AVANT-GARDE
20th century brought significant changes in British post-war art. The subjects of works were no more clearly identifiable. From the 1950s British artists began to represent images in a more liberated and individual way. They were strongly influenced by American movements. In New York new style was established. It was called avant-garde. Interesting is that the term was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also called the vanguard or the advance guard) and now applied to any group, particularly of artists, that considers itself innovative and ahead of the majority.[3The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel," (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”, 1825) which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now-customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde," insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political, and economic reform. Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with “art for art’s sake” focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social reform.
Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm, primarily in the cultural sphere.
Avant-garde was established among European émigrés such as Piet Mondrian and Max Ernst. They settled in New York and began to teach. The new style excluded images of people or things. The works had no subject apart their own elements (art for art’s sake). For instance, the “theme” was simply a hard block of colour or few brush marks on canvas.
Piet Mondrian(birth name Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan )1872-1944- Dutch artist, he evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.
Mondrian produced Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines (1933), a simple painting that introduced what for him was a shocking innovation: thick, colored lines instead of black ones. After that one painting, this practice remained dormant in Mondrian's work until he arrived in Manhattan, at which time he began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples of this new direction, such as Composition (1938) / Place de la Concorde (1943), he appears to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from Paris and completed them in New York by adding short perpendicular lines of different colors, running between the longer black lines, or from a black line to the edge of the canvas. The newly-colored areas are thick, almost bridging the gap between lines and forms, and it is startling to see color in a Mondrian painting that is unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a new sense of depth by the addition of a colored layer on top of the black one.
The new canvases that Mondrian began in Manhattan are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was cut short by the artist's death. New York City (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than his previous works. An unfinished 1941 version of this work uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs.
His painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie(1942–43) at The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan was highly influential in the school of abstract geometric painting. The piece is made up of a number of shimmering squares of bright color that leap from the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing the viewer into those neon lights. In this painting and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44), Mondrian replaced former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles inside them. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made.
In these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The Boogie-Woogie paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.
Max Ernst(1891-1976)- a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet, one of the pioneers of the Dada movement (its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature) and Surrealism (works featured the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions). He never received any formal training in painting or sculpture, and when he turned to art he sought to represent the fairy-tale creatures of his childhood on canvas. A prolific and highly experimental artist, Ernst developed several new painting techniques: frottage (rubbing textured surfaces), grattage (frottage applied to painting), and decalcomania (liquid paint patterns), which resulted in many unique Surrealist works. Some of his most famous pictures include: The Elephant Celebes (1921, Tate Gallery); Ube Imperator (1923, Pompidou Centre, Paris); Grattage: Eclipse of the Sun (1926, private collection); The Entire City (1935, Kunsthaus Zurich); Attirement of the Bride (1940, Guggenheim, Venice); and Old Man River (1953, Kunstmuseum Basel).
ST IVES SCHOOL OF PAINTING
St Ives- small fishing village, the center of bohemian and artistic activity in post-war Britain.
St Ives School- local community of painters such as Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, William Gear. The group were strongly influenced by American Cultural waves. They represented the village and its landscapes in new abstract, subjective form. Their technique was less expressive or usually imaginative, consisting of dark tones such as greens or grays. The artist claimed that these colors are necessary for making faithful representation of the natural environment.
The heyday of the St Ives School was in the 1950s and 1960s but in 1993, Tate St Ives, a purpose-built new gallery overlooking Porthmeor Beach, was opened which exhibits the Tate collection of St Ives School art.
KITCHEN SINK SCHOOL- a realist style developed by British artists of the 1950s(in contrast to the abstraction and subjectivity of American art which was free of tradition and ideology). It was closely associated with the rebellious ideas of the “new wave” in writing('heroes' usually could be described as angry young men). It often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.
Like many new movements in the art of the 1950s and 1960s it was focused outside London, in the industrial areas of northern England such as Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle.
In the UK, the term "kitchen sink" derived from an expressionist painting by John Bratby, which contained an image of a kitchen sink. The critic David Sylvester wrote an article in 1954 about trends in recent English art, calling his article "The Kitchen Sink" in reference to Bratby's picture. Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among young painters in domestic scenes, with stress on the banality of life.
Bratby painted several kitchen subjects, often turning practical utensils such as sieves and spoons into semi-abstract shapes. He also painted bathrooms, and made three paintings of toilets. Other artists associated with the "kitchen sink" style include Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith.
The term was then applied to a then-emerging style of drama, which favoured a more realistic representation of working class life. The term was adopted in the United States to refer to the live television dramas of the 1950s by Paddy Chayefsky and others. As Chayefsky put it, this "drama of introspection" explored "the marvelous world of the ordinary."
Examples:
· “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (a movie)
· “Look Back in Anger” (a play)
· “Coronation Street” (a television soap opera)
These was seen as a radical new departure in the art and received strong support from the political left, including the critic and author John Berger, who organized exhibitions to promote it.
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