Classicism and Neoclassicism

In the arts, historical tradition or aesthetic attitudes based on the art of Greece and Rome in antiquity. In the context of the tradition, Classicism refers either to the art produced in antiquity or to later art inspired by that of antiquity; Neoclassicism always refers to the art produced later but inspired by antiquity. Thus the terms Classicism and Neoclassicism are often used interchangeably.

When used to refer to an aesthetic attitude, Classicism invokes those characteristics normally associated with the art of antiquity—harmony, clarity, restraint, universality, and idealism. Because of the high regard accorded to ancient art, “classic” is sometimes used to mean that the example is the best of its type (e.g., a classical example of a villa). Phases of Western art history that intentionally imitate the antique example directly are usually called Neoclassical.   

   
In the visual arts, besides the general qualities associated with the aesthetic attitude of Classicism, classicizing artists tend to prefer somewhat more specific qualities; these include line over colour, straight lines over curves, frontality and closed compositions over diagonal compositions into deep space, and the general over the particular. Nevertheless, whenever artists have referred to antiquity, they have carried the problems and ideals of their own times with them, interpreting in different ways what antiquity had to offer. Classicism has historically been seen as one of any number of polar opposites.

In painting, artists were to choose subjects that glorified man, use figures suited to the actions being represented, and imitate the appearance of actions in the natural world. In the visual arts the Classicism of the Renaissance is epitomized in “David” (1501–04; Accademia, Florence), in Raphael's portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1516; Louvre, Paris), and in Donato Bramante's Palazzo Caprini (c. 1510; Rome; destroyed). The Last Judgement, fresco by Michelangelo, 1533–41; in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican

1) The Plague at Ashdod (Nicolas Poussin), from the Louvre.
2) Michelangelo's The Last Judgment. Saint Bartholomew is shown holding the knife of his martyrdom and his flayed skin. The face of the skin is recognizable as Michelangelo.

The new conceptual orientation
Throughout the 20th century, another school of thought developed alongside these critics' interest in pure form. The early 20th-century manifestos—in effect, critical statements—of the Constructivist (1920) and De Stijl (1919) movements on the one hand and Dadaism (1919) and Surrealism (1924) on the other grounded art on conceptual rather than formal concerns.

The Russian Constructivists were explicitly antiaesthetic and advocated the idea of the “artist-engineer.” The Dadaists and Surrealists were also ostensibly indifferent to formal stylistic concerns—the former advocated “antiart,” making the production of art an ironical matter (it could be “found” anywhere, depending on the artist's “choice” of object), while the latter, heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, regarded art as an expression of the unconscious and made deliberately absurd works that were like manufactured dreams.

Although they professed conceptual aims, these movements in fact helped broaden expression. Constructivism and De Stijl developed and refined the rational, geometric style that became de rigueur in modern International Style architecture by such architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, while Dadaism's and Surrealism's use of automatist spontaneity, chance, and accident influenced the formal experiments of a generation of artists, particularly those of the Abstract Expressionists.

Despite the conceptual nature of their critical statements, therefore, these movements resisted being easily categorized as purely formal or conceptual. The dual paths these movements embodied—art oriented toward formal innovation and expression versus art oriented toward conceptual aims—would remain central to the major approaches to critical practice and art making throughout the 20th century.

Impressionism (art), a movement in painting that originated in France in the late 19th century. Impressionist painters were considered radical in their time because they broke many of the rules of picture-making set by earlier generations. They found many of their subjects in life around them rather than in history, which was then the accepted source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal of beauty that earlier artists had defined, the impressionists tried to depict what they saw at a given moment, capturing a fresh, original vision that was hard for some people to accept as beautiful. They often painted out of doors, rather than in a studio, so that they could observe nature more directly and set down its most fleeting aspects—especially the changing light of the sun.

To achieve the appearance of spontaneity, impressionist painters used broken brushstrokes of bright, often unmixed colors. This practice produced loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the carefully blended colors and smooth surfaces favored by most artists of the time. The colors in impressionist paintings have an overall luminosity because the painters avoided blacks and earth colors. The impressionists also simplified their compositions, omitting detail to achieve a striking overall effect.
The artists most often associated with impressionism include Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.

Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the neoclassical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-religious works. The group was inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, and its central figure was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Other members were his brother, William Michael Rossetti, an art critic; painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt; art critic Frederick George Stephens; painter James Collinson; and sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner.

Essentially Christian in outlook, the brotherhood deplored the imitative historic and genre painting of their day. Together they sought to revitalize art through a simpler, more positive vision. In portrait painting, for example, the group eschewed the somber colors and formal structure preferred by the Royal Academy. They found their inspiration in the comparatively sincere, religious, and scrupulously detailed art of the Middle Ages. Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities, but much of it has been criticized as superficial and sentimental, if not artificial. Millais eventually left the group, but other English artists joined it, including the painter and designer Edward Coley Burne-Jones and the poet and artist William Morris. The eminent English art critic John Ruskin was an ardent supporter of the movement. Examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting include Millais's The Carpenter Shop (1850, Tate Gallery, London) and D. G. Rossetti's The Wedding of St. George and the Princess Sabra (1857, Tate Gallery).

In literature, the works of the Pre-Raphaelites may be considered a recurrent phase of the romantic movement. In looking back to the Middle Ages, the school paralleled both the Oxford movement in the Anglican church and a Gothic revival led by the English architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. For a time in 1850 the members published a periodical called The Germ, in which some of Rossetti's earliest literary work appeared.

1) Persephone, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
2) Medea by Evelyn De Morgan, 1889, in quattrocento style
3) William Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd, 1851

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Richard Serra. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.

The term has expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Terry Riley. (See also Post-Minimalism).

The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe the plays of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term is also used to describe works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid.

Realism also refers to a mid-19th century cultural movement with its roots in France, where it was a very popular art form around the mid to late 1800s. It came about with the introduction of photography - a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce things that look “objectively real”. Realism was heavily against romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork in the late 18th and early 19th century. Undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism. Truth and accuracy became the goals of many Realists.

Visual Arts

Realists render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects, all in a "true-to-life" manner. Realists tend to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms of art in favor of commonplace themes.

However no art can ever be fully realistic. Distortion in form, simplification of details are required for any painting. Taking this argument further, newer forms of art like Surrealism, hyperrealism, Magic Realism have developed in the field of visual art.

Among the important realist painters are:

William Bliss Baker
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Karl Briullov
Ford Madox Brown
Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Camille Corot
Gustave Courbet
Honoré Daumier
Edgar Degas (also an Impressionist)
Edward Hopper
Thomas Eakins
Nikolai Ge
Aleksander Gierymski
William Harnett (a specialist in trompe l'oeil)
Louis Le Nain
Édouard Manet (associated with Impressionism)
Jean-François Millet
Ilya Yefimovich Repin
Rembrandt van Rijn
Nikolai Yaroshenko

Briullov's Italian Midday (1827).

This is the list of De Stijl artists. This list is not exhaustive. Because of the loose associations many artists had with De Stijl, it is difficult to get a complete overview of contributors.

• Max Bill (1908 – 1994) architect and designer
• Ilya Bolotowsky (1907 – 1981) painter
• Burgoyne Diller (1906 – 1965) painter
• Theo van Doesburg (1883 – 1931) painter, designer and writer, published "De Stijl " 1917 – 1931
• Cornelis van Eesteren (1897 – 1981) architect
• Jean Gorin (1899 – 1981) painter
• Robert van't Hoff (1887 – 1979) architect
• Vilmos Huszàr (1884 – 1960) painter
• Anthony Kok (1882 – 1969) poet
• Bart van der Leck (1876 – 1958) painter
• Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) painter
• Marlow Moss (1890 – 1958) painter and sculptor
• J. J. P. Oud (1890 – 1963) architect
• Amédée Ozenfant (1886 – 1966) painter
• Gerrit Rietveld (1888 – 1964) architect and designer
• Georges Vantongerloo (1886 – 1965) sculptor
• Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart[1] painter
• Jan Wils (1891 – 1972) architect

this is the list of expressionists:

• Germany: Heinrich Campendonk, Emil Nolde, Rolf Nesch, Franz Marc, Ernst Barlach, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Erich Heckel, Otto Dix, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Max Beckmann, Conrad Felixmüller, Carl Hofer, August Macke, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Max Pechstein and Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz.
• Austria: Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka
• Russia: Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Alexei Jawlensky and Natalia Goncharova.
• Netherlands: Charles Eyck, Willem Hofhuizen, Jaap Min, Jan Sluyters,Vincent Van Gogh, Jan Wiegers and Hendrik Werkman
• Belgium: Constant Permeke, Gust De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, James Ensor, Floris Jespers and Albert Droesbeke.
• France: Georges Rouault, Gen Paul and Chaim Soutine
• Norway: Edvard Munch, Kai Fjell
• Switzerland: Carl Eugen Keel, Cuno Amiet
• Hungary: Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry
• Portugal: Mário Eloy
• Poland: Henryk Gotlib
• USA visual artists c. 1920 - : Ivan Albright, Milton Avery, Thomas Hart Benton, Goerge Biddle, Hyman Bloom, Peter Blume, Peyton Boswell, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, John Steuart Curry, Stuart Davis, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney, Edwin Dickinson, Arthur G. Dove, Norris Embry, Philip Evergood, Hugo Gellert, John D. Graham, William Gropper, George Grosz, Louis O. Guglielmi, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, Charles Hawthorne, Albert Kotin, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rico Lebrun, Jack Levine, Alfred Henry Maurer, Alice Neel, David Park, Clayton S. Price, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ben Shahn, Harry Shoulberg, Raphael Soyer, Joseph Stella, Harry Sternberg, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dorothea Tanning, Max Weber, Hale Woodruff, Karl Zerbe

Neo-expressionism around the world
• Germany
o Georg Baselitz (often considered the leading developer of the style)
o Anselm Kiefer
o Jörg Immendorff
o Neo-expressionists were sometimes called Neue Wilde ('The new wild ones'; 'New Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term).
• USA
o Jean-Michel Basquiat
o Eric Fischl
o David Salle
o Julian Schnabel
• France
o Rémi Blanchard
o François Boisrond
o Robert Combas
o Hervé Di Rosa
o The style was sometimes called Figuration Libre.
• Italy
o Francesco Clemente
o Sandro Chia
o Enzo Cucchi
o The style was sometimes called Transavantgarde (beyond avant-garde).
• England
o David Hockney
o Frank Auerbach
o Leon Kossoff
• The Netherlands
o Menno Baars
• South Africa
o Marlene Dumas
• Spain
o Miquel Barcelo
• Australia
o George Gittoes (War Artist)

Among fauvists we can name:

Henri Matisse
André Derain
Maurice de Vlaminck

Nevertheless, Alloway was one of the leading critics to defend mass culture and Pop Art as a legitimate art form. Pop art is one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books, pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so.

Much of pop art is considered very academic, as the unconventional organizational practices used often make it difficult for some to comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be the last modern art movements and thus the precursors to postmodern art, or some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves.