Die Brücke

Die Brücke (The Bridge) was an artistic community of young Expressionist artists in Dresden. Their aim was to overthrow the conservative traditions of German art. Their 'bridge' was a path to a new and better future for German art.The meaning of the name suggested they would build Die Brücke (the bridge) from the great German artistic past of Dürer and Grunewald over the contemporary artistic bourgeoisie to a new and better future. 

Die Brucke made use of a technique that was controlled, intentionally unsophisticated and crude, developing a style hallmarked by expressive distortions and emphases. Die Brucke artists often used color similar to the Fauves, and they were also influenced by art form from Africa and Oceania.
  Some of the painters in the group sympathized with the revolutionary socialism of the day and drew inspiration from Van Gogh's ideas on artists' communities. Die Brucke expressionists believed that their social criticism of the ugliness of modern life could lead to a new and better future. 

The main artistic form that emerged from this fusion of styles was the woodcut. The woodcut had been a traditional German print medium for narrative illustration. When fused with the vocabulary of 'primitive' art, the medium became a powerful tool for personal expression. A modern alterative to this traditional technique was the linocut, a medium invented by Die Brücke.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was one of the founding members of the Die Brucke organized in a former butchershop in Dresden in 1905. It was he who named the group after a quote by Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end..."

 Many consider Schmidt-Rottluff to be the most independent of Die Brucke. He was inspired by the expressive power of the art he saw at the Ethnographic Museum in Dresden. Schmidt-Rottluff excelled in the long German tradition of the woodcut.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Madchen aus Kowno (Girl from Kowno)

References:

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/expressionism.htm

http://www.germanexpressionism.com/printgallery/schmidt-rottluff/index.html

Les Fauves

(Beginning of the 20th century)
Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.

Les Fauves believed that colour should be used to express the artist's feelings about a subject, rather than simply to describe what it looks like.

Fauvist paintings have two main characteristics: simplified drawing and exaggerated colour. Neo Impressionist painters applied pure colors to their canvases in small strokes. The fauves rejected the impressionist palette of soft, shimmering tones in favor of radical new style, full of violent color and bold distortions.
 

Henri Matisse 

The Young Sailor

Beginning in 1905, Matisse spent the summers—and sometimes even the winters—in Collioure and continued to do so intermittently until about 1914. It was in Collioure that the sitter for The Young Sailor, an eighteen-year-old local fisherman named Germain Augustin Barthélémy Montargès (1888–1938), caught his eye. In this second version of the painting (the first, dated 1906, is in a private collection), the contours have been sharpened, the forms are more defined, and the colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink—a decorative style and palette adopted by Matisse from this point on. Matisse also drastically altered the sailor's mood and expression. His stylizing brush wiped off the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of Germain's face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savvy cunning from which a touch of licentiousness seems not absent. Germain's rather theatrical looks and his colorful costume, set against the pink candy-colored ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner.

References:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1999.363.41
http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/fauvism.htm
http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/C20th/fauvism.htm

Expressionism

Expressionism is a term that embraces an early 20th century style of art, music and literature that is charged with an emotional and spiritual vision of the world.

At the end of the 19th century, this Expressionist spirit resurfaced in the paintings of two awkward and isolated personalities – one was the Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh and the other a Norwegian, Edvard Munch. While the Impressionists were admiring the colour and beauty of the natural landscape, Van Gogh and Munch took a radically different perspective. They chose to look inwards to discover a form of ‘self-expression’ that offered them an individual voice in a world that they perceived as both insecure and hostile. It was this more subjective search for a personal emotional truth that drove them on and ultimately paved the way for the Expressionist art forms of the 20th century that explored the inner landscape of the soul.

Paintings like Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ (1888) opened our eyes to the intensity of expressive colour. He used colour to express his feelings about a subject, rather than to simply describe it. In a letter to his brother Theo he explained, ‘Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily to express myself forcibly.’ His heightened vision helped to liberated colour as an emotional instrument in the repertoire of 20th century art and the vitality of his brushwork became a key influence in the development of both the Fauves' and the Expressionists’ painting technique.

Munch’s painting of ‘The Scream’ (1893) was equally influential. It provides us with a psychological blueprint for Expressionist art: distorted shapes and exaggerated colours that amplify a sense of anxiety and alienation. ‘The Scream’ is Munch’s own voice crying in the wilderness, a prophetic voice that declares the Expressionist message, fifteen years before the term was invented. "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."

Wassily Kandinsky

The Russian-born artist Vasily Kandinsky moved to Munich to study painting in 1896. There, he became one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), a loose association of artists formed in 1911 to promote a new art, one that would reject the materialist world in favor of the world of emotion and the spirit. 

Referances:

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/art%20movements/expressionism/van_gogh.jpg

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.70.1

Les Nabis

Les Nabis were a group of young post-Impressionist avant-garde Parisian artists of the 1890s that influenced the fine arts and graphic arts in France at the turn of the 20th century.
Les Nabis


Les Nabis originated as a rebellious group of young student artists who banded together at the Académie Julian. Paul Sérusier galvanized Les Nabis, and provided the name and disseminated the example of Paul Gauguin among them. Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis became the best known of the group; at the time, however, they were somewhat peripheral to the core group.

Meeting at Académie Julian, and then at the apartment of Paul Ranson, they preached that a work of art is the end product and the visual expression of an artist's synthesis of nature in personal aesthetic metaphors and symbols. They paved the way for the early 20th century development of abstract and non-representational art. The goal of integrating art and daily life, was a goal they had in common with most progressive artists of the time.

Les Nabis artists worked in a variety of media, using oils on both canvas and cardboard, distemper on canvas and wall decoration, and also produced posters, prints, book illustration, textiles and furniture. Considered to be on the cutting edge of modern art during their early period, their subject matter was representational (though often symbolist in inspiration), but was design oriented along the lines of the Japanese prints they so admired, and art nouveau. Unlike those types however, the artists were highly influenced by the paintings of the impressionists, and thus while sharing the flatness, page layout and negative space of art nouveau and other decorative modes, much of Nabis art has a painterly, non-realistic look, with color palettes often reminding one of Cézanne and Gauguin. Bonnard's posters and lithographs are more firmly in the art nouveau, or Toulouse-Lautrec manner. After the turn of the century, as modern art moved towards abstraction, expressionism, cubism, etc., the Nabis were viewed as conservatives, and indeed were among the last group of artists to stick to the roots and artistic ambitions of the impressionists, pursuing these ends almost into the middle of the 20th century. In their later years, these painters also largely abandoned their earlier interests in decorative and applied arts.

Maurice Denis
With Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, Denis was a founding member of the Nabis group in France, active from 1888 to 1899. Denis, the group's spiritual leader and chief theoretician, called for a new pictorial language in response to the rhythms of nature. In date and sensibility, his work bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and as shown here, he had a firm grasp on modernist thought. He once said, "Remember that a picture, before being a war horse, a female nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."

Springtime, a double-sided canvas, describes a purification scene set deep in the forest of Saint-Germain, near Paris. Several pairs of young women—representing the sacred and the profane—blend into a bucolic landscape where one of them stands nude in a stream. Denis draws a parallel between the flowering sapling in the center (a symbol of spring, renewal, and Easter) and the maidens.

References:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1999.180.2ab
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Nabis

Symbolism

Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s. Reacting against the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, Moréas proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world. 

Though it began as a literary concept, Symbolism was soon identified with the artwork of a younger generation of painters who were similarly rejecting the conventions of Naturalism. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, quasi-scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism. They felt that the symbolic value or meaning of a work of art stemmed from the recreation of emotional experiences in the viewer through color, line, and composition. In painting, Symbolism represents a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and the artist's inner subjectivity.


Unlike the Impressionists, the Symbolists who emerged in the 1880s were a diverse group of artists often working independently with varying aesthetic goals. Rather than sharing a single artistic style, they were unified by a shared pessimism and weariness of the decadence they perceived in modern society. The Symbolists sought escape from reality, expressing their personal dreams and visions through color, form, and composition.

The Symbolists' rejection of naturalism and narrative in favor of the subjective representation of an idea or emotion would have a significant effect on the artwork of the twentieth century, particularly the formulation of German Expressionism and Abstraction.

Reference:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/symb/hd_symb.htm

Neo-Impressionism

(Late 19th Century)

Artists of the Neo-Impressionist circle renounced the random spontaneity of Impressionism in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics.

Whereas the Impressionist painters spontaneously recorded nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light, the Neo-Impressionists applied scientific optical principles of light and colour to create strictly formalized compositions.

The terms divisionism and pointillism originated in descriptions of Seurat’s painting technique, in which paint was applied to the canvas in dots of contrasting pigment. A calculated arrangement of coloured dots, based on optical science, was intended to be perceived by the retina as a single hue. The entire canvas was covered with these dots, which defined form without the use of lines and bathed all objects in an intense, vibrating light. In each picture the dots were of a uniform size, calculated to harmonize with the overall size of the painting. In place of the hazy forms of Impressionism, those of Neo-Impressionism had solidity and clarity and were simplified to reveal the carefully composed relationships between them. Though the light quality was as brilliant as that of Impressionism, the general effect was of immobile, harmonious monumentality, a crystallization of the fleeting light of Impressionism.

Neo-Impressionism was led by Georges Seurat, who was its original theorist and most significant artist, and by Paul Signac, also an important artist and the movement’s major spokesman. Other Neo-Impressionist painters were Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Maximilien Luce, Théo Van Rysselberghe, and, for a time, the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. The group founded a Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884.

By the 1890s the influence of Neo-Impressionism was waning, but it was important in the early stylistic and technical development of several artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Matisse.

Georges Seurat

Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance.

Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

Seurat's style came to be known as Pointillism (from the French word "point," or "dot"), but he preferred the term divisionism—the principle of separating color into small touches placed side-by-side and meant to blend in the eye of the viewer. He felt that colors applied in this way—not mixed on a palette or muddied by overlapping—would retain their integrity and produce a more brilliant, harmonious result. The juxtaposed touches of color that are woven together here with short, patchy brushstrokes are more systematically applied, with discrete daubs of paint, in the final work.

Refernces:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/408661/Neo-Impressionism

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/536352/Georges-Seurat

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seni/hd_seni.htm

Impressionism

(Late 19th century)

 Impressionism is an art movement that was started by a group of French painters seeking 

 recognition for their innovative techniques and approach to using colour in art.

  Lines were replaced by rounded shapes or tiny dots. Dark shadows became colorful and bright. Artists used a more scientific analysis of colour to capture the effects of light in nature.  These artists often painted outside to observe the effects of light on colour in nature. This is where the term plein air painting got started. Plein air means "outside" in French. Artists began to discard old painting supplies and picked up box easels and panting tubes, allowing them to easily travel outdoors with their supplies. The Impressionists had to paint quickly to capture the atmosphere of a particular time of day or the effects of different weather conditions on the landscape. The speed of the Impressionists' painting technique forced them to sacrifice accurate line and detail in favour of atmospheric effect. The subject most suited to the Impressionist technique was landscape, but they also painted portraits, still lifes and figure compositions.
Impressionism is now seen as the first movement in modern art, and had a huge influence on the development of art in the 20th century.

Claude Monet

, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley and Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec were the main figures who formed the backbone of the movement.

Claude Monet

Weeping Willow

Woman with a Parasol

Claude Monet was a famous French painter whose work gave name to the art movement Impressionism which was concerned with capturing light and natural forms.

Monet rejected the traditional approach to landscape painting and instead of copying old masters he had been learning from his friends and the nature itself. Monet observed variations of color and light caused by the daily or seasonal changes

"My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects."

– Claude Monet

Refernces

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/impressionism.htm

http://www.osnatfineart.com/impressionism.jsp

http://www.biography.com/people/claude-monet-9411771?page=1