Category Art

For as long as there has been a beat there has been dance. Dance is one of the oldest forms of art. People dance to express themselves, for religious reasons, to celebrate their culture, to be with other people, for exercise, or just to have fun!

Religious dances are forms of prayer. Native Americans may dance to ask for help in hunting, farming, or war. They may imitate animals by moving like them or wearing masks. Folk dance celebrates a group’s history and traditions. Folk dancers may wear colourful costumes. Many folk dances are easy to learn. People may join hands or move in a circle. Other folk dances are full of energy and passion and the dancers must be very athletic.

We may go to a theatre to see dancers who have been specially trained to perform a kind of dance. Ballet is the oldest kind of dance performed in theatres. It began in the 1400’s at the courts of princes, dukes, and other rulers in what is now Italy. For hundreds of years, ballet dancers have made beautiful movements as they leap and twirl across the stage. Female ballet dancers, called ballerinas, dance on the tips of their toes in special shoes. Ballet movements are very difficult. But when they are done well, they look graceful and easy.

In the late 1800’s, some dancers thought that the movements in ballet were too unnatural. One of these rebels was an American dancer named Isadora Duncan. Instead of ballet steps, she made natural movements that imitated the wind and the waves. Her ideas inspired a new art form – modern dance. Several American women, including Martha Graham, continued Duncan’s work. Today, even ballet dancers borrow ideas from modern dance.

Another dance developed in the U.S.A. is tap. More than 100 years ago, African Americans combined steps from African dances, the Irish jig, and a British dance called the clog. The first “theatres” for tap dancers were taverns and street corners. But by 1870, the dancers were tapping onstage.

The musical is another mostly American form of theatre dance. It tells a story through songs and dance. The dancing may have a beat, like tap, or it may move like ballet. The American film Singin’ in the Rain, for instance, features dancing that combine parts of ballet, jazz, modern dance, and tap.

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Could you put on a play without saying a word? It might seem impossible. But actors have been performing plays without words for hundreds of years. Acting without speaking is called mime.

Actors who mime a story must use their actions to make it clear who they are, how they feel, and what they are doing. Mimes have no scenery or words to help them. They show what is happening by moving their body and making faces.

Clowns also perform without speaking. But unlike mimes, clowns get help from props. For example, one clown may throw a pie at another clown to show anger. Another may pour water over his own head to make people laugh.

Clowns also use makeup to show who they are and how they feel. No two clowns paint their face in exactly the same way. Some have big smiles painted on. Others look sad and foolish – as if disaster is just around the corner.

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What kind of performer never needs to know what he or she is going to do or say? A puppet. Although a puppet does not need a script, the puppeteer does. The puppeteer is the person who works the puppet.

Many puppets are hand puppets. One kind of hand puppet is called a glove puppet. It has a head attached to a mitten-like upper body. The puppeteer’s hand fits inside the glove. The puppeteer’s thumb and fingers move the puppet’s arms and head.

A marionette has a whole body, including legs. Most marionettes are moved by strings that run from their head, shoulders, hands, and knees up to the control – a small wooden frame. Puppeteers hide backstage and work the marionettes by moving the controls from above.

Puppeteers work rod puppets by moving rods or sticks. A rod puppet can be just a head mounted on a stick. Or it may have a complete body with movable body parts.

In Japan, rod puppets are used in a form of puppet show called bunraku, or doll theatre. A bunraku puppet has joints that move. Its eyes, mouth, and even its eyebrows move, too. In other parts of Asia, rod puppets perform shadow plays. Strong lights from above and behind cast the puppets’ shadows on a cloth screen. The puppets in these shadow plays are often made of leather. In China and Turkey, leather puppets are dyed, and they cast coloured shadows.

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The play Peter Pan tells a story about a boy who refuses to grow up. The story sounds like make-believe. But many people believe that British playwright Sir James M. Barrie wrote the play about a real person.

Some say Barrie modelled Peter Pan after himself! Only 1.6 metres tall, Barrie always related well to children. As an 11-year-old friend told him: “You’re old, but you’re not grown-up. You’re one of us”.

Barrie said that Peter Pan was based on five boys – George, John, Peter, Michael, and Nico Davies. Barrie met their mother at a dinner party and soon became friends with her sons. Barrie told the brothers that Peter Pan came from “the spark I got from you”.

But Barrie wrote about boys who never grew up long before Peter Pan appeared on stage in 1904, and long before he met the Davies family. The idea may have come from his older brother.

Tall and strong, Barrie’s big brother David was everything James wanted to be. But on the day before David’s 14th birthday, he died in an accident. Later, James wrote: “When I became a man, [David] was still a boy of 13”.

Barrie lived to be 77. Throughout his long life, he wrote fondly of people who, like David, never grew up.

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Stage an African Folk-Tale

Here’s a play made from a folk tale of the Hausa people in Africa. Sadiki is a young Hausa man who was kidnapped by enemies and forced to do chores in their village. He manages to escape with his only possessions – a goat, a leopard, and a yam.

Ask friends to join you and pick characters. Take turns reading the lines of the play.

Cast of Characters: Sadiki, Yam, Goat, Leopard

Setting: A river flows centre stage. A jungle grows on either bank. To the left, a canoe rests near a large rock.

Time: Before breakfast

(The yam rolls to the edge of the river. The leopard leaps on stage followed by Sadiki. The goat ambles in.)

Sadiki: (resting on the rock and looking nervous) The sun is up. Soon the villagers will be looking for me.

Goat: But Boss, now you are free and ready to start anew.

Yam: With a yam, a goat, and a leopard. What more could you ask, Boss?

Goat: We need a better head start on the villagers who are after us. Let’s board this canoe and put the river between us and them.

Goat: (studying the canoe) This small canoe can carry only two of us.

Yam: (fearfully) Boss must paddle, so only one of us can go with him.

Sadiki: I shall simply cross the river several times. Will you be first to cross, Yam?

Goat: Oh no, Boss! Then I will be left alone with the leopard, and she will surely eat me.

Sadiki: So the leopard should go first.

Yam: Oh, no, Boss. Then I will be left alone with the goat, and he will surely eat me.

Sadiki: So the goat goes first.

(Sadiki and the goat cross the river.)

Yam: (eyeing the leopard) How hungry are you?

Leopard: (disdainfully) Silly Yam! Vegetables are for goats.

(Sadiki returns.)

Sadiki: Your turn, Yam.

Yam: (hysterically) Oh, no, Boss! When you return for the leopard, I will be alone with the goat on the other side of the river, and he will eat me.

Sadiki: (as they cross the river) Don’t worry, Yam. I have a plan.

Goat: (licking his chops) Good choice, Boss.

Sadiki: You sly goat, get in the canoe.

(Sadiki and the goat return to the left bank. Sadiki leads the goat out of the canoe.)

Leopard: Yum, here comes my lunch.

Sadiki: Your turn to get in the boat, Leopard.

(The leopard joins the yam on the other side of the river as Sadiki returns a fourth time for the goat.)

Leopard: So Boss worked out how to keep you safe and me hungry.

Yam: (smugly) Planning keeps people the masters and us their servants.

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Making Faces

A clown in baggy trousers with a big red nose runs onstage and waves to the crowd. The crowd is already giggling. Just looking at the clown’s funny face makes people laugh.

Clowns use makeup to create their funny faces. Actors use makeup, too. The audience can see actors’ faces more clearly when the actors wear makeup. Also, makeup can change an actor’s face. For example, dark lines and white hair can make an actor look old. Green makeup can make an actor look sick or ghostly.

Some women wear makeup called cosmetics because they think it makes them look pretty. But clowns and actors use special makeup called grease paint. Grease paints are thick, solid sticks of coloured makeup. When an actor has finished making up, he or she sprinkles the makeup with powder so that the grease paint won’t smear. After the performance, actors wipe off the grease paint with an oily makeup remover.

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What does a world-famous theatre look like? To find out, let’s go to Milan, Italy, to visit La Scala, where some of the most famous operas were first performed. It is a theatre built for a type of play called opera. In Western opera, the actors sing their lines.

What happens at theatres before the opening of a play? The cast has lots to do as it prepares for its big night.

The actors memorize their lines. They also memorize as many lines of the other characters as possible. This helps them to recognize their cues. Cues are the last words spoken by another character before an actor says his or her line.

At the first rehearsal, the director blocks, or plans every movement the actors will make on stage. The director also shows the actors how to move and where to stand.

At dress rehearsal, or the last day of practice, the stagehands set up all the scenery. The actors put on their makeup and costumes. The play manager gets programmes, tickets, and everything else ready for opening night.

On opening night, all the actors practise their lines without scripts. Then they go on stage and perform for the audience.

People all around the world love going to the theatre. Most big cities have many theatre buildings. To many people, “American theatre” means whatever is playing in New York City’s Broadway district. London’s Royal Ballet and Royal National Theatre feature some of the world’s best dancers, directors, and actors. And the Comedie-Francaise in Paris, France is one of the world’s oldest theatres still in use.

All these cities offer Western theatre – a style of storytelling that began in early Greece. Stories of comedy and tragedy came from the ancient Greeks. Comedies are funny. Tragedies are sad. Western theatre also followed the Greek custom of dividing stories into parts called acts.

Theatre from the eastern part of the world, such as from Asia, is very different and tells stories in other ways.

Theatre in India goes back about 2,000 years. Stories told in Indian theatres are like long poems. And all Indian plays have happy endings.

Chinese theatre is about 800 years old. The most popular form of play is Peking opera (also called Beijing opera). Its plays are based on Chinese stories, history, and folklore. Actors may change or make up their lines as they go along.

The stage in Peking opera looks bare compared to Western stages. Often special props – the objects that the actors use on stage – are the only clues to where a play takes place. For example, if an actor carries a whip, the audience knows he is outdoors riding a horse.

Also, the actors are never the only ones onstage. Musicians and prop people stay on the stage during the performance, but the actors and audience pretend they are invisible.

In Japan, the oldest form of drama is the noh play. It includes drama, dance, song, and choruses – groups of actors speaking lines together. Men play both male and female parts. The actors with female roles wear masks. Unlike the plays of Peking Opera, every detail in a noh play is traditional – and never changed.

The most popular kind of theatre in Japan today is Kabuki. Female dancers acted out the earliest Kabuki plays. But later on, men played all the parts. Kabuki plays are something like noh plays, but Kabuki theatre has colourful scenery and more exciting stories.

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Theatre

We find our seats in the theatre. The lights dim, the audience hushes, and the curtains draw slowly back. It’s show-time!

The show might be a play, a dance, a musical comedy, or any of the other kinds of stories performed on stage. It can make us laugh, surprise us, or even make us cry.

No one knows for sure how the kinds of shows we see at the theatre began. But nearly every country has had some form of theatre. Most likely, theatre began with people’s love of story-telling. Early hunters probably gathered around the evening fire and told about the day’s adventures. Later these stories grew into plays, songs, and dances.

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Long ago, thousands of rats invaded the German town of Hamelin. The rats were everywhere. They even swarmed into the houses. People could not move without touching a rat. Neither cats nor traps could destroy the swarm of rats.

One Friday, a piper wearing a many-coloured cloak came to town. “I can rid your town of rats,” the piper told the mayor.

“Then I will pay you one coin a head,” the mayor said.

As soon as the moon rose, the stranger started playing a haunting tune. Rats ran out of all the houses into the town square. The piper played a lively tune and led the rats to the nearby Weser River. The rats rushed to the water and jumped right in.

“Pay me,” the piper said to the mayor on Saturday morning. “Nine hundred and ninety thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine rats drowned in the river. You owe me one coin a head.”

“Let us count the heads first,” the mayor said.

“If you want the heads,” the piper cried, “fetch them from the river.”

“By rights, we can refuse to pay you anything,” the mayor answered.

“If you do not pay me, your children will,” said the piper.

“Collect from our children?” the townspeople jeered. “How cleverly the mayor has tricked the piper!”

On Sunday, after the townspeople returned from church, they looked all around for their sons and daughters. “Where can they be?” the people asked.

In all of Hamelin, only one lame boy remained. “The piper played a haunting tune, and the children followed him out of town,” the boy told the parents. “That nearby hill opened wide, and they marched right in. By the time I reached the hill, the opening had closed.”

The parents ran out of town with axes and hammers. They tried but failed to open up the hill that had swallowed their children. Most miserable of all was the mayor. He had lost three boys and two girls.

“The mayor should have paid the piper,” the townspeople moaned. “How could we think he was clever? He is the biggest fool of us all!”

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Once a jolly swagman camped beside a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolibah tree,

And he sang as he sat and waited while his billy boiled,

“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?”

These are words from “Waltzing Matilda,” an Australian ballad, or song that tells a story. Ballads are one kind of folk music. Folk music includes all the traditional songs of a country or group of people.

People learn folk songs by listening. They pass the song from person to person, from place to place and from parents to children. Often the melody and words develop over many years. So, most of the time, nobody knows who made up a folk song.

Some songs that are written by composers become folk songs, too. If many people in a country like a song and sing it often, they think of it as theirs. It says something about their people and their country.

People in Australia think of “Waltzing Matilda” as their song. And when people around the world hear the song, they think of Australians. So although the composer is known – his name is “Banjo” Paterson – “Waltzing Matilda” is certainly a folk song, a song of the people.

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Imagine yourself in a big hall where a large orchestra is preparing to play. The musicians are tuning up their instruments. It sounds noisy. Why? The instruments are not in harmony yet.

Soon, the performance begins. Each family of instruments has a special job. Some instruments – the strings, brass, or woodwinds – play the melody. Others, such as drums, make the beat or the rhythm. Different instruments add different tones. The woodwinds sound soft and light, while the brass instruments provide a strong background. All the instruments play in harmony. In other words, they sound good together.

During the concert, the musicians watch the conductor’s signals. The conductor holds a small stick called a baton in the right hand. The baton tells the musicians when to play slow and when to play fast.

With the left hand, the conductor points to different parts of the orchestra. This signals them that it is time for them to play. The left hand also tells the musicians whether to play soft or loud.

Some conductors even use facial expressions. They make themselves look happy, or sad, or angry. These facial expressions show the musicians how their music should make listeners feel.

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A musical scale is a set of notes arranged from the lowest pitch to the highest. Western composers – those from the U.S.A., Europe, and Australia – call the notes in their scale A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The distance between a note and the next highest note by the same name is called an octave.

An octave also includes sharps – half tones above notes – and flats – half tones below notes. The distance between a note and its sharp or a note and its flat is called a half step. The letter notes and half steps add up to a total of 12 full steps in the Western scale.

Music from countries in the eastern part of the world, such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia, sounds different from Western music, because Asian music has more kinds of notes than Western music has. For example, the Arab scale has 17 steps in each octave. The Indian scale has even more – 22 steps.

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A composer uses notes – the written signs that show the length and the highness or lowness of sound – to write music on paper just as an author uses letters to write a story. Composers use different kinds of notes to tell musicians how long to play each sound.

This note, for example, is a quick note, like a clap of your hands or saying “oh”:

These are notes in order from shortest to longest sound:

Sometimes the composer wants the music to stop for a few beats. Composers show this by using symbols called rests.

These are three kinds of rests:

This rest means to pause for just a short moment:

This rest means to pause a little longer:

This rest means to stop for even longer:

A composer arranges them on a group of five or ten lines called a staff. High notes go on the upper lines. Low notes go on the lower lines. Can you identify the notes and rests in this line from a song?

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Prokofiev, the Children’s Composer

Imagine composing songs for a play at age 9. Sergei Prokofiev did just that. Prokofiev’s play, The Giant, included marches and waltzes. It also told of an outlaw giant who became a king.

Sergei Prokofiev was born in 1891 in Ukraine, a country in Europe. (At that time, Ukraine was part of Russia.) Like most children, Sergei enjoyed fairy tales. But he considered them amusing rather than magical.

Prokofiev did not like popular tunes. He preferred music that surprised people and made them smile. He developed his talent for writing such music at the Conservatory, a music school in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In 1917, there was a revolution in Russia. A Communist government took over. The Communist rulers tried to control the arts as well as the government. So Prokofiev left Russia for the U.S.A. in 1918.

Within five years, orchestras in the U.S.A. and Europe were performing Prokofiev’s music. In 1927, the Communists welcomed Prokofiev’s performances to the Soviet Union, the Communist’s name for Russia. Nine years later, Prokofiev, his wife, and their two sons moved to the Soviet Union and settled in Moscow.

Soon after, Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf for the Moscow Children’s Musical Theatre. He gave each character its own special music. Violins play when Peter takes the stage. Flutes announce the presence of a bird. An oboe speaks for a duck, and a French horn warns that the wolf is near.

Peter and the Wolf  has been loved by children for years. It also helps children recognize the sounds of different instruments.

The Basic Ingredients of Music

To make a cake, a baker uses basic ingredients like flour, sugar, and oil. To make music, a composer – a person who makes up music – uses basic ingredients too. They are tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony.

Tone is the difference in pitch between two notes. Pitch is the highness or lowness of a note’s sound. Notes are the building blocks of a piece of music.

Different notes are held for different lengths of time. Some notes last a long time just as some sounds do. Think of the slow swish-swish of windscreen wipers. Other notes last a short time – like the rapid raindrops in a storm. A composer mixes slow and quick notes to create rhythm.

Melody is the part of music that people hum. To make a melody, a composer mixes tones and rhythms. Short pieces of music, such as songs, have only one melody. Very long pieces of music, such as symphonies, have several melodies.

A composer creates harmony by sounding three or more notes together. Most music in Western countries is based on the idea of harmony.

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The Great Sphinx

What has the body of a lion and the head of a man? A monster, No – a sphinx! A sphinx was a figure from Egyptian myth that was often represented in ancient statues. The Great Sphinx at Giza is the largest of these statues.

About 4,500 years ago, a gigantic limestone hill stood where the Great Sphinx is now. Stonecutters cut blocks from the limestone, perhaps to build the Great Pyramid of Egypt’s King Khufu, or, more likely, to build the pyramid of a later king, Khafre. But the rock in the centre of the hill was too crumbly to use for building.

On this leftover limestone, sculptors carved a rough face and body. To do this, they wedged picks in the stone and hit the picks with wooden hammers.

Next, the sculptors covered the image with a kind of plaster. They could carve the plaster in greater detail than would have been possible in coarse stone. Then artists painted the plaster to add more detail. The Sphinx still wears bits of the red paint, but most of it has worn away.

Playing with Clay

Clay is a clown with no bones.

No roll, stretch, and split – no feat of change is too great for it.

Pinch a thin nose, a chin.

Gouge two eyeholes. Chisel a grin.

Would you then pummel him flat, thumb him again?

No! He’s become someone.

Terracotta Statues

Today, the emperor’s terracotta army is kept in a large museum. Museum artists have a workshop where they make copies of the soldiers. As much as possible, these artists follow the steps the emperor’s sculptors used more than 2,200 years ago.

First, an artist forms long ropes from clay. To build a soldier’s body, the artist coils these ropes around and around. Next, the artist places one hand inside the body to steady it. With the other hand, he or she beats the coils together with a paddle.

The artists make the hands, ears, and basic head shapes in moulds. They cover each moulded head with a layer of clay. In this clay, they model the features of each soldier by hand. They use clay modelling tools to add details on the armour.

Workers then put the body parts in a kiln with a low fire. When the parts dry, the kiln’s temperature rises to 1000 °C. The statues are baked until they glow red.

China’s Terracotta Army

China’s first emperor lies in a tomb outside the city of Xian in eastern China. The emperor is not alone. Buried nearby are thousands of terracotta soldiers and their horses. They were created more than 2,200 years ago.

Terracotta is clay that has been fired, or hardened, in an oven called a kiln. Large solid pieces of terracotta would shrink and crack. So figures like the bodies of the Chinese soldiers are usually hollow.

The figures represent all branches of the early Chinese army – archers, cavalry, charioteers, and foot soldiers. And, out of 7,000 statues, no two faces look the same. Each is a life-sized portrait of a real person. The heads must have been sculpted one by one.

Statues and Sculptures

Sculpture is art you can walk around and view from many sides. People have been making sculptures for thousands of years.

Long ago, sculptors carved many figures from stone, bone, and wood. They modelled others in metal and clay. Sculptors today still work with these materials. But they may also use wax, paper, fabric, string, or plastic. Any material you can think of has probably been used for sculpture.

Pictures Good Enough to Eat

The French artist Nicolas Poussin thought that in a painting, details were more important than colour. So did many other artists of the 1600’s. Poussin also believed that a painting should show only serious subjects. So Poussin based many of his pictures on legends and the Bible. The painting Holy Family on the Steps shows the family with a basket of apples. In the 1600’s, apples were a symbol of life. The apples may also make us think of a story from the Bible. The fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is often shown in paintings as an apple.

In 1877, the French artist Paul Cezanne painted the apples and oranges. Unlike Poussin’s work, Cezanne’s work was not popular during his lifetime. Cezanne learned from the Impressionists, but he used perspective in his paintings very differently than they did. His style inspired modern artists, including Pablo Picasso of Spain.

The Tale of Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter spent most of her childhood in a tall, stone house in London. In the late 1800’s, young women called governesses taught girls from rich families at home. So Beatrix did not go to school and meet other children her age.

The Potters’ servants were Beatrix’s friends. Her nurse told her fairy tales, and her governess taught her about flowers and plants. Cox, the butler, brought her animals that she kept in her third-floor schoolroom.

Two of Beatrix’s dearest pets were mice that Cox caught in the kitchen. Beatrix named them Hunca Munca and Appley Dappley. She also kept a rabbit named Benjamin Bunny and fed him off a china plate. Her most unusual pet was probably Tiggy, a hedgehog, who drank milk from a teacup.

Beatrix loved to watch her animals. She drew lots of sketches showing Hunca Munca, Tiggy, and Benjamin Bunny in their favourite poses. For each drawing, Beatrix made up a story. She shared her stories with her governess after each day’s lessons.

Beatrix’s favourite season was summer, when the Potter family visited the Scottish countryside. There Beatrix admired fields full of plants and animals. She drew the many wildflowers and animals that she saw and painted her drawings with water-colours.

When Beatrix grew up, she remained good friends with her last governess. Beatrix visited her and wrote letters to her governess’s children. One of the earliest letters was actually a story about a rabbit called Peter. It included drawings of the rabbit and his three sisters.

A publishing house offered to print the story as a book if Beatrix would colour the pictures. So she brightened the drawings with delicate water-colours. The Tale of Peter Rabbit became a huge success. In time, children all around the world were enjoying stories and water-colours of Peter, Hunca Munca, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and a host of other animals that flowed from Beatrix Potter’s brush.

Mary Cassatt’s Impressions of Women

Why don’t we see more paintings from long ago done by women? Before the middle 1800’s, art schools did not accept women students. One of the first women to go to art school was the American painter Mary Cassatt.

When Mary was 16, in 1861, she entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, U.S.A. Many considered the academy daringly modern because it admitted women. But Mary thought its classes were boring, even though she studied there for four years.

In the mid-1800’s, most Americans considered art unimportant. Cassatt wanted people to take her paintings seriously. So in 1866, she moved to Paris.

Cassatt’s first paintings showed people in dark colours. Then she saw the work of Edgar Degas, an Impressionist. Degas’s pictures were a turning point in her life as an artist.

Cassatt started painting with light, bright colours. She used dabs of paint to create the “impression” of a scene rather than an exact copy. Like the other Impressionists, she showed only what the eye saw at a glance and how light changed the colour.

The people in Cassatt’s new paintings looked natural. Her most popular works show mothers and children. Other paintings picture women at peaceful activities like sewing and reading.

When Mary Cassatt died in 1926, Americans admired her paintings as much as Europeans did. Within two years after her death, four exhibits, or showings, of her work were put on in the U.S.A. The largest exhibit was in Philadelphia, where Cassatt first studied art.

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Putting it in Perspective

How do artists do it? They paint their pictures on flat surfaces, but we seem to see deep into the pictures. Why? Because the artists use what is called perspective.

In real life, street lights down the road look as if they are smaller than street lights that are nearby. Artists try to get this effect in their painting using perspective. This means they paint some things small and short to show that they are supposed to be far away.

In the same picture, the artist paints everything at the front of the picture larger. These larger things make up the foreground. Everything in between the background and the foreground makes up the middle ground. Having a foreground, a middle ground, and a background gives a painting depth, or perspective.

Artists use even more tricks to give their paintings depth. Sometimes they paint the background pale and misty. This makes the background look far away. Other times, they draw the straight lines in a street or road so they meet in the background. This makes the road seem to disappear in the distance just as a real road appears to do.

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Light and Dark

Artists perform a kind of magic using light and dark. They use them to grab your attention.

Suppose an artist wants you to notice a certain part of a painting. A good way to do this is to make that part a light colour and surround it with a dark colour. The result is called contrast.

In this picture, the painter used contrast to draw your eyes to the centre. He painted a white shawl on a man dressed mostly in black. Since white reflects a lot of light, the white shawl stands out well.

Suppose an artist wants you to notice a subject’s shape instead of his or her face and clothes. The artist might paint the person in front of a light. The result would be a dark shape against a light background. This kind of picture is called a silhouette.

In the picture, the painter placed the girl in front of the light. Her silhouette stands out against the sky. The artist used light and dark to give you a surprising view of an ordinary scene.

A Lasting Impression

Sometimes artists leave out the details in a painting to create a feeling. Half-close your eyes and look at this painting. You can almost feel the sunshine poking through the treetops and warming the forest floor.

Now look at the picture closely. It does not show much detail. You cannot see the bark on the trees or even the kinds of trees in the forest. The artist has painted only an impression of the scene.

In the close-up photo above, you can see all the details of a forest. It looks as if the camera captured every pine needle! But when you see a forest in one quick look, you do not see all the detail. You see it as the painter did – a blurry impression of colour, light, and shade.

A painting does not always need lots of detail. The colours can make an impression of a scene without all the details that show up in a photo.

At first glance, this picture might look like streaks of colour splashed over the page. But the painter, Nazli Madkour, wanted to create more than a pretty pattern. She wanted to tell you about something that she saw. Let’s think about what it could be.

Look at the pale, cool colours. Maybe the colours are telling you about a special place. Could it be somewhere cool? 

The colours seem to rush here and there across one another.

See the splash of blue in the lower-right corner? Blue has a calming effect. Does the blue in this painting make you feel calm?

Now look at the dark lines and shapes. Do you see things in motion? Can you see a bird flying?

A painting should set you wondering and guessing. Maybe the artist painted the wind the way she did to make you think. She wanted you to see calm in the middle of motion. Perhaps she thought you would imagine how it would feel to be a bird in flight.

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Tints and Shades

How would you describe the colour of the sky on a clear day? Most people would say it is blue. But perhaps the sky is not as blue as it was yesterday. Or maybe it is bluer than the sea or a river. There are so many kinds of blue! What makes one blue different from another?

If you have paints, try adding white to some colours. You’ll find that red turns pink, purple turns lavender, and dark blue turns light blue. Colours with white added are called tints.

Now try mixing your colours with a little black to see how they change. Black makes colours darker. These darker colours are called shades.

All colours – red, yellow, blue, orange, green, purple, and the colours in between – have many tints and shades. Blacks and whites even come in different tints and shades, with interesting names like Mars black or zinc white.

In the 1870’s in France, a group of painters called Impressionists invented a different style of painting. New kinds of packaging helped make this new style of painting possible. Lead tubes kept paint from drying out. Now painters could work outside their studios. They took their easels, canvases, and brushes, and painted outdoors.

Outdoors, in natural light, Impressionists noticed that objects cast coloured shadows. So they painted orange haystacks with blue shadows, red dresses with green shadows, and yellow pots with purple shadows.

The colours they were seeing in shadows are called complementary colours. They are like colour opposites. To help identify colours in light and shadow, many artists use colour charts. You can make your own chart of primary, secondary, and complementary colours.

Jars, Tubes, and Powders

Paints come in a rainbow of colours. Some paints are runny and come in jars. Other paints are oozy and come in tubes. Still other paints come in solids or powders. You have to add water before you can use them.

The kinds of paints you probably use most are water-colours, temperas, and powder paints. All these paints are made of pigments and binders. A pigment is a powder that gives the paint its colour. A binder makes the pigments stick together.

Water-colours are probably the easiest paints to use. They come in tubes or solid tablets. You add a little water if you want the paint’s colour to be strong, and more water if you want a thin paint with a delicate colour.

Tempera paints are also easy to use. They are thicker than water-colours. Temperas are ready to use and clean up easily with soap and water. But they cost more than other paints.

Powder paints may be thick or thin, depending on how much water you add. For a thick paint with a shiny finish, mix the powder with white glue. This shiny paint works well for finger painting.

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Prehistoric Paintings

Imagine living more than 30,000 years ago. Writing has not been invented yet. But you want to keep track of the exciting things that happen to you. How do you do it?

Very early people used pictures to record their adventures. In 1956, Frenchman Henri Lhote discovered hundreds of paintings on cave walls in Algeria. Many of them show different kinds of animals. They also show people doing everyday things, such as hunting and herding animals.

Thousands of years ago, the native people of Australia painted pictures on bark. Their relatives, who live in Australia today, the Aborigines, still paint bark pictures. Most of these pictures tell stories that were passed down from parents to children for hundreds of years.

To make a bark picture, Aborigines cut bark from a eucalyptus tree. Next, they flatten and dry the bark.

Then they scratch a design into the bark and paint the design. They make their paint from crushed plants mixed with charcoal.

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Let’s Paint

Painting is the application of pigments to a support surface that establishes an image, design or decoration. In art the term “painting” describes both the act and the result. Most painting is created with pigment in liquid form and applied with a brush. 

Painting media are extremely versatile because they can be applied to many different surfaces (called supports) including paper, wood, canvas, plaster, clay, lacquer and concrete. Because paint is usually applied in a liquid or semi-liquid state it has the ability to soak into porous support material, which can, over time, weaken and damage it.  To prevent this support is usually first covered with a ground, a mixture of binder and chalk that, when dry, creates a non-porous layer between the support and the painted surface.

What feelings can you show in a painting? In a painting of a stormy sea, you can show the power of nature. In a quiet forest scene, you can express peace. A picture of food can send a message of plenty. Or a painting of empty bowls may say “hunger”.

What can you express in a painting that doesn’t show anything real, like people or objects? You can use colours and designs to show feelings. You can put across your own feelings this way.

In Stitches

There are huge machines in factories that sew most of our clothes and other items. But many people still enjoy sewing by hand or with their own sewing machines. One reason people like to sew their own clothes is because, that way, they can choose exactly what size, colour, and material they want. Some people like to sew special things for their homes, such as curtains or pillowcases. People also sew gifts for their friends or families.

Embroidery is a craft that is related to sewing. It is used mainly for decoration. A person who embroiders uses a special needle and coloured thread called embroidery thread to make different kinds of stitches on cloth. The stitches can form pictures or designs.

You may have a shirt or sweater with words or pictures on it that have been embroidered by a machine. But many craft-workers enjoy embroidering by hand because it is creative and it relaxes them.

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The Roots of Ringgold’s Art

When you think of a painting, what do you see in your mind? A piece of canvas, painted and framed, hanging on a wall? That is probably what most people would think of. But artist Faith Ringgold makes paintings and other works of art by using materials in new ways.

Ringgold started experimenting with fabric in 1972, when she was teaching art at a college in New York City, U.S.A. At that time, Ringgold was insisting that museums show art by African American women. Much of this art was made of beads and fabric. Faith Ringgold encouraged her students to use beads and fabric in their art. So why, asked a student, did Ringgold always use canvas and paint in her own work?

The question made Ringgold wonder, too. After all, the women in her family had worked with fabric for almost 100 years. Her mother made a living by sewing and had taught Ringgold how to use a sewing machine.

But how could Ringgold mix fabric and painting? On a visit overseas, she discovered a way – tankas. These are cloth frames that Tibetans use for sacred paintings. Faith started framing her own paintings with tankas.

Next, Ringgold began making cloth sculptures. They looked like African masks. One such sculpture – Mrs. Jones and Family – shows Faith, her mother, Willi, her brother, Andrew, and her sister, Barbara, with their mouths wide open. The open mouths stand for the tradition of storytelling in Faith’s family.

Ringgold used quilting in her paintings in 1986. She used an African design – squares of four triangles – to make a quilted border around her painting Groovin’ High. She even quilted large squares onto the painted canvas.

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The first settlers in America, called colonists, had no factories or shops, and many communities had no craft-workers either. People had to build their own houses, grow their own food, and make their own clothes.

To make clothes, colonists had to do more than just cut out cloth and sew it together. First, they had to grow flax for linen and raise sheep for wool. Next, they had to spin the fibres into thread or yarn. Often they coloured it in dyes made from boiled plants. Then they wove or knitted it into cloth.

When the clothes the colonists had made became ragged, they didn’t throw them away. They found other ways to use them. Some cloth was cut into patches and then pieced together to make blankets called patchwork quilts. The craft of quilt-making is still popular today.

A quilt is a kind of fabric sandwich. The top and bottom layers are cloth. The filling is made of raw cotton or some other soft material.

Today, quilters sew the layers together with tiny stitches. The top and bottom layers can be made out of many coloured patches. Sometimes the stitches form designs like diamonds, leaves, or stars over the patches.

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Carle’s Collage Creatures

They have pictures made with colourful scraps of painted tissue papers, which he paints himself. The caterpillar in The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a collage.

To make the very hungry caterpillar, first Carle made a drawing of the caterpillar. He placed that drawing on top of a piece of red tissue paper and cut along the outline of the face. He put glue on the back of the tissue face and stuck it to a white board. One by one, Carle cut out the other parts of the caterpillar and added them to the red face. Then he drew details, such as hairs, with crayon.

In 1929, Eric Carle was born to German parents in Syracuse, New York, U.S.A. As a small child, Eric took many walks with his father. They often stopped to look under rocks and dead leaves. There they discovered tiny creatures, such as insects, spiders, and worms. Eric Carle’s love of nature began with these walks.

Eric went to kindergarten in Syracuse. He enjoyed experimenting with the fat brushes and bright paints in his art class. Eric’s teacher saw that he had talent. She urged his mother to encourage his drawing. But he learned more about animals and art outside school than inside.

As an older student, Eric was living in Stuttgart, Germany. On summer visits to farms, Eric milked cows and watched bees. While in the city, he visited his Uncle August, a storyteller, who inspired the young Eric. Eric Carle went on to make up his own stories with the collage creatures that delight children and adults today.

Getting Crafty

To do all the crafts, you will need lots of materials. Some things you will need for only one project. But other things you will use again and again.

It is a good idea to collect the materials and keep them in a large cardboard box. Then you will have the materials you need to work with.

Where will you find your materials? You may have to buy some at a craft shop. But you can start your collecting at home and outside. Remember to get permission before you take something for your collection. And be careful when handling sharp objects.

Craft materials to collect

• Rubber bands • tracing paper • bowls of different sizes • cardboard • clear tape • crayons • glue • flowers • leaves • food colouring • paper and card in different colours and weights • magazines • felt-tipped pens • masking tape • newspaper • open-weave canvas • pencils • pieces of cloth • a ruler • scissors • streamers • string • tissue paper • greaseproof paper • embroidery hoop • embroidery needle • embroidery thread.

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Most crafts are activities that have been done for a very long time. Some crafts developed in different parts of the world at the same time. For example, people in different parts of the world carved designs onto their wooden boats. Hundreds of years ago, a group of people called the Maori were skilled woodcarvers as well as good sailors. They sailed from islands in northeast Polynesia to what is now New Zealand in canoes decorated with beautiful woodcarvings.

Thousands of miles away, in northern Europe, Viking sailors decorated the prow, or front, of their ships with woodcarvings called figureheads. The tradition of figureheads continued in Western Europe, North America, and South America as long as large wooden ships sailed the seas.

Other crafts were important in different places. One such craft is kite-making. Almost two thousand years ago, Chinese generals used paper kites to signal their troops in battle.

Today, Japanese paint warriors on their kites and wage “war” in the air at kite festivals. They also celebrate Boys’ Day on May 5 by flying kite-like windsocks. These paper flags are shaped and painted like carp – fish that stand for strength, courage, and determination in Japan.

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When it comes to art, what you see is not always what you get. An art technique known as trompe l’oeil uses realistic imagery to create an optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions.

Trompe l’oeil was widely popular during the Renaissance, the technique was often employed to murals and frescoes on church ceilings. The fresco painting on the ceiling of the Church of Saint Ignazio in Rome, created by Andrea Pozzo during 1691-1694, is one classic example. A semi-circular roof is transformed into a fantastic picture of the heavens, in which Saint Ignatius ascends into paradise.

The term trompe l’oeil (meaning trick of the eye in French) was first used by artist Louis-Leopold Boilly as a title of his painting in Paris in 1800. It later gained currency throughout Europe. The technique was usually used to create the impression of a bigger space.

Artists Vittorio Carpaccio and Jacopo de Barbari took the technique further. They added small trompe l’oeil details to their paintings such as a curtain that appears to partly conceal the painting, or a person might appear to be climbing out of the painting altogether.

Putting things in perspective

A lesser-known art technique known as anamorphosis, is an offshoot of the trompe l’oeil technique. In anamorphosis, a deformed image appears in its true shape when viewed in an unconventional way. There are two types of anamorphosis images:

** Oblique – These images need to be viewed from a position that is very far from the usual positions from where we normally expect images to be looked at

** Catoptric – The image must be seen reflected in a distorting mirror. The Hungarian artist István Orosz has produced some beautiful examples of these

How does it work?

We tend to believe something is real if we see it in front of us. However, seeing is not a direct perception of reality. What we see is the result of our brains constantly interpreting and giving structure to the raw visual input from our eyes. Artists use this knowledge to create optical illusions in the tromp l’oeil paintings.

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Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country’s popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.
Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán—now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Although she was disabled by polio as a child, Kahlo had been a promising student headed for medical school until she suffered a bus accident at the age of eighteen, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems. During her recovery she returned to her childhood hobby of art with the idea of becoming an artist.

Kahlo’s work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

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How did you spend the COVID-19 lockdown? Making Dalgona coffee, attending Zoom calls endlessly, or simply doing nothing? Well British visual artist Sacha Jafri took a slightly different approach. Jafri spent 18 hours a day painting what is dubbed the world’s largest artwork on canvas, measuring close to 2,000 square metres.

Titled “The Journey of Humanity,” the work is roughly equivalent in size to four basketball courts or two soccer fields combined. It is being painted in the ballroom of the Atlantis The Palm hotel in Dubai, where Jafri has been based for over five months – amid strict COVID-19 restrictions.

Jafri is expected to complete the painting by the end of this month (November), after which it will be displayed on the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. The painting will then be cut into 60 square metres each, and will be auctioned off individually in Dubai this December.

The painting in Jafri’s abstract style also incorporates work by children from around the world on the themes of separation and isolation during the pandemic. As part of his “Humanity Inspired” project, Jafri hopes to raise 30 million USD through the painting to support health and education initiatives for children living in poverty worldwide.

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In the 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution began to change the way people had lived their lives for centuries in Europe, it created an intense longing for the past among some. This gave birth to Romanticism, which brought to the fore the feelings of artists and how they expressed it, as opposed to creating within a definite set of rules. It was used mostly in art, literature and music.

It began to take shape in many countries in Europe, and emotions, nature and the past were gloried in paintings through bold brushstrokes. It used an intense emotion to create something authentic and new. Terror, awe, grief and horror were other strong emotions artists played with at this time.

Artists aimed to evoke the sublimity and raw beauty of nature and things gone by. And unlike the Rationalist movement, which aimed to stay close to the present, Romantic artists always looked back, elevating folk and myths to antiquity, in the hope that they could escape the early urbanism of the industrial Revolution. This, indirectly, also stoked nationalistic ideals among the people.

The movement was named Romantic during the 18th century in England and France –‘Romantique’(French), meant beautiful scenery or in general, the praise of a natural phenomenon such as sunsets. And since the art movement placed a lot of emphasis on nature and its beauty, the name stuck on.

But if one were to define what the movement really was, poet and critic Charles Baudelaire put it rather succinctly in 1846-“Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling”.

Examples of Romantic art:

Wanderer above the sea of fog: Painted in 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich, considered the most important German romantic artist, the painting shows a man is formal clothing standing on top of a mountain of rocks with his back to the viewer. The viewer can see a thick blanket of fog and his contemplative body language. The artist aims to show how small humans are in comparison to the grandness of nature.

The Raft of the Medusa: Medusa was a ship that fought in the Napoleonic wars. It survived them all but crashed in 1816 in a sandbank while transporting people to Senegal. The 400 people in it were forced to evacuate and over 150 of them set said on a small raft. They went through many ordeals and 13 days later, when the raft was found, only 15 men were alive. The artist Theodore Gericault studied the scandal and created this masterpiece. This painting is considered one of the most iconic in French Romantic art.

Liberty Leading the People: Liberty is a folk goddess in French culture – not only is she goddess but also women of the people. And so, during the French revolution, she was personified in many works of art. This painting by EUGENE Delacroix commemorates the July revolution of 1830 in which king Charles X was overthrown. Here, Liberty is leading the people of France to victory. The goddess also inspired the Statue of Liberty in New York.

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In the late 1800s, there was a change of thought among some artists. This was around the time that scientific thinking was beginning to spread, and so the idea that what the eye saw and the brain transmitted were two different things was something that artists pounced upon. This new group, with its bright unblended colours and short brushstrokes wanted to create art out of an impression, a fleeting second in time. These paintings were part of Impressionism.

In 1870, the Anonymous Society of Painters organized an exhibition in Paris where they displayed art that went against what was taught at major institutions and what artists in the era strived to be. The sketch-like paintings that many critics called ‘unfinished’, was the birth of Impressionism and focused on light and its effect on the surroundings. The founding members of this movement were Claude Monet, Edger Degas and Camille Pissarro. In fact, it was Monet’s painting “Impression, Sunrise” that gave the movement its name, since a critic called it an ‘impression’ of a painting.

As more painters got drawn to this style, they began to leave their studios and step outside to catch moments to paint. Everyday suburban and rural leisure became popular muses for these painters. Hence, boating and bathing establishments that flourished in that time became popular haunts for impressionists. They used brighter and innovative colours, coloured shadows and even featured industrialisation encroaching on the serenity of the landscape. This would have been allowed in the traditional painting style.

The moment was fleeting and powerful, and eventually, the collective of painters that began and nurtured it developed their own distinct styles, causing raptures in the organisation. Many began to focus on the purity of colour, thereby creating Neo-Impressionism.

Examples

Impression Sunrise:

Painted by Claude Monet in 1872, the painting became a symbol of Impressionism after it gave the movement its name. The subject is the Le Havre harbour in France or so it is suggested, since the brushstrokes are very loose and not defined. Monet captures the scene through light and colour rather than definition.

Le Boulevard Montmartre, effet de nuit:

This painting by Camille Pissarro depicts a scene of Paris in the 19th Century. Pissarro took a room on the Montmartre Boulevard and painted it at different times of the day. This one, painted at night, plays exclusively on light to capture the dramatic effect of the movement.

Paris Street; Rainy Day:

Considered one of the most ambitious paintings of urban lifestyle in the 19th Century, this painting by Gustave Caillebotte depicts de Dublin, an interesting near Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The painting was appreciated for its precision and photograph-like quality. Caillebotte creates the idea of overcast, rainy day just through the light and the reflection on water on the street.

Wow facts

• Impressionists were more concerned with the light and colour of the moment than its vivid details. They mostly painted outdoors and worked quickly to capture the moment before the light changed. For this, they used brush strokes and unmixed colour to save time. Often they had very unusual visual angles too.
• Impressionists were often accused of having unfinished paintings and dealing with social or banal subjects. Most of them could not sell their paintings and lived in poverty for years. In fact, Van Gogh – a post-Impressionist artist – sold only one painting in his lifetime and his buyer was his brother!

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A post-World War II movement that developed in New York in the mid 1940s. abstract Expressionism was all about filling the canvas with vibrant brushstrokes that exuded intense emotions. The most famous painters of this movement are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kitne. The movement inspired artists to create monumentally-sized works that represented the inner psyche, breaking away from traditional forms of art.

The name Abstract Expressionism came to be accepted by the group of artists since they all expressed intense emotions and universal themes but were also inspired by Surrealist art. In the beginning, the artists looked at primitive and ancient cultures to inspire them, and hence, their early works had pictographic elements. Later on, the movement showcased different techniques of abstraction developed along the way. In 1947, Jackson Pollock developed a radical new technique, wherein he dripped and poured paint on a canvas. The paintings were large in scale and shocked many viewers, who were also exposed to Kooing’s new style of using figurative elements in abstract style.

The first generation of abstract expressionists grew between the mid-1940s and 1950s and changed the focus of the art world from Paris to New York. And, in a time of uncertainty and doubt, this movement emerged as the first authentically American avant garde art movement.

Examples

Excavation: This painting, made in 1950 by Willem de Kooning, showcases his innovative brushstroke techniques and organisation of space. It has a great mix of tension between abstraction and figurative elements. Over six-and-a-half feet tall and eight feet wide, this painting is the biggest he ever made.

The Moon Woman: This Jackson Pollock painting was during the days he shifted from Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. There is a moon woman, a regionalist theme, strong and challenging. But there is also more because the painting doesn’t merely show everything clearly but abstracts it, and adds fiery colours to elevate its intensity. This is the perfect juxtaposition of two art movements.

Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental: Richard Pousette-Dart painted this monumental piece thick with dark colours. The work is a mix of Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and mural painting. The title allows us to believe that Pousette-Dart was trying to create an elevated, aesthetic experience, like an orchestral symphony.

Wow Facts

• Due to the chaos and tumultuous times in Europe, many artists migrated to New York, and suddenly, New York became the centre of modern art. And Abstract Expressionism, deemed an American art movement, created art that was large, individualistic and romantic.
• In the 1940s, Jackson Pollock’s approach to art changed the potential of contemporary art and redefined it. His technique of dripping paint on canvas to express intense emotions made him realize that the journey of making art was as important as the art itself.

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Regionalism (1930 to 1935 AD)

During the Great Depression, many American artists rejected urban and modern art movements and went back to traditional paintings and using art as a form of storytelling. Regionalism was born. The artists so they can be enjoyed by a larger audience. The art depicted rural and rustic America, particularly the Midwest and the Deep South, and was appreciated for the positive images it created during a hard time.

What regionalists tried to do was to create something distinctly American, and rejected the idea of abstraction. So they painted the rustic world around them – farmers, ranches, the atmosphere, small cities, everyday life and generally imbibed American culture and traditions into their art. Three artists were at the forefront of this movement – Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton.

Unlike other art movements that had a manifesto and agenda, Regionalism developed rather organically. It was a natural response to a situation, and this is probably also why it didn’t last long. At the end of World War II, Regionalism lost its status. There was peace and prosperity and the upcoming Cold War also changed the political and social situations, which led to the movement’s decline.

Examples

American Gothic: This 1930 piece by Grant Wood is instantly recognisable as one of America’s timeless works of art. It shows an aloof couple, where the man stares straight at the viewer at the while the woman looks at the frame.

The People of Chilmark: Thomas Hart Benton summered in the Chilmark area of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where he found several inspirations to paint – from waves and boats to dramatic skies and people. “ The People of Chilmark” was one of his works there, and it featured family and friends busy with several activities from boating to playing basketball.

Baptism in Kansas: Painted in 1928 by John Steuart Curry, this painting depicts a baptism in a water tank. The sky has a dove and raven, a reference to the birds Noah first released from the Ark. The painting has spiritual and religious significance.

Wow facts

• All three artists of the Regionalist movement studied in Paris and grew to create art distinctly American. They believed that the solution to the Great Depression and all of America’s problems was for it to return agrarian roots.
• Regionalism became a bridge between abstract and realistic art, so much so that following this movement came the intense and daring Abstract Expressionism. This is similar to how Impressionism was a bridge between academic art and post-Impressionism.

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In the early 1900s, following the short burst of a movement called the Dada movement came another that invested in the unconscious and the surreal corners of one’s imagination. This came to be called Surrealism. Inspired by the words of revolutionary Karl Marx and most importantly, father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, the movement aimed to unlock one’s consciousness and reveal its true nature and creativity.

The Dada movement that preceded this was also about moving away from traditional forms of art with a more aggressive approach. This one, in comparison, focussed on dreams and breaking the chains of logic, and influenced art, literature, philosophy, films and music. The forerunners of this movement were Salvador Dali, Andre Breton (writer), Yves Tanguy and Joan Miro.

Surrealism believed in overlooking reality and creating from within. Sometimes, to achieve this, artists conducted different experiments on themselves to reach a state from where they could unconsciously create. One of the experiments was hypnosis but they soon deemed it as too dangerous. In their core, surrealists tried to liberate the imagination and reach new depths of human psyche.

Examples

The Persistence of Memory

Probably the most iconic Surrealist painting in history, this work by Salvador Dali, with dripping clocks, is an ode to time. The painting portrays Dali’s subconscious and also conveys a simple message – that time holds no meaning.

The Son of Man

This painting by Rene Magritte is a self-portrait. This painting aims to convey the message that not everything is as it seems and there’s more than one side to a person.

Harlequin’s Carnival

One of Joan Miro’s most iconic work of art, this painting is about the hallucinations that Miro saw when he went through a rough patch and too poor to often eat three full meals. Of the painting, Miro said, “I tried to translate the hallucinations that hunger would produce. I didn’t depict what I’d see in my drams, as the Surrealist often did, but what hunger would produce: a form of trance.”

Wow facts

• Sigmund Freud preferred the works of Salvador Dali to any other surrealist painters and felt that the unconscious was being manifested into the conscious world through his art. Dali’s paintings border on dreams and illusions, making him one of the Surrealist movement’s most important and popular painters.
• Many women joined the Surrealist movement, even though they were quick to be dismissed by the male surrealists. Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo are a few painters who brought their own personal stories into the movement.

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The early 20th Century witnessed a breakthrough in the art movement. Two iconic painters – Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque – no longer wanted to follow the traditional form of art. They didn’t believe that painters had to copy nature or everyday moments. Instead, they wanted to portray the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Hence, their paintings were flat and the forms were reduced to geometric shapes to give the illusion of a three-dimensional view, allowing the viewer to see different parts of the picture simultaneously, breaking away completely from traditional techniques. French painter Paul Cezanne and popular French art critic Louis Vauxcelleslooked at Georges Braque’s painting “Houses at L’Estaque” in 1908 and called it cubes. And, cubism was born.

In the beginning of this period, the subjects of the paintings were almost indiscernible. They were a collection of angles and planes that blended into the background and were almost in monochrome. The painters usually used musical instruments glasses, bottles, still-life and human face and forms as subjects.

The idea of Cubism was to abandon the idea and traditional notions of shape and form and present the world in an entirely new way. It used influences outside of western art, such as African art, and even science as its base to form different perspectives on a flat canvas.

The liberating concepts had far-reaching influences and were not contained to just art. It spilled over to architecture and sculpture as well.

Examples

 Man with a Guitar: This 1912 painting by Georges Braque is one of the most popular examples of analytical Cubism, a later evolution of the form. Here, the artist uses nails and ropes on a flat surface to depict a man playing a guitar.

The Weeping Woman: This iconic painting by Pablo Picasso tries to paint a universal picture of suffering. Here, Picasso directly targets the effects of the Spanish Civil War and some even say the picture had a personal story behind it. Picasso’s mother once called him saying all the smoke from the fighting (during the war) was making her eyes water.

Ma Jolie: Another of Picasso’s masterpieces, the representation of forms in the painting in subtle. The form of woman is visible in the centre, presumably his lover Marcelle Humbert. There’s also a treble clef drawn next to the name of the painting. Ma Jolie (My Pretty Girl) was a line in a popular song at a music hall in Paris that the artist visited frequently.

Wow facts

Even though many artists were moving towards abstractionism even as early as the 18th Century, Cubism was the first abstract art movement. It intentionally reduced all forms into geometric shapes and gave a flat but simultaneous view of different sides of the same object. It was a scientific art form.
Cubism wasn’t popular in the beginning. In fact, in the early 20th Century, not depicting nature in its purest form was considered scandalous and heretical. But over many years, the path-breaking form began to gain the importance and respect it deserved.

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In the early 20th Century, there was a period of loss in spirituality and high anxiety, surrounding humans’ relationship with the world. At this time, artists began to shun objectiveness and turned within to unleash their emotions. The result was an expressive canvas with distorted shapes and exaggerated, vibrant colours that displayed emotions, rather than a picture. There, Expressionism was born.

The artists at the forefront of this movement were Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and James Ensor. Van Gogh, particularly, was the symbol of this movement since his paintings were mostly autobiographical and chronicled his emotions at different times of his life. Unlike Impressionism, Expressionist art did not aim to depict the world as it is but impose the artist’s sensibilities and feelings about the world. The paintings were harsh, bold and intense, and the artists encouraged distorted shapes in order to convey or exaggerate emotions.

The decline of Expressionism was also because of its intensely personal nature. The paintings were vague and unapproachable, and by the mid 1920s, the movement slowly came to an end.

Examples

• The Starry Night: Painted in 1889 by Vincent Van Gogh, this painting depicts the scene that Van Gogh saw from his window at his asylum room at saint-Remy-de-Provence in France. An icon of Expressionist art, its swirling skies and the sinister cypress tree overlooking this scene are all reproductions of Van Gogh’s emotions on canvas.
• The Scream: Edvard Munch’s most famous painting is everything that Expressionism is about. Throughout his career, Munch’s art described emotions such as anger, guilt, anxiety and fear while talking about humans’ relationship with the world around them. “The Scream” is no different, and often, just a look at this painting can create an emotional jolt due to its vibrant colours and exaggerated, distorted shapes.
• Sunflowers: This iconic painting by Van Gogh is one part of two series of paintings. The first series had the sunflowers wilted and on the ground, while the second had a bunch of sunflowers placed in vases. The sunflower was special to Van Gogh and signified ‘gratitude’ and he hung his first two paintings on the wall in his friend Paul Gaugin’s house. Gaugin called the paintings ‘completely Vincent.’

Wow facts

• Expressionists often had swirls and swaying components in their art, exaggerated and painted with bold brushstrokes to depict their own internal turmoil.
• On his painting “Scream”, Norwegian artists Edvard Munch said he was walking with friends when “suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood… Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature”.

Picture Credit : Google