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