REALISM
 Attempted to depict everyday life in its purest form.
 Realists rejected the embellished, idealistic art of the
past and used detail in an attempt to be absolutely true
to the object depicted.
Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875)
one of the Barbizon painters
THE GLEANERS
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
 Quote on realistic painting:
"Show me an angel and I'll paint you one."
THE SLEEPING
SPINNER
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
 Madame Bovary was
his most famous work
Emile Zola (1840-1902)
 Known for his support
of Alfred Dreyfus
 Also associated with
Naturalism
IMPRESSIONISM
 Attempts to give an immediate impression on canvas
of the artist's subject.
 Its name comes from a painting by the French artist
Claude Monet entitled Impression Sunrise (1870).
 The impressionists were influenced by new scientific
studies of color and light.
 Impressionists liked to paint outdoors and attempted
to reproduce light on their canvases, sometimes
applying small strokes of pure color in order to achieve
this effect rather than mixing it on the palette.
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
“Water Lilies”
“Bridge at Argenteuil”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
“Girl with the watering can”
“Luncheon of the boating party”
Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
“Ballet Class”
Degas’ sculpture
Naturalism
 A literary movement that ttempted to apply scientific
methods and principles to literature and drama.
 The movement first developed in France, but the
naturalistic style of writing later spread to the United
States, Russia, Germany, and Scandinavia.
 Naturalists believed that reality could only be verified
through the senses and that a writer's goal was the
objective reporting of observations.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
His most famous work
was the play “A Doll’s House”
SCIENCE - Charles Darwin
 1859 – The Origin of the Species
 Developed theory of natural selection (survival of the
fittest)
SCIENCE - Physics
 Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg
Modernism
 An artistic movement that began in 1880 as artists, writers,
and architects attempted to replace older artistic styles
with innovative new styles.
 Artistic styles considered modernist include
postimpressionism, expressionism, cubism, dadaism,
Bauhaus, futurism, and surrealism.
 What unified those diverse movements was a break with
traditional narrative and its attempt to realistically present
a coherent, unified, sensible world. Modernist works,
instead, portrayed the world as ambiguous, fragmented,
and obscured by psychological impulses or the inability of
language to describe our essential reality.
Bloomsbury Group
 The Bloomsbury group was a collective of intellectuals
who gathered in London from the early 20th century
until the 1930s.
 The group was organized by Virginia Woolf and her
siblings and became famous for its criticism of
Victorian ideas concerning artistic, sexual, and social
matters.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
 His most lasting contributions came in his belief that a
pure laissez-faire economy was ill-suited to provide full
employment for workers and was likewise unable to
pull an ailing economy out of a recession or
depression.
 He theorized that in order for an economy to recover
from a downturn and remain strong, demand must be
enhanced, both through low interest rates and greater
public expenditures.
Keynesian economics
Modernism in Music
 IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) – “The Rite of Spring”
Auguste Comte
 Father of sociology
 Thought society could be studied in a scientific manner
 Created theory called positivism
Friedrich Nietzsche
 German philosopher
 ANTI- rationality, religion, democracy, nationalism,
racism,etc.
 His most famous work was Thus Spake Zarathustra
 Supported the theory of a heroic superman or
“Ubermensch” who embodied greatness and a higher
humanity
Sigmund Freud
 Jewish Austrian doctor
 Studied the unconscious
• THE ID
• THE EGO
• THE SUPEREGO
 The father of psychoanalysis
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
 Postimpressionist artists expanded upon the work of
impressionists.
 The styles of the artists associated are highly
individualistic, and their concerns ranged from
pictorial structure (Paul Cézanne) to the imagination
(Paul Gauguin) to the scientific perception of color
(Georges Seurat).
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
Georges Seurat (1859-1891)
HE DEVELOPED POINTILISM
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
“Starry Night”
Expressionism
 Artists attempted to express a state of mind, focusing on
emotions and psychological responses to objects and
events rather than objective reality.
 The term expressionism was first used to describe painting,
but it also came to describe literature, opera, and film.
 Although it was most dominant in Germany, expressionism
was practiced by artists in Austria, France, and Russia. The
exhibition and production of expressionist art was banned
in Germany as the Nazis came to power in 1933, and many
expressionist artists were exiled to the United States and
other countries.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
“The
Scream”
Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
“Transverse
Line”
1923
Cubism
 Cubism was an artistic style begun by Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque in early-20th-century France.
 In cubism, objects were transformed into basic
geometric shapes and reassembled in a variety of ways
so that the objects became abstract.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
“Guernica”
POSSIBLE SUBJECTS FOR
IMPRESSIONIST PAINTINGS