KINETIC ART

-Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect.
-The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. Kinetic art encompasses a wide variety of overlapping techniques and styles.
-Kinetic sculptures are examples of kinetic art in the form of sculpture or three dimensions.
-The motion of the work can be provided in many ways: mechanically through electricity, steam or clockwork; by utilizing natural phenomena such as wind or wave power; or by relying on the spectator to provide the motion, by doing something such as cranking a handle.
-The 1950s and 1960s are seen as a golden age of kinetic sculpture, during which time Alexander Calder and George Rickey pioneered kinetic sculpture. Other leading exponents include Yaacov Agam, Fletcher Benton, Eduard Bersudsky, Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Ganson, Starr Kempf, Jerome Kirk, Len Lye, Ronald Mallory, Jean Tinguely, and the Zero group (initiated by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack).
-Kinetic drawing makes use of the critical balance and creates 3D drawings from various materials. Kinetic means that the object holds energy, kinetic drawings usually are critical in their stability and are eager to find a more stable position, through gravity.

 

MINIMAL ART

-Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts.
-As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s.
-The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, as in the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams.
-The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements.
-Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture.
-De Stijl expanded the ideas that could be expressed by using basic elements such as lines and planes organized in very particular manners.
-Another modern master who exemplifies reductivist ideas is Luis Barragán. In minimalism, the architectural designers pay special attention to the connection between perfect planes, elegant lighting, and careful consideration of the void spaces left by the removal of three-dimensional shapes from an architectural design.
-The concept of minimalist architecture is to strip everything down to its essential quality and achieve simplicity.
-The idea is not completely without ornamentation, but that all parts, details and joinery are considered as reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design.
-Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning.
-Minimal music is an originally American genre of experimental or Downtown music named in the 1960s based mostly in consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells. It may include features such as additive process and phase shifting.

HARD-EDGE PAINTING

-Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color.
-The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.
-The term was coined by writer, curator and Los Angeles Times art critic Jules Langsner, along with Peter Selz, in 1959
-Other, earlier, movements, or styles have also contained the quality of hard-edgedness, for instance the Precisionists also displayed this quality to a great degree in their work
- Hard-edge can be seen to be associated with one or more school of painting, but is also a generally descriptive term, for these qualities found in any painting.
-This style of hard-edge geometric abstraction recalls the earlier work of Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian. Other artists associated with Hard-edge painting include Herb Aach, Josef Albers, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Max Bill, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ralph Coburn, Nassos Daphnis, Ronald Davis, Gene Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Peter Halley, Al Held, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Günther C. Kirchberger, Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland, Georg Karl Pfahler, Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Ludwig Sander, Leon Polk Smith, Julian Stanczak, Frank Stella, Myron Stout, Leo Valledor, Victor Vasarely, Charmion von Wiegand, Neil Williams, Larry Zox and Barbro Östlihn.

POP ART

-Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States.[
-Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc.
-Pop art employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.
-It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them.
-Much of pop art is considered incongruent, as the conceptual practices that are often used make it difficult for some to readily comprehend.
-Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising.
-Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, like in the Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol.
-The origins of pop art in North America and Great Britain developed differently
-They were a gathering of young painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who were challenging prevailing modernist approaches to culture as well as traditional views of Fine Art.
Some sample of pop art:

POST-PAINTERLY ABSTRACTION

-This exhibition with its accompanying essay was Greenberg's attempt to describe a period style that appeared to replace the painterly abstraction of the preceding generation known popularly as Abstract Expressionism.
 -His choice of Wölfflin's terminology was apt but perhaps unfortunate; Greenberg disliked the label "Color Field" which had been applied to some of the art that he admired -- why, I don't know; after all, most art labels are the work of journalists and few are descriptive in any meaningful way.
-Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto
-Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style.
-Among the prior generation of contemporary artists, Barnett Newman has been singled out as one who anticipated "some of the characteristics of post-painterly abstraction."
-As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "post-painterly abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

-Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement.
- It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism.
-The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism
- Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.
-Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation.
-The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism.
-Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky.
-While the movement is closely associated with painting, and painters like Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and others, collagist Anne Ryan and sculpture and certain sculptors in particular were also integral to Abstract Expressionism.
-Major paintings and sculpture:

SURREALISM

-Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings
-Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact.
-Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris.
-From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
-The movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing.
- Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism.
Major exhibitions in the 1920s

-1925 - La Peinture Surrealiste - The first ever Surrealist exhibition at Gallerie Pierre in Paris. Displayed works by Masson, Man Ray, Klee, Miró, and others. The show confirmed that Surrealism had a component in the visual arts (though it had been initially debated whether this was possible), techniques from Dada, such as photomontage were used.
-Galerie Surréaliste opened on March 26, 1926 with an exhibition by Man Ray.
 Golden Age
-Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions.
-Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.
-Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer

Max Ernst

Rene Magritte

PITTURA METAFISICA

-Metaphysical art (Italian: Pittura metafisica), style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà.
-The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality.
- De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917.
- Futurism staunchly rejected the past, other modern movements identified a nostalgia for the now faded Classical grandeur of Italy as a major influence in their art.
-Giorgio de Chirico first developed the style that he later called Metaphysical Painting while in Milan.
-In his painting Turin Melancholy (1915), for example, he illustrated just such a square, using unnaturally sharp contrasts of light and shadow that lend an aura of poignant but vaguely threatening mystery to the scene.
-In 1917, in the midst of the First World War, Carrà and de Chirico spent time in Ferarra where they further developed the Metaphysical Painting style that was later to attract the attention of the French Surrealists
-The Metaphysical school proved short-lived; it came to an end about 1920 because of dissension between de Chirico and Carrà over who had founded the group.
The Disquieting Muses by Giorgio de Chirico

The Song Love by Giorgio de Chirico

DADA

 Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922.[
-This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
-The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word.
-Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media.
-Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I.
- Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path.

Hannah Höch

 

SYNCHRONISM

-Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell
-Their abstract "synchromies", based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art.
-Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention.
-Synchromism is based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony.
-The abstract "synchromies" are based on color scales, using rhythmic color forms with advancing and reducing hues.
-The earliest synchromist works were similar to Fauvist paintings.
-Synchromism was developed by Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell while they were studying in Paris during the early 1910s
-From 1911 to 1913, they studied under the Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart, whose color theory connected qualities of color to qualities of music, such as tone to hue and intensity to saturation
-The first synchromist painting, Russell's Synchromy in Green, exhibited at the Paris Salon des Indépendants in 1913.
- Synchromism remained influential well into the 1920s.
Morgan Russell

Stanton MacDonald-Wright

DER BLAUE REİTER

-Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany.
-The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter.
- Der Blaue Reiter was a movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded in 1905.
-The name of the movement is the title of a painting that Kandinsky created in 1903, but it is unclear whether it is the origin of the name of the movement, as Professor Klaus Lankheit learned that the title of the painting had been overwritten.
-Kandinsky wrote 20 year later that the name is derived from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of riders, combined with both love of the color blue.
-Within the group, artistic approaches and aims varied from artist to artist; however, the artists shared a common desire to express spiritual truths through their art.
-They believed in the promotion of modern art; the connection between visual art and music; the spiritual and symbolic associations of colour; and a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting.
-The group was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Franz Marc and August Macke were killed in combat. Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky were forced to move back to Russia because of their Russian citizenship.
- There were also differences in opinion within the group. As a result, Der Blaue Reiter was short-lived, lasting for only three years from 1911 to 1914.

Wassily Kandinsky

SECTION D'OR

-The Section d'Or ("Golden Section"), also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters, sculptors and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism.
- Based in the Parisian suburbs of Puteaux and Courbevoie, the group was active from 1911 to around 1914, coming to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911.
-The group seems to have adopted the name Section d'Or to distinguish themselves from the narrower definition of Cubism developed in parallel by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and to show that Cubism, rather than being an isolated art-form, represented the continuation of a grand tradition (indeed, the golden ratio had fascinated Western intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years).
-The Puteaux Group (an offshoot of la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne) organized their first exhibition under the name Salon de la Section d'Or at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defence of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, entitled Du "Cubisme" (published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913).
-The 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or was arguably the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition.
-The idea of the Section d'Or originated in the course of conversations between Gleizes, Metzinger and Jacques Villon.
-Peladan attached great mystical significance to the golden section (French: Section d'Or), and other similar geometric configurations.
-After World War I, with the support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, Cubism returned as a central issue for artists.
-With the Salons dominated by a return to classicism, Albert Gleizes attempted to resuscitate the spirit of the Section d'Or in 1920 but was met with great difficulty, despite support by Fernand Léger, Alexander Archipenko, Georges Braque and Léopold Survage.
Albert Gleizes

Jean Metzinger

Marcel Duchamp

 

FUTURISM

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.
-It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere.
-The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy.
-The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
-Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.
-The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others.
-The Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia expressed his ideas of modernity in his drawings for La Città Nuova (The New City) (1912–1914). This project was never built and Sant'Elia was killed in the First World War, but his ideas influenced later generations of architects and artists.
- This project was never built and Sant'Elia was killed in the First World War, but his ideas influenced later generations of architects and artists.
-Russian Futurism was a movement of literature and the visual arts. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the movement. Visual artists such as David Burlyuk, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in the imagery of Futurist writings and were poets themselves.
-Futurist music rejected tradition and introduced experimental sounds inspired by machinery, and would influence several 20th century composers.
-Futurism as a literary movement made its official debut with F.T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909), as it delineated the various ideals Futurist poetry should strive for.
Giacomo Balla

Umberto Boccioni

An example of futurustic architecture:

CONSTRUCTIVISM

-Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art.
-The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes.
- Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement
-Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.
-The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917.
-Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow, from 1920–22.
-As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the post-October revolution Bolshevik government.

 

CUBISM

-Cubism is an early 20th century avant-garde art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso and George Braque  that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music,
-Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th-century.
- A primary influence that led to Cubism stems from the representation of three-dimensional form produced during the late 1900s by Paul Cézanne, following a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne
-In Cubist artworks, objects are analyzed, broken up and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
-The beginnings of Cubism have been dated between 1907 and 1911.
-The first organized group exhibition by Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1911 in a room called ‘Salle 41’; it included works by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier, yet no works by Picasso and Braque were exhibited.
-During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures.
Paul Cezanne

Pablo Picasso

Geoerges Braque

 

DİE BRÜCKE

-Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named.
-Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller. The seminal group had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and the creation of expressionism
-The founding members of Die Brücke in 1905 were four Jugendstil architecture students: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976).
-Die Brücke aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the name) between the past and the present
The group members initially "isolated" themselves in a working-class neighborhood of Dresden, aiming thereby to reject their own bourgeois backgrounds.
-The group published a broadside called Programme in 1906, where Kirchner wrote:
We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces
Some samples are:

LES FAUVES

-Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism.
-Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions.
-Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.
-Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions.
-Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the Swiss painter Alice Bailly, and Georges Braque
-The artists shared their first exhibition at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. The group gained their name, after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their show of work with the phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.
Henri Matisse

Andre Derrain

 

EXPRESSIONISM

-Expressionism, was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. 
-Expressionism was developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin
-The term is sometimes suggestive of emotional angst. In a general sense, painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works.
-While the word expressionist was used in the modern sense as early as 1850, its origin is sometimes traced to paintings exhibited in 1901 in Paris by an obscure artist Julien-Auguste Hervé, which he called Expressionismes

August Macke 

Ernst Ludwig Kirscher

Franz March

LES NABİS

(1891-1899)

• REPRESENTER: Pierre Bonnard, Ker Xavier Roussel, Felix Vallotton, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, Maxime Dethomas, Meyer de Haan, Rene Geoeges Hermann- Paul, Henri- Gabriel Ibels, George Lacombe, Aristde Maillol, Paul Ranson, Jozsef Rippl-Ronai, Paul Serusier, Felix Vallotton, Jan Verkade and Edouard Vuillard.
• Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist artists and illustrators in Paris who became very influential in the field of graphic art in France in the 1890s.
• Most of grup members studied at the private school of Rodolpe Julian in Paris in the late 18880.
• Their emphasis on design was shared by the parallel Art Nouveau movement. Both groups  also had close ties to the Symbolist painters. 
• Les Nabis originated as a rebellious group of young student artists who banded together at the Académie Julian
• Les Nabis regarded themselves as initiates, and used a private vocabulary. They called a studio ergasterium, and ended their letters with the initials E.T.P.M.V. et M.P., meaning "En ta paume, mon verbe et ma pensée" ("In the palm of your hand, my word and my thoughts.")
• Les Nabis artists worked in a variety of media, using oils on both canvas and cardboard, distemper on canvas and wall decoration, and also produced posters, prints, book illustration, textiles and furniture.
• The artists of this circle were highly influenced by the paintings of the impressionists, and thus while sharing the flatness, page layout and negative space of art nouveau and other decorative modes, much of Nabis art has a painterly, non-realistic look, with color palettes often reminding one of Cézanne and Gauguin. 
• After the turn of the century, as modern art moved towards abstraction, expressionism, cubism, etc., the Nabis were viewed as conservatives, and indeed were among the last group of artists to stick to the roots and artistic ambitions of the impressionists, pursuing these ends almost into the middle of the 20th century. In their later years, these painters also largely abandoned their earlier interests in decorative and applied arts.

 Fellix Vallatton
The Mistress and Servant
 (1896)

Pierre Bonnard 
The Dining room in the Country
(1913)




 

 Meyer de Haan 
Maternity : Mary Henry Breastfeeding
(1890)

SYMBOLISM

- Symbolism originated in France and it was part of a 19th century movement in which art became infused with mysticism.
-Thematically, the art of Symbolism developed as a countercurrent to Impressionism and the various forms of Naturalism.
- The term of symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to expres an allegorical meaning.
-The symbolist painters used these sybols from mytholugy and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul.
- Gustave Moreau's painting: