Throughout the twentieth century, artists in the vanguard
have repeatedly challenged convention by exploring new avenues of expression
and seeking alternative forms to embody new ideas. In the early years of the
century, the so-called fauve artists ("wild beasts") in France, led
by Henri Matisse, experimented with vivid, highly saturated colors and bold
brushwork to evoke intense emotional responses. Later, creating abbreviated
shapes that, however abstract, were meant to stand for specific concepts or
forms. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were responsible for one of the most
radical innovations of the century. In their cubist Reproduction Oil Paintings,
these artists defied the long-held notion that painting provided a
"window" into deep fictional space.
Instead, they fractured forms and space into shifting
planes and reduced their palette to a few muted tones. Yet Picasso never
favored absolute abstraction as did Piet Mondrian, who eventually eliminated
any reference to the natural world from the rigorous compositions of straight
lines and primary colors that he intended as the expression of an ideal and
universal order. Surrealist artists, through a variety of styles and media,
sought to exploit the internal world of imaginings and the unconscious. René
Magritte, for example, employed precise illusionism to subvert expectations
about reality. European surrealists provided a critical example for postwar
American artists such as David Smith and Jackson Pollock.
In his welded metal sculpture Smith incorporated
"found" objects that, as a kind of sculptural equivalent to
automatism, were often arranged to evoke the standing figure. Pollock recorded
his ideas and gestures on the canvas in dense webs of poured paint. Like his
fellow abstract expressionists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Pollock believed
that abstraction would achieve all the expressive potential of representational
art. By the 1960s, Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were exploring
alternatives to abstract expressionism with subjects drawn from popular culture
and a style informed by mass mechanical reproduction.
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