MODERN ART

Modern art defines the forms and ideas of art during the period around the 1860s to the 1970s and encompasses artistic work made during that time period. The word is most commonly linked with art in which old traditions have been abandoned in favour of innovation.

Modern art is the creative world’s response to the rationalist methods and viewpoints of new lives and ideas brought about by the industrial age’s technological advancements, which caused current society to manifest itself in new ways in comparison to the past.

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Characteristics of Modern art style

·???????Movement of modern art like fauvism, expressionism and colour field painting were first to exploit colour in major way.

·???????New techniques were introduced like neo-impressionism, Automatic drawing, chromolithography, etc.

·???????Modern painters affixed objects to their canvases such as fragments of newspaper & other assemblages.

Major Elements

Messer dissects the elements of modern painting for an uninformed audience by describing five basic elements of modern painting: representation, expression, decoration, construction, and fantasy. Each section is illustrated by a work of modern art from the collection, including Jean Hélion, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso.

Elements of Modern Art presents a glimpse into the history and theories of modern museum art, at a moment when abstract painting was still an unfamiliar form of artistic expression.

Principles of Modern art

·???????Colour scheme : The major colour schemes in art are analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triadic, rectangular and monochromatic.

·???????Splattering and dripping are some of the techniques artists use.

·???????Pulling paint with a palette knife or squeegee, colours mix together, so the results are always surprising.

·???????Pouring: Watching the colours spread and fuse into one colourful and aesthetic blob is indeed satisfying. It is believed to be first discovered by Mexican abstract expressionist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

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Artists and their famous artworks

1) Alphonse Legros

Legros was a French painter who settled in London in 1863. He was initially much influenced by the French Realist painter Gustave Courbet, as can be seen in Le Repas des Pauvres (‘The meal of the poor’). From the late 1860s a number of Victorian painters chose to paint ‘social realist’ subjects of this type to draw attention to the poverty and hardship of working class life.

?2) Kazimir Malevich (Black Square)

Malevich’s black square: Kazimir Malevich painted his first Black Square in 1915. It is one of the seminal works of modern art, and of Western art generally, marking as it does the break between representational painting and abstract painting. Malevich declared the square a work of Suprematism, a movement which he proclaimed but which is associated almost exclusively with his own work

3) Raoul Hausmann

Hausmann, a founder member of the Berlin Dada group, developed photomontage as a tool of satire and political protest. Although the ‘art critic’ is identified by a stamp as George Grosz, another member of the group, the image was probably an anonymous figure cut from a magazine. The fragment of a German banknote behind the critic’s neck suggests that he is controlled by capitalist forces. The words in the background are part of a poem poster made by Hausmann to be pasted on the walls of Berlin.

4) Georges Braque

A bottle and fishes on a plate, laid on a table with a drawer – have been dramatically fragmented to form a grid-like structure of interpenetrating planes. The traditional domestic subject matter and sober colours in this work can be seen as a reaction against the luminous hues and free expression of Braque’s earlier fauvist paintings.

By:- Sakshi