Art Appreciation - ARTS 105 Resource Guide

Art created from the 19th cent. to the mid-20th cent. by artists who veered away from the traditional concepts and techniques of painting, sculpture, and other fine arts that had been practiced since the Renaissance (see Renaissance art and architecture).

Movement in art, architecture, and design in Europe and North America about 1750-1850, characterized by a revival of classical Greek and Roman styles.

A return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator;

Movement in painting that originated in France in the 1860s and had enormous influence in European and North American painting in the late 19th century

Broad term covering various developments in French painting that developed out of Impressionism in the period from about 1880 to about 1905.

Movement in modern French painting characterized by the use of very bold, vivid, pure colours.

In the arts, the use of symbols to concentrate or intensify meaning, making the work more subjective than objective. In the visual arts, symbols have been used in works throughout the ages to transmit a message or idea, for example, the religious symbolism of ancient Egyptian art, Gothic art, and Renaissance art.

This term was used by Hitler and the Nationalist Socialists to describe much modern, avant-garde art that they regarded as 'cultural Bolshevism' and an attack on the purity of the German people.

The Neoclassical style arose from such first-hand observation and reproduction of antique works and came to dominate European architecture, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century.

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism

Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism.

Fauvism was the first of the avant-garde movements that flourished in France in the early years of the twentieth century. The Fauve painters were the first to break with Impressionism as well as with older, traditional methods of perception.

Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, gaining popular credence with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas' manifesto in Le Figaro.

The years 1927-37 were critical for artists in Germany. In 1927, the National Socialist Society for German Culture was formed. The aim of this organization was to halt the "corruption of art" and inform the people about the relationship between race and art. By 1933, the terms "Jewish," "Degenerate," and "Bolshevik" were in common use to describe almost all modern art.