Art and Design Club

(Please click below to see the works in different artistic movements.)

Impressionism

Claude Monet

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Edgar Degas

Paul Cezanne

Expressionism

Vincent Van Gogh

Edvard Munch

Henri Matisse

Cubism

Pablo Picasso

Marc Chagall
 

Surrealism

Salvador Dali

Joan Miro
 

The world's most expensive paintings

Previous entries:

Remembered

Ansel Adams ?A Portrait of God’s Body

Modern Art, Part One

"If you want to rule the world, perhaps you have to make sure you
read enough good literature and have enough appreciation for Art."

~Sarah Cheung

Art is the closest entrance for us to have a dialog with God. It helps build one’s emotional strength, expressional freedom, and common sense, and often brings a higher clarity to life at large. It is the magical passage to the Divine wisdom within and a window to our inner reality. If you want to rule the world, perhaps you have to make sure you read enough good literature and have enough appreciation for Art.

Throughout all the dynasties of China, there was only one chance for the common person to join the royalty. It was through the national examination held once every year, which largely tested each person’s poetry composition skills, instead of math and science. Only one person would be elected and granted royalty status and all the goodness that came along with it. Most kings, queens and warriors mastered the genius of poetry composition. It was believed that through poetry, one would clearly present himself with his life strategy, artistic appreciation and expression, creative skills, and most importantly, his personal integrity and emotional strength. Poetry is intended to test one’s heart. When we know our heart, we know everything.

The other day I was reading Queen Elizebeth I’s letters (1533-1603), I find this woman really knows the power of words. Her words are like a song, well hummed and effortlessly stylized, infused with emotional power, gentle yet firm and commanding, “quietly”moving a big crowd without lifting a finger. (Elizabeth quotes)

There is an incomparable beauty in Chinese characters, as each one of them is itself a picture. Still I think painting is the most beautiful among all arts. In it all feelings are summed up. With only one glance, each one of us builds our own novel from it with our own memories and personal experiences.

Here we are going to look at “Modernism?in Art, which emerged from the mid-19^th century in Europe, and how it led to “Abstract Art?and “Contemporary Art?of the new millennium. The early stages for this artistic movement are “Impressionism,?“Expressionism,?“Cubism?and “Surrealism,?and we will talk about the rest in later chapters.  We will see an overall picture of how these artistic movements evolved and blossomed into what we see in the current moment, in which art increasingly has become more and more independent and personal, as an individual presentation of one’s inner world and personal experience.

Before Modernism, European artistic appreciation was rooted in the “traditional?forms of literature, art, and cultural organization, which became increasingly outdated. People came to look toward a new level of existence, and a new form of lifestyle as well as a more heightened sense of appreciation for life.

In the midst of the sophistication of nineteenth-century Europe, there came a new visual technology, photography. The blurred and schematic look of an early photograph inspired a new approach to painting. Painters found a new excitement in this unique, unrepeatable moment captured in these early photographs. All early photographs had a coarse-grained texture that very much resembled the brushwork of Impressionist paintings. It is no coincidence that photography was what brought the painters a new realization and a new approach to reality. Impressionist was a term used basically to ridicule the half-finished and apparently haphazard character of the “snapshot? approach to painting.

The prologue of this chapter had been prepared in the spring of 1874, when several major painters, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Armad Guillanumin, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne, joined forces in the photographer’s studio. Monet and Renoir are obviously romantic, lushly and smoothly colorful and mostly joyous. Paul Cezanne and others are more rough, masculine and organic.

Impressionism marked the birth of subjective art. “I paint what I see and not what others design to see.?

The history of Impressionism has yet to come to an end. During the 1996 Monet exhibition in Chicago, almost one million (960,000) people came to the museum to look at Monet’s paintings. This indicated that all great art resists the tooth of time. More importantly, Impressionism has continued to influence the development of 20^th-century painting down to the present day. Among countless examples, one is “abstract Impressionism,?where artists like Jean-Paul Riopelle or Jean Bazaine transform natural landscape into a powerfully abstract presentation.

One special artist undoubtly was the most independent and ambitious yet also the most tragic of his time, Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh’s obsessive passion for subjective expression marked him as the pioneer of the later “Expressionist? movement. His artistic power shows us the possibility of overcoming the barrier between the past and the present and forming a rare affinity of spirit.

One of the most beautiful minds of the century, Van Gogh was a great painter, and a sensitive writer with a sharp mind, but most of all a tormented romantic artist, whose endless yearning for redemption of the suffering of the world beautifully presented the universal self-destructive forces that lurk within us onto the canvas. Painting became his internal spiritual journey which paved the way for us to see that there is truth beyond beauty.

For most of his life, Van Gogh wished to be a preacher, to live like the poor and share their hardship. Such extremity and stubborn indifference to money led him to sleep on straw and eat poorly, which eventually gave him poor health both physically and mentally.

The immediate emotional effect and gut-wrenching appeal of Van Gogh’s painting is extremely powerful. There was nothing I could do but CRY when I first saw his Starry Night. It feels almost strange. I have found something in me that will live forever.

Around the same time, “Expressionism?took hold in Norway. One artist named Edvard Munch, whose paintings revealed the crisis of modern consciousness with even greater intensity, inspired a higher level of expressionist painting. As a child, Munch confronted a harsh reality in which his mother died when he was only five, one sister died shortly after, and the other one became insane. His father was a melancholy man who often inflicted fear and emotional pain onto Munch by repeatedly telling him that if he sinned, there was no chance for pardon.

What intrigues me the most about Munch’s work is his inspiring illustration of human emotion and his remarkable insight into the human psyche, especially when it comes to depiciting a man’s repressed sexual anxiety and the endless emotional struggle in love relationships. Munch had a depressed, persmistic view about love, often feeling controlled and hopeless towards sexual relationship. The women in his works are either fragile, vulnerable, feared or lustfully piercing “vampires?such as Madonna.

However, it is his painting The Scream that carries the highest expressive energy. It is a picture of inner hell, composed of a wild red wavy sky and a frail skeletoned man’s scream. The Scream is also the most stolen piece in Norway’s Museum. Munch’s simplicity in using lines and forms and superficial details also inspired the later movement in graphic art, Symbolism. 

Another key painter who draws himself apart in this artistic movement is Paul Cézanne. Personally I hardly find Cézanne’s pictures appealing. The fact that his painting Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier sold for $60 million during 1999 still doesn’t change my mind. His paintings are impersonal, remote and almost dull. However, it is his ideal of insisting on wanting the skill and methold and law of the painting to be more important than the image itself was an innovative approach to painting, which ultmately helped bridge the gap from Impressionism to Classism and Cubism.

Cézanne’s pictures were composed of a dense interweave of strokes that resisted Impressionist dissolution of form, and they paved the way for Cubism to flourish with a new painting style that ultilized form and geometry. Perhaps Cézanne sensed that a profound change in art would soon take place. He might have just come in a little too early.

Inspired by Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, a Spanish painter, came along and co-founded ?/font>Cubism.? The key concept underlying Cubism is that the essence of an object can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously. It is argued that the eyes?“optical illusion? is unreliable, a misrepresentation of facts. Our eyes only record external appearances, and cannot penetrate to the core of things. But it is this “core?of things that the Cubist was concerned about. They stated that they were not going to paint objects the way “they saw them?but the way “they thought them.?