Modern Art - 00

Many sources place the beginning of modern art in the era during and after the industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries because it was a time of great change. This can remain as a basic premise, but also, in every previous age there were minor or major changes and artists who reacted iconoclastically to the current situation with their work.

Giotto (1266-1337)

His artistic expression is special, it does not correspond to either Gothic or Byzantine formulations, he made a path towards a new plasticity. Clear contours around the figure, but not exaggerated as before: the harmony of airy colors, the beauty of the characters without archaic characteristics, the contrast between light and darkness, that is his contribution to painting.

Masaccio (1401-1428)

Starting with the Renaissance, we can say that the discovery and use of perspective played a major role. Masaccio, within only 6 years of his activity gave a big contribution to Italian Renaissance painting. In his work, a new world was created, contrary to the Gothic tradition; harmonious and peaceful figures in front of architectural scenes or landscapes are connected in harmonious groupings, and each individual face has a special characterization.

He created a new way (maniera moderna) of painting, which marks a turning point in the entire development of Italian painting. There is no longer a Gothic distortion, but the same understanding is expressed in his work as in the sculptural volumes of Donatello; the same novelty and the same rhythm that imbued Brunelleschi's architectural creation.

Uccello (1396-1495)

With his study of geometry, Uccello led to the solution of the problem of perspective and, in connection with it, the plasticity of space and figure. His new way of looking at volume is exceptional in the whole painting of the quattrocento. He was the forerunner of Piero della Francesca, who finally solved the problem of three-dimensionally organized space both as a painter and as a theoretician.

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746-1828)

Working in Spain, Goya painted the royal family as well as ordinary people, peasants; the Spanish genre scenes made him the most popular painter of the Iberian Peninsula. He realized an entire social chronicle in that turbulent era at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Blind guitarists and black singers, old women and pimps, street diplomats and aristocratic women with curls, figures like a representation from a wax cabinet, like some masks and idols, danced madly at Goya's Carnival (Madrid, Academia S. Fernando) among the monsters of the carnival in one of the most ingenious paintings of the great miracle worker, in which the program of artistic development of the future age was given.

In fact, Goya's canvases essentially summarize the whole of Impressionism in its initial best phase; on them, the world is captured not only perceived by the retina sensibly and mechanically, but there the visually experienced image on the fire of imagination and unbridled temperament grew into a new nature. This is the secret of the suggestive power of Goya's realizations. His influence on the further course of European art development is therefore understandable. Artists Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí  had been influenced by works of Goya, particularly by Los caprichos and the Black Paintings. 

Delacroix, Eugene (1798-1863)

Delacroix said for himself: I am not a revolutionary, but a rebel.

“Eugene Delacorix was a wonderful mixture of skepticism, civility, dandyism, wild will, despotism, and - finally - the garden of a peculiar tenderness: calm gentleness, which always goes hand in hand with genius.” (Ch. Baudelaire)

It is not the theme that is important in the work of Delacroix, for him History is a stimulating thread, on which the dramatic events of his time are reflected. He organizes the entire image within summarily and dynamically launched compositional axes, and broad plans of strong colors alternate in abrupt and sudden sound contrasts; shaded and dark surfaces suggest an atmosphere of depth and achieve the full illusion of space in the picture. Dalecroix goes so far as to subordinate both line (although he was one of the best draftsmen of the 19th century) and form to color.

Baudelaire, a contemporary of Delacroix, was the first to most accurately define the phenomenon of romanticism, in which the immediacy of experience is manifested.

Courbet, Jean-Désiré-Gustave (1819-1877)

Having crossed paths with conventional academism and the schemes of the then officially recognized art, Courbet resolutely moves towards realism, seeking for motifs from reality the right to life on the canvas.

Addressing nature and truth, he decisively broke with academicism as well as romanticism and its often fabulous themes, and captured the reality of everyday life in full painterly beauty. He experiences attacks and failure from the public in his native France, but his works are better received and understood in Germany.

Édouard Manet (1832 - 1883)

Already at the beginning of his study of painting, the need for concise simplification arises in Manet. He opposed the well-known way of academic modeling and hated conventional illustrative painting ("pittura a tesi"). Manet said: I paint what I see, I don't paint what others like. He painted what is visible: a surface woven of light and color. He did not feel the color as a stain of a certain density or intensity of the mixture itself or size (as the Impressionists later realized in their paintings), but only felt the color as the value of light.

" Everything is mere appearance, the pleasures of a passing hour, a midsummer night's dream. Only painting, the reflection of a reflection - but the reflection, too, of eternity - can record some of the glitter of this mirage." - Édouard Manet

But as new as Manet's understandings and positions were, he also adhered to tradition by studying the old masters in galleries. What is significant about his work is how much he influenced the next generation of painters with his innovations, who, looking up to him, dared to oppose tradition even more and open up new forms of experimentation.

Lit.:

The Painter's Eye by Maurice Grosser, 1956

History Of Art – H. W. Janson, 1967

History of Modern Art  by H.H. Arnason,  1968

ArtintheFridge, September 2022 / with some particular help of GPT-J-6B

Links to other articles:

Impressionism

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/impressionism-00

Post-Impressionism (Neoimpressionism, Divisionism, Nabism)

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/post-impressionism-00

Fauvism

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/fauvism

Cubism

Expressionism