Baroque art differs from that of the Renaissance in various significant aspects. Renaissance art exemplified calm and reason and Baroque was violent and full of emotion and energy. Greater color contrast, more vivid bright colors, light and dark brings about a complexity not seen in the simplistic Renaissance artwork. The leading interpreter in this era was Bernini. His theatrical styles of grand gestures bring an innovative look at the evolution of the human form from the ancient world’s crude compositions to believability. In fact, his subject is in ecstasy in his marble, gilt, and bronze statue of St. Teresa in ecstasy.
Rococo an eighteen-century style, originating in reaction to the grandeur and massiveness of the Baroque era employed refined, elegant, and highly decorative forms. Although an extenuation of its preceding period Rococo is smaller in scale and color schemes are softer. Because the concepts of linear perspective and other technical skills had been discovered during the Renaissance artist could paint and sculpt very realistically, some of them started to paint very idealistic themes. Typically, these romantic pieces of art exemplify park like settings in a most wonderful and fictional manner.
As we enter the modern world we see art fragment or branch out into various schools of thought such as Neo-Classicism a continuation from the technically precise technology of the Renaissance, Impressionism, Abstract, Modern, Post modern. etc. New inventions or technology have a great affect on the way that artists think and emotions became important to the person creating art.
Neo-Classicism is a European style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The perfectionism of the Greek and Romans in representing the perfect body is evident in La Grande Odalisque; an oil on canvas painting by Jean Augusta Dominique Ingres. This era’s intent was to reproduce earlier classical ideologies as authentically as possible using the evolved techniques to perfect the works of art. In reaction to the Neo-classical movement, Romanticism arose. The focus was on the emotional over the perfection of reason and spontaneous expression was highly prized. The stress on drama, turbulent emotions, and imagery in motion was a direct outcome of the revolution in France forty years earlier. Liberty Leading the People is filled with all of them. The sense of blurred motion is created flickering lights and confusion replicated the societal emotions of the time.
Realism was the artists’ reaction to the two previous styles again mimicking the shift in the societal culture. Realism stood for what the eye could actually see. Works of myths, imagination, beauty, and idolized subject matter were rejected as false. Their concerns were rooted in the present.
Impressionism was a term first used by a journalist ridiculing a landscape by Monet. Basically he had it correct in that this group of artists had a common desire to capture the moment and the immediacy of visual impressions or spontaneity. Prime examples of this desire are depicted by Claude Monet and the way he wanted to capture Rouen Cathedral in different light and weather
Two discoveries that affected the thinking of the Impressionists were the invention of photography and the opening of trade with the orient. Photography, which was invented in 1825 and became a constant by the 1850s, had the ability to capture the moment and freeze time rendered portrait painting almost unnecessary as a way to capture the subject for eternity. Vanity and narcissism had a hay-day with photography. Oriental prints used genre themes and incorporated composition techniques that attracted the attention of the impressionistic artists.
With the quality and quantity of photographic images and printing the common person could own and display images at a reasonable cost. During the 20th century artists began to look for way to be more expressive, sometimes to the point of reaction. For the artist emotion is everything and the interpretation is left to the viewer, many times with different reactions from different people. Art became a colorless topic with numerous questions and the leading inquiry was “Is it Art?”
The Piazza San Marco, an oil on linen painting by Renoir is a series of blurred images and the human form is lost in the smudges. Even clearer images such, as La Lecture by Morisot where the human form of a young girl can be distinguished is still blurred and unclear. It is as if the movement wanted to wipe out humanity or blend it into the universal surroundings.
Expressionism, the artistic style that the artist seeks to display not reality, but emotions and responses. Typically, the art uses distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy to evoke a response from the viewer. In 1911, a new group of German Expressionists opens the way towards abstraction with it experimentation and originality. It is Wassily Kandinsky, who is most often credited with painting the first Abstract picture, in 1910. Abstraction distorts the human form and makes it almost unascertainable.
Cubism as can be seen in the George Braque painting of Picasso, to the left, the cubistic style demands that the pictorial elements be influenced by the intersecting of transparent cubes and cones emphasizing the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane. Cubism rejects the traditional techniques of perspective learned in the Renaissance Era and many times depicts numerous sides in the same view simultaneously. Artists, such as Pablo Picasso, often began painting in the realistic or impressionistic style, but would spend part of their life exploring the techniques of cubism or abstraction.
Because the rules of perspective had been historically learned and studied, artists such as the Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher, became most recognized for his spatial illusions of impossible situations and repeating geometric patterns where the illusion of depth was adjusted. Escher was a man studied and greatly appreciated by mathematicians and scientists because of his mathematically complex structures that require a “second look”.
In simplicifation, close up, or minimizing art, the artist is getting rid of the entrapment of enumeration to give the observer a new and many times neglected view of common objects. The close up technique used in the works of Georgia O’Keef many times is taken almost to the point of abstraction, but makes us aware of the loveliness in the parts of the whole flower, which was one of her favorite themes. Artists, such as, Andy Warhol gave us a new look at every day objects through repetition and Piet Mondrian or Paul Klee make us look again at basic colors and shapes.
Non-Representational artist Jackson Pollock was painting abstractly with the drip and splash method in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from a can, manipulating it with sticks, trowels or knives and adding mixture of foreign matter. This method painting was supposed to result in a direct expression of the unconscious moods of the artist. Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world.
Historically, while the method of depicting the human form has changed, the image has remained virtually constant as Plato said about Egyptian art for thousands of years. The healthy, trim, muscular form that represents the ideal period of the era. There have been a few moments in history, such as the artistic works of Renoir and Rubens when a bloated figure was desirable. The evolution of the human form has been to perfect techniques to bring it to life not alter conceptions about the type of body artists have traditionally used to immortalize humanity.
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