The Ash Can School - 20c.

Anschutz Thomas Pollock

"The Farmer and His Son at Harvesting"

The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods.

   The movement grew out of a group known as The Eight, whose only show together in 1908 created a sensation. Its members included five painters later associated with the Ashcan School: WilliamGlackens (1870–1938), Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), EverettShinn (1876–1953) and John French Sloan (1871–1951). They had met studying together under Thomas Pollock Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

   In their paintings as in their illustrations, etchings, and lithographs, artists concentrated on portraying New York's vitality and recording its seamy side, keeping a keen eye on current events and their era's social and political rhetoric. Stylistically, they depended upon the dark palette and gestural brushwork of Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals, Francisco de Goya, Honoré Daumier, and recent Realists such as Wilhelm Leibl, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. They preferred broad, calligraphic forms, which they could render "on the run" or from memory, thereby enlisting skills that most of them had cultivated as newspaper illustrators.

Cubism - 1907-1920

Cubism was one of the first truly modern movements to emerge in art. It evolved during a period of heroic and rapid innovation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The movement has been described as having two stages: 'Analytic' Cubism, in which forms seem to be 'analyzed' and fragmented; and 'Synthetic' Cubism, in which newspaper and other foreign materials such as chair caning and wood veneer, are collaged to the surface of the canvas as 'synthetic' signs for depicted objects. The style was significantly developed by Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, but it attracted a host of adherents, both in Paris and abroad, and it would go on to influence the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Willem de Kooning.

Key Ideas

Analytic Cubism staged modern art's most radical break with traditional models of representation. It abandoned perspective, which artists had used to order space since the Renaissance. And it turned away from the realistic modeling of figures and towards a system of representing bodies in space that employed small, tilted planes, set in a shallow space. Over time, Picasso and Braque also moved towards open form - they pierced the bodies of their figures, let the space flow through them, and blended background into foreground. Some historians have argued that its innovations represent a response to the changing experience of space, movement, and time in the modern world.

Synthetic Cubism proved equally important and influential for later artists. Instead of relying on depicted shapes and forms to represent objects, Picasso and Braque began to explore the use of foreign objects as abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely aware of current events - in particular WWI.

Cubism paved the way for geometric abstract art by putting an entirely new emphasis on the unity between the depicted scene in a picture, and the surface of the canvas. Its innovations would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who continued to explore its use of the grid, its abstract system of signs, and its shallow space.

Large Nude in a Red Armchair

Key artists: Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , Fernand Léger

Marc Chagall

  (1887-1985)

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussia to a poor Hassidic family. The eldest of nine children, he studied first in a heder before moving to a secular Russian school, where he began to display his artistic talent. With his mother's support, and despite his father's disapproval, Chagall pursued his interest in art, going to St. Petersburg in 1907 to study art with Leon Bakst. Influenced by contemporary Russian painting, Chagall's distinctive, child-like style, often centering on images from his childhood, began to emerge.

From 1910 to 1914, Chagall lived in Paris, and there absorbed the works of the leading cubist, surrealist, and fauvist painters. It was during this period that Chagall painted some of his most famous paintings of the Jewish shtetl or village, and developed the features that became recognizable trademarks of his art. Strong and often bright colors portray the world with a dreamlike, non-realistic simplicity, and the fusion of fantasy, religion, and nostalgia infuses his work with a joyous quality. Animals, workmen, lovers, and musicians populate his figures; the “fiddler on the roof” recurs frequently, often hovering within another scene. Chagall's work of this period displays the influence of contemporary French painting, but his style remains independent of any one school of art. He exhibited regularly in the Salon des Independants.

In 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin, exhibiting work dominated by Jewish images and personages. During the war, he resided in Russia, and in 1917, endorsing the revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk and then director of the newly established Free Academy of Art. The Bolshevik authorities, however, frowned upon Chagall's style of art as too modern, and in 1922, Chagall left Russia, settling in France one year later. He lived there permanently except for the years 1941—1948 when, fleeing France during World War II, he resided in the United States. Chagall's horror over the Nazi rise to power is expressed in works depicting Jewish martyrs and Jewish refugees.

In addition to images of the Hassidic world, Chagall's paintings are inspired by themes from the Bible. His fascination with the Bible culminated in a series of over 100 etchings illustrating the Bible, many of which incorporate elements from Jewish folklore and from religious life in Vitebsk. Chagall's other illustrations include works by Gogol, La Fontaine, Y. L. Peretz, and his autobiographical Ma Vie (1931; My Life 1960) and Chagall by Chagall (1979).

Chagall painted with a variety of media, such as oils, water colors, and gouaches. His work also expanded to other forms of art, including ceramics, mosaics, and stained glass. Among his most famous building decorations are the ceiling of the Opera House in Paris, murals at the New York Metropolitan Opera, a glass window at the United Nations, and decorations at the Vatican. Israel, which Chagall first visited in 1931 for the opening of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, is likewise endowed with some of Chagall's work, most notably the twelve stained glass windows at Hadassah Hospital and wall decorations at the Knesset.

Chagall received many prizes and much recognition for his work. He was also one of very few artists to exhibit work at the Louvre in their lifetime.

Chagall died on March 28, 1985, in Saint-Paul, France at age 97.

Above the Town

The Promenade

I and the Village

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso ( 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

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Futurism - 1907-1944

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere.

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913–1914

Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism. Futurism employs techniques of Divisionism, Cubism features (specifically the analysis of energy), dynamism, urban subject matters, and depiction of movement.

Representatives:  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni (19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916) was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death. His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a major retrospective of 100 pieces.

Early portraits and landscapes

From 1902 to 1910, Boccioni focused initially on drawings, then sketched and painted portraits - with his mother as a frequent model. He also painted landscapes - often including the arrival of industrialization, trains and factories for example. During this period, he weaves between Pointillism and Impressionism, and the influence of Giacomo Balla, and Divisionism techniques are evident in early paintings (although later largely abandoned). The Morning (1909) was noted for "the bold and youthful violence of hues" and as "a daring exercise in luminosity." His 1910 Three Women, which portrays his mother and sister, and longtime lover Ines at center, was cited as expressing great emotion - strength, melancholy and love.

Development of Futurism

Initially titled Il lavoro (Labor), Boccioni worked for nearly a year on La città sale or The City Rises, 1910, a huge 2m by 3m painting, which is considered his turning point into Futurism. "I attempted a great synthesis of labor, light and movement" he wrote to a friend.[3] Upon its exhibition in Milan in May 1911, the painting attracted numerous reviews, mostly admiring. By 1912 it became a headline painting for the exhibition traveling Europe, the introduction to Futurism. It was sold to the great pianist, Ferruccio Busoni for 4,000 lire that year, and today is frequently on prominent display at the Museum of Modern art in New York, at the very entrance to the paintings department.

La risata (1911, "The Laugh") is considered his first truly Futurist work. He had fully parted with Divisionism, and now focused on the sensations derived from his observation of modern life. Its public reception was quite negative, compared unfavorably with Three Women, and it was defaced by a visitor, running his fingers through the still fresh paint.  Subsequent criticism became more positive, with some considering the painting a response to Cubism. It was purchased by Albert Borchardt, a German collector who acquired 20 futurist works exhibited in Berlin, including The Street Enters the House (1911) which depicts a woman on a balcony overlooking a busy street. Today the former also is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, and the latter by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.

 

Umberto Boccioni spent much of 1911 working on a trilogy of paintings titled Stati d'animo ("States of Mind"), which he said expressed departure and arrival at a railroad station - The Farewells, Those Who Go, and Those Who Stay. They are cited as defining the vastness and infinite possibility of Futurist painting and sculpture, and liberated from the academic frigidity of Cubism. Critics have acclaimed that he captured a "universal sensation," and today they are considered the summit of the Futurist aesthetic - "The atmosphere is literally shattered." All three paintings were originally purchased by Futurist manifesto poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, until Nelson Rockefeller acquired them from his widow and later donated them to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Beginning in 1912, with Elasticità or Elasticity, depicting the pure energy of a horse, captured with intense chromaticism, he completed a series of "Dynamism" paintings: Dinamismo di un corpo umano ("Human Body"), ciclista ("Cyclist"), Foot-baller, and by 1914 Dinamismo plastico: cavallo + caseggiato ("Plastic Dynamism: Horse + Houses").

While continuing this focus, he revived his previous interest in portraiture. Beginning with L'antigrazioso ("The antigraceful") in 1912 and continuing with I selciatori ("The Street Pavers") and Il bevitore ("The Drinker") both 1914.

In 1914 Boccioni published his book, Pittura, scultura futuriste (Futurist painting and sculpture), which caused a rift between himself and some of his Futurist comrades. As a result perhaps, he abandoned his exploration of dynamism, and instead sought further decomposition of a subject by means of colour.[3] With Horizontal Volumes in 1915 and the Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni in 1916, he completed a full return to figurative painting. Perhaps fittingly, this last painting was a portrait of the Maestro who purchased his first Futurist work, The City Rises.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPpGeH2-0zA

Post-impressionism - 1910

Post-Impressionism is a catch-all term for the many and disparate reactions against the naturalism, and issues of light and color, which had inspired the Impressionists. Emerging around 1886, at the time of the Impressionist's eighth and last exhibition, and declining along with Fauvism in 1905, the movement embraces various trends, including the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat, and the Symbolism of Gauguin. The term 'Post-Impressionism' was devised by English critic Roger Fry, in 1910, for an exhibition in London which also included works by Manet, Cézanne, van Gogh, and many others.
    Despite the myriad approaches and ideologies associated with Post-Impressionists, they were united by their desire to overturn the superficiality of Impressionism. They felt that the Impressionists had allowed their preoccupations with technique, and the effects of natural light, to overshadow the importance of subject matter. But their impulses led them to solve this problem in different ways. Some, like Cézanne, sought greater pictorial structure, and they placed great emphasis on the specific context of a particular landscape or still life. Others, like Gauguin, sought a deeper engagement with expressive and symbolic content: they created paintings "de tete" (from memory or imagination), and they expressed a strong connection with the subject matter that inspired the work, whether it derived from religion, literature or mythology. These artists - Symbolists, or Synthetists - also placed greater emphasis on harmonious surface design: Gauguin was one of the first artists to refer to his work as "abstract."

Representatives: Edvard Munch, Arnold Bocklin, James Ensor, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell

Georges Seurat

My favourite painter is Georges Seurat. I've learnt much about him and some of his works while doing my homework on Art Movements.

   Georges Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the technique of painting known as pointillism. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism. It is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.

   French painter Georges Seurat founded Neo-Impressionism and the technique of tiny strokes of contrasting color, pointillism. Seurat was not just interested in the way that the colors were put onto the painting or the painting itself. He was mostly concentrating on the science in the picture and the optical mixing of the colors. Before actually painting the picture, he would sketch out parts of his artwork so that the models would not have to wait forever while he found the exact color.

   Seurat had many people who really didn't like the new work that he was introducing. They may have thought it as "fuzzy" or "messy". In their opinion it really wasn't very good at all. But there were some artists who really felt that what he was doing was very artistic and complicated.

   Some of his most famous paintings include:

-A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

-Bathing at Asnieres

-Le Chahut

  
 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte Story was eventually exhibited in the eighth Impressionist exhibition of May 1886.

   Where exactly Seurat painted Grande Jatte is a subject of much discussion since its completion. The picturesque content of the piece has also been brought into the question because it is painted at a spot on the island which doesn't incorporate any of the increasingly apparent industry that had begun appearing on the island.

   Despite the island of La Grande Jatte looking a great deal different to how it once did, Seurat's effort is perhaps the most similar to how it looks today. The banks of the river Seine are considerably steeper than in Seurat's day but one spot is convincingly similar to his Grande Jatte.

   Bathing at Asnieres

   This was the first of Seurat's large-scale compositions. He drew conté crayon studies for individual figures using live models, and made small oil sketcheson site which he used to help design the composition and record effects of light and atmosphere. Some 14 oil sketches and 10 drawings survive. The final composition, painted in the studio, combines information from both. The simplicity of the forms and the use of regular shapes clearly defined by light recalls paintings by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. In his use of figures seen in profile, Seurat may also have been influenced by ancient Egyptian art.

Le Chahut

   A frenzied gesticulation suddenly invades Seurat's art in the final two years of his life. Seurat studied and collected Jules Cheret's posters, and their compositional form is felt in Le Chahut. The curled mustache repeated in the dancer's turned-up lips, the decorations and ribbons on the dancers' shoulders and shoes, the strange similarity of male and female legs, everything here expresses the taste for peculiar detail.

   This exuberance, however, does not conceal the extreme rigor of the composition. Seurat inscribes his network of diagonals on a regular geometrical background. A figure in the foreground stabilizes the composition, as one does in The Circus. Between background and foreground breaks occur. Seurat arranges in the intermediary space of Le Chahut a series of arc-shaped curves created by the dancers legs. ``Monsieur Seurat'' wrote Felix Feneon in 1889, ``knows very well that a line, independent of its representational role, has an appraisable abstract value.''

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Georges Seurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 is one of Georges Seurat's most famous works, and is an example of pointillism. The picture depicts an afternoon landscape on an Island with numerous representatives of high class community. The painting is relatively large in size; it is approximately 2 by 3 meters. Speaking about the shape the picture created, and this technique is called pointillism, which means separation of color into small touches placed side-by-side. Seurat used this particular style to blend in the eye of the viewer because light can be measured in particles as well as wavelengths. Such a technique, which nowadays is called divisionism, also allows the viewer’s eyes to perceive the light colors on the painting, thus mixing them in different colors. I think that the author wants to show us the example of how Parisians may enjoy spending the afternoon time. However, the main focus is landscape, especially technique of its painting for producing brighter colors, so I think that the main aim of the artist was to show the advantage of his new style. The title tells us about the island which is located on the Seine in the Neuilly-sur-Seine department of Paris and how a high class gets away for the Parisian community. I also notice that Seurat tries to show members of all classes who may coexisting peacefully. As for composition, my eyes flow across the whole painting, paying heightened attention to the technique but not to this or that particular object. Speaking about colors, it must be mention that the artist finished the work by adding a painted border of red, orange, and blue dots that provides a visual transition between the interior of the painting and his specially designed white frame. As for skills, they are, undoubtedly, on the highest level and as the evidence of it, I should mention the fact that Seurat re-works it several times and even painted a small version of the finished piece. All in all, the painting has significant meaning – as its author is the father of the Neo-impressionist art movement, this masterpiece is considered to be the symbol of the beginning of such art movement. 

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, in 1848, in Paris. He was a leading Post-Impressionist French painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He spent his childhood in Lima (his mother was a Peruvian Creole). From 1872 to 1883 he was a successful stockbroker in Paris. He met Camille Pissarro about 1875, and he exhibited several times with the Impressionists. Disillusioned with bourgeois materialism, in 1886 he moved to Pont-Aven, Brittany, where he became the central figure of a group of artists known as the Pont-Aven school. Gauguin coined the term Synthetism to describe his style during this period, referring to the synthesis of his paintings' formal elements with the idea or emotion they conveyed. Late in October 1888 Gauguin traveled to Arles, in the south of France, to stay with Vincent van Gogh. The style of the two men's work from this period has been classified as Post-Impressionist because it shows an individual, personal development of Impressionism's use of colour, brushstroke, and nontraditional subject matter. Increasingly focused on rejecting the materialism of contemporary culture in favour of a more spiritual, unfettered lifestyle, in 1891 he moved to Tahiti. His works became open protests against materialism. He was an influential innovator; Fauvism owed much to his use of colour, and he inspired Pablo Picasso and the development of Cubism. Gauguin died on May 8, 1903, in Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

Paul Gauguin-Presentation1

Paule Gauguin-Presentation2

Paule Gauguin - Film on You Tube

Paul Cézanne (1)

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.

House of Pére Lacroix (1873)

In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon where he met his good friends Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. The three were famously close for a long period of time. Later Paul Cézanne enrolled at the local art school and attempted to work as a banker but was also unsuccessful in this venture. By this time he was good friends with Impressionist painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro and had met his future wife.

Three Skulls (1906)

In 1873 Cézanne met Vincent van Gogh and in 1874 he exhibited at the Impressionist's first showcase. In 1877 Cézanne showcased 16 of his paintings. Although still influenced by Pissarro's Impressionist style Cézanne continued to work inside his studio and didn't believe in always painting from nature. In the early 1880s Cezanne started to move even further away from the Impressionist's style of painting. In 1886 Cezanne married his mistress and inherited a large estate from his father, meaning he never had to worry about making money from his art. In November 1895 Paul Cézanne held his first solo exhibition in Paris and Ambroise Vollard bought every artwork. He then moved to Aix-en-Provence permanently. In the early 1900s his work was shown all around Europe to wide critical acclaim but throughout his life Cézanne was shy and hostile towards other painters and he maintained this attitude. He died in October 1906 of pneumonia and is buried in the cemetery in Aix-en-Provence. 

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Paul Cézanne (2)

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in Provence in south of France. His father was a successful banker and his father wished him to pursue a 'respectable' career. To please his father, between 1859 and 1861 Paul Cezanne attended the law school of the University of Aix. However, in 1861, he became disillusioned with this career path and dropped out to pursue his life's passion - art.

With the encouragement of his great friend Emil Zola, Paul left for Paris and sought to further his artistic career. Initially his father was upset at his son's choice of career. But, on evidence of his talent, his father later became reconciled to his choice and on the death of his father, Paul inherited a substantial sum which enabled him to pursue art without any financial worries.

In Paris, he met the Impressionist artist, Camille Pissaro. Pissaro acted as Master to the young Paul. However, over time, the student became as respected as the Master.

In 1870, the Franco-Prussian war broke out and Paul Cezanne fled with his mistress to Marseille. He was caught as a draft dodger, but, soon after, the war fortunately ended. In this period in the south of France, Paul drew an increasing number of landscapes and abandoned the dark colours which had dominated his rather somber paintings. In this period Paul Cezanne became one of the leading impressionists though his difficult personality made it hard for him to mix with many of the leading artists of the time.

His final years of his life from 1878-1905 were spent in Provence. It was here that he increasingly developed the style of his paintings and moved beyond a classic impressionist style. He used planes and blocks of colour to give a more abstracted observation of nature. It was this abstract innovation that was said to be a key element in the link between the 19th Century impressionist art and the modern art of Matisse and Picasso of the Twentieth Century.

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Victor Borisov-Musatov

Victor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov, (April 14, 1870 - November 8,1905) was a Russian painter, prominent for his uniquePost-Impressionisticstyle that mixed Symbolism, pure decorative style and realism. Together with Mikhail Vrubel he is often referred as the creator of Russian Symbolism style. Borisov-Musatov had a very successful solo exhibition in a number of cities in Germany, and in the spring of 1905 he exhibited with Salon de la Société des Artistes Français and became a member of this society.

  

Technique:

Musatov's response was creating a half-illusory world of the 19th century nobility, their parks and country-seats. This world was partially based on the estate of princes Prozorvky-Galitzines Zubrilovka and partially just on Musatov's imagination. Borisov-Musatov also abandoned oil-paintings for the mixed tempera and watercolor and pastel techniques that he found more suitable for the subtle visual effects he was trying to create.

Musatov's best works:

Requiem (1905)

The Pool (1902)

Phantoms (1903)

LINKS:

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Film about this painter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjwhw3Bvas