MODERNISM:
Modernism, which gathered pace from about 1850, proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. it is therefore characterised by constant innovation and a rejection of conservative values such as the realistic depiction of the world. This had led to experiments with form and to an emphasis on processes and materials.
Modern art has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the realism of Gustav Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as postmodernism.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:
Abstract Experssionism was never an ideal label for the movement which grew up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. It was somehow meant to encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields of colour and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a vigorous term for a group of artists who did hold much in common. All were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes , and most were shaped by the legacy of "Surrealism", a movement which they translated into a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma. In their success, the New York painters robbed Paris of its mantle as leader of modern art, and set the stage for America's post-war dominance of the international art world.
BAUHAUS MOVEMENT:
"If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times."- Oskar Schlemmer
The Bauhas was the most influential modernist art school of the 20th century, one whose approach to taching, and understanding art's relationship to society and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and the United States long after it closed. It was shaped by the 19th and early 20th centuries trends such as Arts and Crafts movement, which had sought to level the distinction between fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing. This is reflected in the romantic medievalism of the school's early years, in which it pictured itself as a kind of medieval crafts guild. But in the mid 1920s the medievalism gave way to a stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this which ultimately proved to be its most original and important achievement. The school is also renowned for its faculty, which included artists Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Johannes Ittern, architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and designer Marcel Breuer.
The motivations behind the creation of the Bauhaus lay in the 19th century, in anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing and its products, and in fears about art's loss of purpose in society. Creativity and maufacturing were drifiting apart, and the Bauhaus aimed to unite them once again , rejuvenating design for everyday life. Although the Bauhaus abandoned much of the ethos of the old academic tradition of fine art education, it maintained a stress on intellectual and theoretical pursuits, and linked these to an emphasis on practical skills, crafts and techniques that was more reminiscent of the medieval guild system. Fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem solving for a modern industrial society. In so doing, the Bauhaus effectively leveled the old hierarchy of the arts, placing crafts on par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting, and paving the way for many of the ideas that have inspired artists in the late 20th century.
The stress on experiment and problem solving at the Bauhaus has proved enormously influential for the approaches to education in the arts. it has led to the ' fine arts' being rethought as the 'visual arts' and art considered less as an adjunct of the humanities, like literature or history, and more as a kind of research science.
ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT:
The Arts and Crafts Movement was one of the most influential , profound and far-reaching design movements of modern times. it began in Britian around 1880 and quickly spread across America and Europe before emerging finally as the Mingei (Folk Crafts) movement in Japan. It was a movement born of ideals. it grew out of a concern for the effects of industrialisation: on design, on traditional skills and on the lives of ordinary people. In response , it established a new set of principles for living and working. it advocated the reform of art at every level and across a broad social spectrum, it turned the home into a work of art. This was a movement unlike any that had gone before. Its pioneering spirit of reform, and the value it placed on the quality of materials and design , as well as life , shaped the world we live in today.
The Origins of the Movement:
I was not untill the 1860s and 1870s that architects, designers and artists began to pioneer new approaches to design and the decorative arts. These in turn led to the foundation of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The two most influential figures were the theorist and critic John Ruskin and the designer , writer and activist William Morris. Ruskin examined the relationship between art, society and labour. Morris put Ruskin's philosophies into practice, placing great value on work, the joy of craftsmanship and the natural beauty of materials.
By the 1880s Morris had become an internationally renowned and commerically successful designer and manufacturer. New guilds and societies began to take up his ideas, presenting for the first time a unified approach among architects, painters , sculptors and designers. in doing so, they bought Arts and Crafts ideals to a wider public.
