Art Styles [Part I]

[Khoo Ee Hoon]

Art Styles

Abstract
In art, abstraction means that the artist changes the appearance so it no longer looks realistic. Artists use abstraction in many ways and for many different reasons. The artist may leave out details, shift the point of view, exagerate, simplify or otherwise distort the image.

Baroque
The Baroque style first appeared in Europe in the late 1500s. It remained the dominant style until the more relaxed and intimate Rococo period developed in the 1700s. The word baroque comes from the Portuguese word meaning "irregularly shaped pearl." It was first used in the 17th century to describe something that did not meet the classical standards of the Renaissance. Baroque artists created art that was ornately decorated, dynamic and was filled with emotion. All available space on a canvas was filled with action, detail and movement.

The Baroque period was also a time of political and religious tension. Catholic authorities, alarmed by the Reformation, wanted a style of art to draw people back to the Catholic Church. They felt that art of the period should have only one aim: to glorify the Catholic religion and make Catholic beliefs more popular. Paintings and other art created during this time were full of high drama and emotional appeal, portraying vivid images of the Bible, saints, miracles and the crucifixion.

This flamboyant style was fueled in another way as well. Many rulers and other important people paid for artworks to show off their own wealth and power. Baroque art, in general, was characterized by elaborate displays of grandeur. It reflected the contradictory forces and emotions of the time.

Some well-known Baroque artists were Caravaggio, Rubens, Velazquez and Rembrandt.

Byzantine
Byzantine art flourished from about 300 A.D to the 1400s. It grew out of the early Christian world. It took its name from the capital city of the Roman Empire: Byzantium (later renamed Constantinople, then Istanbul when the Ottomans captured the city in 1453).

Byzantine art was very religious. Most Byzantine art was created for the Eastern Orthodox Church. Much Byzantine art was made by servants of the courts or members of religious orders. Most of these artists remained anonymous.

Mosaics and paintings covered the domes of many churches. They were often made of precious materials such as lapis lazuli, gold and silver. Byzantine artists had to follow many rules about subject matter, content, and form. Symbolic representation was very important in Byzantine art. The subjects appear flat and fairly abstract compared to the liveliness and individualism of Western art because Byzantine artists used little shading or other techniques that would have made their subjects more lifelike.

Cubism
Cubism developed in France between 1907 and the early 1920's. The name "Cubism" comes from an insult by another artist, Henri Matisse. He called a painting by Georges Braque: "petits cubes", or little cubes.

Since the Renaissance, many artists believed perception and space were best shown with linear perspective, a mathematical system used to imitate nature. Artists using these ideas show a fixed point of view.

Cubist artists, on the other hand, show more than one view at a time. A Cubist painting may show the front of a face and the side of a face at the same time. You can see this in Picasso's Girl with Dark Hair on the right. Modern studies of perception have shown that people do not view things from one fixed, all-encompassing place, but from an infinite number of glances which are then connected in the viewer's mind into one picture.

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were two Cubist artists who showed how space can be cut-up, distorted and transformed into different planes and views. Cubist painters asked themselves: "Is reality in the eye of the spectator, or is it whatever appears on the canvas?"

Dada
"Dada"—a French word for "hobbyhorse"— was chosen randomly for this art movement. During a meeting of young artists and war resisters in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland, they stuck a paper knife into a French-German dictionary and selected the word it pointed to. They felt "dada" was a good fit for their art movement, which emphasized protest activities, despair regarding World War I, and distaste for what they thought were the bourgeois values of the art of the time.

Dada art was nihilistic, anti-aesthetic and a reaction to the rationalization, rules and conventions of mainstream art. Many Dada artists considered their work to be anti-art or art that defied reason. They felt one purpose of their art was to enrage, as well as engage, their audiences. For example, Marcel Duchamp "improved" the Mona Lisa by painting a copy and adding a mustache. He also signed his name on a snow shovel and called it art. Some well-known artists of this period were Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia.

Fauvism
At the turn of the century a group of artists so shocked the public with their art that they were called "wild beasts" or "fauves", in French. Fauvism flourished from 1898 to 1908. Fauvist paintings often used very bright, pure colors and short blunt brushstrokes. Fauvism differed from the Impressionism in that it was very emotional, raw, and even shocking and violent. Fauvist artist often chose colors, lines and shapes to express emotion rather than to represent the real world.

Futurism
Futurism developed in Italy and Russia in the early 1900s. An Italian poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, named the style to emphasize speed, power, change and innovation in art. He wanted art to reflect the power of the machine, which he felt was more applicable to the times than the static and irrelevant art of the past. The invention of the automobile, a machine with power and speed, was a symbol of this movement's interest in technology.

Futurist painters adopted many of the techniques of the Cubists, but while the Cubists favored still lifes and portraits, Futurists portrayed speeding cars, cyclists, dancers and sciences from urban life. Futurism was a proponent of violence and conflict. It called for the destruction of institutions such as libraries and museums. Futurism was aggressive and inflammatory, and the art of this era was intended to anger and inspire controversy.

Some well-known artists of this period were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra and Gino Severini.

Gothic
Gothic art developed in the late Middle Ages. It lasted from about 1150 A.D. to 1400. Italian Renaissance scholars named this style "Gothic" because they thought it was barbaric and uncivilized—like the Goths who invaded Italy in the 400s.

Painting in the Gothic era was most known for the development of oil painting in Flanders. Some of the better known painters of this time are Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden.

Some of the best-known examples of Gothic art are Gothic cathedrals. Gothic architecture is known for its gigantic size and height. The invention of the flying buttresses in about 1175 made these large buildings possible. Flying buttresses reduced the amount of solid wall space needed for support and made it possible to have large stained glass windows.

Gothic sculpture was mostly used to decorate the doorways of cathedrals. It often showed figures and scenes from the Bible's Old Testament. It differed from Romanesque sculpture in that it was grander, calmer and closer to human scale.

Greek
Much of Western European art has a strong link to ancient Greece. Greek artists used narratives, or stories, and made many portraits and other representational subjects.

Greek architecture is famous for its temples. These temples were often only big enough to house a cult statue and were not meant to be places for large gatherings of people. A typical Greek temple had a long, inner chamber surrounded by columns. There were three main types of columns: the simple Doric, the graceful Ionic and the ornate Corinthian.

Greek sculpture portrayed gods and goddesses as well as mortal humans. Over the centuries, Greek artists became better at showing their subjects in more active poses, and more lifelike as well.

Most of what we know of Greek painting comes from the work we have on pottery. We also know it from writings and Roman copies of Greek artwork. The most common subjects for these artists were scenes from mythology and everyday life.

Hudson River School
A group of painters who created glorious paintings of the wild American landscape. Thomas Cole, the leading artist in the group, painting many works of New York's Hudson River Valley. Others, including Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, traveled to the wildernesses of North and South America and painted vast canvasses which enraptured the American public. Some artists in this group explored ways to use light effects to capture dramatic skies, mists and sunsets, forming a subgroup of artists called Luminists.

Impressionism
The name Impressionism comes from Claude Monet's painting Impression: Sunrise, which was shown at an exhibition in 1874. A critic used the word to make fun of all the works in the show, but the artists later adopted the word to describe themselves.

Impressionist artists tried to capture an immediate impression of what the eye sees at a single glance, rather than what the viewer knows or feels about the work. They were very interested in how light appeared on subjects in different weather and at different times of the day, an interest that can be traced back to Realism. They preferred to work outdoors in natural light, rather than in their studio with sketches. Their art tends to have brilliant colors that almost shimmer in their intensity.

Critics of impressionism complained that the artists had not followed the traditional rules of composition. But the Impressionists favored subjects that appeared informal and spontaneous. They liked their paintings to reflect the life they saw around them; rural scenes, city life and people dressed in everyday clothing going about their business. The sketchiness of this style, with its quick, visible brushstrokes, made critics complain that the pictures did not look finished, that the work was sloppy. Impressionists replied that their work was not just a window to view a certain subject, but that the viewer could become aware of the painting as an object in itself. In this way, it paved the way for abstract art.

Some important Impressionists were Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet and Berthe Morisot.

Luminism
An offshoot of American Romanticism, Luminism explored ways to depict light realistically on canvas. Luminist artists sought to capture the specific effects of light in particular places. Leading American luminists were John F. Kensett, Martin J. Heade , Jasper Francis Cropsey, and Frederick Edwin Church.