At the Turn of the 20th Century

A Bit of History

The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century are incredibly dynamic times. The changes in artistic expression were faster than ever before. Basically, each new artistic era became shorter and shorter. Just look how long the Middle Ages were – roughly 10 centuries! There were different streams and distinctions, with two main “blocks” called Roman style and Gothic style. Each of them lasted hundreds of years.

Then the Renaissance, depending on the area, lasted roughly 300 years. Afterwards, each epoch got shorter and more diversified. Actually different movements overlapped each other, especially in different art areas. For example architectural Baroque lasted in Span till 18th century, when most of the Europe was already deeply in neoclassicism. In addition, Baroque in architecture didn’t mean that painters or writers were under the same influence, they often weren’t.

The 19th century was already a huge rush. It’s the era of romantics, realists, impressionists, symbolists. The same century brought neo-romantics and neo-impressionists. The shifts were incredibly fast and most of them overlapped each other. When in France neo-impressionism begun, Norway was only in it’s impressionism era.

(In my opinion, every artist should be aware of his heritage. I’m European and I respect European history, but I never forget about other parts of the world, I often read about American and Asian history and so should you. But that’s just a side note.)

Munch.. yes, again..

The above portrait of Inger, “Sister Inger” from 1884 is one of my very favorite paintings. I have written a few pages about it in Norwegian but haven’t got a chance to write about it here yet.

When you look at it from a distance, it could be similar to the style you know from Rembrandt and other Dutch Golden Age painters. Dark, usually black background and warm skin colors. However, classical painters were very realistic showing wrinkles, hair, clothes. Munch’s critics said that he left his painting unfinished, yet he opposed that they were exactly as he wanted (though he could paint hyper realistically).

Thick texture, big spots of paint, barely visible clothes is what distinguishes Ingrid completely from the Rembrandt style. Munch was a very first to come up with and stand for this idea.

Nowadays’ photography shows everything, every pore, every hair, every crease. That’s just an idea, but how about forgetting about those insane megapixels for a moment and trying more rough, unfinished style?

As the title of this series suggests, we are here to search for style. And there is no way to search for anything if we don’t do new things. Trying out something that hasn’t been yet done. It doesn’t matter if others tried it, what I mean is that it is new for you. And those last few thousand years have really many ideas…

Let’s Move on

The turn of the 20th century is all about exploring new territories. Doing things that man had not yet thought about. All those new trends came from hundreds of years of thinking, and then people were finally ready to go a step further and unleash their imaginations.

Modern photographers basically don’t do anything new over what artists introduced back then. It all begun with expressionism, then came neo-romanticism, cubism, realism, dadaism, surrealism (yes, it was already in the twenties!) and much more. There were styles that lasted really short, like fauvism that existed for 3 years. The diversity and dynamism was amazing. Don’t forget that there was no Internet, no TV, no video games or cell phones. All development was done on paper, through face-to-dace meetings, letters or news papers. Yet, the dynamism was not so much slower than today.

If you are really interested in improving your artistic sense, I fully encourage you to read more about the turn of the 20th century. You will find many correlations to modern art, and certainly even more inspiration for your future projects.

Wikipedia is a good start, however, in my opinion, Internet is not the best source for such studies. Go to your local library and check the arts shelves, there should be at least 20 different art lexicons and many other books about selected eras. Leaf through them, watch the paintings (and other art too!), when something grabs your eyes, just read about it.

The problem with lexicons is that they rarely have any in-depth information, that’s why I always take a notebook (or just iPhone) and take notes on things that grabbed my attention. Then I look for titles concerning those pieces of art and read more about them.

I wish you all awesome artistic explorations. Go for it, it’s totally worth it!