Art History: A Comprehensive Overview
Baroque Art
The Baroque period, following Italian Mannerism, dominated the first half of the 16th century. While Mannerism employed classical standards with artificiality, Baroque art abandoned classical serenity to express a world in motion and sensory agitation. This period emphasized exaggeration and ostentation, with colorful and ephemeral decor. Baroque architecture prioritized spectacle, subordinating itself to the decor.
Another characteristic of Baroque art, evident in architecture, sculpture, and painting, is the play of shadows. Violent chiaroscuro contrasts were highly valued in Baroque aesthetics, noticeable in painting (e.g., Caravaggio’s tenebrism) and architecture, where architects manipulated volume abruptly with numerous protrusions to create dramatic light and shadow effects.
Neoclassical Art
Neoclassical art emerged from a renewed fascination with the classical world, fueled by archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. It rejected the Baroque style.
Neoclassical architecture drew inspiration from ancient Greek monuments. Its concept of beauty emphasized architectural line purity, symmetry, and proportions governed by mathematical laws. This style reacted against the decorative excesses of Baroque and Rococo, favoring simplicity and basic classical elements like columns, Doric and Ionic orders, pediments, arches, and domes.
Romanticism
Romanticism, a prevailing sentiment from the late 18th to the mid-19th century, emphasized sensitivity and imagination over reason. Its key features included:
- Love of liberty and social and moral evasion of reality
- Exaltation of the individual
- Intuition as a means to truth
- Idealized love
- Nature as untamed and free, not a rational system
- Religiosity as solace for misery and frustration
- Emerging nationalism based on the idea of unique languages, histories, and traditions for peoples and nations
Romanticism found expression primarily in literature, painting, and music.
Pictorial Realism
Pictorial Realism, a movement seeking to capture objective reality, extended across various creative fields but was particularly significant in literature. In fine arts, Realism reached its peak in France.
Realism aimed to represent the contemporary world truthfully, objectively, and impartially, avoiding idealization. Its manifesto emphasized:
- Reality as the sole source of artistic inspiration
- Rejection of preconceived notions of beauty
- The artist’s role as a recorder of reality without embellishment
- The inherent beauty of every person or object, to be discovered by the artist
Impressionism
Impressionism in painting emerged from a rejection of classical themes and artistic formulas advocated by the French Academy of Fine Arts. Impressionists painted outdoors, focusing on everyday subjects.
Their primary goal was to capture the world spontaneously and directly, emphasizing the effects of natural light on objects. Impressionists prioritized capturing light’s effects over precise object representation, as light tends to blur boundaries and reflect surrounding colors in shadows.
Fauvism
Fauvism, a movement contemporary to Impressionism (1910-1920), emphasized color. Artists used paint directly from the tube without mixing on a palette, favoring bright colors applied in flat areas. Color was independent of the object.
Fauves, a small group of painters working in Paris at the turn of the century, were known for simplifying forms and using color to create volume, planes, and perspectives. Their subjects often included portraits of simple, happy, and nude figures, as well as rural and urban scenes, but rarely addressed critical social, political, or artistic issues.
Expressionism
Expressionism, an artistic movement, sought to express the artist’s feelings and emotions rather than objective reality. It revealed the pessimistic side of life, influenced by the historical circumstances of the time.
The hidden face of modernization, alienation, isolation, and overcrowding in large cities was evident, and artists believed in capturing the inner feelings of human beings. Existential angst was a primary driver of Expressionist aesthetics.
Cubism
Cubism aimed to depart from naturalistic representation and capture multiple perspectives of an object simultaneously on a single picture plane, attempting to achieve a fourth dimension.
Cubism is characterized by the use of geometric shapes like triangles, squares, rectangles, and cubes. The movement’s name originated from critic Louis Vauxcelles’s description of Braque’s paintings as composed of cubes in 1908.
Abstract Art
Abstract art emphasizes chromatic, formal, and structural aspects, rejecting natural forms. It replaces figurative representation with an autonomous visual language with its own meanings.
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color, and line to create compositions that exist independently of visual references in the real world.
Surrealism
Surrealism has roots in Romantic visionary and fantastic art, filtered through Symbolism and Dada experiences. Discoveries in biology, psychology, and psychoanalysis provided a starting point for Surrealist forms of expression.
André Breton acknowledged Sigmund Freud as the father of Surrealism. Following scientific principles, Surrealism accepted the expression of what lies hidden in the depths of the mind as true and authentic.
Goya: 1746-1828
Self-taught, Goya developed slowly, anti-academic, spontaneous, without stiffness or royal imagination.
Stages:
- 1st until his transfer to Madrid: Zaragoza learning, 2 trips to Madrid for acad. fernando arts and fail. Rome Travel learned fresco technique, chamber artist Fco.Bayeu sister married Carlo III.
- 2nd to get sick of hearing: 1775 royal tapestry factory enters. elected academician of the century Fine Arts Escape Fernando painting”Christ on the Cros” 1789 painter named Charles IV camera.
- 3rd until independence war: travel to spain ill causing acute deafness k = crisis will affect their character and paint.
- 4th until his exile and death in Bourdeaux: 1808-1813 independence war accentuate their pessimism and mark work. 1819-23 retires at the Quinta del Sordo Where to paint”Black Painting” 1824 was exiled to Bordeaux Where to dies at 28