development status
The origin of modernism can be traced back to impressionism in France. From 65438 to 1980s, French post-impressionism, neo-impressionism and symbolism painters put forward the concepts of "independent value of artistic language itself", "painting should not be a servant of nature", "painting should get rid of dependence on literature and history" and "art for art's sake", which are the theoretical basis of modernist art system. Therefore, P Cezanne, a French post-impressionist painter, pursued something in his works. The obvious modernist painting style first appeared in the works of French fauvism painters. A group of young painters, represented by H. Matisse, exhibited a number of works with wild style, exaggerated artistic language, deformation and expressive force at the Paris Autumn Salon in 1905. They were called "beasts" by people, hence the name "brutalism". 1908, another group of young painters, represented by P Picasso and G. Brague, introduced Cubism to France. The principle of cubism first appeared in Picasso's oil painting The Girl of avignon. This painting is regarded as a watershed between traditional art and modern art, and cubism uses the structural relationship of blocks to analyze objects, showing proper overlapping and staggered aesthetic feeling, which is the goal pursued by cubism. Both animism and cubism have absorbed nourishment from African sculpture, and artistic language has also deviated from traditional rules, which indicates that modernism has entered the stage of self-establishment. At the same time, expressionist societies such as the Bridge Club organized by 1905 in Germany and the Young Knights Club established by 1909 rose. Their aesthetic goals and artistic pursuits are similar to those of fauvism in France, but they have a strong Nordic color and German national tradition. If expressionism is influenced by industrial technology and expresses the static beauty of objects, then futurism, which originated in Italy, is stimulated by modern industrial technology and uses the method of decomposing objects to express moving scenes and feelings. They are also keen to describe a series of overlapping shapes and continuous levels with lines and colors, and try to describe light and sound with lines. Monk: The above thoughts and actions in Our Lady, especially futurism, are all reflected in the field of sculpture. Futurist painter and sculptor U. boccioni signed a manifesto on sculpture art in April 19 12, and applied the principles of futurism to his own works, showing as "continuous shapes in space" (19 13). The corresponding modernist artistic trend of thought was also quite active in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Except for some societies influenced by cubism and futurism, Russian constructivism has made a unique contribution to modern art in exploring how to express industrial beauty. Abstract works of art first appeared around 19 10. Russian painter W Kandinsky, who participated in the activities of the German Young Knights Club, was the first to engage in abstract art creation. He uses the combination and composition of points, lines and surfaces, and refers to the expressive language of music to convey thoughts and emotions with painting. His works Spirit in Art (19 12) and Point, Line and Surface (1923) laid an abstract theoretical foundation. As a practitioner, he is mainly engaged in the creation of lyric abstract paintings, but at the same time he also explores geometric abstraction. Russian painter K.C. Malevic founded supremacism around 19 13, which belongs to the category of geometric abstraction. The supremacist efforts in plane composition are meaningful in exploring the emptiness, emptiness and nothingness of art, and it is de stijl (or Neo-Modelism) founded by Dutch painter P mondriaan that really lays the theoretical foundation of geometric abstraction and makes outstanding contributions in artistic practice. Throughout the 20th century, abstractism basically followed the development of lyric abstraction and geometric abstraction, but changed at various stages. Kandinsky: "The first abstract watercolor" was a Dadaist society that appeared in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I, and its influence spread to European and American countries. There are Dada art societies in France and Germany. Dadaism opposes war, authority and tradition, as well as art and everything. As a society, it is bound to move towards a state of self-denial. Dada's nihilism and anti-traditional spirit run through the whole process of western modern literature and art. It is Dada's contribution to modern art to apply collage in graphic painting and contingency and contingency in artistic creation. Surrealist societies are different from Dadaism. It treats artistic creation with a constructive attitude to replace the destruction and challenge of Dadaism. It directly draws ideological nourishment from Freud's subconscious theory and takes Freud's theory as the guiding ideology of this artistic movement. Surrealism artists draw inspiration from children, mental patients and dreams, and devote themselves to exploring the transcendental level of human experience, trying to break through the concept of realism and combine the concept of realism with the experience of instinct, subconscious and dreams, thus reaching an absolute and surreal realm. Surrealists often use unexpected accidental combinations, unconscious discoveries and ready-made things. Realistic and abstract languages are found in their works. 1924 to the end of 1930s, surrealist art was active. After 1930s, as an art movement, surrealism gradually faded, but many important surrealist painters were still active in European and American painting circles. Powys: Explaining Pictures to Rabbits, an abstract expressionism (also known as action painting or new york painting school) that emerged in the United States after World War II, is a school that combines expressionism, abstraction and surrealism, and is also the peak of modernist painting that attaches importance to individuality and style. Abstract expressionism emphasizes the freedom, automaticity and aimlessness of the creator's behavior, and raises the creative behavior itself to an important position, which has given birth to the factor of using the creator's behavior as the media of art communication. Duchamp: Hard-edged abstraction and post-painting abstraction in Dry Bedpan after abstract expressionism are the changes and development of geometric abstraction in the new situation, and also show the changes of art from emphasizing subjective feelings to paying attention to objective expression. This change is more obvious in pop art, which is completely opposite to abstract expressionism. The rise of pop art indicates the transformation from western modernism to post-modernism. Of course, western art historians also have different views on the concept of postmodernism. Postmodernism, first used in architecture, is of course a relative, vague and controversial concept. Strictly speaking, postmodernism cannot be completely divorced from modernism. Many methods and principles advocated by postmodernism have been tried and tested in modernist art, but individual methods and principles have been extremely developed and exaggerated in post-industrial society. Postmodernism is indeed a backwash of modernism in some aspects. However, the aesthetic principles of modernism still strongly influence contemporary western artists. The rise of new expressionism, new surrealism and new abstraction in the 1980s explained this problem to some extent. In the changes of artistic thoughts of modernism and postmodernism, it seems that subjectivity and objectivity, rationality and sensibility, humanity and * * *, the strengthening and disappearance of style characteristics, humanity and machinery, Chun Xue and chin beauty, aesthetic and anti-aesthetic of art always confuse artists and drive them to explore. In the historical process of art development, there are often changes or changes, especially in industrialized and post-industrialized societies. The reason why post-modernism thoughts such as conceptual art are so shocking is that they not only run counter to traditional art, but also challenge modernism. However, history itself seems to show the fact that the development of art has an objective law that is independent of human will. The process of art itself, like the process of society itself, has a power of self-adjustment, and it should seek a balance between the above two poles. Of course, balance is temporary, temporary, and imbalance is absolute and permanent. Only when it is unbalanced and full of contradictions can art develop continuously. Even though the development process is full of contradictions and twists and turns, the whole trend is forward. In this sense, modernist art should be regarded as a powerful supplement to realism. In other words, modernism is a new artistic expression system, which is different from realism and more in line with the rhythm of modern industrial society. At least it gained the strength to coexist with realism. Les: French-style scene features are the product of the second industrial revolution because modernist art came into being after the monopoly era in the West. It inevitably reflects the important changes in political, economic and spiritual and cultural life in this era, and reflects people's extremely complex and rich thoughts and feelings and profound philosophical thinking in this era. Different from realism, modernist art is unbalanced and distorted in dealing with the relationship between society, man, nature and self. In this way, modernist artists seem to be divorced from society and nature. They do not directly describe society and life (except a few artists), but their works allude to society and life, and the language used is absurd, moral or abstract. In their works, we can feel that these artists show the mental trauma and abnormal psychology of modern people (including the artists themselves), feel their negative, pessimistic and disappointed feelings about real life, and feel their strong nihilism in thought. It is these characteristics of modernist works of art that make them have social, historical and aesthetic values that cannot be ignored. Because they are important aspects of modern western society and modern spiritual life.
Modern industry and science and technology have played an important role in the development of modernist art, and modernist artists' psychology and attitude towards modern science and mechanical civilization are complicated. In the practice of some artists (such as cubism, futurism and constructivism), they try to reflect this profound change in society, while in most artists' works, they take an evasive and detached attitude towards industrial civilization. They are dissatisfied with the depreciation of human nature and the appreciation of machinery in industrial society. But this does not mean that the mainstream of modernist art is contrary to the process of industrial society. In fact, industry and scientific and technological civilization have greatly changed the face of modern society and effectively promoted the rapid spiritual changes of modern art.
Modernist art first draws nutrition from Kant's arsenal of transcendental idealism, and at the same time is strongly influenced by modern philosophical thoughts, especially the philosophy and psychology of Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Jung and Sartre. Nietzsche's theory not only promoted the German expressionism movement, but also had a great influence on the whole modernist literature movement. In particular, he denies authority, advocates creativity based on human will and instinct, despises middle-class civilization and hypocritical morality, respects unconsciousness and instinct, and is pessimistic about the future of the world, which is reflected in the theory and practice of various schools of modernism. Freud's subconscious theory is the theoretical pillar of surrealism movement, which holds that "unconsciousness is the real existence of spirit". It is under the guidance of Freud's theory that artists of surrealism and other schools use various methods to explore the depths of people's spiritual world, which on the one hand opens up new areas of artistic expression, and on the other hand makes artistic language absurd and weird. Many works of nature have created a new realm of absurdity and strangeness.
Compared with traditional art based on realism and imitation, modernist art has the characteristics of symbolism, expressiveness and abstraction. Many schools of modernism flaunt themselves as anti-tradition, but in fact they may completely abandon tradition. What it tries to deny and reject is the realistic tradition with academic characteristics since the middle of19th century. In dealing with historical heritage, they paid more attention to the study of primitive social art, Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, Greek antique art and European medieval art. After Impressionism, western artists began to turn their attention to the expression language of paintings and handicrafts in China, Japan and India and explore freehand brushwork. Fauvism and cubist artists directly benefited from African sculpture. At the same time, Islamic art in the Middle East and the artistic heritage of Oceania are also the research objects of modernist artists. The above-mentioned artistic heritage in human history has provided beneficial nourishment for modernist artists.
Generally speaking, since the 20th century, western modernist art has adapted to the needs of people in modern society and created a number of works that can be incorporated into the classic culture of mankind. However, the theories of all schools and ideological trends are beyond reproach, not to mention the ideological tendencies of some of them are worth studying. It is not advisable to praise modernist art blindly without analysis, but it is even more stupid and sad to regard modernism as a scourge, shut it out and prevent people from contacting and understanding it. The prosperity and activity of China's artistic creation and theory since 1980s is not unrelated to the main factors such as social and economic promotion, but also related to the rich information provided by foreign literature and art, including western modernism.