The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin was essential for the development of modern art. Picasso made his first cubist paintings based in the idea, created by Cezanne, that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. After cubism several movements emerged; Futurism (Balla), Abstract (Kandinsky, Der Blaue Reiter, Mondrian), Suprematism (Malevich), Constructivism (Tatlin), Dadaism (Duchamp, Arp) and Surrealism (Dali, Ernst). Modern painting influenced all visual arts, from architecture to design and became an experimental laboratory in which artists stretched the limits of this medium to his extreme. Van Gogh's painting had great influence in Expressionism which can be seen in Die Brücke, a group lead by German painter Ernst Kirchner and in Edvard Munch or Egon Schiele's work.Post-second world war painting renewed Abstract art with artists like Jackson Pollock and Vieira da Silva and as a response to this tendence Pop-Art emerged with names like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, trying to take popular and mass culture into fine art.During the 1960's and 1970's, there was a reaction against painting. Critics began to veiw it as infected by consumerism and commodification, and as an artistic hegemony. Artists like Ad Reinhardt declared the 'death of painting'. New movements gained prominence; arte povera, performance art, body art, fluxus, the situationists and most importantly, conceptual art. This trend to distance art from painting occurred throughout the 1970's. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, there was a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, America and Britain. These movements were called Transavantguardia, Neue Wilde, Neo-expressionism and the School of London respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. They were a reaction against not only conceptual art, but what was veiwed as the sterile abstraction of high modernism before it. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries. This type of art largely disappeared after the art crash of the late 1980's. Today painting holds a respected position alongside installation art, the major vehicle for academics and the artistic vanguard.
Contemporary, or post-modern painting is an open field no longer divided by the objective vs non-objective dichotomy. Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract. What has currency is content, exploring the boundaries of the medium, and a refusal to recapitulate the works of the past as an end goal.
Modern and Contemporary
The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin was essential for the development of modern art. Picasso made his first cubist paintings based in the idea, created by Cezanne, that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. After cubism several movements emerged; Futurism (Balla), Abstract (Kandinsky, Der Blaue Reiter, Mondrian), Suprematism (Malevich), Constructivism (Tatlin), Dadaism (Duchamp, Arp) and Surrealism (Dali, Ernst). Modern painting influenced all visual arts, from architecture to design and became an experimental laboratory in which artists stretched the limits of this medium to his extreme. Van Gogh's painting had great influence in Expressionism which can be seen in Die Brücke, a group lead by German painter Ernst Kirchner and in Edvard Munch or Egon Schiele's work.
Post-second world war painting renewed Abstract art with artists like Jackson Pollock and Vieira da Silva and as a response to this tendence Pop-Art emerged with names like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, trying to take popular and mass culture into fine art.
During the 1960's and 1970's, there was a reaction against painting. Critics began to veiw it as infected by consumerism and commodification, and as an artistic hegemony. Artists like Ad Reinhardt declared the 'death of painting'. New movements gained prominence; arte povera, performance art, body art, fluxus, the situationists and most importantly, conceptual art. This trend to distance art from painting occurred throughout the 1970's. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, there was a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, America and Britain. These movements were called Transavantguardia, Neue Wilde, Neo-expressionism and the School of London respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. They were a reaction against not only conceptual art, but what was veiwed as the sterile abstraction of high modernism before it. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries. This type of art largely disappeared after the art crash of the late 1980's. Today painting holds a respected position alongside installation art, the major vehicle for academics and the artistic vanguard.
Contemporary, or post-modern painting is an open field no longer divided by the objective vs non-objective dichotomy. Artists can achieve critical success whether their images are representational or abstract. What has currency is content, exploring the boundaries of the medium, and a refusal to recapitulate the works of the past as an end goal.
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