Bauhaus
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A very influential German school of art and design, the aesthetic of which was influenced by and derived from techniques and materials employed especially in industrial fabrication and manufacture -- steel, concrete, chrome, and glass for instance. It was founded in 1919, and closed by the Nazis in 1933, many of its teachers emigrating to the U.S.A. Walter Gropius (German-American, 1883-1969), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (German-American, 1886-1969), Wassily Kandinsky (Russian-German, 1866-1944), Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956), Paul Klee (Swiss-German, 1879-1940), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (German, born Hungary, 1895-1946, active in the US), Josef Albers (German-American, 1899-1976) and other important artists were teachers there. Even though their styles were often quite varied, the artists of the Bauhaus had such a stong effect on the art and art education that this school is often considered as an art movement in itself.
Cobrato the top
A twentieth century European art movement whose members included Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Corneille, Egill Jacobsen, Asger Jorn, Lucebert, and Karl H. Pederson, and was founded in Paris in 1948 by the Belgian poet and essayist Christian Dotrement, and active until 1951. Their art was experimental, inspired by Marxism, somewhat sympathetic to Expressionism and Surrealism, showing greatest affinity to folk art and children's art and to the works of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. Similarities can also be seen to works by American abstract expressionists, but none to those that are geometrically abstract. Cobra's name was distilled from the names of the three capital cities of the countries of its principal members: CO from Copenhagen, Denmark, BR from Brussels, Belgium, and A from Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Cubismto the top
One of the most influential art movements (1907-1914) of the twentieth century, Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1991), and by the Fauves.
In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."
There were three phases in the development of Cubism: Facet Cubism, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism.
After fauvist beginnings, Braque went with Raoul Dufy in 1908 on a trip to l'Estaque, a place often painted by Cézanne. They produced a series of landscapes with simplified forms and a limited variety of colors. The controversy surrounding their exhibition at the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Gallery brought Cubism its name. In effect, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles described the works in this way: "M. Braque scorns form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemas and cubes."
The break with homogeneous form was completed the following year. Braque and Picasso's similar compositions are broken into planes with open edges, sliding into each other while denying all depth. Color is reduced to a gray-tan cameo, applied uniformly in small brushstrokes creating vibrations of light. The interpenetration of the forms lends these paintings a previously unknown aspect of continuity and density. Withdrawing before the abstract and hermetic character of this new space, Braque and Picasso brought recognizable illusionistic features back into their paintings during their stay in Céret, from 1911 to 1913. They used letters, fragments of words, musical notes, then significant material elements: sand or sawdust which create relief, and tend to make the picture more physically an object.
Color returned in force in 1912, in parallel to the creation of the "papiers collés" -- collages. Creating a simple geometric armature and pieces of glued paper with trompe l'oeil patterns imitating wood, marble or newsprint, then introducing "already made" elements (musical scores, tobacco packets or playing cards), the "papiers collés" definitively dissociate color and form. Picasso, then Henri Laurens would create construction pieces from ordinary materials, cut out and assembled into colored geometric planes, where empty and full spaces combine to sketch out the forms.
Although the war of 1914-19 ended Picasso and Braque's collaboration, the cubist core group remained active until the 1920s, through the explorations of Braque, Matisse, Laurens, Lipchitz and Fernand Léger, whose geometric world and abstractly organized canvases with their contrasting, dynamic forms owe almost everything to the pioneering breakthroughs of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso.
Dada to the top
An early twentieth century art movement which ridiculed contemporary culture and traditional art forms. It was born as a consequence of the collapse during World War I of social and moral values which developed to that time. Dada artists produced works which were nihilistic or reflected a cynical attitude toward social values, and, at the same time, irrational -- absurd and playful, emotive and intuitive, and often cryptic. Less a style than a zeitgeist, Dadaists typically produced art objects in unconventional forms produced by unconventional methods. Several artists employed the chance results of accident as a means of production, for instance. Literally, the word dada means several things in several languages: it's French for "hobbyhorse" and Slavic for "yes yes".
Many artists associated with this movement later became associated with Surrealism. Many other movements have been influenced by Dada, including Pop Art and Fluxus.
De Stijlto the top
An art movement advocating pure abstraction and simplicity-- form reduced to the rectangle and other geometric shapes, and color to the primary colors, along with black and white. Piet Mondrian (Netherlandish, 1872-1944) was the group's leading figure. He published a manifesto titled Neo-Plasticism in 1920. Another member, painter Theo van Doesberg (Netherlandish, 1883-1931) had started a journal named De Stijl in 1917, which continued publication until 1928, spreading the theories of the group, which also included the painter George Vantongerloo (Belgian,1886-1965), along with the architects J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963) and Gerrit Rietveld (Netherlandish, 1888-1965). Their work exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus and the International Style.
