Contextual Studies

Contextual Studies 

Learning Outcomes assessed in this assignment

Students should:

Demonstrate an ability to identify key information and issues from core lectures.

Analyse visual and textual material.

Show an understanding of the relationship between issues covered by drawing parrallels and making connections.

Start to develop independant learning skills by researching core idea's further.

Essay 1 Modernist Movement 

There was huge change in art over the period of modernism, modernist artist were concerned with representing modern life in the big cities of the time, hanse all the street seances and interiors of cafes and theatres and so on. Post modernism art was always closely related to the human form and nature as these were traditional of the time.

modernism began to change the way artist were thinking , painting became more abstract and filled with colour to provoke emotion, an example of this change would be Piet Mondarin. he felt that using recognisable form in art takes away the essence of the painting, he believes you only need to concentrate on lines and colour to create a feeling in works of art.

Mondrain reduces objects to there most basic form, you can see how he uses brush strokes themselves to form horizontal rectangles and lines to form the image, the image is very geometric and futuristic.

Another example of modernist thinking is russian painter Wassily Kendisky, in his Composition V11 painted in 1913. His work is all about composition of the objects and the way they work together to form an image, colour plays a vital part in Kandinskys work they are very loud, with is very expressive. He believes "colour lines and shapes could exist autonomously in a painting without any connection to recognisable object, This way of thinking is very similar to the way Piet mandarin works. 

Eventually Art grew out of nature. Nature became more of an inspiration method for painting and not the subject it self. Modernist believed that technology was the way forward, and would shape the future, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy says: to be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. It has replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras. Before the machines, everyone is equal- i can use it so can you, there is no tradition in technology , no consciousness of class or standing". 

The Cubist art movement began in Paris in earley 20^th century. Started by Picasso and Braque, the Cubists broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. and use was made of simple geometric shapes.The movement was seen as 'a new way of representing the world', Cubists like Pablo Picasso thought that the mind sees an object from many different viewpoints simultaneously and can hold all these in the memory to create what we know as the object. When seen from above or below or from behind or to the side, the mind can put all these viewpoints together to recognise an object.

In this painting by Pablo Picasso called "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" you can see how he has used bold lines and different view point of the body to form one image it’s a nearly two-dimensional appearance an inclusion of geometric angles, lines, and shapes; and a fairly neutral color palette. at the time this form of art was seen as unusual and different.

As the movement evolved, color, texture, and graphic elements (like text) were added, to the point where later Cubist works often looked more like collages than anything else you can see this in some of Braque painting it looks like a low art form from stenciling.

Unlike traditional still-lifes, landscapes, or portrait paintings, Cubist paintings weren’t meant to be realistic or life-like in any way. Instead, after looking at the subject from every possibly angle, the artist will piece together fragments from different vantage points into one painting.