Art Deco

Art Deco was a popular international art design movement from 1925 until the 1940s, affecting the decorative arts such as architecture, interior design, and industrial design, as well as the visual arts such as fashion, painting, the graphic arts, and film. At the time, this style was seen as elegant, glamorous, functional, and modern. As any Art movement and/or designs, you can always make an argument that pieces of Art deco was influenced from older pieces of Art.

Here are a few Examples of Art Deco;

A stained glass window. This window represents classic Art Deco Geometric shapes and designs. It has a very simple and modern look to it. the shapes and colours compliment eacother for a very orginal art deco look which comes accorss very attractive and pretty.

This entrance is also influenced by classic Art Deco. The shapes and designs around the door are very symmetrical and geometric. it has a very elegant and squared look/effect. the artwork on the stone is very original and all ties in together for a complete decorative look. the frame around the door was either created in the art deco period or definetly influenced by other art deco furniture.

Looking at Many Art Deco buildings you can argue that they where influenced by earlier Art.

above is the tikal, Guatemala building 8th centuary AD, and just underneath is the wisconsin gas building USA. many could argue that this art deco building was directly influenced by this earlier building in guatemala.

this hotel on the forfront of miami beach is a perfect of example of a building built using the the ideas and influenced by the art deco era. the curvature of the brickwork on the front, bright colours and circular designs have definetly been infleunced by buildings from that era. it comes across very attractive and makes this hotel very famous.

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th Centuary Art Movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.

If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!.
- Claude Monet

Claude Oscar Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein- air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting impressionism Sunrise.



The view of this painting looks over the Le Havre harbor in France. Sunrise is thought of as an important painting of the impressionist movement as art critics used this painting to deride the exhibition.





Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Post-Impressionists extended impressionism while rejecting its limitations: they continued using vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brushstrokes, and real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour.

African Influences on Modern Artists.

During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art. In France, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aima/hd_aima.htm

Kehinde Wiley (born in Los Angeles, California in 1977)is a New York based painter who is known for his paintings of contemporary urban African American men in poses taken from the annals of art history. He has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art.

"In Wiley’s hands, Ice T channels Napoleon"

Ice T
Kehinde Wiley, 2005
Oil on canvas


Napoleon on his Imperial throne
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 1806.


Kehinde Wiley sends powerfull messeges through all of his paintings. He describes his approach as "interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit." Wiley’s figurative paintings "quote historical sources and position young black men within that field of power.” In this manner, Wiley’s paintings fuse history and style in a unique and contemporary manner.

The Arts and Crafts Movement; & Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau was an Art Movement [1890-1914], that explored a new style of visual arts and architecture that developed in Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth century. In some aspects Art Nouveau was Influenced by a 'revolution against machines', an ideology that art should be personal, hand made and individual.

Art Nouveau designers also believed that all the arts should work in harmony to create a "total work of art," or Gesamtkunstwerk: buildings, furniture, textiles, clothes, and jewelry all conformed to the principles of Art Nouveau.

Alphonse Mucha was a Czech Art Nouveau decorative artist, who produced paintings, illustrations, advertisements and designs. he was a prolific Moravian painter and a key figure in the Art Nouvea movement.

The image on the Left is by the infamous Alphonse Mucha [Paris-1896], it was perhaps a cigarette advertisement as you see the women int he picture holding a cigarette. The very similar image underneath it is by Stanley Mouse, [San Francisco-1966] with the women perhaps now holding a joint. This demonstrates how much of the movement 'Art Nouveau' was a influence on the later artists that came.



Morning Awakening
The fresh yet delicate colours used by Mucha, combined with exuberant floral motifs and, in particular, with four beautiful women make this a particularly appealing series. Each woman is set within natural surroundings which both reflect her mood and enhance her beauty. the whole is then enclosed in an elaborate ornamental frame reminiscent of a Gothic window.

I personally take a liking to art Nouveau mainly because of its originality and differentiation from other type of art. It stands out and is very decorative.