Art Styles
Cubism
Cubism is a style of painting and sculpture that was developed in the early 20th Century and comprised a technique that focused on reducing natural forms to related geometric equivalents and organizing plane of an object’s structure independently of their representational requirements. The movement changed architecture, music, and literature during the period between 1910 and 1920 when it was introduced. Pablo Picasso is one of the renowned pioneers of the style of artwork that breaks up objects after analysis, and they are reassembled in an abstracted form. The technique differed from other methods and created new artworks that are not seen from a single viewpoint, and the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to present the issue in a broader context.
Cubism opened up infinite new possibilities that allow the treatment of visual reality and resulted in the development of constructivism and neo-plasticism art forms that evolved in later years. The ability to break objects into planes and figures to show different viewpoints of an image through abstraction while creating a three-dimensional structure. The artistic style helped emphasize the two-dimensional flatness of a canvas and using the technique to create an illusion of depth. The elements of the Cubist style drew from linear perspectives of the Renaissance period and artists such as Paul Cezanne. Other sources of inspiration were tribal marks drawn from African culture that was stylized to create a human mage that was vivid. Picasso stated that the representation of human figures could take any shape depending on the artist’s perspective.
Impressionism
Impressionism is attributed to Claude Monet and was developed in France during the Nineteenth Century based on painting spontaneously as opposed to painting in a studio or drawing from sketches. Impressionist subjects included everyday scenes and landscapes where the artists opted to paint in spaces outside studios where they could capture momentary and transient effects of elements such as sunlight, as they work quickly in the open air to capture the moment. The movement resulted in the creation of awareness of color and light within the shifting patterns of natural scenes, and brushes were used to create renders of the fleeting quality of light.
The basic technique involving bright colors was new and was an initial shock to the population as compared to the academic paintings that had sober colors. The bright colors drove towards the development of synthetic pigments to create more vibrant colors that were unused by previous generations of painters. The new approach encompassed various aspects of modernity because of the differences in materials used in painting. Monet and Auguste Renoir were some of the prominent images of the impressionist movement, and the painting types have contributed to the new aspect of nature photography. The modernization of landscapes in paintings included adding railways, factories, and other elements of the encroaching industrialization to heighten the appeal of the images. The avant-garde painting style resulted in most of the new members taking up art and painting to improvise with their techniques to embrace the modernity of art. The popular art community initially faced the movement with harsh opposition because it violated the rules of academic painting that they were accustomed to, and the brushed colors preceded over the contours and lines.
Realism
Realism is an art period that sought to create pictorial subject matter that avoided artistic conventions and intended to represent subject matter in a manner that was truthful and without supernatural elements. The Realist Movement started after the 1848 Revolution and avoided stylization, which was a core element of Romanticism. The rise of the Realism style was stimulated by various intellectual developments such as the anti-Romanticism movement that was emphasized on the common man being an artistic subject and the development of photography at the time and the discovery of the ability to produce visual appearances accurately. Realism is defined as a detailed, precise, and accurate representation of objects. One of the most recognized realist painters is Gustave Courbet, who is noted for visual the careful depiction of appearances.
The works of Gustave were built on practices by painters of the Barbizon School that were aimed at reproducing the local landscape character, but each painter used various interests and styles to express their artwork. Despite the differences, the artists all reflected the simplicity and ordinary nature of things instead of displaying the tremendous and grandiose nature aspects. The artists painted detailed forms from close observation with notable works such as The Winnower by Millet, which portrayed peasant laborers in a traditionally assigned manner to more prominent people. Honore Daumier was a French realist artist who drew caricatures of the political and societal scene in France. The artwork’s subjects were villainous politicians and lawyers, inspired by his ardent democratic nature to serve the people’s political interests. Pictorial realism outside France was highly represented in the United States, where they depicted acute observations of the records of contemporary life from view.