SYNCHROMISM

   Synchromism, often wrongly spelt as Synchronism, was an American art movement founded in the year 1912-13. Cofounded by Abstractionists Morgan Russell (1886-1953) and Stanton MacDonald-Wright, this purely abstract style was the first to bring America on the international stage of fine arts. It is easy to draw a parallel between Synchromism and its contemporary Art form Orphism, which was essentially a trend or specialization in the Cubist art that placed a premium on the understanding and the use of colors.

AIRPLANE SYNCHROMY IN YELLOW ORANGE
by STANTON MACDONALD-WRIGHT

   Synchromism is based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that by painting in color scales, their work could evoke musicial sensations. It became abstract and expressive, hoping to unite visual and auditory stimuli through a symphony of color.          

SECTION D'OR

   The Section d'Or also known as Groupe de Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters and critics associated with an offshoot of Cubism known as Orphism. Based in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, they were active from 1912 to around 1914, coming to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911. 
   The movement began with an exhibition at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris in 1912, which was also accompanied by publication of the treatise Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes.

JACKUES VILLON
Paris Collection Louis Carré

     The group's title was suggested by Jacques Villon and Marcel, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo Da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura by Joséphin Péladan. Péladan attached great mystical significance to the golden section, and other similar geometric configurations. For Villon, this symbolised his belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportion, because it reflected patterns and relationships occuring in nature.
   The group adopted its name to distinguish itself from the narrower definition of Cubism developed earlier by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris.
   The onset of World War I in 1912 largely ended the group's activities, which had never  been much more than a loose association.


   MAIN REPRESENTATIVES       

WOMAN WITH ANIMALS
by ALBERT GLEIZES

• Guillaume Apollinaire
• Robert Delaunay
• Marcel Duchamp
• Raymond Duchamp-Villon
• Henri le Fauconnier
• Roger de la Fresnaye 
• Albert Gleizes
• Frantisek Kupka
• Fernand Léger
• Andre Lhote
• Louis Marcoussis
• Jacques Villon
• Henry Valensi
• Jean Metzinger
• Francis Picabia
• Maurice Princet
• Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
• Jeanne Rij-Roussaeu

DER BLAUE REITER

   Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a German expressionist movement that was established in December 1911 by Kandinsky, Marc and Gabriele Münter. Painters Kandinsky and Marc worked on an almanac in which they showed their artistic conceptions. The title of the almanac, which then became the name of the group, Der Blaue Reiter, came from the painting by Kandinsky. His Blue Rider was an adventure in the simplification and stylization of forms and the connection between music and painting.

THE TOWER OF BLUE HORSES by FRANZ MARC

   The Blue Riders believed that colors, shapes and forms had equivalence with sounds and music, and sought to create color harmonies which would be purifying to the soul. Although in this very earliest works, the impressionistic influence was recognizable, the artists who took part in The Blue Rider were considered to be the pioneers of abstract art or abstract expressionism. Their work promoted induvidual expression and broke free from any artistic restraints. These Nietzsche's words sum up the group's motto, "Who wishes to be creative must first blast and destroy accepted values."

   The first exhibitions of The Blue Rider included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, and Arnold Schönberg. These artists, who early in their careers broke from the mainstream, were later to become the driving force behind modern art as we know it today.

   Main representatives of this movement: Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei Von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Franz Marc, August Macke, Gabriel Munter.

   WASSILY KANDINSKY

   Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of famous 20th century artists, he credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Kandinsky's purely abstract works followed a long period of development based on his personal artistic experiences. Fascination and unusual stimulation by color in his childhood, than his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background; he used later in his paintings and reflected in much his early work.

COMPOSITION X by WASSILY KANDINSKY

   Kandinsky's paintings from the period of "Der Blaue Reiter" are large expressive coloured masses evaluated independently from forms and lines; these serve no longer to delimit them, but overlap freely to form paintings of extraordinary force. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature, it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations" and described more elaborate works as "compositions."

 

 

   

   

FUTURISM

   Futurism, a modern art movement, originating among Italian artists in 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first appearance of a manifesto published on the front page of the February 20, 1909 issue of Le Figaro, until the end of World War I. It was the very first manifesto of this kind. Marinetti summed up the major principles of Futurists in the publish.
   Futurist movement was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the cubist, constructivist, and the dadaist.
   
    Futurism in Paint 
   The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. They used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others.
   The Futurist painters also adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analysing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. These painters often painted urban scenes. For example, Umberto Boccioni's "The City Rises" represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control.

THE CITY RISES by UMBERTO BOCCIONI

   Futurism in Architecture

   Futurist architects were sometimes at odds with the Fascists state's tendency towards Roman imperial-classical aesthetic patterns. Nevertheless, several futurist buildings were built in the years 1920-1940, including public buildings such as railway stations, maritime resorts and post offices. Example of Futurists buildings still in use today are Trento's railway station, built by Angiolo Mazzoni, and the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence.

AN EXAMPLE OF FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE
by ANTONIO SEN'ELIA

   Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Pricisionism, an important development of American Modernism. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

   Main representatives of this movement: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, David Burliuk, Ilya Zdanevich, Olga Rozanova.

   ANTONIO SENT'ELIA

   He was an architect being closely related to futurist movement. His designs featured groupings and large-scale disposition of planes and masses creating a heroic industrial expressionism. His vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanized city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of induvidual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the "life" of the city. 

"LA CITTA NUOVA"  PEREPECTIVE DRAWING
by ANTONIO SENT'ELIA

   His extremely influential designs featured vast, monolithis skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology. Even in this excitement for technology and modernity, in Sant'elias's monumentalism, however, can be found elements of Art Nouvaeu architect Giuseppe Sommaruga.

DIE BRUCKE

   Rising at the beginning stages of the German Expressionist movement, Die Brucke (The Bridge) was founded in 1905 by four architecture students at the Technical University of Dresden; Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt Rottluff. The four derived the name for their group from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and saw it as a metaphor for a bridge moving into the new art world. Tired of academic artistic practices, the group chose not to receive formal artistic training and instead lived and worked of each other, holding collective exhibitions to publicize their art and message.

WOMAN WITH A BAG by KARL SCHMİDT ROTTLUFF

   They sought to paint using the purest form of expression, doing away with perspective and proportion for bold, loud colors and exaggerated forms. Their style of painting was impulsive, reflecting and immediacy and spontaneity to their work. They believed the art scene belonged to the youth and that traditional art should naturally give way to this new modernity.

   Die Brucke artists were influenced by the art of Van Gogh and Gaughin, as well as the neo-impressionists, art nouvaeu and fauvist movements. Fauvism, occuring during the same period, was similar to Die Brucke in aesthetics only, Die Brucke rejected the tranquil subject matter for the more troubled and anxious, focusing on themes of modernity and sexuality. Scenes of nudes in nature became particularly populer in Die Brucke.

   In 1912, they began to fall apart, with Pechstein leaving the group, The artists of Die Brucke eventually splinter off into their own induvidual styles, dissolving in 1913 due to artistic differences. Die Brucke remains well known as an early progressive movement that sought to break free of the academic mold and hence made a lasting impact on 20th century art.

   FRITZ BLEYL

   Fritz Bleyl, German artist and draughtsman, was born 1880 in Zwickau,Germany. Early member of the Die Brucke movement, Fritz Bleyl enrolled at the Technical University of Dresden in 1901 to study architecture; consenting to the wishes of his parents like fellow member and frontrunner of Die Brucke, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner. The two became close friends and studied art together; sharing the same progressive ideas.

 

WINTER by FRITZ BLEYL

   In 1905, along with graduating from school Bleyl joined Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt Rottluff in forming the Die Brucke movement. Bleyl created many of the posters and tickets for Die Brucke exhibitions. The following year he started teaching at Bauschule ('building school') in Freiburg, Saxony. His role in Die Brucke was short lived; he left the group and married in 1907; choosing the pursue teaching and architecture for financial reasons. He spent the remainder of his life out of the spotlight; teaching and doing architectural and graphic world.

   

    

LES FAUVES

   Les Fauves was a short-lived and loose group of early 20th century medern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retainde by impressionism. Fauvism is the style of Les Fauves. Fauvism the first of the major avant-garde movements in European was characterized by paintings that used intensively vivid, non-naturalistic and exuberand colors. The style was essentially expressionist, and generally featured landscapes in which forms were distorted. The Fauvests first exhibited together in 1905 in Paris.They found their name whwn a critic pointed to a renaissence-like sculpture in the middle of the same gallery as the exhibition and exclaimed derisively 'Donatello au milleu des fauves!' (Donatello among the wild beasts). The name caught on, and was gleefully accepted by the artists themselves.

PORTRAIT OF MADAME MATISSE by HENRI MATISSE

   The movement was subjected to more mockery and abuse as it developed, but began to gain respect when major art buyers. Although short-lived (1905-1908) Fauvism was extremely influential in the evolution of 20th century art.

   Representative artists : Andre Derain, Roul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck.

   ANDRE DERAİN

   Andre Derain founder of the Fauvism movement painted his first landscapes during the time of meeting Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck. Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d'Automne. The vivid unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their work as "les fauves" or "the wild beasts" marking the start of the Fauvist movement.

CHARING CROSS BRIDGE by ANDRE DERAIN

 
 

EXPRESSIONISM

   Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attemps to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse him. He accomplishes his 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-expressionism are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.

   A term "expressionism" is used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early 20th century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense color, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts, but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre.

THE SCREAM by EDVARD MUNCH

   Unlike imressionism, it goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitues to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feelsas an accurate representation of its real meaning.

   Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and more directly Cézanne, Gaugin, Vangogh and the fauvism movement.

   The most well-known expressionist are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludvig Kirchner, the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin, and the Norvegian Edvard Munch, and also Russian Kandinsky was an expressionism addict.

    EDVARD MUNCH

   Edvard Munch was one of the most distinctive painters of his generation. The emotion instilled in his work his deeply affecting and frequently quite disturbing. Plagued with inner demons that tormented him through much of his career, Munch effectively used his paintings to give voice to his neuroses.

THE DANCE OF LİFE by EDVARD MUNCH

   His influence was strong in Scandinavia and Germany particularly, with Van Gogh and himself being seen as the two best exponents of expressionist art. 

   

LES NABIS

   "En ta paume, mon verbe et ma pensée"

    (In the palm of your hand, my word and my thoughts)

   Les Nabis a group of Post-Impressionist avant garde artists who take a step for fine arts and graphic arts, originated as a rebellious group of young student artists in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private high school of Radolphe Julian (Académie Julian) in Paris in the late 1880s.

   In 1890, they began to successfully participate in public exhibitions while most of their artistic output remained in private hands or in the possession of the artists themselves. By 1896, the unity of the group had already began to break: The Hommage a Cézanne, painted by Maurice Denis in 1900 recollects memories of a time already gone, before even the term Nabis had been revealed to the public. Meanwhile most members of the group: Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Villard, could stand artistically, on their own. Only Paul Sérisier had problems to overcome though it was his Talisman, painted at the advise of Paul Gauguin, that had revealed to them the way to go.

PIERRE BONNARD, THE DINNING ROOM IN THE COUNTRY

   The term was coined by the poet Henri Cazalis who drew a parallel between the way these painters aimed to revitalize painting and the way the ancient prophets had rejuvenated Israel. Possibly the nickname arose because "most of them wore beards some were Jews and all were desperately earnest".

   Les Nabis regarded themselves as initates, and used a private vocabulary. They called a studio ergasterium, and ended their letters with the initials E.T.P.M.V. et M.P. meaning " En ta paume, mon verbe etma pensée" (In the palm of your hand, my word and my thoughts.)

   The artists of Les Nabis worked in a variety in media, using oils and both canvas and cardboard, distemper on canvas and wall decoration and also produced posters, prints, book illustration, textiles and furniture. Their subject matter was representational, but was design oriented along the lines of the Japanese prints they so admired, and art nouvaeu.

   PIERRE BONNARD

   Pierre Bonnard was a french painter and printmaker as well as founding member of Les Nabis. In the twenties, he was a part of Les Nabis, a group of young artists committed to creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature. He left Paris in 1910 for the south of France.

PIERRE BONNARD, TWO DOGS IN A DESERTES STREET

  Bonnard is known for his intense use of color, especially via areas built with small brushmarks and close values. His often complex compositions, typically of sunlit interiors of rooms and gardens populated with friends and family members, are both narrative and autobiographical. His wife Marthe was an ever present subject over the course of several decades. He also painted several self-portraits, landscapes and many still lifes which usually depict flowers and fruits. 

   

   

SYMBOLISM

   Symbolism originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theatre, and influenced European and American literatures of the 20th century to varying degrees. Symbolists artists sought to express induvidual emotional experience through the subtle.

   The term symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an importent element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus the symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. Not so much a style of art, symbolism was more an international ideological trend. Symbolists believed that art should apprehend more absolute truths which could only be  accessed indirectly. Thus, they painted scene from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner. They provided particular images or objects with esoteric attractions.

LA MORT DU FOSSOYEUR
(THE DEATH OF THE GRAVEDIGGER)
 by CARLOS SCHWABE

   In literature, the symbolists style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil,1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art.

   Symbolism in painting took its direction from the poets and literary theorists of the movement, but it also represented a reaction against the objectivist aims of realism and the increasingly influential movement of impressionism. In contrast to relatively concrete representation these movement sought, symbolists painters favoured works based on fantasy and the imagination. The symbolist position in painting authoritatively defined by the young critic Albert Aurier, an enthusiastic admirer of Paul Gauguin, in an article in the Mercure de France (1891). He elaborated on Moreas's contetion that the purpose of art "is to clothe the idea in sensuous form" and stress the subjective, symbolical and decorative functions of an art that would give visual expression to the inner life. Symbolist painters turned to the mystical and even the occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual forms.

   Main represantatives of this movement: Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Mareau, Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, James Ensor, Edward Munch, Koloman Moser.