Western modern visual art schools

Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in the American painting world in the 20th century, marked the shift of the center of Western modern art from Paris to New York. If this school of painting is actually the continuation of European modernist painting in the United States, then the various painting schools that have emerged in the United States since then are entirely the creations of the Americans themselves. Pop Art is the earliest painting school with American characteristics. Pop art appeared in the mid-to-late 1950s. According to Lichtenstein, "Applying commercial art themes to paintings is pop art." It uses popular materials, simple and direct visual images, and excludes the expression of personality. Acrylic, enamel and other materials create a flat and smooth texture effect on the picture, which is reminiscent of magazine covers and has a highly stylized atmosphere. In the eyes of Pop artists, art is life and life is art. It can be directly based on objects in real life, and objects in daily life can also be directly used as pop art works. After Pop Art, the American painting world showed a variety of schools. Photorealism, light effects, hard-edged paintings, and more are all here to dazzle. Light effect art became popular in the 1960s. It causes people's visual illusions through special arrangements of lines, shapes, and colors, creating a moving effect on a static picture. Photorealism was mainly popular in the 1970s. It draws pictures based on photos, and the images are realistic and detailed.

Johns was an early representative of Pop Art. He was born in South Carolina and moved to New York in 1952. His paintings abandon the short-lived emotional expressions of Abstract Expressionism and create a "Neo-Dada" style that uses pure painting forms and even real objects in life to delicately deal with daily realistic themes. This style played a decisive role in the development of Pop Art. Johns chose the American flag as the painting's sole motif. This motif has a strong symbolic meaning for the general American public. "No other social symbol has such a powerful resistance to aesthetic transformation as the American flag." However, Johns insisted: "This is not a flag." This is reminiscent of Magritte's painting of a pipe. A sentence written on one of the paintings: "This is not a pipe." Indeed, it was not a pipe, but just a painting. This is probably what Johns is trying to say here. In this painting, he actually wanted to express the boundary between image and reality. Although he painted the three flags with a high degree of realism, they look unnatural. They have no feeling of floating or drooping, and seem to be suspended in mid-air. It can be seen that they are separated by a certain distance and space from each other, but they have no connection with each other. If they still feel a little bit moving, it is that the red, white, and blue colors on the flag are not flat and single colors, but have a slightly undulating effect. One may ask whether the artist is painting a portrait of these three flags. Such a portrait must only exist in the artist's mind. Therefore, what this painting depicts is by no means a real reality, but only a fantasy reality. When we first saw this painting, we never imagined that it would give people such a strange feeling.

"Marilyn Monroe", by Andy Warhol, 1967, print, 90x90 cm each, Hiroshima, Collection of Museum of Modern Art.

In Pop Art, the most influential and representative painter is Andy Warhol (1927-1986). He is the founder and main advocate of the American Pop Art movement. He became famous in 1962 for his exhibition of "sculptures" of soup cans and Brillo soap dishes. His painting patterns are almost the same. He used images taken from mass media, such as Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills, Mona Lisa and Marilyn Monroe's head, as basic elements to repeatedly arrange them in the painting. He tried to completely eliminate the manual element in artistic creation. All of his works are produced using silk screen printing technology, and the image can be repeated countless times, giving the picture a unique dull effect. Regarding his works, Harold Rosenberg once jokingly said: "The pillars composed of Campbell's soup cans are numbly repeated, like a humorless joke told over and over again." He prefers repetition and copying. . "I've been eating the same breakfast for twenty years," he explained. "I guess it's the same thing over and over again." For him, there is no "original" at all. His works are all copies. It is to replace the status of the original work with countless copies. He deliberately eliminated the color of personality and emotion in his paintings, and calmly listed the most ordinary images. He famously said, "I want to be a machine," in stark contrast to Jackson Pollock's declaration that he "wanted to be nature." His paintings, almost inexplicable, “thus arouse boundless curiosity—a slightly terrifying vacuum that needs to be filled with chatter and talk.” In fact, Andy Warhol’s paintings are unique in their The monotony, boredom and repetition convey a certain feeling of indifference, emptiness and alienation, expressing the inner feelings of people in the contemporary highly developed commercial and civilized society.

Marilyn Monroe’s head is one of the most concerning motifs in Warhol’s works. In the painting "Marilyn Monroe" painted in 1967, the artist used the head of the unfortunate Hollywood sexy movie star as the basic element of the painting, repeatedly arranging it row by row.

The simple, neat and monotonous Monroe portraits reflect the helpless emptiness and confusion of people in modern commercial society.

"Girl at the Piano", Lichtenstein, 1963, oil on canvas, New York, private collection.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1923) is famous for his cartoon-like images. Like Andy Warhol, he not only had a preference for the mundane things in daily life and the vulgar images of modern commercialized society, but also liked to deal with these images in an impersonal and neutral way. . For them, he neither attacks criticism nor glorifies them, but simply states - this is the city we are in, these are the images and symbols that make up our lives. In 1961, he began to put the most banal images from comic strips into his large paintings. He relished using oil paint or acrylic paint to enlarge the comic strips as they were, and even took the trouble to reproduce the dots used in the cheap color printing process. In terms of the exquisiteness of the picture and the rigor of its production, its painting style appears to be very classical. "Girl at the Piano" is a work with typical characteristics of Lichtenstein's painting style. The entire painting is a reproduction of a comic strip, enlarged more than five hundred times than the original. The painter not only accurately copied the composition and characters of the original work, but also carefully imitated the original author's brushwork and screen printing dots. He borrowed the magnifying grid of advertising painters and transferred the graphics on the comic strip from the small grid to the large grid of the canvas frame by frame. He also used a special metal engraving plate with neat holes punched in it, and arranged large dots regularly on the huge picture, deliberately imitating the dots in the printing process to show the nature of the enlarged comic strip. Popular culture color. He claimed that this kind of painting is not a mechanical imitation, and the painting method is only for formal reasons: "I think my works are different from newspaper cartoons... What I do is modeling, and newspaper cartoons are based on my interpretation. It’s not a shape.”

Flow, by Riley, 1964, board, mixed media, 149.5x148.3 cm, collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

OPArt art, also known as "visual illusion art" or "light effect art", was popular in the 1960s. This kind of art mainly uses special arrangements of lines, shapes, and colors to cause people's visual illusions, so that static pictures can produce a dazzling and flowing dynamic effect. It originates from the Bauhaus tradition and utilizes the research results of Gestalt psychology. It is an abstract art that is closely related to the visual perception of the viewer.

The sense of light, illusion and movement of light effect art originate from the special dynamic characteristics of the picture itself. Lines, such as the regular arrangement of vertical lines, horizontal lines, and curves, shapes, such as the periodic combination of circles, squares, and rectangles, as well as the juxtaposition, overlap, surround, and gradient of colors, etc., bring special stimulation to the retina. It confuses people's visual perception, causing motion illusions such as flickering, radiation, rotation, and concave and convex. This kind of visual erraticness can even pull the viewer into a trance state of unconsciousness. It can be said that it is a kind of visual magic. Although we know that all painting art involves the gap between physical facts and psychological effects, here we are still surprised by the illusionary effect of undulations on a static plane.

The creation of light effect paintings is a bit like a scientific experiment on vision and has nothing to do with emotion. This kind of painting is not limited to the picture itself, it also calls for the participation of the viewer. Only when people look at it can it gain integrity and realize its value in the interaction with the viewer. In fact, this tendency can be traced back to Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. Those painters tried their best to avoid mixing paints, but instead let the primary colors juxtapose on the canvas. When the viewer steps back to an appropriate distance, people feel the flicker of light due to the unique compounding effect of the retina. Light effect painters took this technique one step further and made it a de facto subject and content. Light effect art can arouse people's interest. It has been used in design, decoration, advertising and other aspects, and has become a popular label. Representative painters of light effects include Victor Vasalelli and Bridget Riley.

Bridget Louise Riley (1931—) is a creative British female painter. Before 1960, she mainly painted figures and landscapes. Later, she devoted herself to light effect art and created a number of very dynamic works. "Flow" was painted in 1964 and is one of his famous black and white painting series. The relationship between the lines seems to have been carefully calculated and arranged, creating a twisting and flowing effect on the picture. When the eyes stare at it, the picture continuously fluctuates, and the illusion of "flow" is produced.

"John", painted by Close, 1971-1972, acrylic on canvas, 254x228.6 cm, collected by Wildenstein Gallery, New York.

Photorealism, also known as hyperrealism, is an art style popular in the 1970s. It is almost entirely based on photographs, objectively and clearly reproduced on canvas. As Chuck Close said, “My main purpose is to translate the message of photography into the message of painting.

"The astonishing degree of realism it achieves is even better than that of a camera.

Photorealist painters do not directly sketch from life. They often use a camera to capture the desired image first. Then they copy the image onto the canvas step by step. Sometimes they use a slide projector to project the photo onto the screen, obtaining an image that is much larger and more precise than what can be seen with the naked eye, and then trace it exactly the same. Some of the unclear details in the blueprint were also corrected by the painters, but such an accurate and detailed picture has become a provocation to people's conventional observation methods. Because under normal circumstances, people's visual perception of images will not be meticulous and will not miss any detail. Usually due to many influences such as occupation, emotion, personality, and pragmatism, the eyes will respond to the image selectively, and some will. You may get clear impressions through careful observation, and some may just pass by. In many cases, people's vision is only roughly clear. The realism of photorealism is almost unreal, but its clear treatment of all details equally implies. The distance between it and reality hints at the unreality beneath reality. In addition, photorealist painters deliberately hide all traces of personality, emotion, and attitude, quietly creating the surface of plainness and indifference. Underneath the indifference, there is actually a certain concept of society, which reflects the spiritual and emotional alienation and indifference between people in post-industrial society.

Photorealistic works are often small in size. Huge, brings a certain shock to the vision. Charles Bell (Chades Bell) believes that "extremely changing the size of ordinary things allows us to enter inside and more easily explore its surface and structure." "Large-scale paintings are produced in a unique way. The painter often divides the photo into many small grids, and then carefully reproduces it piece by piece according to the proportion. Obviously, the whole picture cannot be seen before it is completed. Effect. Photorealism has a wide range of subjects, realistic images, and without exception abandons all subjective factors. On the surface, it is a reply to realism, but in fact, it is a certain revelation of realism here. It has become a modern art technique that goes hand in hand with abstraction.

The emergence of photorealism has attracted imaginable criticism and attacks. With the support of art dealers and the enthusiasm of the public, it has gained a foothold and has established itself. Among the painters of this style, Close used portraits as his only subject matter, Estes liked to paint urban street scenes, Goins was interested in coffee shops and fast food restaurants, and Charles Bell spent his energy on painting game toys. On the topic, Robert Bechtler is committed to balancing the relationship between photography and painting... Although not many people engage in photorealism painting, its influence is endless, and some people are still interested in it. < /p>

Chuck Close (born 1940) is a representative figure of photorealism. He was born in Washington and studied at the University of Washington, Yale University, and the Academy of Plastic Arts in Vienna. He found that his works were similar to other people's works and lacked his own characteristics. In order to pursue his own vision and concept, he turned to painting people and used photos to paint them. He started painting portraits in 1964. Later, he painted based on photos. He joked, "All abstract expressionist painters are very handsome, so I just use the dumbest one." Their paintings were painted very thickly with color, but I only used black and white and painted them very thinly. Of course, later on I also used color. "He finally found himself and became different. The objects Cross painted were all relatives and friends he was familiar with. He understood their voices, smiles, personalities, and psychology. However, in the painting, not only were the characters expressionless, they did not convey any of his own feelings. Characteristically, Close also erases his emotions and shows no inclination. He used airbrushes and electric erasers instead of paintbrushes that might give away his personality, and he worked on "John" in a time-consuming and labor-intensive way. In this work, the portraits are lifelike and detailed. The skin, hair, eyes, glasses, etc. are all painted with rich texture. Such a large size and such a strong sense of realism will give people the idea that they are really "like". It’s like a fake.”