Modern art 150, an unfinished story: what else can art be?

What's the impression that pops up in your mind when you mention modern art? Is it Picasso's seemingly fragmented cubist paintings, Duchamp's urinal works, or Dali's inexplicable weak clock? When you walk into an art gallery and try to appreciate all kinds of "puzzling" modern art works created by current artists by consulting exhibition manuals, do you find yourself more confused and depressed-can this also be called art? Shouldn't art be as beautiful as the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael?

Indeed, in many people's cognition, works of art should beautify and reproduce the world, bring spiritual pleasure to people and bring comfortable embellishment to life. However, the value and significance of art goes far beyond this. So, what else can art be? Will, a famous British art critic and former media director of Tate Gallery, was named one of the 50 most creative thinkers in the world by new york's Creativity magazine. The book Modern Art 150, an Unfinished Story written by Gomez may give you some enlightenment. With this question, we might as well follow the author's humorous and vivid narration, open the map of modern art history and start a journey of exploring the development of modern art.

/kloc-Since the second half of the 9th century, with the scientific and technological progress and rapid economic and social development and changes brought about by several industrial revolutions, the superstructure art belonging to the ideological field has also experienced the continuous evolution of 150 years, subverting and rebelling the classical art tradition. Modern art originated from impressionism, from cubism, expressionism and primitivism to Dadaism, surrealism, pop art, idealism, postmodernism and so on. Through repeated movements and activism, the concept of "what is art" has been redefined, so that art no longer has to be related to beauty, but more to ideas. Artists can choose any media to convey and interpret these ideas in an unrestricted way.

Subvert the tradition of classical art techniques and start the revolution of color and composition.

/kloc-In the middle and late 20th century, with the invention of photography, classical art, which has always paid attention to reproducing the authenticity of creative objects with traditional realistic techniques, no longer has advantages. With the improvement and progress of pigment technology, pre-impressionist artists, led by Monet and Manet, abandoned the traditional indoor painting method of classical art and went out of the studio one after another to learn to capture and present the charming transformation of light and shadow in daily life scenes with brushes in the environment of nature and emerging cities. This has opened the prelude to the subversive revolution of color and composition in the history of art development.

After nearly half a century of the rigidity of the Impressionist School in Paris and the resistance and rebellion of the neo-classical revival tradition, Van Gogh inherited the outdoor painting techniques of the Impressionist predecessors and combined with the painting techniques of Japanese ukiyo-e, and chose to distort the images in his works with strong contrasting colors and more exaggerated expressions, which not only described what he saw but also expressed his thoughts and feelings, which gave birth to a profound and lasting expressionist movement in the 20th century and influenced modern artists from generation to generation. Gauguin, his good friend, walked into Tahiti and painted and carved indigenous life with vivid color images and rich imagination, which created a far-reaching primitivism style for Picasso, giacometti and others.

Cezanne, as a master of impressionist art, has made a revolutionary breakthrough in modern art creation techniques by using "painting with his eyes"-changing the previous art from observing creation from a single perspective, observing objects from multiple different angles and making a unified composition, restoring the "authenticity" he saw, thus pushing open the door of modernism. It is this subversive creative idea that deeply influenced Picasso and gave birth to his great cubist style of deconstructing his creation from multiple perspectives. Today, when we stand in front of Picasso's masterpiece "The Girl of avignon" or "guernica", we no longer question that the works are as immature as children's graffiti as the audience bound by classical artistic thinking a hundred years ago, but thank art for providing us with different dimensions of the world.

At the same time, Fauvism, born in the early 20th century, subverted colorful creation to the extreme on the basis of Van Gogh and Seurat. In Matisse's typical fauvism work Joy of Life, the grass turns blue-purple, the trees are mixed with green and orange, and the sky is pink. This strange subversive color shows the vitality of the theme, not the absurdity. Just like its "beast" style, which was satirized by conservative artistic forces from the beginning, artists' colors are as imaginative as poets' words, aiming at pointing to the essence of things and conveying emotions. The young knight club, which inherited the mantle of color application, creatively crossed the border and integrated music into the emotional expression of color. For example, in his representative composition series, Kandinsky created a viewing experience with color as the note and composition as the keynote.

Redefining art: a conceptual game of keeping pace with the times

If the cubism, expressionism and primitivism born by Impressionism only subvert and rebel the classical art in artistic creation techniques, then the groundbreaking appearance of the ready-made art Spring created by Duchamp in 19 17 led the development of modern art creation in the next century to a consistent theme-redefining art.

As the father of conceptual art, in Duchamp's view, artists should not be confined to such strict media as painting and sculpture to express their thoughts and feelings; The first is the concept, and then we should consider what is the best form to express the concept. Therefore, art no longer has to be about beauty, but more about ideas, which can be realized through any media chosen by the artist.

For example, surrealism, which is famous for its mystery and grotesque in modern art, is deeply influenced by Freud's subconscious theory, subverting reality through crazy and vivid images, or exposing unusual evil under ordinary things with grotesque elements like Margaret, or conveying anxiety from incompetence, fear, ruthlessness of time and death humiliation like Dali's softening clock. These fantastic works can't bring people visual beauty and psychological pleasure, but they can often arouse the viewer's emotional induction and thinking.

In the second half of the 20th century, pop art, idealism and post-modernism appeared one after another, further explaining the core concept of modern art development: idea is a work of art, reflecting its social, political, economic and technological environment, so as to awaken our senses, challenge ourselves and help us understand things.

Andy warhol's famous paintings of can' t Campbell' s Soup and Marilyn Monroe vividly depict and satirize the consumerism and popular culture of pop art in commercial society. Amora's sensational performance art "The Artist is Present" in new york Museum of Modern Art directly transforms the artist's own meditation and interaction with the audience into works, further expanding the definition of art-art includes not only the artist's own behavior concept, but also the audience's reaction. Postmodernism, which came into being at the end of the 20th century, made conscious insight and bitter satire on consumerism commercial times through photography, graphic design, video and even architectural art. ..

Today, the afterheat of various doctrines has not faded, and modern art has rarely seen hard political edges and corners. Artists began to please capital, cater to kitsch on the basis of personal brand building, and refract and ridicule the current society with a relatively gentle attitude; However, the pace of artistic writing has never stopped, and the game of conceptual art continues.

No matter how the times change and develop, in the face of the endless stream of modern art, we don't have to be entangled in judging the quality of works. As the author said, we need to understand that "art is like a game, and all you really need to know is its most basic rules, so that what was once confused begins to become meaningful." In other words, as long as we realize that art can not only reproduce the truth and beauty of the world, but also be used as an ideological game to subvert tradition and keep pace with the times to reflect the influence of the times, we can gain resonance or enlightenment from modern works of art with an open and inclusive eye.