19th Century Isms

Modern art began in the late 19th century with the development of Impressionism. Other isms had existed before Impressionism, though Impressionism was the first truly modern artistic movement: a departure from the traditions of Classicism and Realism, and a step towards abstraction.

Numerous groups reacted against Impressionism, including the Symbolists, Cloisonnists, Synthetists, and Neo-Impressionists. A fin de siecle atmosphere of artistic experimentation and innovation precipitated Modernism and the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century.

It's notable that many 19th century isms were coined by art critics rather than artists. Impressionism was originally employed as a disparaging term in an exhibition review. Japanism, Cloisonnism, Proto-Modernism, Primitivism, and Neo-Impressionism were all styles analysed, defined, and labelled by writers in response to the art being produced at the time. Later, in the 20th century, isms would spring increasingly from manifestos written by the artists themselves.

Aestheticism

Aestheticism was a late 19th century cultural movement dedicated to the production of 'l'art pour l'art' (Theophile Gautier's motto, 'art for art's sake'). The British equivalent of French Symbolism and Italian Decadentism, its influence ranged from literature and painting to the decorative arts and interior design.

Leading aesthetes included playwright Oscar Wilde, illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and painter James McNeil Whistler. Whistler's portrait Arrangement In Gray And Black: The Artist's Mother (1871) is arguably America's most famous painting.

Catalan Modernism
see: Modernisme

Chromoluminarism
see: Pointillism

Chromoluminarisme
see: Pointillism

Cloisonnism

Cloissonnisme (Cloisonnism) was a style of painting developed by Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin. Their paintings, influenced by Gothic stained-glass and cloisonne enamels, contain saturated colours separated by bold outlines, and are also notable for their lack of perspective. The term was coined by Edouard Dujardin in his essay Le Cloisonnisme (1888), in which he noted that Antequin's work "resembles painting by compartments, analogous to the cloisonne manner, and such a technique consists in a sort of cloisonnism".

Several works by the Synthetist and Primitivist artist Paul Gauguin, especially La Vision Apres Le Sermon (La Lutte De Jacob Avec L'Ange) (1888), also demonstrate the key principles of Cloisonnism. Like Bernard and Anquetin, Gauguin was also inspired by Japanese wood-cuts, a trend known as Japanism.

Cloissonnisme
see: Cloisonnism

Decadentism

Decadentismo (Decadentism) was an Italian literary style inspired by the British Aestheticism and French Symbolism movements. The group took its name from the French magazine Le Decadent, founded by Anatole Bajou in 1886.

Decandentismo
see: Decadentism

Divisionism
see: Pointillism

Divisionnisme
see: Pointillism

Impressionism

Impressionnisme (Impressionism) takes its name from Claude Monet's painting Impression, Soleil Levant (1872). The painting was first shown in 1874, when Monet and a small group of his contemporaries held an independent exhibition to compete with the conservative Salon de Paris. (This situation would be repeated, in reverse, a century later, when the conservative Stuckists held an exhibition in London to protest against the perceived radicalism of the Turner Prize.)

Reviews of this first independent exhibition were largely hostile, which was hardly surprising given Impressionism's radical departure from conventional Realism. In his satirical review, headlined L'Exposition Des Impressionnistes (1874), Louis Leroy comments on Monet's painting: "Impression - I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it".

Monet's painting, in its form and content, epitomises several key components of Impressionism. It is a landscape painted en plein air, rather than a studio portrait. It was painted with short, thick strokes, resulting in visible brush strokes and patches of unmixed colour. There is an emphasis on the shadows and reflections cast by natural light, an effect developed further by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose Bal Du Moulin De La Galette (1876), with its dappled light, is another Impressionist masterpiece.

Impressionism marks the birth of modern art. It led to the experimentations of Neo-Impressionism. At the turn of the 20th century, it influenced Post-Impressionist artists who subsequently inspired the Cubists and Fauvists. There is a traceable line of influence from Monet and Renoir to Paul Gaugin, Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, and together they represent the greatest artists of the early modern era.

Impressionnisme
see: Impressionism

Japanism

The availability of Japanese wood-cut prints in Europe in the mid 19th century led to a Japanese influence on Impressionist and Cloisonnist artists, and their contemporaries. The term Japonisme (Japanism, alternatively spelt Japonism), describing this trend, was first used by Philippe Burty in his series of three Japonisme journal articles (1872-1873). Internationally, the most famous Japanese wood-cut is Katsushika Hokusai's Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura (circa 1831).

Japonism
see: Japanism

Japonisme
see: Japanism

Luminism

The label Luminism was applied retrospectively to a style of American painting from the middle of the nineteenth century, which was concerned with the representation of light in natural landscapes. Artists associated with this movement include John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. Their work anticipated the later Impressionist fascination with light and nature, though unlike the Impressionists the Luminists painted with meticulous detail.

Luminisme (Luminism) was also the name given to a group of Post-Impressionist Belgian painters, notably Emile Claus. His 1891 painting De Ijsvogels captures sunlight reflected on ice.

Finally, Piet Mondrian and other Dutch artists who experimented with Post-Impressionist and Pointillist techniques were also labelled Luminists. (In the 20th century, Mondrian developed his own Post-Impressionist style, Neo-Plasticism.)

Luminisme
see: Luminism

Modernisme

Modernisme (also known as Catalan Modernism) emerged as an architectural and literary movement in Catalonia in the 1880s. It was influenced by Symbolism and the widespread Art Nouveau style, though it also had a political agenda: the promotion of Catalan cultural heritage, as distinct from the national Spanish culture.

Antoni Gaudi is the most notable architect associated with Modernisme. His buildings, especially the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona (1883 onwards; uncompleted), feature Gothic and Art Nouveau ornamentation, though they are also celebrated for their curvaceous, organic forms. Salvador Dali later cited Gaudi's work as an influence on Surrealism.

Modernismo

The Spanish literary movement Modernismo was initiated by the poet Ruben Dario. Modernismo rejected sentimentality and subscribed to Aestheticism's slogan 'art for art's sake'. Dario's first Modernismo collection, Prosas Profanas Y Otros Poemas, published in 1896, was influenced by Symbolism.

Neo-Impressionism
see: Pointillism

Neo-Impressionnisme
see: Pointillism

Neo-Traditionalism

Maurice Denis published his Definition Du Neo-Traditionalisme pseudonymously as Pierre-Louis, in 1890. Denis was originally a Symbolist, and Neo-Traditionalisme (Neo-Traditionalism) was a reaction against the mid 19th century Realist movement: "Everywhere those with aesthetic imagination triumph over those who attempt crude imitation, the emotions of Beauty triumph over the lies of Naturalism".

Denis's first principle of Neo-Traditionalism seems to anticipate early 20th century Cubist and abstract art, and the Formalist emphasis on compositional elements: "We should remember that a picture - before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particular pattern".

Later, Cubism also emphasised the "flat surface" of the painting, and abstract artists were concerned with "colours arranged in a particular pattern". Ironically, Denis himself is most associated with purely representational religious imagery, though his bright, semi-abstract Taches De Soleil Sur La Terrasse (1890) is a notable exception.

Neo-Traditionalisme
see: Neo-Traditionalism

Parallelism

Parallelitat (Parallelism) was coined by Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland. Hodler was influenced by Symbolism, though he formulated his theory of Parallelism in Parallelitat, an essay published in 1895: "Parallelism can be pointed out in different parts of a single object, looked at alone; it is even more obvious when one puts several objects of the same kind next to each other".

Hodler felt that Parallelism could heighten the viewer's response to a painting: "If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy". He often painted figures posing in symmetrical formation, as in Blick In Die Unendlichkeit (1913). More than a hundred years after Hodler, Thai artist Nitaya Ueareeworakul used Parallelism as the title of an exhibition in 2000.

Parallelitat
see: Parallelism

Parnassianism

Parnassianism, sometimes abbreviated to Parnassism, was a style of French poetry named after the journal Le Parnasse Contemporain. The journal, originally edited by Louis-Xavier de Ricard and Catulle Mendes, was first published in 1866, and was influenced by Aestheticism's motto 'art for art's sake'.

Parnassism
see: Parnassianism

Pictorialism

Pictorialism was an attempt to combine the traditional aesthetics of painting with the new medium of photography, using soft-focus to create a painterly effect. The style was promoted by Henry Peach Robinson, in his 1869 book Pictorial Effect In Photography: Being Hints On Composition & Chiaroscuro For Photographers.

Robinson discussed the "guiding laws in composition and chiaroscuro, which must, in all forms of art, be the basis of pictorial effect". He later wrote The Elements Of A Pictorial Photograph, in 1896. His most famous photograph is Fading Away, from 1858, produced from a composite of several negatives in a process known as combination printing.

Pointillism

Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed Chromoluminarisme (Chromoluminarism) in 1884, after discovering that individual dots of colour, when juxtaposed, could be combined optically by the viewer. Seurat, who was also associated with Symbolism, employed the technique for his vast canvas Un Dimanche Apres-Midi A L'Ile De La Grande Jatte (1886). Signac later defined the theory, which he called Divisionnisme (Divisionism), as the "optical mixture of solely pure pigments", in his 1899 book D'Eugene Delacroix Au Neo-Impressionnisme.

Today, the technique is known as Pointillisme (Pointillism), a term coined by Felix Feneon, which he described in Neo-Impressionnisme (1887) as "the scientific division of tones: Thus, instead of stirring his mixture on the palette to achieve the more or less finished hues required to represent the surface, the painter will place directly on the canvas brushstrokes depicting the local color". Feneon's essay introduced Neo-Impressionnisme (Neo-Impressionism) as a label to distinguish Seurat and Signac from the earlier Impressionists.

Pointillisme
see: Pointillism

Primitivism

Paul Gauguin lived for some time in Tahiti, and his exoticised paintings of the local culture, notably the large-scale D'Ou Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Ou Allons Nous (1897), were later described as Primitivist. Gauguin was also associated with Cloissonism, Symbolism, and Synthetism.

Inspired in part by Gauguin's emphasis on non-Western subject-matter, Pablo Picasso became interested in African sculptures and tribal masks. Picasso's Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon reveals his interest in Primitive art, as two of the demoiselles have African facial features.

Proto-Modernism

The architects and designers whose work prefigured the 20th century Modernist movement were retrospectively labelled Proto-Modernists. The Wiener Werkstatte group, for example, produced Proto-Modernist decorative arts in Vienna at the start of the 20th century.

Architect Louis Sullivan's maxim 'form follows function' was a philosophy integral to Modernism, and Sullivan was one of the pioneers of skyscraper design. His Wainwright Building, in St Louis, Missouri, constructed in 1891, was one of the world's first steel-framed buildings, and paved the way for the Skyscraperism of the early 20th century.

Symbolism

Symbolisme (Symbolism) emphasised imagination and spirituality as opposed to Realism. Symbolist art and literature depicted dream-imagery and mythical figures, in contrast to Impressionism's focus on natural scenes. The painters Maurice Denis (Neo-Traditionalism), Paul Gaugin (Synthetism; Primitivism; Cloisonnism), and Georges Seurat (Neo-Impressionism), amongst others, are associated with Symbolism, and the group also influenced Modernismo and Modernisme.

Jean Moreas wrote the Symbolist manifesto, Le Manifeste Symboliste, in 1886, and published a journal titled Le Symboliste in the same year. In his manifesto, Moreas emphasised the symbolic meaning of art: "scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideal".

Symbolisme
see: Symbolism

Synthetism

Synthetisme (Synthetism) dates from an 1889 group exhibition organised by Paul Gauguin in Paris. The exhibition was titled L'Exposition De Peintures Du Groupe Impressioniste Et Synthetiste, to highlight the distinction between Synthetism and Impressionism.

Gauguin was influenced by Symbolism and Cloisonnism; in the early 20th century, his bold use of colour was an inspiration to the Fauvists, and his work was included in the Post-Impressionism exhibition. He specialised in an exoticised, Primitivist depiction of non-Western culture, based on his experiences in Tahiti.

Synthetisme
see: Synthetism