Modernized Art Forms and Styles

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The beginning of the 20th-century ushered in a new era of Technology: Automobiles, Trains, Airplanes and the Telegraph, changed the way we perceived and interpreted the world. This new modern era, as it would later be called, had a profound impact on the Arts and Architecture. Gone was the old romanticism and symbolism that had dominated the 19th-entury earlier. Instead, Artists around the world started to incorporate the emerging geometrics of technology into their art. Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, Nonobjective art, and the International Style are all examples of art forms and styles that adapted the abstract geometrics that technology offered.

Cubism is an art form movement that helped shape early 20th century art and the Modernist era. Two of Cubism’s most famous leaders were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Picasso, a Spanish born artisan, wanted to express an art form that broke free of the tradition of what should be presented on the canvas. Picasso achieved his vision by presenting his objects geometrically; that is broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled by placing the object abstractly together in geometric schemes. Influenced by African art, “Picasso’s foremost assault of tradition was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a large painting of five nude women.” (Fiero, p.6) As if developing a new reality or dimension in space, Picasso used colors and shapes to rearrange and present the nude women in an abstract manner that left it to the viewer to use his or her imagination to interpret what is being displayed on the canvas. This style later to be refined and labeled Analytical Cubism. Having moved to France from his native Spain, Picasso began to collaborate with fellow French Artisan Georges Braque. Braque, helped develop the sec...

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... instead he made it his philosophy to express the abstract using geometric shapes and simple colors to titillate the viewer as evident is the painting simply named Tree. The third noted artist and unlike the two previous who descended from the Soviet Union, Mondrian was a Dutch artist, but like his Russian contemporizes, he also wished to move away from representational art and move into an abstract use of geometrics to archive transcendental purity. One such paining evident of this abstract purity is “Composition with Large Red Plane,Yellow,Black,gray and Blue” (Fiery, p.19 Fig, 32.19)Mondrian contribution does not end there, he help develop the movement named De Still or style that would traced its influence not just paintings, but to furniture as in present day Ikea furniture stores and even Architecture.

Works Cited

The Humanistic Tradition sixth edition

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