new media

• Fauvism


  First new artistic style of the 20th century, characterized by bright, cheery landscapes and figure paintings with pure vivid color and bold brushwork
• Fauvism


  • Contrast to dark, vaguely disturbing Symbolist art
  • Pioneered by Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck
  • Influenced by Post-Impressionist artists like Paul Signac
  • Emphasized the expressive potential of color, using it arbitrarily rather than based on an object's natural appearance
• Cubism


  Revolutionary departure from representational art, where objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstracted form from multiple viewpoints
• Cubism


  • Pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
  • Most influential art movement of the 20th century
  • Influenced similar schools of thought in literature, music, and architecture like Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, and De Stijl
• Dada


  Artistic and literary movement that arose as a reaction to World War I and nationalism, with diverse output from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage
• Dada


  • First conceptual art movement, focused on making works that upended bourgeois sensibilities and questioned society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art
  • Incorporated chance and readymade objects to challenge artistic norms and the definition of art
• Abstract Expressionism


  American, post-WWII art movement characterized by spontaneity, large canvases, and an all-over approach
• Abstract Expressionism


  • Includes action painting which emphasizes the act of painting rather than the final work
  • Color-field painting which places less emphasis on gesture and brushstrokes in favor of overall consistency of form and process, with color as the subject matter
• Pop Art


  Movement that reintroduced identifiable imagery from mass media and popular culture, aiming to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture
• Pop Art


  • Pioneered by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg
  • Celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, elevating popular culture to the level of fine art
  • Often emotionally removed and ambivalent in contrast to the "hot" expression of Abstract Expressionism
• Pop artists believed everything is inter-connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork
• Pop art


  • Encompasses a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures
  • Much of it is somewhat emotionally removed
  • In contrast to the "hot" expression of the gestural abstraction that preceded it, Pop art is generally "coolly" ambivalent
• Whether Pop art's coolly ambivalent nature suggests an acceptance of the popular world or a shocked withdrawal has been the subject of much debate
• Pop artists


  • Seemingly embraced the post-WWII manufacturing and media boom
  • Some critics have cited the Pop art choice of imagery as an enthusiastic endorsement of the capitalist market and the goods it circulated
  • Others have noted an element of cultural critique in the Pop artists' elevation of the everyday to high art: tying the commodity status of the goods represented to the status of the art object itself, emphasizing art's place as, at base, a commodity
• The majority of Pop artists began their careers in commercial art
• Pop artists' commercial art backgrounds

  • Andy Warhol was a highly successful magazine illustrator and graphic designer
  • Ed Ruscha was also a graphic designer
  • James Rosenquist started his career as a billboard painter
• Their background in the commercial art world trained them in the visual vocabulary of mass culture as well as the techniques to seamlessly merge the realms of high art and popular culture
• Optical Art (Op art)

  • Artists have been intrigued by the nature of perception and by optical effects and illusions for many centuries
  • Op art typically employs abstract patterns composed with a stark contrast of foreground and background - often in black and white for maximum contrast - to produce effects that confuse and excite the eye
• Op art


  • Initially shared the field with Kinetic art - Op artists being drawn to virtual movement, Kinetic artists attracted by the possibility of real motion
  • Launched with Le Mouvement, a group exhibition at Galerie Denise Rene in 1955
  • After it was celebrated with a survey exhibition in 1965, The Responsive Eye, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it caught the public's imagination and led to a craze for Op designs in fashion and the media
  • To many, it seemed the perfect style for an age defined by the onward march of science, by advances in computing, aerospace, and television
  • Art critics were never so supportive of it, attacking its effects as gimmicks, and today it remains tainted by those dismissals
• Op art movement


  • Driven by artists who were interested in investigating various perceptual effects
  • Some did so out of sheer enthusiasm for research and experiment, some with the distant hope that the effects they mastered might find a wide public and hence integrate modern art into society in new ways
  • Rather like the geometric art from which it had sprung, Op art seemed to supply a style that was highly appropriate to modern society
• Op art


  • May descend from effects that were once popular with Old Masters, such as trompe l'oeil (French: "deceive the eye") or anamorphosis
  • Or, equally, Op may simply be a child of modern decoration
• During its years of greatest success in the mid-1960s, the movement was sometimes said to encompass a wide range of artists whose interests in abstraction had little to do with perception</b>
• Some artists, such as Joseph Albers, who were often labeled as Op artists, dismissed the Op art label
• The fact that the Op art label could seem to apply to so many artists demonstrates how important the nuances of vision have been throughout modern art
• Long after Op art's demise, its reputation continues to hang in the balance
• Some critics continue to characterize Op art's designs as "retinal titillations"
• Others have recently argued that Op art represented a kind of abstract Pop art, one which emulated the dazzle of consumer society but which refused, unlike Pop artists like Andy Warhol, to celebrate its icons
• Photorealism (also known as Hyperrealism or Superrealism)


  Artists whose work depended heavily on photographs, which they often projected onto canvas allowing images to be replicated with precision and accuracy
• The movement came about within the same period and context as Conceptual art, Pop art, and Minimalism and expressed a strong interest in realism in art, over that of idealism and abstraction
• Themes of Photorealist male practitioners

  • Machinery
  • Objects of industry such as trucks, motorcycles, cars, and even gumball machines
• Audrey Flack


  The sole female Photorealist practitioner, who infuses her works with greater emotionality and the transience of life
• Photorealists were successful in attracting a wide audience, but they are often overlooked by art historians as an important avant garde style
• Photorealism


  • Complicates the notion of realism by successfully mixing together that which is real with that which is unreal
  • While the image on the canvas is recognizable and carefully delineated to suggest that it is accurate, the artist often based their work upon photographs rather than direct observation
  • Therefore, their canvases remain distanced from reality factually and metaphorically
• Many Photorealists adamantly insist that their works, which are laden with such mass and consumer culture icons as trucks, fast food restaurants, and mechanical toys, are not communicative of social criticism or commentary
• However, it is hard to deny that these Photorealist works are recognizably American
• In Photorealism, there is the contrast between the reality and primacy of the word or text, over the visual within our society
• Photorealists


  • Acknowledge the modern world's mass production and proliferation of photographs, and they do not deny their dependence on photographs
  • Several artists attempt to replicate the effects of photography (getting away from the natural vision of our eyes) such as blurriness or multiple-viewpoints, because they favor the aesthetic and look
  • Therefore, while the resulting image is realistic, it is simultaneously one-stage away from reality by its dependence on the reproduced image
  • These works question traditional artistic methods, as well as the differences between reality and artificiality
• Photorealism


  • For the first time unites color and light together as one element
  • The capturing of light is most especially evident in the highly reflective surfaces of steel and chrome
• Photorealists, along with some practitioners of Pop art, reintroduced the importance of process and deliberate planning over that of improvisation and automatism, into the making of art, draftsmanship, and exacting brushwork
• Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason