ARTES

From Edouard Manet’s portrait of naturalist writer Émile Zola sitting among his Japanese art finds to Van Gogh’s meticulous copies of the Hiroshige prints he devotedly collected, 19th-century pioneers of European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom, and effervescence, the woodblock print is single-handedly credited with the wave of japonaiserie that first enthralled France and, later, all of Europe—but often remains misunderstood as an “exotic” artifact that helped inspire Western creativity.

While anchoring his practice in the traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) paved the way for modern sculpture. From a very early stage, he was interested in movement, the expression of the body, chance effects, and the incomplete fragment. It was these elements that gave shape, and the impression of life, to such famous works as The Kiss and The Thinker.

A polymath of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a prolific artist, theorist, and writer whose works explored everything from religion to art theory to philosophy. His vast body of work includes altarpieces, portraits, self-portraits, watercolors, and books, but is most celebrated for its astonishing collection of woodcut prints, which transformed printmaking from an artisan practice into a whole new art form.

La belleza de la naturaleza y la soledad del hombre son temas dominantes en la obra de Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). El artista con frecuencia dispone una pequeña figura humana en un amplio paisaje, como en sus famosos lienzos Monje a la orilla del mar y El caminante sobre el mar de nubes. Durante mucho tiempo, la importancia y la influencia de este gran pintor romántico fueron subestimadas. Cuando murió, Friedrich había sido olvidado ya por sus coetáneos y no fue redescubierto hasta principios del siglo xx. Actualmente, se le considera el pintor alemán más importante de su generación y un precursor del expresionismo.

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909–1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions. Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes.

Sharp angles, strange forms, lurid colors, and distorted perspectives are classic hallmarks of Expressionism, the twentieth century movement that prioritized emotion over objective reality. Though particularly present in Germany and Austria, the movement’s approach flourished internationally and is today hailed as one of the most influential shifts in art history. With leading groups Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and key players such as Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, and Emil Nolde, the Expressionists disowned Impressionism, which they regarded as “man lowered to the position of a gramophone record of the outer world”, to depict instead a raw and visceral experience of life as it was felt, rather than seen on the surface. Their paintings brim with emotive force, conveyed in particular through intense and non-naturalistic color palettes, loose brushwork, and thick textures.

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Literally meaning “pictures of the floating world,” ukiyo-e was a particular woodblock print genre of art that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries. Subjects ranged from the bright lights and attractions of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), to spectacular natural landscapes. In the West, Hiroshige’s prints became exemplary of the Japonisme that swept through Europe and defined the Western world’s visual idea of Japan. Because they could be mass produced, ukiyo-e works were often used as designs for fans, greeting cards, and book illustrations. The style influenced Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Art Nouveau artists alike, with Vincent van Gogh and James Abbott McNeill Whistler both particularly inspired by Hiroshige’s landscapes.

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most famous by Rothko. Throughout, Abstract Expressionists strove to convey emotions and ideas through the making of marks, through forms, textures, shades, and the particular quality of brushstrokes. The movement favored large-scale canvases, and embraced the role of accident or chance. With featured works from 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book introduces the movement which shifted the center of art gravity from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden moment of American art.

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general. Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dalí himself explained, he painted with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dalí also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall.