini, Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal ...
Although the style implies a rapid or even slipshod painting process, Open Window, Collioure was carefully orchestrated in every aspect.
Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure
The Futurists called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and cultural monuments and glorified modern technology and the speed of automobiles, trains, and airplanes.
Umberto Boccioni and the Futurist City
Marc looked all the way back to a state of nature before humankind even existed.
Franz Marc and the animalization of art
Kandinsky believed that humankind was on the verge of a cataclysmic change from the current, materialistic epoch to an “Epoch of the Great Spiritual.”
Kandinsky, Apocalypse, Abstraction
The German Neue Sachlichkeit painters lived through the violence of World War I and their art reveals the disillusionment and cynicism that resulted from their often psychologically-shattering experiences.
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) – An Introduction
The figure of the Blue Rider thus embodied the spiritual focus of the group as well as their belief that art plays an important social role in the struggle between good and evil.
Der Blaue Reiter
Words, sounds, images, shapes, and colors were all used to convey the intensity of experience and bring the viewer into the heart of the action.
Futurist Free Word Painting
The Surrealists saw collage as a means to enact what they considered to be the fundamental poetic activity of the unconscious mind.
Surrealist Techniques: Collage
Photographs were used by the Surrealists to call into question the nature of reality.
Surrealist Photography
Surrealist exhibitions broke down conventional distinctions between art and non-art.
Surrealist Exhibitions
The longer you look at the painting the more possible readings of the forms you are likely to discover. Delaunay’s painting is not only about vision, it is also about painting itself and the way colored shapes and relationships structure vision.
Simultanism: Robert Delaunay
Sonia dreamed of transforming everything around her, and she created and exhibited bookbindings, home furnishings, and posters in the Simultanist style.
Sonia Delaunay
Maintaining a precarious balance between representation and abstraction, Picasso and Braque saw themselves as pursuing a daring and dangerous course.
Pablo Picasso, Three Women
Which one is “true,” the one that tricks the viewer into thinking it is really there, or the one that announces itself as what it is, lines drawn on paper?
Juan Gris, The Table
The formalist principle of "truth to materials" was taken up in the twentieth century by art and design movements such as Constructivism and the Bauhaus.
Formalism II: Truth to Materials
When we hear a piece of instrumental music we do not expect it to imitate sounds from the real world. Why should visual art not be appreciated in the same way?
Formalism I: Formal Harmony
Everything is, in the end, a question of representation (in words or images) in which we choose to believe, or not.
Surrealist Techniques: Subversive Realism
Surrealism both infantilized and empowered women.
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