Kinetic Art

Kinetic art explores how things look when they move and refers mostly to sculptured works, made up of parts designed to be set in motion by an internal mechanism or an external stimulus, such as light or air. The movement is not virtual or illusory, but a real movement that might be created by a motor, water, wind or even a button pushed by the viewer. Over time, kinetic art developed in response to an increasingly technological culture.

   The Kinetic art form was pioneered by Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, and Alexander Calder. Among the earliest attempts to incorporate movement in a plastic artwork were Moholy-Nagy's Space-Light Modulator, a sculpture producing moving shadows made at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1930, certain Constructivists works, Marcel Duchamp's Rotary Glass Plate and Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), and Alexander Calder's motorized sculptures from 1930s.

   The expression Kinetic Art was used from the mid-1950s onward. It referred to an international trend followed by artists such as Soto, Takis, Agam and Schoffer. Some Kinetic artists also worked in the field of Op Art. Their works were influenced by a modernist aesthetic and could be made with contemporary materials (e.g., aluminum, plastic, neon). Most kinetic works were moving geometric compositions. In Italy artists belonging to Gruppo N, founded in Padua in 1959 (including Biasi, Costa and Massironi, among others), carried out experiments with light, projections and reflections associated with movement.

   The members of the French group GRAV, which included Le Parc, Morellet and Sobrino and was established in 1960's in Paris, created optical and kinetic environments that disturbed and interfered with meanings and relations to space.

   The term kineticism broadened the concept of Kinetic Art to all artistic works involving movement, without any reference to a specific aesthetics. It applies to all those artists today who work with any kind of movement, rather than only geometric art.

Minimal Art

The term "Minimalism" has evolved over the last half-century to include a vast number of artistic media, and its precedents in the visual arts can be found in Mondrian, van Doesburg, Reinhardt, and in Malevich's monochromes. But it was born as a self-conscious movement in New York in the early 1960s. Its leading figures - Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Morris, and Carl Andre - created objects which often blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and were characterized by unitary, geometric forms and industrial materials. Emphasising cool anonymity over the hot expressivism of the previous generation of painters, the Minimalists attempted to avoid metaphorical associations, symbolism, and suggestions of spiritual transcendence.
The revival of interest in Russian Constructivism and Marcel Duchamp's readymades provided important inspiration for the Minimalists. The Russian's example suggested an approach to sculpture that emphasised modular fabrication and industrial materials over the craft techniques of most modern sculpture. And Duchamp's readymades pointed to ways in which sculpture might make use of a variety of pre-fabricated materials, or aspire to the appearance of factory-built commodities.
Much of Minimalist aesthetics was shaped by a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Minimalists wanted to remove suggestions of self-expressionism from the art work, as well as evocations of illusion or transcendence - or, indeed, metaphors of any kind, though as some critics have pointed out, that proved difficult. Unhappy with the modernist emphasis on medium-specificity, the Minimalists also sought to erase distinctions between paintings and sculptures, and to make instead, as Donald Judd said: "specific objects."In seeking to make objects which avoided the appearance of fine art objects, the Minimalists attempted to remove the appearance of composition from their work. To that end, they tried to expunge all signs of the artists guiding hand or thought processes - all aesthetic decisions - from the fabrication of the object. For Donald Judd, this was part of Minimalism's attack on the tradition of "relational composition" in European art, one which he saw as part of an out-moded rationalism. Rather than the parts of an artwork being carefully, hierarchically ordered and balanced, he said they should be "just one thing after another."

Hard-Edge

'Abstract classical painting is hard-edged painting.Forms are finite,flat,rimmed by a hard clean edge.These forms are not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollection of specific shapes he may have encountered in some other connection.They are autonomous shapes sufficient onto themselves as shapes.'                        
                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                                 Jules Langsner
 Hard-edge painting formed in late 1950s and 1960s.It is closely related to Post Painterly Abstraction and color field painting.It describes an abstract style that combines the clear composition of geometric abstraction
with the intense color and bold, unitary forms of colorfiled painting.It was first identified with Californian artists.
 Hard-edge abstraction was part of a general tendency to move away from the expressive qualities of gestural abstraction. Many painters also sought to avoid the shallow, post-Cubist space of Willem de Kooning's work, and instead adopted the open fields of color seen in the work of Barnett Newman.
Hard-edge painting is known for its economy of form, fullness of color, impersonal execution, and smooth surface planes.
The term "hard-edge abstraction" was devised by Californian art critic Jules Langsner, and was initially intended to title a 1959 exhibition that included four West Coast artists - Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley and Lorser Feitelson. Although, later, the style was often referred to as "California hard-edge," and these four artists became synonymous with the movement, Langsner eventually decided to title the show Four Abstract Classicists (1959), as he felt that the style marked a classical turn away from the romanticism of Abstract Expressionism. 

The Van Doesburg.Counter composition V,1924

                                                                                                       

Pop Art

 The term first appeared in Britain during the 1950s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products. The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and by American artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, British artists such as Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art. Hamilton helped organize the 'Man, Machine, and Motion' exhibition in 1955, and 'This is Tomorrow' with its landmark image Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? (1956). Pop Art therefore coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents - Joe Trilson, Richard Smith, Peter Phillips, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj - shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience.

                                                       

Pop Painterly Abstraction

Post Painterly Abstraction is a term invented by the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1984) for an exhibition of the same name, which called attention to a less energetic and more colorful direction in art. He took the word ‘painterly’ (in German ‘malerisch') from the great Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), who had discussed it in his book Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), translated as Principles of Art History (1932). By it he understood ‘the blurred, broken, loose definition of colour and contour; ' Post-Painterly Abstractionists, in contrast, moved towards ‘physical openness of design, or toward linear clarity, or toward both'.  It was precipitated by artists  Gene Davis, Paul Feeley, John Ferren, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Jensen, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski an Frank Stella. 

                                                          'Bridge' by Kenneth Noland, 1964

Frank Stella's 'Harran II', 1967

                             

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism is a post world war II art movement.It was the first American movement that succeeded worldwide influence and the reason why New York became the center of the art world.According to the art critic Robert Coates the term 'abstract expressionism ' was first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm.Yet it is actually applied to American art in 1946.Alfred Barr was the first man to use the term in 1929 in the United States, according to the works of Wassily Kandinsky.The name of the movement comes from the emotional intensity and self denial of German Expressionists.

Willem De Kooning,Woman V.1952-1953

Hans Hoffman ,The Gate,1959-1960

Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic style and cultural movement that flourished in 1924.Andre Barton is a founder of this style.It's aim is to to creat art with using visual imagery from the subconscious mind.It is famous for its visual arts and writings.Surrealism was arose from Dada during World War I,in Europe centered in Paris.The movement influenced fron the works of Freud and Jung.It can be seen that surrealism and symbolism resemble in some ways.Some of the greatest artists influenced by Surrealist movement and involved into the group. Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray,Rene Magritte are some of the names that attracted from surrealist movement. Surrealism spread all around the world and influenced visal arts, literature, film and music.The word Surrealism founded by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Giorgio de Chirico's Red Tower( La Tour Rouge) ,1913