1.
Serge Poliakoff
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Serge Poliakoff was a Russian-born French modernist painter belonging to the New Ecole de Paris. Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow in 1906, the thirteenth of fourteen children and his father, a Kyrgyz, supplied the army with horses that he bred himself and also owned a racing stable. His mother was involved with the church, and its religious icons fascinated him. He enrolled at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and he arrived in Constantinople in 1920, living off the profits from his talent as a guitarist. He went on to pass through Sofia, Belgrade, Vienna, in 1929 he enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. His paintings remained purely academic until he discovered, during his stay in London from 1935 to 1937 and it was a little afterwards that he met Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Otto Freundlich. With these influences, Poliakoff quickly came to be considered as one of the most powerful painters of his generation. In 1947, he was trained by Jean Deyrolle in Gordes in the Vaucluse region of France amongst peers such as Gérard Schneider, Giloli, Victor Vasarely, a contract enabled him to quickly gain better financial stability. In 1962 a room was given over to his paintings by the Venice Biennial and his works are now displayed in a large number of museums in Europe and New York. Poliakoff also worked with ceramics at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres and he influenced the paintings of Arman. In 2013, The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is devoting a large-scale retrospective to the painter which includes 150 works from the period 1946-1969. Since 1970 there has no significant exhibition of the work of Serge Poliakoff in what became his home city. Jean Cassou, Poliakoff, Bodensee-Verlag, Amriswil,1963, lydia Harambourg, Serge Poliakoff, dans LÉcole de Paris 1945-1965, Dictionnaire des peintres, Neuchâtel, Ides et Calendes,1993. Lorenzelli Arte Milano, Serge Poliakoff Biography - Serge Poliakoff, The Dream of Forms - Musée dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris
2.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
3.
Abstract art
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Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective, the arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning, Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete, even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities, Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational art often contains partial abstraction, both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. It is at level of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it, in Chinese painting, abstraction can be traced to the Tang dynasty painter Wang Mo, who is credited to have invented the splashed-ink painting style. While none of his paintings remain, this style is seen in some Song Dynasty Paintings. A late Song painter named Yu Jian, adept to Tiantai buddhism and his paintings show heavily misty mountains in which the shapes of the objects are barely visible and extremely simplified. This type of painting was continued by Sesshu Toyo in his later years, another instance of abstraction in Chinese painting is seen in Zhu Deruns Cosmic Circle. The painting is a reflection of the Daoist metaphysics in which chaos, in Tokugawa Japan some zen monk-painters created Enso, a circle who represents the absolute enlightenment. Usually made in one spontaneous brush stroke, it became the paradigm of the minimalist aesthetic that guided part of the zen painting, three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. Artistic independence for artists was advanced during the 19th century, patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. Expressionist painters explored the use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations
4.
Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
5.
Abstract expressionism
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Action painting, sometimes called gestural abstraction, is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist. The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, a comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme. According to Rosenberg the canvas was an arena in which to act, to Greenberg, it was the physicality of the paintings clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them. – Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction and it is essential for the understanding of action painting to place it in historical context. Action painting took this a further, using both Jung and Freud’s ideas of the subconscious as its underlying foundations. The paintings of the Action painters were not meant to portray objects per se or even specific emotions, instead they were meant to touch the observer deep in the subconscious mind, evoking a sense of the primeval and tapping the collective sense of an archetypal visual language. This was done by the artist painting unconsciously, and spontaneously, creating an arena of raw emotion and action. Action painting was influenced by the surrealist emphasis on automatism which influenced by psychoanalysis claimed a more direct access to the subconscious mind. Important exponents of this concept of art making were the painters Joan Miró, however the action painters took everything the surrealists had done a step further. Action Writing, Jack Kerouacs Wild Form, Carbondale, IL, auction record including a color image of a 1960 action painting by Elaine Hamilton. 9th Street Art Exhibition-abstract expressionist artists reminisce—YouTube video
6.
Informalism
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Several distinguishing trends are identified within the movement such as lyrical abstraction, matter painting, New Paris School, tachisme and art brut. The French art critic Michel Tapié coined the term art autre in the book in 1952 in relation to non-geometric abstract art. This movement has given way to New Informalism in the year 2000 in Chevry ll, in Gif sur Yvettes, it’s an open work that a spectator can read freely. The pictorial adventure is completely new, instead of going from the meaning to constructing the corresponding signs, in the works of Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer, the language of signs is further deconstructed, allowing for a universal interpretation of a private language. The contribution of music produced the art of musical informalism, lengerke, Ch. von, «La pintura contemporánea
7.
Action painting
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Action painting, sometimes called gestural abstraction, is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist. The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, a comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme. According to Rosenberg the canvas was an arena in which to act, to Greenberg, it was the physicality of the paintings clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them. – Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction and it is essential for the understanding of action painting to place it in historical context. Action painting took this a further, using both Jung and Freud’s ideas of the subconscious as its underlying foundations. The paintings of the Action painters were not meant to portray objects per se or even specific emotions, instead they were meant to touch the observer deep in the subconscious mind, evoking a sense of the primeval and tapping the collective sense of an archetypal visual language. This was done by the artist painting unconsciously, and spontaneously, creating an arena of raw emotion and action. Action painting was influenced by the surrealist emphasis on automatism which influenced by psychoanalysis claimed a more direct access to the subconscious mind. Important exponents of this concept of art making were the painters Joan Miró, however the action painters took everything the surrealists had done a step further. Action Writing, Jack Kerouacs Wild Form, Carbondale, IL, auction record including a color image of a 1960 action painting by Elaine Hamilton. 9th Street Art Exhibition-abstract expressionist artists reminisce—YouTube video
8.
Lyrical abstraction
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It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism, in use since the 1940s. Many well known abstract expressionist painters like Arshile Gorky seen in context have been characterized as doing a type of painting described as lyrical abstraction, whose works related to characteristics of contemporary American abstract expressionism. The art movement Abstraction lyrique was born in Paris after the war, at that time, the artistic life in Paris, which had been devastated by the Occupation and Collaboration, resumed with numerous artists exhibited again as soon as the Liberation of Paris in mid-1944. According to the new forms that characterised some artists, the movement was named by the art critic, Jean José Marchand. Some art critics also looked at this movement as an attempt to restore the image of artistic Paris, Lyrical abstraction was opposed not only to the Cubist and Surrealist movements that preceded it, but also to geometric abstraction. Lyrical abstraction was, in ways, the first to apply the lessons of Kandinsky. For the artists, lyrical abstraction represented an opening to personal expression. S. A, Lyrical Abstraction was opposed not only to l’Ecole de Paris remains of pre-war style but to Cubist and Surrealist movements that had preceded it, and also to geometric abstraction. Lyrical Abstraction was in ways the first to apply the lessons of Kandinsky. For the artists in France, Lyrical Abstraction represented an opening to personal expression, in Belgium, Louis Van Lint figured a remarkable example of an artist who, after a short period of geometric abstraction, has moved to a lyrical abstraction in which he excelled. At the Drouin gallery one could see Jean Le Moal, Gustave Singier, Alfred Manessier, Roger Bissière, Wols and others. In March 1951 was held the larger exhibition Véhémences confrontées in the gallery Nina Dausset where for the first time were presented side to side French and it was organised by the critic Michel Tapié, whose role in the defense of this movement was of the highest importance. With these events, he déclared that « the lyrical abstraction is born » and it was, however, a fairly short reign, which was quickly supplanted by the New realism of Pierre Restany and Yves Klein. Starting around 1970, this movement has been revived by a new generation of artists born during or immediately after the Second World War, some of its key promoters include Paul Kallos, Georges Romathier, Michelle Desterac, and Thibaut de Reimpré. American Lyrical Abstraction is an art movement that emerged in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process, occasional imagery, and other painterly and newer technological techniques. Lyrical Abstraction led the way away from minimalism in painting and toward a new freer expressionism, many of them had been Minimalists, working with various monochromatic, geometric styles, and whose paintings publicly evolved into new abstract painterly motifs. American Lyrical Abstraction is related in spirit to Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Tachisme refers to the French style of abstract painting current in the 1945–1960 period. Very close to Art Informel, it presents the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism, the Sheldon Museum of Art held an exhibition from 1 June until 29 August 1993 entitled Lyrical Abstraction, Color and Mood. Many artists began moving away from geometric, hard-edge, and minimal styles, toward more lyrical, sensuous and these lyrical abstractionists sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting, and to revive and reinvigorate a painterly tradition in American art
9.
Gutai group
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The Gutai group is the first radical, post-war artistic group in Japan. It was founded in 1954 by the painter Jiro Yoshihara in Osaka, Japan and this influential group was involved in large-scale multimedia environments, performances, and theatrical events and emphasizes the relationship between body and matter in pursuit of originality. The movement rejected traditional art styles in favor of performative immediacy, shozo Shimamoto and Jiro Yoshihara founded Gutai together in 1954, and it was Shimamoto who suggested the name Gutai. The kanji used to write gu meaning tool, measures, or a way of doing something, Yoshihara considers it to mean embodiment and concreteness. The group was known as Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai. Coming about during postwar Japanese reconstruction, Gutai stressed freedom of expression with innovative materials, Gutai challenged imaginations to invent new notions of what art is with attention on the relationships between body, matter, time, and space. After the war, attitudes regarding cultural exchanging changed amongst nations as the art environment involved great optimism for global collaboration, since artists were pursuing advances in contemporary art transnationally, the art environment of the time fostered thriving conditions for the Gutai group. For example, with the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, Gutai artwork began being shown in exhibitions in both American and European cities. In the early 1950s, works by Yoshihara were featured in the shows of Nihon Kokusai Bijutsu-ten. In Osaka 1951, Yoshihara and others established the Gendai Bijutsu Kondan Kai and this group served as a workshop and forum for creating new art forms merging Eastern and Western culture as well as the modern and traditional. With post-occupation Japans emphasis on freedom, the United States goal was as well to promote art in order to promote democracy. This helped spread Gutai art since it sponsored its creation, Yoshihara Jiro was a businessman, self-taught painter who founded Gutai art in 1954 by gathering a group of artistic protégés in Ashiya, Hyōgo. The group shared a space in Osaka. He directed the artists to attempt to do what has never been done before and these early works focused on marks made from bodily movements. Yoshiharas vision for Gutai was one of internationality, which was very plausible considering the climate of the time. The worldwide distribution of hundreds of bulletins titled Gutai is perhaps the first proactive international effort done by Yoshihara and this notion is something that Gutai did indeed want to express. The avant-garde abstract art of the created a universal language. Gutai engaged in this language yet used its cultural and physical distance to preserve originality, Gutai art challenges the particularity of performance and painting and can be simplified as an intricate combination of the two
