Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a late 20th Century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was departured from modernism. 

Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. 

1. Anti- authoritarianism - opposed to authoritarianism. 

2. Collapses boundaries between high culture and the mass culture. 

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is an American artist most known for his reproductions of banal objects such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with a mirror finish surface. 

Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York. 

His main influences include Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali. 

Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry is an English artist, known mainly for his ceramic vases and cross dressing. Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance.

Perry's work refers to several ceramic traditions, including Greek pottery and folk art. 

In his work Perry reflects upon his upbringing as a boy, his stepfather's anger and the absence of proper guidance about male conduct.Perry's understanding of the roles in his family is portrayed in Using My Family, from 1998, where a teddy bear provides affection, and the contemporaneous The Guardians, which depicts his mother and stepfather.

Much of Perry's work contains sexually explicit content. Some of his sexual imagery has been described as "obscene sadomasochistic sex scenes".He also has a reputation for depicting child abuse and yet there are no works depicting sexual child abuse although We've Found the Body of your Child, 2000 hints at emotional child abuse and child neglect.  In other work he juxtaposes decorative clichés like flowers with weapons and war. Perry combines various techniques as a "guerrilla tactic", using the approachable medium of pottery to provoke thought.

Surrealism

Surrealism is a movement that began in the 1920s of writers and artists ( such as Salvador Dali and Magritte). They experimented with ways of unleashing subconscious imagination.

Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.

Freud's Theory

1. Dreams

Accessing the subconscious that is playful but disturbing. 

2.Automatism

Drawing from the mind. Accessing materials from the subconscious or unconscious mind. Spontaneous or automatic writing, painting and drawing free association of images and words.

The Objects 

Arranging objects in combinations that challenged reason and summoned subconscious and poetic associations. 

Meret Oppenheim - 'Object'

Joseph Cornell - 'Taglioni's Jewel Casket'

Man Ray - 'Indestructible Object ( Or Object To Be Destroyed) 

The Body

Produced objects and images with an insistently erotic dimention. 

Salvador Dali - 'Retrospective Bust Of A Woman

René Magritte - 'The Lovers'

Hans Bellmer - 'Plate From La Poupée

Landscape 

images of natural scenery

Salvador Dali - 'The Persistence Of Memory

Max Ernst - 'Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale

Joan Miró - 'The Hunter (Catalan Landscape)'

Cubism

Cubism was the first truly modern movement to emerge in art. This movement evolved during a period of heroic and rapid innovation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. 

There were 2 stages of Cubism: 

Analytic Cubism this technique involved a close examination and analysis of the subject in order to translate it into flat geometric shapes, angles and lines. Analytic Cubism staged modern arts.

Synthetic Cubism. The main characteristics of synthetic cubism are:

• -Brighter colours
• -Simpler lines and shapes
• -Collage is used alongside paint (newspaper/ foreign materials). Previously cubism had broken objects down to a grid of complicated planes (flat shapes). Now the artists built up their pictures using collage and simple shapes. So instead of looking closely at an object such as a bottle in order to analyse its shape and structure they created a bottle-like shape from their imagination, making this shape from a simple paper cutout or drawn outline. This Cubism stage explored the use of foreign objects as abstract signs. 

This was developed by Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, but this attracted host of adherents in Paris and abroad. The was for geometric abstract art by putting an entirely new emphasis on the unity between the scene in a picture and surface of the canvas. 

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculpture, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright. In his paintings, Picasso used color as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of color to create form and space. He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture. In his Cubist paintings there are forms recognised as guitars, violins and bottles. Picasso mainly painted from imagination or memory. Som of his most famous work includes: 'The Madolin Player' 'Guernica ' Head Of A Woman'. 

Guernica is a mural sized oil painting created in 1937 during World War II. 

Georges Braque (1882-1963) was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculpture. Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. Braque also created mainly oil canvas paintings. Some of his work includes 'The Mandora' 'Plate And Fruit Dish' 'Violin And Candlestick'. 

Fernand Léger (1881-1955) was a French painter, sculpture, and filmmaker . In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism  which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art. 

Some of his work 'The City' 'Man And Woman' 'The Railway Crossing'. 

Juan Gris (1887-1927) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. Gris's works from late 1916 through 1917 exhibit a greater simplification of geometric structure, a blurring of the distinction between objects and setting, between subject matter and background.

Some of his work 'Fantomas' 'Still Life With Fruit Dish and Mandolin' 'Violin And Checkerboard'. 

Impressionism

Impressionism is a 19th century art movement that began as a loose art movement with painting. This originated with a group of Paris based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The scientific discoveries and inventions of the 19th century had an important influence on the way painters worked. New research encouraged artists to experiment with complementary colours.

Impressionist painting characteristics include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities ( often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. 

This movement has effected other people such as writers, fashion designers and music composers.

One of the main artists that emerged during this movement was Claud Monet (1840 - 1926). He was a French impressionist based artist and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression Sunrise) which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions. Monet is known for many paintings but most famously for 'Water Lillies' 'The Beach At Travaille' 'Impression Sunrise' 'Poppies' 'Wheatstacks'. 

Another French impressionist was Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906). Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. He also uses open composition and also drew many still lifes. Like Monet Cézanne also works and paints from nature, however he also painted using watercolour and also painted portraits. 

Some of his art work includes 'The Black Marble Clock' 'Bend In The Road Through The Forest' 'The Basket Of Apples' 'Self Portrait'. 

Pierre August Renoir (1841 - 1919) was also a French Impressionist artist. Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings. He did many of his painting onto oil canvas but also many portraits. Some of his art work include 'Bal du moulin de la Galette' (Dance at Le moulin de la Galette) ' The Theatre Box'. 

Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) was another French impressionist artist. He was famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance, more than half of his works depict dancers. He is regarded as one of the founders of impressionism, although he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist.  Some of his art work include 'The Bellelli Family' 'Dance Class'. 

Some of Renoir's sculptures also include 'Little Dancer Of Fourteen Years' 'The Spanish Dance'. 

The Renaissance Period

The Renaissance was a period of European History at the end of the Middle Ages and the rise of the Modernist World, during the 14th century through to the 17th. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the late Medieval Period. It's intellectual basis was humanism, derived from the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy.

During the Renaissance there were many famous artists that rose such as Sandro Botticelli (1445 - 1510). He was a Italian printer and painter. Botticelli painted portraits and religious subjects like the pannels of Madonna and churches, most famous one was the Sistine Chapel. He created many paintings, some of most famous work includes 'The Birth Of Venus' 'Feast Of Gods' ' Madonna With Lillies And Eight Angels'.

Another well known artist was Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519) He was also a Italian artist, but was famous for other areas of work. Other than being a painter Da Vinchi was also a sculptor, architect, engineer and a scientist. His most famous art pieces include 'The Last  Supper' 'The Mona Lisa'. 'The Mona Lisa' is one of the worlds most famous paintings due to the mysterious smile upon the woman's face. Many theories have been made for this particular piece one saying that the woman in the painting is actually the artist himself. Due to the fact the woman has big hands and also a line across the top of her head suggesting a wig line.   

Another artist from this period is Jan Van Eyck (1385 - 1441 ). He was a great Neverlandish painter of the late Middle Ages. He painted both secular and religious subject matter paintings including commissioned portraits and also oil paintings. He worked on paneles singular and multiple. Van Eyck's most famous painting was ' The Arnolfini Wedding' he also painted portraits of the Virgin Mary. 

 

Finally another well known artist was Michelangelo (1475 - 1564) he was an Italian artist but also was a sculptor, architect, poet and engineer or the high Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western Art. His most famously work is the 'Statue Of David' 'Pietà' and also the painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo also paints with a religious matter like his painting 'The Creation Of Adam' on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.