The Science of Light

Impressionism moved away from "painting things" to painting light itself. Artists sought to capture the immediate sensory "impression" of a fleeting moment.

Key Characteristics

• Broken Color: Short, quick brushstrokes that aren't blended, allowing the eye to "mix" the colors.

• Modern Life: Subject matter focused on leisure—cafes, dance halls, and sailboat regattas—rather than history.

• En Plein Air: Artists painted outdoors to catch shifting light, utilizing newly invented portable paint tubes.

• Atmospheric Finish: Works often look "unfinished" or sketch-like compared to traditional studio art.

Subjectivity and Structure

Post-Impressionists felt Impressionism was too "loose" and lacked meaning. They took the bright palette of their predecessors but added personal emotion, symbolic depth, and geometric order.

Key Characteristics

• Emotional Expression: Artists focused on "subjective visions"—painting how a scene felt rather than just how it looked.

• Abstract Forms: Use of unnatural colors and simplified shapes to convey mood.

• Symbolism: Objects often represented deeper personal or spiritual meanings

Other Notable Artists

• Paul Gauguin: Known for "Synthetism," using flat areas of bold, unnatural color and heavy outlines to evoke a primitive or spiritual feeling.

• Paul Cézanne: The "father of modern art" who sought to "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone," providing the foundation for Cubism.

The Scream of the Soul

Expressionism turned the camera around: instead of looking at the world, artists looked at the anxieties, fears, and raw emotions inside themselves. It was a reaction against the coldness of the industrial world and the loss of spiritual connection.

Key Characteristics

• Distortion of Form: Shapes and bodies were twisted or exaggerated to mirror the artist's internal state.

• Aggressive Colors: Colors were chosen for emotional impact, not accuracy (e.g., a green face to show envy or sickness).

• Tribal & Folk Influence: Artists looked to non-Western "tribal art" and folk traditions to find a more "authentic," primal way of expressing feeling.

• The "Primitive": A desire to strip away the "fake" layers of modern civilization.

Dada: The Anti-Art Rebellion (1916)

• The Vibe: Radical absurdity and "anti-reason."

• The Cause: A protest against the "rational" logic of WWI; if logic led to war, Dadaists chose nonsense as the cure.

• "Anti-Art" philosophy : They rejected traditional beauty, favoring "readymades" (everyday objects) and "chance" to prove that anything—or nothing—could be art.

• Attemptted to shift art from visual beauty to intellectual concepts.

Surrealism: The Reaction to Cubist Logic

• Rejection of Rationality: While Cubism was a "logical" deconstruction of space, Surrealists found logic repressive. They used Cubism's broken reality as a doorway to the unconscious mind.

• From "How" to "Why": Cubism focused on the mechanics of sight (geometry); Surrealism focused on the meaning of imagery (Freudian symbols).

• The Return of Realism: Unlike Cubist abstraction, Surrealists often used hyper-realistic detail—but applied it to "bizarre" and impossible scenarios to defy reason.

Side Note: While Surrealism inherited its "anti-reason" spirit from Dada (to challenge the social norms of society, and purposefully make art that would shock, confuse, or outrage people), it used the fragmented visual style of Cubism as its foundation

Notable Surrealist Artists

• Joan Miró: Used "automatism" to paint spontaneous, organic squiggles that bypassed logic to map the subconscious.

• René Magritte: Famous for witty, thought-provoking images (like a pipe labeled "This is not a pipe") that challenged how we perceive reality.

• Frida Kahlo: While she often resisted the label, her work is frequently categorized as Surrealist due to her symbolic, dream-like self-portraits exploring pain and identity.

 Art moved from representing objects (Cubism) or dreams (Surrealism) to expressing raw emotion through the act of painting itself.

• The "Action": Led by Jackson Pollock, artists used "drip" techniques, throwing paint onto massive canvases to capture the physical energy of the moment.

• Purpose: To make the canvas an "event" rather than a picture.

Pop Art succeeded by collapsing the distinction between "Fine Art" (exclusive, unique, intellectual) and "Commercial Art" (mass-produced, common, accessible).

The Synthesis of High and Low

• Subject Matter: Pop artists argued that a Campbell’s Soup can or a comic strip possessed the same formal qualities—shape, color, and composition—as a classical still life or a landscape. They elevated the "mundane" to the status of a masterpiece.

• The "Aura" of the Original: Traditionally, art was valuable because it was a "one-of-a-kind" object touched by the artist. Pop Art used silk-screening and industrial printing to create multiples, mocking the idea that art must be rare to be meaningful.

• Cultural Mirror: It turned the museum into a mirror of the real world. By placing a $15,000 price tag on a painting of a $0.10 can of soup, they exposed the absurdity of the art market and the consumerist nature of modern life.

The Shift in Value

The movement proved that an object’s "artistic value" isn't found in the physical material or the difficulty of the craft, but in the cultural weight of the image. It moved art from the "sacred" realm of the elite into the "profane" realm of the supermarket.

Other notable pop artists:

Roy Lichtenstein: Famous for blowing up comic book panels into massive canvases, using hand-painted Ben-Day dots to elevate "cheap" mass-media printing to the status of fine art. 

The Response to Pop Art

If Pop Art was a loud, colorful explosion of "too much" stuff, Minimalism was the "cleanse" that followed in the 1960s.

• The Rejection of Symbols: Pop Art was obsessed with icons (Marilyn, Soup). Minimalists (like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin) felt these were just distractions. They stripped away all images, stories, and emotions.

• The "Literal" Object: A Minimalist work doesn't represent anything else. A metal box is just a metal box. As artist Frank Stella famously said: "What you see is what you see."

• The Industrial Look: Like Pop Art, Minimalism used industrial materials (steel, neon, plexiglass). However, while Pop used these to mimic advertisements, Minimalism used them to highlight geometry and space.