Моdern art

The term modern art has come to denote the innovating and even revolutionary developments in Western painting and the other visual arts, such as sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts characteristic of the second half of the 19th century and the 20^th century. It embraces a wide variety of movements, styles, theories, and attitudes the modernism of which resides in a common tendency to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in subject matter, mode of depiction, and painting technique in an effort to create an art more in keeping with changed social, economic, and intellectual conditions

. Not all the painting of this period has made such a departure; representational work, for example, has continued to appear, particularly in connection with official exhibiting societies. Nevertheless, the idea that some current types of painting are more properly of their time than are others, and for that reason are more interesting or important, applies with particular force to the painting of the last 150 years.

By the mid-19th century, painting was no longer basically in service to either the church or the court but rather was patronized by the upper and middle classes of an increasingly materialistic and secularized Western society. This society was undergoing rapid change because of the growth of science and technology, industrialization, urbanization, and the fundamental questioning of received religious dogmas. Painters were thus confronted with the need to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in an effort to create an art that would better reflect the changed social, material, and intellectual conditions of emerging modern life. Another important, if indirect, stimulus to change was the development from the early 19th century on of photography and other photomechanical techniques, which freed (or deprived) painting and drawing of their hitherto cardinal roles as the only available means of accurately depicting the visual world. These manually executed arts were thus no longer obliged to serve as the means of recording and disseminating information as they once had been and were eventually freed to explore aesthetically the basic visual elements of line, colour, tone, and composition in a nonrepresentational context. Indeed, an important trend in modern painting has been that of abstraction—i.e., painting in which little or no attempt is made to accurately depict the appearance or form of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. The door of the objective world was thus closed, but the inner world of the imagination offered seemingly infinite possibilities for exploration, as did the manipulation of pigments on a flat surface for their purely intrinsic visual or aesthetic appeal.

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The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but there is general agreement that it started in 19th-century France. The paintings of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the prevailing academic tradition and a quest for a more naturalistic representation of the visual world. These painters' Postimpressionist successors—notably Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin—can be viewed as more clearly modern in their repudiation of traditional techniques and their expression of a more subjective personal vision. From about the 1890s a succession of varied styles and movements arose that are the core of modern painting and that represent one of the high points of Western visual culture. These modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurisml, Suprematism, Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, de Stijl, Purism, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism.

. Despite the enormous variety seen in these movements, most of them are characteristically modern in their investigation of the potentials inherent within the painting medium itself for expressing a spiritual response to the changed conditions of life in the 20th century. These conditions include accelerated technological change, the expansion of scientific knowledge and understanding, the seeming irrelevance of some traditional sources of value and belief, and an expanding awareness of non-Western cultures.

An important trend throughout the 20th century has been that of abstract, or nonobjective, art—i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to objectively reproduce or depict the appearances or forms of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. It should also be noted that the development of photography and of allied photomechanical techniques of reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important influence on the development of modern art, because these mechanical techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed drawing and painting of their hitherto crucialrole as the only means of accurately depicting the visible world.

Modern architecture arose out of the rejection of revivals, classicism, eclecticism, and indeed all adaptations of past styles to the building types of industrializing late 19th- and 20th-century society. It also arose out of efforts to create architectural forms and styles that would utilize and reflect the newly available building technologies of structural iron and steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. Until the spread of Postmodernism, modern architecture also implied the rejection of the applied ornament and decoration characteristic of premodern Western buildings. The thrust of modern architecture has been a rigorous concentration on buildings whose rhythmical arrangement of masses and shapes states a geometric theme in light and shade. This development has been closely tied to the new building types demanded by an industrialized society, such as office buildings housing corporate management or government administration. Among the most important trends and movements of modern architecture are the Chicago School, Functionalism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the International Style, New Brutalism and Post Modernism.

Francis William Wentworth-Sheilds

NEO-IMPRESSIONISM

movement in French painting of the late 19th century that reacted against the empirical realism of Impressionism by relying on systematic calculation and scientific theory to achieve predetermined visual effects. 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. 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.

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.

Signac's later work showed an increasingly spontaneous use of the divisionist technique, which was more consistent with his poetic sensibility. Seurat, however, continued to adopt a theoretical approach to the study of various pictorial and technical problems, including a reduction of the expressive qualities of colour and form to scientific formulas. 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.