Revision of History of Modern Art

I've only pick 3 art movement to revise, de Stijl, Bauhaus and minimalism.

A book that I've borrowed from TOA library.

Book name : History of Modern Art

Author : H.H Arnason & Elizabeth C.Mansfield

de Stijl 

• "the style" ,1910s. 
• known as neoplastism
Pre– and Post–World War 1 art experiments: new forms to express modern life
• Russian Revolution (1917)
• Led by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian (the 2 famous among the others)
• de Stijl embraced geometric abstraction and Constructivist ideas(free from the resurgence in classicism that led so many French avant-garde artists to retreat from abstraction.)
• Geometric abstraction was in part an attempt to create a scientifically based, universal language of the senses that would transcend the cultural, political, and economic divisions compounded by the war. 
• The members of de Stijl sought a universal aesthetic that would unify all forms of visual art while also unifying humanity.
• "the absolute devaluation of tradition.....the exposure of the whole swindle of lyricism and sentiment."
• "the need for abstraction and simplification" : mathematical structure as opposed to Impressionism and all "baroque" forms of art.
• transmitted through the straight line, the rectangle, or the cube, and eventually through colors simplified to the primaries red, yellow and blue and the neutrals black, white and gray.
• Symbolic significance
• popular spiritual movement
• unified and coherent entity, it included many individual talents who did not strictly adhere to a single style.
• Formal purity, logic , balance, proportion and rhythm.

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Piet Mondrian 

1904

-Trained in Amsterdam Rijksacademie until 1904 worked primarily as landscape painter.

-Under influence of Jan Toorop for painted Symbolist manner. 

-Early work evinces tendency to work in series, focus on single scene or object. 

1908

-He is being aware some of innovations of modern art.

-Color blossomed in Fauveinspired blues, yellows, pinks and reds.

-Painted motifs such as church facades, from the inspiration of Neo- Impressionists and the brush strokes of Van Gogh.

-One can be trace his progress from naturalism through Symbolism , Impressionism, Post- Impressionism ,Fauvism and Cubism to abstraction.

1912

-Mondrian moving beyond the tenets of Cubism to eliminate both subject and three-dimensional illusionistic depth.

-He favored centralized compositions, which involve greater density in the center with gradual loosening towards the edges. 

-His occasional adoption of the oval canvas(inspired by the Cubists) allowed him to emphasize further the ideas of center and periphery. As his experiments continues, the linear structure of his paintings became more rectangular and abstract. 

1914

-the artist had begun to experiment with a broader but still subtle range of colors, asserting their identity within a structure of horizontal and vertical lines.

-In Paris, Mondrian was profoundly affected by the example of Cubism, but gradually began to feel that the style " did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries: it was not developing abstraction towards it ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality. - plasticism.

-Mondrian became aware of 

Neoplasticism : (a) in plastic art reality can be expressed only through the equilibrium of dynamic movements of form and color; (b) pure means afford the most effective way of attaining this.

-From that led artist to develop a set of organizational principles in his art. Chief among them were the balance of unequal opposites, achieved through the right angle, the simplification of color to the primary hues plus black and white.

Between 1914 - 1916 

-Eliminated all vestige of curved lines, the structure became predominantly vertical and horizontal.

1917

-Explored another variation , rectangle of flat color of varying sizes , suspended in a sometimes loose, sometimes precise rectangular arrangement. Color rectangle sometime touch, sometimes float independently, sometimes overlap.

-Interaction creates surprising illusion of depth and movement,  as they kept rigidly parallel to the surface of canvas.

1920 

-his painting express abstract , universal ideas: the dynamic balance of vertical and horizontal linear structure and simple, fundamental color. 

-He ultimate aim was to express a visual unity through an "equivalence of opposites" ; this in turn expressed the higher mystical unity of the universe. 

-Mondrian found his solution to a long unsolved problem - how to express universals through a dynamic and asymmetrical equilibrium of vertical and horizontal structure, with primary hues of color disposed in rectangular areas.

-The solution, he found, lay in making the forms independent of color, with heavy lines moving through the rectangles of colors. 

-The total structure is emphatic, not simply containing the color rectangles but functioning as a counterpoint to them. 

1932

-Mondrian introduced a dramatic new element in one of his Neoplastic compositions when he divided a black horizontal into two lines, 

-"Double line" he set out to replace all vestiges of static form with a "dynamic equilibrium" 

Work from Mondrian

image from http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78441

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Van Doesburg

- moving spirit in the formation and development of de Stijl 

-Fascinated by the mathematical implications of his new abstraction, he exploredthe possibilities in linear structures as in a later version of Card Player which by Cézanne.

1920 

-Van Doesburg attention turned to architecture.

-Began abandon the rigid vertical-horizontal formula of Mondrian and de Stijl , to introduce diagonals. 

1926

-Doesburg made his most monumental statement of Elementarist principles. He tilted his colored rectangles at 45 degree angles and framed them in uniform strips of color. 

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Some other sources about De Stijl 

Video found in youtube

Key words that I jotted down
-Utopian perception of spiritual harmony by Mondrian 

-Universalize 

-simple visual

-Nature forming 

-The ascent of meaning within the world

-Nature reality 

-The artist do not frame the painting , the extension of the world 

De Stijl Inspired Websites

http://pixelslave.com/

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Bauhaus

From :http://www.abstract-art-framed.com/bauhaus.html

Some key pointed I highlighted :

• The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919 by architect, Walter Gropius with the aim of bridging the gap between art, design and industry and unifying all three. 
• It was a school where students received theoretical and practical training in all of the fine arts -ceramics, murals, stained glass, typography, metalwork, book binding, stone sculpture and furniture-making – and learned to combine these fine art skills with new technologies to design and manufacture products that were both beautiful and practical.
• Its aim had been to bring artists and craftspeople together to ensure the survival of beautiful craftsmanship in the face of mechanized labour.
• Gropius’ aim was to unite artists and craftspeople in order to embrace technological developments. 
• Bauhaus aimed to create an environment in which artists could work alongside architects and designers to contribute to the ‘building of the future’ using this new machine technology.
• The Dutch De Stijl movement founded by artist and architect, Theo van Doesburg was particularly influential during between 1924 and 1928. 
• ‘machine aesthetic’

Minimalism

From http://www.theartstory.org/movement-minimalism.htm

• created objects which often blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and were characterized by unitary, geometric forms and industrial materials. 
• In seeking to make objects which avoided the appearance of fine art objects, the Minimalists attempted to remove the appearance of composition from their work.
• "Minimalism" was the term that eventually stuck, perhaps because it best described the way the artists reduced art to the minimum number of colors, shapes, lines and textures. 
• The Minimalists' emphasis on eradicating signs of authorship from the artwork (by using simple, geometric forms, and courting the appearance of industrial objects) led, inevitably, to the sense that the meaning of the object lay not "inside" it, but rather on its surface - it arose from the viewer's interaction with the object.
• Minimalism was beginning to show signs of breaking apart as a movement