Key Movements and Concepts in Modern Art

Art for Art's Sake

the painter's first loyalty is to the canvas not the outside world or the patron and certainly not for use.

Art Nouveau

tried to create an aesthetic based on natural forms mass produced for a large audience (Antonio Gaudi, Victor Horta and Aubrey Beardsley)

Arts and Craft Movement

dedicated themselves to functional objects of high aesthetic value for a wide public. (John Ruskin, William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh)

Avant-Garde

any new or cutting-edge cultural manifestation. After 1880 it referred to artists who were ahead of their time and who transgressed the limits of established art forms.

Class Struggle

Karl Marx and Frederic Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, which called for the working class to overthrow the capitalist system as labor was exploited to benefit the wealthy and the powerful.

Darwinism

developed the theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

En plein air

of or relating to a branch of impressionism that attempts to represent outdoor light and air.

Fin-de-siecle

the end of the century world-weariness, fashionable despair.

Form Follows Function

the famous dictum of Louis Henry Sullivan which became the slogan of modern architecture.

Georges Seurat

developed a system called Pointillism or Divisionism.

Impressionism

theory and practice of painting among French painters who used short strokes of unmixed primary colors to enhance the effect of reflected lights on objects.

Japonisme

described the Japanese aesthetic. Areas of flat colors and a new presentation of space that characterize the woodblock prints intrigued the Parisians of the late 1800s.

Local Color

an object's actual color.

Modernism

seeks to capture the images and sensibility of their age. Besides dealing with the present it also involves the artist's critical examination of and reflection on the premises of art itself.

Paul Cezanne

made Impressionism into something 'solid and durable.'

Paul Gauguin

used the technique into flat shapes, which emphasized color, line and design.

Plein-air Painting

outdoors.

Pointillism or Divisionism

which was a careful and systematic organization of color based on scientific color theory.

Post-Impressionism

artists using the broken color technique of Impressionism but carrying it into other areas.

Rodin

a sculptor who redefined modern sculpture. He made the unfinished look an aesthetic principle and dissolved the form of the sculpture into flickering patches of light and dark.

Salon de Refuses

was established by Napoleon III because of dissatisfaction with the confining and authoritative decisions of the jurors of the French Academy.

Skyscraper

the high rise, architectural development which came from the invention of steel and the Otis elevators.

Symbolism

exaggerated aesthetic (visual and tactile features) become increasingly esoteric and exotic, mysterious, visionary, dreamlike and fantastic.

Vincent van Gogh

used the technique to express feeling (Expressionism).