20th-century Western painting

20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters

Crystal Cubism was a distilled form of Cubism consistent with a shift between 1915 and 1916 towards a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes, practised by Braque, Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko, Fernand Léger, and several other artists into the 1920s.^[4]

During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism, several movements emerged in Paris.

• 
  Henri Matisse, 1905, Fauvism
• 
  Henri Matisse, Music, 1910, late Fauvism
• 
  Pablo Picasso, 1907, early Cubism
• 
  Analytic Cubism
• 
  Metaphysical art (pre-Surrealism

  )
• 
  The Dream, 1910, Primitive Surrealism
• 
  Juan Gris, 1912, Cubism
• 
  František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors, 1912, Orphism

Pioneers of abstraction

• 
  Robert Delaunay, 1911, Orphism
• 
  Piet Mondrian, 1911, early De Stijl
• 
  Franz Marc 1912, Der Blaue Reiter
• 
  Marcel Duchamp, 1911–1912, Cubism and Dada
• 
  Abstract Art
• 
  Robert Delaunay, 1912–1913, Orphism
• 
  Morgan Russell, 1913–14 Synchromism
• 
  Kazimir Malevich, 1916, Suprematism
• 
  Neo-Plasticism
• 
  Synthetic Cubism, Tubism
• 
  Stuart Davis, American modernism, 1921
• 
  Stuart Davis American Modernism 1922

• 
  Wassily Kandinsky, Der Blaue Reiter, 1903
• 
  Henri Matisse, Fauvism, 1905
• 
  André Derain, Fauvism, 1906
• 
  Maurice de Vlaminck, Fauvism, 1906
• 
  Alexej von Jawlensky, Der Blaue Reiter, 1909
• 
  Franz Marc, Der Blaue Reiter, 1913–14
• 
  Ernst Kirchner, Die Brücke

  , 1913
• 
  Otto Mueller, Die Brücke, 1919

"How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion."

The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain—friendly rivals of a sort, each with his own followers. Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso's yin in the 20th century. Fauvist painters included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, and Picasso's partner in Cubism, Georges Braque amongst others.^[9]

Fauvism, as a movement, had no concrete theories, and was short lived, beginning in 1905 and ending in 1907. The Fauves had only three exhibitions. Matisse was seen as the leader of the movement, due to his seniority in age and prior self-establishment in the academic art world. His 1905 portrait of Mme. Matisse, The Green Line (above), caused a sensation in Paris when it was first exhibited. He said he wanted to create art to delight; art as a decoration was his purpose and it can be said that his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition. In 1906 at the suggestion of his dealer

By 1907 Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, soon it was replaced by

Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancer Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff, 1909 is in the gallery above, Marianne von Werefkin, Lyonel Feininger and others founded the Der Blaue Reiter group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgement from an exhibition. Der Blaue Reiter lacked a central artistic manifesto, but was centered around Kandinsky and Marc. Artists Gabriele Münter and Paul Klee were also involved.

The name of the movement comes from a painting by Kandinsky created in 1903. It is also claimed that the name could have derived from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal.^[13]

Expressionism, Symbolism, American Modernism, Bauhaus

• 
  Gustav Klimt, Expressionism, 1907–1908
• 
  Marc Chagall, Expressionism and Surrealism, 1911
• 
  Arthur Dove, early American modernism, 1911
• 
  Egon Schiele, Symbolism and Expressionism, 1912
• 
  Amedeo Modigliani, Symbolism and Expressionism, 1917
• 
  Georgia O'Keeffe, American modernism, 1918
• 
  Patrick Henry Bruce, American modernism, 1917–1918
• 
  Paul Klee, Bauhaus, 1922

• 
  Giorgio de Chirico, The Red Tower (La Tour Rouge), 1913, early Surrealism
• 
  Francis Picabia, Machine Turn Quickly 1916, Dada
• 
  André Masson, 1922, Surrealism
• 
  Kurt Schwitters, 1919, painted collage, Dada

In 1924

Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high-water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Surrealist groups in Japan, and especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and in Mexico produced innovative and original works.

Dalí and Magritte created some of the most widely recognized images of the movement. The 1928/1929 painting This Is Not A Pipe by Magritte is the subject of a Michel Foucault 1973 book, This is not a Pipe (English edition, 1991), that discusses the painting and its paradox. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, and perception, sometimes evoking empathy from the viewer, sometimes laughter and sometimes outrage and bewilderment.^[21]

1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: in one example liquid shapes become the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting. Evocations of time and its compelling mystery and absurdity.^[22]

The characteristics of this style – a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological – came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modernist period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality."^[23][24]

Max Ernst studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. His paintings, such as Murdering Airplane (1920), may have been inspired by the

During the 1920s André Masson's work was enormously influential in helping the young artist Joan Miró find his roots in the new Surrealist painting. Miró acknowledged in letters to his dealer Pierre Matisse the importance of Masson as an example to him in his early years in Paris.

Long after personal, political and professional tensions have fragmented the Surrealist group into thin air and ether, Magritte, Miró, Dalí and the other Surrealists continue to define a visual program in the arts. Other prominent surrealist artists include Giorgio de Chirico, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Grégoire Michonze, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonor Fini among others.

Neue Sachlichkeit, Social realism, regionalism, American Scene painting, Symbolism

• 
  Neue Sachlichkeit
• 
  Neue Sachlichkeit
• 
  Regionalism
• 
  American realism
• 
  José Orozco, detail of mural Omnisciencia, 1925, Mexican Social Realist Mural Movement
• 
  Pop Art

  )
• 
  Pop Art

  )
• 
  Charles Demuth, 1931, Precisionism
• 
  Stanton Macdonald-Wright 1920, Airplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange, Synchromism
• 
  Man, Controller of the Universe), originally created in 1934, Mexican muralism movement

In its final form, Guernica is an immense black and white, 3.5 metre (11 ft) tall and 7.8 metre (23 ft) wide mural painted in oil. The mural presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white contrasts with the intensity of the scene depicted and invokes the immediacy of a newspaper photograph.[28] Picasso painted the mural sized painting called

Technically Surrealism was an important predecessor for Abstract expressionism with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.

Additionally, abstract expressionism has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic "

Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko's work (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied was abstract), are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what Clement Greenberg termed the Color field direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell (gallery) can be comfortably described as practitioners of action painting and Color field painting.

Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or of the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. An exception might be the drip paintings of Pollock. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American

Although Abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the New York School, and the San Francisco Bay area. Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which the whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvas as the arena became a credo of Action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color Field painters. Many other artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s including Alfred Leslie, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Milton Resnick, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Ray Parker, Nicolas Carone, Grace Hartigan, Friedel Dzubas, and Robert Goodnough among others.

During the 1950s, Color Field painting initially referred to a particular type of

After World War II the term

Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël

's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop art of the 1960s.

Pop art

Pop Art

Camel cigarettes, and Rauschenberg's surprising constructions using inclusions of objects and pictures taken from popular culture, hardware stores, junkyards, the city streets, and taxidermy gave rise to a radical new movement in American art

. Eventually by 1963 the movement came to be known worldwide as Pop art.

Pop art is exemplified by artists:

painterly style. They helped usher in Pop art as a major art movement that relied on themes from popular culture. These works by Andy Warhol

are repetitive and they are made in a non-painterly commercial manner.

Earlier in England in 1956 the term Pop Art was used by Lawrence Alloway for paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected Abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which depicted, and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age.^[39] The early works of David Hockney whose paintings emerged from England during the 1960s like A Bigger Splash, and the works of Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, and Eduardo Paolozzi, are considered seminal examples in the movement.

While in the downtown scene in New York's

comic books and in paintings like Drowning Girl, 1963, in the gallery above. There is a connection between the radical works of Duchamp, and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists – with a sense of humor; and Pop Artists like Alex Katz (who became known for his parodies of portrait photography and suburban life), Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein

and the others.

Art Brut, New Realism, Bay Area Figurative Movement, Neo-Dada, Photorealism

During the 1950s and 1960s as abstract painting in America and Europe evolved into movements such as

Great Spruce Head Island, Maine

.

Neo-Dada is a movement that started in the 1950s and 1960s and was related to Abstract expressionism only with imagery. Featuring the emergence of combined manufactured items, with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art, and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz among others were important pioneers of both abstraction and Pop Art; creating new conventions of art-making; they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion of unlikely materials as parts of their works of art.

Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Hard-Edge, Color field, Minimal Art, New Realism

• 
  New Realism

During the 1960s and 1970s abstract painting continued to develop in America through varied styles.

Minimal Art. Two influential teachers Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann introduced a new generation of American artists to their advanced theories of color and space. Josef Albers is best remembered for his work as a Geometric abstractionist painter and theorist. Most famous are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically on the canvas. Albers' theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists. His own paintings form the foundation of both hard-edge painting

and Op art.

minimalist in character. The Bykert Gallery, and the Park Place Gallery were important showcases for Minimalism and shaped canvas

painting in New York City during the 1960s.

In 1965, an exhibition called

The Responsive Eye, curated by William C. Seitz, was held at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City. The works shown were wide-ranging, encompassing the Minimalism of Frank Stella, the Op art of Larry Poons, the work of Alexander Liberman, alongside the masters of the Op Art movement: Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bridget Riley and others. The exhibition focused on the perceptual aspects of art, which result both from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color relationships. Op art, also known as optical art, is a style present in some paintings and other works of art that use optical illusions. Op art is also closely akin to geometric abstraction and hard-edge painting

. Although sometimes the term used for it is perceptual abstraction. Op art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing.[42] Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.

Shaped canvas, Washington color school, abstract illusionism, lyrical abstraction

• 
  Abstract Illusionism
• 
  Lyrical Abstraction

Color Field painting clearly pointed toward a new direction in American painting, away from

Lyrical Abstraction

.

Color Field painting sought to rid art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like

Color Field paintings

in Washington, D.C. during the 1950s and 1960s, Black, Grey, Beatis a large vertical stripe painting and typical of Gene Davis's work.

minimalist in character. From 1960 Frank Stella produced paintings in aluminium and copper paint and are his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example. Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors, typically arranged in straight or curved lines. Later he began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color. Harran II, 1967, is an example of the Protractor Series. These paintings are named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. The Irregular Polygon canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped canvas

.

The Andre Emmerich Gallery, the

Minimal art

were often closely associated with each other. In actuality by the early 1970s both movements became decidedly diverse.

Another related movement of the late 1960s,

Whitney Museum of American Art and other museums throughout the United States between 1969 and 1971.^[44]

Lyrical Abstraction in the late 1960s is characterized by the paintings of

Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.^[47] Lyrical Abstraction is a type of freewheeling abstract painting that emerged in the mid-1960s when abstract painters returned to various forms of painterly, pictorial, expressionism with a predominate focus on process, gestalt and repetitive compositional strategies in general.^[48][44]

Lyrical Abstraction as exemplified by the 1971 Ronnie Landfield

painting Garden of Delight (above), there is a sense of compositional randomness, all over composition, low key and relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on process, repetition, and an all over sensibility. During the 1960s and 1970s artists as powerful and influential as Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Josef Albers, Elmer Bischoff, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Gene Davis, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Joan Mitchell, Friedel Dzubas, and younger artists like Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, Sam Gilliam, John Hoyland, Sean Scully, Blinky Palermo, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Joan Snyder, Richard Tuttle, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, Mino Argento and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.

Monochrome, minimalism, postminimalism

Artists such as

Hard-edge formats from the late 1950s through the 1960s.^[49]

Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal—as demonstrated by Robert Mangold, who understood the concept of the shape of the canvas and its relationship to objecthood—there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman,^[50] who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

In a much more general sense, one might find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. American painters such as Brice Marden and Cy Twombly show a clear European influence in their pure abstraction, minimalist painting of the 1960s. Ronald Davis polyurethane works from the late 1960s pay homage to the Broken Glass of Marcel Duchamp.

This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic

Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation

and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art.

Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive

all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."

Still other important innovations in abstract painting took place during the 1960s and the 1970s characterized by

Lyrical Abstraction, and postminimalism blurred the distinction between movements that became more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s. The neo-expressionism movement is related to earlier developments in abstract expressionism, neo-Dada

, Lyrical Abstraction and postminimal painting.

Neo-expressionism

In the late 1960s the

abstract expressionist painter Philip Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects. These works were inspirational to a new generation of painters interested in a revival of expressive imagery. His painting Painting, Smoking, Eating 1973, seen above in the gallery is an example of Guston's final and conclusive return to representation.^[51]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was also a return to painting that occurred almost simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France and

Stuckists, a group that emerged late in 1990s respectively. These painting were characterized by large formats, free expressive mark making, figuration, myth and imagination. All work in this genre came to be labeled neo-expressionism

. Critical reaction was divided. Some critics regarded it as driven by profit motivations by large commercial galleries. This type of art continues in popularity into the 21st century, even after the art crash of the late 1980s.

During the late 1970s in the United States painters who began working with invigorated surfaces and who returned to imagery like

graffiti artist), Julian Schnabel, and Keith Haring, and Italian painters like Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi, among others defined the idea of Neo-expressionism in America.^[54]

Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting that became popular in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. It developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour harmonies. The veteran painters Philip Guston, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck and Georg Baselitz, along with slightly younger artists like Anselm Kiefer, Eric Fischl, Susan Rothenberg, Francesco Clemente, Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and many others became known for working in this intense expressionist vein of painting.

Contemporary painting into the 21st century

Main articles: Contemporary art, Postmodern art, and Late modernism

At the beginning of the 21st century Contemporary painting and Contemporary art in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralism.^[55][56]

Mainstream painting has been rejected by artists of the postmodern era in favor of artistic pluralism.^[57] According to art critic Arthur Danto there is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity.^[58][59]

See also

• Art periods
• Australian art
• Contemporary art
• Hierarchy of genres
• History of art
• History of painting
• History painting
• Indian painting
• Japonism
• Lists of painters
• Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
• Modern art
• Modernism
• Painting
• Painting in the Americas before European colonization
• Renaissance art
• Self-portrait
• Visual art of the United States
• Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Western painting

References