Art Periods & Movements

1760-1840s: The Industrial Revolution and the Arts

With industrialization, factories, smokestacks, towers, cranes, and trains became the icons of the landscape. ... But as the factories filled, artists' practice was radically and permanently changed by a very simple invention. It had both a direct and indirect impact on 19th-century art movements. It also became an inspiration for other art movements that focused on simple designs and their utility, especially Modernism. The Industrial Revolution influenced the Arts and Crafts movement because the movement grew as a reaction against the modernity that the Industrial Revolution introduced to the modern world.

1850s: Realism

Realism is a theory that claims to explain the reality of international politics. It emphasizes the constraints on politics that result from humankind's egoistic nature and the absence of a central authority above the state.

Courbet Gustave Courbet led the realism movement in the late 1840's early 1850's. His work mostly depicted the figure as well as land and seascapes. His philosophy was to capture the truth using realist techniques. He wants to paint things as they were, and his work often commented on the social class, specifically the poor. His painting, "Burial at Ornans" was iconic because he didn't use models, but the actual people who attended the service. Towards the end of his career, he painted women in erotic compositions. He rejected the norm of what people wanted to see and created paintings he felt were important for the viewer to experience.

1874: First Impressionist Group exhibition

Taking place from April 15th to May 15th, artists Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Renoir, and others created an exhibition containing Impressionist style works. The collection had over 160 pieces, and critics had mixed reviews at the time. However, everyone can agree that the new style was unique and eventually began the modern art movement.

Historical
Events

1760 – 1840s: Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution, now also known as the First Industrial Revolution in England was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the United States.

1773 Boston Tea Party

1776 Declaration of Independence is adopted, proclaiming "all men are created equal"
1789 George Washington is inaugurated president

August 10, 1793
The Louvre first opened on August 10, 1793. With nearly 10 million visitors each year, the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world. The Mona Lisa was stolen by a Louvre employee in 1911. After being exhibited across Italy, it was finally returned to its Paris home in 1913.

1800 Thomas Jefferson is elected president
1801 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed Moonlight Sonata.
1804 Napoleon is crowned Emperor of France
1814 British army attacks Washington and burns the Capitol and the Library of Congress.
1821 Napoleon died
1824 Beethoven completes the Ninth Symphony
1828 Construction of first railroad, Baltimore-Ohio, in the U.S.

1830s: Camera & Photography invented

The camera was invented, or rather, developed by multiple people, over the course of history. But the camera was invented, as we know it today, by french inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in (about) 1816.

Niépce technically took the first photo on a homemade camera, with silver chloride covered paper.

While his first photograph was only partially successful, he is the inventor of the very first surviving photograph, which is a main reason why he is widely accepted as the inventor of the camera. It dates to 1826 or 1827.

The term photography, (drawing with light) was first used in 1839 by John Herschel, but the use of photographing objects and people started long before then.

Joseph Niepce was the first person to use silver plates and have light carve an image into it. This was the first prototype camera.

The American Civil War is the first war to be photographed using these early cameras. From 1840 to the present, photography is used in advertisement, news, and became a new form of art.

1841: Portrait artist, John Goffe Rand invented paint tube.

1879: First practical electric light bulb

Thomas Edison created the first light bulb that can be manufactured and sold to the public. Although others have created a light bulb, they burn out easily and not last long enough for an area to be lit. His other inventions helped push the world's societies into the future by redefining what is and isn't possible.

The late 19th & The early 20th Centuries

First Impressionist Group exhibition

Impressionism began to take shape in the 1860s on the canvases of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Impressionism created a new way of seeing the world. It was a way of observing the city, the suburbs, and the countryside as mirrors of the modernization that each of these artists perceived and wanted to record from their point of view. Modernity, as they knew it, became their subject matter. Mythology, biblical scenes and historical events that had dominated the revered "history" painting of their era were replaced by subjects of contemporary life, such as cafes and street life in Paris, suburban and rural leisure life outside of Paris, dancers and singers and workmen.

The Impressionists attempted to capture the quickly shifting light of natural daylight by painting outdoors ("en plein air"). They mixed their colors on the canvas rather than their palettes and painted rapidly in wet-on-wet complementary colors made from new synthetic pigments. To achieve the look they wanted, they invented the technique of "broken colors," leaving gaps in the top layers to reveal colors below, and abandoning the films and glazes of the older masters for a thick impasto of pure, intense color.

The first piece of art to inspire the critical nickname "impressionism" was Claude Monet's 1873 piece "Impression: Sunrise," a piece that was presented at the first exhibition in 1874.

The most influential impressionists of the period include:

Claude Monet

(born in 1840, Paris - died in 1926, Giverny, France) French painter who was the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the light or as his interest shifted. These series were frequently exhibited in groups—for example, his images of haystacks (1890/91) and the Rouen cathedral (1894). At his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his last series of paintings. His popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century, when his works traveled the world in museum exhibitions that attracted record-breaking crowds and marketed popular commercial items featuring imagery from his art.

Edgar Degas

(born in 1834, Paris - died in 1917, Paris, France) French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially the female—figure, which he explored in works ranging from the sombre portraits of his early years to the studies of laundresses, cabaret singers, milliners, and prostitutes of his Impressionist period. Ballet dancers and women at their toilette would preoccupy him throughout his career.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

(born in 1841, Limoges, France, —died in 1919, Cagnes) French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. He was considered the other leader of the Impressionist movement. He shared Monet’s interests but often preferred to capture artificial light in places like dance halls and directed his studies of the effects of light on figures, particularly the female form, rather than scenery, and he frequently focused on portraiture.

Camille Pissarro: (born 1830, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies—died in 1903, Paris, France) French painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions; throughout his career he remained dedicated to the idea of such alternative forums of exhibition. He experimented with many styles, including a period when he adopted Georges Seurat’s “pointillist” approach. A supportive friend and mentor to influential artists such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, he was described by many who knew him as “Father Pissarro.”

Gustave Caillebotte

(born in 1848, Paris, France—died in 1894, Gennevilliers, France) French painter, art collector, and impresario who combined aspects of the academic and Impressionist styles in a unique synthesis.

Born into a wealthy family, Caillebotte trained to be an engineer but became interested in painting and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors. Caillebotte became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase works by other Impressionists, notably Monet, Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot.

Caillebotte was an artist of remarkable abilities, but his posthumous reputation languished because most of his paintings remained in the hands of his family and were neither exhibited nor reproduced until the second half of the 20th century. His early paintings feature the broad new boulevards and modern apartment blocks created by Baron Haussmann for Paris in the 1850s and ’60s. The iron bridge depicted in The Pont de l’Europe (1876) typifies this interest in the modern urban environment, and The Floor Scrapers (1875) is a realistic scene of urban craftsmen busily at work. Caillebotte’s masterpiece, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), uses bold perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection on a rainy day. Caillebotte also painted portraits and figure studies, boating scenes and rural landscapes, and decorative studies of flowers. He tended to use brighter colours and heavier brushwork in his later works.

Edouard Manet

(born in 1832, Paris, France—died in 1883, Paris) French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time. His Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, aroused the hostility of critics and the enthusiasm of the young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionist group. His other notable works include Olympia (1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

1890 and 1910s: Art Nouveau

Ornamental style of art that flourished throughout Europe and the United States. Art Nouveau is characterized by its use of a long, sinuous, organic line and was employed most often in architecture, interior design, jewelry and glass design, posters, and illustration. It was a deliberate attempt to create a new style, free of the imitative historicism that dominated much of 19th-century art and design. About this time the term Art Nouveau was coined, in Belgium by the periodical L’Art Moderne to describe the work of the artist group Les Vingt and in Paris by S. Bing, who named his gallery L’Art Nouveau. The style was called Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Stile Floreale (or Stile Liberty) in Italy, and Modernismo (or Modernista) in Spain.

The distinguishing ornamental characteristic of Art Nouveau is its undulating asymmetrical line, often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils, insect wings, and other delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike force. In the graphic arts the line subordinates all other pictorial elements—form, texture, space, and colour—to its own decorative effect. In architecture and the other plastic arts, the whole of the three-dimensional form becomes engulfed in the organic, linear rhythm, creating a fusion between structure and ornament. Architecture particularly shows this synthesis of ornament and structure; a liberal combination of materials—ironwork, glass, ceramic, and brickwork—was employed, for example, in the creation of unified interiors in which columns and beams became thick vines with spreading tendrils and windows became both openings for light and air and membranous outgrowths of the organic whole. This approach was directly opposed to the traditional architectural values of reason and clarity of structure.

Antoni Gaudí

(born in 1852, Reus, Spain - died in 1926, Barcelona), Catalan architect, whose distinctive style is characterized by freedom of form, voluptuous colour and texture, and organic unity. Gaudí worked almost entirely in or near Barcelona. He is perhaps the most original artist of the movement, who went beyond dependence on line to transform buildings into curving, bulbous, brightly coloured, organic constructions.

1884 to 1935s

1886 to 1906: Neo-Impressionism Or Pointillism

Artists who employ the style apply separate colors to the canvas so that the eye of the viewer blends the colors together rather than the artists on their palettes. According to the theory of chromatic integration, these independent tiny touches of color can be mixed optically to achieve better color quality. A glow radiates from the minuscule dots, all the same size, that are packed together to create a specific hue on the Neo-Impressionist canvas. The painted surfaces are especially luminescent. Seurat’s style is defined by small dots of color that appear more separate when viewed close-up but blend into a cohesive image as the viewer pulls back. Seurat developed this style along with painter Paul Signac.

The key traits of Neo-Impressionism include tiny dots of local color and clean, clear contours around the forms. The style also features luminescent surfaces, a stylized deliberateness that emphasizes a decorative design and an artificial lifelessness in the figures and landscapes. Neo-Impressionists painted in the studio, instead of outdoors as the Impressionists had. The style focuses on contemporary life and landscapes and is carefully ordered rather than spontaneous in technique and intention.

Georges Seurat

(born in 1859, Paris, France - died in 1891, Paris, France) French Painter of the leader of Neo-Impressionism. He is a circle renounced the random spontaneity of Impressionism in favor of a measured painting technique grounded in science and the study of optics. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance.

1886 and 1905s Post-impressionism

Post-Impressionism in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style’s inherent limitations. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism. In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through colour and line.

The most influential post-impressionists of the period include:

Vincent Van Gogh

(born in 1853, Zundert, Netherlands - died in 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, France)

Dutch painter. His striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms of his work powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. Van Gogh’s art became astoundingly popular after his death, especially in the late 20th century, when his work sold for record-breaking sums at auctions around the world and was featured in blockbuster touring exhibitions. In part because of his extensive published letters, van Gogh has also been mythologized in the popular imagination as the quintessential tortured artist.

Paul Gauguin

(born in 1848, Paris, France - died in 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia)

French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work. The artist, whose work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, is particularly well known for his creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh as well as for his self-imposed exile in Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th century.

Paul Cézanne

(born in 1839, Aix-en-Provence, France - died in 1906, Aix-en-Provence)

French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. He did something very interesting in his compositions, he painted his still lives from multiple viewpoints. For example, in his painting "still life with apples and oranges", the bowls are painted as if he saw them from different angles. His goal was to paint the action and energy of a scene, and to force the viewer to view the objects as shapes and color before the mind interprets it as a recognizable image. Cézanne’s art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values of painting in the 19th century because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of subject matter.

1897: Vienna Secession

Vienna Secession is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian painters, graphic artists, sculptors and architects, including Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner, and Gustav Klimt. They resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in protest against its support for more traditional artistic styles. Their most influential architectural work was the Secession Building designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich as a venue for expositions of the group. Their official magazine was called Ver Sacrum which published highly stylised and influential works of graphic art. In 1905 the group itself split, when some of the most prominent members, including Klimt, Wagner and Hoffmann, resigned in a dispute over priorities, but it continued to function, and still functions today, from its headquarters in the Secession Building.

Gustav Klimt

(born in 1862, Vienna, Austria - died in 1918, Vienna)

Austrian painter. He was the leader of the Vienna Secession movement, was a master of symbolism. He embedded allusions to sexuality and the human psyche in the rich, lavishly decorated figures and patterns that populated his canvases, murals, and mosaics. Often, their messages—of pleasure, sexual liberation, and human suffering—were only thinly veiled. His more risqué pieces, depicting voluptuous nudes and piles of entwined bodies, scandalized the Viennese establishment.

1899-1908 Fauvism

Fauvism, the first 20th-century movement in modern art, was initially inspired by the examples of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. The Fauves ("wild beasts") were a loosely allied group of French painters with shared interests. Several of them, including Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, and Georges Rouault, had been pupils of the Symbolist artist Gustave Moreau and admired the older artist's emphasis on personal expression. Matisse emerged as the leader of the group, whose members shared the use of intense color as a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined pure color and form as means of communicating the artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of abstraction.

Henry Matisse

(Born in 1869, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France - Died in 1954, Nice, France)

Henri Matisse is widely regarded as the greatest colorist of the 20th century and as a rival to Pablo Picasso in the importance of his innovations. He emerged as a Post-Impressionist, and first achieved prominence as the leader of the French movement Fauvism. Although interested in Cubism, he rejected it, and instead sought to use color as the foundation for expressive, decorative, and often monumental paintings. As he once controversially wrote, he sought to create an art that would be "a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair."

This early work by Matisse clearly indicates the artist's stylistic influences, most notably Georges Seurat's Pointillism and Paul Signac's Divisionism, in the use of tiny dabs of color to create a visual frisson. What sets this work apart from these more rigid methods, however, is Matisse's intense concentrations of pure color. The oranges, yellows, greens, and other colors all maintain their own discrete places on the picture plane, never quite merging to form the harmonious tonality that both Seurat and Signac were known for, and instead heighten the almost vertiginous effect created by the striking dots of paint. Matisse took this work's title, which translates as "luxury, peace, and pleasure," from Charles Baudelaire's poem L'Invitation au Voyage (Invitation to a Voyage).

1920-1930s Art Deco (style moderne)

Art and Design movement in the decorative arts and architecture that developed into a major style in western Europe and the United States during the 1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the intention was to create a sleek and anti-traditional elegance that symbolizes wealth and sophistication.

1878: The story of the light bulb begins long before Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879. In 1800, Italian inventor Alessandro Volta developed the first practical method of generating electricity, the voltaic pile.

February 20, 1872: The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue.

1888: George Eastman starts manufacturing Kodak cameras. He an inventor and founder of the Kodak camera company is responsible for bringing photography to the public in an easy and accessible way. He also established programs in dentistry, medicine and music.

1887-1889: The Eiffel Tower is built in Paris was the main exhibit of the Paris Exposition — or World's Fair — of 1889. It was constructed to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution and to demonstrate France's industrial prowess to the world. Gustave Eiffel convinced his structure to be built because it would be made from metal not stone. The metal was a metaphor for the advancements France has made in technology and architecture.

1895: Venice first Biennale show in Italy
One of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world. Established in 1895, the Biennale has an attendance today of over 500,000 visitors at the Art Exhibition.

1895 Guglielmo Marconi: develops radio signals

1897: The Tate Gallery is founded as the National Gallery of British Art

1898 Nikola Tesla: invents the remote control

1900: Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. Sigmund Freud publishes a work which explains the idea of a subconcious and dream interpretation. The book was not successful at first, but many people slowly picked up interest in his ideas and writings. Seven more books were published in his lifetime.

1904: Picasso moved between France and Spain before finally settling in Paris in 1904. There he experimented with a number of styles and produced his own original ones, reflected in his 'Blue' and 'Rose' periods.

1911:IBM is formed on June 15, 1911

1914-1930 The World War I

1924 John Logie Baird: invents the Electromechanical television system.

1928: Construction of the Chrysler Building commenced on September 18, 1928.

1930-1931: The Empire State Building is an iconic office building known as "the Most Famous Skyscraper in the World." The grand opening was held on May 1, 1931.

1929-1939: The Great Depression

The Republic of China Era (1912–1949)

The Republican Revolution of 1911, led by Sun Yat-sen, ended the rule of the Qing Dynasty.