Italy Secondaria di secondo grado – classe 5ª (esame di Stato) Art history

1. 19th and 20th centuries

Neoclassicism to Impressionism · Avant-gardes to contemporary art

• Impressionism – Impressionism was an art movement that began in France in the 1860s–1870s. Painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt painted outdoors, quickly, to catch the changing effects of light and the atmosphere of one moment. They used bright, pure colours placed side by side in visible brushstrokes, coloured shadows and scenes of modern everyday life. Their first group show in Paris in 1874 was mocked by critics, who took the name from Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise'. Impressionism opened the way to Post-Impressionism (Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin) and modern art, and the word was also used for music (Debussy) and literature.
• Modern Art and Modernism – Between about 1880 and 1945, artists stopped copying reality and asked what art itself could do. Colour and brushwork showed feeling (Post-Impressionism, Expressionism); objects were seen from many sides (Cubism); speed and machines were celebrated (Futurism); art became pure shape and colour (abstraction, De Stijl, Constructivism); chance and dreams came in (Dada, Surrealism); and design followed function (Bauhaus, the Modern Movement). The same break happened in music, theatre and dance, and modernism spread worldwide through exchange, including India.