Modern Art Movements (by Ar Kush Jee Kamal)

Modern Art
Movements
Red and Black,
Mark Rothko
Centre Pompidou, Paris
By Ar. Kush Jee Kamal
Two world wars, sweeping
technological change, and the
undoing of traditional academic art.
1860 - 1980

Claude Monet, Meules, 1890,
sold for $110.7 million.
1867-1886

Impressionism was an art movement in France at the end of the 19th century.
The Impressionists were a group of artists renowned for their innovative painting techniques
and approach to using color in art.
The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism in painting was an attempt to
accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour.
The bold designs of Japanese woodblock
prints, popular in France at the time, were
another influence on the Impressionists. Their
asymmetrical arrangements, contrasting
large areas of flat color with patches of
intricate pattern, offered a compositional
format that the Impressionists could use to
develop their ideas about color Sometimes,
even the most avant-garde artists need the
security of knowing that the path they have
chosen to follow has some roots in tradition.

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of
Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition
in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism.
The group was unified only by its independence from the
official annual Salon, for which a jury of artists from the
Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded
medals.
The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to
painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group.
While conservative critics panned their work for its
unfinished, sketch like appearance, more progressive writers
praised it for its depiction of modern life.
Pierre Auguste Renoir Edgar Degas
Raymond de
Toulouse-Lautrec
Four Dancers, Edgar Degas, c. 1899
Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors,
Printmakers, etc. (1874)

The name 'Impressionism' comes from a sarcastic review of Monet's painting, 'Impression,
Sunrise' (1873), written by Louis Leroy in the satirical magazine 'Le Charivari'.
Impressionism was a style of painting that used a more scientific analysis of color to capture
the effects of light in nature.
The main artists associated with Impressionism were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley and Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Pierre Auguste Renoir Edgar Degas
Raymond de
Toulouse-Lautrec

The Impressionists were excited by contemporary developments in color theory which helped
their search for a more exact analysis of the effects of color and light in nature.
They abandoned the conventional idea that the shadow of an object was made up from its
color with some brown or black added. Instead, they enriched their colours with the idea that
the shadow of an object is broken up with dashes of its complementary color
For example, in an Impressionist painting the shadow on an orange may have some strokes of
blue painted into it to increase its vitality..
Camille PissarroAlfred SisleyEdouard Manet

MICHEL EUGÈNE CHEVREUL:
THE PRINCIPLES OF HARMONY AND CONTRAST OF
COLOURS, AND THEIR APPLICATIONS TO THE ARTS
Through observing a series of colour combination,
Chevreul offers new principles of colour on visual
perceptual.
The law of simultaneous colour contrast suggests that
the contrast of colours will ―affect the optical
composition of each juxtaposed colour.‖
discovery of
margaric acid,
and invention of soap

This painting depicts a woman
sitting outside alone and
reading a book under shade.
Like many other artists did
before him, the impressionist
painter Claude Monet uses
color to create a focal point.
While all of the woman's
surroundings are differing
shades of green, she stands out
in brilliant white and draws the
viewer's attention to her.
Springtime,
Claude Monet, 1872,

This painting shows four
ballerinas adjusting their cloths,
perhaps in preparation for an
upcoming performance. Yet
again, we see an impressionist
artist making use of
complementary colors. Degas
uses green to form the
background of his work and a
contrasting red for the focal
point, but also uses these
contrasting colors to create
shadow. A common practice
amongst the impressionist.
Four Dancers,
Edgar Degas, c. 1899

This painting depicts an ornate,
large building in a city. The
colors used in this work are
primary. There are bright swaths
of blue, red, and patches of
yellow. While the painting is
mostly white, the colors grow
bright near the focal point of
the work and are used to
create form and depth.
The Piazza San Marco, Venice,
Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1881

Arrival of the Normandy depicts
a train pulling into station. The
colors used in this work are
primarily cool and of varying
shades of blue. In this way, the
artist is able to create an
atmosphere of solidarity and
perhaps give the impression of
an early morning.
Arrival of the Normandy Train,
Gare Saint-Lazare,
Claude Monet 1877

A painting by Ladislav
Mednyanszky that depicts a
fisherman's boat at harbor.
Contrasting or complementary
colors were often used in
impressionist works, and in this
painting the primary colors that
the artists uses are
complementary shades blue
and orange.
Cargo Ship on the
Bank of the River Danube,
Ladislav Mednyánszky, 1890 - 1900

The Impressionists had to paint quickly to capture the atmosphere of a particular time of day
or the effects of different weather conditions on the landscape.
The speed of the Impressionists' painting technique forced them to sacrifice accurate line
and detail in favour of atmospheric effect.
The subject most suited to the Impressionist technique was landscape, but they also painted
portraits, still lifes and figure compositions.
Impressionist compositions were strongly influenced by the development of photography and
the discovery of Japanese woodcuts.
Impressionism is now seen as the first movement in modern art, and had a huge influence on
the development of art in the 20th century.
The Impressionists painted with small strokes of pure colours which mixed in the eye of the
spectator when viewed from a distance.
The Impressionists were the first group of artists to embrace painting 'en plein air' (painting
outside).

Le bec du Hoc, Grandcamp,
Georges Seurat, 1885
Mid-1880s

Pointillism was a revolutionary painting technique pioneered by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in
Paris in the mid-1880s. It was a reaction against the prevailing movement of Impressionism, which
was based on the subjective responses of individual artists.
Points of pure colour: Pointillism involved the application of paint in carefully placed dots of pure,
unmixed colour. According to Seurat and Signac, these would be blended by the viewer‘s eye to
create a more striking image than any made after mixing colours conventionally on a palette.
'Painting by dots': The movement's name derives from a review of Seurat's work by the French art
critic, Félix Fénéon, who used the expression peinture au point (―painting by dots‖). Seurat
actually preferred the label "Divisionism" – or, for that matter, Chromoluminarism – but it was
Pointillism that stuck.
Meticulous technique: Pointillism is regarded as a Neo-Impressionist movement. Which is to say, it
grew out of – and beyond – Impressionism. Pointillists wished to render optical phenomena.
However, they renounced fluid, spontaneous strokes in favour of a measured, meticulous
technique.
From Pointillism to Fauvism: With its strident colour combinations, Pointillism was a clear influence on
Fauvism, among other movements: Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904) is often cited as
an important work of transition between the two.

Henri-Edmond Cross Maximilien LucePaul SignacGeorges Seurat
Some say they see Poetry in my paintings; I see only science.
Georges Seurat

Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande
Jatte (1884–86)
Georges Seurat

Bathers at Asnières
(1884)
Georges Seurat

The Lake in the
Bois de Boulogne
(oil on canvas, 1899)
Henri Edmond-Cross,

Portrait of Félix Fénéon,
1890
Paul Signac

Picking Peas (1887)
Camille Pissaro

The Card Players, 1894–95
Paul Cezanne
Sold for $250 Million to Qatar‘s royal
1885 - 1940

Post Impressionism was not a formal movement or style.
The Post Impressionists were a few independent artists at the end of the 19th century who rebelled
against the limitations of Impressionism.
They developed a range of personal styles that focused on the emotional, structural, symbolic and
spiritual elements that they felt were missing from Impressionism.
Their combined contributions form the artistic roots of modern art for the next eighty years.
Impressionism was the first movement in the canon of modern art. Like most revolutionary styles it was
gradually absorbed into the mainstream and its limitations became frustrating to the succeeding
generation.
Artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat, although
steeped in the traditions of Impressionism, pushed the boundaries of the style in different creative
directions and in doing so laid the foundations for the art of the 20th century.

Their name was derived from the title of the exhibition
'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' which was organized in
London by the English artist and critic Roger Fry in the winter
of 1910-11.
For historical convenience these artists have been labeled
as Post Impressionists but, apart from their Impressionist
influence, they don't have that much in common.

―I dream my painting and I paint my dream.‖
Vincent van Gogh
Paul GauguinPaul Cézanne Vincent van Gogh

Paul
Cézanne
Bathers (1874–75)

―When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower.
If it clashes, it is not art.‖
Paul Cezanne
Paul Cézanne believed that the Impressionists had lost one of the classical hallmarks of great art: a
structured composition where the visual elements are carefully refined and balanced to work in
harmony with one another. He felt that the Impressionists' technique was naturally limited,
principally because they had to work so quickly to capture the fleeting effects of atmospheric
conditions. Cézanne wanted to make paintings whose compositions were more tightly organized
and "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums ".
He called his pictures 'constructions after nature' in which elements from the three-dimensional
world were translated into patterns of shapes and colors arranged on a flat canvas. The way that
Cézanne structured and abstracted his paintings with carefully modulated color pushed art
towards the revolutionary style that was Cubism.
Paul Cézanne used heavy brush strokes during his early years and thickly layered paint onto the
canvas. The texture of the compositions is tangible and the marks of his palette brush can be
obviously discerned.

The Fishermen
(Fantastic Scene)
ca. 1875
Paul Cézanne

The Gulf of Marseilles
Seen from L'Estaque
ca. 1885
Paul Cézanne

Mont Sainte-Victoire,
1902-04
Paul Cézanne

Still Life with Apples and
a Pot of Primroses
ca. 1890
Paul Cézanne

Vincent Van Gogh
Wheatfield with Crows, 1890,

―Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and
can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well..‖
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh embraced the vivid color of Impressionism but discarded any Impressionist
ideas about the careful analysis and effects of color and light in nature. This was far too scientific
an approach for this temperamental Dutchman whose gut instincts were tuned to the expressive
power of color. When Impressionism was filtered through the heightened perception of Van Gogh's
vision, the results pushed art towards Expressionism, an exploration of the spiritual and emotional
side of art.
Vincent van Gogh was a unique artist who worked with a sense of urgency which often caused
him a great deal of stress. He was famed for his bold, dramatic brush strokes which expressed
emotion and added a feeling of movement to his works. It´s thought that he often used paint
straight from the tube (impasto) and in the 70 days leading up to his death, he averaged one
painting per day.

The Starry Night,
1888
Vincent van Gogh
―This morning I saw the
countryside from my window
a long time before sunrise,
with nothing but the morning
star, which looked very big,‖
wrote van Gogh to his
brother Theo, describing his
inspiration for the painting.
The window was in the Saint-
Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in
southern France, where he
sought respite from his
emotional suffering.

The Starry Night
Looking beyond his soft landscape, serene atmosphere and dotted sky, there is a deeper sense of
distress. Looking beyond his soft landscape, serene atmosphere and dotted sky, there is a deeper
sense of distress.
Van Gogh appreciates the nocturnal glow as it brings the sky to life in a monochrome of blues that is
both grandiose and awe-inspiring. In sharp contrast to the deep blue hues are the eleven golden-
yellow stars that make up the Saint-Rémois sky.
The massive spiral seems to be propelling the spinning motion. Was this perhaps symbolic of his
illness? Something that kept his artistic wheels spinning while also driving him mad? The question as to
whether we are witnessing one of Van Gogh‘s episodes or a creative outburst still remains
unanswered. Perhaps it‘s a cathartic mix of the two.
Typical of the southern French landscape, the cypress tree‘s branches sway and move like waves.
Van Gogh‘s, however, is seized by lethargy. Serpent-like in appearance, it serves as an echo of
the tortured and twisted environment in which Van Gogh found himself. Upon further exploration of
the view from his cell, it was found that the trees were a fictitious addition by the artist.
Despite the late hour, dim yet welcoming lights appear in the windows of homes. Next to the houses is
a church whose bell tower seems to have been pulled into the celestial scrolls. Beyond the village of
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence are the Alpilles, a mountainous region that he could see from his window.

Irises, 1889
Vincent van Gogh
―It strikes the eye from afar. It is
a beautiful study full of air and
life.‖
For van Gogh, the painting
was ―the lightning conductor
for the illness‖ because he felt
that he could keep himself
from going insane by
continuing to paint. Observing
his continued ability to paint,
he felt sure that he was not
really a madman.

The Bedroom
1888
Vincent van Gogh
While he was in Arles, Van
Gogh made this painting of his
bedroom in the Yellow House.
He prepared the room himself
with simple furniture and with
his own work on the wall. The
bright colours were meant to
express absolute ‗repose‘ or
‗sleep‘.
The rules of perspective seem
not to have been accurately
applied throughout the
painting, but this was a
deliberate choice.

Almond Blossom
1890
Vincent van Gogh
Almond trees flower early in
the spring making them a
symbol of new life. Van Gogh
borrowed the subject, the
bold outlines and the
positioning of the tree in the
picture plane from Japanese
printmaking.
The painting was a gift for his
brother Theo and sister-in-law
Jo, who had just had a baby
son, Vincent Willem.

Sunflowers, 1888-1889
Vincent painted a total of five large canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow
‗and nothing else‘. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with
numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.
The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh: they communicated ‗gratitude‘, he
wrote. It was painted during a rare period of excited optimism, while Van Gogh awaited the arrival of
his hero, the avant-garde painter Paul Gauguin.

Self-Portraits / Vincent van Gogh

Paul
Gauguin
Self-Portrait with a Yellow Christ,
1891

The Yellow Christ
1889
Paul Gauguin
The Yellow Christ shows the crucifixion of
Christ taking place in nineteenth-century
northern France as Breton women are
gathered in prayer. The bold outlines and
flatness of the forms in this painting are
typical of the cloisonnist style.
Gauguin said he chose yellow to convey
how he felt about the isolated life and piety
of the peasants, several of whom are
pictured here dressed in their distinctive
regional costume and kneeling at the foot
of the cross during the evening hour

The Red Cow, 1889
Paul Gauguin
Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile
Bernard (Les misérables), 1888
Paul Gauguin,

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 1897-98
Paul Gauguin,
huge, brilliantly colored but enigmatic work painted on rough, heavy sackcloth. It contains
numerous human, animal, and symbolic figures arranged across an island landscape. The sea and
Tahiti‘s volcanic mountains are visible in the background.

Cubism
Atelier de la modiste,
1933
Pablo Picasso
1907 - 1939
@kushjeekamal

Cubism, highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the
artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style
emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional
techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro, and refuting time-honoured
theories that art should imitate nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture,
colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically
fragmented objects.
In 1907, Picasso and Braque attended a retrospective of Cézanne‘s work. His paintings gave them a
whole new perspective, especially in regards to the treatment of space and form. Picasso abode
by a sentence Cézanne once wrote when he recommended that nature be ―treated by the
cylinder, sphere and cone.‖
Cubism developed in three phases: First there was the Cezanian Cubism(1907), then came
Analytical Cubism (1910-1912) and finally there was Synthetic Cubism (After 1912). Each phase had
its own defining characteristics wherein the artists would study subjects in a reductive manner or in
contrast, they would add new materials to the work to give it an element of depth and dimension.

Pablo
Picasso
Self-Portrait, 1901

In 1907, Picasso unveiled one of his most famous
works of art. It was not only overwhelming in style
but also in its subject matter.
Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon features five naked
women in a madly unstructured atmosphere, full of
geometric shapes and strange angles.
The absence of shadows and perspective and
the flatness of the picture plane are all done to
strike the viewers.
The lack of realism is continued with the
asymmetry in the other faces. While some are less
dramatic than others, they all demonstrate
Picasso‘s interest in the reconfiguration of features.
A basket of fruit sure these ―demoiselles
d‘Avignon‖ are actually prostitutes in a brothel.
Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon, 1907, Pablo PiCasso

In 1937, Picasso expressed his outrage against war with Guernica, his enormous mural-sized painting
displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World‘s Fair. It has since become the twentieth century‘s most
powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today.
Giernica, 1937

What can we see?
This painting is not easy to decipher. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust
to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in
pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and
unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the
only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a
severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest
of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a
terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more
women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of
the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears
trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes
are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.
Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may
reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white.
Picasso balances the composition by organizing the figures into three vertical groupings moving left to
right, while the center figures are stabilized within a large triangle of light.
‖In the panel on which I am working, which I call Guernica, I clearly express my
abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death.‖

Woman Ironing, 1904
Early work of Picasso
Family of Saltimbanques, 1905Self Portrait - Paris, 1906

Three Women, 1907-8 Girl with a Mandolin, 1910Portrait of
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

'Weeping Woman', 1937 Woman‘s Head (Fernande),
1909
Guitar, 1914

Portrait of Fernande Olivier,
1909
Head of Woman (Dora Maar),
1939
The Dream
(Marie-Thérèse Walter )1932
Pablo Picasso And His Women

The Portuguese, 1911–12
Georges Braque,
The Portuguese and Ma Jolie are
well-known examples of late
Analytic Cubism, sometimes
called High Analytic Cubism or
Hermetic Cubism. The latter
name refers directly to the
mysterious and difficult qualities
of these paintings‘ abstraction.
The two paintings are very similar
in overall appearance. At the
time, Braque and Picasso were
using the same pictorial
language and had stopped
signing the front of their
paintings, sometimes making it
difficult to distinguish authorship
of individual works.
Ma Jolie, 1911–12
Pablo Picasso,

The Portuguese, 1911–12
Georges Braque,
Cubist portraits and figure paintings typically follow the
traditional format of placing the figure in the center of
the canvas. In The Portuguese, darker shadowed planes
suggest the upper body in the center. There are also
suggestions of cylindrical forms representing the upper
arms on the sides of this area, and half circles above
them indicate shoulders. On top of the dark torso area
rises a long lighter triangle outlining a collection of
smaller forms surrounding another dark cylinder. This is
the area of the man‘s neck and head.

Pitcher and Violin, 1909–10
Georges Braque,
Still Life with Clarinet (Bottle and Clarinet),
1911, Georges Braque,
Houses at l‘Estaque, 1908
Georges
Braque

Salon Cubism
Today, most people associate Cubism with Picasso and Braque, but in the early 1910s when the
style was new, the works of many other Cubist artists, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes,
Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger, were better known. These artists are often called the
Salon Cubists because they participated in the large annual public exhibitions in Paris known as
Salons.
Like Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists extended Cézanne‘s exploration of the tensions and
ambiguities of depicting three-dimensional objects in space on the flat surface of the picture
plane. Salon Cubist paintings were, however, notably different from Picasso‘s and Braque‘s.
Picasso and Braque painted mostly still lifes and single figures in portrait format, while the Salon
Cubists addressed grand themes and painted multi-figure compositions, landscapes, and
cityscapes.
While Picasso and Braque never provided any explanation of their Cubist work, some Salon
Cubists were more forthcoming.

Abundance, 1910
Henri Le Fauconnier
The Bathers, 1912, Albert Gleizes,

Le Goûter, 1911
Jean Metzinger,
The Path (Meudon), 1911
Albert Gleizes,

Le Goûter, 1911, Jean Metzinger,
The City, 1919, Fernand Léger,

Dadaism
A book about the Dada movement
1951
Paul Rand
c. 1913 - 1920

Dadaism or Dada was a form of artistic anarchy born out of disgust for the social, political and
cultural values of the time. It embraced elements of art, music, poetry, theatre, dance and
politics. Dada was not so much a style of art like Cubism or Fauvism; it was more a protest
movement with an anti-establishment manifesto.
Dada, nihilistic and anti-aesthetic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zürich,
Switzerland; New York City; Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover, Germany; and Paris in the early 20th
century.
Dada's weapons of choice in their war with the establishment were confrontation and
provocation. They attacked traditional artistic values with irrational attitudes and provoked
conservative complacency with outrageous statements and actions. They also launched a full
scale assault on the art world which they saw as part of the system. It was considered equally
culpable and consequently had to be toppled. Dada questioned the value of all art and
whether its existence was simply an indulgence of the bourgeoisie.
The great paradox of Dada is that they claimed to be anti-art, yet here we are discussing their
artworks. Even their most negative attacks on the establishment resulted in positive artworks that
opened a door to future developments in 20th century art. The effect of Dada was to create a
climate in which art was alive to the moment and not paralysed by the traditions and restrictions
of established values.

Dada artists, group photograph, 1920, Paris.
From left to right, Back row: Louis Aragon, Theodore Fraenkel, Paul Eluard, Clément Pansaers,
Emmanuel Fay (cut off). Second row: Paul Dermée, Philippe Soupault, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes.
Front row: Tristan Tzara (with monocle), Celine Arnauld, Francis Picabia, André Breton.

„Spirit of Our Time‟ is a sculptural metaphor for the
inability of the establishment to inspire the
changes necessary to rebuild a better Germany. It
is a satirical illustration of Raoul Hausmann‘s
statement that the average supporter of what he
considered to be a corrupt society ―has no more
capabilities than those which chance has glued to
the outside of his skull; his brain remains
empty‖. This blockhead of a hat maker‘s dummy
can only experience that which can be measured
by the range of mechanical equipment attached
to the outside of his head - a ruler and tape rule,
the movement of a pocket watch, a jewelry box
containing a typewriter wheel, some brass knobs
from a camera, a leaky telescopic beaker of the
kind that was issued to German soldiers during the
World War 1, and an old purse nailed to the back
of his head. With his eyes deliberately left blank,
the ‗Spirit of Our Time‘ is a blind automaton whose
blinkered attitude excludes any possibility of
creative thought. 'The Spirit of Our Time', 1920
Raoul Hausmann

Dada Readymades
The term was coined by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp to
describe ordinary, prefabricated objects selected by an artist
and presented as art. Sometimes the object is altered, such as
by combining it with another object to make an ―assisted
readymade.‘‖ The first readymade consisted of a bicycle wheel
mounted upside-down on the seat of a stool. For his most
notorious readymade, Duchamp took an ordinary men‘s urinal,
flipped it ninety degrees, titled it Fountain, and submitted it to an
art exhibition under the pseudonym ―R. Mutt.‖ Although the
exhibition was non-juried, meaning that it would theoretically
accept any submitted work, Fountain was rejected, and
Duchamp published a defense of it:
―Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not
has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of
life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared
under the new title and point of view — created a new thought
for that object.‖
Marcel Duchamp (anonymously)
Fountain ,1917
Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp‘s deliberately anti-art
readymades is a postcard reproducing
one of the world‘s most famous and
revered works of art, Leonardo‘s Mona
Lisa, adorned with a mustache and
goatee.
Not only did Duchamp deface what is
commonly regarded as a work of
transcendent technical skill with a bit of
crude graffiti, he violated gender norms
as well by adding facial hair to a
woman‘s portrait. Beneath the image is
more Duchampian wordplay: the initials
L.H.O.O.Q., which read aloud in French
sounds like ―Elle a chaud au cul‖ —
―she‘s got a hot ass.‖
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
Marcel Duchamp,

The Beautiful Girl, photomontage and collage
1919-20,
Hannah Höch,
Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last
Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany,
1919, Hannah Höch,

Surrealism
Bleu III
1961
Joan Miro
1924

Surrealism was the 20th century art movement that explored the hidden depths of the
'unconscious mind'. The Surrealists rejected the rational world as 'it only allows for the
consideration of those facts relevant to our experience'. [1] They sought a new kind of reality,
a heightened reality that they called 'surreality', which was found in the world of images drawn
from their dreams and imagination.
Surrealism was founded in Paris where many of the Dadaists had settled after the Great War. It
was originally a literary movement but its unusual imagery was more suited to the visual arts
and to those artists who were searching for a more consistent approach to art as an antidote
to the chaos of Dada.
Surrealism was similar in character to Dadaism as both were hostile to the traditions of
academic art and the values that it stood for. The main difference between the two
movements was in their method of opposition. While the Dadaists were content to blast the
establishment with a scattergun of negativity, the Surrealists were in search of a more creative
and positive philosophy.
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.‖
André Breton
Major spokesman of the movement

Salvador DalíJoan Miró Max Ernst René Magritte
The major Surrealist painters were Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy,
Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró.

Back row: Man Ray, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy and André Breton.
Front row: Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Rene Crevel.

Salvador Dalí
Self-Portrait
―I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by
the images I see appear upon my canvas. I register
without choice and with all possible exactitude the
dictates of my subconscious, my dreams….‖

With its uncanny, otherworldly feel, and its melting pocket
watches and mollusk-like central figure strewn about a
barren landscape, Salvador Dalí‘s The Persistence of
Memory seems wholly imaginary. In fact, it sprang not only
from the artist‘s imagination, but also from his memories of
the coastline of his native Catalonia, Spain
Dalí frequently described his works as
―hand-painted dream photographs.‖
He applied the methods of Surrealism,
tapping deep into the non-rational
mechanisms of his mind—dreams, the
imagination, and the subconscious—to
generate the unreal forms that
populate The Persistence of Memory.
These blend seamlessly with features
based on the real world, including the
rocky ridge in the painting‘s upper-
right-hand corner, which describes the
cliffs of the Cap de Creus peninsula.
Utilizing what he called ―the usual
paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling,‖ Dalí
claimed that he made this painting
with ―the most imperialist fury of
precision,‖ but only ―to systematize
confusion and thus to help discredit
completely the world of reality.‖
The Persistence of Memory,1931

Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937)

Salvador Dali painted this masterpiece six
months before the Spanish Civil War
began. He claimed to have been aware
of the war due to ―the prophetic power of
his subconscious mind‖. The painting
reflects his anxiety during the time and
predicts the horror and violence in the
war. It portrays two bodies, one darker
than the other, in a gruesome fight where
neither appears to be a victor. The
monstrous creature is self-destructive just
as a civil war is. Dali made sure the
painting looked very realistic despite the
fantastical creature it depicts. The boiled
beans in the painting, which are also
mentioned in the title, are perhaps a
reference to the simple stew that was
eaten by the poor citizens living through a
difficult time in Spain. Soft Construction
with Boiled Beans is considered one of
Dali‘s greatest masterpieces and is
renowned for brilliant use of surrealism to
depict the horrors of war.Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936)

The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee (1944) Tuna Fishing (1967)

René Magritte
The Son of Man, 1964
―My painting is visible images which conceal nothing;
they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one
of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question,
‗What does that mean?‘ It does not mean anything,
because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable.‖

René Magritte's paintings explore the 'unconscious' gaps
between the communication and interpretation of the
words and images that we use to describe reality. He
paints commonplace images that set a trap for our
rational faculties with their visual and verbal tripwires. The
interplay between the titles and the content of his
paintings adds another level of disorientation to these
philosophical conundrums.
'The Human Condition' (1933) portrays a canvas on an
easel in front of a window. The image on the canvas is a
landscape painting which exactly registers with the view
through the window. This immediately makes us pause
and think, 'How do we know that the landscape behind
the painting is what we see on the canvas? Is the image
on the canvas revealing or concealing a view of reality?'
The answer is that we simply don't know because we
cannot move the painting to find out. Therefore, the
reality of what exists is either accepted as an act of faith
or becomes a construct of the mind, both philosophical
perspectives of the human condition.
The Human Condition, 1933, René Magritte

Les fleurs de l‘abîme, 1928 Empire of Light, 1950
What is represented in a picture is what is visible to the eye, it is the thing or the things that had to be thought of.
Thus, what is represented in the picture are the things I thought of, to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a
skyscape such as can be seen in broad daylight. The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This
evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry" ‖

The Treachery of Images presents the
disjunctions between the written phrase
―Ceci n‘est pas une pipe‖ (This is not a
pipe) and the depiction of a pipe above
it.
Representation is not reality, although it
may look like it; nor is language to be
trusted as a source of truth about what is
real. The painting of a pipe is not a pipe;
but the word ―pipe‖ is not a pipe either.
By undermining comfortable assumptions
about the human ability to understand
reality through language and
representation, Magritte‘s works
demonstrate that we make the world we
think we know.
Everything is, in the end, a question of
representation (in words or images) in
which we choose to believe, or not.
The Treachery of Images, 1929, René Magritte

The Lovers I (1928), The Lovers II (1928),

Joan Miró
Birth of the World, 1925
―Rather than setting out to paint something I began
painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert
itself, or suggest itself under my brush.…
The first stage is free, unconscious.
The second stage is carefully calculated.‖

The hunter, a key figure in the
work, stands in the left of the
composition. He is reduced to
small attributes and
represented by geometric
shapes. These are very
characteristic of Miró‘s
painting. He has a stick body
and a triangle head.
With a heart that seems to be
floating in mid-air, he smokes a
pipe and brandishes a smoking
gun. We are led to believe that
he has just shot a rabbit. Miró‘s
reductive representation of the
human body is perhaps a
commentary on his views of
humankind itself.
The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) 1923–1924, Joan Miró,

Harlequin's Carnival, 1924-25The Farm, 1922

The anti-painting of Joan Miró
is not an actual technique as it
is more of a statement. He
didn‘t mean to violate or to
deconstruct the norms and
traditions of painting, but
rather to remove all sacred
qualities and status of the
artistic work.
Miró tortured the canvas with
unconventional methods: he
burnt it, wounded it and
perforated it in order to create
a grotesque disfigurement.
The anti-painting of Joan Miró
proved that he was an artist of
violence and resistance who
never ceased to be a painter.
―I want to assassinate painting.‖ Burnt Canvas 4, 1970s

Fauvism
The Dessert (Harmony in Red),
1908
Henri Matisse
1905 - 1910

Fauvism developed in France to become the first new artistic style of the 20th century.
In contrast to the dark, vaguely disturbing nature of much fin-de-siècle, or turn-of-the-
century, Symbolist art, the Fauves produced bright cheery landscapes and figure paintings,
characterized by pure vivid color and bold distinctive brushwork.
When shown at the 1905 Salon d‘Automne (an exhibition organized by artists in response to
the conservative policies of the official exhibitions, or salons) in Paris, the contrast to
traditional art was so striking it led critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe the artists as ―Les
Fauves‖ or ―wild beasts,‖ and thus the name was born.
One of several Expressionist movements to emerge in the early 20th century, Fauvism was
short lived, and by 1910, artists in the group had diverged toward more individual interests.
Nevertheless, Fauvism remains significant for it demonstrated modern art‘s ability to evoke
intensely emotional reactions through radical visual form.
―In the centre of the room, was a child‘s torso and a small marble bust by Albert Marque,
whose work is a delicate science. The shock of seeing the sculptures stuck in between an orgy
of bright tones was like seeing a Donatello among wild beasts.‖
Art critic, Louis Vauxcelles

Albert MarquetHenri Matisse André Derain Maurice de Vlaminck

The Joy of Life,
1905
Henri Matisse.
It is a large-scale
painting depicting an Arcadian
landscape filled with brilliantly
colored forest, meadow, sea,
and sky and populated by
nude figures both at rest and in
motion. As with the earlier
Fauve canvases, color is
responsive only to emotional
expression and the formal
needs of the canvas, not the
realities of nature. The
references are many, but in
form and date, Bonheur de
Vivre is closest to Cézanne‘s last
great image of bathers.

The Dance,
1910
Henri Matisse.
the viewer‘s gaze is
drawn in by their circular
characteristics: the
figures on top are folded,
in the act of arching their
backs, while those on the
bottom are extended.
Their curves dominate
the composition and by
joining hands, their
circular shape gives the
painting a feeling of
movement and motion.

L‘Estaque, the Turning Road, 1906
André Derain,
In a Fauvist painting, the colours
are bright and and exacerbated
but above all, pure. They should
barely touch once on the canvas
and should not be mixed with
other pigments prior to
application. This technique was
well beyond unconventional for its
time.
Moreover, in the Fauvist doctrine,
the painter has no obligation to
respect and thus depict his
observable reality. The choice of
colour could be completely
arbitrary or something that the
artist sees in his mind‘s eye. Trees
can be red or blue and people
can be green. Either way, it
doesn‘t really matter because
you‘re not bound by the rules of
academic painting.

Red Trees, 1905
Maurice de Vlaminck
Unlike Impressionism, which
focused mainly on the
landscape genre, Fauvist
paintings feature numerous
subjects. Nevertheless, nature
remains a favourite. Particularly
fond of landscapes in the South
of France, the artists
appreciated well-lit
atmospheres.

Portrait of Madame Matisse1905
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse1905
André Derain

Expressionism
Number 26 A (Black and white),
1948
Jackson Pollock
From 1910
@kushjeekamal

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the
subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person.
The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and
through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.
In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th
centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical
of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.
Expressionism was not a name coined by artists themselves. It first emerged around 1910 as a
way to classify art that shared common stylistic traits and seemed to emphasize emotional
impact over descriptive accuracy.
For this reason, artists like Edvard Munch straddle the line between Post-Impressionist
developments in late 19th century painting and early 20th century Expressionism. Likewise, the
Fauves in France exhibited similar characteristics in their work and are often linked to
Expressionism.

Munch‟s painting of ‘The Scream’ (1893) was equally
influential. It provides us with a psychological blueprint
for Expressionist art: distorted shapes and
exaggerated colors that amplify a sense of anxiety
and alienation.
‗The Scream‘ is Munch‘s own voice crying in the
wilderness, a prophetic voice that declares the
Expressionist message, fifteen years before the term
was invented.
'The Scream'
1893
Edvard Munch
"I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun
set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky
became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the
railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds
that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black
fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there,
trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending
scream piercing nature."

German Expressionism
The German Expressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness, boldness, and visual
intensity. They used jagged, distorted lines; crude, rapid brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban
street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their
instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety,
disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the
ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life.
Woodcuts, with their thick jagged lined and harsh tonal contrasts, were one of the favourite media of
the German Expressionists.
The German Expressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness, boldness, and visual
intensity. They used jagged, distorted lines; crude, rapid brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban
street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their
instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety,
disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the
ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life.
Woodcuts, with their thick jagged lined and harsh tonal contrasts, were one of the favourite media of
the German Expressionists.
Though many artists of the early twentieth century can accurately be called Expressionists, two groups
that developed in Germany, Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), are among
the best known and help to define the style.

Die Brücke (The Bridge)
In 1905, four young artists working in Dresden and Berlin, joined
together, calling themselves Die Brücke (The Bridge). Led by Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, the group wanted to create a radical art that
could speak to modern audiences, which they characterized as
young, vital, and urban. T he name ―Die Brücke‖ describes their
desire to serve as a bridge from the present to the future. While
each artist had his own personal style, Die Brücke art is
characterized by bright, often arbitrary colors and a ―primitive‖
aesthetic, inspired by both African and European medieval art.
Their work often addressed modern urban themes of alienation and
anxiety, and sexually charged themes in their depictions of the
female nude.
―With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and
spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future
and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement
against the long established older forces.‖ - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Manifesto, 1906, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Die Brücke (The Bridge): Its leading members were
Emile Nolde, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
Street Dresden, 1908, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,Self-Portrait with Model, 1907

‗Madchen aus Kowno‘, 1918 ,
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Fränzi Reclining (Fränzi liegend), 1910, Erich Heckel

Indian and Woman, 1910
Max Pechstein,
‗Crucifixion', 1912
Emile Nolde
Mother (Mutter) 1918
Max Pechstein

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
Der Blaue Reiter was formed in 1911 in Munich as a loose
association of painters led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc.
They shared an interest in abstracted forms and prismatic colors,
which, they felt, had spiritual values that could counteract the
corruption and materialism of their age. The flattened
perspective and reductive forms of woodcut helped put the
artists, especially Kandinsky, on the path toward abstraction in
their painting.
The name Blaue Reiter (―blue rider‖) refers to a key motif in
Kandinsky‘s work: the horse and rider, which was for him a symbol
for moving beyond realistic representation. The horse was also a
prominent subject in Marc‘s work, which centered on animals as
symbols of rebirth.
―'We do not seek to propagate any precise or particular form; our
object is to show, in the variety of the forms represented, how the
inner desire of artists realises itself in multiple fashion.'
Cover of Der Blaue Reiter Almanac , 1912
Vasily Kandinsky

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider): Its leading associated artists were
Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter
.
On White II, 1923 ,
Vasily Kandinsky
Der Blaue Reiter ,1903
Vasily Kandinsky)

.
Lady in a Green Jacket, 1913
August Macke,
Rehe im Walde (Deer in Woods), 1914
Franz Marc,

.
Interior (Das Interieur), 1908
Gabriele Münter
'Ad Parnassum', 1932
Paul Klee

Austrian Expressionism
Expressionism in Austria is principally represented by two major figures: Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele.
Although they were essentially rivals, they both concentrated on portraiture and the nude, using sexually
or psychologically charged body language to bore into the human psyche and challenge the facade of
complacency and conformity that dominated Viennese culture.
For the Austrian Expressionists it was drawing—Schiele's taut lines and Kokoschka‘s nervous draftsmanship—
rather than printmaking that helped them develop their highly personal and emotional styles.
Egan Schiele Oskar
Kokoschka Gustav Klimt
Max Oppenheimer (MOPP)

‗Portrait of Wally‘,1912
Egon Schiele
Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant, 1912
Egon Schiele

Self-Portrait, Hand on Chest, 1912
Oskar Kokoschka
The Girl Li and I (Das Mädchen Li und ich)- 1907
Oskar Kokoschka

Tree of Life,
1909,
Gustav Klimt,

The World War, 1916, Max Oppenheimer Moderne Galerie Theatiner, 1911, Max Oppenheimer

New Objectivity
The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) emerged as a style in Germany in the 1920s as a challenge to
Expressionism. As its name suggests, it offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on the
objective world, as opposed to the more abstract, romantic, or idealistic tendencies of Expressionism. The
style is most often associated with portraiture, and its leading practitioners included Max Beckmann, Otto
Dix, and George Grosz. Their mercilessly naturalistic depictions, sometimes reminiscent of the meticulous
processes of the Old Masters, frequently portrayed Weimar society in a caustically satirical manner.
Max Beckmann Otto Dix
George Grosz Alexander Kanoldt
Jeanne Mammen Georg Scholz

Self-Portrait With Trumpet, 1938 Self-Portrait with a Cigarette 1923Self-Portrait in Tuxedo 1927
Max Beckmann

Portrait of Sylvia Von Harden,1926 Self-portrait, 1912Self-Portrait 1922
Otto Dix

Portrait of Sylvia Von Harden,1926
Suicide, 1916The Eclipse of the Sun, 1926
George Grosz

Abstract
Expressionism
Number 26 A (Black and white),
1948
Jackson Pollock
From late 1940s
@kushjeekamal

―We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world destroyed by a great depression
and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings
that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello.‖
Barnet Newman

Front row: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst,
Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko;
Middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William
Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert
Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin;
Back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb,
Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne
[Photographer - Nina Leen, November 24,1950 ]

Abstract Expressionism is a term applied to a movement in American painting that flourished in New
York City after World War II, sometimes referred to as the New York School or, more narrowly, as action
painting. The varied work produced by the Abstract Expressionists resists definition as a cohesive style;
instead, these artists shared an interest in using abstraction to convey strong emotional or expressive
content.
Abstract Expressionism is best known for large-scale paintings that break away from traditional
processes, often taking the canvas off of the easel and using unconventional materials such as house
paint. While Abstract Expressionism is often considered for its advancements in painting, its ideas had
deep resonance in many mediums, including drawing and sculpture.
Abstract Expressionists insisted their subjects were not ―abstract,‖ but rather primal images, deeply
rooted in society‘s collective unconscious. Their paintings did not express mere emotion. They
communicated universal truths about the human condition.
The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen
Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker
Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov.

Jackson Pollock
Photograph by Hans Namuth, July 1950
―On the floor, I am more at ease. I feel
nearer, more a part of the painting, since
this way I can walk around it, work from the
four sides and literally be in the painting. I
prefer sticks, trowels, knives, and dripping
fluid paint….When I am in my painting, I‘m
not aware of what I‘m doing….there is pure
harmony, an easy give and take, and the
painting comes out well.‖

―When I am in my painting, I‘m not aware of what I‘m doing. It is only after a sort of ‗get
acquainted‘ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes,
destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come
through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise
there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.‖
Jackson Pollock

Full Fathom Five (1947), Jackson Pollock

Full Fathom Five is a metaphor for the human mind: whilst it appears to shine and glitter in the light,
beneath the surface, the assortment and randomness of the composition show the anxious and
dark mind of humanity.
The ‗accidental nature‘ of the 'painting' process meant that Pollock combined layers of paint with
contents of his trouser-pocket paraphernalia to create a unique, optical pattern. Embedding
everyday materials and textures into the painting provides a three-dimensional element.
Pollock embedded these textural agents (matches, keys, screws, paint-tube tops, nails, buttons, a
torn cigarette and coins) into the surface of Full Fathom Five and covered them with layers and
layers of paint, so they appear almost invisible in reproductions of the painting.
However, when your fingertips touch the surface, or the light shines onto surface, the undulations
and textures amplify the potential and simplicity of the image.
"Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes.".
The Tempest
William Shakespeare

it is a field of densely interlaced threads of paint offset by pools and splashes of color. Pollock
began by laying canvas on the floor and pouring, dribbling, and flicking enamel paint onto its
surface, sometimes straight from the can or with sticks and stiffened brushes. He would also
convey paint onto his canvases by punching holes in the bottom of paint cans, squeezing it
directly from tubes, and even using a turkey baster. Although he was not the first to explore liquid
enamels, Pollock harnessed their physical properties more dramatically than ever before.
One: Number 31, 1950

Number 11 (Blue Poles), 1952, Jackson Pollock

Willem
de Kooning
Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt, 1950
―The attitude that nature is chaotic and that
the artist puts order into it is a very absurd
point of view, I think. All that we can hope
for is to put some order into ourselves‖

―Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented,‖
de Kooning once remarked, and although he
painted many abstractions he continually
returned to the figure.
Woman I took him an unusually long time to
complete: he made numerous preliminary
studies, then repainted the canvas repeatedly,
eventually arriving at this figure of a woman,
the first of a series.
Some saw the painting as a betrayal, a
regression to an outmoded figurative tradition.
Others have called it misogynistic,
understanding it as objectifying and violent.
De Kooning himself said, however, ―Beauty
becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque.
It‘s more joyous.‖
Woman I
1950–52
Willem de Kooning

Interchange speaks to a technical change in
the way de Kooning painted. It was painted
during a time when he worked closely with
Franz Kline. Both painters had iconic personal
styles. Kline was known for intuitive, quick brush
strokes and a black and white palette. De
Kooning was known for violently attacking his
canvases, thrusting his brushes so dramatically
against them that he would often puncture
their surfaces. He would also work his paintings
repeatedly, over long spans of time, scraping
the paint away and adding more layers, giving
them a sense that they were simultaneously
overworked and yet never finished.
.
Interchange, 1955
Willem de Kooning
$300 million (2nd Highest auctioned Art work)

Pink Angels marked an important stage in de
Kooning's evolution from figuration towards
abstraction in the 1940s. The fleshy pink
biomorphs of his earlier work - shapes that
evoke eyes and other anatomical forms - are
violently torn apart in a painting that was
reportedly inspired by the carnage of World
War II, and the figurative elements are barely
distinguishable from the mustard yellow
background. This thorough blurring of figure
and ground was an important step in de
Kooning's development towards the black and
white paintings of the later part of the decade.
Pink Angels,
1945
Willem de Kooning

Mark Rothko
In front of his painting ―No.7‖, 1960
―I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the
relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm
interested only in expressing basic human
emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.‖

Orange and Yellow reflects Mark Rothko‘s mature
style, in which two or three rectangles are set within
a background that surrounds them all, but divides
them gently from one another. The edges of the
rectangles are never distinct, avoiding an optical
break and allowing viewers‘ eyes to move quietly
from other area to another in a contemplative way.
Rothko did not want us to think about him when
looking at his paintings, so he tried to remove all
evidence of the creation process. To accomplish
this, he applied numerous layers of thin paint with a
brush or rag to unprepared canvas, which absorbed
the colors into its fabric. The many thin washes help
to give his paintings a lightness and brightness, as if
they glow from within.
Orange and Yellow was considered quite large in
the 1950s, and Rothko asked viewers to stand close
in order to be visually surrounded by the colors.
Orange and Yellow 1956
Mark Rothko

Rothko using multiform, with several blocks of
layered, complimentary colour. The top half are
analogous colours of yellow/orange, orange and
orange/red mixed with a complimentary bottom
with yellow and pink, then with a black strip
across the middle. The piece top to bottom is a
yellow horizontal rectangle with the black
horizontal strip, then the narrow white rectangular
band white mixes in both colour schemes and a
lavender bottom half. The top half of the rose
ground is deeper in colour and the bottom half is
paler adding value. Overall the artist used a
variety of colour schemes mixed into one
painting that creates a warm, bright and even
happy feel to the viewer mixing between the
complimentary, analogous with the primary and
tertiary colours.
White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose),1950
Mark Rothko

―…I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically
the function of painting large pictures is painting
something very grandiose and pompous. The reason
I paint them, however — I think it applies to other
painters I know — is precisely because I went to be
very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is
to place yourself outside your experience, to look
upon an experience as a stereopticon view a
reducing glass. However you paint larger picture,
you are in it. It isn‘t something you command.‖
No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), 1951,
Mark Rothko
Sold for $153 Million in an auction

Untitled (Yellow and Blue) in 1954Blue, green, and brown, 1952

Black on Maroon, 1959
―I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.‖

Barnett
Newman
Photograph by Irving Penn 1966
―I hope that my painting has the impact of
giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his
own totality, of his own separateness, of his
own individuality,‖

Throughout the 1930s and early
1940s Newman was endlessly
dissatisfied with his own efforts as a
painter. He had the heart of a poet
and philosopher and was seeking a
way to communicate his inner
nature through his art. He found
solace writing about art, as he
wrote exhibition catalogue essays
for various other artists, thanks to his
association with Betty Parsons.
Those writings, along with his varied
life experiences and personal
struggles, led him gradually to
develop a profound theory about
the nature of humanity and the
purpose of art.
Midnight Blue, 1970
Barnett Newman

He spelled that philosophy out in
two essays he wrote in 1947 and
1948, respectively. The first essay
was titled The First Man Was an
Artist. In it, Newman argued that
the poetic, or artistic instinct has
always preceded the utilitarian
instinct in humans, since the
beginning of time. He argued that
mud sculptures of gods had
predated pottery, and that poetic
grunts and screams expressive of
the most primal emotions predated
so-called civilized utterances.
―Pottery is the product of
civilization,‖ Newman wrote.
―The artistic act is man's personal
birthright.‖
The Third, 1964
Barnett Newman

Vir Heroicus Sublimis .1950, Barnett Newman

Franz Kline, Clyfford Still,
Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler,,
Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell,
Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin,
William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt,
Richard Pousette-Dart,
Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov.

As with many of his contemporaries, Kline was
originally trained as a figurative painter. His early
artworks show an excellent grasp of formal
technique and an advanced talent for drawing. He
transitioned into abstraction after befriending
members of the New York School, such as Willem de
Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Hans
Hoffman and Philip Guston. Through their influence,
Kline narrowed his focus, exploring the nature of
brush strokes in large-scale action paintings that
consisted of a simplified, black and white palette. But
a look at his earlier works, although figurative in
nature, such as Puppet in the Paint Box, reveals some
of the same brushstrokes and raw grasp of
composition and color that defined the abstract
style that ultimately made him famous.
―unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence.‖
Untitled II, 1952
Franz Kline
Franz Kline

Even though he was friends with, and is
still today associated with the founding
members of the Abstract Expressionist
New York School painters, Kline‘s oeuvre
is different from theirs in a specific and
important way. While the other Abstract
Expressionists were mining their own
feelings, intuitions and subconscious
emotions and using them to create
works that were deeply personal and rife
with hidden meaning, Kline made work
that was about the formal qualities of
painting, such as paint, brush stroke,
composition and color.
―I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.‖
Untitled – Locomotive, Franz Kline

Rather than explaining or analyzing the
content of his works, Kline encouraged
viewers to simply interact with the marks
and compositions themselves, not
seeking symbolism or meaning but
simply interacting with the formal
qualities of the art. These works were all
about the singular aesthetic
appreciation of his signature brush
strokes and the surrounding negative
space. Kline felt that the emotional
impact of the work could be
experienced entirely through an
appreciation of these formal qualities,
and insisted that that was the most
important thing on which to focus.
Through this personal style he became a
sort of link between the mysticism of the
Abstract Expressionists and the formalism
embraced by the Minimalists.Chief, 1950, Franz Kline

At first glance, Abstract Painting may appear to be a
monochromatic black canvas, but a careful look
reveals that this painting is a three-by-three grid with
squares in varying shades of black. Ad Reinhardt
once said, ―There is a black which is old and a black
which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in
sunlight and black in shadow.‖1 To create the work,
Reinhardt mixed black oil paint with small amounts of
red, green, or blue and allowed the paint to sit for
several weeks in order to separate the pigment from
the solvent. He would then pour out the solvent and
use the remaining concentrated paint to apply a
completely smooth, matte surface that left no trace
of the artist‘s brush. Reinhardt explained that he
hoped to achieve ―a pure, abstract, non-objective,
timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless,
disinterested painting—an object that is self-
conscious (no unconsciousness), ideal, transcendent,
aware of no thing but art.‖
―Art is Art. Everything else is everything else..‖
Abstract Painting, 1960,Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt

For the last ten years of his life, between 1957 and
1967, the abstract expressionist painter Ad Reinhardt
focused exclusively on the colour black, creating
austere, square, pictures he described as 'ultimate
paintings'.
―These were the culmination of what he construed as
a negative progression of modern art, in which
modernism was ever more defined by an art form‘s
essential attributes," writes art historian Stella Paul
For Reinhardt, these essential attributes were a process
of negation, or subtraction, of all extraneous elements,
including referential imagery, narrative, emotion,
gestural incident and superfluous high colour.
Reinhardt looked beyond his own milieu to Eastern art,
particularly closely toned Chinese and Japanese
landscapes. His study of Eastern religions also informed
his asceticism, according to Stella Paul.
.
―Artists who peddle wiggly lines and colours as
representing emotion should be run off the streets.‖
Abstract Painting (Black 1), 1963, Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt

Abstract Painting (Blue), 1952, Ad Reinhardt Abstract Painting (Red), 1952, Ad Reinhardt

Gothic Landscape, 1961, Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner
―It‘s too bad that women‘s liberation
didn‘t occur 30 years earlier in my life, I
couldn‘t run out and do a one-woman
job on the sexist aspects of the art
world, continue my painting, and stay
in the role I was in as Mrs. Pollock.‖
Lee Krasner found herself in a male
dominated group of Abstract
Expressionists where macho
individuality and ego over-shadowed
her desire to explore the duality and
ambivalence of the human
experience laid bare on canvas.

Untitled, 1949, Lee Krasner
Lee Krasner
Combat, 1965, Lee Krasner,

Mountains and Sea, 1956,
Helen Frankenthaler
Mauve District,1966

POP ART
'Gala 1965'
Peter Stämpfli
Late 1950s and ‘60s
@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal

Pop Art was the art of popular culture. It was
the visual art movement that characterized a
sense of optimism during the post war
consumer boom of the 1950's and 1960's. It
coincided with the globalization of pop
music and youth culture, personified by Elvis
and the Beatles. Pop Art was brash, young
and fun and hostile to the artistic
establishment. It included different styles of
painting and sculpture from various countries,
but what they all had in common was an
interest in mass-media, mass-production and
mass-culture.
@kushjeekamal
'100 Sources of Pop Art', 2014 (silkscreen
print with diamond dust, glitter and glazes)
Sir Peter Blake

The word 'POP' was first coined in 1954, by
the British art critic Lawrence Alloway, to
describe a new type of art that was inspired
by the imagery of popular culture. Alloway,
alongside the artists Richard Hamilton and
Eduardo Paolozzi, was among the founding
members of the Independent Group, a
collective of artists, architects, and writers
who explored radical approaches to
contemporary visual culture during their
meetings at ICA in London between 1952
and 1955. They became the forerunners to
British Pop art.
@kushjeekamal
'I was a Rich Man's Plaything' , 1947
Eduardo Paolozzi

Richard Hamilton‘s collage of 1956, ‗Just
What Is It That Makes Today‘s Homes So
Different, So Appealing?‘ is the ultimate
catalogue of pop art imagery: comics,
newspapers, advertising, cars, food,
packaging, appliances, celebrity, sex, the
space age, television and the movies. A
black and white version of this collage was
used as the cover for the catalogue of the
'This Is Tomorrow' exhibition at the
Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. This show
heralded a widening of our understanding of
what culture is and inspired a new
generation of young British artists that
included Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake,
David Hockney, Allen Jones, Joe Tilson, Derek
Boshier, Richard Smith and R.B Kitaj.
@kushjeekamal
'Just what is it that makes today's homes so
different, so appealing?' 1956 (collage)
Richard Hamilton

Pop art in America evolved in a slightly differently
way to its British counterpart. American Pop Art
was both a development of and a reaction
against Abstract Expressionist painting. Abstract
Expressionism was the first American art
movement to achieve global acclaim but, by the
mid-1950's, many felt it had become too
introspective and elitist. American Pop Art
evolved as an attempt to reverse this trend by
reintroducing the image as a structural device in
painting, to pull art back from the obscurity of
abstraction into the real world again.
Around 1955, two remarkable artists emerged
who would lay the foundations of a bridge
between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They
were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the
forerunners of American Pop Art.
@kushjeekamal
Flag
1954-55
Jasper Johns

Popular culture, “popular” art
At first glance, Pop Art might seem to glorify
popular culture by elevating soup cans, comic
strips and hamburgers to the status of fine art on
the walls of museums. But, then again, a second
look may suggest a critique of the mass marketing
practices and consumer culture that emerged in
the United States after World War II. Andy Warhol‘s
Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962) clearly reflects this
inherent irony of Pop. The central image on a gold
background evokes a religious tradition of
painted icons, transforming the Hollywood starlet
into a Byzantine Madonna that reflects our
obsession with celebrity. Notably, Warhol‘s spiritual
reference was especially poignant given
Monroe‘s suicide a few months earlier. Like
religious fanatics, the actress‘s fans worshipped
their idol; yet, Warhol‘s sloppy silk-screening calls
attention to the artifice of Marilyn‘s glamorous
façade and places her alongside other mass-
marketed commodities like a can of soup or a
box of Brillo pads.@kushjeekamal
Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962,Andy Warhol

Post-War Consumer Culture Grabs Hold (and Never Lets Go)
The years following World War II saw enormous growth in the American economy, which, combined
with innovations in technology and the media, spawned a consumer culture with more leisure time
and expendable income than ever before. The manufacturing industry that had expanded during the
war now began to mass-produce everything from hairspray and washing machines to shiny new
convertibles, which advertisers claimed all would bring ultimate joy to their owners. Significantly, the
development of television, as well as changes in print advertising, placed new emphasis on graphic
images and recognizable brand logos—something that we now take for granted in our visually
saturated world.
It was in this artistic and cultural context that Pop artists developed their distinctive style of the early
1960s. Characterized by clearly rendered images of popular subject matter, it seemed to assault the
standards of modern painting, which had embraced abstraction as a reflection of universal truths and
individual expression.
@kushjeekamal

Appropriation is the intentional borrowing,
copying, and alteration of existing images and
objects. A strategy that has been used by artists
for millennia, it took on new significance in the
mid-20th century with the rise of consumerism
and the proliferation of images through mass
media outlets from magazines to television.
Pop artists reveled in reproducing, juxtaposing,
and repeating everyday images from popular
culture in their wide-ranging work. In doing so,
they both mirrored and critiqued the ideas,
desires, and cultural trends of their time.
Today, appropriating, sampling, and remixing
elements of popular culture is common
practice for artists working in many different
mediums, but such strategies continue to
challenge notions of originality and authorship,
and to push the boundaries of what it means to
be an artist.
@kushjeekamal
Jewish Jackie, 1992, Deborah Kass

@kushjeekamal
Emerging in the mid 1950s in Britain and late 1950s in America, pop art reached its peak in the 1960s.
It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on
what art should be. Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in
museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day.
Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop
music and comic books for their imagery.
In 1957 pop artist Richard Hamilton listed the ‗characteristics of pop art‘ in a letter to his friends the
architects Peter and Alison Smithson:
Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily
forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous,
Big business
Modernist critics were horrified by the pop artists‘ use of such ‗low‘ subject matter and by their
apparently uncritical treatment of it. In fact pop both took art into new areas of subject matter and
developed new ways of presenting it in art and can be seen as one of the first manifestations of
postmodernism.

Jasper Johns
Photograph by Irving Penn 1983
―I assumed that everything would lead to
complete failure, but I decided that didn't
matter – that would be my life. ‖

@kushjeekamal
White Flag -1955 Three Flags -1958
―The painting of a flag is always about a flag, but it is no more about a
flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint.‖

@kushjeekamal
Flags
Johns painted his first Flag paintings in 1954, the same year the Army-McCarthy hearings were held in
the US Senate. It was a time when every American was under pressure to declare their patriotism. The
American flag was at the height of its objective meaning and its power as an aesthetic object. To
those who loved America and saw the flag as something to be revered it could have been seen as
blasphemy to paint an image of the flag, especially one that was incorrectly positioned. Or to those
sympathetic to the citizens who were being harassed by the House Un-American Activities
Committee, Johns‘ flags could have been interpreted as a revolutionary political statement.
Johns made no explanation of the meaning of his flag paintings whatsoever. He simply appropriated
the most potent symbol in the American visual lexicon and used it in his work. By painting it a variety of
different ways and in a variety of different contexts he neutralized its inherent meaning and turned it
into a symbolic form, no different than a triangle or a square. He proved that a white painting of an
American flag form, such as his White Flag, painted in 1955, isn‘t definitively an American flag any
more than a silver circle over a horizon line is definitively the sun or the moon. Johns turned the flag
into an abstract symbol devoid of intrinsic value and invited viewers to complete the flag artworks in
their own minds.

@kushjeekamalFlags I -1973 Flags II -1973
Johns has created more than 100 flags in various media, in a variety of sizes, as a single flag or in
multiples, and depicted it in black & white, greys, in oranges and greens and in the traditional red,
white and blue.

@kushjeekamal
False Start-1959
Semiotic Relationships
Semiotics is the study of symbols and their
meaning. Integral to this branch of thought is the
act of interpretation. When it comes to verbal
languages, we see interpretation as an objective
thing. To interpret a sentence from one verbal
language to another requires that we all accept
that each language has an objective basis of
meaning. Jasper Johns turned the world of
semiotics on its head. By appropriating imagery
from the mass culture he began with symbols
that were already familiar, or as he called them,
―things the mind already knows.‖
In his 1959 painting False Start, Johns
incorporated the familiar symbols of the English
language onto the surface. He inserted text
related to colors but the words were painted in
unrelated colors and were surrounded by other
colors still.

Robert
Rauschenberg
Photograph by Seidner David 1992
―Painting is more like the real world if it's made
out the real world‖.

@kushjeekamal
Inspired by Schwitters who created collages from the refuse he picked up on the street,
Rauschenberg combined real objects that he found in his New York neighborhood with collage and
painting techniques. He said, ―I actually had a house rule. If I walked completely round the block and
didn't have enough to work with, I could take one other block and walk around it in any direction –
but that was it.‖ He called these multi-media assemblages ‗combines‘, which ―had to look at least as
interesting as anything that was going on outside the window‖.
―Combine‖ is a term Rauschenberg invented to describe a series of works that combine aspects of
painting and sculpture. Virtually eliminating all distinctions between these artistic categories, the
Combines either hang on the wall or are freestanding. With the Combine series, Rauschenberg
endowed new significance to ordinary objects by placing them in the context of art.

Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953
Robert Rauschenberg
Canyon, 1959

'Retroactive 1', 1964
In 'Retroactive 1', Rauschenberg plays with the way we
have read paintings since the early Renaissance. The
composition recalls early religious icons where the
central figure of Christ or a saint would have been
surrounded by some smaller narrative panels. An iconic
image of the venerated President Kennedy, the most
powerful man in the world who was assassinated in the
previous year, holds the central position as he forcefully
issues a warning. He points to the red image on his right
which looks deceptively like Masaccio's 'Expulsion of
Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden'. With the
symbolic association of 'red' and the mushroom-shaped
cloud hovering above the president's head, this could
easily be interpreted as a cold war reference to the
Cuban Missile Crisis, ironically using a creation allegory to
represent the Doomsday scenario. However,
Rauschenberg is not that simple. If you look more closely
you discover that the red image is not a section of
Masaccio's fresco, but a stroboscopic flash photograph
(Life Magazine, 10/10/1952 by Gjon Mili) of a real life
reconstruction of the painting 'Nude Descending a
Staircase, No 2' (1912) by Rauschenberg's mentor Marcel
Duchamp.

Andy Warhol
Self-Portrait in Fright Wig, 1986
―Pop artists did images that anyone walking
down the street would recognize in a split
second—comics, picnic tables, men‘s pants,
celebrities, refrigerators, Coke bottles.‖

@kushjeekamal‗32 Campbell's Soup Cans‘, 1962

@kushjeekamal
If there was one artist who personified Pop Art it was Andy Warhol. He originally worked as a
'commercial artist' and his subject matter was derived from the imagery of mass-culture:
advertising, comics, newspapers, TV and the movies.
Warhol embodied the spirit of American popular culture and elevated its imagery to the status of
museum art. He used second-hand images of celebrities and consumer products which he
believed had an intrinsic banality that made them more interesting. He felt that they had been
stripped of their meaning and emotional presence through their mass-exposure. Typically
subverting the values of the art establishment, Warhol was fascinated by this banality which he
celebrated in a series of subjects ranging from soup cans to celebrities. Whether it was a painting
of 'Campbell's Chicken Noodle' or a 'Car Crash', a portrait of 'Elizabeth Taylor' or the 'Electric
Chair', Warhol's detached approach was always the same: "I think every painting should be the
same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a
better or worse painting.―
As Cubism stands on the shoulders of Cézanne, Warhol's art is dependant on Duchamp's
'readymades. He was really a Dadaist in spirit - an 'agent provocateur'. His many whimsical
proclamations about art were deliberately enigmatic and contrary, avoiding clarification and
forcing his audience to speculate on their meaning:
"I'd prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up
different every time I'm asked."

@kushjeekamal
Marilyn Diptych,
1962
Andy Warhol
"art should be
meaningful in the
most shallow way"

@kushjeekamal
―Marlon,‖ 1966 ―Marilyn,‖ 1967

@kushjeekamal
Eight Elvises (1963)

@kushjeekamal
Mao (1973) Coca Cola (3) (1962) Mickey Mouse (1981)

Roy
Lichtenstein
"It was hard to get a painting that was
despicable enough so that no one would
hang it.......everybody was hanging
everything. It was almost acceptable to hang
a dripping paint rag, everybody was
accustomed to this. The one thing everyone
hated was commercial art; apparently they
didn't hate that enough, either."
Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe 1985

@kushjeekamal
Whaam! 1963, Roy Lichtenstein

@kushjeekamal
Roy Lichtenstein developed a pop art style that was based on the visual vernacular of mass-
communication: the comic strip. It was a style that was fixed in its format: black outlines, bold colors
and tones rendered by Benday dots (a method of printing tones in comic books from the 1950's and
60's). What actually changed through the development of Lichtenstein's art was his subject matter
which evolved from comic strips to an exploration of modernist art styles.
The hard-edged commercial style of Lichtenstein's comic book paintings was an antidote to the
incoherent splashes of late Abstract Expressionism, but it was not simply intended as an act of
Pop/Dada protest,
"I don't think that Pop would have existed without Dada having existed before it, but I don't really
think that Pop is Dada. I don't think that I look on my work as being anti-art or anything that's different
from the mainstream of painting since the Renaissance."
Although there is an element of irony and humor in Lichtenstein's style, his work lies within the classical
tradition of control in the use of line, shape, tone and color as compositional elements. The discipline
of the work is cerebral with little left to impulse or emotion or what he calls 'the character of art'.
"My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I
think it can be read that way........People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But
it‘s really the position of line that‘s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the
character of it."

@kushjeekamal
Pablo Picasso was Lichtenstein's hero,
Lichtenstein painted his Picasso-inspired
Cubist Still Life in 1974.
'The Artist's Studio No. 1 (Look Mickey)', 1973

@kushjeekamal
‗Ohhh ... Alright ..' 1964
Lichtenstein's 1960s works were comic-inspired
— they're angsty frames, often featuring ladies
in distress. In one iconic image, a beautiful,
fraught woman with a furrowed brow grasps a
telephone in both hands as she says "Ohh ...
Alright ..." You just know she's talking to a fellow.
"What I like about it is the way she's holding the
phone, She's caressing the phone, and I think in
a way she would rather have a relationship with
the receiver than with whoever is on the other
end of the line.―

@kushjeekamal
"I don't care! I'd rather sink — than call Brad
for help!" - Drowning Girl., 1963
Brushstroke 1965

Claes
Oldenburg
Photograph by Jack Mitchell 1970
―I like to take a subject and deprive it of its
function completely."

@kushjeekamal
Claes Oldenburg was the Pop Artist who gravitated towards sculpture more than any of his
contemporaries. At the start of 1960's he was involved in various 'Happenings': spontaneous,
improvised, artistic events where the experience of the participants was more important than an
end product - a kind of consumer art encounter for a consumer culture.
Oldenburg found his inspiration in the imagery of consumer merchandise, "I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art,
Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol Art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L
& M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art,
New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art,
Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art." In 1961 he opened 'the Store' where he sold plaster replicas of fast
foodstuff and junk merchandise whose crudely painted surfaces were an obvious parody of Abstract
Expressionism. He used the front shop of 'The Store' as a gallery while he replenished his stock from his
studio in the back shop.
Oldenburg's work is full of humorous irony and contradiction: on one hand he makes hard objects
like a bathroom sink out soft sagging vinyl, while on the other he makes soft objects like a
cheeseburger out of hard painted plaster. He also subverts the relative size of objects by taking small
items like the spoon and cherry above and recreating them on an architectural scale. By
undermining the form, scale and function of an object Oldenburg contradicts its meaning and
forces the spectator to reassess its presence. When you see his large scale public works in their
environmental settings, they have a powerful surrealist quality like Gulliver at Brobdingnag.

@kushjeekamal
Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985–88, Claes Oldenburg

@kushjeekamal
Batcolumn (1977)
Shuttlecocks, 1992

Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969Clothespin, 1976

David
Hockney
Photograph by Godfrey Argent 1969
―The moment you cheat for the sake of
beauty, you know you're an artist.‖

@kushjeekamal
David Hockney is one of the most popular and widely recognised artists of our time. For over sixty
years he has enchanted audiences with his bold, colourful, and innovative art.
In the 1950s and 1960s when Hockney was just starting out, lots of artists were experimenting with
abstraction. For example abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock were making paintings
using only colour and gestural marks. Although Hockney explored abstraction at art college –
simplifying and abstracting people and using expressive marks – he has always been interested in
representing the places and people around him.
―To me painting is picture making. I am not that interested in painting that doesn‘t depict the visible
world. I mean, it might be perfectly good art it just doesn‘t interest me that much.‖
David Hockney, Audio Arts 1978

@kushjeekamal
―When you photograph a splash, you‘re
freezing a moment and it becomes
something else. I realise that a splash could
never be seen this way in real life, it happens
too quickly. And I was amused by this, so I
painted it in a very, very slow way.‖
Painted in 1967, A Bigger Splash is perhaps
David Hockney's best-known artwork. What
is it that makes this painting so iconic and
seductive – and still very modern-looking.?
The painting depicts a sun-drenched
swimming pool in Los Angeles. Behind the
pool is a pink modernist building and an
empty chair. The silhouettes of neighbouring
buildings are reflected in the building‘s large
window. Two spindly palm trees and a neat
border of grass suggest carefully manicured
gardens. Unusually for Hockney's paintings
from this time, there is no-one in sight and
the scene is almost entirely still … apart from
the splash.

@kushjeekamal
One of the most iconic images in
the artist‘s oeuvre, David
Hockney‘s Portrait of an Artist
(Pool with Two Figures) is a story
of two compositions. The first,
started in 1971, was inspired by
the serendipitous juxtaposition of
two photographs on the artist‘s
studio floor. ‗One was of a figure
swimming underwater and
therefore quite distorted… the
other was a boy gazing at
something on the ground,‘
Hockney would later recall. ‗The
idea of painting two figures in
different styles appealed so
much that I began the painting
immediately.‘
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), painted in 1972

@kushjeekamal
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–71My Parents, 1977

Peter Blake
Photograph by Drew Farrell
People say, "Why do you paint?" and I say, to
make magic.

@kushjeekamal
Peter Blake is a contemporary British artist
known for his association with the Pop Art
movement. Alongside David Hockney,
Patrick Caulfield, and Richard Hamilton,
Blake sourced imagery from popular
culture to produce colorful and distinctly
graphic works. He is perhaps best known
for creating the album cover for The
Beatles‘s Sgt Pepper‘s Lonely Hearts Club
Band in 1967. ―I wanted to make an art
that was the visual equivalent of pop
music,‖ he reflected.
Born on June 25, 1932 in Dartford, United
Kingdom, Blake studied at the Gravesend
School of Art and the Royal College of Art.
On The Balcony (1955) and Self Portrait
with Badges (1962) are two important
works reflective of his transition into Pop
Art.
‗The Meeting‘ or ‗Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney‘
1981–3

On the Balcony, 1955–57Self-Portrait with Badges,1961

Portrait of Sammy Davis Jnr 1960mal
The Fine Art Bit, 1959

'The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's Album Cover, 1967
(record sleeve)
The Beatles 1963–68

MINIMALISM
Untitled (to Donna) 5a, 1971
Dan Flavin
1960s
@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal

Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were self-consciously
renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic. A wave of new influences
and rediscovered styles led younger artists to question conventional boundaries between various
media. The new art favored the cool over the "dramatic": their sculptures were frequently fabricated
from industrial materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract
Expressionism. Painters and sculptors avoided overt symbolism and emotional content, but instead
called attention to the materiality of the works.
Minimalists distanced themselves from the Abstract Expressionists by removing suggestions of
biography from their art or, indeed, metaphors of any kind. This denial of expression coupled with an
interest in making objects that avoided the appearance of fine art led to the creation of sleek,
geometric works that purposefully and radically eschew conventional aesthetic appeal.
The use of prefabricated industrial materials and simple, often repeated geometric forms together
with the emphasis placed on the physical space occupied by the artwork led to some works that
forced the viewer to confront the arrangement and scale of the forms. Viewers also were led to
experience qualities of weight, height, gravity, agility or even the appearance of light as a material
presence. They were often faced with artworks that demanded a physical as well as a visual
response.
Minimalists sought to break down traditional notions of sculpture and to erase distinctions between
painting and sculpture. @kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal

The Marriage of Reason
and Squalor, II.
1959
Frank Stella
@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal

The primary structures of the Minimalist sculptors Donald
Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro,
Sol LeWitt, John McCracken, Craig Kaufman, Robert
Duran, and Robert Morris and the hard-edge painting of
Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth
Noland, Al Held, and Gene Davis
@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal
"All I want anyone to get out of my [works] and all I ever get out of
them is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any
confusion. What you see is what you see."
Frank Stella, 1964

@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal
Geometric single or repeated forms:
Minimalism is characterised by single or
repeated geometric forms. It is usually three-
dimensional, taking the form of sculpture or
installation, though there are a number of
minimalist painters as well such as Agnes Martin
and Frank Stella
Deliberate lack of expression:
With no trace of emotion or intuitive decision
making, little about the artist is revealed in the
work. Minimalist artists rejected the notion of
the artwork as a unique creation reflecting the
personal expression of a gifted individual,
seeing this as a distraction from the art object
itself. Instead they created objects that were as
impersonal and neutral as possible.
Two Open Modular Cubes/Half-Off 1972
Sol LeWitt

@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal
Self-referential:
Minimalist art does not refer to anything
beyond its literal presence. The materials used
are not worked to suggest something else;
colour (if used) is also non-referential, i.e if a
dark colour is used, this does not mean the
artist is trying to suggest a sombre mood.
Factory-manufactured or shop-bought
materials:
Carl Andre frequently used bricks or tiles as
the medium for his sculpture; Dan Flavin
created his works from fluorescent bulbs
purchased from a hardware store; Judd's
sculptures are built by skilled workers following
the artist's instructions
Hyena Stomp 1962
Frank Stella

@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal
Space-aware:
Carl Andre said 'I'm not a studio artist, I'm a
location artist'. Minimalist art directly engages
with the space it occupies. The sculpture is
carefully arranged to emphasise and reveal
the architecture of the gallery, often being
presented on walls, in corners, or directly onto
the floor, encouraging the viewer to be
conscious of the space
Untitled 1972
Donald JuddEquivalent VIII 1966
Carl Andre

@kushjeekamal
@kushjeekamal
Morris‘s Minimalist sculptures of the mid-1960s
consist of rigorously pared down geometric
forms. He typically arranged these into
‗situations‘ where ‗one is aware of one‘s own
body at the same time that one is aware of
the piece‘. This work demonstrates the
principle. As the viewer walks around the
four cubes, their mirrored surfaces produce
complex and shifting interactions between
gallery and spectator. The cubes were
originally installed in the garden at Tate for
Morris‘s 1971 exhibition, but were put on
show in the galleries when the exhibition had
to be re-made with substitute works.
Untitled 1965, reconstructed 1971
Robert Morris

Modern Art Movements (by Ar Kush Jee Kamal)

Modern Art Movements (by Ar Kush Jee Kamal)

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