7/31/2019 From Reality to Abstraction

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From Reality to Abstraction

From the Renaissance to the 1860s, Western art was preoccupied with the attempt toreproduce perspective and the illusion of reality in visual form, known asrealism.

Artists used a variety of technical aids to depict single-pointperspective, such as geometricgrids to determine the 'vanishing point'.The British artist David Hockney and the American experimental physicist Charles Falcoargue that optical aides had been used by artists as early as 1425 to achieve realistic, almost'photographic' qualities in their drawings and paintings. Concave mirrors and optical lenseswere used to project compositions of posed models or objects onto the canvas. Click heretoread Hockney and Falco's paper The Art of the Science of Renaissance Painting, andclickhereto view Hockney's YouTube films The Lost Secrets of the Old Masters.

Abstraction and CubismFrom the impressionists of the 1860s onwards, visual artists of the modernist movementhave reflected the energy and dynamics of the age through a shift towardsabstraction.Moving away from depicting reality based on recognisable visual references, artists becameincreasingly concerned with developing a non-representationalvisual language of form,colour and line. New terms entered the language: abstract, non-figurative, non-objective,non-representational.

The movement was instigated by post-impressionists, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gaugin,George Seurat, and, in particular, Paul Cezanne. Cezanne explored the underlyinggeometric planes and structures of forms, reducing them to their essentials: cylinder, coneand sphere.

This was further developed bycubism, which experimented with multiple viewpoints,multiple perspectives, and the breaking up and re-assembling of objects in seeminglyrandom relationships. George Braque, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and others wereinfluenced simultaneously by the stark power and simplicity of African tribal art, and by thelatest technology: film. The editing of sequences showing different sizes and angles of shots,revealed the possibility of multiple perspectives, with which the artists became fascinated.

Synthetic cubism emerged as the cubists and other artists, includingMarcel Duchamp,engaged with different materials and textures and collage elements.Kurt Schwitterand

Man Raybecame key exponents of collage and influenced the development ofdada. Otherart movements emerged at this time, such asfauvism, which included Henri Matisse andRaoul Duffy; and futurism, which you will look at in a later section.

Activity

I would like you to look at Alfred H. Barr's diagramThe Development of Abstract Artproduced to accompany the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art1936. Here you can see theinter-connection of ideas, movements and creativity which were in circulation in the early partof the 20th centuryI would like you to demonstrate this inter-connection by selecting images from work by artists

from the early part of the 20th centuryI would also like you to demonstrate the extension of this inter-connection by selectingimages from the media of this period. You might want to choose, for example, photographs,posters, propaganda images, or film stills.

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