Abstract art, nonfigurative art, nonobjective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They are similar, although perhaps not of identical meaning.

Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be only slight, or it can be partial, or it can be complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.

Both Geometric abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Early etching was to decorate metal items such as guns, armour, cups and plates by goldsmiths and other metal-workers. It has been known in Europe since the Middle Ages at least, and may go back to antiquity. The elaborate decoration of armour, in Germany anyway, was an art probably imported from Italy around the end of the 15th century—little earlier than the birth of etching as a printmaking technique.

Today Etching is applied to a metal plate, most often copper or zinc but steel plate is another medium with different qualities. Copper was always the traditional metal, and is still preferred, for etching, as it bites evenly, holds texture well, and does not distort the colour of the ink when wiped.

Photo-etching is another type of modern etching printmaking and Etching has often been combined with other intaglio techniques such as engraving (e.g. Rembrandt) or aquatint (e.g. Goya).

The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain. Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Alfred Maurer, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the Swiss painter Alice Bailly, and Georges Braque (subsequently Picasso’s partner in Cubism).

The paintings of the Fauves were characterised by seemingly wild brush work and strident colours, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated colour—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derain’s work at Collioure in 1905. In 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier:
“ How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow;      this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red     leaves? Put in vermilion. ”

Fauvism can also be seen as a mode of Expressionism.

His early years were spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist. Later he was converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. He studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse in 1859. There he made a friendship with Pissarro. He also joined for two years’ military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre because he had contracted typhoid fever. On his return he met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye’. He then entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris , in 1862. There he met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism. Monet’s Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La femme à la robe verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Woman in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868, pictured here. Shortly thereafter, Cammille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean.

The Franco-Prussian War broke in 1870-71 and he traveled to England with Pissarro where he studied the work of Constable and Turner and painted the Thames and London parks. He also met the dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists.

Monet married Camille Doncieux in 1870. She had been the model of his paintings. He had two sons from her. After the birth of the second son weakened her already fading health. On 5 September 1879, Camille Monet died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two; Monet painted her on her death bed.

Before the death of his wife during the period from 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley. In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris. After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to prosper. By 1890 he was successful enough to buy the house at Giverny he had previously rented and in 1892 he married his mistress, with whom he had begun an affair in 1876, three years before the death of his first wife.

Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s through the end of his life in 1926, Monet worked on “series” paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions.–Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the best known. He travelled widely, visiting London and Venice several times (and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana), but increasingly his attention was focused on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely.

During World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of Weeping Willow trees as homage to the French fallen soldiers. In 1923, he underwent two operations to remove his cataracts: the paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye, this may have had an effect on the colors he perceived. After his operations, he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.

Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. He was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

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Kahlo was born in a small town house known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House). Her parents were Lutheran Germans. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen. Frida’s mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well as Spanish descent. Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. It has been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal and leg development. Kahlo joined a clique at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued. On September 17, 1925, Kahlo met a serious accident causing several injuries.

After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a full-time painting career. It was due to her temporary immobilization and isolation. It were her depriviations which appeared in the stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds.

As a young artist, Kahlo approached the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, whose work she admired, asking him for advice about pursuing art as a career. This advice later resulted in likeness, love and ultimately, marriage. But their marriage was often tumultuous due to numerous extramarital affairs of the both artists. Farida was bisexual. She had affairs both with men and women, including Josephine Baker. Their marriage broke but they remarried in in 1940, yet their metrimonial life remained the same. Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 due to pulmonary embolism.
A few days before her death she wrote in her diary: “I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to return – Frida”

Kahlo’s Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where she lived and worked, was donated by Diego Rivera upon his death in 1957 and is now a museum housing artifacts of her life. Her work  conveys a melancholy and contemplative nature and is largly admired throughout the whole world. Though late after her death yet her art forced the art lovers to admire her works truely, deeply and cosiderably.

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At age 14, he entered apprenticeship with the painter José Luzán, after completing his early education at the school named Escuelas Pias. He later moved to Madrid where he studied with Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter who was popular with Spanish royalty but could not continue his study there due certain clash with his master.

In 1771, he journeyed to Rome where he won second prize in a painting competition organized by the City of Parma. He the same year, returned to Zaragoza and painted a part of the cupola of the Basilica of the Pillar, frescoes of the oratory of the cloisters of Aula Dei, and the frescoes of the Sobradiel Palace. He studied with Francisco Bayeu y Subías and his painting began to show signs of the delicate tonalities for which he became famous.

His work gradually made him famous with the maturity of his art. In 1783, the Count of Floridablanca, a favorite of King Carlos III, commissioned him to paint his portrait. He also became friends with Crown Prince Don Luis, and lived in his house. His circle of patrons grew to include the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, whom he painted, the King and other notable people of the kingdom. After the death of Charles III in 1788 and revolution in France in 1789, during the reign of Charles IV, Goya reached his peak of popularity with royalty.Goya left Spain in May 1824 for Bordeaux, where he settled. He returned to Spain in 1826, but, despite a warm welcome, he returned in ill health to Bordeaux, where he died in 1828 at the age of 82.

Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso. His famous works like “The Maja”, “Darker realms”, “Black Paintings and The Disasters”, made him immortal in the realm of Art.

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The surrealist movement of visual art flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Surrealism emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past.

The artistic movement Surrealism came into being after the French poet Andre Breton 1924 published the first Manifeste du surrealisme. In this book Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surrealism.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Influenced by the theories of the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, the images found in surrealist works are as confusing and startling as those of dreams. Surrealist works can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies, as in the works of René Magritte and Salvador Dali. Surrealism sometimes had a more abstract style, as in the works of Joan Mir?, Max Ernst, and Oscar Dominguez, who invented spontaneous techniques, modeled upon the psychotherapeutic procedure of “free association” as a means to eliminate conscious control in order to express the workings of the unconscious mind.

The Surrealists aimed to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed, the true aim of Surrealism is “long live the social revolution, and it alone!” To this goal, at various times surrealists aligned with communism and anarchism.

The Surrealist movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the Surrealists played collaborative drawing games and discussed the theories of Surrealism. The Surrealists developed a variety of techniques such as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage, and decalcomania. Soon more visual artists joined Surrealism including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Enrico Donati, Alberto Giacometti, and Valentine Hugo. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.

Source: www.michaelarnoldart.com

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí (Spanish pronunciation: [daˈli]) was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work (Surrealism). His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to a self-styled “Arab lineage,” claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

Source: Wikipedia

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In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil’s gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself “for the good of all.” During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh’s finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh’s inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

Source: vangoghgallery.com

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