KINETIC ART

 '' Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions. ''  
                                                                                                               Alexander Calder
     Kinetic art marked an important revival of the tradition of Constructivism and Dadaism. Kinetic means movement and that is exactly what kinetic art is. Kinetic art was made to encourage people that art doesn’t always have to be traditional, but instead optical illusions or objects that move. Kinetic was soon split into two groups Jean Tinguely who made mechanical movement art and Victor Vasarely was more interested in optical illusions and illusion movement. These two artists brought the two different parts of kinetic art together and made them so special.Victor was taught in Bauhaus ideas and founded optical illusions. He created it by mixing black and white in different patterns to create a flickering look. Then the start of the creation of mechanized movement began. They used normal movements to examine objects in outer space. They also used geometric shapes to make them have a sense of shape. These mechanical movement machines would move by hand or air. Although ostensibly fascinated by machines, some Kinetic artists developed a profound interest in analogies between machines and human bodies. Rather than regarding machines and human bodies as radically different - one being soulless and functional, the other being governed by the sensitive, rational mind - they used their art to suggest that humans might be little more than irrational engines of conflicting lusts and urges, like a dysfunctional machine.




















''To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete.''
                                                  Jean Tinguley

MINIMAL ART

   Minimalism is a sytle of art, which Hard Edge and Colour Field Painting tendencies were an important pre-requisite for the development of, as they had essentially prepared the ground for the use of very simple, reduced minimal forms. Minimal Art first established itself in painting, and then sculpture, where it had the greatest impact. 
    Minimal art sculptures were primarily made from industrial materials, such as aluminium, steel, glass, concrete, wood, plastic or stone. The objects, frequently reduced to very simple geometric shapes, were industrially produced, thus removing the artist’s personal signature from the work. The works were also characterised by serial arrangements of a number of bodies/shapes, and large dimensions. 
    The main representatives of Minimal art were Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken and Robert Morris.
     In contrast with Abstract Expressionism and its impulsive and gestural expression of the unconsciousness, Minimal artists focused on material aesthetics, the relationship of objects to space, the effects of light, and producing highly reduced arrangements. Donald Judd (1928-94) followed these basic principles, arranging coloured aluminium boxes in different ways, above, or next to one another. Carl Andre (born 1935) stacked rectangular wooden pegs on top of each other, or in a row. Dan Flavin (1933-96) created subtle light spaces with evenly laid out neon tubes. Minimalism also had an impact on dance and music in the 1960s. Minimalist principles also influenced artistic phenomenon such as Land Art, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. 

HARD- EDGE

    Hard- Edge movement,had no true purpose except for enjoyment when it began. People say that Hard-Edge painting has combinations of artists such as Mondrian, Albers, and Reinhardt. Today, the phrase “Hard-Edge paintings” is used to describe some strange tendencies in abstract painting.Frank Stella Moultonboro II 1965 Hard-Edge painting means an abstract style that mixes geometric painting with the intense forms of Color Field painting. It is bold and from faraway, looks very common, yet very unique and individual. This type of art is known for its “economy of form, fullness of color, impersonal execution, and smooth surface planes.” Eventually, this style of work fell from use as different types of abstract painting moved in and Hard-Edge painting became just a term for types of art. A very famous artist who used Hard-Edge painting is Frank Stella.

POP-ART

   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.

      

POST PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

   Colorful painting began as a part of Abstract Expressionism an d later evolved into a further purified form.The phrase Colorfield Painting or Post Painterly Abstraction was first used by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to distinguish abstract painting of the 1960s from abstract expressionist works of the 1950s.The colorfield painters sometimes called Abstract Imagists, are the most abstract of all the abstract expressionists because all reference to objective subject matter have been removed.The abstract expressionist works involved a strong personel emotionalism and a painterly quality.Post-painterly abstraction works were more impersonel and from a more intellectual aesthetic.They focused on what they considered to be the fundamental formal elements of abstract painting.Their paintings employed pure,unmodulated areas of colour; flat two dimentional space and a monumental scal.Post-painterly abstraction includes both minimalism and color-field painting.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

   Jackson Pollock's elegant abstract paintings, which were created by spattering paint on huge canvases placed on the floor, brought abstract expressionism. Abstract expressionism presented a broad range of stylistic diversity within its largely, though not exclusively, nonrepresentational framework. For example, the expressive violence and activity in paintings by de Kooning or Pollock marked the opposite end of the pole from the simple, quiescent images of Mark Rothko. Basic to most abstract expressionist painting were the attention paid to surface qualities, i.e., qualities of brushstroke and texture; the use of huge canvases; the adoption of an approach to space in which all parts of the canvas played an equally vital role in the total work; the harnessing of accidents that occurred during the process of painting; the glorification of the act of painting itself as a means of visual communication; and the attempt to transfer pure emotion directly onto the canvas. The movement had an inestimable influence on the many varieties of work that followed it, especially in the way its proponents used color and materials. Its essential energy transmitted an enduring excitement to the American art scene.

SURREALISM

   Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism's emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.
     The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró. With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content.