Movement in fine art of the early 20th century. Modern styles and trends in art of the 20th century

Depict not the original, but the attitude towards it (Pablo Picasso)

Welcome to the blog!

Contemporary art movements and museums of the world. We all chronically lack time to “absorb” all the information in all areas of interest to us, so I decided to prepare this guide to contemporary art.

It will be as concise as possible. We will look at the main movements of contemporary art, as well as the most famous museums in the world of contemporary art in which they are represented. By the way, this can serve as an additional incentive for new travels!

At the end of the article you will find a video review of one of the most interesting museums - Theater-Museum of Salvador Dali in Figueres (Spain).

You will learn from the article:

• where and how each of the movements of modern art and its ideas appeared
• who are the brightest representatives of the direction
• places to see their work

We'll consider 50 most significant and vibrant trends of the 20th-21st centuries, which became revolutionary and determined the course of events in the future. Perhaps it will not be possible to fit all the information into one article, so you will have to break it into 3 parts according to the periods of origin of each direction contemporary art.

The guide to contemporary art will include 3 articles:

• Part 1. First half of the 20th century ( we'll look at it in this article)

If you want to delve deeper into each of the areas of contemporary art(each has branches) and see many works of their most prominent representatives, very I recommend that you use the Google projectGoogle Art Project. I also recommend these blogs to understand what's going on in contemporary art and design: But Does It Float, Them Thangs, American Suburb X, M U S E O.

Directions of contemporary art of the 1st half of the 20th CENTURY. The most famous museums in the world of contemporary art.

In this part we will look at these brightest trends of the first half of the 20th century:

1. Modernism
2. Post-Impressionism
3. Avant-garde
4. Fauvism
5. Abstractionism
6. Expressionism
7. Cubism
8. Futurism
9. Cubofuturism
10. Formalism
11. Naturalism
12. New materiality
13. Dadaism
14. Surrealism

The 20th century is a time of the most unexpected and sometimes even extravagant ideas. But without them, art most likely took a different path of development. And it would remain the advantage of a small number of initiates. But new trends in art have “brought” art closer to life and, one might say, “brought” it to the streets, to the ordinary passerby. They made this passerby a co-author of their works. The opportunity to create and understand art has become available not only to the elite, but to many.

The motto of 20th century art was the words “Art into life”

Gesture art, readymades, and installations are still relevant today. Net art, massurrealism, and superflatness are art movements adequate for their time, because they appeal to to modern man in a language he understands.

In our century, a similar story happened with the profession of photographer. Thanks to the advent of digital photography, the Internet and social networks, the availability of a camera (it simply became an addition to the phone), now this most interesting area of ​​​​activity has become available to absolutely everyone. Now every second person is a talented photographer who has a beautiful account with photos on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and other social networks. Read more about this phenomenon of our century in the article on technological socialism ().

1. MODERNISM. Modernist artists. An innovative movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which questioned the tradition of realistic depiction

Modernism is all the trends in art that appeared after 1863 and until the mid-20th century. In 1863, the Salon of the Rejected exhibition opened in Paris - an alternative to the official Salon. The goal of the new art was to create works not with a real image, but taking into account the author’s vision of the world.

Modernist artists - Chagall, Picasso, Modigliani, Borisov-Musatov, Klimt and other artists from impressionists to surrealists made a breakthrough, a revolution in art. They believed that a person’s view of the world is unique and inimitable. And the tradition of depicting realistically in sculpture and painting is outdated.

Further more - the Dadaists generally questioned the significance and essence of art. Their doubts led to the emergence of conceptual art, which discussed not the execution of the work, but its idea. Impressionists began to organize their exhibitions, an art market appeared and art became a form of investment.

2. POST-IMPRESSIONISM. Post-impressionism in painting was based on impressionism, but conveyed not a state, but a separate moment

Post-Impressionism in painting became the link between the 19th and 20th centuries. This movement belonged neither to the impressionists nor to the realists. These artists were looking for a middle ground, each in their own way, inventing new techniques: pointillism (Paul Signac, Georges Seurat), symbolism (Paul Gauguin and the Nabis group), linear-painting Art Nouveau style (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec), the constructive basis of the subject (Paul Cézanne ), and the presaging expressionist paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

Look. Post-Impressionist artists are represented in many museums. Paintings by Georges Seurat - in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Brussels, Belgium), Emile Bernard - in the Orsay Museum (Paris, France), Vincent van Gogh - in the museum of the same name (Amsterdam, Holland), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - in the museum named after him (Albi, France), Henri Rousseau - at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Russia).

3. AVANT-GARDISM. The most innovative movements, of which there were 15 in the 20th century, from Fauvism to Pop Art

Avant-garde artists understood that painting the world as it is had become meaningless. It was only possible to amaze the viewer who believed in progress and Nietzsche’s superman with something extravagant. But not landscapes.

Therefore, the avant-garde artists abandoned absolutely everything that was “classical” and looked “beautiful.” And now, everything that looked shocking and required associations and imagination began to be called avant-garde. Avant-gardists despised details because they believed that the world was universal.

It is the avant-garde artists who own the motto “Art into life!” The key directions of avant-garde art are installation, ready-made, happening, environment, as well as Electonic music, photography, cinema.

Look: Avant-gardeism in painting is represented by the works of Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse - in the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia), the Center Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA).

4. FAUVISM. The direction to which the group of artists “Wild Beasts” belonged

Fauvism became the very first avant-garde movement in the art of the 20th century. There was only one step left from him to abstractionism.

Fauvist artists were “wild” primarily in color. Henri Matisse, the leader of the group, used in his works the then fashionable motifs of color Japanese prints. To enhance the effect, the Fauvists quite often used a colored outline. The Wild Ones greatly influenced the German Expressionists.

Look: Fauvism in painting is presented at the Center Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), the Orsay Museum (Paris, France), and the Museum of Modern Art (Baltimore, USA).

5. ABSTRACTIONISM. The first painting movement in the history of art that refused to depict the world as real

Abstract artists, founders of the movement - Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Delaunay. They called abstraction a new stage in painting. It was argued that abstraction could now create forms that only existed in art. For example, Malevich's Black Square can contain everything that the black color and shape of a square can contain, for example, the entire history of art.

There are lyrical and geometric abstractionism. Geometric abstractionism includes Malevich's Suprematism, Delaunay's Orphism, and Mondrian's Neoplasticism. To the lyrical - the works of Kandinsky, some expressionists (Pollock, Gorky, Mondrian), Tachists (Vols, Fautry, Saur), informalists (Tapies, Dubuffet, Schumacher).

Look: State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), National Art Museum and Kyiv Museum Russian Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA).

6. EXPRESSIONISM. Expressionist artists depicted bright pictures with dreary subjects.

Expressionism in painting is associated with the creativity of two art associations. "Bridge" - founded in 1905 by Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel and "Blue Rider" - in 1911 by Mark and Kandinsky.

"The Bridge" drew on African sculpture, German Gothic and folk art, while "The Blue Rider" drew on cosmology and mystical theories that led them to abstraction. The language of the expressionists is deformations, bright colors, exalted images.

Both groups had a rather morbid worldview, which was taken to the extreme by their followers - Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann and James Ensor.

Look: Edvard Munch Museum (Oslo, Norway), paintings by James Ensor - in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (Belgium).

7. CUBISM. French cubist artists tried to depict the world using geometric shapes.

Like other directions, cubism in painting developed from rough massive forms to small ones, and then went headlong into collage. Experience has shown that simple geometric figures are too few and too crude to represent the world. But in collages, cubists could use bright, voluminous, textured objects and thereby extended the life of this direction for some time.

Very interesting statements about Cubism were written by his contemporaries, for example, the Russian philosopher Berdyaev called Cubism “the most radical revolution since the Renaissance.” Hemingway said: “To understand Cubism, you need to see what the earth looks like from an airplane window.”

Look: It is best to see Picasso in the museum named after him (Barcelona, ​​Spain), Marcoussis, Braque and Léger - at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Alexander Archipenko - at the Ukrainian Museum of Art (New York, USA), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), National Art Museum (Kyiv, Ukraine).

8. FUTURISM. "Future Art" of the early 20th century, which influenced future art throughout the world.

For the first time in history, artists officially renounced everything that had been created before them and began to depict the world in a new way. They believed that an artist should keep his finger on the pulse of his time.

Futurist artists painted both realistic landscapes and abstractions depicting speed, energy and movement. Futurism in painting was based on previous trends - Fauvism (in terms of color), Cubism (in terms of form).

Futurists became famous for their provocative speeches and actions. They were essentially the first performances and art gestures. The ideas of the Italians were picked up by the Russians and Ukrainian artists and poets.

Look: Works by Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini - in the Museum of Modern Art of Trento and Rovereto (Rovereto, Italy), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the National Gallery of Modern Art (Rome, Italy). Russian and Ukrainian futurists can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin (Moscow, Russia), National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine), Dnepropetrovsk Art Museum (Dnepr, Ukraine).

9. CUBO-FUTURISM. A movement that united many Eastern European abstractionists.

Cubo-futurism in painting became a mixture of the ideas of cubism, futurism and folk primitivism. “Russian Cubism” lived only 5 years, but thanks to it such bright trends of the last century as Suprematism (Malevich), Constructivism (Lissitzky, Tatlin), analytical art (Filonov) appeared.

Cubo-Futurist artists collaborated with Futurist poets (Khlebnikov, Guro, Kruchenykh), from them they received new ideas.

Look: Malevich - in the Municipal Gallery of Amsterdam (Holland), State Russian Museum (Moscow, Russia), Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), Works by Burliuk, Exter, Goncharova - in the National Art Museum (Kyiv, Ukraine).

10. FORMALISM. A direction that implied the primacy of form over meaning

Cubism, futurism, fauvism, and abstractionism are similar in that they depict the world as different from reality. Many German art historians worked on the theory of formalism - Fiedler, Riegl, Wölfflin. They substantiated the dominant form in art, with the help of which “ideal reality” is created.

Based on this idea, the linguistic school of formalism appeared in Russia in the 1910s. Thanks to her, literary criticism has become a science of world significance.

Look: Matisse Museum in Nice (France), Picasso Museum in Barcelona (Spain), Tate Gallery (England).

11. NATURALISM. A movement in literature and art that arose under the influence of the ideas of positivists

American and European naturalist artists, supporters of the then fashionable ideas of the positivists Spencer and Comte, began to imitate science, depicting the world without embellishment, dispassionately, objectively. Very soon they slipped into socialism and biologism: they began to depict portraits of marginalized people, pathologies, and scenes of violence.

Look: Paintings by naturalist artists Max Liebermann - in art gallery Kunsthal (Hamburg, Germany), Lucian Freud - at the Museum of Modern Art (Los Angeles, USA).

Naturalism in painting influenced the work of artists such as Degas and Manet. Photographicity and de-aestheticization of naturalism in the 20th century will manifest itself in hyperrealism, but here it carries a different meaning. Hyperrealist artists do not strive to copy everyday reality. The objects of their painting are very detailed and create the illusion of reality. False, but convincing.

12. NEW SUBSTANCE. Neoclassicism - represented by the work of German artists of the 20-30s

The director of the gallery in Mannheim called the work of the young talents who exhibited in his gallery in 1925 “new substance.” They rejected the ideas of expressionism and advocated a return to the realistic depiction of reality.

They believed that the world should be depicted on canvas photographically accurately, in all its ugliness. But their realism was more likely to be attributed to the grotesque than to the truth.

New thingsists Georg Gross, Max Beckmann, Otto Disk - masters static compositions and exaggerated forms.

Look: Georg Grosz, Otto Disk - in the New National Gallery (Berlin).

13. DADAISM. Anti-cultural and anti-war movement, named by the French after a wooden horse

The Dadaists considered the creation of something funny to be the only meaning of creativity, since the world is crazy. The first Dadaists - residents of Zurich Gulsenbeck, Ball, Janko, Arp - organized noisy and cheerful parties, published a magazine, and gave lectures.

They had followers in Berlin (they were more involved in politics), Cologne (they became famous for an exhibition that could only be accessed through the toilet), and Paris (they were carried away by provocative actions). The main Dadaist was Marcel Duchamp, the author of the “ready-made” concept and the first daredevil who painted Gioconda’s mustache. And also Picabia, who exhibited fantastic designs that were both a verdict and a hymn to industrial society.

Look: Works by Duchamp and Picabia are in the English Victoria and Albert Museum (London, England), the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (Barcelona, ​​Spain), the Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), and the Art Institute of Chicago (USA).

14. SURREALISM. A powerful movement of the 1st half of the 20th century, which was inspired by dreams, dreams and hallucinations.

Surrealist artists, who called themselves direct followers of the Dadaists, provoked viewers, changed consciousness, and turned traditions upside down.

Initially, surrealism appeared in literature (the magazine Literature and the Surrealist Revolution, author Andre Breton). Artists read Freud and Bergson and considered the subconscious - dreams, hallucinations - to be the source of creativity.

Representatives of the first direction of surrealism in painting (Ernst, Miro, Masson) depicted blurred images. The second (representatives of Dali, Delvaux, Magritte) - believable, accurate, but unrealistic landscapes and characters. The beautiful deception instantly captivated the world. Surrealism gave impetus to the emergence of pop art, happenings and conceptual art.

Look: Dali Theater-Museum in Figueres (Spain), Rene Magritte Apartment Museum in Brussels (Belgium), Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate Gallery of Modern Art (London, UK).

In this part, we got acquainted with the most striking art trends of the 1st half of the 20th century. In the next publication we will look at the trends of the middle of the last century.

Summary

1) From the article you learned about the main bright directions of art of the 1st half of the 20th century: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, Avant-garde, Fauvism, Abstractionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Formalism, Naturalism, New Materiality, Dadaism, Surrealism.

2) I think you have there was a desire to go on a trip to visit the most famous museums in the world, which represent all areas of contemporary art. Even if you don’t have such an opportunity now, don’t be upset, the main thing is: dream and your dream will come true! Checked!

For inspiration, watch a video review of the extraordinary, amazing Dali Museum-Theater surrealist artist Salvador Dali, located in the city of Figueres, in Catalonia (Spain). From Barcelona to Figueres you can drive in just 53 minutes. Ticket prices start from 20 euros. How to plan the perfect trip to Barcelona read this useful article .

With all my heart I wish you to go on a trip as soon as possible to see the works of your favorite masters!

I wish everyone to rejoice and dream!

P.S..

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The art of the 20th century is especially diverse in its areas. Traditional academic (or conservative) art, based on the classical traditions of high ideals, continues to develop successfully

both in the first and second half of the 20th century, without stopping in the already arrived 21st century. Academic art today continues to exist and develop based on the traditions of classical aesthetics. However, it is not something frozen and devoid of development, since it strives for unshakable human values ​​and therefore claims eternal significance for humanity. On the other hand, traditional academic art developed quite actively within the framework of the so-called “totalitarian regimes” (for example, the art of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union), showing no less a desire for perfection and ideal than in the times of the ancient Greeks . What this ideal was and how this perfection was achieved is another matter. Thus, the academic line of development of art throughout the 20th century is diverse and diverse, but the basis of this dynamics remains the same principle following the established traditions of the classical heritage.

The set of artistic movements that oppose the radical aspirations of avant-gardeism and continue the classical traditions of art, as well as avoiding harsh “revolutionary” tactics, is called traditionalism. Traditionalists can stand not only on the canons of classicism, but also on the principles of romanticism or modernism, impressionism or post-impressionism. There are also compromise movements that combine traditionalism and modernism: magical realism, metaphysical painting or postmodernism. Thus, traditional art strives to preserve what is of value to humanity and can be considered tradition. Therefore, traditionalism can also be conditionally called conservatism in art.

Modernist art movements (avant-garde)beginning of the 20th century aimed at experimenting, at breaking out of the traditional, sustainable framework, at searching for something completely new. The artistic avant-garde begins by taking art out of the framework of the artistic. The task of art is seen as transforming the world according to artistic ideals and aesthetic needs. The main slogan becomes: “It’s time to move from contemplation to action!” Modernists deliberately break the foundations of the classical understanding of a work of art as a relationship between content and form, craft and art, technology and beauty, life and culture, creating a new harmony of social existence. With the advancement of avant-garde ideas in art, the individualistic principle of the artist-author begins to prevail. Art is structurally fragmented: stable forms of the traditional movement are being replaced by interacting, integrated types of art and genres.

In the middle of the 20th century, a new concept of art was established: it

is not intended to transform reality, but must obey social and state orders, being a means of ideological politics. It develops most actively at this time art of totalitarian regimes, based on traditional art. It reaches particular development in countries such as the Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany and communist China. This direction is distinguished by a special ideology and a desire for mass participation. What it has in common with traditional art is its emphasis on affirming a positive ideal and imposing ideas of perfection.

Modernismsecond half of the 20th century(neo-avant-garde) demonstrates a departure from the problems of life and a rejection of ideological content. It breaks up into many independent movements that continue those avant-garde ideas that arose at the beginning of the century (the so-called neo-, super-, ultra-), and those called trans-avant-garde. The aesthetics of the neo-avant-garde is often no less scandalous and shocking than the aesthetics of the avant-garde of the first third of the century, but we must not forget that many discoveries of these sensational movements helped and are helping to understand the problems of all modern art as a whole and outline possible paths for its development in the future. The neo-avant-garde worldview is characterized by feelings of fragility and variability of the world, its instability and a predilection for irony and skepticism. The neo-avant-garde no longer seeks to radically transform the world; it is enough for it to simply invent something that did not exist before, simply to surprise, to stand out at any cost. Their activity ceases to be a creative search or experiment, often becoming a simple mockery of tradition.

The emergence in the middle of the 20th century of a new mentality, called “postmodernism,” also gave rise to new phenomena in the artistic environment. In their entirety, these phenomena are today called "Postmodern Art". IN Due to the insufficient development of the very concept of “postmodernism” in science, one can also find such a use of the concept “postmodern art”, which implies the entire set of artistic non-traditional practices. However, this is an erroneous opinion, since the manifestation of postmodernism in art is trans-artistic. This means that it is not a local formation in the art of the 20th century. It would be more correct to talk about the manifestation of postmodernism in specific works of art. Even some works of art created today and classified by art historians as traditional academic art, contain elements of post-modernity. The aesthetics of postmodernism is saturated and oversaturated with impressions of the past and experiences; it is based on the idea of ​​​​eternal repetition. Postmodernism brings artistry to the point of decorativeness and excessive grandiosity, but proclaims the cult of everything accidental, fragmentary.

mental and unstable. The aesthetics of such art are tuned to uncertainty and negligence.

And finally, another direction in the development of art of the second half of the 20th century, named today post-postmodernism. Post-postmodernism in art is associated with a change in the general cultural situation that arose as a result of the emergence and active spread of new means of communication, media, as well as computer technology and the Internet. This could not but affect the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The most difficult thing for aesthetics and art history today is choosing a position in assessing these phenomena. Is such a leap in the development of artistic culture a blessing or ruin for humanity? Should we be afraid of these changes, fight them or welcome them? Most likely, you just need to react faster to the changes taking place, analyze them more boldly, not be afraid of your own mistakes and forecasts, and not declare that everything new is a collapse for humanity. After all, everything that arises in culture (including art) is just a response to emerging requests or needs born of the dynamics of the world.

Thus, The main feature of aesthetics and art of the entire 20th century can be considered eclecticism, multi-levelness or conventionality (V.V. Bychkov), due to an unprecedented diversity of directions and ideas.

Socialist art

Sots art (socialist art) is one of the areas of post modernist art, which developed in the USSR in the 1960-1970s, within the framework of the so-called “Alternative culture”, opposing the state ideology of that period.

Sots art arose as a parody of official Soviet art and images of modern mass culture in general, which was reflected in its ironic name, which combined the concept of social realism with pop art. The creators of Sots Art were well aware of the emptiness, deceit and hypocrisy of official art, which was in the service of the totalitarian regime. Using and reworking odious clichés, symbols and forms of this art and common motifs of Soviet political propaganda, social art debunked their true meaning in a playful, often shocking form, trying to liberate the viewer from ideological stereotypes. His objects were, as a rule, artistic collages, “quoting” the Soviet official-state environment according to all the rules of pop art aesthetics, using real things and everyday objects in the structure of the works. Irony, grotesque, sharp substitution, free quotation of any techniques and styles, use of various forms (from easel painting to spatial compositions) became the basis for a catchy, deliberately eclectic artistic language this direction. Sots art rejects faith in everything, no matter what it concerns. He seeks to destroy all cults that are offered to a person from the outside - by political, economic, spiritual and other authorities; Sots art does not tolerate anything that imposes unequal communication on a person, brings a person to his knees and forces him to submit. To combat cults, Sots Art uses laughter, acting, and hoaxes. Sots-artists appear in grotesque and funny situations as figures of “bosses”, political leaders, spiritual leaders, outstanding cultural figures, etc. (and among them are not only the Bolshevik leaders, but also Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, Repin, Christ, Solzhenitsyn).

The inventors of Sots Art were well aware of the emptiness, deceit, hypocrisy and cynicism of official Soviet art, which was in the service of the totalitarian regime. They expressed their attitude both to this art and to the ideology that gave birth to it in an original way, using forms, symbols, signs, stereotypes of this art and political propaganda tools.

Moscow artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are considered the inventors of socialist art (the cycle “The Birth of Socialist Realism”, “Stalin and the Muses”, “Double Portrait”, “Cross and Sickle”, “Demonstration” 1972, “Friendship of Peoples” 1974), around which in the second half of the 1970s. A circle of young artists formed who shared their views and beliefs. Over the years, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, Dmitry Prigov, Boris Orlov, Erik Bulatov (“Glory to the CPSU” 1975, “Kraskov Street” 1977), members of the groups “Nest” and “Mukhomory” joined their association. Sots art was not a rigid stylistic movement; it united authors who were very different in their style, not just in “artistic opposition,” but developing in their work the multi-layered components of the official ideology and its artistic dogmas. By the end of the 1990s. Sots art practically ceased to exist, because With the change in the political situation, the substantive basis of this art became irrelevant.

Masters of Sots Art: Vitaly Komar, Alexander Milamid, Eric Bulatov, Boris Turetsky, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, Dmitry Prigov, Boris Orlov, Rostislav Lebedev (“Perestroika”), Grigory Bruskin (“Partner” 1978).

Kinetic art

Kinetic art, Kineticism is a trend in modern art that plays with the effects of real movement of the entire work or its individual components. Kineticism is based on the idea that using light and movement to create a work of art. Objects are moving installations that produce interesting combinations of light and shadow as they move, sometimes making sounds. These carefully constructed devices made of metal, glass or other materials, coupled with flashing light devices, are called "mobiles". Kinetic art techniques have found wide application in organizing shows, exhibitions, and designing parks and squares.

Creative searches in this area paved the way for the flourishing of kineticism, which has become a relatively integral movement in art since the 50s. Among the "kinetic" experiments of this period are the "self-destructive compositions" of Jean Tinguely ("Glory to New York" in New York, 1960; "Studies for the End of the World" in Hambleback, Louisiana, and Las Vegas, 1961-1962 .). From early non-objective geometric compositions, he moved in 1954 to the creation of paintings and sculptures, which he called “metamechanical”; Their various parts were driven by special motors and cables. Then, towards the end of the 1950s, he began to exhibit “painting machines” - they produced, in front of the viewer’s eyes, cursory similarities of abstract expressionist sketches. Later, in his works he combined figurative catastrophism with monumental stability. In Tinguely's works, the role of color and playfulness grew, designed to involve viewers in the process of managing the art object. Among his compositions are “In Praise of Stupidity,” a relief created for the ballet by R. Petit, 1966; fountains "Carnival" - 1977, in the center of Basel.

This also includes compositions by the French artist of Venezuelan origin Jesus Rafael Soto, a prominent representative of kinetic art. Soto was interested in optical effects. In his works, such effects are achieved by superimposing one layer on top of another. For example, two drawings on organic glass with a gap between them. They seem to merge in a new space. In 1955, Soto participated in the exhibition “Movement”, which was held at the D. Rene gallery in Paris and which marked the birth of kinetic art. Since 1957, Soto has used metal rods suspended from nylon threads and set against a base patterned with black and white lines. The movement of the viewer and the instability of the structure create optical vibrations, leading to the dematerialization of forms. Since 1967, Soto became increasingly interested in the problem of space and moved from paintings with relief elements placed in front of them to installations of rods positioned vertically in front of the wall. Famous works include La Boite (“The Box”), 1967; Vibrations métalliques (“Metal vibrations”), 1969; Petite Vibration Brique et Noire, 1966.

Nicolas Schaeffer (1912-1992), a French artist of Hungarian origin, a prominent representative of kinetic art, one of the founders of cybernetic art (1954) and video art (1961), continues his experiments. He began with innovative painting and unique spatially dynamic sculptures, and then came up with the idea of ​​​​creating an interactive cybernetic city-spectacle, a “kinetic city” or “kinetic towers”. Schaeffer proposed dividing the city along the coordinate axis: residential areas should be linearly arranged horizontally, and all business, trade and industrial establishments should be located in giant skyscrapers up to 1500 m high.

Günter Uecker - a German sculptor, installation artist and artist (born in West Germany in 1930) began to use nails in his art, in addition, Uecker began studying light, optics, vibrations, which allowed him to influence the visual process.

In the early '60s, he began hammering nails into furniture, musical instruments, and household objects, then began combining nails with a light theme, creating lightweight nails and kinetic nails. He also used natural materials such as sand and water.

A striking example of Russian kinetic art was the world-famous project of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) - “Monument of the Third International” (1919-1920).

Conceptual art

Conceptualism is a movement in avant-garde art of the 1960s-90s, which set the goal of a transition from creating works of art to reproduction " artistic ideas"(so-called concepts), which are inspired in the viewer’s mind with the help of inscriptions, graphs, diagrams, diagrams, etc. Creativity is conceptualized here as close in spirit to happenings and performances, but, unlike them, a process of involvement recorded in a stable exhibition the viewer into the play of such concepts. The latter can be represented by fragments of textual and visual information, in the form of graphs, diagrams, numbers, formulas and other visual-logical structures, or (in more individualized versions of conceptual art) in the form of inscriptions and diagrams, declaratively telling about the artist’s intentions.

The name “conceptual art” itself appeared in 1967 (the American artist S. Levit was the first to use it), and a year earlier his compatriot J. Kosut exhibited the landmark series “Art as an Idea,” which is a series of brief dictionary definitions shown in the form of tables with enlarged text photocopies. In 1969, Kosut published a programmatic article “Art after Philosophy,” where he argued that what is most important is the process of art communication, and not its result. Soon the movement acquired an international character, drawing into its circle the (a little earlier) German “Fluxus”, English group“Art and Language”, Italian “poor art”, Argentine “Rosario group” and other radical movements.

In the conceptual art of the 1970s, social protest tendencies emerged very sharply, updating the methods of photographic posters and photomontage, but then, as a rule, it was dominated by either detached philosophical contemplation or caustic self-irony (typical of the style of the so-called “neo-geo” 1980--1990s). Prominent conceptualists included (in addition to those mentioned above) H. Haacke, B. Kruger, J. Holzer in the USA, D. Buren in France, M. Merz in Italy. By the end of the 20th century. the techniques of conceptual art - with its paradoxical visual informatics - were picked up by commercial advertising and firmly entered into mass media culture. Haake began by criticizing the media, forcing the viewer to doubt the objectivity of the information. In 1969, he made the installation “News”: incredibly long rolls of paper come out of a telex with real-time news from the German agency DPA. Haacke literally materialized the metaphor “information garbage” - flows of information gradually turn into a pile of waste paper, from which it is no longer possible to extract a clear message. In 1971, Haacke did work based on incriminating evidence about a certain Shapolsky, a Manhattan real estate owner who was a business partner of members of the Guggenheim Museum's board of trustees. The exhibition was canceled six weeks before the opening, and the artist himself did not exhibit in the United States for fifteen years. Since then, the connection between corporations and museums has been Haacke's favorite target. Since the late 1960s, Daniel Buren has been painting stripes of equal width, alternating two colors, thereby abandoning tradition.

In the 1970s, in the sphere of “unofficial art”, a real master class of domestic conceptualism was the workshop of I. I. Kabakov, who created huge visual and graphic series in which everyday realities (of a large communal apartment), despite all their meticulous details, were outlined the absence of both the characters themselves and the plot that holds them together. In line with the “Moscow conceptualism”, the recognized leader of which was Kabakov, the spouses R. A. and V. M. Gerlovina, the group “Collective Actions” (under the leadership of A. V. Monastyrsky), poets D. A. Prigov and L. S. Rubinshtein, and a little later, already at the turn of perestroika - the groups “Medical Hermeneutics” (S. A. Anufriev, Yu. A. Leiderman, P. V. Pepperstein) and “TOTart” (N. B. Abalakova and A. I. Zhigalov). After all bans on avant-garde art were lifted, the concept of “conceptual art” became very vague in Russia, becoming almost synonymous with postmodernism and covering many artistic phenomena not only in the fine arts, but also in literature and theater.

Optical art (op art)

Optical art (op art) is an artistic movement of the second half of the 20th century, using various optical illusions based on the peculiarities of perception of flat and spatial figures.

The direction of op art (optical art) originated in the 50s within abstractionism, more precisely, its variety - geometric abstraction. Its spread as a movement dates back to the 60s. 20th century Op art gained worldwide fame in 1965 after the New York exhibition “The Sensitive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art. At the Arte Fiera 77 exhibition, held in 1977 in Bologna, works by artists of this movement - Victor Vasarely, Ennio Finzi and others - were displayed in abundance. Op art artists often unite and perform incognito: group N. (Padua), group T. (Milan), group Zero (Dusseldorf), a group of searches for visual art led by Victor Vasarely, which gave the initial impetus to the op art movement.

Optical art is the art of visual illusions based on features visual perception flat and spatial figures. Optical illusion is inherently present in our visual perception: The image exists not only on the canvas, but actually in the eyes and brain of the viewer. Let us turn, for example, to Bridget Riley’s film “Flow” (1964). Its entire surface is covered with thin wavy lines. Towards the middle, the bends become steeper, and here the appearance of an unsteady current separating from the plane appears. In her work “Cataract-III”, 1967, the effect of wave movement is created. In another black and white composition by Riley, “Straight Curvature” (1963), circles shifted in the center and intersected with broken lines create the effect of a voluminous, twisting spiral. In “Fragment No. 6/9” (1965) by the same artist, black disks scattered across a plane give rise to a jump of successive images that instantly disappear and reappear. Thus, in Victor Vasarely's painting Tau Zeta (1964), squares and diamonds are continuously rearranged according to the pattern of Greek letters, but are never combined into a specific configuration. In another work by Vasarely, “Supernovas” (1959-1961), two identical contrasting forms create the feeling of a moving flash, the mesh covering the surface after a while separates and freezes, and the circles inscribed in the squares disappear and reappear at various points. The plane continuously pulsates, now resolving into a momentary illusion, now again closing into a continuous structure. The title of the painting refers to the idea of ​​explosions of cosmic energy and the birth of supernovas. The continuously oscillating surfaces of “super-sensory” paintings lead perception to a dead end and cause visual shock.

The Visual Arts Research Group (an association of optical and kinetic artists) wrote in its manifesto, Enough Mystification (1961): “There should no longer be works exclusively for: the cultural eye, the sensitive eye, the intellectual eye, the aesthetic eye, the amateur eye. Human eye is our starting point."

Op art is gradually acquiring an international character, entire groups of artists are formed in different countries: in Italy (Alviani De Vecchi, Colombo Marie), Spain (Duarte Ibarrola), Germany (Hacker Mac Gravenitz), Switzerland (Talman Gerstner), USSR (Vyacheslav Koleichuk ). Note that in the United States, the crisis of abstraction gives rise to hard edge and minimalism, which were caused by the same aesthetic needs.

The possibilities of op art have found some application in industrial graphics, posters, and design art.

Popular art (pop art)

Pop art (popular art) is a movement in the fine arts of the 1950s-1960s that arose as a reaction to abstract expressionism, using images of consumer products. Pop art based its aesthetics on images borrowed from popular culture and placed in a different context. The language of this direction was paradoxical and unclear. Hidden mockery, slight irony over everything that people are accustomed to consider beauty, artistic creativity, spirituality - this is pop art. Representatives of pop art declared their goals to be a “return to reality” and the revelation of the aesthetic value of samples of mass production. They literally reproduce typical objects of modern urbanized life (household items, packaging of goods, machine parts, etc.), widely use the familiar language of the media (stamped methods of advertising, press, television, cinema, documentary photography, comics, etc. .). International fame for American pop art was brought by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, in Great Britain P. Blake, R. Hamilton, in France A. Fernandez; N. de Saint-Falle, in Germany P. Wunderlich.

In 1963, an exhibition of the famous pop art artist Robert Rauschenberg was held in New York. The first thing the audience saw when entering the hall was a completely white canvas - “White Painting”. Nearby was “Charlene” - a picture of crumpled scraps of newspapers, fragments of mirrors, scraps of a shirt, pieces of wood and fabric, a postcard, a constantly blinking electric lamp and a flattened umbrella. Also exhibited here was Rauschenberg’s famous work “The Bed,” which was a blanket stretched over a stretcher and splattered with paint.

The works of pop art artists of that time show pride in American goods - accessible and cheap. He said that pop art swapped the internal and external. Representatives of this movement created images that were recognizable to everyone: bathroom curtains, cola bottles, men's pants, picnic tables, comic books - everything that the abstract expressionists “didn’t see.”

Claes Oldenburg, also an artist from America, created loaves, sausages, tomatoes, and hamburgers from various materials. There is even a monument he created in the form of a huge cut cutlet. The world of packaging and dummies, stamped images and mannequins. In pop art, the beautiful and the trivial, the living and the synthetic, the high and the low become equal.

Minimalism

Minimalism is a movement in painting and sculpture that spread in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly in the USA. As the name suggests, the art of minimalism is reduced to its basic essence; it is purely abstract, objective and anonymous, devoid of external decorativeness or expressive gesture. Minimalist paintings and graphics are monochrome and often reproduce mathematically regular lattices and linear structures. Minimalist sculptors use industrial processes and materials such as steel, foam or fluorescent tubes to create geometric shapes, often in large series. Such a sculpture does not resort to any illusionistic techniques, but is designed for tactile perception by the viewer. Minimalism can be seen as a reaction to the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, which dominated art throughout the 1950s. The most famous minimalists are Andre, Judd, Kelly, Le Witt, Mangold, Ryman, Serra, Stella, Flavin.

Dan Flavin is an American minimalist artist known for sculptural objects and installations created from fluorescent lamps. Flavin first came up with the idea of ​​using electric light as an art form in 1961. His first solo exhibition was also held in 1961 at the Judson Gallery in New York. The first works to incorporate electric light were a series of “icons”: eight colored square shapes, fluorescent lamps with incandescent lamps attached to the sides. One of these “icons” was dedicated to Flavin’s twin brother, David, who died of polio in 1962. Most of Flavin’s works were untitled, often dedicated to friends, artists, critics: the most famous works include “Monuments to V. Tatlin”, above which he worked between 1964 and 1990. Last job Flavin had a site-specific work in the Church of S. Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa in Milan, Italy.

Carl Andre is an American artist, a representative of minimalism. Characteristic features of Andre's sculpture are the use of industrial materials, modular units, and the articulation of three-dimensionality through the consideration of negative and positive space. André sought to reduce the vocabulary of sculpture to basic phonemes such as squares, cubes, lines and diagrams. In 1960 Andre sketched a series of sculptures he called "Elements". He proposed making these sculptures from standard 12 x 12 x 36" (30.2 x 30.2 x 90.7 cm) blocks of wood. The importance of Elements, even in sketch form, lies in the decision to use modular units in regular, repeating compositions, a principle that became fundamental to his later works. In 1966, Carl Andre revolutionized sculpture with innovative works (such as 37 Pieces of Work, first exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970) that lay flat on the ground instead of rising up into the surrounding space. Andre invited viewers walk around the sculpture, so they could get a sensory experience of different materials (such as steel and aluminum) and the differences between standing in the center of the sculpture and being outside its boundaries. In the 1970s, the artist prepared a number of large-scale installations, such as "Blocks" and Stones" in 1973 for the Portland Center for Visual Arts, as well as works for public spaces such as "Stone Sculpture Field" in 1977 in Hartford.

Donald Judd is an American sculptor and art critic, one of the outstanding representatives of minimalism. As an artist, he initially (in the late 1940s-50s) worked as a painter. In the early 1960s, Judd began adding three-dimensional elements to the surface of his works, first creating reliefs and then moving to completely free-standing structures, which he called "concrete objects". In 1963, he formulated a basic "vocabulary" of forms - "stacks", "boxes" and "progressions", with which he worked for the next thirty years. While Judd initially worked in wood, industrially manufactured metal boxes appeared in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, his work took the form of installations, and Judd began exhibiting work in outdoor spaces. Using industrial materials to create abstract works that emphasize the purity of color, form, space and materials, Judd described his own work as "the simple expression of a complex thought."

Richard Serra begins his creative career as a minimalist sculptor. At the end of the 1960s he began working with metal. At this time, he met such masters of minimalism as Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Carl Andre. His series of works with rubber and neon lamps date back to this creative period. In 1966, Serra's first solo exhibition took place in Rome, and in 1968, an exhibition in Cologne. In 1977 he participated in the contemporary art exhibition Document 6 in Kassel.

Nonconformism

Nonconformism (from Lat. non - “not” and later Lat. conformis - “similar”, “conformable”) - the desire of an individual to adhere to and defend attitudes, opinions, results of perception, behavior and so on, directly contradicting those that dominate in a given society or group.

Nonconformism in art is a special property of artistic creativity, expressed in the innovation of creative thinking in artistic images. Nonconformism involves abstraction from the conditions of everyday, material reality. Against, socialist realism, academicism, naturalism, various forms of salon and mass art characterized by conformism - adaptation to established tastes, public opinions and established institutions, fulfillment of the “social order”. Nonconformists behave inappropriately to social rules, because they reject not only their own well-being, but also disturb the peace and conformity of other people. Nonconformism causes rejection and irritation among ordinary people, rulers, and customers. Unlike official art, nonconformist art gives preference not to content, but to to a greater extent artistic form, in the creation of which the artists were completely independent and free.

The art of nonconformism is existentialist in its essence, as it affirms the absolute uniqueness of the individual. The idealistic aesthetics of nonconformists is based on the idea of ​​the artist’s inner “I” as the source of beauty. This idea contained the rebellious protest of nonconformists against the objectified world, bridging the gap between objectivity and subjectivity, which led in creativity to the expression of the problem of being in disturbing and unusual forms.

Nonconformism, as existentialist art, is based on the artist’s conversation with his soul, and a painting can arise not only from strong unambiguous feelings, but also from a combination of impressions, references, and the internal need to perpetuate wordless beauty.

Famous nonconformist artists: Dmitry Plavinsky (“Shell”, 1978), Oscar Rabin (“Still Life with Fish and the Pravda Newspaper”, 1968); Lev Kropivnitsky (“Woman and Beetles”, 1966); Dmitry Krasnopevtsev (“Pipes”, 1963); Vladimir Nemukhin (“Unfinished Solitaire”, 1966); Anatoly Zverev (“Portrait of a Woman”, 1966); Lydia Masterkova (“Composition”, 1967); Vladimir Yakovlev (“Cat and Bird”, 1981); Ernst Neizvestny (“Heart of Christ”, 1973-1975); Eduard Steinberg (“Composition with Fish”, 1967); Mikhail Roginsky (“Red Door”, 1965); Oleg Tselkov (“Calvary”, 1977); Hulo Sooster (The Red Egg, 1964).

First part of question 37!

Modernism(from the French moderne modern), in art the collective name of artistic trends that established themselves in the second half of the 19th century in the form of new forms of creativity, where it was no longer so much following the spirit of nature and tradition that prevailed, but the free gaze of a master, free to change the visible world in his own way discretion, following personal impressions, inner ideas or mystical dreams (these trends largely continued the line of romanticism). The most significant, often actively interacting, his directions were impressionism, symbolism and modernism. In Soviet criticism, the concept of “modernism” was ahistorically applied to all art movements of the 20th century that did not correspond to the canons of socialist realism.

Goals and aspirations. Nihilistic hostility to society, unbelief and cynicism, a special “sense of the abyss”, usually associated with the concept of decadence, often identified with modernism, contradictorily coexisted with constructive, “life-building” aspirations, especially in the field of decorative and applied arts and modern architecture (based on which directly arose the functionalism of modern architecture). The external verisimilitude of the images, initially violated only by a slight, impressionistic-subjective blurriness, eventually becomes unnecessary and unnecessary, and in the 1900s, modernist artists came close to the border of abstract art, and some crossed it.

Postmodernism (postmodern, post-avant-garde) (from the Latin post “after” and modernism), the collective name of artistic trends that became especially clear in the 1960s and are characterized by a radical revision of the position of modernism and the avant-garde.

Goals and aspirations Having rejected the possibility of a utopian transformation of life with the help of art, representatives of postmodernism accepted existence as it is and, making art extremely open, filled it not with imitations or deformations of life, but with fragments of the real life process. The latter here is usually only critically corrected, and not completely transformed into something new and unprecedented. (This concept is often used broadly, calling “postmodern” all the last decades of the 20th century as a whole, with their new, that is, computer, scientific and technological revolution, the collapse of the socialist system, etc.).

In its fundamental anti-utopianism, postmodernism refuses to replace art with philosophy, religion or politics (without, however, abandoning various types of express artistic analysis of all these spheres of culture). Restoring the purity and autonomy of creativity entails strengthening its independent, in its own way “post-ideological” (that is, free) social sensitivity.

Styles: Abstract Expressionism, Ready-Made, Pop Art, Primitivism, Net Art, Optical, Graffiti, Hyperrealism, Land Art, Minimalism.

Abstract expressionism post-war (late 40s - 50s of the XX century) stage of development of abstract art. The term itself was introduced back in the 20s by the German art critic E. von Sydow to refer to certain aspects of expressionist art. In 1929, the American Barr used it to characterize the early works of Kandinsky, and in 1947 he called the works of Willem de Kooning and Pollock “abstract expressionist”. Since then, the concept of abstract expressionism has become firmly established in a fairly wide, stylistically and technically variegated field. abstract painting(and later sculpture), which received rapid development in the 50s. in the USA, in Europe, and then throughout the world. The direct ancestors of abstract expressionism are considered to be the early Kandinsky, the expressionists, the Orphists, partly the Dadaists and the surrealists with their principle of mental automatism. The philosophical and aesthetic basis of abstract expressionism was largely the philosophy of existentialism, popular in the post-war period.

Abstract expressionism continued the “liberation” of art begun by Kandinsky and the surrealists from any control of the mind, logical laws and, moreover, from the traditional laws of color relationships, the color syntax of European-Mediterranean culture. The motto of the Abstract Expressionists was the formula: “Liberation from rules, liberation from formalism, from the dominance of the ruler and compass, but first of all – liberation of freely flowing color from doctrinaire laws of form” (Carl Ruhrberg). The main creative principle of the artists of abstract expressionism was the spontaneous, automatic application of paints to the canvas solely under the influence of subjective moods and emotional states. Joy, anger, passion, fear, suffering are literally splashed out by abstract expressionists in streams of paint onto the canvases. Painting styles are very different - from traditional brush work to applying paints only with a spatula, pouring them from cans, squeezing them out of tubes, spraying them from a spray bottle, etc. Accordingly, the resulting color structures are diverse both in form and color (from monochrome to sharp , a nerve-wracking riot of colors that has no analogues in nature or in traditional painting). The spectrum of influence of the works of abstract expressionists is also diverse - from the black symbolic hieroglyphs of Pierre Soulages and the meditative huge almost monochrome (with barely noticeable tonal fluctuations) paintings of Mark Rothko to the shocking eyes and psyche of the viewer, the paintings of the Dutchman Karel Appel, “wild” in brightness, plasticity and syntax.

Readymade(English ready-made - ready) The term was first introduced into the art historical lexicon by the artist Marcel Duchamp to designate his works, which are objects of utilitarian use, removed from the environment of their normal functioning and, without any changes, exhibited at an art exhibition as works of art. Ready-mades affirmed a new view of things and thinghood. An object that had ceased to perform its utilitarian functions and was included in the context of the space of art, that is, had become an object of non-utilitarian contemplation, began to reveal some new meanings and associative moves, unknown either to traditional art or to the everyday utilitarian sphere of existence. The problem of the relativity of the aesthetic and the utilitarian has emerged acutely. Duchamp exhibited his first ready-mades in New York in 1913. The most notorious of his ready-mades were “Bicycle Wheel” (1913), “Bottle Dryer” (1914), “Fountain” (1917) - that’s how it was designated an ordinary urinal. With his Ready-Made, Duchamp achieved (consciously or not) a number of goals. As a true Dadaist, he shocked the snobbish regulars of art salons at the beginning of the century. He brought to its logical conclusion (or absurdity) the mimetic principle traditional for the art of past centuries. No pictorial copy cannot show an object better than it itself by its appearance. Therefore, it is easier to exhibit the object itself in the original than to strive to depict it. This completely destroyed the border between art and visible reality, negated all the aesthetic principles of traditional classical art in Ready-Made into the space of artistic exhibition not because of their particularly significant aesthetic form or other outstanding qualities; the fundamental arbitrariness of their choice argued that aesthetic laws relational and conventional.

POP ART. After World War II, America developed a large social class of people who earned enough money to buy goods that were not particularly important to them. For example, the consumption of goods: Coca Cola or Levi's jeans become an important attribute of this society. A person using this or that product shows his belonging to a certain social class. Mass culture was now being formed. Things became symbols, stereotypes. Pop art necessarily uses stereotypes and symbols. Pop art (pop art) embodied the creative quest of new Americans, who relied on creative principles Duchamp. These are: Jasper Johns, K. Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and others. Pop art gains the significance of mass culture, so it is not surprising that it formed and became an art movement in America. Their like-minded people: Hamelton R, Tone China chose Kurt Schwieters as an authority. Pop art is characterized by a work - the illusion of a game that explains the essence of the object. Example: K. Oldenburg's pie, depicted in various variants. An artist may not depict a pie, but rather dispel illusions and show what a person really sees. R. Rauschenberg is also original: he glued various photographs to the canvas, outlined them and attached some kind of stuffed animal to the work. One of his famous works is a stuffed hedgehog. His paintings, where he used photographs of Kenedy, are also well known.

PRIMITIVISM. Naive art. This concept is used in several senses and is actually identical to the concept of “primitive art”. In different languages ​​and by different scientists, these concepts are most often used to designate the same range of phenomena in artistic culture. In Russian (as in some others), the term “primitive” has a somewhat negative meaning. Therefore, it is more appropriate to dwell on the concept of Naive art. In the very in a broad sense This is the designation for fine art, characterized by simplicity (or simplification), clarity and formal spontaneity of figurative and expressive language, with the help of which a special vision of the world is expressed, not burdened by civilizational conventions. The concept appeared in the modern European culture of recent centuries, and therefore reflects the professional positions and ideas of this culture, which considered itself the highest stage of development. From these positions, naive art also includes the archaic art of ancient peoples (pre-Egyptian or pre-Egyptian) ancient greek civilizations), for example, primitive art; the art of peoples delayed in their cultural and civilizational development (indigenous populations of Africa, Oceania, American Indians); amateur and non-professional art on a wide scale (for example, the famous medieval frescoes of Catalonia or the non-professional art of the first American settlers from Europe); many works of the so-called “international Gothic”; folk art; finally, the art of talented primitivist artists of the 20th century, who did not receive a professional art education, but who felt the gift of artistic creativity and devoted themselves to its independent implementation in art. Some of them (the French A. Rousseau, C. Bombois, the Georgian N. Pirosmanishvili, the Croatian I. Generalich, the American A.M. Robertson, etc.) created true artistic masterpieces that are included in the treasury of world art. Naive art, in its vision of the world and the methods of its artistic presentation, is somewhat close to the art of children, on the one hand, and to the creativity of the mentally ill, on the other.

Net art(Net Art - from the English net - network, art - art) Newest look art, modern art practices, developing in computer networks, in particular, on the Internet. Its researchers in Russia, who also contribute to its development, O. Lyalina, A. Shulgin, believe that the essence of Net art comes down to the creation of communication and creative spaces on the Internet, providing complete freedom of online existence to everyone. Therefore, the essence of Net art. not representation, but communication, and its unique art unit is an electronic message. There are at least three stages in the development of Net art, which arose in the 80s - 90s. XX century The first was when aspiring Internet artists created pictures from letters and icons found on a computer keyboard. The second began when underground artists and just anyone who wanted to show something of their creativity came to the Internet. A mass of electronic galleries, salons, and cinemas appeared, which brought into the Network products of the outside world that were not organic to the Network, using it as an intermediary. The next stage consisted of special network artists mastering the expressive capabilities of the Network as a kind of electronic environment or virtual reality, within which it is necessary to create in a way that is impossible to work in the real world.

OP-ART(English Op-art - shortened version of optical art - optical art) - an artistic movement of the second half of the 20th century, using various visual illusions, based on the peculiarities of perception of flat and spatial figures. The movement continues the rationalistic line of technicism (modernism). Goes back to the so-called “geometric” abstractionism, the representative of which was V. Vasarely (from 1930 to 1997 he worked in France) - the founder of op art. The possibilities of Op art have found some application in industrial graphics, posters, and design art. The direction of op art (optical art) originated in the 50s within abstractionism, although this time of a different variety - geometric abstraction. Its spread as a movement dates back to the 60s. XX century The first experiments in the field of Op Art date back to the end of the 19th century. Already in 1889, an article appeared in the yearbook “Das neue Universum” about the optical illusions of the German professor Thompson, who, using black and white cocentric circles, created the impression of movement on a plane: the wheels in Thompson’s drawings “rotate” and the circles “shimmer.” But this was a more scientific study of the characteristics of vision than art. In 1955, Denis Rene exhibited op art in her gallery in Paris. But op art gained worldwide fame in 1965 after the New York exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art. At the Arte Fiera 77 exhibition, held in 1977 in Bologna, works by artists of this movement - Victor Vasarely, Ennio Finzi and others - were displayed in abundance.

HYPERREALISM(hyperrealism - English), or photorealism (photorealism - English) - artist. a movement in painting and sculpture based on photography and the reproduction of reality. Both in its practice and in its aesthetic orientations towards naturalism and pragmatism, hyperrealism is close to pop art. They are primarily united by a return to figurativeness. It acts as an antithesis to conceptualism, which not only broke with representation, but also questioned the very principle of the material realization of art. concept.

The main thing for hyperrealism is precise, dispassionate, unemotional. reproduction of reality, imitating the specifics of photography: the principle of automatism of visual fixation, documentaryism. hyperrealism emphasizes mechanical, “technological” character of the image, achieving the impression of smooth painting using glazing, airbrushing, emulsion coatings; colors, volumes, textures are simplified. And although the favorite problems of hyperrealism are the realities of everyday life, the urban environment, advertising, macrophotography. a portrait of a “man on the street” creates the impression of a static, cold, detached super-reality, alienated from the viewer.

Hyperrealism arose in the USA on Tuesday. floor. 60s The work of his adherents in the field of painting is devoted to quite a number of examples. themes: truncated billboards (R. Cottinham), abandoned cars (D. Salt), shop windows with city life reflected in them (R. Est, R. Goings), horse racing (R. McLean).

MINIMALISM(minimal art - English: minimal art) - artist. a flow that comes from minimal transformation of the materials used in the creative process, simplicity and uniformity of forms, monochrome, creativity. artist's self-restraint. Minimalism is characterized by a rejection of subjectivity, representation, and illusionism. Rejecting the classic techniques of creativity and tradition. artist materials, minimalists use industrial and natural materials of simple geometric shapes. forms and neutral colors(black, grey), small volumes, use serial, conveyor methods of industrial production. An artifact in the minimalist concept of creativity is a predetermined result of the process of its production. Having received its most complete development in painting and sculpture, minimalism, interpreted in a broad sense as an economy of art. means, has found application in other forms of art, primarily theater and cinema.

Minimalism originated in the USA in the lane. floor. 60s Its origins lie in constructivism, suprematism, dadaism, abstract art, formalistic amer. painting from the 50s, pop art. Directly forerunner of minimalism. is American artist F. Stella, who in 1959-60 presented a series of “Black Paintings”, where ordered straight lines prevailed. The first minimalist works appear in 1962-63. The term “minimalism.” belongs to R. Wollheim, who introduces it in relation to the analysis of the work of M. Duchamp and pop artists, minimizing the artist’s intervention in the environment. Its synonyms are “cool art”, “ABC art”, “serial art”, “primary structures”, “art as a process”, “systematic”. painting". Among the most representative minimalists are K. Andre, M. Bochner, U. De Ma-ria, D. Flavin. S. Le Witt, R. Mangold, B. Murden, R. Morris, R. Ryman. They are united by the desire to fit the artifact into the environment, to play with the natural texture of materials. D. Jade defines it as “specific. object”, different from the classic one. works of plastic arts Independently, lighting plays a role as a way of creating minimalist art. situations, original spatial solutions; Computer methods are used to create works.

loss value guidelines, characteristic of the culture of the 20th century, can most easily be traced in the visual arts. The art of modernism, breaking with tradition and considering formal experiment as the basis of its creative method, each time acts from the position of opening new paths, and therefore is called the avant-garde. All avant-garde movements have one thing in common: they deny art direct representation and deny the cognitive functions of art. This dehumanization of art is the dead end of the avant-garde. The denial of pictorial functions inevitably follows the denial of the forms themselves, the replacement of a painting or statue with a real object. Hence the completely natural arrival, for example, to the art of pop art. But neither formalistic experiments nor appeal to archaic art Ancient East, or Asia, or America, to the naivety of children's creativity, cannot replace the importance of the person himself in art. That is why the search for pure form often turns the artist back to man, to life, to its real, inexhaustibly diverse problems.

It would, however, be a big mistake to imagine the evolution of art of the 20th century in the form of a opposition between realism and modernism, because, as already noted, many artists, having passed through the fascination with the avant-garde, came to search for realistic forms of art, and, sometimes, vice versa. This is especially noticeable in the work of those masters whose life path coincided with the great trials of the world wars, who took part in the struggle between the forces of progress and reaction, and who did not stand aside from big problems social life of his people and the destinies of the whole world.

Difficulties in the development of artistic culture in the 20th century. can be clearly seen in the art of France. In French literature of the 20th century. The realistic direction is characterized by a continuous line of development, despite the fact that it also knew and knows formalistic subjective-aesthetic trends. In the fine arts of France, especially in painting, from the very beginning of the 20th century. marked a departure from realism. French painting went through almost all stages and variants of formalist art. France was the birthplace of Fauvism, Cubism and its variety - Purism; it gave birth to its Dadaists, surrealists, and abstractionists. Futurism and expressionism were least developed in France.

In 1905, at an exhibition in Paris, artists Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Georges Rouault, Van Dongen and several others exhibited their works, which critics called “wild” works for their sharp contrast of unusually bright colors and deliberate simplicity of forms. - les fauves, and the whole direction was called “ Fauvism" The Fauvists, with their understanding of the relationship between spots of pure color, a laconic design reduced to a contour, and a simple, “childish” linear rhythm, had enormous opportunities for solving decorative problems. The most talented of the Fauves was undoubtedly Henri Matisse(1869-1954). Raoul Dufy is close to Matisse in his cheerful attitude and sunny palette with his racing scenes, seascapes, and sailing regattas, which he creates on canvas with sonorous, moving small strokes (“Boats on the Seine”, 1925).

Raoul Dufy(1877-1953) came to Paris from Le Havre, as Monet once did, and experienced considerable influence from the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. His Norman and Mediterranean landscapes and still lifes of the beginning of the century, cheerful and bright, are very close to Fauvist ones. But in the 20-30s it acquires its unique face. In the decorativeism of his paintings there is no Matisse's monumentalism, Dufy's handwriting, his richest transitions of blue from almost black to watercolor-transparent blue, his almost childish drawing cannot be confused with anything. As the researcher rightly noted, behind this naive simplicity and cheerful ease one feels the highest artistry and a sophisticated understanding of form.

Close to Matisse and Albert Marche(1875-1947), who, like the Impressionists, glorified modern Paris with its Seine, barges, churches, Louvre, sky, people. But this is not a view of the city by Pissarro or Monet, but by a man of the 20th century.

Other artists exhibited with Matisse in 1905 nevertheless had little in common with him. This is primarily Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), who is characterized by increased expressiveness in reproducing the world. With intense colors and sharp color chords, he creates an image of gloomy, gloomy nature, conveying a feeling of melancholy and loneliness (“Flood in Ivry”, 1910). Even more expressive and nervous is the art of Georges Rouault, which tends towards the grotesque (the “Clowns” series).

Georges Rouault(1871 -1958), who once studied in the workshop of G. Moreau, very quickly moved away from the Fauves. Rouault's understanding of color is very different from that of Matisse or Marquet. The shimmering blue-violet and cherry-red colors of his compositions, in which figures are sharply outlined in black, are somewhat reminiscent of late Gothic stained glass. In terms of mood, they are closer to the expressionists (“We’ve lost our minds”),

Like Vlaminck, Van Gogh was greatly influenced by painting Andre Derain(1880-1954), especially in the early period, then successively influenced by Seurat and Signac. Through Cezanne, Derain subsequently came to Cubism ("Saturday Day", 1911-1914).

A special place among French artists of the early 20th century. takes Amedeo Modigliani(1884-1920). There are many things in common between him and Matisse - the laconicism of the line, the clarity of the silhouette, the generality of the form. But Modigliani does not have Matisse’s monumentalism; his images are much chamberer, more intimate (women’s portraits, nudes). Modigliani's line is of extraordinary beauty. The generalized drawing conveys the fragility and grace of the female body, the flexibility of the long neck, and the sharp characteristic of the male pose. You can recognize Modigliani by a certain type of face: close-set eyes, a laconic line of a small mouth, a clear oval, but these repeated techniques of writing and drawing in no way destroy the individuality of each image.

The art of the 20th century, especially its beginning, generally knows a number of single artists who did not adhere to any movement, such as Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955), a singer of the Parisian streets, or rather, the streets and squares of Montmartre, the Parisian environs. Henri Rousseau remained even more so alone in art. Henri Rousseau, a customs officer (this was his nickname, because after the war he served in customs), came to painting late, gained fame only shortly before his death and was later declared the head of primitivism, a new movement so named for the “naivety” of what was depicted on canvas. But with Henri Rousseau this is not a cast from life, but either a fantastic, almost exotic world: tropical vegetation, predatory animals, mysterious frozen nature, or the life of a Parisian street with funny and absurd little people, seen, however, with the keen eye of the artist, so skillfully subordinating what is depicted to the laws of the decorative plane, which can hardly be attributed to “Sunday” self-taught people, as they sometimes try to characterize him (“The Snake Charmer,” 1907; “The Gig of Monsieur Junet,” 1910).

Among the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, perhaps one of the most complex and controversial is expressionism. Expressionism developed in Germany. Its ideologist Kirchner considered expressionism a direction specifically characteristic of the German nation (the Latin word expressio itself - expression - was interpreted as an internal expression of the triumph of spirit over matter). The expressionists considered their predecessors Belgian artist(English by birth) James Ensor with his main motif of creativity - masks and skeletons, an expression of horror before reality; Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose paintings were called “cries of the times” by critics; the Swiss F. Hodler, one of the representatives of symbolism; Dutchman Van Gogh. The beginning of expressionism as an artistic movement was laid in 1905 by the organization of the “Bridge” association in Dresden by students of the architectural faculty of the Higher Technical School E. L. Kirchner, E. Heckel and K. Schmidt-Rottluff. They were joined by E. Nolde, M. Pechstein, Van Dongen and others. In their work, they sought to express the dramatic depression of man in the world - in geometrically simplified, crude forms, through a complete refusal to convey space in painting, operating with disharmonious tones. Their work, full of horror of reality and the future, feelings of their own inferiority, hopelessness and defenselessness in this world, built on deformation, on sharp drawing, on external emotionality, in its essence, no matter how unexpected with all the exaltation, is ultimately cold and soulful rationalistic calculation. From 1906 to 1912, members of the Bridge organization periodically organized exhibitions in Dresden and Cologne.

In 1910, V. Kandinsky and F. Marc created an almanac called “The Blue Rider”, and in next year organized an exhibition under the same name. This exhibition marked the beginning of the second association of expressionists, “The Blue Rider” (1911-1914). Its main figures were Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Macke, Kampendong, Klee, Kubin, Kokoschka joined the “Blue Rider”. By the beginning of the First World War, both associations had collapsed. As one researcher (V. Vlasov) correctly said, nervously and brokenly, “they were looking for heaven on earth, but found the First World War.” After the war, the Expressionists sharply demarcated. Some went completely into abstractionism, Pechstein and Nolde went to the islands in Oceania, seduced by Gauguin, Kirchner became interested in African sculptural primitives. Social notes sounded clearly in the work of others, such as Grosz (1893-1959), who, however, did not consider himself an expressionist, and Dix. Otgo Dike (1891-1969) expressed the horror of war in the famous painting “Trench”, destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, and in 50 etchings from the “War” series. The most faithful to the positions of expressionism were the Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877-1955) with works close to Kafka, full of hallucinations, permeated with mysticism, in which the illusory, unreal nature of images coexists with naturalistic details (illustrator of Dostoevsky, Hoffmann, Strindberg, Poe), and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) with his dramatic compositions - “portraits of cities”, images inspired by the philosophy of Freud, in which a person is seen as something unsteady, elusive, vague (portrait of psychiatrist Forel, 1908).

A complete rejection of illusory space, a flat interpretation of objects, disharmonious combinations, favorite characters - prostitutes, criminals, the mentally ill - such is the gloomy poetics of the expressionists. Members of the “Bridge” are characterized by frenzied mysticism, almost repulsive deformation, depressing pessimism, indicating confusion and spiritual emptiness. The "Blue Rider" was an even more anti-realist association, striving to overthrow the still living traditions of impressionism; he went further towards abstract art. Naturally, Kampendong then came to him, who worked a lot on church stained glass windows in Hamburg, Munich, Amsterdam; Feininger, author of architectural landscapes with geometric shapes of cold gray houses, a thoughtful rationalist in art; Paul Klee, a talented stylist of children's drawings. Expressionism also had its exponents in sculpture (Ernst Bardach. “Monument to the Fallen,” 1931, Magdeburg).

Expressionism influenced many artists, and its influence continues today on artists who want to express their rejection of the ugly modern world, “the pathos of denial”, a cry of pain, in his own way understanding the possibilities of art.

The emergence of another direction of avant-gardeism - cubism- associated with the work of French artists Braque and Picasso. In 1907, a posthumous exhibition Cezanne, which was a huge success. The schematization of forms that the future Cubists saw in Cezanne, and the geometrization that attracted their attention in African sculpture, which had just been discovered by Europeans, was the impetus for the creation of this direction. Like the Expressionists, the Cubists abandoned illusory space, any hint of aerial perspective, fetishized the construction of the painting, placing at the forefront the strict construction of the object, presented on a plane open to viewing from all sides. The Cubists liked to emphasize that they write not as they see, but as they know, and in accordance with the modern development of the natural sciences. It is believed that Cubism went through several phases in its development: Cezanne (1907-1909), analytical (when the object began to be presented from different points of view, 1910-1912) and synthetic (the period when the connection with the object of the image was completely broken, 1913- 1914). At the last stage, “Orphism” (the term of G. Apollinaire) was isolated from cubism.

The beginning of Cubism can be considered the appearance of Picasso’s work “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907-1908), in which there is still a certain plot, but there is no aerial perspective and the figures are deformed. The shape of the right part is modeled not by chiaroscuro, but by the direction of the stroke, while the left part of the picture is modeled using shadows and shading. The composition is based on deliberately different modeling different parts. The visible form is decomposed into its constituent elements to create a new pictorial form.

Braque and Derain come to the studio of the successful Picasso, and young artists gather around him. The foundations of the art of cubism are being formed. Forms objective world are destroyed, the human figure turns into a combination of concave and curved planes. The image is static (Picasso. “Woman with a Fan”, “Dance with Veils”). In Picasso's Three Women (1908), movement is conveyed through three different poses. In 1908, a group of poets and artists, which included leaders Picasso and Braque, artists Laurencin and Gris, poets Apollinaire, Jacob, Salmon, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and Kahnweiler (Daniel Henry), who became a historiographer of cubism, created the Bateau-Lavoir association. . In G. Apollinaire's preface to the catalog of Braque's personal exhibition, held in 1908, there was not yet a hint of a cubist program. The critic Weksel called Braque's works "bizarreries cubiques" ("cubic oddities"), and this term was picked up.

In 1911 A new group of cubists was formed in the workshop of Jacques Villon, who was joined by Duchamp, Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Léger, Picabia, and Kupka. In the group called “Du Puteaux” (1911-1914), abstractionist tendencies became more pronounced than in the Bateau-Lavoir association. Thus, the works of Leger (1881-1955) are based primarily on the comparison of color planes of pure tones (“Smokers”, 1911; “Lady in Blue”, 1912). Subsequently, Léger’s work, entirely devoted to the glorification of the machine as the only worthy subject of depiction in art, completely diverged from Cubism (“City”, 1919). Interest in man never left Léger. After the Second World War, returning from America, where he went, not wanting to stay in Pétain’s France, he acts as an artist for whom the main object of attention is not the machine, but the person, although the master remains faithful to constructivism with its schematism of forms (“Builders” ", 1950). In recent years, Leger worked a lot in monumental art, mainly in ceramics (majolica mosaics on a sports theme on the facade of his museum in Biot, stained glass windows and tapestries for the church in Audencourt).

The last widespread performance of the Cubists dates back to 1912. The 10th Autumn Salon was, at the same time, their first exhibition of a programmatic nature. Their problems were purely formal. In the same year, Gleizes and Metzinger’s book “On Cubism” was published - the first theoretical basis cubism. According to the Cubist theory, a painting is an independent organism, and it acts not by image, but by formal means, by its own rhythm. According to Apollinaire, cubist works relate to old art as music relates to literature. “Not the art of imitation, but the art of concept,” proclaimed Apollinaire. According to the theorists of Cubism, the beauty of a painting has nothing to do with the beauty of the real world, it is based only on plastic feeling.

Cubism manifested itself most consistently in the work of Georges Braque (1882-1963). Brak always introduces appliqués and genuine pieces of paper or wood into his compositions, which are always in an exquisite range of gray, yellow, green, and brown tones, thereby introducing an element of the real world into the generally abstract form. In other works, for example, in his “Bach Aria” (1914), flatly interpreted black and brown geometric shapes, only vaguely reminiscent of a violin, piano keys, and notes, should convey musical images in visual images. The objectivity of the form is still preserved here, but soon it will turn into a pictorial sign-symbol that clarifies the plot. And then this will be the last step of cubism towards abstract painting. The Cubists always emphasized their apoliticality, and it is significant that their separation occurred precisely by 1914. After the First World War, many Cubists went into decorative art. Glez began to take up mural painting. Lursa and Leger - carpets and ceramics. The successors of the Cubists - the purists - developed the rationalistic, rational tendency of Cubism (Ozanfant). Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Le Corbusier, the famous architect of the 20th century, the creator of constructivism, who believed that any painting can be built in the same way as a car or a building, also began with purism.

The first formative experiments in sculpture are associated with cubism. Alexander Archipenko (born in 1887 in Kyiv, died in 1964 in the USA) is credited with the invention of counterform (replacing convex parts with concave or voids), combining different materials and their coloring (cheek-painting), “sculpting with light” (openwork sculpture illuminated from inside). A. Laurent (1885-1954), who later turned to surrealism, also took the position of cubism; J. Lipchitz (1891-1975), later purist, constructivist, expressionist and surrealist; O. Zadkine (1890-1967), who used the principle of counterform in the monument “In Memory of Destroyed Rotterdam” (bronze, 1953): a deformed figure with an empty chest and raised arms is a cry of despair, a cry for help, extreme mental stress. He did not escape the influence of cubism and later surrealism, which later turned to abstractionism by A. Giacometti (1901-1966).

Researchers have quite rightly noted that, unlike Cubism, which emerged first as a pictorial movement and only then theoretically, Futurism declared itself primarily in manifestos. Futurism was the first direction openly hostile to realism. In 1909, 11 theses of Marinetti were published in the Parisian “Figaro”, which proclaimed the apotheosis of rebellion, “offensive movement”, “feverish insomnia”, “gymnastic step”, “slap and blow of the fist”, as well as “the beauty of speed”, for in the modern world “a car is more beautiful than the Samothrace Victory.” This manifesto was repeated in expanded form in 1910 and was very successful among young people. Futurists denied the art of the past, called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and classical heritage: “Down with archaeologists, academies, critics, professors.” From now on, human suffering should interest the artist no more than the “sorrow of an electric lamp.” The birthplace of futurism is Italy, therefore, most of all futurists are among Italian artists: U. Boccioni, C. Carra, L. Russolo, G. Severini, G. Balla and others. They strived to create art - apotheosis big cities and the machine industry. Futurism (from the Latin futurum - future) came out with an apology for technology, urbanism, and the absolutization of the idea of ​​movement. Thus, Léger’s “Mechanical Elements” are a combination of mechanical, geometric shapes (like pipes, some kind of disks, etc.) on a red background. The materiality of object forms is dissolved in the dynamics of rhythms and lines. Naturalistic details are somehow combined with abstract lines and planes reproduced on the canvas. The object is laid out on a plane, the movement is divided into elements. Deconstruction, illogical composition, disharmony of color are characteristic of futuristic paintings (Boccioni. “State of Mind”, 1911; Severini. “Nord-Süd”, 1912; Balla. “Shot from a Gun”, 1915). The appearance of Futurist paintings was accompanied by continuous scandals. In 1910 they organized an exhibition in Paris. Unlike the Cubists, the Futurists, with their cult of power, actively intervened in public life, often playing an extremely reactionary role. It is not for nothing that the leader of futurism, Marinetti, became close to Mussolini during the years of fascism. But already in the 20s, futurism had exhausted itself. Carra returned to figurative forms, Severini became the head and theoretician of Italian “neoclassicism”. He came to it through purism, advocating the purity of forms, “built on the aesthetics of compasses and numbers.” At the end of the 20s, the new futurist forces came out with a slightly modified program.

The most extreme school of modernism - abstractionism emerged as a trend in the 10s of the 20th century. Since artists of this movement refuse to show the objective world, abstractionism is also called non-objectivity. Theorists of abstractionism derive it from Cezanne through cubism. It was precisely this path - from figurativeness through the “ideal reality” of the so-called synthetic cubism to complete non-figurativeness - that one of the founders of “ neoplasticism» Piet (Peter Cornelis) Mondrian(1872-1944), who believed that “pure plasticity creates pure reality.” In the 10s, Mondrian was associated with Cubism, however, bringing its principles to simple drawing on a plane. In his homeland, Holland, Mondrian had a group of followers united around the magazine “Style”. The magazine's program proclaimed the creation of a universal image of the world through... rectangles of different colors, separated from each other by a thick black line. This is how countless compositions appeared without a name, under numbers or letters. Mondrian was literally obsessed with the cult of balance between verticals and horizontals and broke with the magazine Style when it introduced the 45° angle as a component of expressive language in 1924. In the 1940s, Mondrian's programmatic ideas were taken up by the Italian "concretists". Based on Mondrian’s statement that “there is nothing more concrete than a line, a color, a plane,” they began to create a “new reality” from lines and planes of open yellow, red, blue colors (the so-called “constructive geometricism” of Mondrian).

Another founder of abstract art - Wassily Kandinsky(1866-1944) created his first “non-objective” works even before the Cubists. A Muscovite by birth, Kandinsky first prepared for a legal career, in 1896 he came to Munich, went through a passion for Gauguin and the Fauves, popular popular prints. As already mentioned, he was one of the organizers of the Blue Rider almanac. In his work “On the Spiritual in Art,” he proclaims a departure from nature, from nature to the “transcendental” essences of phenomena and objects; he is actively occupied with the problems of bringing color closer to music. Kandinsky was also greatly influenced by symbolism. Undoubtedly, from symbolism his understanding of black, for example, as a symbol of death, white - as birth, red - as courage. Horizontal line embodies the passive principle, the vertical - the active principle. Researchers rightly believe that Kandinsky is the last representative of literary-psychological symbolism, like Moreau in France and Ciurlionis in Lithuania, and at the same time the first abstract artist. “Objectivity is harmful to my paintings,” he wrote in his work “The Artist’s Text.”

Kandinsky's paintings from this period are colorful canvases in which shapeless spots of intense color in beautiful combinations are intersected by curved or sinuous lines, sometimes reminiscent of hieroglyphs. This in itself was already a great crime, from Mondrian's point of view. They do not have the gloom of Mondrian’s creations; they are rather close to the childish spontaneity of Klee’s paintings. Kandinsky’s paintings are somewhat reminiscent of photographic effects of light captured in paint (“abstract expressionism” by Kandinsky).

In the early 20s, Kandinsky was fond of so-called geometric abstractionism (as opposed to the pictorial abstractionism of the previous period). In 1933, with the advent of fascism in Germany, Kandinsky emigrated to France, where he lived until the end of his days. Kandinsky's late works seem to combine the principles of pictorial and geometric abstractionism.

The third founder of abstract painting - Kazimir Malevich(1878-1935). He combined the impressionistic abstractionism of Kandinsky and the Cezannean geometric abstractionism of Mondrian in the Suprematism he invented (from the French supreme - highest). A student of the Kyiv Art School, then the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Malevich went through a passion for impressionism, then cubism, and in the 10s he was influenced by the futurists Carr and Boccioni. Since 1913 he created his own system of abstract painting, expressed in the painting “Black Square,” calling this system “dynamic suprematism.” In his theoretical works, he says that in Suprematism “there can be no talk of painting, painting has long been obsolete and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.” In the 20s, Malevich unsuccessfully tried to apply Suprematism to architecture in his “planitas” and “architectons”. In the early 30s, he returned to figurative painting in the realistic tradition (“Girl with a Red Shaft”). Malevich's "Black Square" has gone down in history as the highest expression of the extremes of modernist art. Malevich's followers and students in Russia were L. Popova, O. Rozanova, I. Puni, N. Udaltsova (the so-called “Supremus” group). By association with the term “minimalism” in 20th-century avant-garde music, Mondrian’s “neoplasticism” and Malevich’s “suprematism” are sometimes called “minimalism.”

A special direction in abstract art - rayonism - was headed by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. According to Larionov, all objects are seen as a sum of rays. The artist’s task is to find and record the intersection of rays converging at certain points, that is, colorful lines that represent them in painting.

Abstractionism was less expressed in sculpture than in painting. Two trends are observed here: the so-called volumetric direction (interest in the relationship of abstract volumes - C. Brancusi, G. Arp) and “new space” (solution to new spatial relationships - N. Gabo, A. Pevzner).

With the coming to power of the fascists, the centers of abstract art moved to America. In 1937, a museum of non-objective painting was created in New York, founded by the family of millionaire Guggenheim, and in 1939, the Museum of Modern Art, created with funds from Rockefeller. During the Second World War and after its end, all the ultra-left forces of the artistic world gathered in America.

In the post-war period new wave abstract art was supported by a huge scale of advertising and organized success. Capital is invested in works of abstract painting. The reasons for such success of non-objective art are primarily socio-psychological. An apology for chaos, disorder, the rejection of the “conscious” in art, the call to “give way to forms, colors, colors,” together with existentialist literature and the theater of the absurd - these are the means that express the general disharmony of the modern world. Art becomes a language of signs, and it is no coincidence that a whole direction of abstract art is called abstract calligraphy (for example, the work of its representative Hans Hartung). In America, the so-called Pacific school of abstractionism, headed by Mark Tobey, is very close to him. The most acute is the work of the abstractionists of the New York school (Hans Hoffmann, Archia Gorky, etc.). Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is rightfully considered the “star” of American abstract art of the post-war period. Pollock coined the term "dripping" - splashing paint onto the canvas without using a brush. This is also called abstract expressionism in America, tachisme in France (from the word tache-stain), in England - action painting, in Italy - nuclear painting (pittura nucleare).

In France, in the first half of the 40s, there was some lull in the field of abstract art. This was caused by the strengthening of the position of realistic art after the war. Since the late 40s, abstractionists have united again in the “Salon des realites nouvelles” and publish a special magazine “Aujourd"hui art et architecture.” Its theorists are Leon Degan and Michel Seyfor. Seyfor was the organizer of the magazine and association of artists back in 1930 - abstractionists “Circle and Square”, which included Kandinsky, Arp, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Ozanfant and others.

In the 50s in France, the passion for abstract art was everywhere. The rival of the American Pollock is Georges Mathieu, who accompanies his “creativity sessions” in the presence of the public with masquerade disguises and music and calls his huge creations quite plot-wise (for example, “The Battle of Bouvines”), which does not, however, make them “less abstract.” As the theorist of abstractionism L. Venturi wrote, “... art is called abstract when it is abstracted not from the personality of the artist, but from objects of the external world...”

Abstract art was not the last of the avant-garde movements that emerged in the first decades of the 20th century. In February 1916, in Zurich, emigrant bohemians organized the artistic “Voltaire Club”. Its founder was the poet Tristan Tzara, a Romanian by origin, who, having found the word “Dada” in the dictionary - a game of horses, gave this association the name “Dadaism”. After the center of the Dadaists moved to Paris, the poets A. Breton, L. Aragon, P. Eluard, artists M. Duchamp, F. Picabia, X. Miró and others joined it. The second center of Dadaism, the so-called political, merged with post-war expressionism, there was Germany. Dadaism is the most chaotic, motley, short-lived performance of avant-garde artists, devoid of any program. Thus, at the New York exhibition of 1917, M. Duchamp exhibited various collages (“ready made” - finished products introduced into the image, for example, sawdust, cigarette butts, newspapers, etc. glued to the canvas), in which he even included fountain in the form of a urinal. The demonstration was accompanied by the music of beating boxes and cans and dancing in sacks. The calls of the Dadaists read: “The destruction of logic, the dance of the impotent creatures of creation is Dada, the destruction of the future is Dada.” Or: “The Dadaists are nothing, nothing, nothing, undoubtedly they will achieve nothing, nothing, nothing.” Behind all this “artistic hooliganism” was the denial of all spiritual values, moral laws, ethics, religion, the assertion of chaos and arbitrariness, unbridled nihilism, the desire to shock the bourgeoisie, the hysterical overthrow of all the foundations of morality. Dadaism, as aptly said, by 1922 “had run out of steam.”

On the basis of dadism, and at first only as a literary movement, surrealism arose (from surrealite - super-real). This term was first used in 1917 in Apollinaire's preface to his work, although he was neither a poet nor a theorist of surrealism.

In 1919, the magazine “Litterature”, around which the Dadaists led by Andre Breton grouped, became the center of surrealism. After the collapse of the Dadaist group, all their magazines were replaced by one magazine “La Revolution surre" aliste, the first issue of which was published on December 1, 1924. In the same year, the “First Manifesto of Surrealism” appeared. From literature, surrealism moves into painting, sculpture, cinema and theater.

Surreal art direction was born as a philosophy " lost generation", whose youth coincided with the First World War. It was represented mainly by rebellious artistic youth, close in their worldview to the Dadaists, but understanding that Dadaism was powerless to express the ideas that worried them. The theory of surrealism was based on the philosophy of intuitionism of Henri Bergson (intuition is the only means of knowing the truth, because reason is powerless here and the act of creativity has an irrational, mystical character), on the philosophy of idealism of Wilhelm Dilthey, who preaches the role of fantasy and the random in art, and on the philosophy of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud with his teaching on psychoanalysis, with the cult of the “unconscious” and with the cult of the sexual instinct - “libido”, which, according to Freud, accompanies a person from childhood and is sublimated into a creative act. It is Freud that the surrealists consider their spiritual father. The first manifesto of the surrealists stated that creativity is based on “psychological automatism, this is something like the fixation of super-real illogical connections of the objective world obtained in the unconscious state: sleep, hypnosis, illness, etc. The manifesto proclaimed unconditional faith “in the omnipotence of sleep " Proclaiming “free associations” in creativity, the surrealists introduced their basic “rule of inconsistency”, “connection of the incompatible”. In their art, according to one researcher, “all the “flowers of evil” of the worst sides of Freudianism sprouted: the cult of the fatal predetermination of social evil, aggressive drives, base impulses, destructive instincts, perverted eroticism, pathological psyche.” Haters of the bourgeois world, looking for new sharp means of expression in art, such great masters as Eluard, Aragon, Picasso, Lorca, Neruda joined surrealism in the 20s (who dissociated themselves from it, however, already in the 30s).

The surrealists declared their predecessors to be the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, the painter Marc Chagall, a native of Russia, and the Italian artist and poet Giorgio di Chirico, the creator of “metaphysical painting” (the latter was a participant in the first exhibition of the surrealists in 1925, but then abruptly broke with them). . The first surrealists in painting were: Andre Masson (quick sketches of animals, plants, some fantastic decorative forms); Joan Miró (imitation of a child's drawing, the world seen as through a microscope), who soon moved on to abstract art; Max Ernst, a former Dadaist who brought to surrealism its main principle - “deceiving the eyes”; Yves Tanguy, a self-taught artist, with his landscapes reminiscent of a dead desert, animated by fantastic plants or animals. This irrational world, written, however, always with emphasized volume, and “deception of the eyes” - naturalistic details conveyed with photographic precision in combination with abstract non-representational forms - in order to show the reality of the subconscious, mystical, painful, to influence the viewer with nightmarish associations - the most typical features of surrealism. In the paintings of the surrealists, “the heavy hangs,” “the hard spreads,” “the soft ossifies,” “the durable collapses,” “the lifeless comes to life,” and the living rots and turns to dust.

In the 30s, an artist appeared among the surrealists who embodied the culmination of this trend in his work. The name of this artist is Salvator Dali(1904-1989). An artist of enormous talent, exceptional flexibility of manner, allowing him to copy and imitate many great old masters, “the creator of large canvases and masses of drawings, the author of films and ballet librettos, as well as books about himself, an atheist and blasphemer in the past, then seemingly a true believer Catholic, a man of world fame, a multimillionaire, but always and in everything a cynic and a hoaxer” - this is how this artist appears in the description of one of the researchers (T. Kapterev). Dali's early works, already of a surrealist nature, are very verbose. This even affects their name (“The remains of a car giving birth to a blind horse that kills a telephone”, 1932).

The illogicality should act on the viewer’s psyche, leading him into the world of delusional associations. Dali sometimes attaches a certain political meaning to these frightening, meaningful associations. In 1936, he, a Spaniard by birth, responded to events in his homeland in this way: in the film “Premonition civil war"depicts some kind of terrifying structure of a decaying head on a bone leg and with two huge paws, one of which is squeezing a breast with a bloody nipple. All this “rests” on a small, illusively painted box-cabinet and is placed against the backdrop of a lifeless, dead, typically surreal landscape. The same dead landscape with the idyllic motif of a white house is the backdrop to another, no less terrible action in the film “Autumn Cannibalism” (1936-1937). The author explains that it should depict how two Iberians, armed with knives and forks, devour, “scoop” each other - in this he sees the “pathos of the civil war.”

In the 30s, surrealism went beyond European boundaries. In 1931, the first exhibition was organized in America. The New York exhibition of 1936 is called "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism." Along with works by the surrealists and Dadaists, it displayed works by the mentally ill, “natural objects of a surrealist nature,” such as a spoon from a death row, and “scientific objects,” such as a cross section of lichen.

During World War II, the center of surrealism moved to America. Dali, Breton, Masson, Ernst, Tanguy and others moved here. Dali’s activities in America during these years were extremely diverse: he painted canvases, which he sold at fabulous prices, staged ballets, collaborated in magazines, designed stores and even acted as a consultant on women’s hairstyles. . Researchers note two methods in his work: either he introduces deliberately everyday objects into an absolutely unreal landscape, an unreal environment, or he distorts the familiar and real into some kind of monstrous image. So, he turns the chest, stomach, knees of the copy of the Venus de Milo into some kind of pulled out cabinet drawers with suction cup handles. In the 50s, at the zenith of his fame, he made an absolutely exact copy of Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker” in the Louvre and at the same time painted a rhinoceros in the zoo. The fruit of such studies was a work depicting the body of Wermere’s “Lacemaker” mangled by a rhinoceros horn.

After World War II, Dali painted the following paintings: “Three Bikini Sphinxes” (three heads with permanents growing out of the ground), “Atomic Nero” (a split statue of the emperor) and “Atomic Leda” (an almost academically correct study of nude female nature and a swan with huge paws).

In the 40-50s in America, the surrealists had the greatest success. Researchers of surrealism explain this by the fact that the public, tired of abstractionism, rushes to paintings in which “something is still depicted.” In 1947, with an exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, a new stage of Dali's surrealism began - the so-called Catholic surrealism. The sketch for the painting “Madonna of the Port of Lligat” (1949) was sent to the Pope for approval - another publicity stunt by Dali. The works of the 50s do not have any deformation and are made to a high standard. professional level(“Christ of St. John on the Cross”, 1951; “The Last Supper”, 1955; “St. James”, 1957). In addition to paintings on religious themes, Dali painted those in which he tries to reconcile religion and science (“Atomistic Cross”, 1952 - an image of an atomic reactor and a piece of bread as a symbol of Holy Communion). In the 60s, surrealism began to give way to a new wave of abstractionism and, most importantly, to new directions of avant-gardeism, primarily the art of pop art.

The term " pop Art” (folk, popular art, or more precisely, “consumer art”) arose in 1956 and belongs to the critic and curator of the Guggenheim Museum Lawrence Alway. Pop art arose in America as a reaction to non-objective art and consists of collages, combinations of everyday things on canvas. Highest point the development of this direction - the 60s, the Venice Biennale of 1962. True, “pop artists” were not allowed into the exhibition area; they staged an exhibition at the American consulate. It was here that “works” were exhibited, the components of which were buckets, shovels, torn shoes, dirty pants, posters, car parts, casts, mannequins, blankets, comics and even a stuffed chicken. The “inventors” of pop art are Robert Rauschenberg, who even received a gold medal at the Venice Biennale, and Jasper Johns. What pop art artists such as James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenberg, Chamberlain, Oldenburg, Dine and others used was also done by the Dadaists, sometimes even with irony, at least not without humor. Nevertheless, pop art from America spread throughout Europe. The French variety of pop art is “new realism” (A. Herro). (Sometimes these artists are called "new wild ones"). Close to pop art is “body art” with a demonstration of the artist himself, accompanied by ridiculous attributes, and “actionism” - a mixture of abstractionism, Dadaism, pop art combined with performance - an entire theatrical performance (70s). “Ready-made” by M. Duchamp is turning into a whole movement, dissociating itself from both Duchamp and pop art and claiming originality - the so-called conceptual art, where very real objects are called “concepts” and “attributes of civilization”.

By the mid-60s, pop art was losing ground to op art, optical art, who considers the geometric abstractionism of the Bauhaus and Russian and German constructivism of the 20s to be its forerunner (Victor Vasarelli, who worked in France, is considered its founder). The meaning of op art is the effects of color and light carried out through optical instruments on complex geometric structures. This avant-garde wing demonstrated itself in full force in New York at the exhibition “Sensitive Eye”, in which 75 artists from 10 countries participated. Op art had some impact on the art industry, applied arts, and advertising.

Kinetic (kinematic) art means “inventions” with various kinds of humming, rotating and other mechanisms, compositions with magnets, etc. It began in 1931 in the USA: A. Colbert created a structure made of tin and wire, driven moved either by a motor or by the wind. In the 50s, kinetic art had success mainly in the interior. Günter Uecker received the nickname “nail kineticist” because his work of art represented a moving fabric onto which nails were hammered. The most famous “kineticist” is the Swiss Jean Tinguely, the creator of self-destructing machines, combining the process of “self-destruction” with light effects. In kinetic art and op art, the viewer can be an author and an accomplice if he uses a structure, rearranges something, or even enters the “work”, wanting in this case, for example, to rest on it. But the artist, who, as a “supreme being” is called upon to create aesthetic and moral, ethical values, ceases to exist, because all this no longer has anything to do with art, which in a figurative artistic form comprehends and interprets life. Op art and kinetic art still exist today, as does hyperrealism (from the English hyperrealism - superrealism), or rather, photorealism, which arose in the 70s in America and Europe. Using color photography or a dummy to reproduce reality, hyperrealism is essentially a type of naturalism (another name is “magical realism”, “radical realism”). From here there is a direct path to kitsch - the quintessence of mass culture - with its cliches, vulgarity, truisms, lack of a sense of proportion, the victory of bourgeois taste - evidence of the displacement of the great European culture with its spiritual traditions - civilization, humanistic values ​​and ideals - by the pragmatism and materialism of the technocratic age.

Throughout the 20th century, art lives and develops, not breaking with a realistic vision, forcing us to think about the fate of the world and society and continuing the best traditions of world art.

New realism, for which an exact term has not yet been found and which is most often referred to by researchers as “realism of the 20th century”, began to take shape from the first years of the century in the revolutionary graphics of Käthe Kollwitz, the Swiss Théophile Steinlen, the Belgian Frans Maserel (1889-1972), in the etchings and paintings of the Englishman Frank Brangwin and in the lyrical landscapes of the Frenchmen Maurice Utrillo and Albert Marquet (although the latter began his journey with the Fauves), in the classically clear sculptural images of Aristide Maillol and in the sculptural portraits of Charles Despiau, in the compositions full of intense dynamics by Antoine Bourdelle.

However, even among the listed masters it is difficult to find those who equally understand figurative system expressions of realism. Realism acquired its most expressive character in creativity Käthe Kollwitz(1867-1945). One of Käthe Kollwitz's early works is a series of three lithographs and three etchings "The Weavers' Revolt". In 1903-1908 She created a series of etchings “The Peasant War”, which were the pinnacle of European graphics at the beginning of the 20th century. These are harsh and tragic images of people's struggle. The combination of monumentality and acute expressiveness is characteristic of many restrained and mournful works by K. Kollwitz.

The piercing, intensely emotional engravings of Frans Maserel (1889-1972) present a whole chronicle of the modern world, the horrors of war, the suffering of a person infinitely alone in this split world (series “The Way of the Cross of Man,” 1918; “My Book of Hours,” 1919 ; "City", 1925).

Among the English artists of the realistic movement, we must name first of all Frank Brangwin(1867-1956), who worked in decorative arts (carpet weaving), and collaborated in applied graphics in the magazine “Graphic”. He owns such works of monumental and decorative art as the panel “Modern Trade” for the London Stock Exchange (1906), the painting of the Tanners’ House in London (1904-1909). But whatever art form Brangwyn works in, main theme His works are about labor, the main character is a simple man. His etchings and lithographs show the world of dockers and lumberjacks, timber raftsmen, and builders. Brangwyn's graphic sheets are unusually large in size. In addition to the line and stroke, the master widely uses a large black spot. Laconism expressive means Brangvina is organic with the majesty and monumentality of his images. Augustus John (1878-1961) worked in the tradition of realism at the beginning of the century. His portraits, both pictorial and graphic, are firmly constructed, free from any deformation, and give a multifaceted characterization of the model (portrait of Bernard Shaw, 1913-1914).

French plastic art remains true to realistic traditions. At the beginning of the 20th century. In French sculpture, three outstanding masters appear, three bright creative individuals, united by Rodin’s understanding of form, especially his late period, and striving to return sculpture to the strict laws of plasticity.

Aristide Maillol(1861-1944) studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of the painter Cabanel, and came to sculpture at the age of forty. Its main material is stone, its main theme is nude female model, the main idea of ​​creativity is the beauty and naturalness of a healthy beautiful body, strong and strong. Maillol never engaged in formalistic trickery. It is faithful to classically clear and solid forms, its monumentality and genuine plasticity are built on strictly selected details, a clear silhouette, and the absence of any deformation. (“Squatting”, 1901; “Ile de France”, 1920-1925). In the 10-20s, Maillol worked on a monument to Cezanne, but it is significant that he did not turn to a specific model, to the image of Cezanne himself, but personified creativity in the guise of a beautiful woman (1912-1925, Paris, Tuileries Garden). Maillol did little with portraiture, but among his portraits it is impossible not to note the highly spiritual image of the old Renoir (1907).

Antoine Bourdelle(1861-1929) with his drama and expressiveness, interest in the dynamics of plastic masses - as if the direct opposite of Maillol. He was born into a hereditary family of woodcarvers and stonemasons, studied first at the Toulouse School, then at the Paris School of Fine Arts, and in 1889 began working with Rodin. Later he said that his true teachers were the Louvre, Notre Dame, Puget, Bari. His first monument is “Monument to those who fell in 1870-1871.” (1893-1902), installed in Montauban. A work that reveals the peculiarities of his manner, bearing in itself features that would be characteristic in the future, is “Shooting Hercules” (1909). Hercules is depicted at the moment of highest tension, before shooting the arrow. In his swift pose, as well as in his face, reminiscent of an archaic kouros, there is something elemental, indomitable. This energy and pressure is only emphasized by the rough texture of the stone, its sharp, rough processing, which preserves traces of stacking. Dynamics and expression do not exclude clear architectonics, clear constructiveness, always preserved in Bourdelle’s monumental works (monument to Adam Mickiewicz in Paris, 1909-1929).

As a sculptor and painter, Bourdelle appeared in the decorative design of the Auguste Perret theater on the Champs-Elysees (1912), and he designed the design of the opera house in Marseille (1924). Unlike Maillol, Bourdelle did a lot of portrait work.

He devoted his creativity exclusively to the portrait genre Charles Despio(1874-1946), who studied first at the School of Decorative Arts, then at the School of Fine Arts, exhibited at both the Salon of the Champs-Elysees and the Salon of the Champs-Elysees. Despio never performed “imaginary” portraits. He worked from life, examining it very carefully and finding those elusive features in the model that make it unique, unique. Despio’s portraits lack any external showiness; their charm (especially female portraits) lies in high spirituality and intellectual subtlety, which the sculptor knows how to convey in simple and classically clear plastic solutions (“Eva”, 1925; “Asya”, 1937).

The events of 1917 in Russia caused an inevitable split among modernists and the inevitable politicization of artists. The camp of artists such as Kollwitz and Maserel included former expressionists Georg Grosz and Otto Dicke, sculptor Ernst Bardach, photomontage master John Heartfield, American graphic artist William Gropper and many others. From now on, the path of development of realism is difficult and impossible to limit to Europe, and “realism” itself takes on a variety of forms. In 1925, unions of proletarian artists arose in Japan and Korea. Rockwell Kent develops the national school of landscape painting in America - a romantic art, saturated with pure, shining colors. In the 20s, an unprecedented flowering of monumental art in Mexico began, which influenced the development of other national schools Latin America(Orozho X. K., A. Siqueiros). Even in the USA, which became a stronghold of the “left” in the 1930s, art that raises social problems, critical art (Anton Refregier, Charles White, etc.) continues to develop.

In the period between the two world wars, realistic art continued to develop in constant conflict with all forms of avant-gardeism, primarily abstractionism, and, since the mid-20s, with surrealism.

Speaking about the complex paths of development of art of the 20th century, it is appropriate to talk about Picasso, for he is one of those artists who most clearly expressed the general evolution of the art of the century. An artist of enormous talent and tireless creative work, who lived a long life, Picasso (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso), like any innovator, evoked different attitudes and different assessments, from recognizing him as a genius to completely denying his work.

The 20th century gave rise to a number of names of artists whose lives seemed to coincide with the century and lasted almost a whole century. Next to Picasso, one can name Chagall here. But if in the work of Picasso one can trace the evolution of, in fact, all styles and trends in painting of the 20th century, then Chagall retained one specific range of themes and images, and his style is recognizable from the earliest to the most recent works.

Marc Chagall(1887-1985) - artist who was born in Russia, but lived outside it almost all his life (about 70 years out of 98). And throughout his long life he remained faithful to the impressions of childhood and youth, his native pre-revolutionary Vitebsk, memories of small-town life, and Jewish folklore.

A violinist, lovers hovering above the ground, cows, horses, donkeys, roosters, rickety wooden houses of the Vitebsk outskirts - these motifs are not obscured by Parisian and other impressions and accompany the works of all stages of his creative life in a wide variety of variations and artistic modifications. The work of Marc Chagall truly belongs to the whole world. He created for the whole world, from Russia to France, from the States to Jerusalem. And in a variety of genres and types, both in easel painting and in monumental painting (plafond for the Paris Grand Opera, 1964; painting at the Metropolitan Opera, 1965; stained glass for the university in Jerusalem, 1960-1961; the famous “Biblical Cycle” stained glass windows exhibited at the Chagall Museum in Nice). Did Chagall belong to any movement? Who is he? Surrealist? But the cult of the subconscious was never characteristic of him. Expressionist? But in his work, despite all the anxiety, there is no “scream”, hysteria, or anguish. Marc Chagall is, as they say, “a painter par excellence.” Its nature is the element of painting, with incomparable beauty of strokes conveying burning colors.

In Italian art In the 20th century, three stages can be clearly traced. The first stage was associated with futurism and lasted until 1922; the second - “neoclassicism”, glorifying the power of the “new Rome” - the art of the period of Mussolini’s dictatorship; the third began during the years of the Resistance. More precisely, this third stage began back in 1938, when artists led by R. Guttuso and D. Manzu grouped around the Milanese magazine “Corriente” (“Current”). Very soon their influence spread to artists from other cities (A. Pizzinato, G. Mucchi). Reality is perceived tragically by the artists of this circle, and in this they are close to the expressionists, but expressionists like Kollwitz and Barlach. Their art is politically acute, highly civic, and in this sense it is rightly called “heroic expressionism” (R. Guttuso. “Execution”, dedicated to Garcia Lorca). It is no coincidence that during the Second World War, almost all of these artists were associated with the Resistance movement. Guttuso owns a series of 20 graphic sheets (watercolor and ink) depicting the atrocities of fascism - “Gott mit uns” (1944). In 1952, in Rome, on the initiative of Guttuso, the newspaper “Realism” was founded, which was destined to become the theoretical center of the movement called neorealism, and which was to experience a period of brilliant prosperity in Italian cinema. Undoubtedly, neorealism was not a homogeneous movement; a variety of artists worked within its framework, from different creative individuals, worldview and understanding of realism. They were united by the desire to critically comprehend the events taking place in society. There was something common in the system of expressive means: the desire to symbolic image, to its maximum generalization.

Concerning 20th century sculptures., then she is looking for more generalized forms. The art of the remarkable Italian sculptor is deeply humanistic in its essence. Giacomo Manzu, an artist-philosopher who resolves many pressing issues of our time in plastic form.

Manzu's peculiarity is that he gives several solutions to the same theme, thereby achieving extraordinary artistic expressiveness and elevating each of the works to a symbol. This is how his sculptures arose on the themes “Crucifixion”, “Cardinal”, and the theme “Ballerina” developed into a whole series.

In the early period of his work, D. Manzu developed a passion for impressionism, which he soon abandoned, but it was thanks to the impressionists that he learned the finest light and shadow modeling and the use of picturesque textures. Manzu did not become an impressionist in sculpture because he was always interested in the statics of form, which he preserves with all the picturesque texture and subtlety of light and shadow modeling, the integrity of the generalized characteristics. Thus, the figure of his “Cardinal” (1955) is gloomy and motionless, reminiscent in its integrity of an undivided block, but the light seems to glide over the uneven surface of the face, creating challenging game, giving it a sharpness of expression.

One of Mantsu's milestone works was reliefs for the “Gate of Death” of the Cathedral of St. Peter's in Rome, the creation of which he devoted fifteen years of his life (1949-1964). These are six (very flat, sometimes almost contour) thematic bas-reliefs with symbolic images of animals and plants between them. The plots are also symbolic, but interpreted with life-like convincingness. The image of Pope John XXIII on one of the bas-reliefs speaks of the outstanding skill of Manzu as a portrait painter. The graphic heritage of J. Manzu is also extremely interesting for its realistic traditions and sophistication of language (graceful linear rhythm, nobility of contour, precision of drawing).

Sculpture has never been leading in English fine art. But it was England that gave birth to the greatest master of sculpture of the 20th century Henry Moore(1898-1986). His creative path is very complex and contradictory, it contains works of various directions, from completely realistic (his drawings dedicated to the war) to pure abstractions (mainly in sculpture). Moore's images are schematic and abstract. But his sense of volume, plasticity of form, sense of the measure of tension that he imparts to curved and concave planes, knowledge of the material, impeccable sense of harmonious connection with the natural environment give these images true majesty and monumentality (“Mother and Child”, 1943-1944, Hampton -Court, St. Matthew's Cathedral; "Reclining Figure" for the UNESCO building in Paris, 1957-1958; "King and Queen", stone, plateau near Demfries, 1952-1953, etc. We have chosen only a few names - those masters whose work chronologically fit into the 20th century.

28. Fauvism. The work of Matisse.

29. Cubism. Picasso's work.

30. Expressionism in the art of Germany.

31. Dadaism. Association "Bridge", "Blue Rider". The works of F. Mark, V. Kandinsky, M. Duchamp.

32. Surrealism. The works of S. Dali, J. Arp, I. Tanguy, H. Miró, R. Magritte.

33. Pop art, op art, hyperrealism and other movements in the artistic avant-garde last decades. (Happening, performance, conceptual art, fluxus)

Russian art

34. Choice of faith (chronicle and historical versions). The role of spiritual and moral ideas of Christianity in the development of culture and art of medieval Rus'. Theocentric artistic image of the world in Russian medieval art.

35. Pre-Mongol icon, its purpose and its associated features. The canon and its transformation on Russian soil.

36. Art of the Petrine era. General characteristics.

37. Classicism in Russian art. General characteristics.

38. Academic painting in the 19th century. (functions, features, evolution)

39. Development of the realistic system of genres in the 1880s. The main problems of Russian painting of this period.

40. Russian realism of the 1890s. “Landscape vision of the world” (concept and reality)

41. Artistic associations the beginning of the 20th century in Russia. “World of Art”, “Jack of Diamonds”, “ Blue Rose", "Donkey's Tail". (optionally)

42. Plan for monumental propaganda. Revolutionary art.

43. Artists of the Russian avant-garde (K. Malevich, V. Kandinsky, P. Filonov, M. Larionov, V. Tatlin). The uniqueness of paths into the non-objective.

44. Concept and representatives of the Soviet underground. The second wave of Russian artistic emigration. (E. Neizvestny, M. Shemyakin, etc.)

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