ART MOVEMENTS

Mary Frances Chantalle M. De Villa

BSA 1-12

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BAROQUE
The Baroque is a period of artistic style that started around 1600 in Rome,
Italy, and spread throughout the majority of Europe during the 17th and 18th
centuries. In informal usage, the word baroque describes something that is
elaborate and highly detailed.

Baroque art showcased artistic interests in realism and rich color. The
Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to
produce drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture,
literature, dance, and music. Baroque iconography was direct, obvious, and
dramatic, intending to appeal above all to the senses and the emotions.

The Massacre of the Innocents

by Peter Paul
Rubens
1612

Chiaroscuro refers to the interplay

between light and dark and is a
technique often used in paintings of
dimly lit scenes to produce a very high-
contrast, dramatic atmosphere. This
technique is visible in this painting by
Peter Paul Rubens.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

by Rembrandt
1632

The scene depicted in this work is

a public dissection of an executed
criminal that was conducted by
the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons the
same year the painting was made. The
dramatic lighting, theatrical
composition, and the figures’ allusion to
Christ impacted the trajectory of Dutch painting at the time and characterizes it
as a work of the Baroque period.

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 Judith Slaying Holofernes Painter

by Artemisia Gentileschi

1610

This work graphically depicts Judith severing

the head of Assyrian general Holofernes with the help
of her maid. The work is intriguing because it is a rare
example of an artwork by a female painter of the
period and has been analyzed by scholars
throughout history in relation to her gender. The work,
however, is important in its own right, as the dramatic
spraying blood and Judith’s determined expression make it a masterpiece of
Baroque painting.

Realism
is a genre of art that started in France after the French Revolution of 1848.
A clear rejection of Romanticism, the dominant style that had come before it,
Realist painters focused on scenes of contemporary people and daily life. What
may seem normal now was revolutionary after centuries of painters depicting
exotic scenes from mythology and the Bible, or creating portraits of the nobility
and clergy. Additionally, it is the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of
nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour
of a close observation of outward appearances

The Stone Breakers

by Gustave Courbet
1849-50

In the painting, which shows

two workers, one young, one old,
Courbet presented both a Realist
snapshot of everyday life and an
allegory on the nature of poverty.
While the image was inspired by a
scene of two men creating gravel
for roads, one of the least-paying, most backbreaking jobs imaginable,

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 Courbet rendered his figures faceless as to make them anonymous stand-
ins for the lowest orders of French society. More attention is given to their
dirty, tattered work clothes, their strong, weathered hands, and their
relationship to the land than to their recognizability. They are, however,
monumental in size and shown with a quiet dignity befitting their willingness
to do the unseen, unsung labor upon which modern life was built.

a Burial at Ornans
Gustave Courbet
1849

Courbet does not

idealize the funeral in any
form. There is no sense of
afterlife or heaven like in
many other works of his time.
The old classical pieces usually had the sky opening up with the person who died
in the clouds (showing the afterlife), but in Courbet's depiction the sky is a morbid
gray and he puts all the faith in the expressions of the people.

Eight Bells
Winslow Homer
1886

The painting focuses the eye on the

subjects, the strong and confident
sailors at the rail, concluding that
these heroic men can conquer even
the violent and stormy sea. The mixture
of color and brushstroke are so
effective and the waves in the ocean,
the sailor’s coats blowing, and the
very ominous-looking sky above are
visible.

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RENAISSANCE
From 14th to 17th century, Renaissance—a term derived from the Italian
word Rinascimento, or “rebirth”—this period saw increased attention to cultural
subjects like art and architecture.

Italian Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael

found inspiration in classical art from Ancient Rome and Greece, adopting
ancient interests like balance, naturalism, and perspective. In Renaissance-era
Italy, this antiquity-inspired approach materialized as humanist portrait painting,
anatomically correct sculpture, and harmonious, symmetrical architecture.

Virgin of the Rocks

Leonardo da Vinci
(1483-1486)

This painting presents the Madonna with infant

versions of Christ and John the Baptist, along with the
archangel Gabriel. The quartet sits amongst a mystical,
imagined landscape that exemplifies Leonardo's
acuity with depth of perspective. Juxtaposed with the
intimate group in the foreground, the fully imagined
environment of desolate rocks and water lends a
dreamlike quality both infusing the viewer with the
sense of merging with the heavenly as well as
witnessing a resonant experience of human-like
tenderness. St. John was the patron saint of Florence
and his depiction in this piece was important. According to Florentine tradition,
he was a playmate of Christ, but he was also aware of Christ's future sacrifice for
mankind. Like other artists of the time, Leonardo was interested in presenting
known religious narratives in an un-idealized way, thus humanizing the secular.

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 Lady with an Ermine
Leonardo Da Vinci
(1489-90)

The Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza,

commissioned this portrait. In it, Leonardo depicts
Sforza's sixteen-year-old mistress Ceclia Gallerani.
She peers to the right, as if her attention has been
caught by something happening just outside the
painting's frame. She bears a look of poised
knowing in direct opposition to her age. The smile,
slightly coy, seems to suggest her confidence in her
position at the Court, and the knowledge of the
power in her beauty. She holds an ermine, bearer
of the fur that was used in Sforza's coat of arms, which was added later to the
portrait at the subject's request. The paradox of the ermine is that it is also a symbol
of purity, embraced by a young woman prey to the sensual needs of an older
man in what was a very chauvinistic age. But other interpretations suggest the
ermine is representative of Cecilia's fidelity to the Duke.

Mona Lisa
Leonardo Da Vinci
1503
The Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda,
is said to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife
of a Florentine merchant named Francesco del
Gioconda. The innovative half-length portrayal
shows the woman, seated on a chair with one arm
resting on the chair and one hand resting on her
arm. The use of sfumatocreates a sense of soft
calmness, which emanates from her being, and
infuses the background landscape with a deep
realism. Chiaroscuro creates a profound depth in
this piece, which keeps the eye moving across the
painting. But it is her enigmatic smile that
magnetizes the viewer, along with the mystery of
what's behind that famous smile.

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Expressionism
Expressionists were artists prominent from 1905-1925, who’s artwork would
use exaggerated expression and distortion to display some emotional effect. The
movement was popularized in Northern Europe. The aesthetic look of these
artworks was often abstract. Distorting lines and shapes were common practice
in expressionism, with use of exaggerated colours and brush strokes.

Kjerringa med Lykta (Old

Woman with a Lantern)

Nikolai Astrup

(1895-1899)
This is one of three
paintings that Astrup created
in his youth by painting upon
fabric from used trousers, in all
likelihood because he was struggling financially and unable to afford canvas. In
the painting, a slightly hunched woman, dressed head-to-toe in black, and
carrying a glowing yellow-orange lantern, is seen walking between two dark
brown log cabins. The scene is set in winter during heavy snowfall. Long icicles
hang from the roof of the right-hand cabin. The space between the two cabins is
filled with snow, and large flecks of white snow descends on the cabins and on
the woman.

Fjøsfrieri (Cowshed Courting)

Nikolai Astrup

(1904)
In Cowshed Courting, we
are given a deep-focus view
down the corridor of a wooden
barn that houses several cows.
Occupying the left of the
foreground is a young couple
shown in a romantic clinch. The
man, dressed in all black - boots,
trousers, jacket, and hat, with a bottle of liquor poking out his jacket pocket

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(maybe it has given him Dutch-courage) - has both his arms wrapped around the
girl who is barefoot and wears a green shirt, red dress, and a headscarf. The girl's
right arm hung down by her side, but her left arm, draped round her suitor's
shoulders, and her deep red blushing cheek, confirm her amorous emotions. At
the upper center-right, a male figure laying in the hayloft is seen spying on the
kissing couple. Through a window at the back of the barn, a peak can be seen
and, beyond that, a glimpse of vibrant green foliage and clear blue skies.

Klar Juninatt (Clear June Night)

Nikolai Astrup

(1905-1907)
Artwork description & Analysis: This
painting depicts a lush green
landscape at the foot of a mountain.
In the foreground, a small pond is
speckled with waterlilies, and
surrounded by vibrant green grass.
Beyond this we see a field of yellow
buttercups. Further back, a small
cluster of log buildings indicates the
presence of human life within this
idyllic setting. In the background, mountains loom over the scene. Streams and
waterfalls (Kleberfossen) can be seen on the nearer mountains, while the more
distant, taller peaks are capped with snow.

Cubism
The Cubist art movement was a phase between 1907 and 1920. The look
of this art involves segmenting objects and arranging the pieces in abstracted
form, and from multiple viewpoints or perspectives. The segments would often be
small cube-like geometric shapes with various angles of view, size, orientation,
etc. The movement involved highly analytical work, especially during the first sub-
phase, with the second being coined the “Synthetic Phase”. Pablo Picasso was
an early pioneer of this art movement, and other artists included Georges Braque
and Maria Blanchard.

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 The Weeping Woman
By Pablo Picasso
1937

The oil painting depicts a face,

presumably of a woman, who appears to
be crying into a handkerchief.

The face itself is painted in a palette of bright

warm colors, significant of a sense of joy and
life, but where the face meet hands and
handkerchief, particularly around the lips, the
colors are contrasted with a bright white.

Violin and candlestick

Georges Braque
1910

is a painting that cracks, broke, and

compressed the known objects and reconstructs
it in multiple point-perspectives on a small space.
He expressed this art of fragmentation as "a
technique for getting closer to the object."
(SFMOMA n.d.) He fits multiple surfaces on a flat
canvas giving the viewers a three-dimensional
view on a two dimensional surface. This painting
is decided to be viewed from different angles.
He also blends the objects and the background
by opening up the black-outlined objects and topping their boundaries by using
earth-toned colors for the whole painting.

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 Houses of l'Estaque
Georges Braque

(1908)
Artwork description & Analysis: Braque's
paintings made over the summer of 1908 at
l'Estaque are considered the first Cubist
paintings. After being rejected by the Salon
d'Automne, they were fortunately exhibited that
fall at Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler's Paris gallery.
These simple landscape paintings showed
Braque's determination to break imagery into
dissected parts. The brown and green palette
here also predicts a palette that Braque
employed in many paintings to come.

Dadaism
This was an art movement from 1915-1923 which rejected popularized
aesthetic values, and attempted to create bizarre, nonsensical “anti-art”.
Dadaism was also a cultural movement of a post World War I era, and the
artworks tended to have no implied meaning. The works often mocked the
artwork or styles of other artists, and the most popular example of dada seems to
be Marcel Duchamp’s mockery of the Mona Lisa (see below). This highly anti-
standard type of art was to be an influence to later art movements such as
Surrealism and Pop Art, and artists of the movement included Hannah Höch and
Max Ernst.

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 Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada
through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural
Epoch of Germany (1919)
By Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch is known for her

collages and photomontages composed
from newspaper and magazine clippings
as well as sewing and craft designs often
pulled from publications. she contributed
to at the Ullstein Press. As part of Club Dada
in Berlin, Hoch unabashedly critiqued
German culture by literally slicing apart its
imagery and reassembling it into vivid,
disjointed, emotional depictions of modern
life. The title of this work, refers to the
decadence, corruption, and sexism of pre-
war German culture. Larger and more
political than her typical montages, this
fragmentary anti-art work highlights the polarities of Weimer politics by juxtaposing
images of establishment people with intellectuals, radicals, entertainers, and
artists. Recognizable faces include Marx and Lenin, Pola Negri, and Kathe Kollwitz.

The Spirit of our Time

Raoul Hausmann
(1920)

This assemblage represents Hausmann's

disillusion with the German government and their
inability to make the changes needed to create a
better nation. It is an ironic sculptural illustration of
Hausmann's belief that the average member of
(corrupt) society "has no more capabilities than
those which chance has glued to the outside of
his skull; his brain remains empty". Thus Hausmann's
use of a hat maker's dummy to represent a
blockhead who can only experience that which
can be measured with the mechanical tools
attached to its head

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 Merzpicture 46A. The Skittle Picture (1921)
by Kurt Schwitters
This is an early example of assemblage in
which two and three dimensional objects are
combined. The word "Merz," which Schwitters used
to describe his art practice as well as his individual
pieces, is a nonsensical word, like Dada, that
Schwitters culled from the word "commerz", the
meaning of which he described as follows: "In the
war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had
learned at the academy was of no use to me....
Everything had broken down and new things had
to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz". In his Merzpictures, which have
been called "psychological collages," he arranged found objects - usually detritus
- in simple compositions that transformed trash into beautiful works of art.

Impressionism
This art movement started in the late 19th century through the works of
French painters whose work would focus on the effects of light and colour.
Impressionism was mainly a representational art form, with nature and life subjects
featuring prominently. With the focus on light and colour, impressionist painters
attempted to give more accurate representations of real-life equivalents. The
period whilst not concisely restricted to the time of the particular movement was
between1860-1900, and like other movements gave birth to or influenced some
other art movements. Impressionist artists included pioneer Claude Monet, Pierre-
Auguste Renoir, and Mary Stevenson Cassatt.

Paris Street; Rainy Day

by Gustave Caillebotte
1877

The piece depicts the Place de

Dublin, an intersection near the
Gare Saint-Lazare, a railroad station
in north Paris. Even though there are
no raindrops to be seen, Caillebotte
masterfully creates the impression
of rain through lighting, lack of
strong shadows and impression of
water on the street.

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 L'Absinthe
edgar degas
1876
The two lonely individuals sitting in a café
communicates a sense of isolation, even
degradation, as they apparently have nothing better
to do in the middle of the day. Degas's heavily
handled paint further communicates the emotional
burden or intense boredom of his subjects

impression Sunrise
By Claude Monet
1872

The subject of the painting is the

harbour of Le Havre in France. It is noted for
very loose brushstrokes that suggest rather
than define it. Monet uses color as the main
factor to capture the very essence of the
scene. An interesting thing about this painting
is that if you make a black and white copy of
it then the sun disappears almost entirely.

Modernism
Modernism was again more of an overall movement which simply signified
the change from traditional art forms and the strive to create more complex
artworks which were abstract and expressionist in form. It was a movement
containing many other movements; which made the move away from
conventional artwork, and happened during the period of 1890-1940. It was an
overall tendency pioneered by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Edouard Manet, and
Sigrid Hjertén

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Pop Art
The Pop Art movement was one which was influenced by popular culture,
and was a move against art of its time (1950-1969) similarly to Dadaism. It
commonly used techniques similar in aestheticism to advertising and mass media.
It was a response against the seriousness of abstract expressionism. It would
involve commonplace people and items of the time such as soda bottle and
soup cans, particularly the work of Andy Warhol who was an establisher of pop
art. Other pop artists of the movement included Roy Lichtenstein, and British artist
Pauline Boty.

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So

Different, So Appealing?
By Richard Hamilton
(1956)

Hamilton's collage was a seminal piece for

the evolution of Pop art and is often cited as the
very first work of Pop art. Created for the
exhibition This is Tomorrow at London's
Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Hamilton's image
was used both in the catalogue for the exhibition
and on posters advertising it. The collage presents viewers with an updated Adam
and Eve (a body-builder and a burlesque dancer) surrounded by all the
conveniences modern life provided, including a vacuum cleaner, canned ham,
and a television. Constructed using a variety of cutouts from magazine
advertisements, Hamilton created a domestic interior scene that both lauded
consumerism and critiqued the decadence that was emblematic of the
American post-war economic boom years.
President Elect (1960-61)
by James Rosenquist
(1960-61)

Like many Pop artists,

Rosenquist was fascinated by the
popularization of political and
cultural figures in mass media. In his
painting President Elect, the artist
depicts John F. Kennedy's face amidst an amalgamation of consumer items,

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including a yellow Chevrolet and a piece of cake. Rosenquist created a collage
with the three elements cut from their original mass media context, and then
photo-realistically recreated them on a monumental scale. As Rosenquist
explains, "The face was from Kennedy's campaign poster. I was very interested at
that time in people who advertised themselves. Why did they put up an
advertisement of themselves? So that was his face. And his promise was half a
Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake." The large-scale work exemplifies
Rosenquist's technique of combining discrete images through techniques of
blending, interlocking, and juxtaposition, as well as his skill at including political
and social commentary using popular imagery.

Campbell's Soup I
By Andy Warhol
1968

Artwork description & Analysis: Warhol's iconic

series of Campbell's Soup Cans paintings were never
meant to be celebrated for their form or compositional
style, like that of the abstractionists. What made these
works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally
recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can,
Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and
depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine
art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing
popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on
how people have come to perceive these things in
modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with
one glance. This early series was hand-painted, but Warhol switched to
screenprinting shortly afterwards, favoring the mechanical technique for his mass
culture imagery. 100 canvases of Campbell's soup cans made up his first solo
exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world
map almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern art.

Surrealism
This was a movement which started in 1920’s France and lasted through the
1930’s. It was an art movement displaying works which played on the idea of
reality and dreams. Artists would also create works which attempt to transform
the real world. An example is the work of René Magritte shown below, of which

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the text translates into “this is not a pipe”. Some other Surrealists were Dorothea
Tanning and Salvador Dalí.

Realism
Realism [1840-1880] was a very general movement which rejected
dramatic romanticism and produced artwork of real to life scenes. Subjects in the
artworks had closely representational colour, shadows and features, without
abstract focus. Realist art included that of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Honore
Daumier and Rosa Bonheur.

Plowing in the Nivernais

Rosa Bonheur

(1849)

Artwork description &

Analysis: This large oil painting,
commissioned and exhibited in
1849 by the French government, was Bonheur's first early success. She primarily
depicted animal subjects and here twelve oxen peacefully plough the land in
preparation for future planting. Her focus on the land, the animals and the
landscape tell a respectful story of timeless peasant life, work, and tradition. The
humble sense of realism that emanates from the canvas recalls that work of
Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet. Similar to the Realists, Bonheur presents man
and nature working seamlessly together to yield harvest from the land.

The Horse Fair

Rosa Bonheur

(1855)
Artwork description &
Analysis: Bonheur's most
famous painting is
monumental: eight by sixteen feet. She dedicated herself to the study of draft
horses at the dusty, wild horse market in Paris twice a week between 1850 and
1851 where she made endless sketches, some simple line drawings and others in
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great detail. Her ability to capture the raw power, beauty and strength of the
untamed animals in motion is superbly displayed in this dramatic scene. In arriving
at the final scheme, the artist drew inspiration from George Stubbs, Théodore
Gericault, Eugène Delacroix, and ancient Greek sculpture: she herself referred
to The Horse Fair as her own "Parthenon frieze." The Parthenon featured rows of
rearing writhing horses in sculpted muscular relief.

Spanish Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees

Rosa Bonheur

(1857)
Artwork description & Analysis: Although
the painting is dominated by a dense
pack of animals, the dynamic
composition incorporates one of Bonheur's most spectacular landscapes. Mules
like these were an important means of trade over the mountains; they stream
dutifully forward creating a scene of a "Hymn to Work" as described by one critic.
The paler distant mountains serve as a backdrop for the artist's "...reverence for
the dignity of labor and her visions of human beings in harmony with nature." The
bright colors and donkey dressage hints towards more exotic and far away lands
in a motif typical of Victorian painters and in particular of Lawrence Alma-
Tadema.

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