Art Movement

 

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered as a new avant- garde.

According to theories associated with modernism and the concept of postmodernism , art movements are especially important during the period of time corresponding to modern art. The period of time called "modern art" is posited to have changed approximately half-way through the 20th century and art made afterward is generally called contemporary art. Postmodernism in visual art begins and functions as a parallel to late modernism  and refers to that period after the "modern" period called contemporary art. The postmodern period began during late modernism (which is a contemporary continuation of modernism), and according to some theorists postmodernism ended in the 21st century. During the period of time corresponding to "modern art" each consecutive movement was often considered a new avant- grade.

Also during the period of time referred to as "modern art" each movement was seen corresponding to a somewhat grandiose rethinking of all that came before it, concerning the visual arts. Generally there was a commonality of visual style linking the works and artists included in an art movement. Verbal expression and explanation of movements has come from the artists themselves, sometimes in the form of an art manifesto, and sometimes from art critics and others who may explain their understanding of the meaning of the new art then being produced.

In the visual arts, many artists, theorists, art critics, art collectors, art dealers and others mindful of the unbroken continuation of modernism and the continuation of modern art even into the contemporary era, ascribe to and welcome new philosophies of art as they appear. Postmodernist theorists posit that the idea of art movements are no longer as applicable, or no longer as discernible, as the notion of art movements had been before the postmodern era. There are many theorists however who doubt as to whether or not such an era was actually a factor just a passing fad.

The term refers to tendencies in visual art, novel ideas and architecture, and sometimes literature. In music it is more common to speak about genres  and styles  instead. See also cultural movement, a term with a broader connotation.
As the names of many art movements use the -ism suffix (for example cubism and futurism), they are sometimes referred to as isms.

 Dada Art Movement

Dada was an art movement of the European avant- grade in the early 20th century. Many claim Dada began in Zurich, Switzerlandin 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly thereafter but the height of New York Dada was the year before in 1915. To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge.

Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artist and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel  Janco's frequent use of the words da, da, meaning yes, yes in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.

The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre  and graphic design, and concentrated its anti- war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti- art cultural works. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti- bouegeois and had political affinities with the radical left.

Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction."

As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."
 A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path... [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege. 

 Realism Art Movement 

Realism in literature and visual arts refers to the attempt of classifying subjects according to empirical and secular rules, as they are considered to exist only in a third person’s objective reality, without interpretation and embellishment. The approach believes in the principle that reality is independent of an individual’s conceptual schemes, beliefs and linguistic practices, and thus may be known to the artist who can represent this form of ‘reality’ faithfully.

Realism more specifically refers to the art movement which originated in France in the early 1850s. The advocates of such movement considered themselves people who are against romanticism, a dominating French artwork and literature in the early 19th century. Realism deals with the principle of objective reality and fought against the emotionalism of the romanticism. Accuracy and truth were the primary goals of the so called Realists. A lot of oil paintings and canvas art which emerged at this time showcased people who were at work, as it were also the peak of Industrial Revolution at that time. The popularity of realistic artworks also gave way to the rise of photography- a brand new visual source that created a desire within the people to create representations that looked real.

Realism art is described as an artistic endeavor that aims to imitate nature using a paintbrush. This is the desire for those who belonged to this art revolution and believed that romanticism, subjectivism and classicism portrayed the many fallacies of nature.

Realism focuses more on the accurate and truthful depiction of the subjects which nature and life offer to the artists. The artificiality of the previous Romanticism and Classicism was rejected and the necessity to come up with a contemporary art style was introduced. The new idea revolved around everyday activities and ordinary people who are worthy subjects of the Realist artists. The advocates of the Realist art movement attempted to portray the ordinary lives, problems, appearances, customs and mores of the bourgeois & lower classes, the ordinary, unexceptional, unadorned and humble. They have set themselves conscientiously to create all the ignored elements of contemporary life and the society- material conditions, physical settings, and mental attitudes.

As every art period is best expressed in the masterpieces crafted by the artists, realism is the manifestation of concepts and principles held by the people who remained true to their ideology. In the broadest sense, the principle of realism can be seen as the pursuit of truthfulness through art to the life conditions and hardships of the ordinary citizens and the lower class citizens of the society. These hardships are considered as the imbalances found in the society that needs to be corrected with the help of scientific application. Here are some of the famous canvas art and oil painting masterpieces of the realism movement.

Horse Ploughing at the Nivernais. This painting is the product of the artistic hands and mind of French artist, Maria Rosa Bonheur. It was also her first achievement after the French government commission. Bonheur is popular for her tendencies to dress up with male clothing as it gave her greater movements when working with animals. She was also considered as one of history’s earliest feminists.  

Three Women in Church. The Three Women in Church painting was one of the masterpieces of Wilhelm Liebl, a German born artist. Leibl studied art under the supervision of many artists at the Munich Academy. When he saw and witnessed the art display of a Gustav Courbet, a French realist painter, he immediately went to Paris to study arts. During his return, he moved to a country side where he could develop and focus his artworks on the peasant life and rural sceneries. His work was truly void of any personal impression, a trait that is characteristic of the realist movement. 

De Stjil Art Movement 

De Stijl also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands. De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), propagating the group's theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Vilmos Huszar (1884–1960), and Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and the architects Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), Robert van't Hoff (1887–1979), and J.J.P.Oud (1890–1963). The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism — the new plastic art (or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch).

Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction  and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colours along with black and white. Indeed, according to the Tate Gallery's online article on neoplasticism, Mondrian himself sets forth these delimitations in his essay 'Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art'. He writes, "... this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour." The Tate article further summarizes that this art allows "only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line." The Guggenheim Musuem's online article on De Stijl summarizes these traits in similar terms: "It [De Stijl] was posited on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines."

The name De Stijl is supposedly derived from Gottfried Semper's Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik (1861–3), which Curl suggests was mistakenly believed to advocate materialism and functionalism. In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular  forms. Furthermore, their formal vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red, yellow, and blue, and the three primary values, black, white and grey. The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition. This element of the movement embodies the second meaning of stijl: “a post, jamb or support”; this is best exemplified by the construction of crossing joints, most commonly seen in carpentry.

In many of the group's three-dimensional works, vertical and horizontal lines are positioned in layers or planes that do not intersect, thereby allowing each element to exist independently and unobstructed by other elements. This feature can be found in the Rietveld Schroder House and the Red and Blue Chair.

De Stijl was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms (such as the "perfect straight line") in the neoplatonic  philosophy of mathematician M.H.J Schoenmaekers. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the international style of architecture as well as clothing and interior design. However, it did not follow the general guidelines of an “ism” (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism), nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like the Bauhaus; it was a collective project, a joint enterprise.

In music, De Stijl was an influence only on the work of composer Jakob van Domselaer, a close friend of Mondrian. Between 1913 and 1916, he composed his Proeven van Stijlkunst (Experiments in Artistic Style), inspired mainly by Mondrian's paintings. This minimalistic—and, at the time, revolutionary—music defined "horizontal" and "vertical" musical elements and aimed at balancing those two principles. Van Domselaer was relatively unknown in his lifetime, and did not play a significant role within the De Stijl group.