Schools Of Art


Home Art Prints Canvas Art Photography Celebrities Mirrors Sculptures Limited Edition Art

My Gallery	Shopping Cart	Contact Us
Login	Help	Referrals

Search for Prints

by Title/Description

by Artist

by Category

Quick Print Finder

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Quick Artist Finder

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Navigating Argyll Artists

Become an Argyll Artist

Commission an Artist

Courses and Holidays

Argyll Artists On Tour

Info About Art

National Galleries

Home > Argyll Artists > Schools Of Art

ANCIENT & CLASSICAL ART
KEY DATES: 15000 BC / 400 BC-200AD / 350 AD-450AD
Ancient - There are few remaining examples with early art often favouring drawing over colour. Work has been found recently in tombs, Egyptian frescoes, pottery and metalwork.
Classical - Relating to or from ancient Roman or Greek architecture and art. Mainly concerned with geometry and symmetry rather than individual expression.

Byzantine - A religious art characterised by large domes, rounded arches and mosaics from the eastern Roman Empire in the 4th Century.

MEDIEVAL & GOTHIC
KEY DATES: 400AD
Medieval - A highly religious art beginning in the 5th Century in Western Europe. It was characterised by iconographic paintings illustrating scenes from the bible.
Gothic - This style prevailed between the 12th century and the 16th century in Europe. Mainly an architectural movement, Gothic was characterised by its detailed ornamentation most noticeably the pointed archways and elaborate rib vaulting.

First developed in France, Gothic was intended as a solution to the inadequacies of Romanesque architecture. It allowed for cathedrals to be built with thinner walls and it became possible to introduce stained glass windows instead of traditional mosaic decorations. Some of the finest examples of the style include the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims and Amiens. The term was also used to describe sculpture and painting that demonstrated a greater degree of naturalism.

RENAISSANCE
KEY DATES: 1300s
This movement began in Italy in the 14th century and the term, literally meaning rebirth, describes the revival of interest in the artistic achievements of the Classical world. Initially in a literary revival Renaissance was determined to move away from the religion-dominated Middle Ages and to turn its attention to the plight of the individual man in society. It was a time when individual expression and worldly experience became two of the main themes of Renaissance art.
The movement owed a lot to the increasing sophistication of society, characterised by political stability, economic growth and cosmopolitanism. Education blossomed at this time, with libraries and academies allowing more thorough research to be conducted into the culture of the antique world.

In addition, the arts benefited from the patronage of such influential groups as the Medici family of Florence, the Sforza family of Milan and Popes Julius II and Leo X. The works of Petrarch first displayed the new interest in the intellectual values of the Classical world in the early 14th century and the romance of this era as rediscovered in the Renaissance period can be seen expressed by Boccaccio.

Leonardo da Vinci was the archetypal Renaissance man representing the humanistic values of the period in his art, science and writing. Michelangelo and Raphael were also vital figures in this movement, producing works regarded for centuries as embodying the classical notion of perfection. Renaissance architects included Alberti, Brunelleschi and Bramante.

Many of these artists came from Florence and it remained an important centre for the Renaissance into the 16th century eventually to be overtaken by Rome and Venice. Some of the ideas of the Italian Renaissance did spread to other parts of Europe, for example to the German artist Albrecht Dürer of the 'Northern Renaissance'. But by the 1500s Mannerism had overtaken the Renaissance and it was this style that caught on in Europe.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Leonardo da Vinci
Sandro Botticelli
Raphael
Titian

MANNERISM
KEY DATES: 1520-1600
Artists of the Early Renaissance and the High Renaissance developed their characteristic styles from the observation of nature and the formulation of a pictorial science. When Mannerism matured after 1520(The year Raphael died), all the representational problems had been solved. A body of knowledge was there to be learned. Instead of nature as their teacher, Mannerist artists took art. While Renaissance artists sought nature to find their style, the Mannerists looked first for a style and found a manner.
In Mannerist paintings, compositions can have no focal point, space can be ambiguous, figures can be characterized by an athletic bending and twisting with distortions, exaggerations, an elastic elongation of the limbs, bizarre posturing on one hand, graceful posturing on the other hand, and a rendering of the heads as uniformly small and oval. The composition is jammed by clashing colors, which is unlike what we've seen in the balanced, natural, and dramatic colors of the High Renaissance. Mannerist artwork seeks instability and restlessness. There is also a fondness for allegories that have lascivious undertones.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Andrea del Sarto
Jacopo da Pontormo
Correggio

BAROQUE
KEY DATES: 1600s
Baroque Art emerged in Europe around 1600, as an reaction against the intricate and formulaic Mannerist style which dominated the Late Renaissance. Baroque Art is less complex, more realistic and more emotionally affecting than Mannerism.
This movement was encouraged by the Catholic Church, the most important patron of the arts at that time, as a return to tradition and spirituality.

One of the great periods of art history, Baroque Art was developed by Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, among others. This was also the age of Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Vermeer.

In the 18th century, Baroque Art was replaced by the more elegant and elaborate Rococo style.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Caravaggio
Annibale Carracci
Gianlorenzo Bernini Rubens
Rembrandt
Nicolas Poussin Velázquez
Vermeer

ROCOCO
KEY DATES: 1700s
Throughout the 18th century in France, a new wealthy and influential middle-class was beginning to rise, even though the royalty and nobility continued to be patrons of the arts. Upon the death of Louis XIV and the abandonment of Versailles, the Paris high society became the purveyors of style. This style, primarily used in interior decoration, came to be called Rococo. The term Rococo was derived from the French word "rocaille", which means pebbles and refers to the stones and shells use to decorate the interiors of caves. Therefore, shell forms became the principal motif in Rococo. The society women competed for the best and most elaborate decorations for their houses. Hence the Rococo style was highly dominated by the feminine taste and influence.
Francois Boucher was the 18th century painter and engraver whose works are regarded as the perfect expression of French taste in the Rococo period. Trained by his father who was a lace designer, Boucher won fame with his sensuous and light-hearted mythological paintings and landscapes. He executed important works for both the Queen of France and Mme. de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, who was considered the most powerful woman in France at the time. Boucher was Mme. de Pompadour's favorite artist and was commissioned by her for numerous paintings and decorations. Boucher also became the principal designer for the royal porcelain factory and the director of the Gobelins tapestry factory. The Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas is a template for a tapestry made by this factory.

Characterized by elegant and refined yet playful subject matters, Boucher's style became the epitome of the court of Louis XV. His style consisted of delicate colors and gentle forms painted within a frivolous subject matter. His works typically utilized delightful and decorative designs to illustrate graceful stories with Arcadian shepherds, goddesses and cupids playing against a pink and blue sky. These works mirrored the frolicsome, artificial and ornamented decadence of the French aristocracy of the time.

The Rococo is sometimes considered a final phase of the Baroque period.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Francois Boucher
William Hogarth
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Angelica Kauffmann
Giovanni Antonio Canaletto

NEO-CLASSICAL
KEY DATES: 1750-1880
A nineteenth century French art style and movement that originated as a reaction to the Baroque. It sought to revive the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art. Neoclassic artists used classical forms to express their ideas about courage, sacrifice, and love of country. David and Canova are examples of neo-classicists.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Jacques-Louis David
Sir Henry Raeburn
Sir Joshua Reynolds Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Thomas Gainsborough Antonio Canova
Arnold Bocklin

ROMANTICISM
KEY DATES: 1800-1880
Romanticism was basically a reaction against Neoclassicism, it is a deeply-felt style which is individualistic, beautiful, exotic, and emotionally wrought.
Although Romanticism and Neoclassicism were philosophically opposed, they were the dominant European styles for generations, and many artists were affected to a greater or lesser degree by both. Artists might work in both styles at different times or even mix the styles, creating an intellectually Romantic work using a Neoclassical visual style, for example.

Great artists closely associated with Romanticism include J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, and William Blake.

In the United States, the leading Romantic movement was the Hudson River School of dramatic landscape painting.

Obvious successors of Romanticism include the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Symbolists. But Impressionism, and through it almost all of 20th century art, is also firmly rooted in the Romantic tradition.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
George Stubbs
William Blake
John Martin
Francisco Goya
Sir Thomas Lawrence
John Constable
Eugene Delacroix
Sir Edwin landseer
Caspar David Friedrich
JMW Turner

HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL
KEY DATES: 1825-1875
The name given to a number of American landscape painters working between 1825-1875, inspired by their pride in the beauty of their homeland. The three founders, and probably the most important figures were Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty and Asher B Durand.
The patriotic spirit of the painters of The Hudson River School won them great popularity in the middle of 19th Century.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Thomas Cole
Thomas Doughty
Asher B Durand

PRE-RAPHAELITES
KEY DATES: 1848-1920s
This movement was originally founded in 1848 by Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The name was decided upon as the group aimed to rediscover the painting styles of artists working earlier than the time of Raphael. The group, initially comprising Rossetti, his brother William, James Collinson, the sculptor Thomas Woolner as well as Hunt and Millais, specialised in detailed studies of medieval scenes strong on elaborate symbolism and noble themes.
Controversy tainted the group early on with commentators believing their name implied that they were superior artists to Raphael, but the influential critic John Ruskin supported them and ensured their success. However, after Millais' 'Ophelia' (1850-1851) was exhibited to great acclaim at the Academy Exhibition the group dissolved.

Rossetti, together with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones formed an alternative Brotherhood based in Oxford, specialising in the depiction of pale, ethereal beauties, while Millais and Hunt went their separate ways but continued working according to the original ideas of the movement.

Pre-Raphaelitism was highly successful during the Victorian era and continued into the early 20th century with artists such as Maxwell Armfield and Frank Cadogan Cowper before becoming out-moded in the 1920s.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Ford Maddox Brown
Sir John Everett Millais
William Holman Hunt
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
William Morris
Edward Burne-Jones
John William Waterhouse

ART & CRAFTS MOVEMENT
KEY DATES: 1850s
The Victorian style of heavily ornamented interiors displaying many pieces of furniture, collections of small ornamental objects, and surfaces covered with fringed cloths prevailed in middle-class homes in England and America during the latter half of the 19th century. In both countries, techniques of mass production promoted the use of reproductions in many different styles. William Morris, the British poet, artist and architect rejected this opulence in favor of simplicity, good craftsmanship, and good design. The Arts & Crafts Movement was born.
To the proponents of Arts & Crafts, the Industrial Revolution separated humans from their own creativity and individualism; the worker was a cog in the wheel of progress, living in an environment of shoddy machine-made goods, based more on ostentation than function. These proponents sought to reestablish the ties between beautiful work and the worker, returning to an honesty in design not to be found in mass-produced items. Architecture, furniture, and the decorative arts became the focus of the movement.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Walter Crane
John Ruskin
William Morris
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gustav Stickley
Elbert Hubbard
Frank Lloyd Wright
Dirk Van Erp
Charles & Henry Greene

SYMBOLISM
KEY DATES: 1885-1910
Symbolism began as a reaction to the literal representation of subjects preferring to create more suggestive and evocative works. It had its roots in literature with poets such as Baudelaire believing ideas and emotions could be conveyed not only through the meaning of words but also in their sound and rhythm.

The styles of the Symbolist painters varied considerably, but they shared many of the same themes particularly a fascination with the mystical and the visionary. The erotic, the perverse, death and debauchery were also regular interests for the Symbolists. The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley.

The movement also known as Synthetism flourished from around 1885 and continued until 1910. It was an important move away from the naturalism of the Impressionists and showed a preference for feeling over intellectualism. A number of sculptors were also involved including the Belgian Georg Minne and the Norwegian Gustav Vigeland. In Symbolism's faith in the power of expressivity possible in a colour or a line, the movement is crucial in understanding the development of the abstract arts in the 20th century.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Gustave Moreau
Odilon Redon
Gustav Klimt

REALISM
KEY DATES: 1830-1870
Realism, also known as the Realist school, was a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects. Daumier, Millet and Courbet were realists.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Gustave Courbet
Jean-Francois Millet
Honore Daumier
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
J A MacNeil Whistler
John Singer Sargeant

IMPRESSIONISM
KEY DATES: 1867-1886
A French 19th century art movement which marked a momentous break from tradition in European painting. The Impressionists incorporated new scientific research into the physics of colour to achieve a more exact representation of colour and tone.
The sudden change in the look of these paintings was brought about by a change in methodology: applying paint in small touches of pure colour rather than broader strokes, and painting out of doors to catch a particular fleeting impression of colour and light. The result was to emphasise the artist's perception of the subject matter as much as the subject itself.

Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir.

Manet influenced the development of impressionism. He painted everyday objects. Pissaro and Sisley painted the French countryside and river scenes. Degas enjoyed painting ballet dancers and horse races. Morisot painted women doing everyday things. Renoir loved to show the effect of sunlight on flowers and figures. Monet was interested in subtle changes in the atmosphere.

While the term Impressionist covers much of the art of this time, there were smaller movements within it, such as Pointillism, Art Nouveau and Fauvism.

Pointilism was developed from Impressionism and involved the use of many small dots of colour to give a painting a greater sense of vibrancy when seen from a distance. The equal size dots never quite merge in the viewer's perception resulting in a shimmering effect like one experiences on a hot and sunny day. One of the leading exponents was Seurat to whom the term was first applied in regard to his painting 'La Grand Jette' (1886).

Seurat was part of the Neo-Impressionist movement which included Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Signac. The word Divisionism describes the theory they followed while the actual process was known as pointillism.The effects of this technique, if used well, were often far more striking than the conventional approach of mixing colours together.

The Neo-Impressionist movement was brief yet influential. The term Divisionism was also the name of an Italian version of Neo-Impressionism in the 1890s and early 1900s, and one can trace a line to Futurism which was founded in 1909.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Edouard Manet
Eugene Boudin
Frederic Bazille
Alfred Sisley Edgar Degas
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Mary Cassatt
Camille Pissarro Claude Monet
Walter Richard Sickert
Berthe Morisot

POST IMPRESSIONISM
KEY DATES: 1880-1920
Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.
The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone. Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced “the abominable error of naturalism.” With the young painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. Copying the pure, flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure colour and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to create poetic images of the Tahitians among whom he would eventually live. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape.

In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Paul Cézanne
Georges Seurat
Paul Gauguin
Vincent van Gogh
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Paul Signac
Auguste Rodin
Amedeo Modigliani

FAUVISM
KEY DATES: 1905-1908
The first of the major avant-garde movements in European 20th century art, Fauvism was characterised by paintings that used intensely vivid, non-naturalistic and exuberant colours.
The style was essentially expressionist, and generally featured landscapes in which forms were distorted. The Fauves first exhibited together in 1905 in Paris. They found their name when a critic pointed to a renaissance-like sculpture in the middle of the same gallery as the exhibition and exclaimed derisively 'Donatello au milieu des fauves!' ('Donatello among the wild beasts!'). The name caught on, and was gleefully accepted by the artists themselves.

The movement was subjected to more mockery and abuse as it developed, but began to gain respect when major art buyers, such as Gertrude Stein, took an interest. The leading artists involved were Matisse, Rouault, Derain, Vlaminck, Braque and Dufy. Although short-lived (1905-8), Fauvism was extremely influential in the evolution of 20th century art.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Andre Derain
Henri Matisse
Raoul Dufy
Maurice de Vlaminck

ART NOUVEAU
KEY DATES: late 1800s
This describes a decorative style popular from the last decade of the 19th century to the beginning of the First World War. It was characterised by an elaborate ornamental style based on asymmetrical lines, frequently depicting flowers, leaves or tendrils, or in the flowing hair of a female. It can be seen most effectively in the decorative arts, for example interior design, glasswork and jewellery. However, it was also seen in posters and illustration as well as certain paintings and sculptures of the period.
The movement took its name from La Maison de l'Art Nouveau in Paris, a shop keen to promote modern ideas in art. It was influenced by the Symbolists most obviously in their shared preference for exotic detail, as well as by Celtic and Japanese art. Art Nouveau flourished in Britain with its progressive Arts and Crafts movement, but was highly successful all around the world.

The leading exponents included the illustrators Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Crane in England; the architects Henry van de Velde and Victor Horta in Belgium; the jewellery designer René Lalique in France; the painter Gustav Klimt in Austria; the architect Antonio Gaudí in Spain; and the glassware designer Louis C. Tiffany and the architect Louis Sullivan in the United States. Its most common themes were symbolic and frequently erotic and the movement, despite not lasting beyond 1914 was important in terms of the development of abstract art.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Gustav Klimt
Alphonse Mucha
Aubrey Beardsley
Antonio Gaudí
Hector Guimard
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

ART DECO
KEY DATES: 1920-1930
An art movement involving a mix of modern decorative art styles, largely of the 1920s and 1930s, whose main characteristics were derived from various avant-garde painting styles of the early twentieth century. Art deco works exhibit aspects of Cubism, Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism-- with abstraction, distortion, and simplification, particularly geometric shapes and highly intense colors--celebrating the rise of commerce, technology, and speed.
The growing impact of the machine can be seen in repeating and overlapping images from 1925; and in the 1930s, in streamlined forms derived from the principles of aerodynamics.

The name came from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes, held in Paris, which celebrated living in the modern world.

It was popularly considered to be an elegant style of cool sophistication in architecture and applied arts which range from luxurious objects made from exotic material to mass produced, streamlined items available to a growing middle class.

MODERNISM
KEY DATES: 1890-1940
Modernism was characterised by the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Modernism refers to this period's interest in new types of paints and other materials, in expressing feelings and ideas, in creating abstractions and fantasies, rather than representing what is real. This kind of art requires its audience to observe carefully in order to get some facts about the artist, his intentions, and his environment, before forming judgments about the work. Paul Cézanne is often called the 'Father of Modernism'.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Paul Cezanne
Edouard Manet

EXPRESSIONISM
KEY DATES: 1905-1925
A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.
Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics.

Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement.

The most well known German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Georges Rouault
Oskar Kokoschka
Egon Schiele
Franz Marc
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Edvard Munch
Marc Chagall

CUBISM
KEY DATES: 1908-1914
The Cubist art movement began in Paris around 1907. Led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. Instead they used an analytical system in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from several different points of view simultaneously.
The movement was conceived as 'a new way of representing the world', and assimilated outside influences, such as African art, as well as new theories on the nature of reality, such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Cubism is often divided into two phases - the Analytic phase (1907-12), and the Synthetic phase (1913 through the 1920s). The initial phase attempted to show objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them.

The Synthetic phase featured works that were composed of fewer and simpler forms, in brighter colours. Other major exponents of Cubism included Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Georges Braque
Pablo Picasso
Fernand Leger
Piet Mondrian
Sir Jacob Epstein
Juan Gris

FUTURISM
KEY DATES:1909-1944
An Italian avant-garde art movement that took speed, technology and modernity as its inspiration, Futurism portrayed the dynamic character of 20th century life, glorified war and the machine age, and favoured the growth of Fascism.
The movement was at its strongest from 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first manifesto of Futurism appeared, until the end of World War One. Futurism was unique in that it was a self-invented art movement.

The idea of Futurism came first, followed by a fanfare of publicity; it was only afterwards that artists could find a means to express it. Marinetti's manifesto, printed on the front page of Le Figaro, was bombastic and inflammatory in tone - "set fire to the library shelves... flood the museums" - suggesting that he was more interested in shocking the public than exploring Futurism's themes.

Painters in the movement did have a serious intent beyond Marinetti's bombast, however. Their aim was to portray sensations as a "synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees", and to capture what they called the 'force lines' of objects.

The futurists' representation of forms in motion influenced many painters, including Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay, and such movements as Cubism and Russian Constructivism.

SURREALISM
KEY DATES: 1920-1930s
A literary and art movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement. Like Dada, it was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, the most obvious influence being Freud's model of the subconscious.
Founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton with his Manifesto of Surrealism, the movement's principal aim was 'to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality'. Its roots can be traced back to French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Lautreamont, the latter providing the famous line that summed up the Surrealists' love of the incongruous; "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."

The major artists of the movement were Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Joan Miró. Surrealism's impact on popular culture can still be felt today, most visibly in advertising.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Marcel Duchamp
Georgia O'Keeffe
Max Ernst
Sir Henry Moore
Rene Magritte
Joan Miro
Salvador Dali
Pablo Picasso
Man Ray
Dorothea Tanning
MC Escher

CONSTRUCTIVISM
KEY DATES: 1915-1940s
Constructivism was an invention of the Russian avant-garde that found adherents across the continent. Germany was the site of the most Constructivist activity outside of the Soviet Union (especially as home to Walter Gropius's Bauhaus, a progressive art and design school sympathetic to the movement) but Constructivist ideas were also carried to other art centers, like Paris, London, and eventually the United States.
The international character of the movement was proven by the various origins of its artists. Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, and El Lissitzky brought Constructivism from the Soviet Union to the West. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy came to Germany from Hungary, Theo van Doesburg from the Netherlands. Ben Nicholson was the most prominent English Constructivist. Josef Albers and Hans Richter encountered the movement in their native Germany but were also instrumental in its international dissemination.
Constructivist art is marked by a commitment to total abstraction and a wholehearted acceptance of modernity. Often very geometric, it is usually experimental, rarely emotional. Objective forms which were thought to have universal meaning were preferred over the subjective or the individual. The art is often very reductive as well, paring the artwork down to its basic elements. New media were often used. Again, the context is crucial: the Constructivists sought an art of order, which would reject the past (the old order which had culminated in World War I) and lead to a world of more understanding, unity, and peace. This utopian undercurrent is often missing from more recent abstract art that might be otherwise tied to Constructivism.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Vladimir Tatlin
Kasimir Malevich
Alexandra Exter
Wassily Kandinsky
Alexander Rodchenko
Robert Adams
El Lissitzky
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
KEY DATES: 1940-1960s
Emerging in the 1940s in New York City and flourishing in the Fifties, Abstract Expressionism is regarded by many as the golden age of American art. The movement is marked by its use of brushstrokes and texture, the embracing of chance and the frequently massive canvases, all employed to convey powerful emotions through the glorification of the act of painting itself.
Some of the key figures of the movement were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Although their works vary greatly in style, for example the sprawling pieces of Pollock at one end of the spectrum and the brooding works of Rothko at the other, yet they all share the same outlook which is one of freedom of individual expression.

The term was originally used to describe the work of Kandinsky but was adopted by writers in the Fifties as a way of defining the American movement, although the practitioners, disliking being pigeonholed, preferred the term New York School.

The movement was enormously successful both critically and commercially. The result was such that New York came to replace Paris as the centre for contemporary art and the repercussions of this extraordinarily influential movement can still be felt thirty years after its heyday.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Jackson Pollock
Willem de Kooning
Franz Kline
Robert Motherwell
Arshile Gorky
Josef Hoffmann
Mark Rothko
Clyfford Still
William Baziotes
Adolph Gottlieb
Barnett Newman

HARLEM RENAISSANCE
KEY DATES: 1920-1930s
From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among African-Americans occurred in all fields of art. Beginning as a series of literary discussions in the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City, this African-American cultural movement became known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem Renaissance. More than a literary movement and more than a social revolt against racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression. African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke.
One of the factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the great migration of African-Americans to northern cities (such as New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) between 1919 and 1926. In his influential book The New Negro (1925), Locke described the northward migration of blacks as "something like a spiritual emancipation." Black urban migration, combined with trends in American society as a whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and the rise of radical black intellectuals — including Locke, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis magazine — all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented success of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance period.

POP ART
KEY DATES:1950-1960s
This movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post-war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebrating everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons.
Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself.

Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took familiar objects such as flags and beer bottles as subjects for their paintings, while British artist Richard Hamilton used magazine imagery. The latter's definition of Pop Art - "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" - stressed its everyday, commonplace values.

It was Andy Warhol, however, who really brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell's soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art owed much to dada in the way it mocked the established art world. By embracing commercial techniques, and creating slick, machine-produced art, the Pop artists were setting themselves apart from the painterly, inward-looking tendencies of the Abstract Expressionist movement that immediately preceded them. The leading artists in Pop were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Richard Hamilton
Roy Lichtenstein
Robert Rauschenberg
Andy Warhol
David Hockney
Jeff Koons
Claes Oldenburg
Tom Wesselmann

OP ART
KEY DATES: 1960s
Op Art or Optical Art is the term used to describe paintings or sculptures which seem to swell and vibrate through their use of optical effects. The movement's leading figures were Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely who used patterns and colours in their paintings to achieve a disorientating effect on the viewer.
The sculptors Eric Olsen and Francisco Sobrino used layers of different coloured perspex to create a similar illusion of distortion. The artists used established ideas on perceptive psychology but needed to use maximum precision to gain the results they intended.

Op Art is a form of abstract art and is closely connected to the Kinetic and Constructivist Art movements.

It was fashionable in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s but was greeted with a certain degree of scepticism by the critics.

After 'The Responsive Eye' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 the term became a household name and the style was soon appropriated by fashion designers and high street stores.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Bridget Riley
Heinz Mack
Victor Vasarely

MINIMALISM
KEY DATES: 1962
Minimal Art emerged as a movement in the 1950s and continued through the Sixties and Seventies. It is a term used to describe paintings and sculpture that thrive on simplicity in both content and form, and seek to remove any sign of personal expressivity. The aim of Minimalism is to allow the viewer to experience the work more intensely without the distractions of composition, theme and so on.
There are examples of the Minimalist theory being exercised as early as the 18th century when Goethe constructed an Altar of Good Fortune made simply of a stone sphere and cube. But the 20th century sees the movement come into its own. From the 1920s artists such as Malevich and Duchamp produced works in the Minimalist vein but the movement is known chiefly by its American exponents such as Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly and Donald Judd who reacted against Abstract Expressionism in their stark canvases, sculptures and installations.

Minimal Art is related to a number of other movements such as Conceptual Art in the way the finished work exists merely to convey a theory, Pop Art in their shared fascination with the impersonal and Land Art in the construction of simple shapes. Minimal Art proved highly successful and has been enormously influential on the development of art in the 20th century.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Frank Stella
Ellsworth Kelly

SITUATIONISM
KEY DATES: 1957-1972
They originated in a small band of avante-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner of the group who founded the magazine 'Situationiste Internationale' in 1957. At first, they were principally concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life.
At first, the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure.

The Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers' councils. But they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre's critique of the alienation of everyday life. They believed that the revolutionary movement in advanced capitalist countries should be led by an "enlarged proletariat" which would include the majority of waged laborers. In addition, although they claimed to want neither disciples nor a leadership, they remained an elitist vanguard group who dealt with differences by expelling the dissenting minority. They looked to a world-wide proletarian revolution to bring about the maximum pleasure.

NEO-EXPRESSIONISM
KEY DATES: 1980s
A diverse art movement that dominated the art market in Europe and the United States during the early and mid-1980s. Neo-Expressionism comprised a varied assemblage of young artists who had returned to portraying the human body and other recognizable objects, in reaction to the remote, introverted, highly intellectualized abstract art production of the 1970s. The movement was linked to and in part generated by new and aggressive methods of salesmanship, media promotion, and marketing on the part of dealers and galleries.
Neo-Expressionist paintings themselves, though diverse in appearance, presented certain common traits. Among these were: a rejection of traditional standards of composition and design; an ambivalent and often brittle emotional tone that reflected contemporary urban life and values; a general lack of concern for pictorial idealization; the use of vivid but jarringly banal colour harmonies; and a simultaneously tense and playful presentation of objects in a primitivist manner that communicates a sense of inner disturbance, tension, alienation, and ambiguity (hence the term Neo-Expressionist to describe this approach). Among the principal artists of the movement were the Americans Julian Schnabel and David Salle, the Italians Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, and the Germans Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Neo-Expressionism was controversial both in the quality of its art products and in the highly commercialized aspects of its presentation to the art-buying public.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Julian Schnabel
David Salle
Francesco Clemente
Sandro Chia
Anselm Kiefer
Georg Baselitz

POST MODERNISM
KEY DATES: 1960-present
The name given to a wide range of cultural phenomena, to characterise a move away from the 'highbrow' seriousness of modernism, preferring a more eclectic and populist approach to creativity.
The term came into common use in the 1970s. It is used both as a 'stylistic' term and also as a period designation.

Paintings that have been described as Postmodernist include the work of Stephen McKenna and Carlo Maria Mariani, also selected works by Peter Blake and David Hockney.

REPRESENTATIVE ARTISTS:
Jasper Johns
Frank Stella
Donald Judd
Bridget Riley
Joseph Beuys

Delivery Information

Links

Returns

Terms & Conditions

Sitemap

Argyll Pictures & Framing offer the complete solution for all your refurbishment and interior design needs, including: Picture Frames, Open Edition Art Prints, Poster Prints, Canvas Art, Photographs, Giclée Limited Edition Prints, Fine Art Limited Edition Photographs,
Music Posters, Movies Posters, Fine Art Prints, Limited Edition Canvas Art, Original Art and Paintings. As well as Pre made Mirrors,
Custom Made Mirrors, Bathroom Mirrors, Wall Mirrors, Sculptures, Custom Frames and digital pictures printed onto paper or canvas.
For something unique, please view the work from our Argyll Artists.