Characteristics of Western art styles and schools

Since the 20th century, Western modern art has shown a variety of schools and styles. The Fauvist painting represented by Matisse, born in 1905, emphasized the simplification and flatness of shapes and pursued the decorative nature of the picture. Cubist painting, represented by Braque and Picasso, which emerged in 1908, inherited Cezanne's modeling rules and decomposed natural objects into geometric blocks, thus fundamentally breaking away from the visual rules and spatial concepts of traditional painting.

With the establishment of the Bridge Society in Germany in 1905 and the Blue Rider Society in 1909, expressionism entered the painting world as an important genre. This school of painting focused on expressing the painter's subjective spirit and inner emotions.

The Futurist art movement emerged in Italy in 1909. Painters of this school were keen to use Cubism to decompose objects to express the feeling of moving objects and movement. Abstract art works were produced around 1910. Its representative painters include the Russian painter Kandinsky and the Dutch painter Mondrian, and both of them represent the two directions of lyrical abstraction and geometric abstraction respectively.

Dadaism emerged during the First World War. Artists of this school not only opposed war, authority, and tradition, but also denied art itself and everything else. Duchamp painted Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" with a beard and used the urinal as a work of art, which is the embodiment of Dadaism.

As the Dada movement faded, the Surrealist artistic trend emerged on this basis. This school of painters is based on Bergson's intuitionism, Freud's psychoanalysis and dream psychology, and strives to show the unconscious and subconscious world. His paintings often combine detailed descriptions with fictional artistic conceptions to express dreams and hallucinations. Representative painters include Ernst, Rene Magritte, Chagall, Dali, Joan Miró, etc.

The abstract expressionist paintings produced in the United States after World War II, represented by Pollock and de Kooning, combine the characteristics of abstraction and expressionism, emphasizing the freedom of movement and freedom of the painter. Automaticity.

Pop Art, which originated in the United Kingdom in the early 1950s and flourished in the United States in the mid-1950s, inherited the spirit of Dadaism and made extensive use of waste, product posters, movie advertisements, and various newspapers and periodicals in its works. The pictures are collaged together, so it is also called Neo-Dadaism. Representative figures include American painters Johns, Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, etc.

The main feature of the hyperrealism (or photorealism) movement that emerged in the 1970s is the use of photographic results for objective reproduction and realistic depiction. Representative painters include Close and Perlstein, and among the sculptors, Andre and Hansen are the most famous. In addition to the above, there are also incidental art, land art, etc. that can be included in the category of modern art. Many of its artistic activities have gone beyond the scope of fine arts.