Methods of Presenting

the Art Subjects

Realism

• Realism is broadly considered the beginning of modern art.

Literally, this is due to its conviction that everyday life and the
modern world were suitable subjects for art.

• Philosophically, Realism embraced the progressive aims of

modernism, seeking new truths through the reexamination and
overturning of traditional systems of values and beliefs.
Realism

• Realism concerned itself with how life was structured socially,

economically, politically, and culturally in the mid-19th century.
This led to unflinching, sometimes "ugly" portrayals of life's
unpleasant moments and the use of dark, earthy palettes that
confronted high art's ultimate ideals of beauty.

• Realism was the first explicitly anti-institutional, nonconformist

art movement. Realist painters took aim at the social mores and
values of the bourgeoisie and monarchy upon who patronized the
art market.
 Realism

GUSTAVE COURBET
• Gustave Courbet is often
considered the leading figure
of Realism. He laid the
groundwork for the movement
in the 1840s, when he began
portraying peasants and
laborers on a grand scale
typically reserved for religious,
historical, or allegorical
subjects.
Gustave Courbet, “The Stone Breakers” (1849)
 Mona Lisa
by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503

Girl with a Pearl Earring

By Johannes Vermeer, 1665
 Abstract

• Abstract art, also called nonobjective art or

nonrepresentational art, painting, sculpture,
or graphic art in which the portrayal of
things from the visible world plays no part.
All art consists largely of elements that can
be called abstract—elements of form, colour,
line, tone, and texture.
• Abstract art has its origins in the 19th
century. The period of Romanticism had put
forward ideas about art that denied
classicism’s emphasis on imitation and
idealization and had instead stressed the
role of imagination and of the unconscious as
the essential creative factors.
Helen Frankenthaler - Mountains and Sea, 1952
 Blue II (1961) – Joan Miro

Abstraktes Bild [599] (1986) – Gerhard

Richter
 Fauvism

• Fauvism, style of painting that flourished in

France around the turn of the 20th century.
Fauve artists used pure, brilliant colour
aggressively applied straight from the paint
tubes to create a sense of an explosion on
the canvas.
• Henri Matisse, who had arrived at the Fauve
style after experimenting with the various
Post-Impressionist approaches of Paul
Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges
Seurat.

Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line, oil painting by Henri Matisse, 1905
 Landscape near Chatou by André Derain

Prades, the Village by Joan Miró

 Expressionism

• Artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict

not objective reality but rather the subjective
emotions and responses that objects and events
arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes
this aim through distortion, exaggeration,
primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid,
jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal
elements.
• The roots of the German Expressionist school lay
in the works of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch,
and James Ensor, each of whom in the period
1885–1900 evolved a highly personal painting
style.
The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893
 The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso

Reclining Nude by Amedeo Modigliani

 Cubism

• Cubism, highly influential visual arts style

of the 20th century that was created
principally by the artists Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and
1914. The Cubist style emphasized the
flat, two-dimensional surface of the
picture plane, rejecting the traditional
techniques of perspective, foreshortening,
modeling, and chiaroscuro, and refuting
time-honoured theories that art should
imitate nature.
A Portrait by Pablo Picasso
The Weeping Woman by Pablo Picasso

Green Violinist by Marc Chagall

 Futurism

• Futurism, Italian Futurismo, Russian Futurizm,

early 20th-century artistic movement centred
in Italy that emphasized the dynamism, speed,
energy, and power of the machine and the
vitality, change, and restlessness of modern
life.
• Futurism was first announced on February 20,
1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro
published a manifesto by the Italian poet and
editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti
coined the word Futurism to reflect his goal of
discarding the art of the past and celebrating
change, originality, and innovation in culture
and society. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – Skyscrapers and Tunnels, 1930
 Dynamism of a Car by Luigi Russolo

Simultaneous Visions by Umberto Boccioni

 Symbolism

• The term was coined in 1886 by French critic

Jean Moréas to describe the poetry of Stéphane
Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. It was soon applied
to visual art where the realistic depiction of the
natural world, seen in impressionism, realism,
naturalism, was rejected in favour of imaginary
dream worlds populated with mysterious figures
from literature, the bible, and and Greek
mythology.
• The work of symbolist artists and writers was
also fuelled by new psychological content,
particularly erotic and mystical. Common
themes included: love, fear, anguish, death,
sexual awakening, and unrequited desire.

Black Iris (1926) by Georgia O'Keeffe

 The Crying Spider by Odilon
Redon

Oedipus and the Sphinx

by Gustave Moreau
 Dadaism

• Dada was an art movement formed during the

First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to
the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry
and performance produced by dada artists is often
satirical and nonsensical in nature
• The founder of dada was a writer, Hugo Ball. In
1916 he started a satirical night-club in Zurich,
the Cabaret Voltaire, and a magazine which,
wrote Ball, ‘will bear the name ”Dada”.
• Dada artists felt the war called into question
every aspect of a society capable of starting and
then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim
was to destroy traditional values in art and to
create a new art to replace the old.
Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic 1919–20
 Fountain
Sculpture by Marcel Duchamp

The Skat Players by Otto Dix

 Surrealism
• Surrealism, movement in visual art and
literature, flourishing in Europe
between World Wars I and II. Surrealism
grew principally out of the earlier Dada
movement, which before World War I
produced works of anti-art that
deliberately defied reason; but
Surrealism’s emphasis was not on
negation but on positive expression.
• The poet and critic André Breton, who
published The Surrealist Manifesto in
1924, Surrealism was a means of
reuniting conscious and unconscious
realms of experience so completely
that the world of dream and fantasy
would be joined to the everyday
rational world in “an absolute reality, a
surreality.” The Persistence of Memory, oil on canvas, by Salvador Dalí, 1931
 The Lovers by René Magritte

Voluptas Mors by Philippe Halsman