Henri Matisse: drawing with scissors: masterpieces from the late years

French Fauvism (c. 1904–1907) comprised a loosely formed group of painters whose mentor, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), argued for a new approach to painting, integrating the chromatic lessons of Neo-Impressionism, the symbolist evocation of sensation through color and form and the expressive nature of the artist. The style was not programmatically theorized until it was essentially over, and yet Fauvism fundamentally shifted the course of modern painting, anticipating Cubism, Orphism and abstract painting. Fauvism incorporated bold, brash colors, often applied directly from commercially produced tubes of paint; gestural and broken brush-work; lack of finish; and color used for expression rather than description, resulting in flattened and distorted perspectives that radically diverged from mimetic representation. While its pictorial advances shocked conservative critics and audiences of its time, Fauvism – like many early avant-garde movements – maintained an appreciation of historical painting and its iconographies (landscape, cityscape, still life, and portraiture). Similar to Expressionism, Fauvism differed significantly from the German schools Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905–13) and Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911–14) in its stress on pleasing decorative and synthetic effects.

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Seurat, Georges-Pierre (1859–1891)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1431-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lynn M. Somers

Keyword(s):

Pablo Picasso ◽

Henri Matisse ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Sunday Afternoon ◽

Paul Gauguin ◽

Vincent Van Gogh ◽

Painting Technique ◽

French Painting ◽

Gallery System ◽

Figure Paintings

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family, painter and draughtsman Georges-Pierre Seurat enjoyed a brief but mature career as the leading French Neo-Impressionist. His invention of Divisionism (or "chromo-luminarism"), a painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics, challenged the spontaneity and fluidity of Impressionism, which by the 1880s had been largely subsumed by a capitalist gallery system. In 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, Seurat debuted his monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (1884–1886), a "patient tapestry" of line and color that led the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon to coin the term néo-impressionisme. Equally shaped by the Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the Baudelairean praise of the ephemerality of modern life, La Grande-Jatte symbolically closed a chapter in French painting. Seurat’s systematic aesthetic produced an indelible impact on fin de siècle artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, and later Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, and André Breton’s Surrealism, firmly establishing him as integral to the 20th-century avant-garde. Seurat’s oeuvre includes approximately 500 drawings and 6 major figure paintings, an astonishing output for a career that lasted only 11 years.

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Orientalism

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1206-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Katherine Higgins

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

Western Europe ◽

The West ◽

Henri Matisse ◽

Wassily Kandinsky ◽

Eastern Culture ◽

Western Art ◽

Anthropological Study ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Definition Of

Orientalism is the sociological, historical, cultural, and anthropological study of the Orient, with "the Orient" constituting countries East of "the Occident" (Western Europe), and including lands spanning from Morocco to Japan. The term Orientalism, however, is primarily used to describe the incorporation of Eastern culture in Western art, literature, and design during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Artists whose work largely focused on Oriental subjects are often referred to as the Orientalists, and include Eugène Delacroix, Alphonse Etienne Dinet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Holman-Hunt, John Frederick Lewis, and the photographers Lehnert and Landrock. Traces of Oriental themes can also be found in the work of 20th-century artists including Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Wassily Kandinsky. Orientalist artists predominantly depicted scenes of the Arabian Desert, portraits of natives with Oriental artefacts and clothing, the harem, odalisques, and Oriental architecture. Broadly speaking, the Orientalists represented the Orient as primitive yet opulent, and in stark contrast to the "rational" and enlightened West. Much of the scholarship around (and the very definition) of Orientalism in the 20th century is indebted to Said’s Orientalism (1977), which discusses why the West has preconceived notions of the Orient (and primarily the peoples of the Middle East).

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