Contextual References in Art & Design

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The aim of this unit is to develop my own knowledge of how historical and cultural influences inform art, craft and design. I will achieve this by researching and recording information, whilst developing critical and analytical skills, and relating this to my own developing practice. This unit will form the basis of my knowledge and understanding of contemporary and historical art, craft and design and allow me to use this to underpin my primary and secondary research.

Task one: know about the key developments and influences in art, craft and design.
Using handouts as a guide I will be required to consider the key influences on graphic design products as they have evolved through the decades. Besides the fundamental impact of art movements what other factors have influenced this area of design?

ART NOUVEAU

Art Nouveau was a movement in the visual arts popular from the early 1890s up to the First World War. It is viewed by some as the first self-conscious attempt to create a modern style. Its influence can be found in painting, sculpture, jewellery, metalwork, glass and ceramics. The drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, the architecture of Victor Horta and Paul Hankar and the poster designs of Alphonse Mucha are some of the most familiar examples of the Art Nouveau style. (Reference http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/a/art-nouveau/)/

Model #342, “Wisteria” Lamp (ca. 1901-05)

Artist: Clara Driscoll for Tiffany Studios, New York

Table lamps are some of the most famous Art Nouveau items produced by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s firm. The model #342, commonly called “Wisteria,” is one of the most prized. The bronze base resembles the roots and lower trunk of a tree, with the leaded glassU shade that appears like the branches of a wisteria at its crown cast in bronze. These suspend the flowering petals that appear to drip-like drops of water, created from nearly 2,000 individually-selected pieces of glass whose screen produces a warm, yet soft glow, suggesting the filtering of sunlight. The irregularity of the armature at the crown along with the border of the bottom of the shade add to the naturalism of the design, but they also recall the influence of Impressionism and Japonisme on Art Nouveau, as wisteria are from both the eastern United States, where Tiffany was based, and to China, Japan, and Korea. The design points to the global reach of Art Nouveau in part due to the expanding networks of artistic exchange at the end of the 19th century. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-art-nouveau.htm)

Here are a few examples of images Art Noveau style I found.
 

 

De Stijl

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals. Originally a publication, De Stijl was founded in 1917 by two pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondarin and Theo van Doesburg. De Stijl means style in Dutch. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian’s ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year’s issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art he and the De Stijl circle practised. De Stijl had a profound influence on the development both of abstract art and modern architecture and design. (Reference http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/d/de-stijl)

Composition A (1920)

Artist: Piet Mondrian

Composition A – whose title announces its non objective nature by making no reference to anything beyond itself – is a good example of Mondrian’s geometric abstraction before it fully matured within the framework of the De Stijl aesthetic. With its rectilinear forms made up of solid, outlined areas of colour, the work reflects the artist’s experimentation with Schoenmaekers’s mathematical theory and his search for a pared-down visual language appropriate to the modern era. While here Mondrian uses blacks and shades of grey, his paintings would later be further reduced, ultimately employing more basic compositions and only solid blocks of primary colours. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-de-stijl.htm)

Here are some examples of some De Stijl-style work I found.
 

 

Futurism

The most important Italian avant-garde art movement of the 20th century, Futurism celebrated advanced technology and urban modernity. Committed to the new, its members wished to destroy older forms of culture and to demonstrate the beauty of modern life – the beauty of the machine, speed, violence and change. Although the movement did foster some architecture, most of its adherents were artists who worked in traditional media such as painting and sculpture, and in an eclectic range of styles inspired by post impressionism, nevertheless, they were interested in embracing popular media and new technologies to communicate their ideas. Their enthusiasm for modernity and the machine ultimately led them to celebrate the arrival of the First World War. By its end the group was largely spent as an important avant-garde, though it continued through the 1920s, and, during that time several of its members went on to embrace Fascism, making Futurism the only twentieth century avant-garde to have embraced far right politics. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-futurism.htm)

The City Rises (1910)

Artist: Umberto Boccioni

The City Rises is often considered to be the first Futurist painting. Here, Boccioni illustrates the construction of a modern city. The chaos and movement in the piece resemble a war scene as indeed war was presented in the Futurist Manifesto as the only means toward cultural progress. The large horse races into the foreground while several workers struggle to gain control, indicating tension between human and animal. The horse and figures are blurred, communicating rapid movement while other elements, such as the buildings in the background, are rendered more realistically. At the same time, the perspective teeters dramatically in different sections of the painting. The work shows influences of Cubism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism, revealed in the brushstrokes and fractured representation of space. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-futurism.htm)

Here are a few examples of Futurism style work I have found.

 

 

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement and artistic style that was founded in 1924 by André Breton. Surrealism style uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without the intention of logical comprehensibility. The movement was begun primarily in Europe, cantered in Paris, and attracted many of the members of the Dada community. Influenced by the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung, there are similarities between the Surrealist movement and the Symbolist movement of the late 19th century. Some of the greatest artists of the 20th century became involved in the Surrealist movement, and the group included Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, René Magritte, and many others. The Surrealist movement eventually spread across the globe, and has influenced artistic endeavours from painting and sculpture to pop music and film directing. The greatest known Surrealist artist is the world famous Salvador Dali. (Reference http://www.surrealism.org/)

The Accommodations of Desire (1929)

Artist: Salvador Dalí

Painted in the summer of 1929 just after Dalí went to Paris for his first Surrealist exhibition, The Accommodations of Desire is a prime example of Dalí’s ability to render his vivid and bizarre dreams with seemingly journalistic accuracy. He developed the paranoid-critical method, which involved systematic irrational thought and self-induced paranoia as a way to access his unconscious. He referred to the resulting works as “hand-painted dream photographs” because of their realism coupled with their eerie dream quality. The narrative of this work stems from Dalí’s anxieties over his affair with Gala Eluard, wife of artist Paul Eluard. The lumpish white “pebbles” depict his insecurities about his future with Gala, circling around the concepts of terror and decay. While The Accommodations of Desire is an exposé of Dalí’s deepest fears, it combines his typical hyper-realistic painting style with more experimental collage techniques. The lion heads are glued onto the canvas, and are believed to have been cut from a children’s book. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-surrealism.htm)

Here are some examples of Surrealism-style work I have found.

 

 

Pop Art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture such as advertising, Hollywood movies and pop music. Key pop artists include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and David Hockney. 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. (Reference http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/pop-art)

Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962)

Artist: Andy Warhol

Warhol’s iconic series of Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings were never meant to be celebrated for their form or compositional style, like that of the abstractionists. What made these works significant was Warhol’s co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell’s soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn’t just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance. This early series was hand-painted, but Warhol switched to screen printing shortly afterwards, favouring the mechanical technique for his mass culture imagery. 100 canvases of Campbell’s soup cans made up his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world map almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern art. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-pop-art.htm)

Here are some examples of Pop Art I have found.

 

 

Expressionism

Expressionism is a term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, 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. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in 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-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. (Reference http://www.artmovements.co.uk/expressionism.htm)

The Scream (1893)

Artist: Edvard Munch

Throughout his artistic career, Munch focused on scenes of death, agony, and anxiety in distorted and emotionally charged portraits, all themes and styles that would be adopted by the Expressionists. Here, in Munch’s most famous painting, he depicts the battle between the individual and society. The setting of The Scream was suggested to the artist while walking along a bridge overlooking Oslo; as Munch recalls, “the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence…shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.” Although Munch did not observe the scene as rendered in his painting, The Scream evokes the jolting emotion of the encounter and exhibits a general anxiety toward the tangible world. The representation of the artist’s emotional response to a scene would form the basis of the Expressionists’ artistic interpretations. The theme of individual alienation, as represented in this image would persist throughout the twentieth century, captivating Expressionist artists as a central feature of modern life. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-expressionism.htm)

Here are some examples of expressionism-style work I have found.

 

 

Neo Pop

In the 1980s there was a renewed interest in the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and contemporaries. Warhol died in 1987, but he had long before inspired a while generation of new artists. It should be noted that Neo-Pop Art is not really a new art movement, but rather an evolution of the old Pop Art movement. Neo-Pop Art consists of a revised form of Pop Art adapted from its forefathers, a rebirth of recognizable objects and celebrities from popular culture with icons and symbols of the present times. This type of Pop Art often relies heavily on broadening the idea of ready mades and using pre-existing items to create a final product, first developed by Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and also borrowing heavily from cultural icons. Neo-Pop Art relies heavily on the mass media both for influence/inspiration but also for promoting their work. (Reference http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/popart/Neo-Pop-Art.html)

Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton
Artist: Daniel Edwards
The nude study of Senator Hillary Clinton used in creating her first portrait as U.S. President is featured in a documentary now viewable at YouTube. “Hillary’s Bust”, an eight-minute short produced by Goodnight Film, reveals the sexy origins of a statue of the former First Lady planned for display at New York’s Museum of Sex. The film contains the only footage taken of an unclothed preparatory study of Hillary Clinton’s upper torso used for developing the heroic-scaled “Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton: First Woman President of the United States of America”. Daniel Edwards is a neo-pop artist and has produced some outlandish and talented work. (Reference http://www.cacanet.com/presidential-bust-of-hillary-rodham-clinton.html)

Here are some examples of neo-pop art I have found.

 

 

Neo Expressionism

Many artists have practiced and revived aspects of the original Expressionism movement its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the most famous return to Expressionism was inaugurated by Georg Baselitz, who led a revival that dominated German art in the 1970s. By the 1980s, this resurgence had become part of an international return to the sensuousness of painting – and away from the stylistically cool, distant sparseness of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Very different artists, especially in the United States, from Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente to Jean-Michele Basquiat, turned in expressive directions to create work that affirmed the redemptive power of art in general and painting in particular, drawing upon a variety of themes including the mythological, the cultural, the historical, the nationalist, and the erotic. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-neo-expressionism.htm)

Adieu (1982)

Artist: Georg Baselitz

Baselitz, who grew up in post-World War II East Germany, was the earliest and most senior member of the group of Neo-Expressionists. His works were distinctive in that he frequently painted his figures upside down as if to create a modern-day counterpart to the seventeenth-century paintings of a world “topsy-turvy.” Though the artist denied ascribing any particular meanings to his works, he nonetheless contributed meaningful figures that served as visual analogues to the upheavals of recent German history. The figures here seem to have no point of origin and are suspended awkwardly between the top of the picture and the empty space beneath their heads, existing in a sort of horrifying limbo. The title of the picture also suggests a separation, confirmed by one figure moving away from the other. Their bodies are sites of violence as indicated by the ferocious and expressive brushwork, and their organic and vulnerable bodies contrast with the abstract geometry of the background – a background that reflects the figures’ emotional states in its intensity of colour and paint handling, but which seems also to function in a way that suggests the indifference of a universal pattern. (Reference http://www.theartstory.org/movement-neo-expressionism.htm)

Here are some examples of some neo expressionism style work I have found.