20th century art essay topics
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20th century art and culture - Essay Example
The early 20th century was marked by rapid industrial, economic, social, and cultural change, which influenced the worldview of many and set the stage for new artistic movements. Identify how industrial, economic, social, and cultural change set the stage for the art movements of the early 20th century.
The first two decades of the 20th century were marked by enormous industrial, economic, social and cultural change. International trade brought with it increasing growth and prosperity, along with a rise in poverty and slums in major cities. Urbanization, architectural advances, increases in technology, and the spread of goods and information were markers of the times. Competition between nations was reflected in attempts to show off advances in technology, business, and architecture, among other things.
After the relative peace of most of the 19th century, rivalry between European powers erupted in with the outbreak of the first World War. Over 60 million European soldiers were mobilized from — as countries around the world were called into the conflict. With the widespread death and destruction of the greatest war the world had ever seen, art increasingly became a means for escapism, a way to abstract life and escape the difficulties of the human condition.
A ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles in a communication trench during the Battle of the Somme, July : The death and destruction of World War I contributed to the desire of artists to abstract life. The economic and social changes of the early 20th century greatly influenced the North American and European worldview which, in turn, shaped the development of new styles of art.
Artists began to question and experiment with themes of reality, perspective, space and time, and representation. The rapid rise of technology impacted artists both directly and indirectly, from the invention of new artistic materials to subject matter and themes. The Fauves were a group of early 20th century Modern artists based in Paris whose works challenged Impressionist values.
Contrast the characteristics of Fauvism, as found in the work of Matisse and Derain, from those of its predecessor Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around and continued beyond , the movement as such lasted only a few years, —, and had three exhibitions. The paintings of the Fauves were characterized by seemingly wild brush work and strident colors, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse, As one of the most influential artists of the 20 t h century, Pablo Picasso is widely known for his involvement in Cubism and Primitivism.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Micronesian, and Native American art. African artifacts were being brought back to Paris museums following the expansion of the French empire into Africa. The press was abuzz with exaggerated stories of cannibalism and exotic tales about the African kingdom of Dahomey. Cubism, established by Picasso and his colleague Georges Bracque, was marked by a revolutionary departure from representational art.
In Cubist artwork, objects were analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstracted form instead of being depicted from one viewpoint. Picasso, Braque, and other Cubists depicted subjects from a multitude of viewpoints to create a greater scope of context.
Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. Cubism had a global reach as a movement, influencing similar schools of thought in literature, music, and architecture. Particular offshoots beyond France included the movements of Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, and De Stijl, which all developed in response to Cubism.
Other common threads between these disparate movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization and modern life. And just as in painting, it became a pervasive influence and contributed fundamentally to Constructivism and Futurism.
Cubist sculpture developed in parallel to Cubist painting. During the autumn of Picasso sculpted Head of a Woman Fernande with positive features depicted by negative space and vice versa. Marcel Duchamp was responsible for another extreme development inspired by Cubism. The next logical step, for Duchamp, was to present an ordinary object as a self-sufficient work of art representing only itself. In he attached a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and in selected a bottle-drying rack as a sculpture in its own right.
The movement revolutionized European painting and sculpture and inspired related movements in music, literature, and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia in It entailed a rejection of the idea of autonomous art and was in favor of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great impact on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement. It is difficult to isolate a particular aesthetic common to the Constructivist philosophy as it is so broad, but it can be roughly distinguished by its use of bright, bold color and geometric designs, especially in graphic design.
The First Working Group of Constructivists including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Aleksei Gan, Boris Arvatov, and Osip Brik developed a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura : the particular material properties of an object, and tektonika , its spatial presence.
Initially the Constructivists worked on three-dimensional constructions as a means of participating in industry. Later the definition would be extended to designs for two-dimensional works such as books and posters. Proun Vrashchenia by El Lissitzky c. Futurism was an Italian movement that emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future such as speed, technology, youth, and violence, as well as objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.
In and futurist painters made use of the technique of divisionism, which entails breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism. Following a visit to Paris in , the Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analyzing energy in paintings and visually expressing their desired focus on dynamism, motion, and speed. The adoption of Cubism determined the style of much subsequent Futurist painting.
German Expressionism refers to a number of related creative movements beginning before WWI and peaking in Berlin during the s.
Expressionism was a modernist movement, beginning with poetry and painting, that originated in Germany at the start of the 20th century. It emphasized subjective experience, manipulating perspective for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality.
Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War and remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, architecture, and music.
Expressionist painters had many influences, among them Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and several African artists. The group aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge hence the name between the past and the present.
As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older media, particularly woodcut prints. The group is often compared to both Primitivism and Fauvism due to their use of high-keyed, non-naturalistic color to express extreme emotion like the Fauvists and a crude drawing technique that eschewed complete abstraction, like the Primitivists.
Within the group, artistic approaches and aims varied from artist to artist, however, there was a shared desire to express spiritual truths through their art. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities. Egon Schiele — was an Austrian painter. His work is noted for its intensity, as well as for the many self-portraits he produced.
Schiele explored themes not only of the human form, but also of human sexuality. Paula Modersohn-Becker — was a German painter and one of the most important representatives of early Expressionism. In a brief career, cut short by her death at the age of 31, she created a number of groundbreaking images of great intensity. On her last trip to Paris in , she produced a series of paintings about which she felt great excitement and satisfaction.
During this period of painting, she produced her initial nude self-portraits—something unprecedented by a female painter—and portraits of friends such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Werner Sombart. Modern abstract sculpture developed alongside other avant-garde movements of the early 20th century like Cubism and Surrealism. Auguste Rodin, along with artists like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, developed a radical new approach to the creation of sculpture in the 19th century. Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion.
Departing from centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism of the Greeks and the decorative beauty of the Baroque and neo-Baroque movements. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, suggesting emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay of light and shadow. The modern sculpture movement essentially began during the Rodin exhibit at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in Cubist sculpture developed in parallel with Cubist painting, centered in Paris beginning around and evolving through the early s.
The style is most closely associated with the formal experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. During his period of Cubist innovation, Picasso revolutionized the art of sculpture by combining disparate objects and materials into one sculptural work—the sculptural equivalent of collage in two dimensional art. Just as collage was a radical development in two dimensional art, so was Cubist construction a radical development in three dimensional sculpture.
Head of a Woman by Picasso, : Picasso was a pioneer in early 20th century Cubist sculpture. Surrealist sculpture made use of many of the same techniques as other forms of Surrealist art, such as games to tap into the unconscious mind such as coulage, a kind of automatic or involuntary sculpture made by pouring a molten material into cold water.
As the material cools it takes on what appears to be a random form, though the physical properties of the materials involved may lead to a conglomeration of discs or spheres. The artist may use a variety of techniques to affect the outcome. Involuntary sculpture is described by Surrealists as sculpture created by absent-mindedly manipulating something, such as rolling and unrolling a movie ticket, bending a paper clip, etc.
Marcel Duchamp had a deep impact on the evolution of abstraction in sculpture. Duchamp experimented a great deal with sculpture, creating readymades, assemblages, and kinetic works.
His notion that anything can be art that an artist names art is an idea that has resonated throughout many historical and contemporary movements. Though never considered himself to be a Surrealist, he was involved socially with many key members of the movement and his ideas were of influence. Duchamp participated in the design of the International Surrealist Exhibition, which was held at the Galerie des Beaux-arts , Paris.
The show featured more than 60 artists from different countries, including approximately paintings, objects, collages, photographs, and installations. These elegantly refined abstract forms became synonymous with 20th century sculpture. Dada and Surrealism were multidisciplinary cultural movements of the European avant-garde that emerged in Zurich and Paris respectively during the time of WWI.
Dadaism was intensely anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and held strong political affinities with the radical left.
The origin of the name Dada is unclear. Dada began in Zurich in Plaque commemorating the birth of Dada movement : This plaque is from the Cabaret Voltaire, the first venue where Dada artists showcased their work in Dada was an informal international movement with participants in Europe and North America that employed all kinds of media but are known especially for collage, writing, photomontage and performance.
Here, you will find excellent essay topics about art, artists, and pieces of art. We have also The most important painting of the 20th century. We have gathered a list of artists from the 18th, 19th and 20th century, respectively, for you to choose for your upcoming art essay. 18th century. William Blake.
Art has played a vital cultural role throughout human history. Thousands of years ago the paintings on cave walls were made by some of the first humans as a way to document history and express beliefs. Today a single art piece can fetch millions of dollars alone and people are willing to flock in large crowds to catch a glimpse of a famous statue or painting publicly displayed in a museum.
Have to do a history art essay today? Here you have a little help with a topic for your awesome essay!
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20th Century Arts and Artist Paper
The Museum of Modern Art is located on 11 west 53rd street, New York and is home to thousands of art pieces that together represent modern art, which refers to artistic work that has been produced since the s to present day. The museum includes works of art in forms of paintings, architecture, sculptures, photographs, prints, drawings and more. The variety of modern art works is often sorted into various art periods based on specific characteristics. After examining some of the art periods, such. Modern art is almost impossible to define or categorise other than it occurred in the rough time span of the s to s.
Check 40 Best Art History Research Paper Topics!
The early 20th century was marked by rapid industrial, economic, social, and cultural change, which influenced the worldview of many and set the stage for new artistic movements. Identify how industrial, economic, social, and cultural change set the stage for the art movements of the early 20th century. The first two decades of the 20th century were marked by enormous industrial, economic, social and cultural change. International trade brought with it increasing growth and prosperity, along with a rise in poverty and slums in major cities. Urbanization, architectural advances, increases in technology, and the spread of goods and information were markers of the times. Competition between nations was reflected in attempts to show off advances in technology, business, and architecture, among other things. After the relative peace of most of the 19th century, rivalry between European powers erupted in with the outbreak of the first World War. Over 60 million European soldiers were mobilized from — as countries around the world were called into the conflict. With the widespread death and destruction of the greatest war the world had ever seen, art increasingly became a means for escapism, a way to abstract life and escape the difficulties of the human condition. A ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles in a communication trench during the Battle of the Somme, July : The death and destruction of World War I contributed to the desire of artists to abstract life.
This webpage will help you use library research tools to find credible information for art history research papers.
If you have been assigned a paper for art history class , you know how overwhelming this can be, with thousands of years of art history to consider. Here are 10 topics that might fire you up for the task. Consider each of the topic ideas and examples to help you find your own inspiration.
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By Will Fenstermaker. There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. The American Action Painters. Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31 , Frank Stella, Untitled , Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in , freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Donald Judd, Galvanized Iron 17 January ,
19th Century Art Essays (Examples)
The debate of whether this topic is truly one of issue has been discussed for years yet no real answer has come from it. To help better understand and demonstrate why cultural appropriation is a harmful act, this paper will specifically. As a child Klee was extremely interested in drawing and music. Although widely known for his physically small. The beginning of the 20th-century ushered in a new era of Technology: Automobiles, Trains, Airplanes and the Telegraph, changed the way we perceived and interpreted the world. This new modern era, as it would later be called, had a profound impact on the Arts and Architecture. Gone was the old romanticism and symbolism that had dominated the 19th-entury earlier. Instead, Artists around the world started to incorporate the emerging geometrics of technology into their art.
