Art of the 20th Century



Postwar Developments & Contemporary Art


 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map



 

The New Avant-garde & Postmodernism

 

Soviet Nonconformist Art


(From Wikipedia)

The term Soviet Nonconformist Art refers to art produced in the former Soviet Union from 1953-1986 (after the death of Stalin until the advent of Perestroika and Glasnost) outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism. Other terms used to refer to this phenomenon are "unofficial art" or "underground art."

Notable Soviet Nonconformist artists from Russia include Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vassiliev, Komar and Melamid, Leonid Sokov, Boris Sveshnikov, Vladimir Yakovlev, Anatoly Zverev, Ylo Sooster, Vladimir Nemukhin, Ernst Neizvestny and Oscar Rabine, Alexander Yulikov, Andrey Grositsky, Igor Shelkovsky, from Moscow, and Timur Novikov and Afrika (Sergei Bugaev), from St. Petersburg.

The Petersburg group are formed in Leningrad into 1960.
The Group begins in 1964, from the exhibition in Hermitage Museum of five artists: V. Kravchenko, V. Uflyand, V. Ovchinnikov, Michail Chemiakin and O. Liagatchev.

The official name of the exhibit was "Exhibition of the artist-workers of the economic part of the Hermitage. Towards the 200 anniversary of Hermitage".

Exhibition was opened 30-31 March of 1964 and on 1 April it was arrested by authorities.
The Hermitage director, Mikhail Artamonov, was removed from his post.

In 1967 it was written "Manifest Peterburg Group", signed by Michail Chemiakin, O.Liagatchev, E. Yesaulenko and V. Ivanov. Somewhat previously by V. Ivanov and Michail Chemiakin are written theoretical essay " Métaphysique Synthétisme".

Group gave preference to still life, stylistic searches and illustration.
Michail Chemiakin in its painting realizes the ideas of the "Métaphysique Synthétisme". In the graph they created illustrations to the works E.T.A. Hoffman, to "Crime and Punishment" Fyodor M. Dostoevsky; it so works in the technology of the engraving painted by water color.
Since 1968 O. Liagatchev is fascinated by semiotic searches and manufactures his visual-ornamental style; characteristic for this style picturesque works as "Kafka" and "Intimeniy XX" in 1973, "Composition - Canon" in 1975.

Joined this group A. Vasiliev, as the master of picturesque invoices and technical improvisations and V. Makarenko as miniature-painter and metaphysical painter.

In 1971 Michail Chemiakin emigrated to France, and later the United States.
Liagatchev and Vasiliev participated in the exhibitions non-conformist artists at the Cultural Center Gaza in 1974 and at the Cultural Center Nevsky 1975.
In 1975 Liagatchev emigrated to France. Group did not have joint exhibitions and became defunct in 1979.

 

Since the 1960s, artistic exploration has proceeded apace on a global scale.

Among the many and varied developments witnessed in recent decades are the

reworking of complex traditional styles, the introduction of new media, and a

broadening of artistic horizons, characterized by a willingness to experiment

and to push artistic expression to the limit.

 

The 1950s saw the triumph of Art Informel (Art without form), a type of expressive abstract painting that celebrated the artist's uniqueness and individuality in defiance of industrial mass-production and its dehumanizing effect on society. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, the creation and appreciation of art demanded less emotional involvement.

Neo-Humanist or Neo-Figurative Art

Neo-figurative art describes an expressionist revival in modern form of figurative art. The term neo- & figurative emerged in the 1960s in Mexico to represent a new form of figurative art.

Famous Neo-figurative artists include:
Fernando Botero
Antonio Berni
Rebekah Boyer
Benjamin Canas
Oswaldo Viteri

 

New Directions
 

Of the prominent movements, Kinetic art favoured mass-production, with materials and techniques borrowed from industrial science; meanwhile, Pop art took its inspiration from the iconographic repertoire of the consumer world. However, neither of these new artistic tendencies wanted the viewer to be passive or alienated. Indeed, never before had the public been so encouraged to participate. While Art Informel had assimilated the experiences of Expressionism and Surrealism, the artists of the new avant-garde drew on the infinite inventions of Dadaism, which had attempted to break down all the barriers between art and life and to make them interchangeable. The "readymade" (the mass-produced article elevated to the status of "art"), which had already surfaced in the art of Neo-Dada and Nouveau Realisme, now appeared in a new guise under the banner of Pop art.

Other revolutionary initiatives that were taken by the Dadaists emerged in the various forms of expression of Conceptual art. For the first time, art was to be found away from its usual location in a gallery and was presented in the open air in town squares or in remote, inaccessible parts of the world. It was seen on screen, for example, or in the street in the form of an artist pretending to be a sculpture. Towns and cities worldwide were becoming focal points for the new trends. In the early 1960s, the development of Pop art took place predominantly in the US, while Europe, previously the centre of artistic change, lagged behind. A decade later, the art scene, as represented by its important events and leading groups, had become more international. However, by going down this road to total freedom and accessibility, many of these avant-garde movements paradoxically failed in their pursuit of the Dada connection between art and life. Art became distanced from the public, lost in introspection and experimentation.

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Nouveau Realisme.

Movement of French and other European artists announced by the publication in Paris of a short manifesto of 27 October 1960, drawn up by the French critic Pierre Restany (b 1930) and signed by the original Nouveaux Réalistes. These were Arman, the French artist Francois Dufrene (1930–82), Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and the French artist Jacques de la Villegle (b 1926).

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"NOUVEAU REALISME"

^{In the early 1960s, a parallel movement to American Neo-Dada was developing in Europe. Headed by the critic Pierre Restany (b. 1930), the French group of New Realists, including artists such as Arman (b. 1928), Cesar (b. 1921), Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930), Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely (1925-91), and Mimmo Rotella (b. 1918), took up the Dada concept of the "ready-made". They used objects in their raw state, advocating the use of real materials and existing artefacts. Arman used litter in his series of Poubelles ("Dustbins"), while Daniel Spoerri framed fragments of newspapers, like a memorial to past events. These works have clear echoes of the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who created collages with buttons, bus tickets, and various other paraphenalia. In Spoerri's work, however, the objects are given complete "roles", in which they seem to represent the tangible evidence of a scene from daily life.
 
Therefore, the leftovers from a meal or an ashtray full of cigarette ends suspends actions that have been}
completed, remaining as a testimony for all time. Completely different results were achieved by the Bulgarian artist Christo (b. 1935). who was especially interested in the disorientating effects provoked by certain Dada works. For example, in Man Ray's Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920) the wrapping of a sewing machine in fabric completely changes the nature of this everyday object. All of a sudden it is shrouded in an aura of mystery that really has nothing to do with the object. It is easy to understand, therefore, why Christo's most ambitious projects, such as the wrapping of the Aurelian Wall in Rome (19960 and the Reichstag in Berlin (1996), have reached the conceptual extremes of Land Art.
 

Portrait of Arman by Lothar Wolleh.
 

Assemblage

Assemblage is an artistic process in which a three-dimensional artistic composition is made from putting together found objects.
Assemblage is the 3-dimensional cousin of collage. The origin of the word (in its artistic sense) can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Jean Dubuffet created a series of collages of butterfly wings, which he titled assemblages d'empreintes. However, both Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso had been working with found objects for many years prior to Dubuffet. They were not alone, alongside Duchamp the earliest woman artist to try her hand at assemblage was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven , the Dada Baroness, and one of the most prolific, as well as producing some of the most exciting early examples, was Louise Nevelson, who began creating her sculptures from found pieces of wood in the late 1930s.

In 1961, the exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" was featured at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition showcased the work of early twentieth century European artists such as Braque, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, and Kurt Schwitters alongside Americans Man Ray, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, and also included less well known American West Coast assemblage artists such as Wallace Berman (1926-1976), Bruce Conner and Edward Kienholz. William C Seitz, the curator of the exhibition, described assemblages as being made up of preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials.


 

Installation [Environment].

Term that gained currency in the 1960s to describe a construction or assemblage conceived for a specific interior, often for a temporary period, and distinguished from more conventional sculpture as a discrete object by its physical domination of the entire space. By inviting the viewer literally to enter into the work of art, and by appealing not only to the sense of sight but also, on occasion, to those of hearing and smell, such works demand the spectator’s active engagement. As an art form, installations are particularly associated with movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as Pop art, Nouveau Réalisme, Minimalism, conceptual art and process art, but in theory they can be conceived within the terms of virtually any style.

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Kinetic art.

Term applied to works of art concerned with real and apparent movement. It may encompass machines, mobiles and light objects in actual motion; more broadly, it also includes works in virtual or apparent movement, which could be placed under the denomination of OP ART. Kinetic art originated between 1913 and 1920, when a few isolated figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Tatlin and Naum Gabo conceived their first works and statements to lay stress on mechanical movement. At about the same time Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Man Ray constructed their first mobiles, and Thomas Wilfred and Adrian Bernard Klein, with Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Kurt Schwerdtfeger at the Bauhaus, began to develop their colour organs and projection techniques in the direction of an art medium consisting of light and movement (1921–3). Although Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder pursued more or less continuous artistic research into actual motion in the 1920s and 1930s, it was only after 1950 that the breakthrough into kinetic art, and its subsequent expansion, finally took place. Such artists as Pol Bury, Jean Tinguely, Nicolas Schoffer and Harry Kramer played a leading part in this development as far as mechanical movement was concerned; Calder, Bruno Munari, Kenneth Martin (iv) and George Rickey in the domain of the MOBILE; and Wilfred, Frank Joseph Malina (1912–81), Schoffer and Gyorgy Kepes (b 1906) in that of lumino-kinetic experiment.

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Kinetic Art

The 1961 "Nouvelle Tendance" (New Tendency) show in Zagreb exhibited the diverse Constructivist tendencies that were coming to the fore in Western Europe. Participants included the GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel) in Paris, Gruppo N in Padua, and Gruppo T in Milan, all of whom were motivated by the desire to make art more accessible by demonstrating the ways in which it is perceived. Their methods sought to bring art closer to a wider public by involving the viewer directly. The sculptures, or assemblages, which were devised with mathematical precision, did not bear the artist's stylistic mark or speak of any emotions but stood as basic demonstrations of themselves. Kinetic art incorporated actual moving parts (as opposed to Op art, which implied motion in its images).

The movement was derived either from the intrinsic nature of the objects, such as mobiles, or from devices causing the motion. Sometimes the public was invited to intervene in the workings of the sculpture. This is the case with Oggetto a composizione autocondotta (Object with Self-Regulating Composition, 1959) by Enzo Mari (b. 1932), in which geometric shapes enclosed in a glass container change their arrangement according to alterations made by the spectator. Kinetic works were completely devoid of the sacred "do not touch" aura usually surrounding art and demanded more involvement than the passive acceptance usually associated with viewing art. The artists themselves wanted to avoid the narcissistic self-involvement of some Art Informel artists and to lose their identity within the discipline of a more collective activity. However, these hopes were soon to be clashed by the rapid rise to fame of certain members of the group.
 

Mobile.

Form of kinetic sculpture, incorporating an element or elements set in motion by natural external forces. The term, which is also sometimes used more loosely to describe sculptural works with the capacity for motorized or hand-driven mechanical movement, was first used by Marcel Duchamp in 1932 to describe works by Alexander Calder. The notable feature of Calder’s sculptures, which were suspended by threads, was that their movement was caused solely by atmospheric forces, such as wind and warm air currents. Movement was not, therefore, merely suggested by the treatment, as in traditional sculpture, but took place directly and unpredictably in the object. Because the kinetic sequences of the mobile could not be fixed or programmed, predictability and repeatability were eliminated.

 

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Continuita.

Italian group of painters and sculptors formed in 1961. With the critic Carlo Argan (b 1909) as spokesman, it included Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Gastone Novelli (1925–68), Achille Perilli (b 1927) and Giulio Turcato among its founder-members. They were soon joined by Lucio Fontana, Arnaldo Pomodoro and Giò Pomodoro. Some of these artists had previously been members of FORMA, founded in 1947 to promote abstract art. The notion of continuity was inherent not only in the group’s general aim—to regenerate the traditional greatness of Italian art—but equally as an ideal for specific works of art, each painting or sculpture reflecting the order and continuity of its creation. This was in opposition not only to the social realists, such as Renato Guttuso and Armando Pizzinato (b 1910), but also (to a lesser extent) to the Informalist trends among artists of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and the Gruppo degli Otto Pittori Italiani. However, some members, notably Turcato, went through all phases from Expressionism in the 1930s to geometrical abstraction in the 1960s. Accardi, Perilli and Novelli incorporated geometrical writing or ‘signs’ in their work. Fontana, the most influential and avowedly abstract artist to be associated with the group, added a further aspect to Continuita, the idea of continuity of a work within its surroundings, for example his Spatial Environment (1949; Milan, Gal. Naviglio), which was a precursor of environmental art. From the late 1950s onwards he also suggested continuity with the space behind the canvas in his slit canvases known as Tagli (‘slashes’, e.g. Spatial Concept—Expectations, 1959; Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris). Among the sculptors, Giò Pomodoro created cast bronze reliefs with irregular surfaces, creating a sense of integration with the surrounding wall or floor. Continuita, like Forma before it, represented a convergence of artists with similar aims rather than a definitive movement.

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Junk art.

Term first used by the critic Lawrence Alloway in 1961 to describe an urban art in which found or ready-made objects and mechanical debris were transformed into paintings, sculptures and environments by welding, collaging, decollaging or otherwise assembling them into new and unusual forms. The name evolved from the phrase ‘junk culture’, which had been used in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly in Great Britain and the USA, by writers such as Hilton Kramer (b 1928) to describe the vulgar and kitsch qualities of objects with built-in obsolescence produced in industrial nations after World War II.

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Auto-destructive art.

Term applied to works of art in a variety of media, with the capacity to destroy themselves after a finite existence, ranging from a few moments to 20 years. This self-destruction may result from natural processes such as collisions, decomposition and dematerialization, or from mechanisms requiring collaboration between artists, scientists and engineers, and may be either random and unpredictable or strictly controlled. The term, which is also sometimes used more loosely to describe any works with the capacity to transform themselves, was first used by Gustav Metzger in a manifesto (November 1959). Metzger elaborated on what he saw as an inherently political art theory and practice in five manifestos, in public lectures and demonstrations and in his own innovative techniques, including ‘painting’ in acid on nylon (1960–62).
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Auto-destructive art is a term invented by the artist Gustav Metzger in the early 1960s and put into circulation by his article Machine, Auto-creative and Auto-destructive Art in the summer 1962 issue of the journal Ark. From 1959, he had made work by spraying acid onto sheets of nylon as a protest against nuclear weapons. The procedure produced rapidly changing shapes before the nylon was all consumed, so the work was simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive.

In 1966, Metzger and others organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. This was followed by another in New York in 1968. The Symposium was accompanied by public demonstration of Auto-destructive art including the burning of Skoob Towers by John Latham. These were towers of books (skoob is books in reverse) and Latham's intention was to demonstrate directly his view that Western culture was burned out.

In 1960, the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely made the first of his self-destructive machine sculptures, Hommage a New York, which battered itself to pieces in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Grupo Hondo.

Spanish group of painters. It was formed in Madrid in 1961 by Juan Genoves (b 1930), Jose Paredes Jardiel (b 1928), Fernando Mignoni (b 1929) and Chilean Gaston Orellana (b 1933) and was active until 1964. They first exhibited together in 1961 at the Galería Nebli, Madrid, reacting against the total abstraction of Art informel but applying its free, automatic, rapid and uninhibited techniques to a socially committed and Expressionist ‘neo-figurative’ style. They acquired two new members, José Vento (b 1925) and Carlos Sansegundo (b 1930), for their second exhibition in 1963, at the Sociedad de Amigos de Arte in Madrid, but they went their separate ways a year later.

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Gruppe 5 [Nor.: ‘Group 5’].

Norwegian group of artists active from 1961. It has had a decisive influence on the recognition of abstract art in Norway. The group was founded in 1961 by the Spanish-born Ramon Isern (Sole) (b 1914; d 1989), together with Hakon Bleken (b 1929), Halvdan Ljosne (b 1929), Lars Tiller (1924–94) and Roar Wold (1926 - 2001). They were all teachers in the architectural department (Institutt for form og farge) of the Norges Tekniske Hogskole in Trondheim. They wished to define their shared opposition to the traditional and conventional Trondheim art world and to break Oslo’s dominance of Norwegian art. Without any agreed ideological platform, they examined, in non-representational paintings, the relationship between plane, form, colour, space, the process of abstraction and the legacy of Constructivism, as they had in their teaching. In their abstract paintings the Constructivist stamp was rhythmically enlivened by the materiality of colours and such evocative spatially expansive subjects as that of Wold’s At the Edge of the Beach (1963; Oslo, Mus. Samtidskst). Isern made geometrically defined and totem-like sculptures in different materials, as well as tapestries with similar forms. Most of the group’s members also executed charcoal drawings, graphics and collages, such as Ljosne’s oil painting Accumulation (1965; Oslo, Mus. Samtidskst) with glued-on newspaper clippings and disturbing spatial effects, and wrote articles about art theory .

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Drop Art

In 1961, filmmaker Gene Bernofsky and artist Clark Richert, art students from the University of Kansas, developed an art concept they called Drop Art or "droppings". Informed by the "happenings" of Allan Kaprow and the impromptu performances a few years earlier of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, Drop Art began when Richert and Bernofsky started painted rocks and dropping them from a loft roof onto the sidewalk of Lawrence Kansas's main drag - watching the reactions of passersby. Early Drop Art included such pieces as "Egg Drop" and "Pendulum" (pictured) . Drop Art eventually led to the creation of Drop City, an experimental artist's community founded in 1965 near Trinidad, Colorado. The intention was to create a live-in work of "Drop Art".
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Annandale Imitation Realists.

Australian group of mixed-media artists active in 1962. They formed for the purpose of staging an exhibition of the same name. Ross Crothall (b 1934), Mike Brown and Colin Lanceley worked together in Crothall’s studio in Annandale, a suburb of Sydney, in 1961. They shared an interest in assemblage, collage, junk art, objets trouvés and in non-Western art. Brown, who had worked in New Guinea in 1959, was impressed by the use in tribal house decoration and body ornament of modern urban rubbish such as broken plates and bottletops. Crothall delighted in the altered objet trouvé, for example egg cartons unfolded to become the Young Aesthetic Cow, or pieces of furniture crudely gathered into frontally posed female icons, sparkling with buttons and swirling house-paint, with such titles as Gross Débutante. Lanceley was deeply influenced by his teacher John Olsen and through him by Jean Dubuffet. He covered impastoed surfaces with junk materials, often decorating distorted female forms with strings of pearls, broken plates and other items; in Glad Family Picnic (1961; Sydney, A.G. NSW) elements combine into a garish visual cacophony.

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Soft art.

Term that gained currency in the late 1960s to describe any form of sculpture made from pliable materials and consequently not absolutely fixed in its shape. As an art form its origins can be traced particularly to the ‘soft sculptures’ devised by Claes Oldenburg as early as 1962. Precedents can be found, however, in earlier 20th-century art, beginning with Dada, for example in Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of a typewriter cover as a ready-made entitled Traveller’s Folding Item (1917; untraced; replica, 1964) and in object collages by Man Ray (e.g. the Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, 19204). Sculptures made by Surrealists, such as those shown in Paris at the Galerie Charles Ratton (1936) and at the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme (Paris, Gal. B.-A., 1938), made particular use of malleable materials, often with a strong erotic aspect; Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936; New York, MOMA), a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, is perhaps the most notorious example. The Surrealists displayed such a predilection even in their paintings, as in Salvador Dali’s the Persistence of Memory (1931; New York, MOMA), with its soft watches as an image of the fleeting nature of time.
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Hi-Red Center [Haireddo Senta].

Japanese group of installation artists founded in 1963 and active until 1964. The group’s name comprised a translation of the first part of each founder’s surname: ‘Taka’ from JIRO TAKAMATSU, ‘Aka’ from Genpei Akasegawa (b 1937) and ‘Naka’ from Natsuyuki Nakanishi (b 1935). The group attempted to draw attention to their neo-Dadaist ideas through the staging of public installations and performances. In the Dairoku ji mikisa keikaku (‘The sixth blender plan’) exhibition at the Miyata Clinic, Shinbashi, Tokyo (1963), for example, Nakanishi covered himself in metal clothes-pegs. The Shieruta puran (‘Shelter plan’) event in the Teikoku Hotel, Tokyo (1964), involved the creation of personalized nuclear fall-out shelters by the group’s members. Hi-Red Center also produced a number of pamphlets in addition to their other activities.
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Equipo Cronica [Sp.: ‘the chronicle team’].

Spanish group of painters formed in 1964 and disbanded in 1981. Its original members were Rafael Solbes (1940–81), Manuel Valdés (b 1942) and Juan Antonio Toledo (b 1940), but Toledo left the group in 1965. They worked collaboratively and formed part of a larger movement known as Crónica de la Realidad, using strongly narrative figurative images that were formally indebted to Pop art and that had a pronounced social and political content directed primarily against Franco’s regime.

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Post-painterly Abstraction.

Term devised as an exhibition title in 1964 by the critic Clement Greenberg to describe a new trend in American abstract painting that emerged in reaction to Abstract Expressionism. Extending to contemporary art the distinction made by Heinrich Wolfflin between painterly and linear art, Greenberg postulated that the most recent painting, although still owing something to its immediate forebears, was in contrast moving towards a greater linear clarity and/or a physical openness of design.

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Ugly Realism.

Term coined to describe the work of a number of artists working in Berlin in the 1960s. These artists combined the fine draughtsmanship of Otto Dix and George Grosz with an iconographical treatment of the ‘ugly’: this could be a pimple, a deformed limb or a terrorist with a machine-gun, all rendered with a chilling photographic clarity that pointed to the brutality, shallowness, alienation and perversion of modern urban humanity. The objects and figures presented to the observer in such detail were designed to provoke in him a mixture of disgust, revulsion and distaste as well as a reluctance to recognize what was being portrayed. Many of the artists associated with Ugly Realism were originally members of the artists’ co-operative gallery in Berlin, Grossgorschen 35, founded in 1964. In 1966 a rift developed between the expressionist faction represented by K. H. Hodicke, Markus Lupertz and Koberling and the so-called critical realists, Ulrich Baehr (b 1938), Charles Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick and Peter Sorge (b 1937), who later made the Galerie Eva Poll home to this new brand of realism.

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