CONTEXTUAL STUDIES & GRAPHIC DESIGN

A Few Art Movments:

Abstract impressionism:

Abstract Impressionism is a type of abstract painting (not to be confused with Abstract Expressionism, a similar but different movement) where small brushstrokes build and structure large paintings. Small brushstrokes exhibit control of large areas, expressing the artist's emotion and focus on inner energy, and sometimes contemplation, creating expressive, lyrical and thoughtful qualities in the paintings. The brushstrokes are similar to those of Impressionists such as Monet and Post-Impressionists such as van Gogh and Seurat, only tending toward Abstract Expressionism. While in the action painting style of Abstract Expressionism brushstrokes were often large and bold and paint was applied in a rapid outpouring of emotion and energy, the Abstract Impressionist's short and intense brushstrokes or non-traditional application of paints and textures is done slowly and with purpose, using the passage of time as an asset and a technique. Milton Resnick, Sam Francis, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Philip Guston were notable Abstract Impressionist painters during the 1950s. Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, and Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle helped introduce Abstract Impressionism to Paris in the 1950s.

Art nouveau:

Art Nouveau is an international philosophyand style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art". It is known also as Jugendstil, German for "youth style", named after the magazine Jugend, which promoted it, as Modern (Модерн) in Russia, perhaps named after Parisian gallery "La Maison Moderne", as Secession in Austria and Hungary after the Viennese group of artists, and, in Italy, as Stile Liberty from the department store in London, Liberty & Co., which popularised the style. A reaction to academic art of the 19th century, it was inspired by natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants but also in curved lines. Architects tried to harmonize with the natural environment. It is also considered a philosophy of design of furniture, which was designed according to the whole building and made part of ordinary life.

The style was influenced strongly by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, when Mucha produced a lithographed poster, which appeared on 1 January 1895 in the streets of Paris as an advertisement for the play Gismonda by Victorien Sardou, featuring Sarah Bernhardt. It popularised the new artistic style and its creator to the citizens of Paris. Initially named Style Mucha, (Mucha Style), his style soon became known as Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau was most popular in Europe, but its influence was global. Hence, it is known in various guises with frequent localised tendencies. In France, Hector Guimard's Paris metro e  ntrances were of art nouveau style and Emile Gallé practised the style in Nancy. Victor Horta had a decisive effect on architecture in Belgium. Magazines like Jugend helped publicise the style in Germany, especially as a graphic artform, while the Vienna Secessionists influenced art and architecture throughout Austria-Hungary. Art Nouveau was also a style of distinct individuals such as Gustav Klimt, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alphonse Mucha, René Lalique, Antoni Gaudí and Louis Comfort Tiffany, each of whom interpreted it in their own manner.

Although Art Nouveau was replaced by 20th-century modernist styles, it is considered now as an important transition between the historicism of Neoclassicism and modernism. Furthermore, Art Nouveau monuments are now recognised by UNESCO with their World Heritage List as significant contributions to cultural heritage.

Futurism:Minimalism:

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Key figures of the movement include the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Tullio Crali and Luigi Russolo, and the Russians Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Important works include its seminal piece of the literature, Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, as well as Boccioni's sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Balla's painting, Abstract Speed + Sound (pictured). Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Rayonism and Vorticism.

The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.

Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.

The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others. Later, Severini, who lived in Paris, attributed their backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from Paris, the centre of avant garde art. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism and following a visit to Paris in 1911 the Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.



In New York City in the late 1950s, young artists like Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin were painting in then dominant Abstract Expressionist vein, and beginning to show at smaller galleries throughout the city. By the early 1960s, many of these artists had abandoned painting altogether in favour of objects which seemed neither painting nor sculpture in the conventional sense. For example, Frank Stella's Black Paintings (a series of hugely influential, concentrically striped pictures from 1959-60), were much thicker than conventional canvases, and this emphasised their materiality and object-ness, in contrast to the thin, window-like quality of ordinary canvases. Other early Minimalist works employed non-art materials such as plywood, scrap metal, and fluorescent light bulbs. Many names were floated to characterise this new art, from "ABC art" and "Reductive Art" to "literalism" and "systemic painting." "Minimalism" was the term that eventually stuck, perhaps because it best described the way the artists reduced art to the minimum number of colors, shapes, lines and textures. Yet the term was rejected by many of the artists commonly associated with the movement - Judd, for example, felt the title was derogatory. He preferred the term "primary structures," which came to be the title of a landmark group show at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966: it brought together many of those who were important to the movement, including Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd, though it also included some who were barely on its fringes, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Anthony Caro. The Minimalists' emphasis on eradicating signs of authorship from the artwork (by using simple, geometric forms, and courting the appearance of industrial objects) led, inevitably, to the sense that the meaning of the object lay not "inside" it, but rather on its surface - it arose from the viewer's interaction with the object. This led to a new emphasis on the physical space in which the artwork resided. In part, this development was inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings on phenomenology, in particular, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Aside from sculptors, Minimalism is also associated with a few key abstract painters, such as Frank Stella and, retrospectively, Barnett Newman. These artists painted very simple canvases that were considered minimal due to their bare-bones composition. Using only line, solid color and, in Stella's case, geometric forms and shaped canvas, these artists combined paint and canvas in such a way that the two became inseparable. By the late 1960s, Minimalism was beginning to show signs of breaking apart as a movement, as various artists who had been important to its early development began to move in different directions. By this time the movement was also drawing powerful attacks. The most important of these would be Michael Fried's essay "Art and Objecthood," published in Artforum in 1967. Although it seemed to confirm the importance of the movement as a turning point in the history of modern art, Fried was uncomfortable with what it heralded. Referring to the movement as "literalism," and those who made it as "literalists," he accused artists like Judd and Morris of intentionally confusing the categories of art and ordinary object. According to Fried, what these artists were creating was not art, but a political and/or ideological statement about the nature of art. Fried maintained that just because Judd and Morris arranged identical non-art objects in a three-dimensional field and proclaimed it "art", didn't necessarily  make it so. Art is art and an object is an object, Fried asserted. As the 1960s progressed, different offshoots of Minimalism began to take shape. In California, the "Light and Space" movement was led by Robert Irwin, while in vast ranges of unspoiled land throughout the U.S., Land artists like Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria completely removed art from the studio altogether, and turned the earth itself into a work of art. This achievement not only further blurred the boundaries between "art" and "object," but reinvented the more conventional definitions of sculpture.