MODERN ART, ABSTRACT ART and
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A painting movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly, and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings and emotions, painting gesturally, non-geometrically, sometimes applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Their work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned. Some Abstract Expressionist artists were concerned with adopting a peaceful and mystical approach to a purely abstract image. Usually there was no effort to represent subject matter. Not all work was abstract, nor was all work expressive, but it was generally believed that the spontaneity of the artists’ approach to their work would draw from and release the creativity of their unconscious minds.

The expressive method of painting was often considered as important as the painting itself. Emerging in the 1940s in New York City and flourishing in the Fifties, Abstract Expressionism is regarded by many as the golden age of American art. The movement is marked by its use of brushstrokes and texture, the embracing of chance and the frequently massive canvases, all employed to convey powerful emotions through the glorification of the act of painting itself. Some of the key figures of the movement were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Although their works vary greatly in style, for example the sprawling pieces of Pollock at one end of the spectrum and the brooding works of Rothko at the other, yet they all share the same outlook which is one of freedom of individual expression.

The term was originally used to describe the work of Kandinsky but was adopted by writers in the Fifties as a way of defining the American movement, although the practitioners, disliking being pigeonholed, preferred the term New York School. The movement was enormously successful both critically and commercially. The result was such that New York came to replace Paris as the centre for contemporary art and the repercussions of this extraordinarily influential movement can still be felt thirty years after its heyday.

Constructivism was an invention of the Russian avant-garde. Germany was the site of the most Constructivist activity outside of the Soviet Union. Constructivist art is marked by a commitment to total abstraction and a wholehearted acceptance of modernity. Often very geometric, it is usually experimental, rarely emotional. Objective forms which were thought to have universal meaning were preferred over the subjective or the individual. The art is often very reductive as well, paring the artwork down to its basic elements. New media were often used. Again, the context is crucial: the Constructivists sought an art of order, which would reject the past (the old order which had culminated in World War I) and lead to a world of more understanding, unity, and peace. This utopian undercurrent is often missing from more recent abstract art that might be otherwise tied to Constructivism.

Modernism was characterized by the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Modernism refers to this period’s interest in new types of paints and other materials, in expressing feelings and ideas, in creating abstractions and fantasies, rather than representing what is real. This kind of art requires its audience to observe carefully in order to get some facts about the artist, his intentions, and his environment, before forming judgments about the work. Paul Cézanne is often called the ‘Father of Modernism’.

The name given to a wide range of cultural phenomena, to characterize a move away from the ‘highbrow’ seriousness of modernism, preferring a more eclectic and populist approach to creativity. The term came into common use in the 1970s. It is used both as a ‘stylistic’ term and also as a period designation. Paintings that have been described as Postmodernist include the work of Stephen McKenna and Carlo Maria Mariani, also selected works by Peter Blake and David Hockney.

Conceptual art is intended to convey a particular idea or concept to an audience. According to the rules of this movement, it is the concept which takes importance over the aesthetics and materials of an artwork. As the idea of a work matters more than the way it is represented, traditional art objects such as paintings and sculptures are commonly rejected by conceptual artists as precious commodities. While it has its roots in the European Dada movement of the early 20th century conceptual art emerged as a recognized art movement in the 1960s. When the expression “concept art” was coined by Henry Flynt in 1961, the term took on a different meaning when it was used by Joseph Kosuth and the Art and Language group in England.

Marcel Duchamp was a key influence of the conceptualists for the way he provided examples of artworks in which the concept takes precedence. For example, Duchamp’s most famous work, Fountain (1917) shows a urinal basin signed by the artist under the pseudonym “R.Mutt”. When it was submitted in the annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York it was rejected under the argument that it did not reflect the traditional qualities of art making. It was a commonplace object and therefore not unique.

Duchamp’s focus on the concept of his art work was later defended by the American artist Joseph Kosuth in his 1969 essay “Art after Philosophy” when he wrote “All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.” Between 1967 and 1978 Conceptual art was in it in golden years, allowing notable conceptualists such as Henry Flynt, Dan Graham, Robert Morris and Ray Johnson to emerge on the art scene. During the reign of conceptual art, other conceptualists such as Michael Asher, Allan Bridge, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono, Yves Klein and Mark Divo established names for themselves.