INTRODUCERE
imagineze lucrurile. Omul nu e un receptor senzorial
Istoria artei : disciplină ce are drept obiect de studiu
operele de artă în istorie și sensul pe care acestea îl pot
căpăta. Istoria artei studiază de asemenea condițiile
creației artistice, recunoașterea de către public, dar și
contextul cultural, spiritual, antropologic, ideologic,
teoretic, economic și social al artei. Așadar, istoria artei
studiază creația artistică și diferitele sale dimensiuni și
concepții (înțelese uneori ca ficțiuni sau narațiuni). Ca
orice disciplină istorică, și istoria artei este întotdeauna o
perspectivă a prezentului asupra trecutului. Disciplina
istoriei artei studiază, printre altele:
⦁ideea de creație artistică
⦁obiectul artistic (operă, tehnică, materiale, mediu)
⦁publicul/spectatorul și receptarea operei de artă
⦁limbajul artistic
⦁sensurile operei de artă
Discursul tradițional al istorie artei folosește concepte
precum acelea de stil, operă/capodoperă, manieră,
tendințe, curente.
Deși studiul istoriei artei exista încă din Renaștere
(Vasari, Viețile celor mai importanți pictori, sculptori,
arhitecți - Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e
architettori, 1550), înțelesul modern al istoriei artei i se
datorează lui Johann Joakim Winckelmann (1717-1768).
Arheolog și elenist, fondator al arheologiei moderne,
Winckelmann este primul care face o sistematizare a
istoriei artei, în termeni de stiluri și categorii. El explică
fenomenele artistice prin succesiuni, influențe, secvențe și
progresie istorică. În lucrarea sa Istoria artei în antichitate
(1764, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums),
Winckelmann definește momentele-cheie ale unei
civilizații în termeni de creștere, maturitate și declin
(influențat probabil de filosofia istoriei a lui Giambattista
Vico-1668-1774). În contextul descoperirilor arheologice
din secolul al XVIII-lea (care va influența și stilul
neoclasic în arhitectură), teza lui Winckelmann situează
arta greacă ca etalon și prototip al frumosului, iar arta
romană și elenistică sunt considerate momente de declin
ale artei grecești.
Aloïs Riegl (1858-1905) Spätrömische
Kunstindustrie,1901 (Arta antichității romane târzii).
Aproape un secol și jumătate mai târziu, istoricul de artă
austriac Alois Riegl (membru al școlii de la Viena,
împreună cu M. Dvorak, A v. Scharsow, J.v. Schlosser)
repune în discuție teza superiorității civilizației grecești și
în general a oricăror ierarhii în istoria artei. Pentru Riegl,
nu putem vorbi de progres în reprezentarea artistică, căci
fiecărei epoci istorice îi corespunde o “voință de artă”- pe
care el o definește prin conceptul Kunstwollen: “întreaga
voință umană se îndreaptă către modelarea satisfăcătoare
a relațiilor omului cu lumea, la nivel individual și dincolo
de individual. Voința de artă plastică (Kunstwollen)
reglează relația omului cu aparența perceptibilă și sensibilă
a lucrurilor. Arta exprimă felul în care omul vede formele
și culorile, la fel după cum voința de artă poetică
(Kunstwollen) exprimă felul în care el vrea să își
pasiv, ci și o ființă activă și plină de dorințe, care vrea să
interpreteze lumea așa încât aceasta să corespundă cât
mai fidel dorințelor sale (variind de la o epocă, regiune și
populație la alta). Caracterul acestei voințe aparține a
ceea ce numim perspectiva asupra lumii
(Weltanschauung), în sensul cel mai larg: în religie,
filosofie, știință, chiar administrație și legi. (Riegl,
Kunstindustrie, ultimul capitol). Astfel, pentru Riegl,
“istoria artei nu este istoria putinței artistice, ci istoria
voinței artistice” (Tudor Vianu), iar această voință
artistică este motorul evoluției stilistice, atât în artele
majore cât și în artele minore.
Aby Warburg (1866-1929) este unul dintre cei mai
importanți istorici de artă ai secolului XX, iar metodele
sale noi de cercetare vor influența în mod decisiv
cercetători precum Ernst Gombrich sau Erwin Panofsky.
Un mare cunoscător și cercetător al culturii Renașterii,
Warburg este de asemenea preocupat de studiul culturilor
tradiționale (pueblo și navajo) din Statele Unite.
Metodele sale de cercetare includ ca material de studiu nu
numai capodoperele sau reperele cunoscute ale istoriei
artei, ci orice tip de reprezentări grafice (pe care le
include în colecția sa). El este de asemenea foarte
interesat de interpretarea miturilor, și introduce în istoria
artei conceptul de Pathosformel (forme ale patosului),
forme/imagini recurente care traversează istoria
reprezentării. În 1927, Warburg începe să compună un
atlas de imagini, intitulat Mnemosyne, compus din 40 de
panouri care cuprindeau în jur de 1000 de imagini diverse,
preluate din surse diferite (ziare, reviste, cărți etc) și
organizate în 14 teme legate de antichitate, memorie,
modele, mitologie etc.
În cartea sa care anunță sfârșitul istoriei artei (The End of
the History of Art? (1987)), Hans Belting repune în
discuție metodele tradiționale ale istoriei artei și măsura în
care acestea mai pot fi suficiente pentru a studia arta
contemporană și ramificațiile sale multiple. Desigur nu e
vorba despre sfârșitul istoriei artei cu totul, ci mai degrabă
despre sfârșitul - regândirea- unei concepții particulare
despre artă ca secvență istorică progresivă.
NEOCLASSICISM
1750-1850
New classics of the highest rank! This was the rallying cry
of populations immersed in the 18th century Age of
Enlightenment who wanted their artwork and architecture
to mirror, and carry the same set of standards, as the
idealized works of the Greeks and Romans. In
conjunction with the exciting archaeological rediscoveries
of Pompeii and Herculaneum in Rome, Neoclassicism
arose as artists and architects infused their work with past
Greco-Roman ideals. A return to the study of science,
history, mathematics, and anatomical correctness
abounded, replacing the Rococo vanity culture and 1771-1772 The Academicians of the Royal Academy
court-painting climate that preceded. Johann Joseph Zoffany

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Neoclassical art arose in opposition to the overly
decorative and gaudy styles of Rococo and Baroque that
were infusing society with a vanity art culture based on
personal conceits and whimsy. It brought about a general
revival in classical thought that mirrored what was going
on in political and social arenas of the time, leading to the
French Revolution.

The primary Neoclassicist belief was that art should

express the ideal virtues in life and could improve the
viewer by imparting a moralizing message. It had the
power to civilize, reform, and transform society, as society
itself was being transformed by new approaches to 1787 Vizita Prințului de Wales la Somerset House
government and the rising forces of the Industrial Johann Heinrich Ramberg
Revolution, driven by scientific discovery and invention.

Neoclassical architecture was based on the principles of

simplicity, symmetry, and mathematics, which were seen
as virtues of the arts in Ancient Greece and Rome. It also
evolved the more recent influences of the equally
antiquity-informed 16th century Renaissance Classicism.

Neoclassicism's rise was in large part due to the

popularity of the Grand Tour, in which art students and
the general aristocracy were given access to recently
unearthed ruins in Italy, and as a result became enamored
with the aesthetics and philosophies of ancient art.
1787 Salon du Louvre
Key Artists
Pietro Martini
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Jacques-Louis David

Artworks and Artists of Neoclassicism

1760 Lord Ligonier
Sir Joshua Reynolds

1761 L'Accordée de Village (Contractul de căsătorie)

Jean Baptiste Greuze
ROMANTICISM 1780-1830
At the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th,
Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the
United States to challenge the rational ideal held so
tightly during the Enlightenment. The artists emphasized
that sense and emotions - not simply reason and order -
were equally important means of understanding and
experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the
individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search
for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative,
subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde
movements well into the 20th century.
Romanticist practitioners found their voices across all
genres, including literature, music, art, and architecture.
Reacting against the sober style of Neoclassicism
preferred by most countries' academies, the far reaching
international movement valued originality, inspiration, and
imagination, thus promoting a variety of styles within the
movement. Additionally, in an effort to stem the tide of
increasing industrialization, many of the Romanticists
emphasized the individual's connection to nature and an
idealized past.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
In part spurred by the idealism of the French Revolution,
Romanticism embraced the struggles for freedom and
equality and the promotion of justice. Painters began
using current events and atrocities to shed light on
injustices in dramatic compositions that rivaled the more
staid Neoclassical history paintings accepted by national
academies.
Romanticism embraced individuality and subjectivity to
counteract the excessive insistence on logical thought.
Artists began exploring various emotional and
psychological states as well as moods. The preoccupation
with the hero and the genius translated to new views of
the artist as a brilliant creator who was unburdened by
academic dictate and tastes. As the French poet Charles
Baudelaire described it, "Romanticism is precisely
situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth,
but in a way of feeling."
In many countries, Romantic painters turned their
attention to nature and plein air painting, or painting out
of doors. Works based on close observation of the
landscape as well as the sky and atmosphere elevated
landscape painting to a new, more respectful level. While
some artists emphasized humans at one with and a part of
nature, others portrayed nature's power and
unpredictability, evoking a feeling of the sublime - awe
mixed with terror - in the viewer.
Romanticism was closely bound up with the emergence of
newly found nationalism that swept many countries after
the American Revolution. Emphasizing local folklore,
traditions, and landscapes, Romanticists provided the
visual imagery that further spurred national identity and
pride. Romantic painters combined the ideal with the
particular, imbuing their paintings with a call to spiritual
renewal that would usher in an age of freedom and
liberties not yet seen.
William Blake 1757-1827
Though he is perhaps still better-known as a poet than an
artist, in many ways William Blake's life and work provide
the template for our contemporary understanding of what
a modern artist is and does. Overlooked by his peers, and
sidelined by the academic institutions of his day, his work
was championed by a small, zealous group of supporters.
His lack of commercial success meant that Blake lived his
life in relative poverty, a life in thrall to a highly individual,
sometimes iconoclastic, imaginative vision. Through his
prints, paintings, and poems, Blake constructed a
mythical universe of an intricacy and depth to match
Dante's Divine Comedy, but which, liked Dante's, bore
the imprint of contemporary culture and politics. When
Blake died, in a small house in London in 1827, he was
poor and somewhat anonymous; today, we can recognize
him as a prototype for the avant-garde artists of the later
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose creative spirit
stands at odds with the prevailing mood of their culture.
Blake was perhaps the quintessential Romantic artist.
Like his peers in the world of Romantic literature -
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly - Blake
stressed the primacy of individual imagination and
inspiration to the creative process, rejecting the
Neoclassical emphasis on formal precision which had
defined much 18th-century painting and poetry. Above all
else, Blake scorned the contemporary culture of
Enlightenment and industrialization, which stood for a
mechanization and intellectual reductivism which he
deplored. Blake felt that imaginative insight was the only
way to cast off the veil thrown over reality by rational
thought, claiming that "If the doors of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to man as it is,
infinite."
Blake is unique amongst the artists of his day, and rare
amongst artists of any era, in his integration of writing
and painting into a single creative process, and in his use
of innovative production techniques to combine image
and text in single compositions. Celebrated for his visual
output, Blake is also recognized as one of the most radical
poets of the early Romantic period, combining a highly
wrought, Miltonic style with grand, Gothic themes.
Moreover, through original techniques such as his
"illuminated printing" Blake was able to adapt his craft to
meet the demands of his creativity.
Blake's spiritual vision was central to his creativity, and
was crucially and uniquely informed by a complex,
imaginative pantheon of his own making, populated by
deities such as Urizen, Los, Enitharmion, and Orc. Grand
allegorical narratives illustrated with Blake's own designs,
were played out in this universe, which might seem to
have existed in a space apart from reality. However, in his
epic poem sequences, Blake imagined the fate of the
human world, in the era of the French and American
Revolutions, as hinging on these sequences, determined
by the battles between reason and imagination, lust and
piety, order and revolution, which his protagonists
represented.

1786 Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing

1795 Angel of Revelation

1795 The Song of Los

John Constable 1776-1837
Along with J. M. W. Turner, Constable revolutionized
landscape painting of the 19th century and his paintings
had a profound and far-reaching effect on European art,
particularly in France. Constable moved away from the
highly idealized landscapes that were the expected norm
of the period and instead favored realistic depictions of
the natural world created through close observation.
Constable is most clearly remembered for his bucolic
images painted in and around the Stour Valley but he also
produced over 100 portraits and a huge number of
preparatory sketches often completed in oil. In these he
experimented with a freer style of representation and this 1821-1822 Hampstead Heath with Bathers
allowed him to capture the effects of elemental change on
the countryside with a spontaneity which he was then able
to transfer to his finished works. Although his sketches
are considerably more impressionistic and less detailed
than his display canvases his overall aim remained the
same regardless of medium and technique - to depict the
scenery that he saw in a truthful and realistic manner.

Constable was a pioneering advocate of realistic

depictions of the natural world. He rejected contemporary
styles of landscape painting stating that "The great vice of
the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something
beyond the truth". Instead he created his own distinct
manner of representation based on transferring what he
saw as truthfully as possible to a canvas.
1831 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
He was fascinated by changing patterns of clouds,
weather and light and he sought to capture these
moments in his oil sketches. He worked with large, loose Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851
Turner took classical genres and scenes - the stately
brushstrokes to create expressive representations which
landscape in well-designed compositions and historical
depicted an overall sense of what he saw rather than fine
events writ large - and infused them with a new dynamic
details. His sketches can be seen as an early precursor to
in painting. He reflected on the increasing importance of
the work of the Impressionists thirty years later.
individual experience in the era of the Enlightenment,
where the perceptions of human beings led to exalted
Even in his completed work, Constable abandoned the
personal moments and sublime interactions with nature.
traditional invisible brushstrokes that were expectations of
Through this dedication to rendering heightened states of
Academic art of the period. Instead he applied paint in a
consciousness and being, he helped define the
range of ways including with a palette knife giving his
cross-disciplinary artistic movement of Romanticism,
canvases a textured and imperfect finish which served to
setting the stage for later developments in painting
enhance their realism.
subjective experiences that would lead to Impressionism.
In some of his later works especially, Turner responded to
Constable also utilized color more widely than was the
the arrival of the modern era by making the contraptions
norm, reflecting the hues he found in nature. He is
of human invention powerfully, sometimes threateningly
particularly known for his unique addition of pure white
present.
highlights which served to represent the sparkle of light
on water.
Striving for greater subjective effects, he ignored and even
exploded the precise rendering of details and static scenes
that previous generations' masters and his peers still
pursued. Instead he developed painterly effects to render
perceptions from closely observed nature, resulting in
swirling clouds of varied light and bold arrays of color
dabbed in oil. Many of these techniques in paint to evoke
sensations of the "Sublime" would become the substance
and subject matter of the generation of painters working
in Abstract Expressionism.
The subjects chosen for many of his paintings emphasized 1810 The Wreck of a Transport Ship
the power of nature in a way that had not previously been
depicted - making the human figure and all that
civilization had built seem minuscule and fragile in
comparison.

Turner helped establish landscape painting - and especially

its water-based corollary, seascapes - as an artistic genre
for greater respect and exploration, compared to what had
existed before or during his own time.

Turner also incorporated novel motifs from the modern

industrial era into his paintings - steamships and railway
trains figuring prominently - foreshadowing a recurrent
fascination with these elements of modern life that would
figure in later generations of visual artists - from the
1839 Campo Vaccino
Futurists, muralists such as Diego Rivera to contemporary
artists such as Matthew Barney.

1796 Fishermen at Sea

1803 Calais Pier

REALISM 1840-1880
Though never a coherent group, Realism is recognized as
the first modern movement in art, which rejected
traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization
as outmoded in the wake of the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution. Beginning in France in the 1840s,
Realism revolutionized painting, expanding conceptions of
what constituted art. Working in a chaotic era marked by
revolution and widespread social change, Realist painters
replaced the idealistic images and literary conceits of
traditional art with real-life events, giving the margins of
society similar weight to grand history paintings and
allegories. Their choice to bring everyday life into their
canvases was an early manifestation of the avant-garde
desire to merge art and life, and their rejection of pictorial
techniques, like perspective, prefigured the many
20th-century definitions and redefinitions of modernism.

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 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. Though
they continued submitting works to the Salons of the
official Academy of Art, they were not above mounting
independent exhibitions to defiantly show their work.

Following the explosion of newspaper printing and mass

media in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Realism
brought in a new conception of the artist as self-publicist.
Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and others
purposefully courted controversy and used the media to
enhance their celebrity in a manner that continues among
artists to this day.
THE BARBIZON SCHOOL
1830-1870
Pioneers of the Naturalist movement in landscape
painting, The Barbizon School was a loose association of
artists who worked around the village of Barbizon, located
just outside Paris near the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Members came from different backgrounds and worked in
a range of styles but they were drawn together by their
passion for painting en plein air and their desire to elevate
landscape painting from a mere background to
mythological or classical scenes to a subject in its own
right. The rugged countryside and ancient trees of the
forest held a powerful attraction and inspired several
generations of artists from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
Theodore Rousseau, and Jean-François Millet to Renoir
and Manet.
In reaction to the stylized and idealized depictions of
figures and landscapes favored by Neoclassicism, most
artists that formed part of the school approached painting
in a naturalistic manner - capturing the things that they
saw truthfully, making careful observations and painting
directly from nature to faithfully reproduce the colors and
forms of the countryside.
Masters and contemporary Realism gave him the crucial
foundation for his revolutionary approach.
Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to
update older genres of painting by injecting new content
or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with
an acute sensitivity to historical tradition and
contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root
cause of many of the scandals he provoked.
He is credited with popularizing the technique of alla
prima painting. Rather than build up colors in layers,
Manet would immediately lay down the hue that most
closely matched the final effect he sought. The approach
came to be used widely by the Impressionists, who found
it perfectly suited to the pressures of capturing effects of
light and atmosphere whilst painting outdoors.
His loose handling of paint, and his schematic rendering
of volumes, led to areas of "flatness" in his pictures. In
the artist's day, this flatness may have suggested popular
posters or the artifice of painting - as opposed to its
realism. Today, critics see this quality as the first example
of "flatness" in modern art.

Although many pieces produced by artists from the school

contain figures, most are without narrative and this
echoes the wider tenets of the school in that the
landscape itself forms the main subject matter of the
work. The exception to this is Millet who extended the
concepts of Naturalism to the human form, focusing on
rural laborers in the area around Barbizon and often
including a social commentary in his art.

The Barbizon painters trialed various techniques including

applying wet paint onto wet paint, completing a canvas in
a single sitting, and concentrating on the effects of light
on the landscape. Many also worked using looser
brushstrokes and a freer style than was traditional in
Academic painting. These experiments had a profound
impact on the work of the Impressionists who travelled to
Barbizon as young artists to learn from the members of
the School.

Edouard Manet 1832-1883

Édouard Manet was the most important and influential
artist to have heeded poet Charles Baudelaire's call to
artists to become painters of modern life. Manet had an
upper-class upbringing, but also led a bohemian life, and
was driven to scandalize the French Salon public with his
disregard for academic conventions and his strikingly
modern images of urban life. He has long been associated
with the Impressionists; he was certainly an important
influence on them and he learned much from them
himself. However, in recent years critics have
acknowledged that he also learned from the Realism and
Naturalism of his French contemporaries, and even from
17th century Spanish painting. This twin interest in Old
IMPRESSIONISM 1862-1892
Impressionism is perhaps the most important movement
in the whole of modern painting. At some point in the
1860s, a group of young artists decided to paint, very
simply, what they saw, thought, and felt. They weren’t
interested in painting history, mythology, or the lives of
great men, and they didn’t seek perfection in visual
appearances. Instead, as their name suggests, the
Impressionists tried to get down on canvas an
“impression” of how a landscape, thing, or person
appeared to them at a certain moment in time. This often
meant using much lighter and looser brushwork than
painters had up until that point, and painting out of
doors, en plein air. The Impressionists also rejected
official exhibitions and painting competitions set up by the
French government, instead organizing their own group
exhibitions, which the public were initially very hostile to.
All of these moves predicted the emergence of modern
art, and the whole associated philosophy of the
avant-garde.

The Impressionists used looser brushwork and lighter

colors than previous artists. They abandoned traditional
three-dimensional perspective and rejected the clarity of
form that had previously served to distinguish the more
important elements of a picture from the lesser ones. For
this reason, many critics faulted Impressionist paintings
for their unfinished appearance and seemingly amateurish
quality.

Picking up on the ideas of Gustave Courbet, the

Impressionists aimed to be painters of the real: they aimed
to extend the possible subjects for paintings. Getting
away from depictions of idealized forms and perfect
symmetry, they concentrated on the world as they saw it,
which was imperfect in a myriad of ways.

Scientific thought in the Impressionist era was beginning

to recognize that what the eye perceived and what the
brain understood were two different things. The
Impressionists sought to capture the former - the optical
effects of light - to convey the fleeting nature of the
present moment, including ambient features such as
changes in weather, on their canvases. Their art did not
necessarily rely on realistic depictions.

Impressionism records the effects of the massive

mid-19th-century renovation of Paris, led by civic planner
Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which included the city's
newly constructed railway stations; wide, tree-lined
boulevards that replaced the formerly narrow, crowded
streets; and large, deluxe apartment buildings. The works
that focused on scenes of public leisure - especially scenes
of cafés and cabarets - often conveyed the new sense of
alienation experienced by the inhabitants of the first
modern metropolis.
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
1880-1914
Post-Impressionism encompasses a wide range of distinct
artistic styles that all share the common motivation of
responding to the opticality of the Impressionist
movement. The stylistic variations assembled under the
general banner of Post-Impressionism range from the
scientifically oriented Neo-Impressionism of Georges
Seurat to the lush Symbolism of Paul Gauguin, but all
concentrated on the subjective vision of the artist. The
movement ushered in an era during which painting
transcended its traditional role as a window onto the
world and instead became a window into the artist's mind
and soul. The far-reaching aesthetic impact of the
Post-Impressionists influenced groups that arose during
the turn of the 20th century, like the Expressionists, as
well as more contemporary movements, like the
identity-related Feminist Art.

Symbolic and highly personal meanings were particularly

important to Post-Impressionists such as Paul Gauguin
and Vincent van Gogh. Rejecting interest in depicting the
observed world, they instead looked to their memories
and emotions in order to connect with the viewer on a
deeper level.

Structure, order, and the optical effects of color

dominated the aesthetic vision of Post-Impressionists like
Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac. Rather
than merely represent their surroundings, they relied upon
the interrelations of color and shape to describe the world
around them.

Despite the various individualized styles, most Post -

Impressionists focused on abstract form and pattern in the
application of paint to the surface of the canvas. Their
early leanings toward abstraction paved the way for the
radical modernist exploration of abstraction that took
place in the early-20th century.

Critics grouped the various styles within Post -

Impressionism into two general, opposing stylistic trends -
on one side was the structured, or geometric style that
was the precursor to Cubism, while on the other side was
the expressive, or non-geometric art that led to Abstract
Expressionism.
FAUVISM 1899-1908
Fauvism, the first 20th-century movement in modern art,
was initially inspired by the examples of Vincent van
Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne.
The Fauves ("wild beasts") were a loosely allied group of
French painters with shared interests. Several of them,
including Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Georges
Rouault, had been pupils of the Symbolist artist Gustave
Moreau and admired the older artist's emphasis on
personal expression. Matisse emerged as the leader of the
group, whose members shared the use of intense color as
a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined
pure color and form as means of communicating the
artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved
to be an important precursor to Cubism and
Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of
abstraction.

One of Fauvism's major contributions to modern art was

its radical goal of separating color from its descriptive,
representational purpose and allowing it to exist on the
canvas as an independent element. Color could project a
mood and establish a structure within the work of art
without having to be true to the natural world.

Another of Fauvism's central artistic concerns was the

overall balance of the composition. The Fauves' simplified
forms and saturated colors drew attention to the inherent
flatness of the canvas or paper; within that pictorial space,
each element played a specific role. The immediate visual
impression of the work is to be strong and unified.

Above all, Fauvism valued individual expression. The

artist's direct experience of his subjects, his emotional
response to nature, and his intuition were all more
important than academic theory or elevated subject
matter. All elements of painting were employed in service
of this goal.
CUBISM 1907-1922
Cubism developed in the aftermath of Pablo Picasso's
shocking 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in a period of
rapid experimentation between Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque. Drawing upon Paul Cezanne’s emphasis
on the underlying architecture of form, these artists used
multiple vantage points to fracture images into geometric
forms. Rather than modelled forms in an illusionistic
space, figures were depicted as dynamic arrangements of
volumes and planes where background and foreground
merged. The movement was one of the most
groundbreaking of the early-20th century as it challenged
Renaissance depictions of space, leading almost directly to
experiments with non-representation by many different
artists. Artists working in the Cubist style went on to
incorporate elements of collage and popular culture into
their paintings and to experiment with sculpture.

A number of artists adopted Picasso and Braque's

geometric faceting of objects and space including Fernand
Léger and Juan Gris, along with others that formed a
group known as the Salon Cubists.

The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used

to depict space since the Renaissance, and they also
turned away from the realistic modeling of figures.

Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects

by letting the space flow through them, blending
background into foreground, and showing objects from
various angles. Some historians have argued that these
innovations represent a response to the changing
experience of space, movement, and time in the modern
world. This first phase of the movement was called
Analytic Cubism.

In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubism

practicioners explored the use of non-art materials as
abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later
historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above
all with form, the artists were also acutely aware of
current events, particularly World War I.

Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by

putting new emphasis on the unity between a depicted
scene and the surface of the canvas. These experiments
would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who
continued to explore their use of the grid, abstract system
of signs, and shallow space.