Art-203 / Intro to the Visual Arts – 16 : Modernism | Spring 2015

Posted by: Ping

Modernism was an artistic movement that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and activities of daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political environment of an emerging fully industrialized world. Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements. Modernism’s stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, and radicalism disregards conventional expectations. Many modernist artists rejected religious belief. In some fields the effects of Modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. In fact, Modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself.

American Modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the 20th century between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century. It includes the activities and creations of the contemporary forms of art, design, architecture, and literature. In the visual art area.

Modernism generally includes the following artistic movements/aspects:

  • Fauvism
  • Cubism
  • Expressionism
  • Abstract Art
  • Surrealism
  • Dadaism
  • Pop Art

The most influential modernist artists in the world:

  • Henri Matisse
  • Pablo Picasso
  • Salvador Dali
  • Piet Mondrian
  • Wassily Kandinsky
  • Henry Moore

Four Modern Masters Who Changed Our World:

  • Henri Matisse
  • Pablo Picasso
  • Salvador Dali
  • Andy Warhol
  • Henry-MooreHenry Moore was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore’s works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom. Most sculptors who emerged during the height of Moore’s fame, and in the aftermath of his death, found themselves cast in his shadow. By the late 1940s, Moore was a worldwide celebrity; he was the voice of British sculpture, and of British Modernism in general.

“All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don’t really, you know.”

– Henry Moore

 

"Untitled Abstraction" | Frank Stella
“Untitled Abstraction” | Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella was born in Massachusetts, United States. He attended Princeton University, where he majored in history. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artist development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.

  • Hans Hofmann
    "The_Gate"_1959–60 | Hans Hofmann
    “The_Gate”_1959–60 | Hans Hofmann

    Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter. He was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he introduced Modernism and modernist theories to a new generation of American artists. Through his teaching and his lectures at his art schools in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, he widened the scope of Modernism in the United States.