Major Art Movements: From Renaissance to Fauvism

Futurism

Futurism was a literary and artistic movement that emerged in Italy in the first decade of the 20th century. It was named for its intention to break completely with the art of the past, especially in Italy, where the artistic tradition permeated everything. Futurists wanted to create a new art, according to the modern mind, the new times, and new needs. This new art was modeled after machines and their main attributes: strength, speed, energy, motion, and dehumanization. The main feature of Futurism is plastic dynamism and movement.

Dadaism

Dada (1916) emerged with the intent to destroy all codes and systems established in the art world. It is an anti-artistic, anti-literary, and anti-poetic movement because it challenges the existence of art, literature, and poetry. It appears as a total ideology, as a way of life, and as an absolute rejection of any tradition or previous scheme.

Surrealism

Surrealism (1924 - Paris) For the Surrealists, the work is born of pure automatism, that is, any form of expression in which the mind does not exercise any control. They try to capture, through abstract shapes or figurative symbolic images, the profound reality of man, the subconscious, and the world of dreams.

Expressionism

Expressionism (Germany) is an artistic movement that seeks the expression of the author's feelings and emotions rather than the representation of objective reality.

Renaissance

Renaissance is the cultural and artistic movement that began in Italy in the 15th century. It directs its eyes to Roman classicism and man as the center of things, after the medieval theocentric tradition.

Baroque Art

17th Century (Baroque Art) is the art born in the late 16th century that covers the 17th and part of the 18th century. It contrasted with the rationalism and classicism that meant Renaissance balance and symmetry.

• Proposes new aesthetic values prevailing in motion with the use of curved shapes, concave and convex, to create its forms.
• Represents realism in its performances, like the theatrical and scenic.
• The Baroque artist's goal is to represent reality to exalt feelings and move the beholder.
• The artwork is presented as a theatrical scene.
• The first characteristic is the triumph of color over drawing.
• Colors are used, and that helps to warm the use of oil, but fresco painting also continues.
• Another feature is realism, which represents things as they really are, using real-life models to paint even religious subjects.
• Concerned with the search for movement.

Fauvism

Fauvism (1910 - 1920) was not a consciously defined movement; it lacked a manifesto. It was a mosaic of contributions in which each artist assailed his works as a personal experience full of spontaneity and freshness. He joined the violent attitude with which they faced the conventions of the time, rejecting rules and established sound methods. They reacted against Impressionism and against the importance they had given birth to at the cost of the loss of color.

• The Fauves believed that through colors, they could express feelings, and this thought conditioned their way of painting.
• They sought naturalistic representation but enhanced the value of color in itself.
• Therefore, they rejected the naturalistic palette of the Impressionists and used violent colors to create a more expressive emphasis.
• Another feature is the taste for the aesthetics of statues and African masks.
• The art of primitive peoples is not imitative, but it raises an obvious departure from naturalistic forms to tend to patterning.