Help:Art Styles

Just some helpful guides to art styles. See Images>Other for examples.

Romanticism (1800-1860)

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.

The industrialization made consumer goods cheaper and increased the production of food but many people looked back at the past longingly. Before the industrial revolution life seemed romantic, then the revolution commodified people and destroyed nature.

There was also a growing reaction against the philosophy of the enlightenment, which emphasized science, emprirical evidence and rational thought. Romantics challanged that reason was the one path to truth, judging it inadequate in understanding the great mysteries of life. These mysteries could be uncovered with emotion, imagination and intuition. Nature was seen as a classroom for self discovery and spiritual learning. Romantics emphasized a life of deep feeling, spirituality and free expression. They extolled the value of human beings, which they believed to have infinite godlike potential.

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.

Realism (1850-1880)

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.

In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection of Romantic subjectivism and imagination in favor of Realism - the accurate and objective description of the ordinary, observable world, a change especially evident in painting. Positivist thinking is evident in the full range of artistic developments after 1850- from the introduction of realistic elements into academic art, from the emphasis on the phenomenon of light, to the development of photography and the application of new technologies in architecture and constructions. 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 (late 1860's to late 1890's)

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.

Impressionist art is a style of art characterized by unique visual angles, prominently evident brush strokes and an open composition. The art form emphasizes on the changing patterns of light to indicate the passage of time. It deals with capturing an object as if someone has caught just a glimpse of it. Hence, images have lesser details. But the paintings are often brightly colored and involve an element of movement.

Impressionists of the early period went beyond the traditional academic painting. Inspired by the artists like Eugene Delacroix, they based their paintings more on color strokes rather than line drawing. Previously, paintings were done indoors. French painters like Gustave Courbet, and Theodore Rousseau paved a path for Impressionism. Impressionists showed art, the outside world. They started painting realistic scenes with the use of broken strokes of pure colors.

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.

Post-impressionism (1886)

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 (1880's)

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.

Symbolism was soon identified with the artwork of a younger generation of painters who were also rejecting the conventions of Naturalism. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in the objective, scientific manner embodied by Realism and Impressionism. Returning to the personal expressivity like the Romantics earlier in the nineteenth century, they felt that the symbolic value or meaning of a work of art stemmed from the recreation of emotional experiences in the viewer through color, line, and composition. In painting, Symbolism represents a synthesis of form and feeling, of reality and the artist's inner subjectivity.

Wanting to imbue their works with spiritual value, these progenitors of Symbolism produced imaginary dream worlds populated with mysterious figures from biblical stories and Greek mythology as well as fantastical, often monstrous, creatures. Their suggestive imagery established what would become the most pervasive themes in Symbolist art: love, fear, anguish and death.

The Symbolists sought escape from reality, expressing their personal dreams and visions through color, form, and composition. Their almost universal preference for broad strokes of unmodulated color and flat, often abstract forms was inspired by Puvis de Chavannes, who created greatly simplified forms in order to clearly express abstract ideas. His muted palette and decorative treatment of forms made a considerable impact on a new generation of artists.