Social Realism

Social realism was an international art movement, it refers to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working class and the poor. 

While the movement's characteristics vary from nation to nation, it almost always utilises a form of descriptive or critical realism. 

This became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930's. 

Ben Shahn

Shahn was an Lithuanian born American artist. He was best known for his works of social realism. 

Shahn mixed different genres of art. His body of art is distinctive for its lack of traditional landscapes, still lifes, and portraits Shahn used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he coalesced through the consistency of his authoritative line.

His background in lithography contributed to his detail-oriented look Shahn is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, which is often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee's drawings. While Shahn's "love for exactitude" is apparent in his graphics, so too is his creativity. In fact, many of his paintings are inventive adaptations of his photography. 

         Freedom Of The Press 1939

              McCarthy Peace 1968

              Register To Vote 1946

John Augustus Walker

Walker was a well known Alabama artist of the Depression era. 

His paintings reflect a passion for bright colours, heavy dark outlines and painterly brushwork characterized both his commercial and public works. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture. 

Maxine Albro

Albro was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal Art Project. 

Albro's artistic style is described as "clean, bright and clear with the strong rounded forms of this era, often depicting the women of Mexico, in particular those of the Tehuantepec region in Oaxaca. 

Albro was most recognized for her frescoes and her characteristic treatment of Mexican and Spanish subject matter. The influence of Mexican art is visible throughout her paintings, murals and lithographs. 

                     Mexico - 1933

                    California - 1934

Pop Art

Pop Art is an art movement that emerged in the mid - 1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in the United States. Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Edwardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the United States. 

Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of "pop art" refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes behind the art.

Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who then became a leading artist during the pop art movement. He then explored a variety of different art forms including performance art, film making, video illustrations and writing. 

Warhol is well known for many of his paintings, including the most famous Campbell's soup cans. Some of his other famous works included coca cola bottles, vacuum cleaners and hamburgers. He also did many celebrity portraits in vivid and garish colours. Warhol's most famous subjects were Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Zedong. 

               Campbell's Soup Cans

                   Marilyn Monroe

               Coca - Cola Bottles

Roy Lichenstein

Roy Lichenstein is an American pop artist, painter, lithographer and sculptor. His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody. Favouring the comic strip as his main inspiration, he produced hard edged precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue in cheek manner. Lichenstein's work was heavily influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. 

Lichenstein is most known for his most famous art work 'Whaam!', ' Drowning Girl', ' Oh, Jeff ... I love you, too ... but ...', ' Look Mickey' and ' Woman with flowered hat'. 

                         Whaam!

    Oh, Jeff ... I Love you, Too ... But...

                    Drowning Girl

                       Look Mickey

Peter Blake

Blake is an English pop artist, best known for co-creating the sleeve design for The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

Blake also made album sleeves for the Band Aid single ' Do They Know It's Christmas?', Paul Weller's ' Stanley Road'( 1995 ), the Ian Dury tribute album ' Brand New Boots And Panties' ( 2001 ), The Who's ' Face Dances' ( 1981 ) and Pentangle's ' Sweet Child'. In 2006, Blake also designed the cover for Oasis's greatest hit album ' Stop The Clocks'. 

Band Aid - Do They Know It's        Christmas?

            The Who - Face Dances

             Oasis - Stop The Clocks

Banksy

Banksy is an English based graffiti artist and film director. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stencilling and spray paint technique, with commerical, political and contemporary imagery infused with ironic social commentary and humour. 

Some off his most famous work includes 'Love Rat'(2004), 'Girl With Balloon'(2004), 'Kate Moss'(2005). 

                         Love Rat

                   Girl With Balloon 

                       Kate Moss 

Banksy also created a theme park called Dismaland. 

This was like Disneyland however instead of having the magical feel to the park Dismaland was the complete opposite and had the idea of nightmare instead. 

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'.