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billokekeunit5and13 · 6 years ago

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Art Movement research

Bauhaus

Bauhaus is where Modernism in architecture grew from, it is a German school of architecture and design, initially established in 1919 by Walter Gropius along with Marcel Breuer and other designers.

Bauhaus translates from German to ‘house of building’ which means “building house”, since then it was understood as meaning “School of building”.

The founder of Bauhaus was an architect but the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during its first years.

One of the main goals of this movement was to create a relationship between manufacturing and creativity as there was a fear that art was losing its purpose in society. They are responsible for the creation of one of the most famous and most used fonts: San Serif and Bauhaus. The artist “Herbert Bayer” felt that typeface was the clearest form of communication and artistic expression.

In 1928, Hannes Meyer took over as Gropius stepped down as director.

Under Meyers control advertising and photography continued but the social function became stressed more as it was designing for mass production. Due to the pressure , Meyer also resigned from the position of director and was replaced by the architect Ludwig Mies der Rohe who increased the emphasis of architecture. After Mies took over in 1930, the Bauhaus was relocated to Berlin and reduced scale.

A fact is that “ Some of the greatest modern artists and designers of the 20th century studied or taught at the Bauhaus including: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Mies Van Der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Marianne Brandt.” it says on www.archilover.com

During the rise of the Nazi power in Germany, Bauhaus were labelled “degenerate” and many of their artworks and designs were destroyed, causing it to dissolve the group in 1933 and shut its doors.

It was revealed at a 2009 exhibition at the Neue Museum in Weimar, that the Nazi later moved on the functionality of the Bauhaus design to build concentration camps such as Buchenwald.

In the 1930s there were many German Jewish architects who migrated to British Mandate of Palestine. They made around 4,000 Bauhaus or International styles buildings. This collection is names “The White City of Tel Aviv”.

Next year will mark the hundreth year of Bauhaus and the school will be turning 100 (in 2019).

Germany has plans to celebrate in a 3 year celebratory program that will involve three museums housed in the former school in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, but also at least 10 of the country’s 16 federal states will participate so several exhibitions, events, publications and new museums are expected.

This movement influenced mainly the area of Graphic Design and to make it they needed tools like paint, erasers, airbrushes, and other art supplies were necessary in any studio as was a steady hand and a keen eye for color and shadow.

DADA

Dada is a new artistic and literary movement founded in 1916. It is almost impossible to define as it cannot be reduced to a single form of expression.

Nevertheless, the movement is generally regarded as being anti bourgeois and anarchically. Dada art is a crazy, wild and nonsensical movement.

It was founded in Zurich in 1916 when the First World War raged throughout the majority of Europe. Many artists and intellectuals migrated to Zurich, in a neutral location ‘Switzerland’ where they were able to create exile art.

At that time Zurich, was a place of refuge, and became the main area for the European avant grade.

On February 5th , 1916, Hugo Ball ahd what will be his future wife, Emma Hennings, opened Voltairebartists tavern at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich’s Niederdorf quarter. After this it became one of the most popular meeting locations for many like minded international artists.

The origin of the name ‘Dada’, is from the french word for “rocking horse” and is said that it was picked at random whilst going through a German-French dictionary. Another version claims that the name derives from the Russian word “da”, meaning “yes”. Yet another maintains that the Dadaists were inspired by the soap manufacturer, Bergmann & co., which had a rocking horse as its logo.

The founding members came from different countries such as: Germany, Rumania, France, only Sophie Taeuber Arp, the wife of Hans (Jean) Arp, was from Switzerland.

Hugo Ball left the group after just a few months and went into new exile in Tocono, where he completely devoted himself to mystical Catholism.

In 1923, Surrealism was founded, which many Dadaists joined.

https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/10-facts-about-dada

Russian constructivism

The Russian Constructivism was the last and most influential movement in 20th century Russia, It borrows ideas from the Cubism, Suprematism and Futurism, the movement served as the conduit for the hopes and ideas of Russian constructivism, it allows them to portray their vision of a democratic and modernized Russian Revolution.

It evolved just as the Bolsheviks came to power in the October Revolution of 1917, and initially it acted as a lightning rod for the hopes and ideas of many of the most advanced Russian artists who supported the revolution's goals.

The Tatlin’s Tower, was a Monument that was modelled but never built. It was meant to stand taller and more functional than the Eiffel Tower, soaring up to 1,300 feet. By 1920′s two more models were produced and if there weren’t any short of materials, the projects would have been fully realized.

Malevich and Kandinsky believed that art should remain a spiritual activity rather than a meaning of serving utilitarian needs of society; whilst Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchencko devoted to communism by pursuing industrial design, visual communication and applied arts.

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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From Dada to Bauhaus, How 14 Art Movements Got their Names

As anyone who’s read an Art History syllabus or walked through the Museum of Modern Art’s fifth floor knows, the history of modern art has been dominated by groups of like-minded artists with specific aims or approaches, otherwise known as art movements. Since the late 19th century, a quick succession of radically experimental groups has responded to rapidly changing social, political, and cultural climates—leading to the formation of countless movements, and with them, dozens of -isms, acronyms, portmanteaus, manifestos, and peculiar words like “Dada.”

And the stories behind movements’ names, while sometimes quite arbitrary, are often surprisingly revealing about their members, as well as a group’s historical context and mission. Here, we dig into the names of 14 unique and influential movements in recent art history, listed in chronological order.

Pre-Raphaelites

Coined in 1848

Ophelia, 1851-1852. Sir John Everett Millais Tate Gallery, London

Despite name-dropping the Renaissance master Raphael, the British artists who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 wanted nothing to do with him. Rather, founders Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt sought to emulate the aesthetics that were popular before Raphael rose to fame in 15th- and 16th-century Italy.

Raphael continued to be a major influence long after his death in 1520, particularly on the Pre-Raphaelites’ fellow British painters, who practiced what the Brotherhood viewed as a clichéd, academic style. Indeed, the conservative Royal Academy of Arts and its late 18th-century leader, Joshua Reynolds, consistently promoted Raphael as the preeminent master of painting, along with the traditional Victorian style that emphasized Raphaelesque idealism. Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt rejected all of these conventions, instead finding inspiration in the Medieval period and the Early Renaissance (eras the Academy had deemed “primitive”), as well as in literary themes.

The group grew to seven members, painting whimsical works filled with naturalism, symbolism, and light, and often signing them “PRB,” short for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. After a few strong years, however, the Brotherhood split in 1853 once Millais joined the Royal Academy as an associate, effectively turning his back on everything the movement stood for. (Even more, he became president of the Academy shortly before his death in 1896.)

Though the Brotherhood was no more, the term “Pre-Raphaelites” remained in use around Britain for the following two decades, in reference to a larger group of artists, such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who were in turn inspired by the original trio’s ideas.

Impressionism

Coined in 1874

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

On April 15, 1874, a group of French artists who called themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. did what none of their peers in the Parisian art world had done before: They organized their own exhibition. Held in a vacant studio on the Boulevard des Capucines for four weeks with an admission fee of one franc, the show featured 165 works by 30 artists, including Claude Monet’s 1872 Impression, Sunrise, a pulsating, highly saturated picture rendered in quick, visible brushstrokes.

Louis Leroy, an art critic for the magazine Le Charivari, was not a fan of this painting, nor of any others in the show. He made fun of Monet’s title, writing sarcastically in his review: “I was just saying to myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in the picture…and what freedom! What ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its formative state is more finished than this seascape!” He then headlined his scathing critique “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” implying that all artists in the show—which also included works by Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—were only capable of painting simplistic “impressions” of the world.

Harsh? Yes—but Leroy wasn’t exactly wrong. Though these artists had differing styles and subject matter—Monet’s rapid, plein air renderings of landscape scenes; Degas’s dynamically composed paintings of dancers in motion—they shared a common desire to represent fleeting moments of modern life, moments that could otherwise be called “impressions.”

And despite the term’s negative connotations, many of the artists evidently liked it. After moving through other confident names such as the “Independents” and the “Intransigents,” the group formally adopted the label of “Impressionists” by its third exhibition in 1877—a term now associated with the world’s first true modern art movement.

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

Coined in 1903

The Large Blue Horses, 1911. Franz Marc Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

The artist group known as Der Blaue Reiter—meaning “the Blue Rider” in English—was named after a painting by one of its co-founders, the Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky. The artist’s 1903 painting Der Blaue Reiter is a blue-tinged composition showing a figure on horseback. But the group would not emerge until the following decade, by which time Kandinsky had evolved his style, developing his synesthetic technique of rendering musical sounds visually, resulting in colorful swirling abstractions like 1911’s Komposition 4.

That same year, Der Blaue Reiter formed in Munich, with the German-born Franz Marc joining Kandinsky. By this point, the title of Kandinsky’s painting carried new meaning for him and Marc. Both artists now viewed blue as the most spiritual color, and “the rider” came to symbolize their journey from terrestrial figuration towards pure, divine abstraction. Furthermore, Marc frequently painted horses, among other animals, to represent the concept of rebirth.

Der Blaue Reiter would soon grow into a loose association of artists, including Paul Klee and August Macke. They emphasized a kind of spiritual abstraction based on the belief that colors carry metaphysical meaning. Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, published in 1912 and edited by Kandinsky and Marc, defined the significance of each hue and remains an influential writing on color theory.

The group disbanded at the outset of World War I. Years later, in 1930, Kandinsky, reminiscing about his late friend—Marc was killed on the battlefield in 1916—revealed that the two conceptualized the name almost by divine coincidence. “We both loved blue: Marc, horses; I, riders,” he said. “So the name invented itself.”

Fauvism

Coined in 1905

L'Estaque, 1905. André Derain The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Before Cubism emerged as one of the most influential modern art movements of the 20th century, Fauvism made waves. And as with the later movement, the masses did not immediately take to Henri Matisse and André Derain’s unnatural approach to painting, nor did critics who were accustomed to artistic realism—particularly the critic Louis Vauxcelles. Fauvist paintings, with their shockingly unorthodox usage of vivid colors and rough brushstrokes, went on view for the first time at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris.

In room seven of the Salon’s exhibition space at the Grand Palais, highly saturated works by Matisse, Derain, and fellow colorists Maurice de Vlaminck and Albert Marquet were displayed alongside a relatively tame, Renaissance-like bust that was placed in the center of the room. The resulting juxtaposition caused Vauxcelles to call the sculpture a “Donatello parmi les fauves”—an Old Master, like Donatello, amidst wild beasts. (The room was then unofficially re-named “la cage aux fauves.”)

Rather than take offense, Matisse, Derain, and their peers welcomed the comment—practicing the principle that all press is good press—and started calling themselves Fauvists. Soon afterwards, Fauvism became all the rage in avant-garde Paris, only to be overshadowed by Cubism a few years later.

Cubism

Coined in 1909

The Portuguese, 1911. Georges Braque Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

Man with a Violin, 1911-1912. Pablo Picasso Philadelphia Museum of Art

As so often is the case with groundbreaking cultural innovations—like rock and roll—this revolutionary art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 20th century, was initially challenged by contemporary critics. The artists threw perspective out the window, dissolving spatial borders, abandoning any vestige of naturalistic representation, and flattening the picture plane. Cubists were interested in depicting everyday scenes from multiple sharp angles, resulting in jumbled, geometric compositions—and it was this angular style that earned the movement its name.

Braque, influenced by Picasso’s distorted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), incorporated similarly jagged, cubic and cylindrical shapes in his 1908 landscape Trees at L’Estaque. The painting was included in an exhibition of the artist’s recent work, held at the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Gallery in Paris that November, in what is now considered the first-ever display of Cubist art. One visitor happened to be the same critic that gave Fauvism its name, Louis Vauxcelles, who, unimpressed with Braque’s reduction of a lovely French landscape to simple shapes, wrote the following year of the artist’s “bizarreries cubiques,” or “cubic weirdness.” (According to some sources, Vauxcelles may have taken the word from another artist he once insulted, Matisse, who allegedly used it early on to criticize Picasso.)

Though intended as a jab—and Picasso or Braque were reportedly not thrilled with it—“Cubism” eventually stuck, and was cemented as the movement’s official moniker in Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes’s 1912 essay Du Cubisme. And just as he did with Fauvism, Vauxcelles had unintentionally coined the name for a strange new artistic development that he didn’t even like.

Orphism

Coined in 1912

Sonia Delaunay and two friends in Robert Delaunay's studio, rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris 1924. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

The term “Orphism” was coined by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, when he described Robert Delaunay’s “Windows” series at Paris’s Salon de la Section d’Or as “orphique.” Apollinaire was referencing the ancient myth of Orpheus, the Greek prophet known for his divine musical talents, and who had served as inspiration for many artists who were interested in the musical qualities of painting. In doing so, Apollinaire had connected the works of Delaunay and his wife, Sonia Delaunay, with those of painters like František Kupka, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. These artists’ paintings all possessed a rhythmic cadence and featured lush color palettes, at least in the pre-Dada days—Picabia stopped working in the Orphist mode by 1915, and Duchamp abandoned canvases entirely after 1918.

Orphism had a lot in common with Der Blaue Reiter, which in some ways can be considered its German counterpart: Both promoted abstraction, emphasized a rich use of color, and were inspired by music, and each began around 1912, eventually getting cut short in 1914 by World War I. However, Orphism was more of an ad hoc movement—it probably wouldn’t have existed, nor been included here, if not for the connections made by Apollinaire; it’s better understood as a loosely connected group of artists who shared similar ideas at the same time and who represented a key point on the road to wholly abstract art.

Today, the term is primarily associated with Kupka and the Delaunays, each of whom continued working in the Orphist style long after its heyday, for the remainder of their respective careers.

Dada

Coined in 1916

Dada Group, . Man Ray Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Unlike most other movements discussed here, whose names tend to have clear origins, the story behind the term “Dada” is rather ambiguous—though perhaps that’s the point. Dada embraced nonsense, irreverence, and the absurd; its members engaged in making “anti-art” as a reaction to World War I, and against the bourgeois society that caused it. The movement emerged in two locations almost simultaneously during the war: New York, where Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia were showing in proto-Dada exhibitions beginning in 1915; and in the neutral city of Zürich, where foreign poets and artists like Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp escaped from their war-ravaged nations and pursued this avant-garde rebellion.

In February, 1916, the group held its first meetings as the “Cabaret Voltaire,” formed by writer Hugo Ball and singer Emmy Hennings in the back room of a divey tavern. According to the Tate, Ball wrote in a magazine later that year that the group would now “bear the name ‘Dada.’ Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada.”

Still, it’s uncertain exactly who came up with the name: Another common tale is that German poet and psychoanalyst Richard Huelsenbeck threw a knife into a dictionary, which must have punctured the entry for dada, a colloquial French word for a hobby-horse. “Dada” may also have been strategically chosen for its simultaneous meaning in some languages—MoMA notes that it translates to “yes, yes” in Russian—and complete nonsense in others. For English speakers, it sounds like little more than a baby’s first words.

Regardless of who came up with it, Dada made the perfect name for the movement, what with its childish associations, international reach, and utter absurdity. It became official in 1918 with Tzara’s Dada Manifesto.

De Stijl

Coined in 1917

Theo and Nelly van Doesburg in the studio on Rue du Moulin Vert, Paris, 1923. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This Amsterdam-based movement, known for its use of primary color palettes and straight-lined shapes, has an equally straightforward origin for its name. De Stijl adapted its moniker from a journal launched in 1917 by one of the movement’s leaders, painter and theoretician Theo van Doesburg. He and another founder, geometric abstraction icon Piet Mondrian, spread their ideas on harmony and clarity in art throughout interwar Holland via De Stijl magazine, which van Doesburg also edited.

De Stijl artists sought an ideal of balance—in art as in life—after the tragedies of World War I, and ultimately hoped their hyper-rational style would lead to a harmonious, functional, aesthetically pleasing world, and one characterized by greater moral clarity. As Mondrian wrote in an issue of De Stijl, such a “pure plastic vision should build a new society.” He initially dubbed these concepts “Neo-Plasticism,” a term still often used to refer to his own work. But De Stijl’s simple meaning—it’s Dutch for “the style”—made it even more apropos for the movement.

Bauhaus

Coined in 1919

Bauhaus, 1925-1926. Walter Gropius The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Dessau

Like many others in the aftermath of World War I, German architect Walter Gropius sought to reform his country’s defeated, anxiety-ridden society. In his case, this took the form of a school that he founded and named the Bauhaus (from the German words “bauen” and “haus,” roughly translating to “house of building”)—what he described, in his 1919 manifesto, as “a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” The word Bauhaus has roots in “Bauhütten,” which were medieval lodges used as shelters for stonemasons in Gothic Germany.

The Bauhaus School indeed eradicated the boundaries between structural and decorative arts during the late 19th century, and became a massively influential center for art, architecture, and design. Though the school’s location changed multiple times during its existence—from Weimar to Dessau and finally Berlin, where it was shuttered by the Nazis in 1933—its curriculum remained consistently strong and innovative. (It would later morph into the “New Bauhaus” school, directed by Bauhaus alumnus László Moholy-Nagy, in Chicago.)

With faculty members like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, Bauhaus’s focus on industrial design, hands-on workshop training, and emphasis on functionality produced not only a slew of iconic alumni—including Marcel Breuer, Anni and Josef Albers, and Herbert Bayer—but also an iconic movement in its own right.

Abstract Expressionism

Coined in 1919

Selected Images of Jackson Pollock painting, 1950. Hans Namuth Phillips

When art historians talk about Abstract Expressionism, they’re almost always referring to the famed post-war movement based in New York—but the term had actually existed decades before Jackson Pollock started dripping paint all over his canvases. It first appeared in an article on German Expressionism from 1919; 10 years later, inaugural MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. used it to describe works by Wassily Kandinsky.

But it was American critic Robert M. Coates that introduced the phrase as we know it today; in 1946, he described Hans Hofmann’s messy, colorful paintings as Abstract Expressionist; he subsequently applied the term to the chaotic canvases of fellow New York dwellers Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

More a loosely-affiliated circle of artists than a movement, the Abstract Expressionists developed the distinct (yet parallel) modes of action painting and color field painting. It wasn’t until the early ’50s that any of these artists formally came together—to boycott a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition titled “American Painting Today—1950.” Pollock, de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and 14 other artists wrote a protest letter to the museum, attacking it for alleged bias against “modern painting.” The letter soon landed on the front page of the New York Times.

American media quickly grew fascinated with these bold painters, an interest that apexed with a 1951 profile in LIFE magazine that (literally) brought “Abstract Expressionism” to the nation’s doorsteps. It included a now-legendary ensemble photo of 15 artists who practiced the style.

CoBrA

Coined in 1948

The blue bird, 1966. Asger Jorn HUNDERTMARKartFAIR

Composition with mask, 1952. Egill Jacobsen HUNDERTMARKartFAIR

On November 8, 1948, the 25-year-old painter-slash-poet Christian Dotremont invited a group of artists from Denmark, Holland, and his native Belgium to meet him at a café in Paris. This wasn’t their first encounter, however. Dotrement, Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Carl-Henning Pedersen, and the other attendees all knew one another, but from an earlier world—one before the devastations of World War II. This informal circle of artists had been temporarily broken during several years of Nazi rule, and by the time the war ended, “we wanted to start again, like a child,” as Appel once said.

That November evening saw the official formation of this continent-spanning group that came to be known as CoBrA: a portmanteau of its members’ home bases of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. According to its manifesto, written by Dotremont shortly thereafter, the group chose to call itself “CoBrA” as “a tribute to the geographic passion which filled us in our refound freedom, giving birth to the animal myth.” (And they probably thought it sounded a lot cooler than “DeBeHo.”)

The CoBrA group spoke out against pre-war art movements such as Surrealism, and also rejected the geometric abstraction pioneered by De Stijl. In fact, the troubles of the war caused them to resent Western culture entirely and to turn to “primitive” cultures and children’s scribbles for inspiration. (“Primitive art” is a highly problematic term used in the late 19th and 20th centuries to mean, essentially, “non-Western art.”)

Though short-lived, CoBrA had a massive influence on a later generation of artists, and contributed to the development of the contemporary auction category called “Outsider art”—which itself was not coined as a term until 1972, and remains popular (yet understandably controversial) to this day.

Gutai

Coined in 1954

Work, . Kazuo Shiraga Whitestone Gallery

Circle, 1971. Jiro Yoshihara Whitestone Gallery

Gutai, another post-war movement, was formed near Osaka, Japan, in 1954. Its name is usually translated into English as “concrete,” which reflects its followers’ aims of creating works of art with more than just a tube of paint—incorporating materials such as mud, chemicals, plastic, and Elmer’s glue. According to its entry in the Tate’s dictionary of art terms, Gutai has also been translated into English as “embodiment,” perhaps pointing to its ties with performance art, and also functioning as a double-entendre: For instance, Kazuo Shiraga’s “performance paintings,” which saw him dipping his feet in paint buckets or writhing, half-nude, in a pile of mud, can be understood as literal embodiments of putting brush to canvas.

Indeed, as Jiro Yoshihara, the movement’s co-founder and primary leader, wrote in its 1956 manifesto: “Gutai Art does not alter matter. Gutai Art imparts life to matter.” Gutai artists, including Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, and Saburo Murakami, experimented with new forms and media while also remaining inherently tied to painting; this set it apart from other performance-based, post-war movements, like Happenings, which totally abandoned any trace of the traditional art form. Further, Yoshihara himself was a self-taught painter, which likely explains Gutai’s continued connection to the medium even while artists pushed its limits.

The Stars Art Group (Xing Xing)

Coined in 1979

Femme Allongée AP WK16, 2010. Wang Keping 王克平 10 Chancery Lane Gallery

Beijinger, 1988. Huang Rui 10 Chancery Lane Gallery

Considered the first avant-garde Chinese art movement, the Stars Art Group (a.k.a. Xing Xing) emerged in Beijing during the late 1970s. Founded by Huang Rui and Ma Desheng in opposition to the state-promoted Socialist Realist art, the group grew to include like-minded artists such as Ai Weiwei, Li Shuang, and Wang Keping. These artists were mostly untrained and didn’t work in a particular style; rather, they created expressive works that commented on censorship and isolation in China. Primary examples include Wang’s bronze sculptures that satirized Mao Zedong, or Ai’s early Suzhou River in Shanghai (1979), in which the 22-year-old prodigy brought Pop art aesthetics to a traditional Chinese landscape.

As for its colorful name, Ma once explained that they called themselves the Stars “to emphasize our individuality. This was directed at the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution.” Indeed, the group’s first exhibition in September 1979—in which they hung their own artworks on railings outside of the state-controlled China Art Gallery (known today as the National Art Museum) in Beijing—was a protest against the Mao-instated rule mandating that public displays of art be approved by the government.

Authorities were quick to react, shutting the exhibition down after two days; in response, the Stars organized a march calling for democracy and artistic freedom. Their efforts proved successful: The group was allowed to re-stage the show in a different location, and it was said to have attracted over 80,000 viewers over 18 days. Despite this initial win, the government’s criticism and censorship of the Stars continued, and the group decided to split under political pressure in the early 1980s.

Afterwards, many of its members emigrated from China in search for greater freedoms, most notably Ai, who lived in the U.S. from 1981 to 1993 and is now based in Berlin, where he continues to use art as something of a political weapon—much in the spirit of the Stars.

Afrofuturism

Coined in 1993

Inertia, 2015. Jacolby Satterwhite LUNDGREN GALLERY

In Killing Fields Sweet Butterfly Ascend, 2003. Wangechi Mutu rosenfeld porcini

Spanning the fields of music, film, literature, and beyond, Afrofuturism is best defined as an Africanist movement to hypothesize, visualize, and understand black existence in a postmodern world. Early Afrofuturist works of the 1960s and ’70s, from Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novels to Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz compositions, were informed as much by futuristic thinking and the aesthetics of the mid-century space age as by traditional arts of the African Diaspora.

Though its roots were planted in the mid-20th century, the movement’s name, “Afrofuturism,” wouldn’t emerge for a few decades. The term comes from the influential essay “Black to the Future,” first written by cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993 and published in the 1994 book Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture…might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism,’” wrote Dery. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?”

The term Afrofuturism has since been applied to numerous visual artists of later generations—like Renee Cox and Wangechi Mutu—whose works draw upon Butler’s utopian writings and Sun Ra’s mystical persona, and engage with Dery’s existential questions about race, identity, and community. And a younger generation of artists including Juliana Huxtable, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Elia Alba continues to employ Afrofuturist aesthetics.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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How to Be an Artist, According to Kandinsky

Composition, VII, 1913. Wassily Kandinsky The State Tretyakov Gallery

Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky is considered to be one of the very first Western proponents of abstract painting, known for his colorful fields of spidery lines and shapes.

He first developed many of the theories that shaped his practice in his seminal text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), where he laid out his tenets for artistic creation as a spiritual act. Later, during his 11-year teaching stint at the Bauhaus, he expanded upon these ideas in Point and Line to Plane (1926).

But Kandinsky did not intend for his theories to be prescriptive. Artmaking, he insisted, was about freedom. Nevertheless, there are several lessons that artists should heed if they are to meet Kandinsky’s requirements. We start with five below.

Lesson #1: Express your inner world, not the latest artistic trends.

Dreamy Improvisation, 1913. Wassily Kandinsky Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich

Sans titre, 1917. Wassily Kandinsky Galleria Tega

According to Kandinsky, an object could only legitimately be considered art if it was an unadulterated, outward manifestation of the artist’s psyche—of his or her authentic thoughts and feelings. Despite the theoretical underpinnings of his work, Kandinsky believed that theory came after, not before, true artistic creation.

He felt that the expression of one’s inner reality was crucial to achieve moral integrity. Anything less would not only undermine one’s artistic merit, but it would also be spiritually harmful to the artist. Furthermore, true artists should be prepared to be misunderstood throughout their lifetimes.

Lesson #2: Don’t paint things. Paint in abstract form.

Untitled, 1921. Wassily Kandinsky Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

Composition , 1925. Wassily Kandinsky Leila Heller Gallery

Monet’s now-iconic haystacks were an early influence on Kandinsky, who was struck by his own inability to identify the real-world objects that the forms referenced. At first taken aback by this disconnect, Kandinsky soon embraced its possibilities, eventually insisting upon art that was not only abstracted but entirely non-representational.

Kandinsky experimented with compositions populated entirely by lines, simple geometric shapes, and the energized points where they met or overlapped. Unlike artists working in a Suprematist or Constructivist style, he was not interested in exploring or achieving a purity of composition for its own sake and considered the commitment to any specific formal qualities unimportant. Rather, even in their simplest iterations, his forms embody references to the artist’s interior world.

Lesson #3: Approach color as a window into the human soul.

Nine Elements of the Chromatic Circle , 1922-1933. Wassily Kandinsky Les Arts Décoratifs

Gespannt im Winkel, 1930. Wassily Kandinsky Kunstmuseum Bern

While Impressionist painting introduced Kandinsky to unorthodox ways of using color, the Fauvist paintings he saw while living in Paris from 1906 to 1907—with their wild hues that were entirely divorced from the real world—proved to be even more influential. Embracing this type of freedom in color, Kandinsky pushed his thinking a step further.

Influenced by Theory of Colors (1810), which German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had published a century earlier, Kandinsky believed that each color had an inherent personality. For example, green was like a cow: peaceful yet strong. Yellow, while warm and earthy, also represented rage and could be deeply unsettling. Blue, on the other hand, was both serene and heavenly, and could be experienced as a kind of transcendent spirituality.

Kandinsky compared colors to the keys of a piano and the human soul to the piano itself. As an artist used colors, he or she was in effect playing different musical notes, causing “vibrations in the soul.”

Lesson #4: Inject rhythm into your painting, like a musical score.

Counter weights (Gegengewichte), 1926. Wassily Kandinsky Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr, Mülheim an der Ruhr

Composition in red and black, 1920. Wassily Kandinsky The State Museum of Art, Tashkent

The connection between painting and music was more than just a metaphorical analogy for Kandinsky. He most likely had synesthesia, a condition in which two or more of a person’s senses are intertwined. One indication of this was the striking experience he once had during a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin, in which he had a vision of lines and colors that presented themselves in tandem with the opera’s score.

Kandinsky noted that, even without synesthesia, colors had implicit aural qualities: No one would associate yellow with low notes nor deep blue with high notes. Colors affected the viewer, therefore, with respect not only to their visual associations but also to the sounds they produced (whether or not they were consciously heard), and a painting would do well to be composed like a musical score.

In Point and Line to Plane (1926), Kandinsky expands on elements such as rhythm and amplification. An artist should experiment with repetition, ordering, and scale, not just with colors but also with points, lines, and planes. These, he believed, were the building blocks of a composition.

Lesson #5: By creating original work, you will further the cause of humanity.

Komposition 4, 1911. Wassily Kandinsky Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf

Violett, 1923. Wassily Kandinsky Redfern Gallery Ltd.

Kandinsky’s philosophy about spiritual life and art is founded on the idea of a three-tiered triangle containing all of humanity, with the sections descending from top down, smallest to largest. The triangle is slowly—nearly imperceptibly—moving forward and upward, towards a higher level of enlightenment. The top of the triangle represents the current day, while the next segments represent future ages.

The most spiritually elevated people exist in the top section and are, as such, the smallest group; they see today what others will not understand until tomorrow. Artists exist in every segment of the triangle, and those who can see beyond the bounds of their section are prophets, offering “spiritual food” that will only be fully grasped by the segment below in the day to come.

The artist’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, when translated into art, have the power to affect the spiritual climate of his or her society. The artist is obligated to use his or her talent to make a positive impact in this way—to create sincere, original work that helps humanity toward collective enlightenment.

—Rachel Lebowitz

from Artsy News

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