ArtistPortfolio.Net

KEY DATES: 1960-present

The name given to a wide range of cultural phenomena, to characterise a move away from the ‘highbrow’ seriousness of modernism, preferring a more eclectic and populist approach to creativity.

The term came into common use in the 1970s. It is used both as a ’stylistic’ term and also as a period designation.

Paintings that have been described as Postmodernist include the work of Stephen McKenna and Carlo Maria Mariani, also selected works by Peter Blake and David Hockney.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:

Jasper Johns
Frank Stella
Donald Judd
Bridget Riley (Op Art)
Joseph Beuys

KEY DATES: 1880-1920

Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style’s inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters
formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.

The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone. Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced “the abominable error of naturalism.” With the young painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. Copying the pure, flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure colour and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to create poetic images of the Tahitians among whom he would eventually live. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape.

In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:

Paul Cézanne
Georges Seurat
Paul Gauguin
Vincent van Gogh
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Paul Signac
Auguste Rodin
Amedeo Modigliani

KEY DATES:1950-1960s

This movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post-war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebrating everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons.

Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself.

Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took familiar objects such as flags and beer bottles as subjects for their paintings, while British artist Richard Hamilton used magazine imagery. The latter’s definition of Pop Art - “popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business” - stressed its everyday, commonplace values.

It was Andy Warhol, however, who really brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell’s soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art owed much to dada in the way it mocked the established art world. By embracing commercial techniques, and creating slick, machine-produced art, the Pop artists were setting themselves apart from the painterly, inward-looking tendencies of the Abstract Expressionist movement that immediately preceded them. The leading artists in Pop were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:

Richard Hamilton
Roy Lichtenstein
Robert Rauschenberg
Andy Warhol
David Hockney
Jeff Koons
Claes Oldenburg
Tom Wesselmann

KEY DATES: 1960s

Op Art or Optical Art is the term used to describe paintings or sculptures which seem to swell and vibrate through their use of optical effects. The movement’s leading figures were Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely who used patterns and colours in their paintings to achieve a disorientating effect on the viewer.

The sculptors Eric Olsen and Francisco Sobrino used layers of different coloured perspex to create a similar illusion of distortion. The artists used established ideas on perceptive psychology but needed to use maximum precision to gain the results they intended.

Op Art is a form of abstract art and is closely connected to the Kinetic and Constructivist Art movements.

It was fashionable in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s but was greeted with a certain degree of scepticism by the critics.

After ‘The Responsive Eye’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 the term became a household name and the style was soon appropriated by fashion designers and high street stores.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:

Bridget Riley
Heinz Mack
Victor Vasarely

KEY DATES: 1980s

A diverse art movement that dominated the art market in Europe and the United States during the early and mid-1980s. Neo-Expressionism comprised a varied assemblage of young artists who had returned to portraying the human body and other recognizable objects, in reaction to the remote, introverted, highly intellectualized abstract art production of the 1970s. The movement was linked to and in part generated by new and aggressive methods of salesmanship, media promotion, and marketing on the part of dealers and galleries.

Neo-Expressionist paintings themselves, though diverse in appearance, presented certain common traits. Among these were: a rejection of traditional standards of composition and design; an ambivalent and often brittle emotional tone that reflected contemporary urban life and values; a general lack of concern for pictorial idealization; the use of vivid but jarringly banal colour harmonies; and a simultaneously tense and playful presentation of objects in a primitivist manner that communicates a sense of inner disturbance, tension, alienation, and ambiguity (hence the term Neo-Expressionist to describe this approach). Among the principal artists of the movement were the Americans Julian Schnabel and David Salle, the Italians Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, and the Germans Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Neo-Expressionism was controversial both in the quality of its art products and in the highly commercialized aspects of its presentation to the art-buying public.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:

Julian Schnabel
David Salle
Francesco Clemente
Sandro Chia
Anselm Kiefer
Georg Baselitz