Help:Art Styles: Difference between revisions

The industrial revolution started in the later part of the 18th century. The revolution brough a new market economy, based on new technology, machine tools and machine power instead of human tools and animal power. Vilages turned into urban centres and many people took new jobs in factories. This produced cities that were dirty and crowded, the working people lived in squalor and smokestacks darkened the air with soot.

Artists tried to capture these ideas in their work. They hoped to inspire an emotional response, trying to evolve a nostalgic yearning for rural, pastoral life.

The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems.

Realism sets as a goal not imitating past artistic achievements but the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer to the artist. The artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism in the academic art was unanimously rejected, and necessity to introduce contemporary to art found strong support. New idea was that ordinary people and everyday activities are worthy subjects for art. Artists - Realists attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. They set themselves conscientiously to reproduce all to that point ignored aspects of contemporary life and society - its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions.

Impressionism is an art movement that started in the 19th century in France. Critic Louis Leroy coined the term in a satiric review on Impression, the work of art by Claude Monet. Claude Monet was the founder of the French Impressionist Painting.

Paintings by the Dutch painters of the 17th century represented a vivid distinction between the subject and the background. Photography inspired the painters to capture moments in daily life. While photography could depict facts, paintings could portray an artist's interpretation of facts. Impressionists were the first to bring in subjectivity to paintings. Japanese art also contributed to the emergence of Impressionism.

Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism. Through the use of simplified colors and definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies. The artists responding to Impressionism included Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and the eldest of the group, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). They followed diverse stylistic paths in search of authentic intellectual and artistic achievements. These artists, often working independently, and today called Post-Impressionists. Although they did not view themselves as part of a collective movement at the time, Roger Fry (1866–1934), critic and artist, broadly categorized them as "Post-Impressionists," a term that he coined in his seminal exhibition.

In the 1880s, Georges Seurat was at the forefront of the challenges to Impressionism with his unique analyses based on then-current notions of optical and color theories. Seurat believed that by placing tiny dabs of pure colors adjacent to one another, a viewer's eye compensated for the visual disparity between the two by "mixing" the primaries to model a composite hue.

Symbolism developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, becoming popular with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas' manifesto in Le Figaro. Reacting against the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, Moréas proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world. This philosophy, which would incorporate the poet Stéphane Mallarmé's conviction that reality was best expressed through poetry because it paralleled nature rather than replicating it, became a central tenet of the movement.